This anti-Modi battle cry is lazy, illiberal and an affront to Muslims — and to Hindus.

National Interest: Secularism is dead!

 Written by Shekhar Gupta | New Delhi | April 18, 2014 11:52 pm

   

If the opinion polls turn out to be generally correct, and Narendra Modi comes to power, it will unleash an angry flurry of obituaries of Indian secularism. Last week, some of India’s most respected public intellectuals signed a joint appeal to save the idea of India from Modi. That his rise is a crucial turn in the Hindutva project that began with the Babri Masjid demolition. That nobody and nothing will be able to resist this wave of saffron communalism. Not the liberals among the majority Hindus, not our great institutions and, least of all, Muslims.   

Nothing could be lazier, more cowardly, illiberal or unfair to all three. Let me try to explain.

I said in a television discussion on NDTV 24×7 last week that India was not a secular country because only its minorities wished it to be secular. India is secular because its Hindu majority wants it to be so. I said, also, that if I were an Indian Muslim, I couldn’t be faulted for thinking sometimes that both sides on the secular divide in this election were hell bent on fighting their ideological battle to the last Muslim. It drew quite a bit of comment and I think it deserves a more detailed elaboration than a sound bite would allow.

This is how the picture would look to an Indian Muslim. First, the BJP, it would seem, has accepted that Muslims won’t vote for it, and it couldn’t care less. It would simply contest this election with, to take liberties with a golfing metaphor, a handicap of 15 per cent. The BJP is therefore not even bothering to address Muslim concerns and fears specifically. The “secular” group, led by the Congress, on the other hand, is pitchforking India’s Muslims into this unequal fight against the BJP. As if the responsibility of saving our secularism lies with our Muslim minority. An Indian Muslim would find it both unfair and worrying.

To say that only Muslim consolidation can stop Modi, or at least limit his mandate, is unfair to the Hindu majority as well. It is as if all of the Hindus have joined the RSS and have no faith in constitutional secularism. This is rubbish. Because if such was the case,  Modi would probably equal Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984 mandate of 415, if not better it. No such thing is about to happen. The most generous opinion poll estimates put the NDA’s vote share in the mid-30s, which accounts for just over a third of India’s Hindus. The remaining majority will be voting for others. And most of these 30-odd per cent would vote for the BJP/NDA not because they want to build grand temples, spank the Muslims or banish them to Pakistan. They will be voting in search of an alternative to the weakest, most incompetent, uncommunicative and incoherent full-term government in our history. Having voted in the UPA so enthusiastically for a second time, they are going elsewhere, in search of jobs, more buying power, stability and confidence. To insinuate that this mass of Hindus will be voting Modi because they have suddenly turned communal is unfair to them.

It is also intellectually lazy, morally cynical and politically disastrous. Put more simply, it is a bit like saying that Hindus have been voting for the Congress and other “secular” forces all these decades because they were not given a convincing saffron option.

India gave itself a secular, liberal constitution because a vast majority of all its people, in fact almost unanimously, determined that this was the finest formulation for nation-building in a land as diverse and complex as ours. The Constituent Assembly had participation from across the many ideological divides. The document it drafted has now acquired the status of scripture and nobody in mainstream politics dares to question it. The man credited with leading that process, Ambedkar, has been added to our pantheon of all-party gods.

It is also unique. Unlike Western countries, where secularism means living with one or two faiths, Christianity and Judaism or Islam, India is a deeply religious country, and peopled by every religion invented, including the many thousand variants of Hinduism. As Wendy Doniger says in her magisterial book, The Hindus — the one Penguin pulped, quivering with fear in the face of a man called Dina Nath Batra — Hinduism is the “Ellis Island of religions”. Pluralism and diversity are deeply ingrained in it, “the lines between different beliefs and practices are permeable membranes”. That is why, she says, there are countless more narratives of Hinduism than the ones defined by Sanskrit, Brahmins and the Gita. And if I may dare to make my own risky addition to that list of defining three, by the RSS or VHP.

In a country where the determinants of identity change every 10 miles, from religion to caste to language to ethnicity to culture, tribe, sub-tribe and region, secularism is the glue needed to keep it all together. It isn’t just a charter to protect Muslims. The Hindus need it as much as them. That is all the more reason why India is secular, and must remain so.

Indian Muslims can, in fact, complain that over the decades, they have been taken for granted and offered a minimal political deal in return for their votes: to give them physical protection from the Hindu right. I know some will argue that even that promise was never really kept. But the truth is, the Muslim vote has been hostage to fear. Explaining why he had joined the BJP now, M.J. Akbar said to me that in the “Congress/secular” view so far, the Indian Muslim had to conform to one of three stereotypes: the decadent, decrepit feudal with sherwani fraying at the collar, as portrayed in the 1960s’ “Muslim socials” like Mere Mehboob, a riot victim like the crying Gujarati with folded hands in that infamous 2002 portrait, or a petty criminal in the image of Haji Mastan, even if sometimes with a sacrificing heart of gold.

Since he hasn’t delivered, despite my asking him several times to put this in an article, I am borrowing the idea. That mainstream, liberal politics in India has deliberately failed to treat the Muslim as a mainstream Indian. The extreme and most shameful manifestation of this was Azam Khan’s claim that the peaks of Kargil were conquered not by Hindu soldiers of our army, but by Muslims with the battle cry of Allah-o-Akbar. This is not a secular claim, but amounts to spreading communalism to the one institution that remains so secular, the army. It is true that Muslim soldiers fought alongside the Hindus and the rest in Kargil. Two of the battalions with mostly Muslim soldiers, 12 JAK LI and 22 Grenadiers, suffered heavy casualties.

But to now view them in isolation, through a sectarian prism, and pit them competitively against their fellow soldiers from other faiths is not secularism. It isn’t even pseudo-secularism. It is the most cynical, anti-minority communalism. That is why this newspaper and this writer had objected so furiously to the Sachar Committee’s misplaced idea of investigating the recruitment patterns and numbers of Muslims in the army (‘Kitne Musalman hain?’, National Interest, IE, February 18, 2006, iexp.in/FC79596)

The fundamental values of our secular Constitution sustain because of our institutions, which are trusted as fair and secular. The Election Commission can send Imran Masood to jail, ban Azam Khan and Amit Shah and then let one off with an apology. Some will call it unfair but nobody calls it communal. The Supreme Court, the UPSC, the armed forces, the mainstream media and the public intellectual class are, by and large, liberal and secular. Of course, these institutions will be tested by such a fundamental ideological shift on Raisina Hill.

But that is why the founding fathers invented them. We need to strengthen them, preserve their credibility and freedoms to protect and strengthen our secularism. It is too hasty to write its epitaph. Or to hunt for a sabbatical to a liberal campus on the American east coast until some post-Modi secular resurrection. I am conscious that this column is being written on Good Friday. But that is purely coincidental.

The future and AAP

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu

One of the most magical moments of this election, the moment when people saw politics once again as an act of faith and hope, was the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party. The story of AAP is not just its story, it is the story of these people reinventing politics and themselves

I want to begin with a story. Last night, I received a phone call from a friend of mine. She told me that she was on a truck heading for the Kolar Gold Fields to campaign for a friend who had joined the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). She hinted that AAP there spoke a different dialect from AAP in Bangalore or Varanasi.

AAP, she claimed, was a collection of dialects, a set of murmurings, whispers and silences. She did not use the word voice claiming that social scientists had wrecked the meaning of voice, divorcing it from speech. AAP, she claimed could be an amplifier of murmurings, little fragments of protest scattered across the landscape. Her candidate, Ramiah would not get the attention that a Nandan Nilekani commands but it is precisely why the former is important. AAP, she and others claim, is not a taproot like the Congress, or the CPI(M) or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); it is like a rhizome ready to spring anywhere and connect to anything. In an organisational sense, AAP is not a hierarchical party, with a centralised voice. In recreating the idea of empowerment as an enabling exercise, AAP has to continue to be inventive. Murmurings were her label for the new politics. She referred to it as the politics of humility because it captures the power of small protests. Empowerment, she said, begins with the marginal, or the forgotten; it has to entice the music of politics out of the silences of our time. Politics takes storytelling to realms beyond the formal by translating the “murmurings” of our age, the still inarticulate protests of our time. The beauty of AAP is that it is full of surprises. It realises that the conscience of politics will come from these people.

I realise my friend was right. One of the most magical moments of this election was the rise of AAP. I am not referring to Mr. Kejriwal only but the AAP effect, that magical moment when people saw politics once again as an act of faith and hope. Thousands of people including students, retired professionals, journalists and housewives saw in AAP a new phenomenon which renewed their faith in citizenship. In fact, the story of AAP is not just AAP’s story, it is the story of these people reinventing politics and themselves. AAP may not win many seats but it is an exemplary exercise. It will continue to reinvent itself long after this election is over. It is a chrysalis for the future.

This essay asks itself what the directions in which an AAP can create new worlds and possibilities could be.

Incompleteness of citizenship

In reworking politics, it questions old classifications. It realises that citizenship is not a fully hatched word like a large ostrich egg. It is a growth, a promise, a hypothesis which has to be tested. Citizenship is not a guarantee of entitlements but a promissory note. What AAP has to emphasise is the incompleteness of citizenship. It is the recognition of the fact that the refugee, the scavenger, the nomad, the subsistence farmer, the pastoral group, the fisherman and others in the informal economy constitute over 70 per cent of India and lack rights or even a temporary claim to citizenship. To reinvent democracy, AAP has to retain the mnemonic of the informal. In challenging the temporariness of citizenship, AAP creates a durability, a competence around the fragility of the informal threatened by clerks, police and goons. Empowerment is a way of going beyond these obstacles to rework cities, offices, hospitals, villages and technologies.

Learning from Gandhi

The history of AAP begins with the politics of body because the body is the real site for politics. In claiming the body as a vehicle of being and protest, students discover the violence of the state and vulnerability of their bodies facing water cannons, stones or lathi charges. The body gives politics an immediacy which fine-tunes protest. It is a site for struggle. The body also prevents politics from straying into the abstractions of ideology or policy. It is a statement of presence, of sensing politics and suffering as part of a sensorium of sounds, smells, touch, taste and memory. In this world, poverty can never be a statistic, but a way of experiencing the world. Poverty can never be reduced to Rs.32 a day when it is lived through the body. The body keeps politics concrete, tangible, and personal and creates a space for ethics. This much the AAP generation learnt from Gandhiji.

An experiment in politics as truth begins with the body. It is the tuning fork for understanding poverty, well-being, torture, communication and time. It gives politics the depth of everydayness as it understands pain, joy or stigma. When Mr. Kejriwal was stoned and slapped repeatedly he realised that there were other messages beyond coercion. When he communes with Gandhiji at Rajghat, he articulates a new strength and vulnerability that is profound by moving. Language then becomes critical because language is not mere text but speech and dialect. AAP realises the world of manifesto as text comes alive in speech, in orality, in gossip and rumour as the nukhad and mohalla embrace and debate an idea. Because language is playful, politics can be playful, allowing for humour, ambiguity, translation. In being playful with language, AAP can liberate politics from its pomposity, its ideological heaviness, and the hypocritical impasses it has got into. AAP has to return magic to old tired words like secularism, development, security, participation, and nation state. It is more open to mistakes as it is constantly rereads its own politics. It creates a new language of error which liberates it from pomposity. What makes AAP refreshing is the ease with which it owns up to mistakes. AAP has a more relaxed view of its role in history so it can see the comedy of politics.

An experimental party

The politics of AAP cannot be an act of storytelling in linear time as history and most U.N. and World Bank reports are. The obscenity of development is that it has no sense of defeated or obsolescent time. One needs a plurality of time to dream of diversity. Tribal time, body time, peasant time, displaced time of refugee, the obsolescent time of a craftsmen need space, voice and articulation. They cannot be confined to indifference. The nation state seeks to create a uniformity of time while AAP politics should seek to pluralise time. One cannot think of an ethics of memory or an ethics of sustainability without it. In this sense, AAP is creating a link between the ethical and the political, pointing out to the lost times in each word. History eats up myth, development destroys nomadic time, and innovation hides obsolescence. Forces like globalisation only understand speed and instantaneity. AAP, by creating a commons of time, allows for memories, silence, new tales of suffering, and new kinds of ecology. AAP in that sense is not a specific timetable but an act of storytelling, which unfolds terms of its own rhythms. This variety of time allows for little experiments all over India. Instead of a million mutinies, AAP becomes the politics of a million inventions, many of which are life sustaining. Democracy without that diversity of experiments in technology and livelihood is doomed.

Finally, AAP is experimental. As a result, it is not inflexibly tied to any ideology or any charter of the future. AAP wants politics to be full of surprises. In that sense, it is not a planned rocket but a wager. It does not need the mass leader in a fascist sense but insists that citizenship, when it is no longer passive, is a form of leadership. It takes problem-solving in a modest way realising that solutions to work are contextual and local. AAP requires a million exemplars to sustain itself as a paradigm. In doing this, it breaks the fossilisation of democracy as a fetish of rights, elections and governance. It is the democratisation of democracy that makes AAP the party of the future. I think this is why we have to look at AAP differently, expect more but expect the less predictable from it. This is what makes it the party of the future and a party with a future.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)

The politics of quota and merit

Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu

There is unquestionable value in a general policy of reservation because it attacks caste-based inequities that have proved so damaging to our society; but through an ever-expanding scheme of reservation, we have lost sight of what our aims were in the first place

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s election manifesto, released on April 7, 2014, and its opponents’ reaction to the proposal, exemplifies the level of political debate in India today. In spite of an element of truth in claims that the manifesto is an impressionist’s version, the document nonetheless departs on certain crucial, philosophical issues. But, such is our reluctance to engage on matters of first principle that these departures are rarely, if ever, contested with anything resembling an intellectual vigour. Take, for instance, the issue of reservation. While the Indian National Congress and most other political parties have proposed detailed policy measures, including the prospect of reservation for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in the private sector, the BJP’s manifesto is curiously silent on the issue. Even the promise contained in its 2009 declaration to introduce reservation for the economically weaker general class finds no mention in this term’s version. It is likely that this decision is a product of electoral strategy. But its failure to clarify its vision is nonetheless symptomatic of a larger malaise in the Indian political sphere: a mistrust of debate subsumed by core issues of moral concern.

Arguments on reservation

The Congress’ response is also familiar: the manifesto’s silence on reservation, according to the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has been designed to “poison” voters with a majoritarian approach. If pressed further, Mr. Chidambaram ordinarily would tell us that affirmative action is not necessarily irreconcilable with merit. Yet, what he will not tell us is why the Congress’ approach to reservation is, in the party’s belief, the only means to fulfil the fundamental right to equality. And, he will also not tell us what the Congress intends to achieve through its reservation policies: are they aimed at ensuring more than mere formal equality (which would ensure that all castes achieve equal status) or are they a means to one day achieve a society that is completely rid of the caste system?

The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s answer to questions of whether there ought to be reservation along caste lines is similarly devious. He sings the same tune/s that he uses to counter any issue of economic inequality. According to him, the development and growth of the economy will bring with it a concomitant rise in both educational and employment opportunities, making the question of any community seeking reservation moot. But both Mr. Chidambaram’s claims about merit and Mr. Modi’s arguments about development skirt the real issue.

It is a matter of well-chronicled fact that the social and economic inequities prevalent in Indian society transcend ordinary conception. Any reasonable thinker would tell us that, as a matter of duty, our country’s resources ought to be dispersed evenly across all classes. But the argument on reservation, today, as evinced by Mr. Chidambaram and Mr. Modi’s public statements, is no longer about such considerations. The questions, therefore, are: how did we get here, and what do we do now?

Expanding reservation policy

At its inception, the Constitution envisaged very limited reservation. Articles 15 and 16, which today occupy the bedrock on which our entire policy of affirmative action rests, were meant to entrench a system where no discrimination was permissible on grounds of race, religion, caste, etc. Even clause 4 to Article 16, which permitted reservation in public employment for any backward class of citizens, was viewed as subservient to larger goals contained in clauses 1 and 2. Any such programme for reservation justified under Article 16(4) had to be shown to further the objective of ensuring equality of opportunity to all citizens. But over time, the original philosophical outlook toward affirmative action has waned.

Now, as a matter of a very specific policy of the state, not only are backward classes of citizens often identified solely on the basis of their castes, but reservation has also stretched well beyond the realm of public employment, at its first instance. These actions of the State have been brought forth either in response to particular, contrarian judgments of the Supreme Court, or in furtherance of judgments supporting the state’s larger outlook, according these programmes a constitutional sanction.

When the Supreme Court in State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan (1951) struck down a government policy seeking to arrange admission to engineering and medical colleges based on divisions of caste and religion, the government’s response was to amend the Constitution. Article 15(4) was introduced to allow the State to make special provisions for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the SCs and STs. Yet, this amendment did not produce an immediate change in the Supreme Court’s thinking. The court continued to hold, as it did for example in M.R. Balaji v. State of Mysore (1963), that policies of reservation are exceptional measures, requiring strict constitutional defence. It also ruled that classification of backward classes of citizens could not be based solely on the caste of the citizen; such policies, wrote Justice Gajendragadkar, might “contain the vice of perpetuating the caste themselves.”

However, in 1975, the Supreme Court finally acquiesced to the state’s ever-expanding reservation policy. In a judgment that would have widespread consequences, the court ruled that Article 16(4) wasn’t as much an exception to the general rule contained in clause 1, as it was an integral component of the right to equality, properly understood (State of Kerala v. N.M. Thomas). In other words, Article 16(1), it was held, permitted classification on the basis of caste to achieve its broad goal: equality of opportunity for each citizen, as an individual. This was further validated in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), by a nine-judge bench, which ruled that the Constitution permitted backward classes to be identified on the basis of caste. In so holding, the court provided the government the jurisprudential basis for formulating sweeping policies on reservation.

Through a series of constitutional amendments, beginning in 1995, Parliament allowed the state to make provisions for reservation in matters of promotion to SCs and STs, to carry forward any vacancies created through a failure to fill-up the reserved category from one year to the following year, and to provide specially for Other Backward Classes or SCs and STs in matters of admission to educational institutions, including in private institutions. Each of these amendments and the laws made to enforce their aims (including reservation in favour of the so-called “other backward classes”) was challenged at various stages before the Supreme Court. But, the Supreme Court, after providing Parliament the legal justification for its general policy on reservation, could not now strike down the laws that emanated as a consequence.

Political discourse vs. debate

Apart from holding these amendments to be in consonance with the Constitution’s basic structure, the court also ruled in these cases that the laws made in furtherance of these amendments, including the identification of Other Backward Classes on the basis of caste, were valid. What’s more, it found the doctrine of creamy layer, which, in principle, disallowed benefits applicable to certain groups based on their economic status, which they would have otherwise been entitled to as members of a certain caste, as inapplicable to SCs and STs. These decisions, in M. Nagraj v. Union of India and Ashoka Kumar Thakur v. Union of India, are a product of a sustained change in the court’s jurisprudential thinking on the subject. But it ought to be asked: how does the exclusion of SCs and STs from the doctrine of creamy layer fit with the purported objectives?

Unfortunately, neither the Supreme Court nor our Parliamentarians are willing to engage with these fundamental issues. There is unquestionable value in a general policy of reservation because it attacks caste-based inequities that have proved so damaging to our society; but through an ever-expanding scheme of reservation, we have lost sight of what our aims were in the first place. We, therefore, need to address the debate at a more basic level.

We need to ask ourselves, once again, whether it is equality of opportunity that we strive for, or whether we want to rid our society of the caste system. If indeed the reservation policies are aimed at achieving both these ideals, we ought to be shown proof of how the present policies are working. If Other Backward Classes have to be equated with SCs and STs, the state ought to empirically prove why the doctrine of creamy layer should be applicable to the former and not to the latter, and how such thinking links to the larger goal of ensuring a supposed equality of opportunity. We also need to ask ourselves whether these policies, as Justice Gajendragadkar suggested in 1963, have the effect of perpetuating the caste system.

Regrettably, our political discourse appears unsuited for genuine debate on such questions. If the BJP supports a change in policy, it is its bounden duty to tell us what such new policy would be, and why it would work. If the Congress believes its present policy is effective, it ought to show us how the policy fulfils the Constitution’s ideals. Instead, we are left meandering in the politics of quota and merit. Our most ingrained social inequities are, in the process, further entrenched. And as a result, the abstract ideal of equality, which the Constitution guarantees, continues to wither toward insignificance.

(Suhrith Parthasarathy is an advocate in the Madras High Court.)

Are you turning into your dad?

The top ten signs you've embraced dad-ism revealed as survey says 38 is age men turn into their father

Rob Williams in The Independent

It's a startling moment in any man's life.

You're sat on the sofa keenly scrutinising the money pages of the newspaper, looking forward to giving the lawn a good mowing and finding yourself unusually excited about an upcoming sale at B&Q, when it hits you (if you can keep your eyes open long enough): you've turned into your dad.

It's enough to make you slip on your sensibly priced comfortable shoes and retreat to your man cave with a pint of bitter.

According to a new survey by the TV Channel Gold, dad dancing, owning a ‘man drawer’ and believing that all modern music sounds the same, are just a few of the warning signs that men could be turning into their fathers.

The survey of 2,000 adults, which concludes that the average British man turns into his dad at the age of 38, details 30 potential warning signs that you are becoming your dad.

Topping the list of so-called ‘dad-isms’ was falling asleep in the front room (40%), followed by having ‘a chair’ (28 per cent), a special seating place at the dining table and around the television where no-one else is allowed to sit.

A quarter of respondents (25 per cent) said a man’s need for a man cave such as a shed, was a sign that they are following in their father’s footsteps.

The survey for also revealed that of those asked, British men admit to hoarding batteries (70 per cent), an assortment of leads and cables (58 per cent) keys of no use (29 per cent), takeaway menus (25 per cent) and even food (5 per cent) in their man drawers.

Steve North, General Manager of UKTV channel Gold says, “The future looks bright for men, more sleep, having your very own chair, letting loose on the dance floor and finding ourselves funny – it seems 38 is the age men officially lose their inhibitions.”

Top ten signs you could be turning into your father:

1. Fall asleep in the front room

2. They have ‘a chair’

3. Dad dancing

4. Spend time in the shed

5. Making awful jokes that only they find funny

6. Don’t know any artists in the top 40

7. Spending longer on the toilet

8. Keeping an eye on the thermostat

9. Excited about appliance sales

10. Embarrassing younger members of the family or children and thinking it’s funny

You can't control talent, only channel it

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

 

Will we increasingly see players prefer private guidance over their team's coaching system?  © PA Photos

Enlarge

Bubba Watson won the Masters golf tournament on Sunday, taking his second green jacket in three years. While he isn't quite in the league of Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, Watson is - as those two did before him - playing a game with which the rest of golf is unfamiliar; at least at the Augusta National. The distance he hits the ball (with a pink driver) and the extraordinary spins that he applies in order to shape his shots through the air, mean that he attacks the famous course entirely differently to everyone else. He has never had a coach, and what's more he's never had a lesson, which makes him rare among high-end golfers (and most hackers) - it is after all the sport that authored the phrase "paralysis by analysis".

Nicklaus himself was reflecting on this during a commentary stint, and he recalled his own coach, a man named Jack Grout, who would speak to him twice a year, usually in a couple of clipped sentences. "His whole philosophy," Nicklaus said, "was to enable me to correct my own mistakes on the golf course." 

One of sport's great archetypes is the aged and taciturn coach, the kind of man who will watch silently for half an hour and then impart, often via a single and devastating sentence, a thought that changes not just how you play the game, but how you see it. When John Jacobs, a golf coach who has been working for 60 years and who is possibly the most influential instructor in the sport, sat down to write his first book, he said: "I remember that the first thing I wrote down on paper was, 'Golf is what the ball does.' That was my breakthrough as a teacher. I look at what the ball's doing, and then I ask, 'Why?'"

Jacobs had distilled his philosophy down to one thought: you can learn everything you need to know about a player's swing by watching what the ball does once it has been struck. It's fantastically obvious and wonderfully true, and it applies equally well to cricket. All that matters is that moment when bat meets ball. You could discover how to coach anything by talking to John Jacobs.

He came to mind this weekend not just during the Masters, but when I read Neil Burns' angry and telling excoriation of cricket coaching in England on this site (and a somewhat terrifying first-person account from Rupert Williams, the father of a county triallist subjected to some sort of intensive PE course reinforced with nonsensical slogans and punishment press-ups).

Burns' piece should be taken as a whole, but there were some key threads. One was: The "teach yourself about yourself" philosophy still speaks loudly to all who aspire to become top performers - or as Nicklaus' coach had it all of those years ago, "being able to correct your own mistakes". Then there was a wider notion of: "More art, less science" - or as Jacobs put it, "Golf is what the ball does."

Burns likens the expansion of sports science and the growth of the "support systems" around international teams, counties and franchises to the cult of the manager in football, a valid comparison. There is one worth drawing with golf too. David Leadbetter's success with Nick Faldo, and Butch Harmon's with Woods, led indirectly to the development of a mini-industry of swing gurus, mind coaches, short-game experts and other potential saviours, an ecosystem that feeds on itself, producing endless ways to reframe old knowledge in new language.

From there it is a short step to the cycling coach Dave Brailsford's school of "marginal gains", where everything from the quality of bikes to the togs on the cyclists' duvets are micro-managed. None of these things are intrinsically wrong, but they depend on an ever-increasing complexity to survive. And then along comes a Usain Bolt or a Bubba Watson or a Virender Sehwag and the goalposts move again…

Golf, like any other sport, has its manufactured players. Faldo's partnership with Leadbetter made legends of them both, and Woods has undergone three major swing overhauls (in truth as much to lessen the damage to his body as to change his method), the most important of those with Harmon. It's easy to see a future in which superstar freelance batsmen discard the wider team coaching systems and use similar relationships - indeed, they already exist: Kevin Pietersen and Graham Ford, Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch; even Sachin Tendulkar and his brother Ajit, with whom he'd discuss each innings (and according to Sachin, sometimes each shot…).

Ultimately, sports like golf and cricket are games of skill. They are as much about art as science. Talent will out, and it cannot be controlled, only channelled. Any idiot can get fit. Not many people can bowl like Murali. That may not be an entirely appetising lesson for the coaching industry but it's one that must be absorbed, as Neil Burns points out.

The Tendulkar Prism

Hassan Cheema

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11 April 2014 

In the 90s, Pakistan were just vastly better at cricket than India, and Pakistanis assumed it had always been so. They viewed Sachin Tendulkar as the leader of a group of wannabes and never-will-bes, not a match-winner. © AFP

Sachin Tendulkar’s retirement from limited-overs cricket in December 2012 brought them out in full force. By the time he said goodbye to Test cricket, nearly a year later, they were tired and outnumbered, but clung desperately to their self-created bubble. Beyond the plethora of heartfelt eulogies was a world – mostly confined to the privacy of living rooms and online message boards – where Tendulkar wasn’t the God worshipped by a billion. Here, where contrarians and trolls live, he was far from the match-winner he was made out to be. Inevitably, this universe consisted overwhelmingly of Pakistanis. For a generation of them, Tendulkar’s career wasn’t just the story of arguably the greatest batsman of his era, and unarguably the biggest star in modern cricket, but the story of the prism through which Pakistanis saw their place in the world – though they’d be loathe to admit it.

It seems odd to argue that a foreign sportsman could have such a far-reaching influence on a country’s youth, but the view that Pakistanis had of India – and by extension of Tendulkar – is unique. Their attitude towards the Indian team was how Pakistanis proved they were Pakistani, as the post-Zia nation over the last three decades went from isolation, and in search of recognition, to a place the world knows about – not necessarily for the right reasons. It’s no coincidence that at the time the rest of the cricketing firmament prostrated before Tendulkar, a major Pakistani news channel ran a segment about how Javed Miandad, Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf were each his equal.

The rejection of the Hindu – and by definition of India – was how you became Pakistani. From Pakistan’s first tour in 1952-53, when Test captain Abdul Hafeez Kardar took his team only to “monuments and museums that reflected Muslim glories in India, while ignoring the rest” – as described in Shashi Tharoor’s Shadows Across the Playing Fields – to their acceptance of Imran Khan’s opinion that Inzamam-ul-Haq was a better player of pace than Tendulkar, this view of India as the other is hardly restricted to cricket. Ayub Khan (the President of Pakistan 1958 to 1969) was a Sandhurst-trained army officer who said a Muslim soldier was equal to ten Hindu soldiers. He worried about how much of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was under “Hindu culture and influence.” Pakistani academic Aasim Sajjad Akhtar believes the country’s ideology “is an anti-Indian ideology. It’s a negation, rather than something that stands up on its own.” Defined by what one is not, rather than what one is.

I grew up in the 1990s, when everyone, barring elite Pakistanis, had access to only one source of news (beyond the dailies): the 9pm TV bulletin Khabarnama. Every day it began with the headlines, followed by the latest from around the country. Ten minutes in, we had the Kashmir update – this was our war, but it wasn’t being fought by us or in our cities (unlike the wars in the 2000s, which aren’t our wars – supposedly – but are being fought by us, in our streets). Popular Urdu literature for children at the time focused on the constant state of war Pakistan found themselves in – Afghanistan in the ’80s, Kashmir in the ’90s, and the whole world in the 2000s, if you read author Ishtiaq Ahmed. The only thing the children of the ’90s, regardless of class and economics, could agree on was that Pakistan was in danger and India was the enemy.

It is in this context that one has to consider Pakistan’s view of Tendulkar. Omar Kureishi, the late Pakistani journalist, once said the only two things that could unite his country were war and cricket – incidentally the only two areas in which Pakistan was directly pitted against its neighbour. For all the mistrust and animosity of India cultivated in us, there were no avenues to release it. The only interaction a Pakistani had then with anything Indian was cricket or Bollywood. The latter was overwhelmingly popular and could never be shunned by the majority; it was, and still is, a guilty pleasure. Uncles and aunties may complain all day about India’s soft power eroding Pakistani culture, and yet, the same uncles and aunties watch every Shah Rukh Khan film that hits the theatres. Thus, the cricket team was how one became Pakistani. As the world changed, the opinions shifted but never the ideologies – until 2004, when India toured Pakistan for the Friendship Series and we were struck by the realisation that those two decades of fostering hostility may have been for naught. History seemed irrelevant during that 40-day tour and India’s Lakshmipathy Balaji became an ironic icon.

But I digress. The Indian cricket team of the ’90s wasn’t even worthy of our revulsion; condescension was more apt. Ayub Khan may have been wrong about the inequality of soldiers but the inequality of the cricketers was obvious. From Javed Miandad hitting the six at Sharjah in 1986 until the 2003 World Cup, Pakistan’s ODI record against India read 44 wins and 21 losses – this is what we saw growing up. Pakistan were just better at cricket than India – and we assumed this had always been so. It was through this barometer that Tendulkar was judged – he was the leader of a group of wannabes and never-will-bes and, therefore, not a match-winner.

As if to lend credence to this hypothesis, Tendulkar didn’t exactly prove us wrong when India played Pakistan. Until that 2003 World Cup, he had scored just two centuries in 41 ODI innings against Pakistan – both in the space of a fortnight in 1996, hence lessening their impact, and one of them in a losing cause. He averaged in the mid-30s. Even more significant for the casual Pakistani fan was that both those hundreds came in the first innings of day games, a time when viewership is much lower than usual. Pakistanis had a simple formula by which they judged India: batting second in day/night matches. This scenario saw Pakistan play to their strength and viewership was at its maximum as well (add Friday in Sharjah to the picture and it would be the most stereotypical of Pakistan-India face-offs in the ’90s). It was here that Tendulkar struggled most. During this phase, he averaged under 30 in 21 innings – batting second against Pakistan – with no hundreds. India won only seven of these 21 matches, with Tendulkar scoring just three fifties. His role in this narrative served only to reinforce biases: India were hopeless at chasing and Tendulkar was not a match-winner.

Pakistan cricketers were macho; they were in-your-face, aggressive and only borderline legal. Tendulkar, on the contrary, was cherubic, slightly effeminate (in voice) and squeaky clean. © Getty Images

By comparison, his greatest contemporary Brian Lara punished Pakistan like few others. Lara averaged over 50 batting second, and over 70 in games West Indies won – they won more games than they lost against Pakistan during this time. To a Pakistani, the Lara-Tendulkar debate was never a debate.

But why judge Tendulkar only on his record against Pakistan? For a parallel to this story, you have to look no further than Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s career (until 2012). During the 2006 football World Cup, the English-based Northern Irish manager Martin O’Neill called him the most overrated player in the world and this was accepted as the establishment line. Zlatan dominated the Italian game like few before him, yet the English believed he was far from world class because he never did it against them; a brace against Arsenal for Barcelona did not count, nor did winners in the Milan derby or the El Clásico have any affect. But then he scored four goals in 90 minutes against England (including that overhead kick) in 2012 and the English begrudgingly acknowledged his genius.

It was this line of thinking that Pakistani fans indulged in too. Our bowling attack was the best in the world – until you did it against them you weren’t worthy. The decade saw Pakistan boast probably the most complete generation of bowlers a country has ever had. Thus while the attitude smacked of superiority, unlike that of English football fans, it felt well-earned.

But it’s not merely what he did, but who he was, that alienated Pakistanis. Social conditioning had taught us that the way to live your life was to go for what you believed you deserved rather than waiting for it to come to you. Our cricketers, like our image of Pakistan, were macho; they were in-your-face, aggressive and only borderline legal. Tendulkar, on the contrary, was cherubic, slightly effeminate (in voice) and squeaky clean. While our players were standing in Justice Qayyum’s court to answer allegations of match-fixing, everyone in India was sure Tendulkar would never do such a thing. And it is no surprise that Pakistanis never warmed to Tendulkar. The two great heroes of the post-Wasim generation were Shahid Afridi and Shoaib Akhtar. They were ephemeral, inconsistent, unorthodox and over the top. He was not.

Yet Tendulkar was much more than a cricketer. He became the face of post-liberalisation India – the rise of the country’s middle class coinciding with his own. In cricket writer Ayaz Memon’s words, “Tendulkar became a metaphor of what is now called the new India… where achievement, and reward, and fate all go hand in hand.” He also became the cornerstone of India’s growth as a cricketing power – on and off the field.

Lest we forget, Australia played only three series against India between 1981 and 1996 (and only one of them in India), while England visited India once between 1985 and 2000. The turn of the century saw an extraordinary rise in these match-ups, not only because India were now the cash cow, but because the Indian team with its newfound confidence – led by Tendulkar – had earned the respect of the cricketing world, except Pakistan perhaps. His debut series, the seventh between Pakistan and India in 11 years, was followed by a nine-year hiatus. At the peak of his career, India played only one Test series against Pakistan, and that series crystallised how Pakistanis saw him.

I refer, of course, to the three-Test series in 1999 (Pakistanis regard the first Test of the Asian Test Championship in February 1999 as the third of the series against India since it came immediately after the Kolkata and Chennai Tests earlier in the year – taking that result into account means Pakistan won the series 2-1 rather than drawing it 1-1). This series featured one of Tendulkar’s greatest Test innings. A fourth-innings masterpiece on a fifth-day pitch while batting with the lower order against Wasim, Waqar and Saqlain – that was how the world saw it. But across the border it was Tendulkar being the gallant batsman he always was and failing to win the match as he always did. The fact that this was his only 30-plus score in six innings of the series merely confirmed the bias: when India won Tendulkar didn’t play a part; India lost despite what he could offer.

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Until the late 1990s, PTV (Pakistan Television), ruled the roost – except for those who could afford a satellite dish, or an array of similar but cheaper options which were almost always exclusive to Karachi. But the turn of the millennium saw the rise of cable television, providing a whole host of Indian channels. Within five years we went from watching whatever was available on one channel to complaining about not having anything to watch on 80. Among them were a pair of Indian sports networks which brought us the other perspective on Tendulkar and the Indian team. It didn’t take long for the Pakistani attitude towards India to become the same as the Irish attitude towards the English. The average Irishman can support any English football club he likes, but their national team is to be reviled – a dislike fuelled by the irritation with the one-eyed, jingoistic and hypocritical English media.

Cable television in Pakistan only took off after the turn of the millennium. Most of the nation never watched Tendulkar at his peak, when he took apart Shane Warne during the 1997-98 Border-Gavaskar Trophy and Operation Desert Storm soon after. © AFP

Much the same happened in Pakistan. Most of us never watched Tendulkar at his peak since those matches were never broadcast to the overwhelming majority of the country. We did not get to watch Tendulkar take apart Warne during the 1997-98 Border-Gavaskar Trophy, and Operation Desert Storm soon after was a performance most Pakistanis only read about. In Indian Cricket 2000, Raja Mukherjee described Tendulkar as someone who was “No Indian in his method.” He goes on to say, “His batsmanship was of the West Indian mould. Never before did an Indian treat the ball as he did. His method was aggression, his weapon, power. The niceties of grace and classic conventional technique were not for this valiant kid of the Nineties generation. He was born in independent India… he knew not the uncertainties, nor the enforced servility of the pre-independence era. He was born free, to chart his own course.” This was the Tendulkar that Pakistanis missed. All they saw was a man who struggled against one of the great attacks in limited-overs history, and then the run-machine he became in the second half of his career. But as the cablewalas multiplied, Pakistanis became acquainted with the Indian perception of Tendulkar.

Now, you could watch Indian matches, and you did: India’s failure was a victory in itself, and the greatest possible introduction to Schadenfreude. Every time Pakistan beat India, it tasted sweeter. Between the Sharjah series win in 1998 and the tri-nation series victory in 2008, India played 21 finals, of which they won one. One! Tendulkar averaged 26. Your argument, previously based on just matches against Pakistan, only gained strength as you watched Tendulkar fail in crucial games.

Except, right in the middle of this decade, came Centurion – the day most Indians would think Tendulkar settled the debate. But his performance was easily tossed aside as an aberration, against an ageing team that had been in inexorable decline for three years.

More than Tendulkar, it was Sehwag and his generation who frightened Pakistan. Tendulkar was just the same as he had been for the previous decade – to be respected and admired, but not feared. Which explains why, even after Centurion, the Pakistani view of Tendulkar hardly changed. Instead, the anomalies in his record became more important than the bigger picture. From that innings in 2003 to Mohali in 2011, Tendulkar had seven 50-plus scores against Pakistan – only two of those came in wins. He only scored one 100 in 11 Tests against Pakistan after 1999. Pakistanis have grown up with the idea that if a batsman scores a hundred the team was guaranteed a win. Tendulkar’s four great Pakistani contemporaries – Saeed Anwar, Inzamam, Yousuf and Younis – combined to score 51 ODI 100s, only seven of which resulted in losses. Three of Tendulkar’s five ODI 100s against Pakistan were in a losing cause. Of course, the one-eyed ignored the fact that Pakistan always had a better bowling attack than India did. Flip that stat to see the bigger picture and you realise that the four great Pakistanis combined to score two more ODI hundreds than Tendulkar did on his own. But for the non-believers, even this wouldn’t change their minds.

As Tendulkar retired, Pakistanis biases against him disappeared, at least on the surface. Beyond a couple of exceptions, the reaction to his retirement in Pakistan was overwhelmingly positive, almost sycophantic. © BCCI

But as Tendulkar retired, those biases disappeared, at least on the surface. Beyond a couple of exceptions, the reaction to his retirement in Pakistan was overwhelmingly positive, almost sycophantic. It made sense too. Pakistan is no longer the country it was in the ’90s. No longer is it a paranoid local miscreant, some of whose citizens feel victimised: it is now a paranoid worldwide miscreant, all of whose citizens feel victimised. Since 9/11, and the beginning of the Afghan war, the anger is reserved for the United States rather than India. For the 2013 national elections, the two most popular centre-right parties in Pakistan called for peace and love towards India – a fact that went unnoticed outside war-mongering circles because of how small a deal it was.

It is no surprise that, despite the attacks in Mumbai, the past 12 years have been a relatively peaceful era in the countries’ histories. The media and technology boom may have provided platforms for hate-mongers on both sides, but it has also ensured a level of interaction that never existed before. Perhaps peace is impossible, but coexistence seems achievable.

These developments may have resulted in the Tendulkar of 2013 being respected far more than the Tendulkar of 1998 – though he was now a lesser player. In the end, he played for so long that he was still around by the time the Pakistani attitude towards India changed – well, almost. There can be no greater proof of Tendulkar’s longevity and greatness than that.

Gujarat is India’s top state in economic freedom

S A Aiyer in the Times of India

Does Narendra Modi actually have a great Gujarat model, or just wellpackaged hype? Critics say that Gujarat has grown fast, but some others have grown faster. 

The Raghuram Rajan Committee on development indicators says Gujarat’s social indicators are just middling. Looking at children of class 3-5 who can do subtraction, Gujarat has declined from 22nd among 28 states in 2006 to 23rd in 2012. However, economist Arvind Panagariya argues that Gujarat has made substantial social progress under Modi, starting from a low base. 

Forget this debate. Neither growth nor social indicators are accurate measures of Modi’s main election plank — good governance. Measuring governance is difficult, and hence neglected by statisticians. Yet it’s all-important. One annual report has long provided indicators of governance. This is Economic Freedom of the States of India (EFSI), written by Bibek Debroy, Laveesh Bhandari and me. The 2013 EFSI report shows Gujarat has been No. 1 in economic freedom for the last three years, widening its lead over others. On a scale from 0 to 1, its overall freedom score has improved from 0.46 to 0.65. Tamil Nadu comes a distant second with 0.54. Economic freedom is not identical to good governance. But lack of economic freedom typically means poor governance — a jungle of rules and obfuscating bureaucrats that promote corruption, delay and harassment. This hits everybody from farmers and consumers to industrialists and transporters. 

What exactly is economic freedom? EFSI uses a methodology adapted from Economic Freedom of the World, an annual publication of the Fraser Institute. Data for Indian states is not available on many issues. So, EFSI limits itself to 20 indicators of the size and efficiency of state governments, their legal structure and property rights, and regulation of labour and business. 

Many of these indicators directly measure governance — the proportion of stolen property recovered; proportion of judicial vacancies; proportion of violent crimes; proportion of investigations completed by police and of cases completed by the courts; and the pendency rate of corruption cases. The list is by no means comprehensive, but provides strong clues. 

Gujarat is the best state in pendency of corruption cases, and in the proportion of non-violent crime. It is close to the top in completion of police investigations. It scores poorly in judicial vacancies and recovery of stolen property. 

Its quality of government spending is high: it has the lowest ratio of administrative GDP to total GDP. Spending is focused on infrastructure rather than staff. Modi’s repeated state election victories show that his approach produces high voter satisfaction. Gujarat is not a classical free-market state. It has large, expanding public sector companies, and substantial taxes on capital and commodities. It has many subsidies, though fewer than in other states. Still, business thrives in its business-friendly climate. One businessman told me that in Tamil Nadu, it took six months and several visits (and payments) to ministries for industrial approval. But in Gujarat, the ministry concerned called him the day before his appointment, asking for details of his proposal. Next day, he found the bureaucracy had in advance prepared plans of possible locations for his project, and settled the matter on the spot. This was unthinkable elsewhere, and showed both efficiency and honesty. Corruption has not disappeared in Gujarat, but is muted. 

Modi’s Jyotigram scheme provides 24/7 electricity for rural households, plus reliable power at fixed times for tubewells. This explains why Gujarat has India’s fastest agricultural growth (10%/year for a decade, say economists Gulati and Shah). Indian agriculture is crippled by regulations, but Gulati shows that Gujarat has the highest agricultural freedom among states. Modi charges farmers for power, and so all his three state power companies are profitable. By contrast, power companies in other states with free rural power have accumulated losses of almost Rs 200,000 crore. 

Critics accuse him of giving cheap land to favoured industrialists. But state and national governments the world over use such sops to attract industries. Unlike most politicians, Modi has clearly not enriched himself. 

Good governance includes communal peace. So, the 2002 Muslim killings reflect terribly on Modi. For some, it puts him beyond the pale. But since 2002 the state has been peaceful. In 2011-12 , Gujarat had the lowest Muslim rural poverty rate among all states. Its overall poverty rate for Muslims (11.4%) was far lower than for Hindus (17.6%). This was also true of six other states, so Gujarat is not unique in this. 

In sum, EFSI and other studies show that Gujarat has good governance. It has social and communal flaws. But it is India’s top state in economic and agricultural freedom. That’s not hype.