Why the Church is waltzing with Narendra Modi in Kerala

By John Cheeran
The Church’s truck with Narendra Modi is becoming apparent by each passing day in Kerala as the alert has been sounded for the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
In Kerala, the Christians are hardly a minority community. They, in fact, run the show in the state. (To state the facts, they are still a minority going by sheer numbers. The Christians are only 19% among a population of 3.34 crore Malayalis with the Hindus (57%) and the Muslims (25%) dominating the demography.)
The chief minister is a God-fearing Orthodox Christian. The finance minister is a God-fearing Catholic. The opinion maker, the largest selling daily newspaper in Kerala – The Malayala Manorama--, is run by a God-fearing Orthodox family. At all levels of bureaucracy, including the law and order, there are a significant number of God-fearing Christians. 
Secularism is the great ruse that brings together both the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF). The transfer of power happens every five years between the UDF and LDF and, in this affair, BJP has little role to play. So there is no fear factor, when you contemplate the idea of Modi.
That pretty much explains why the Christians in Kerala think they have nothing to worry about Modi becoming the Prime Minister of India. So does the Church leadership. After all the Christians are astute businessmen and they have turned education and healthcare into a much thriving business in Kerala and elsewhere in the country. And what’s Modi’s hallmark? The great leader encourages businessmen. He cuts red tape and makes things easier for business. So that makes him a good man?
Of course, it does. 
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Winds of Change Blow Away Akhilesh’s Cycle of Hope

By John Cheeran
Is Akhilesh Yadav more than his father’s son? There is no doubt that Akhilesh’s time has come with Muzaffarnagar riots challenging his authority as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. In the last 18 months, Akhilesh has turned BSP leader Mayawati into a saint, with the state witnessing more than 100 riots. The cycle of hope has been broken. 
Yet, not many can see the man behind Uttar Pradesh’s youngest chief minister, who now at 40, struggles to break free from the circle of his famous daddy and uncles.  
Yes, Akhilesh deserves our attention. Sunita Aron’s biography of the man in the hot seat, Akhilesh Yadav: Winds of Change (published by Tranquebar, pages 561), could not have come at a better time. Everyone is talking about UP and how Akhilesh has managed to alienate both the Hindu and Muslim communities. Muzaffarnagar riots have rocked political equations in Uttar Pradesh, reviving BJP’s drooping electoral fortunes in the state.
Winds of Change, however, fails to pull Akhilesh out of the shadow of India’s forever prime minister-in-waiting, netaji Mulayam Singh Yadav. 
Aron’s rambling account has a lot about the shifting political scape in UP but very little about Akhilesh. Despite being a witness to political vicissitudes in UP, the author has a hazy focus, and ends up with an amateurish effort. The book is too long (560 pages) and the tone is reverential. Poor writing mars this biography, factual errors add to readers’ woes. Relying on too many secondary sources and library clippings make this a dull reading. May be a bit of editing could have rescued this book -- it is amazing how the biographer can translate ‘shramdaan’ as land donation.
Aron uses colourful language as regional reporting often tends to be: "The tussle for power got increasingly vulgar and for the first time in history the UP assembly's carpets were soaked in blood even as legislators indulged in fisticuffs and routinely kidnapped and threatened each other in public.” 
Sample this: “It was evening time and a riot of emotions was visible on the grounds. Evening walkers ambled briskly despite a steady traffic of commuters.”
For all that, Tranquebar and Aron, I guess, got the name of the book wrong. It could have been easily titled Mulayam Singh Yadav: Winds of Change. This is a Mulayam biography in disguise as much as the current Uttar Pradesh administration is.       
Samajwadi Party, founded in 1992 by a shifty Mulayam, is now trying to change its colours with Akhilesh at helm. With free laptops but without English keyboards, it has been a difficult transition for Sydney and south India (Mysore) educated Akhilesh. The Yadav scion turned down an alliance from another powerful Yadav clan, to marry outside of his caste. Akhilesh has shades of strong will but the biography rarely tries to figure out the man.       
Although Samajwadi Party has its own Mahatma in Ram Manohar Lohia, whose ideology has been observed only in its violations, Mulayam has turned the party into a Yadav dynasty. The ‘modern’ Akhilesh has no qualms about it. He justifies the dynasty by saying people like him had ‘struggled’ to become politicians.
There is no doubt that Akhilesh has a tough task. He is ruling a state where students want their chief minister to allow them to copy during examinations. So much for aspirational values and free laptops. 
Much of the political reporting in India does not go beyond the inane. Sample this: “His (Vinod Barthwal, a SP leader) words had proved prophetic as Akhilesh's political career did witness a meteoric rise after his marriage to Dimple and he entered the Lok Sabha for the first time in 2000 after winning from Kannauj and eventually became the youngest chief minister of the largest state in 2012.” So what has marriage got to do with Akhilesh becoming an MP? Is it because the marriage came before the elections? Akhilesh married Dimple in 1999. And the biographer sees significance for an event that took place 13 years later and describes it as “meteoric rise.” 
Aron, however, gets it right, almost, when she writes: “Despite a growth story which remains unparalleled in any other village of Uttar Pradesh, the aggression amongst the locals of Saifai could be just a slice of what ails the Samajwadi Party across the state. It took a rustic Mulayam to rein in such elements in the past but for Akhilesh who is not only known for his politeness but is also hemmed in by lumpen elements within the party, it could prove to be a long overhaul.” 
May be it is a long haul. May be this is what we deserve when you write about a political party and a father-son duo who take pride in ‘English Hatao’ campaigns.

Is Muslim League a dead horse?

By John Cheeran

There is little in common between Jawaharlal Nehru and Ramesh Chennithala. The former is India’s most celebrated statesman-prime minister, the latter a khadi-clad Peter Pan in Kerala.

Last week Chennithala, president, Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee, tried to emulate Nehru when he said the rump of Muslim League in Kerala (what is variously described as Indian Union Muslim League Kerala committee, Muslim League, etc) has become a liability for Congress.

It was Nehru who dismissed Muslim League as a dead horse in the post-independence euphoria in 1957. (It is another matter that, two years later, he keeled over and the state unit of Congress struck an alliance with the League in Kerala). Now the dead horse is galloping faster than Congress in Kerala, threatening almost to wreck the United Democratic Front (UDF) coalition.

Will the high command in New Delhi agree about what Nehru said in 1957?

Why do Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi flog the dead horse? The Gandhis can hardly displease the rump of Muslim League in Kerala, for the Oommen Chandy-led UDF ministry leads a precarious existence even with the support of the League. So they will acquiesce, and League will continue to press their arguments.

It is important to realise who flogged Nehru’s dead horse into life.

With a 25% Muslim population in the state, both the UDF and CPM-led LDF are wary of alienating Muslim voters. But one cannot understand the need for a Muslim League, in Kerala’s cultural and social context, in electoral arena. Both Congress and CPM are quite accommodative of Muslim aspirations, so why strike a divisive note on the basis of religion? The answer should come from the Muslim community. League, however, has realized that only thing that matters in a first-past-post democracy is numbers in a given geographical area.

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When India is a metaphor for BCCI

By John Cheeran

So who won? There may not be a definitive answer to that question but there is no doubt about who lost in the Chennai Test on Sunday –the Indian cricket fan. It was a victory for N Srinivasan and his brinkmanship, it was a victory for Arun Jaitley and his political nous, and it was a victory for Jagmohan Dalmiya and his sense of opportunism.

If you have been a cricket lover, you can henceforth love BCCI. What a beautiful four-letter word it is. You can use it now to let your steam out – ‘BCCI You.’ This is the only message coming from Chennai. Whatever the outraged public say, BCCI is a realm, where you are not given entry. You can buy a match ticket, enter M A Chidambaram Stadium, or M A Chinnaswamy Stadium or for that matter Eden Gardens. That’s it. (As much as you can cast your vote during elections but your tryst with democracy ends there.) You cannot walk into the portals of the BCCI. We will fix the game for you, that’s the message coming from Srinivasan, Jaitley and Dalmiya. We are in it together. We will run this as a private organization (which in any case, it is) and let no one come forward to clean-up our act, say the entrenched forces in Indian cricket.

And mind you, BCCI is the most professionally run sports organization in India. It only shows how poorly managed our other sports organizations are. You cannot criticize BCCI on certain counts. For example, former and current cricketers are taken care of financially by the board. There is no breakdown of administration. Indian board flexes its muscle and money at the International Cricket Council. It vetoes ICC proposals and takes on the perpetrators of imagined insults to the nation and its cricketers. BCCI may be a mafia, it is a mafia that gets things done. Like what? When Srinivasan was around, India regained the World Cup, in 2011, 28 years after its first title triumph. The board’s coffers are full. It religiously conducts all domestic tournaments, and on the face of it, there is a degree of process (however skewed it may be) involved in its decision making. To a large extent, this explains the silence of the satraps of the state associations in the working committee meeting in Chennai on Sunday.

But when it comes to big decisions, there is opacity, deceit, subterfuge, arm-twisting and mutual back-scratching. Very rarely we see the ‘back-stabbing’ attempted by the western lobby, led by one of the most ambitious politicians around in India now.

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Ram Janmasthan is in Ayodhya: A split verdict for national unity

By John Cheeran
Three judge Allahabad bench of Lucknow High Court has given a split verdict for national unity. The Ramajanmabhumi-Babri Masjid disputed land is to be divided into three parts --- Sunni Waqf Board, Nirmohi Akhara and Hindus – in what can be interpreted as an out-of-the-box judgment. Judges Sharma, Sudhir Agarwal and SU Khan delivered three separate judgments on the title dispute.
The bench rejected the claims of Sunni Waqf board and Nirmohi Akhara but in a reconciliatory gesture said that the land will be divided in three.
The most significant decision of the bench is that it affirms the place below the central dome of the disputed stricture is the birthplace of Ram. It also said prior to the construction of Babri Masjid in 1528, there was a temple structure at the site but it cannot be definitively said whether it was a Ram temple. The bench relied on the evidence presented by the Archeological Survey of India for this.
What emerges is that the bench has clearly gone beyond the brief given to it when one considers the fact that it pronounced that the place is Ramjanmasthan. It has apparently arrived at this decision considering the majority community’s faith and available evidence such as the ruins of a temple.
It also upheld the installation of Ram idols into the Babri Masjid on December 22, 23, 1949, arguing that there never was a Masjid to begin with at Ramjanmabhumi. The bench said as per the Islamic tenets a mosque will not have legitimacy if it is built over an existing place of worship by destroying it.
The court may have also taken into consideration the observation made by Justice JS Verma in 1994 that in Islam, Muslims can offers prayers at any place and therefore a mosque is not place that cannot be taken over by the state, claiming sanctity.
Of course, in a nutshell, the judgment of Allahabad Bench is a vindication of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the stance taken by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
It remains to be seen whether Indian Muslims will fight the legal battle and ensure that the long festering wound does not get any salve at all.

Oil crisis: How about Rahul Bajaj for Indian Prime Minister?

By John Cheeran
How about Rahul Bajaj for Indian Prime Minister?
The Indian automaker has welcomed the hike in petrol and diesel prices for all the right reasons. On Wednesday he told a television channel that though the sales of his company’s products, mainly Bajaj scooters and bikes, will be hurt as direct result of fuel price rise, in the interest of the nation and the future generations to come we should accept the rising costs.
Yes, I agree, when Bajaj says that money to buy crude oil for Indian refineries will not drop from heaven. It has to be found among the direct users of petrol and diesel, at a time when the price of crude oil per barrel has touched $130, and if you can trust Goldman Sachs’ Arjun Murty’s forecast, it will touch $200 mark before the year turns over.
Bajaj is a member of the Parliament. But he does not belong to any political party. He has no constituency to lose, so unlike our populist politicians, Bajaj can speak his mind, even though it is for the good of the nation.
Don't you think that Bajaj should replace Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister?
BJP wants the federal government to cut duties and keep the prices where they are to shield the common man from the cascading effect of fuel price hike. It is easier said than done, where will the government rise funds for its social outlay?

Simple fact is that, when it rains, as it did in Delhi yesterday night, it is difficult not to get drenched despite your umbrellas. Tough times are upon us.

Different and diverse ideas are needed to tackle the energy crisis. India should search for alternative energy sources. The United States is experimenting with corn ethanol, a move which has been widely blamed for pushing the global food prices up.

That perceptive columnist Roger Cohen has written in today’s New York Times about a better experiment—Brazil’s sugar ethanol.
Allow me to quote Mr Cohen.
“Some 35 years after the first oil shock, Brazil has moved from dependence on imports to self-sufficiency while the United States still relies on imported oil for more than half its needs. In the same period, Brazil has developed the world’s most advanced ethanol program, based on sugar cane, while the U.S. corn ethanol program is essentially a wasteful folly of dubious carbon offset merits….
Sugar cane is not a staple. It’s eight times more productive than corn. It grows year round. It must be processed fast, so CO2-spewing transport to distant ethanol plants is impossible (unlike for corn).
Its leftover biomass can be used to produce electricity, enough, by some estimates, to provide a third of Brazil’s power needs by 2030. Ethanol already accounts for about 50 percent of car fuel in Brazil. The vast extent of unused arable land — only 16 percent is cultivated — offers enormous scope. At $40 per barrel-of-oil-equivalent in Brazil, sugar-cane ethanol makes strategic and economic sense.”
I hope Mr Sharad Pawar, India’s Minister for Agriculture and sugar baron, will take the lead in India to develop sugar cane ethanol.
We need initiatives such sugar cane ethanol, at least till such time, when Mr Bajaj or Mr Ratan Tata comes up with vehicles that run on love and fresh air!