It’s too early to write Posco off

Trust the unabashed commitment of our political leadership for the Posco project to circumvent the green tribunal’s review order

Tehelka, 28 April, 2012

ON 30 March, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) suspended the final order of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) dated 31 January 2011 that cleared the POSCO project in Odisha. It brought relief and hope for many fighting the project.
The NGT has stalled work until a full review of the project can be undertaken by specialists with fresh terms of reference. We have had two such reviews in the past. The majority in both review panels reported glaring illegalities in the project that found echo in the NGT’s observation that “a project of this magnitude… has been dealt with casually, without there being any comprehensive scientific data regarding the possible environmental impacts.”
Yet, those reviews did not come in the way of the project getting the final clearance from the MoEF in 2011. So can yet another review reverse what seems a fait accompli?

In August 2009, then environment minister Jairam Ramesh ordered that no forest land be diverted without the consent of the affected gram sabhas. But in December, he granted the ‘final clearance’ for land diversion in violation of his order. He issued a face-saver in January 2010: the ‘final clearance’ was ‘conditional’, depending on the settlement of rights under the Forest Rights Act (FRA).

Odisha promptly lied that there were no traditional forest dwellers in the project area. In the next few months, two Centre-appointed committees — under NC Saxena and Meena Gupta — nailed those lies. But Ramesh offered yet another ‘conditional’ final clearance in January 2011, asking Odisha to furnish an ‘assurance’ that there were no ‘eligible persons’ under the FRA in the area. The state termed the gram sabhas ‘illegal’ and repeated all the claims earlier trashed as ‘false’ by the MoEF panels. On 2 May, Ramesh gave the ‘final approval’ for land diversion.

The backroom developments were still more shocking. On 8 May 2007, the finance ministry sought an update on the project, which was to be sent by 18 May to then finance minister P Chidambaram. On 16 May, A Raja issued an environment clearance to POSCO’s port. Again, in a letter dated 4 June 2007, the finance ministry sought the status of the POSCO applications. The MoEF Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) cleared the plant on 20 June.

Meena Gupta took charge as MoEF secretary in June 2007 when the ministry was under the PMO. While it took even Raja eight months and a nudge from the finance ministry to clear the POSCO port, Gupta issued the green clearance for the plant in less than three months. When Odisha sought clearance for diverting forest land, Gupta got an in-principle nod from the FAC in less than two months.

Surprisingly, Ramesh handpicked the same Gupta to head the fact-finding committee in 2010. Unsurprisingly, Gupta was the lone dissenter in the panel and found nothing wrong with the clearance for land diversion that she had issued.

While the project was being examined for its legal merits, PM Manmohan Singh assured South Korean President Lee Myung-bak of a speedy clearance when the latter visited Delhi in January 2010. Steel minister Virbhadra Singh even offered a six-month deadline for the handover of land. Manmohan repeated the assurance at the Asean summit at Hanoi in October 2010. At the G-20 summit at Seoul in November, India’s Ambassador to Korea SR Tayal said “every effort is being made by all stakeholders” to see the project through. Such was the pressure on the MoEF to clear the project before the G-20 meet that Ramesh, after failing to meet the deadline, blamed the FAC for the delay and assured his bosses that “the decision will be taken within a couple of weeks”. Against mounting legal odds, it took him a few months though to deliver.

Five days before the NGT order, Manmohan thrice assured the Korean government and investors that his “government is keen to move forward with the POSCO project”. With the PM’s commitment unwavering, courts, tribunals and inquiries be damned.

Nobody Hits a Lady

The national outrage over Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s handling of satire is plain naiveté. Didi knows better than to ignore such timeless instruments of destruction, particularly when she is sure to get away with her counter-offensive


Open, 21 April, 2012


It is ridiculous how the so-called educated, liberal mind works. Granted, nothing stops us from taking sides. We can defend our right to forward a cartoon on email. We can back the content of that cartoon. We can have nightmares about Mamata Banerjee’s motives, methods and manias. We can also get a life if we believe she refuses to have one.

But must we accuse West Bengal’s Chief Minister and her aides of overreacting, that too, to a professor, of chemistry? Must we call her ‘insecure’ because she saw a conspiracy—political, because she is a politician—in the act of circulating the aforementioned cartoon? Must we also insist that the cartoon was innocuous? Must we always underestimate her?

For all our so-called education and liberalism, Mamata, for once, knows better. She knows that cartoons are a form of satire, an offshoot of Dionysian traditions that date back more than 3,000 years. She knows that satire, in its earliest form, was an impromptu magic curse hurled by Greek performers of fertility rituals in their phallic chants. Not for nothing has her police force invoked a section of the Indian Penal Code that deals with ‘outraging a woman’s modesty’.

Mamata knows that satire is not to be trifled with. Nearly 2,800 years before she became Chief Minister, Greek poet Archilochus killed his fiancée Neobule and her father Lycambes with good old satire. Ancient Arab tribal poets accompanied armed troops to the battleground spewing satirical curses. Their Irish counterparts used the same oral weapon to destroy crops and dry up milk. And yet, we called it paranoia when Mamata Banerjee saw in the professor’s satire a potent conspiracy and sought to defend her regime of ma-mati-manush against it.

For a staunch ‘anti-red’, Didi is deceptively well-read. Growing up, she might not have had access to Juvenal or Horace, but she must surely have come across pamphleteer Jonathan Swift and his nauseatingly dangerous solution for Irish poverty. Swift, in 1729, modestly proposed that ‘a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled’ and would fetch a good price in the market.

If only the clamouring liberals had paused, Didi’s supporters would have told them how she shuddered to imagine the despicable depth to which Swift could have plunged had the English not meticulously discouraged the tradition of satire by burning all ‘lampooning texts’ during the Elizabethan era that preceded his A Modest Proposal. By upping the ante in time, Mamata is only defending Bengal, and indeed the country, against future onslaughts.

But thanks to us, the thankless, Didi never gets enough credit for being the good political student she is. A few months before she became one of India’s youngest ever MPs in 1984, her then role-model Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had got a particular issue of The Economist confiscated upon arrival at Indian airports. So swift was this crackdown that not a single copy was delivered in India.

Kevin Kallaugher aka KAL, the magazine’s devil-turned-cartoonist, had portrayed Mrs G as a menacing, four-armed goddess of sorts, with a pair of monstrous eyes, a snake necklace and an ample belly. Trampling over Sri Lanka, this cartoon avatar of Mrs G held a bag of money and dagger in two hands, while the other two squeezed a turbaned fellow and an aam admi. The sensible Prime Minister that she was, Indira Gandhi could not have taken any chances.

If her role model was not enough, Didi’s arch enemies also had a timely lesson for her. In the run-up to the last Assembly polls in West Bengal, painter Shuvaprasanna, handpicked by Didi as head of the Indian Railways’ passenger amenities committee, had exhibited a satirical version of The Last Supper in Kolkata. The canvas depicted CPM Politburo members, their left hands missing, seated grimly around a corpse that resembled Jyoti Basu on a table draped in a red cloth, under an upturned party symbol on the wall. Alarmed by this ‘malicious, distasteful, defamatory and insulting’ painting, the Left leaders had rushed to the Election Commission seeking retribution.

Mamata does not get credit for avoiding bad influence either. Only this February, a cartoon in The New York Post by Sean Delonas portrayed a chimpanzee being shot on the street by two cops, with one of them pointing out that, ‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.’ Forget poor taste, wasn’t that downright racist?

While quite a few resented The New York Post cartoon, Barack Obama, the hopeless liberal that he is, did not bother protesting. Post editor-in-chief C Allan nonchalantly defended his cartoonist’s “right to parody current news events”, and Delonas is still happily sketching and publishing away. It must have taken Didi quite some righteousness to swim against such decadent tides unleashed by none other than the US President.

Pity, we did not give Mamata her due even for appealing to educated liberals to use their superior brains for things more constructive. But then, of course, she must have had Maya Neyestani on her mind. In the last week of March, the Iranian cartoonist drew a few outstretched hands emerging from under two facing podiums marked with the flags of Israel and Iran. While these arms exchange roses, two angry men engage in a shouting match at the stump, their empty word bubbles in the shape of ‘WMD’. A triumph of hope, Neyestani’s work soon went viral on social media.

Not too long ago, an amateurishly morphed image of Mamata and her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in a cozy, arm-round-the-shoulder togetherness was doing the rounds online. The morphed image was a rather forced take on a popular still from an all-time Bengali celluloid hit (Saptapadi) and the most popular Bengali screen pair ever (Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen). Mamata did not object to it.

In her teens, Mamata confessed in a recent memoir, she was mortified after meeting her classmates’ boyfriends, lest someone spotted her doing so. Nobody acknowledged that in the constructive interest of affairs, her elder-sisterly public persona even swallowed the embarrassment of being part of a frame charged with such romantic overtones.

Gratitude is a rare virtue. That is why our ‘educated liberals’ are daring her all over the internet these past few days with a new surge of caustic, provocative cartoons. But Didi is not, and never was, against fun. However, the leader in her has always taken care to have fun responsibly. Dyspeptic Bengalis, she knows, are too celebral for their own good. They never get enough physical exercise, preferring to while their time away with books, surfing the net or addabaazi at tea shops. So Didi has taken it upon herself to set the standard for healthy humour. Remember how playfully she pushed the dhoti-clad Kolkata Mayor Shovandeb Chatterjee into a swimming pool during an official function?

Unfortunately, the hate-Mamata campaign has intensified after her party leaders forbade Trinamool sympathisers from marrying or socialising with CPM supporters. Call it political correctness or sensationalism, so readily do we make Didi a victim of her unabashed ways.

There is no record whatsoever of intellectual inbreeding putting a community’s biological future at risk. Moreover, the Trinamool Congress has barred only social contracts such as marriage, but ‘rapid integration’ through such anti-social means as political rape continues on the ground across the state anyway.

But for our liberal pretences, it would not be very difficult to appreciate the merit of this social embargo. Didi remembers how the state suffered in the absence of an effective opposition during the 34-year-long reign of the Left Front. This so-called fatwa is her think-tank’s bold attempt to preserve the still surviving opposition constituency that would otherwise get diluted by the influx of decidedly stronger Trinamool genes and intellect through marriage and over tea.

Pity, our liberal Didi-haters never grasp the larger picture. These wasted minds have not come to terms with the fact that intellectual criticism of her alleged insecurity will never force Mamata on the backfoot even tactically or temporarily. She knows she is the chosen one to defend Bengal against “the slanderous enemies of the people”. She has no choice. Ask ‘the people’ who had to eventually choose her for that role because destiny did so a long time ago.

What’s more, Mamata has never shied away from paying the price for being that chosen one. As a self-proclaimed political teen, she did not let the Naxalite movement or Emergency touch her. A daddy’s girl who cried all night, she always woke up to fight for her political dues. A homely Kolkata girl, she grew up to become a leader who believed “the right hand should not know what the Left hand does”.

More recently, as Bengal’s biggest mass leader during her 26-day fast against land acquisition in Singur, she was “terrified that instead of medical help”, the doctors “handpicked by the [Left] administration… would actually do something to disable me temporarily or permanently”.

Today, destiny’s chosen leader bears the burden of becoming her people’s destiny. These are not small sacrifices that she has made along the way. Not small enough to fritter away just because some ‘educated liberals’, quite a few among them clearly traitors, are suddenly crying foul. Today, Mamata is on a mission, ready to make more sacrifices, but rightfully protected by an astute sense of history and gender.

Remember Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister and a popular target of vengeful satirists in her time? Cartwoonist Bill Deore once had a curious take on the Iron Lady. His Thatcher, all puffed up and armed with oversized boxing gloves, dared her unseen critics: ‘You wouldn’t hit a lady?’

Would you, now, you ‘educated, liberal’ morons? Once?

In Defence of Culling

Keeping wildlife in check, where their overabundance threatens life and livelihood, is very much part of the big nature picture

Tehelka, 21 April, 2012

IT IS the litmus test of animal lovers and conservationists. In the past nine weeks, many of them have responded strongly to the idea of culling wild animals when their overabundance threatens life and livelihood (A Time to Cull, 18 February). Some, like veteran Maneka Gandhi, were outraged. Others, like young Divya Vasudev, turned contemplative. Reason does not work in matters of faith. But it may have a chance at clearing misconceptions.

Outside the minefield of ethics, anti-culling outpourings can be summarised into three basic premises. Human development has damaged the natural harmony, pushing wildlife into conflict with people, and a loss of tolerance has led to an exaggerated perception of that conflict. So instead of addressing the effect by culling, we should look into the cause and mend our ways. Anyway, humans do not have any right to control nature.

Let us knock off the first misconception. Nature does not believe in harmony, certainly not in the sense we often misunderstand the term. Otherwise, there would be no evolution, ever. The natural harmony is about equal natural opportunities, a fair game. Beyond that, nature thrives on constant change and shifting balances of power where each species and individual strives to control the other, directly or indirectly, and the fitter live to evolve. There is no sin in that. Otherwise, every predator would be guilty of survival.

Otherwise, the first argument against culling is an understatement. We are indeed responsible for this conflict situation because we moved away from nature and our development destroyed forests. But we also stopped being wild. Our less-civilised forefathers lived in forests, hunted for food or in self-defence and were very much predators themselves. Over time, they became ‘civilised’, developed artificial technology and killed too many animals too easily, even for sport. It was not a fair game anymore.

But if we, the civilised, were guilty of killing for fun, something truly unusual in the wild, our ‘civilised’ streaks also made us conscientious. So, somewhere down the line, we became the only species to curb our natural predatory instincts so that we could protect the few remaining wild animals by law. Of course, many of us broke such laws and game hunting remained legal in many parts of the world. But this, in a nutshell, is the historical drift of the human-wild interface.

What do we do when the equation changes? When the few wild animals become too many in certain pockets (because we stopped killing) and threaten our lives and livelihood? In such a situation, is it not only natural that we return to our ‘predatory selves’ and bring down the numbers till we feel secure again? We may have become a super species but we still have the right to defend ourselves.

It is important that we distinguish between the unreasonable irritation or fear of numerous big farm owners or average city dwellers who are intolerant of wildlife as a nuisance and the bona fide desperation for survival among certain poor farmers who are at the mercy of wildlife, marauding or not. Effective preventive measures and compensation can help many of them. For the rest, culling should be very much an option.

Many argue that a culled population always bounces back because fewer mouths compete for resources. The logic sounds smart on paper, but is defeated by repeated local extinction of several species. Culled or killed well, populations do decrease.

But let’s not miss the bigger picture. A huge rural population still nourishes a cultural bond with nature. It is because of them that a sizeable number of wildlife still survives. The outlandish demands of the fanatically righteous animal welfare lobby and hypocritically preachy conservationists are fast destroying this last constituency. Those who have voluntarily given many a yard will not brook being pressed for miles, particularly by those who do not have an inch to spare.

NTCA refines Phase IV Protocols for monitoring Tiger populations

Tehelka, 14 April, 2012

TWO WEEKS after the TEHELKA report (Still Counting More Tigers Per Tiger, 30 March), the NTCA on 14 April adopted refined protocols for intensive monitoring of tiger source populations under Phase IV of the National Tiger Estimation.

The new protocols will enable state forest departments to formally collaborate with qualified scientists and enable them to shift from estimating minimum numbers of tigers to robust estimates of population density, change in numbers over time, survival and other crucial parameters. The collaborative process is expected to ensure robust scientific standards as well as greater transparency in data collection and analyses.

“We fine-tuned the protocols for better results. It may not always be possible for reserve managers to access adequately qualified scientists. So it (Phase IV) will be a ‘ladder process’ in which tiger reserves will graduate from routine management-oriented monitoring to intensive scientific monitoring,” says NTCA member-secretary Dr Rajesh Gopal.

“When implemented fully, these refinements will put India’s tiger monitoring programme well ahead of any other in the world,” says Dr Ullas Karanth, director, Wildlife Conservation Society-India, whose team of scientists collaborated with the NTCA and the Wildlife Institute of India on the protocols.

The analysis of the data will be done in collaboration with a technical expert/scientist conversant with spatially-explicit capture-recapture process. The NTCA also noted that the period of leaving the camera traps open is important owing to the fundamental assumption of “population closure” (no deaths/ births /immigrations/emigrations) and that leaving the cameras open for longer duration may lead to over estimation.

Field Disorder

The SC deadline for notifying buffer areas around each tiger reserve is being cheered by the greens. But court orders alone cannot alter the grim ground reality. A primer

Tehelka, 14 April, 2012

HOWOn 3 April, the Supreme Court directed state governments to demarcate and notify buffer zones around critical tiger habitats (CTH) in each tiger reserve within three months. Bhopal-based RTI activist Ajay Dubey had moved the court, seeking implementation of a 2008 directive of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) that ordered shifting of tourism activities from CTH to buffer areas. When the NTCA informed the apex court that 10 states were yet to notify buffers, the Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Dipak Misra set a threemonth deadline and asked the NTCA to submit final guidelines for tourism by 10 July.

WHATSection 38 V of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, defines buffer as peripheral to critical tiger habitat or core area, “where a lesser degree of habitat protection is required to ensure the integrity of the CTH with adequate dispersal for tiger species, and which aims at promoting co-existence between wildlife and human activity with due recognition of the livelihood, developmental, social and cultural rights of the local people. The limits of such areas are determined on the basis of scientific and objective criteria in consultation with the gram sabha concerned and an expert committee constituted for the purpose”.

In the present context, notification of buffer areas will pave the way for the tiger reserves to phase out tourism from CTHs to outer forests. On a broader plane, this is supposed to restrict mining, industry, commercial construction, etc. around tiger reserves.

In short, CTHs will have a protective ring where land use will strike a balance between conservation and development imperatives.

WHY NOTThere is fear, real and imaginary, among people residing around tiger reserves that notification of buffer areas will compromise their livelihood. Unlike core forests, buffers allow human habitation. Yet, there have been attempts in the past to relocate villages from buffer areas. Even the latest NTCA evaluation of tiger reserves proposes relocation of villages from buffer areas of some tiger reserves such as Pench (Maharashtra). The limiting factor, though, is that green laws do not allow industries or mines in buffer areas, reducing opportunities for local employment.

Business and political interests are also opposed to the idea of buffer forests. Often, even Forest Departments play ball. For example, in a December 2010 note on the decision of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan not to notify buffer areas around Panna tiger reserve, then state forest chief HS Pabla assured the government that his department had taken all care to ensure that such a notification would not hurt the (diamond) mining interests in and around the reserve. More than a year later, Panna is yet to notify its buffer.

BUTIndia has 39 tiger reserves (40 including Karnataka’s BR Hills where a different, people-oriented management approach is being tried out) spread over approximately 32,578 sq km of CTH notified by 16 tiger states. Bihar’s Valmiki Tiger Reserve is the only one that does not have a notified CTH. Till April 2011, 22 tiger reserves had notified their buffer areas that added up to 18,000 sq km. In most reserves, the expanse of the buffer exceeds the CTH. In Manas, for example, the buffer is almost three times the core.

While these add up to a sizeable green zone on paper, such demarcation often has no ground implication. Most of our reserves are islands surrounded by highways, rail tracks and settlements. Take Ranthambhore, for example. Every possible patch of forests of this tiger reserve has been notified as the CTH. When Ranthambhore notifies its buffer, it will have to mark out agricultural fields, villages and perhaps even a part of Sawai Madhopur town. Depending on its expanse, the Ranthambhore buffer will have 1-2 lakh people residing in it. Any curb on developmental activities or the livelihood of such a huge population will invariably create a major law and order problem.

THEREFOREUnderstandably, few legal provisions are exercised under such circumstances. Most buffer areas exist on paper while it is business as usual on the ground. Moreover, such expansive buffer areas spread the administrative resources thin at a time when even many CTHs are barely secure.

Consider the high-profile tiger reserves. Mining is a major threat in the CTHs of both Sariska and Ranthambhore. Within Corbett’s CTH, the land mafia rules at Loha Chaur inside the reserve’s Durga Devi gate and the timber mafia manipulates the traditional rights (Hak Hakook) of local villagers, particularly in the Sonanadi forests. Corbett’s Kosi river is being mined away openly for construction material that is used locally by mushrooming tourist resorts.

If CTHs are not secure, buffers stand little chance. Tadoba in Maharashtra’s Chandrapur district, for example, notified its buffer in May 2010. Its lush peripheral forests are still under consideration for coal mining and a few mines are operating in adjacent areas. Iron and bauxite ore mining in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district threatens the Sahyadri Tiger Reserve and its connectivity to Dandeli-Anshi. In Madhya Pradesh’s Chhindwara district, lobbying for coal mining undermines the future of Pench and Satpura. Even Kaziranga Tiger Reserve, the celebrated home of the one-horned rhino, has not been able to stop mining in its peripheral forests. The list is just too long.

Back in December 2006, the apex court had issued directions to all states on the notification of the Ecologically Sensitive Zones (ESZ), a 10-km ring of restricted land use around all national parks and sanctuaries. The Centre and the states have been debating and dithering on the provisions of ESZ ever since. Five years on, yet another court order may get defeated on the field if the legal framework of environmental protection continues to be twisted at political and administrative will.

Rajasthan Transfers Sariska Officials as SC Committee, NTCA Intervene

Tehelka, 11 April, 2012

WITHIN A week of the TEHELKA report (Blasting the Tigers Away, 6 April), the Rajasthan Forest Department has transferred key officials from the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Rajasthan Forest Minister Bina Kak took the decision to shift assistant conservator of forests (ACF) Ghanshyam Sharma, ACF Dharampal Yadav and range officer (RO) Uday Ram out of the tiger reserve on 11 April. The three have been replaced by ACF Bhawani Singh, ACF Man Singh Meena and RO JS Hada, respectively. The department also filled up the vacant research officer’s post at Sariska with ACF Vipin Gupta. The Sariska shake-up, say sources, is not complete yet and more “clean-up orders” will follow.

Earlier on 10 April, the Central Empowered Committee (CEC) of the Supreme Court instructed the Rajasthan government to conduct an “appropriate inquiry” into the findings of the TEHELKA report and immediately stop construction work in Sariska Tiger Reserve. On 9 April, Dr Dharmendra Khandal, a field biologist with Ranthambhore-based NGO Tiger Watch, wrote to the CEC, drawing attention to the TEHELKA report, and sought immediate intervention.

Hours before the CEC intervention, Forest Minister Kak held a meeting with top forest officials and decided not to pursue a fresh loan of Rs 3 crore from NABARD for constructing six new anicuts. She also constituted a field inquiry to examine the status of the construction work at Sariska. “The anicuts that are at an advanced stage of construction will be completed by the end of this month. We will stop work wherever the construction is at an early stage once I get the report next week,” says Kak.

In its order (File No. 1-26/CEC/SC/2011-Pt.XXXXII) to the Rajasthan chief secretary, CEC member-secretary M Jiwrajka wrote: “Immediate action may please be taken to ensure that no work is undertaken in violation of the provisions of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and/or the orders of the Hon’ble Supreme Court and/or which may cause disturbance/fragmentation of the habitat in Sariska Tiger Reserve.”

Meanwhile, National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) member-secretary Dr Rajesh Gopal has asked the Forest Department to hold an inquiry. In a June 2009 communiqué, the NTCA had asked the state to “strictly adhere to” the NTCA guidelines and the directives of the SC regarding construction activities inside tiger reserves. “We will put a high-level panel in place to monitor the reserve in future,” says Dr Rajesh Gopal. The NTCA is in the process of constituting a fact-finding team that will soon visit Sariska.

Blasting the Tigers Away

Sariska has refused to learn its lessons from the 2005 wipeout and is blowing its second chance. As Delhi and Jaipur watch, the reserve is losing its stripes

Tehelka, 6 April, 2012

THE NOISE is deafening, breathing not easy and the sight blurred. Earthmovers are gnawing away at the rocky earth and tractors lugging heaps of construction material through the foliage. Jeeps are ferrying overseers and supplies for hundreds of labourers camping inside the tiger reserve. Off and on, dynamite sticks go off in silent blasts, spiking the air with a heady gunpowder stench. Welcome to Sariska. Its heart is ripped open, literally.

Coming up simultaneously are 22 giant anicuts, ostensibly to quench the thirst of animals during summers. NABARD is funding the project worth Rs 11.5 crore and the Sariska management has sought an additional Rs 3 crore for building another six. Never mind that the new structures are coming up a stone’s throw away from old, still-functioning water systems.

Outside the reserve entrance, angry villagers block the road and refuse to let this reporter through. “Sit down and listen to our demands. We can’t sell our land. We don’t have roads, electricity, ration card, nothing. This is our forest these corrupt foresters are destroying,” snarl a handful of protesters. The rest of the crowd has taken their agitation to district headquarter Alwar.

Further down the road, a few forest guards man the reserve gate. One of them believes in plain speaking: “Why go inside? The forest is a construction zone. Forget tiger sighting, we are thankful that the big cats have not yet walked away. And people keep discussing why the tigers are not breeding!”

The magnitude of disturbance unfolds soon. Hundreds of headloads of firewood is moving freely. There is, in fact, a ranger in charge of collecting “protection money” from these village women.

Cattle are omnipresent. There is an acute shortage of grass for wild herbivores — the prime tiger prey — as weeds such as cassia tora, adhatoda and lantana have proliferated into even the core forests through cattle dung.

Nobody, it seems, is even interested in managing the mess. Till a recent recruitment and appointment drive, staff strength was critically low. Even today, nine senior (assistant commissioner of forest to assistant foresters) and 12 guard posts are vacant. A divisional forest officer (DFO) is the one who holds the field control in a tiger reserve. Since tigers were reintroduced in 2008, Sariska has seen six DFOs. For five months in 2010, there was nobody in charge.

Seven years ago, after Sariska had lost all its tigers, the tragedy was dubbed as an opportunity for reforms. The prime minister set up a tiger task force. The state government also appointed its own panel. The remedies offered were simple: minimise disturbance, maximise protection and mobilise local support. Simultaneously, there was a call for professionalism and more transparency.

The panels also laid down a set of conditions for securing Sariska before reintroducing tigers. These included relocation of villages, closing down the state highway running through the reserve, restricting pilgrims from roaming free inside the forest, a ban on mining, etc. In a hurry to create history, Sariska flew in tigers in 2008 without meeting any of these conditions, pledging that the results would soon be there for everyone to see.

Four years and six tigers later, the ghastly results are there for everyone to see. Consider:
The first tiger flown in to Sariska was killed in 2010 when it had preyed on a buffalo and the carcass was poisoned with pesticide. Then DFO D Pravin and ACF Mukesh Saini were suspended. Little else changed on the ground.

Rampant grazing and firewood collection brought down the prey density so alarmingly that Wildlife Institute of India (WII) had to nudge the governments at Delhi and Jaipur last year. But with cattle still the most easily available prey and enough villagers still inside the reserve, the possibility of carcass poisoning merely depends on how frequently a cattle owner has lost his animals to tigers and when his patience runs out.

The quality of scientific management is also suspect. In 2010, before the tiger was poisoned, nobody had been tracking it for two days. It went unnoticed even after its radio collar started sending the static signal. It did not help that collars, too, were suspects. Thrice since 2009, collars had to be refitted on tigers because of malfunctioning. But the management probably had had enough. So for nearly a year now, tigress ST2, the first female to be reintroduced, is moving without a signal and being monitored only through its pugmarks, when available.

Few officers want to stick around at Sariska lest they are held accountable if anything goes wrong. Those who do, accept its culture of corruption. In 2010, a number of chowkies were constructed in the western pockets — Banna and Pathakhora, for example — of Sariska. Today, few forest staff dare enter those buildings. Infamous as “standing graveyards”, these two-year-old structures were built so shoddily that they could collapse any moment.

During the last financial year, Rs 40 lakh was spent, on paper, on repairing a 22 km road from the Sariska gate to Pandupol. Drive down the road and you can tell that the actual work happened only along a 3 km-stretch, between milestones 4 and 7.

After the 2005 wipeout, Sariska chalked out a plan to shift 28 villages from the tiger reserve. Only a small village, Bagani, with 21 families, was relocated before tigers were reintroduced in 2008. Since then, another 400 families have been shifted from Umri, Rothkala, Kiraska, Dabli and Kankwari villages.

But villagers and even a section of the forest staff allege that many passed the eligibility test for the Rs 10 lakh compensation by “unfair means”, antagonising others who have since turned hostile to the idea of relocation. The number of eligible families in Kiraska, for example, shot up by 60 percent within four years.

While money changed hands in most cases, there are also allegations of sexual favours, even fathers forcing their daughters to visit the DFO hut, to make it to the compensation list.

The DFO hut in question, a single-storey structure close to Kalighati inside Sariska, was built in 2008 for housing researchers from the WII. In 2009, the building was renovated for “guests of the management” even though a 2008 National Tiger Conservation Authority guideline barred tourists from staying overnight inside a tiger reserve. Recently, the building has been rechristened as CF (conservator of forest) hut and nobody in Sariska can explain what purpose it serves inside the forest when the CF has his official accommodation only 10 km away.

To top it all, the high-handed approach of the present management has completely forfeited public support. Villagers proudly recall how the present CF RS Shekhawat was roughed up a few times by the locals. “They (forest staff ) are looting the forest and still have the audacity to show us the rules. They impose restrictions on us so that nobody gets to know the secrets of their jungle raj,” fumes Nanakram Gurjar of Haripura village.

The agitation was called off on its sixth day after the Alwar administration, including the forest brass, assured the villagers of patchwork on the state highway and a survey to resolve the confusion over the forest boundary.

Bina Kak was torn between a “politician’s commitment to the people” and “the forest minister’s responsibility to protect the tiger”. She explained: “The villagers don’t understand the legalities (Section 20 of the WLPA denies right to sell one’s land within a sanctuary) and the binding nature of Supreme Court directives (on closure of the road). We must engage them in dialogue. Yes, the situation could be handled in a better way before it snowballed. But I was informed late.”

THE REINTRODUCED tigers, meanwhile, are not breeding. It is a major embarrassment for the state forest department because Panna, the other zero-tiger reserve that was repopulated after Sariaka, has already produced multiple litters. So a number of bizarre theories are doing the rounds. Many, including former Sariska DFO Sunayan Sharma, have blamed, of all things, the radio collars. Others rue the eviction of a holy man from the core area who cursed the forest staff that the “new tigers would never bear fruit”.

But a survey of the reserve, torn apart by blasts, excavation, heavy vehicle movements, labour camps, cattle and tree fellers, leaves little to the imagination. Mining is thriving all along the peripheral hills from Sili Baori to Majoad, including hotspots such as Jaitpur Brahmin, Riksha, Gopalpur and Mundiyabas. But the state forest administration proudly claims that there is no mining “inside Sariska”.

Meanwhile, land price has gone up by more than ten times around Thana Gazi and Tehla, along the approach roads to Sariska’s two entries, since the tigers are back. Villagers claim that many “outsiders” have invested through “powerful insiders” who acquired land in time and are making high profit. The list apparently includes the who’s who of the forest establishment. But that is another story.

Still Counting More Tigers Per Tiger

A decade after the pugmark count method was junked as unreliable, the camera-based scientific estimation protocol remains as susceptible to human error and fudging

Tehelka, 31 March, 2012

AN EXACT headcount of tigers is not necessary to save the animal. Tigers do just fine till there are just a few left in a forest. So should we fuss over feel-good numbers propped up every now and then for a figure-happy media? Fuss we must, because the first casualty of such manipulation is the early warning system.

Sariska and Panna did not lose their tigers overnight. The managements were happily counting many tigers per tiger till the last ones were killed in a poaching spree that continued for years. Honest monitoring could have easily detected the population slide in both cases, leading to a timely crackdown on the mafia.

History cannot be undone. But seven years after the Sariska lesson, the Centre’s much-vaunted initiative of continuous monitoring of tiger reserves has again left it to the ability, whims and integrity of the states to report real-time data that will determine the management response on the ground. The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) is entirely funding this exercise but has set no benchmark for accountability.

Ironically, Project Tiger (now NTCA) boss Dr Rajesh Gopal had termed the 2005 Sariska debacle an opportunity for reforms. Already, in 2002, Project Tiger and the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) had begun replacing the human error-prone pugmark census method with a scientific estimation protocol. In 2005, the initiative gathered steam. In a three-phase programme, the Centre institutionalised camera-trapping and has since spent nearly Rs 25 crore to conduct two quadrennial all-India censuses. While in 2006, the tiger numbers were rationalised from the pugmark based count of 3,500 to 1,411, the 2010 report claimed a jump to 1,706.

But, independent experts were already raising a few pertinent points. The future of the species depends on good breeding populations and there are few left in India. While the mega quadrennial census spread out resources over 3 lakh sq km, key tiger areas spanned not more than 25,000 sq km. Besides, tiger mortality and birth rate are very high and poaching anyway causes a rapid fall in numbers. So a lot can happen to a tiger population in the long window between two quadrennial censuses.

The NTCA agreed and decided to move on to Phase IV of its monitoring programme. In a series of meetings hosted by the government during 2009-11, experts decided that the NTCA would ensure rigorous scanning of the high tiger density areas to generate real-time data while the WII would continue with its all-India exercise every four years. In November 2011, Phase IV monitoring was launched in all tiger reserves (except Sunderbans and Buxa) and the NTCA has since distributed Rs 5 crore among the states. The annual exercise will eventually cost Rs 30 lakh per 1,000 sq km.

So how was Phase IV supposed to be different?


During the 2010 all-India census, camera trapping was done in small forest patches adding up to roughly 10,000 sq km and this data was extrapolated, rather dubiously, to obtain tiger numbers for the entire 85,000 sq km of India’s tiger forests. Moreover, the cameras were used for different durations (usually too long) in different field locations.

Big cats move across long ranges and sampling several small patches within a landscape results in the same tigers getting clicked in different sampling areas. Keeping the cameras on for too long records many tigers that either die during the estimation process or are transient animals just passing through the sampling area. Naturally, such tigers, unlike the surviving resident tigers, are not captured repeatedly by the camera.

Since the estimation relies on the ratio of the instances of recapture of the tigers that have been already captured, this leads to overestimation. Moreover, while counting unique tigers in camera trap photos, too many shots often add to the numbers, particularly if the frames show different parts of the body.

To fix such holes, the minutes of the meetings mentioned above defined Phase IV as an intensive but time-bound exercise to be conducted by the state Forest Departments “in collaboration with outside experts/organisations”.

The entire area (in multiples of 400 sq km) of each reserve having a good tiger population was to be scanned by deploying a minimum of 25 camera traps per 100 sq km for 40-60 days. During the same time, distance sampling of prey base would be conducted by walking 300 km along 30 randomly selected linear forest tracts and counting animals encountered on both sides. Thus, within two months, the real time status of a tiger and its prey population would have been assessed in a scientifically robust and transparent manner.

Instead, the NTCA encumbered its Phase IV guidelines, issued in November 2011, with all the paraphernalia of its earlier phases, including the pugmark study, and left it to the states to decide on involving outsiders. Few states have opened their doors to external expertise since. Instead, they have asked their wildlife wings to go ahead with what little manpower they have, never mind if they have the technical rigour or simply the time for what has now become an arduous, multi-pronged exercise. Past experience shows that a liability on paper is reduced to a farce on the field.

“It is frustrating that the authorities decide something in consultation with the experts and then go on and do something conveniently different. This is one of the reasons for which I resigned from the NTCA in 2009,” says conservationist Valmik Thapar. Many share his anger and maintain that the Centre is going back on its promise of a scientific count.

“The purpose of the Phase IV is lost in this combination of so many exercises that will both add to and justify the confusion. Many reserves simply don’t have the capacity. Left to themselves, forest guards randomly fill in data. Who will ensure that the camera traps are deployed properly and not for longer than the prescribed periods,” asks a young field biologist involved in tiger monitoring.

NTCA DEPUTY director SP Yadav says a Central committee will soon be set up to monitor the Phase IV implementation. Few buy it, though. “Snap audits are fine but a few field visits by a Central committee can’t ensure that the science is not being compromised in the field across 17 states,” says an NTCA member who is likely to be named to the soon-to-be-formed panel.

Others hint at corruption. For years now, tiger reserves have been procuring cameras worth crores. “We know there are always opportunities in purchase. That may be one of the reasons for this resistance to research institutes that bring their cameras and do a thorough job,” says a member of the National Board for Wildlife.

Yadav, however, says that the NTCA believes in building capacity at the government level and that the tiger reserves will utilise their cameras for round-the-year monitoring.

That should be useful, unless the year-round availability of cameras results in Phase IV data collection over a period longer than the prescribed 40-60 days. Anyway, the NTCA has asked the states merely for the maximum possible photos of individual tigers, conceding that few reserves have the capacity to carry out advanced scientific assessment.

But, asks former Project Tiger director PK Sen, will involving external agencies alone guarantee transparency? Organisations such as WCS-India, WWF India and Aaranyak are helping a few states monitor tigers in some areas. But states rarely tolerate outsiders unable to defend the celebratory official numbers.

Perhaps the only way out is to commission independent audits with longer mandates of, say, 5-10 years so that professional agencies can continue scientific monitoring without having to oblige the governments and break the annual cycle of number games for good. Till then, the tiger boom will continue and jolts like Sariska will remain very much a possibility.

A Train To Nowhere

The other surprise in the railway budget is a new line that Mamata Banerjee wished in the heart of Buxa Tiger Reserve

Tehelka, 24 March, 2012

DEEP INSIDE the core of Buxa Tiger Reserve in north Bengal and at the heart of a vast forest landscape that includes Bhutan’s Phipsu wildlife sanctuary is the settlement of Jayanti. Set up during the Raj to facilitate mining, this was a busy railway station transporting dolomite and limestone till the mid-1980s before conservation became the priority.

Today, Jayanti is a sizeable village that appears larger with a paramilitary camp and the Forest Department campus adjacent to it. All that remains of the abandoned railway station is the canteen, since converted into a dhaba that serves jawans, forest staff and tourists. The iron tracks have long been dug out and sold as scrap.

In 2008, the Forest Department conducted a survey of the forest settlements inside Buxa under the voluntary village resettlement scheme. The villagers at Jayanti were keen to move out with the 10 lakh-per-family compensation package. What helped build this consensus was a rapid realignment of the Jayanti river, which threatened to wash the village away. While the threat persists, Jayanti has not been able to shift to safety because the village soon became a political battleground.

The guides’ association of Jayanti affiliated itself to the Trinamool Congress and locked horns with a proxy-Left Forest Department. These guides and a section of the villagers who offered homestay to visitors refused to relocate and demanded that sundry forest laws be bent to promote tourism. Relaying of the railway tracks to Jayanti from Rajabhatkhawa, cutting across the core forests of the tiger reserve, was one such demand.

Nobody took it seriously. The railway track till Rajabhatkhawa was broadened in 2001 and has claimed the lives of nearly three dozen elephants since. The railways has been under pressure to stop night traffic along that killer stretch. The idea of extending the same line to the interiors of a core tiger reserve seemed out of question, until Mamata Banerjee took over as the railways minister in 2009. Never to miss out on a chance to cultivate a support base, she ordered a feasibility study of the line.

“Soon after Mamata became the minister, rail officials conducted a low-key survey. But we never heard anything after that and, frankly, did not bother because it was never an issue here,” says Lal Singh Bhujel, a local activist who has been mobilising villagers for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act in the area.

In 2011, Banerjee became chief minister. It was time to reward and cement her support bases. So Dinesh Trivedi, while hiking the fare against his party supremo’s wish, sanctioned the Rajabhatkhawa- Jayanti line in his budget. Many in Jayanti hailed the announcement.

“I have not been intimated about any such project yet. This was not in the agenda of the last meeting of the State Wildlife Board held on 6 February. A railway line through Buxa is certainly not good news for wildlife,” says RP Saini, field director, Buxa Tiger Reserve, adding that he would, of course, carry out any government decision within the sanctions of the law.

Siliguri-based Soumitra Ghosh, convener of National Forum of Forest People and Forest Workers, makes it clear that his organisation never raised such a demand. He is worried that railway connectivity to Jayanti may add to the tourism mess in the area.

In the political drama that followed the budget, nobody pointed out the absurdity of clearing a new line inside a tiger reserve, which requires a host of statutory clearances under the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980, and Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, to a village that may soon move out or be washed off.

Even the future of wildlife tourism now depends on the Supreme Court and if the court orders against tourism in core forests, the line will serve no one. Unless the very idea of a train to Jayanti is to expose, Mamata-style, the UPA government’s policy contradictions.

Congrats, Sachin! And thank you

Tendulkar has thrilled us in many impossible ways for too long. The 100th ton scraped off the pitch, the maestro, and his billion fans, now must get a life

Tehelka, 19 March, 2012

Even the most unlikely of milestones has been logged. Plaudits and platitudes duly recorded. Take a bow, Sachin Tendulkar. We have had enough.

Runs may still trickle, even flow on occasions. But it is time Tendulkar retires, certainly from the ODIs. Not because some losers would have us believe that his centuries lose us matches. Such nonsense discounts the fact that Tendulkar has scored more match winning hundreds than most batsmen scored in their entire careers.

Rickey Ponting, statistically the closest we have to Tendulkar, has hit 30 ODI tons. Tendulkar’s centuries helped India win 33 ODIs and 20 Tests. Only four other Indian batsmen have ever scored more than 20 tons in the five-day format.

True, many of his efforts did not translate into match-winning, or even match-saving, knocks. Not his fault. He scored so much and so routinely that some of his runs could no way have impacted his team’s fortunes unless his teammates matched up to his amazing consistency and skills.

No batsman will ever achieve in numbers what Tendulkar has. But his time is up. Not because it pains millions of his fans to watch him graft, even struggle, against both quality and average bowling. Tendulkar, and his fandom, has taken such tests in the past. In 2006, he was booed at Wankhede after edging one to the wicketkeeper after an agonising half hour at the crease during which he managed to score just a single.

Before and after that Mumbai ignominy, Tendulkar made emphatic batting statements while under scrutiny. Grounds across the world—Nagpur (October 2005), Kuala Lumpur (September 2006) and Sydney (January 2008) – bear witness, Tendulkar makes memorable comebacks.

Yet, the ‘thank you’ note is due.


Two decades ago, Tendulkar was the game’s most outlandish promise. Even generations that worshipped a certain Gavaskar or a Kapil were in awe of the boy wonder who played without a fear of his mighty opponents but with all the care for the correctness of his craft. And boy, did he score runs.

Over the years, Tendulkar’s game had to lose that daring spontaneity, that innocence of bounty. As his body aged, the mind took over from the instinct. While Tendulkar increasingly optimized the splendour and risks involved in his batting, we moved on to admiring the results in the record books.

We had little choice. Like all sports, cricket is also an indulgence. We could not have abandoned such a rare and precious love that we grew for a boy genius and his munificence even if we had to eventually find more mundane justification, such as statistics, to keep the flame aglow. Once his fans made that adjustment, Tendulkar rarely gave them a reason to complain, by keeping the bookkeepers busy.

But even when his game does not test its limits, it is often a treat to watch. On the occasional rough patch, the king of his craft unabashedly grinds like a scavenger. Now that is as big a demand on someone’s character as is the level of focus Tendulkar maintains after all the press, good and not-so-good. When one is deemed God, it anyway takes a lot to keep playing, and performing, by the same set of rules that apply to 21 others who are merely accomplished men on the ground.

***

In a world where change is the only constant, the mortals are programmed to hanker after permanence. But we are a reasonable lot. So when Sourav Ganguly called it a day, we reasoned that flair, like beauty, faded. When Anil Kumble hung up his bowling shoes, we knew hard work became harder with age. And with Rahul Dravid, we accepted that the wall knew best what was happening on the other side.

But with Tendulkar, we never believed that even the world’s most celebrated cricketing brand came with a sale-by date. When all his contemporaries have quit, we contemplated a grand occasion that would become the maestro. A few suspects among us even dared suggest that he could have retired from the ODIs after the World Cup win at Mumbai.

Tendulkar batted brilliantly during those six weeks last year. He would have believed he had enough in him to carry on. After his hundredth ton, he echoed Dravid on the idea of timing. Retiring on a high, both argued, is selfish; it denies the country one’s service while one is still good at the job.

Dravid, however, called it quits after a bad run because he did not think it was in the interest of the team, or his conscience, to deny a youngster and play a farewell series at home. Few have the stomach for Dravid’s inhumanly righteous standards. So we were not surprised when Tendulkar took the flight to Dhaka. Asian opponents on sub-continental tracks were our best bet for his hundredth ton.

***

Anyone who happened to wake up early enough on that chilly February morning in 1981 and tuned in to the ether waves from faraway Melbourne became indebted to Kapil Dev for life. With a groin injury, Kapil ran in exactly a hundred times and returned 5 for 28. A batting line-up bosting Chappell, Hughes, Yardley and Border was wrapped up for 83 in less than 50 overs.

The rest waited for their mega Kapil moment till 1983. For the generations that watched him play in the 1980s, he was the ultimate cricketing genius. But Kapil continued to play well into the 1990s. His last 16 Test matches earned him just 33 wickets before he finally quit one wicket ahead of Richard Hadlee who had retired four years ago and played 45 Tests less.

During 1992-94, Kapil did not do himself, certainly not his fans or Indian cricket, any favour. Sunil Gavaskar, who brought substance to Indian batting and earned his rightful place among the towering trinity of his time with Richards and Chappell, went past Sir Don’s tally of 29 tons and Geoff Boycott’s 8114 runs in 1983 while still in his prime. But even he was tempted to carry on till he scaled the summit of 10,000 Test runs in 1987.

In his Bradman Oration speech last December, Dravid spoke of how each cricketing generation influences the ones that follow. Gavaskar and Kapil were India’s first two champion cricketers, better than the most in the world. But their team rarely returned triumphant, perhaps because the rest of the eleven were not nearly as good. So fans were left to celebrate two individuals who obliged by chasing a few late personal feats. That tradition continues.

Such a sporting culture made Tendulkar’s departure impossible before his century of tons. To be fair, nobody thought after the World Cup that he would struggle to get there. The phasing-out-experience and easing-in-youth plan meant that he was, and still is, a necessity for the Test squad. But after Dravid snubbed an SOS call to the ODI squad in England with a pre-series retirement announcement, fans expected clarity from Tendulkar.

He was entitled to take it easy. It made sense that he would preserve himself for quality contests and give soft engagements a miss. We understood when he did not turn up against West Indies at home. But Tendulkar going to Dhaka would not have made sense, not unless he played 11 tests since the World Cup without a century, and then another seven sterile ODIs down under. Suddenly, nothing else mattered. Irrespective of the stage, the opponent or the challenge, all of us just wanted Tendulkar to get it over with. As did Tendulkar himself.

***

The only ODI batting record not on Tendulkar’s book and worth his motivation now is perhaps the fastest hundred. But to beat Afridi’s 37 ball feat, Tendulkar will have to post one almost double quick than he has ever done. After Mirpur, even the most demanding of fans will not burden him with such a thought.

A number of firsts, besides of course the hundredth hundred, happened at Mirpur. It was Tendulkar’s first ODI hundred against Bangladesh. It was Tendulkar’s first ODI hundred in the subcontinent at a strike rate below 78. Possibly, it was also Tendulkar’s first hundred that cost India the match.

Tendulkar took 138 balls to reach his 100th ton. Playing at Sharjah in October 2000, he scored an equally tedious ODI century against Sri Lanka, also in a lost cause. But on that occasion, wickets kept tumbling and he was joined by the last recognised batsman Robin Singh as early as the 24th over.

At Mirpur, India was two-down till the 47th over. Yet, Tendulkar scored 8 runs from 9 balls during the batting powerplay. He failed to score off two free hits. At 83, he played out a maiden over to Mashrafe Mortaza. He would take another 10 overs to reach his century. Skipper Dhoni was justified in feeling that his team was at least 20-25 runs short.

Like all of us praying for him, Tendulkar wanted the century badly. But Tendulkar was also batting for India. He knew he slipped on that count. That is why his pointing at the tricolour on the helmet during a particularly muted celebration for such a colossal feat smacked of guilt. That is why his repeated insistence during post-century interactions that he plays for the country rang hollow.

Tendulkar has given the country his blood and sweat for 22 years. Nobody can take away any of that. But at Mirpur, once he got close, he was not ready to risk it for anything. Not even for his team’s cause. If it was a personal tryst with the annals of the game he was so determined to fulfil, the deity of cricket also extracted the price for such ambivalence. It did not look like Tendulkar was enjoying his game. It did not look good at all.

Few doubt that Tendulkar can still score as quickly as any of India’s young guns every now and then. But after the world cup triumph, he could not have any justification for playing ODIs except for the thrill of the game. Or for that hundred that would complete his legend.

After Mirpur, he has none.

So, Who Will Budget For Mamata?

Don't be shocked that Mamata Banerjee’s intervention turned the rail budget into a political tamasha. She is the product of a political culture that holds party far above government and will do anything to defend that order.

The Economic Times on Sunday, 18 March, 2012

Olympia aka Oly pub is a great Kolkata institution. Till the late 90s, this Park Street joint was much more than a cheap watering hole; it was where pseudo-intellectuals sparred and impoverished students like me could expect a few shots on credit from discerning waiters who would, on the odd occasion, tell us we had had a few too many.

Today, Olympia is a rundown den crowded by small-time builders, who shout for waiters in second-person offensive for panic refills. To be fair, the pub still serves a sumptuous chateaubriand and the mustard tastes as tangy on cocktail sausage. Fresh crops of students and pseudo-intellectuals have turned up. Some old patrons are still regulars. Renegades like me who have deserted the city also pay customary penance whenever in Kolkata.

Only a few months ago, I was there to meet a friend who was sharing a table with a bunch of acquaintances. A couple of them, my friend let out, were CPIM card-holders. Initially reluctant to be drawn into a discussion on the body blow Mamata Banerjee had dealt them in the Assembly elections, one of them soon worked up some fervour.

If there was a lesson in the defeat, I was told, it was that the party should never have loosened its grip on the government. But did not the government’s failure to rein in the party result in the poll debacle? Nonsense, the party was always above all else but some in the Writer’s Building (the secretariat) forgot what happened to Somnath Chatterjee.


I remembered Chatterjee soon after Dinesh Trivedi finished reading out his budget this Wednesday. A political giant known for his integrity, Chatterjee belongs to a league very different from that of Trivedi who joined the Trinamool after spending roughly a decade each in the Congress and the Janata Dal. In 2008, the CPIM stalwart upheld the non-partisan status of the Speaker’s office in the Lok Sabha. This week, the entrepreneur-turned-politician presented a hesitantly reformist budget.

Chatterjee was promptly expelled from the party because, to quote CPIM politburo member Biman Bose, “he might have acted according to the Indian Constitution but the party constitution was supreme”. Nobody familiar with the tradition of party raj was under the illusion that Trivedi’s protestations of a fare hike being in the interest of the Railways, would remotely move his one-woman leadership.

Back in Oly pub, sullen comrades stared me down as I wondered aloud if Bengal had much hope if ‘party-is-supreme’ was the message the Left deciphered from the landmark verdict that voters took 34 years to deliver. Then, glasses hit the table with loud thuds. “You are an outsider,” I was told, fingers wagging, “You don’t need to bother about Bengal. We have looked after ourselves all these years.”

Dismissed, I asked for the bill. I remembered all those years.

+++

We did not even notice when it happened. That summer of 1990, students of our age in Calcutta were an impatient lot whose scrutiny was not restricted to Amitabh Bachchan’s morphed voice in Agneepath. We had strong opinions on the lack of sex in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape, the overdose of spirituality in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the perils of Soviet glasnost.

Yet, we did not notice that three women – a UNICEF officer and two government employees -- travelling in a state car were brutally raped by local office bearers of the CPIM on the outskirts of Kolkata on May 30 because no newspaper reported it the morning after. But by mid-June, the truth was out.

The response of then chief minister Jyoti Basu – these things happen – did not help. So, in a letter to Mainstream, then information and culture minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee slammed the critics for not having confidence in the Leftist struggles and respect for the tradition of the Bengali intelligentsia.

All this while, Calcutta cheered the Roger Milla show in Italy. In theatres across the state, Dil and Ghayal became the year’s big grossers. Then the focus shifted to cricket. But before the new boy wonder could score his maiden test ton at Old Trafford, three Bangladeshi refugees were raped on 17 July in a Calcutta suburb.

The party did not blink. Its women’s wing head Shyamali Gupta issued a statement in CPIM mouthpiece People’s Democracy on 29 July, arguing that the rape victims lived in “unauthorised hutments along the railway tracks” and were “involved in foul professions” as “mistresses of notorious anti-socials”.

Calcutta moved on, prompting historian Tanika Sarkar to note how “there was no spontaneous and vast demonstration in this city of processions”, indicating “a somewhat unusually high threshold of tolerance in a Calcutta celebrated for its concern for women”.

+++

The only time I was forbidden to read newspapers at home was in 1982. I was in class five and my father would not have me traumatized with the details of how 16 Anandmargi monks and one nun were beaten and burnt alive in broad daylight on a south Calcutta flyover.

Roughly between the Marichjhanpi massacre in 1979 and the Suchpur butchery in 2000, the Left rule witnessed 28,000 political murders or four killings a day. Political violence escalated in the new millennium, culminating in the flashpoints of Singur and Nandigram. The latest in this series were the murders of two CPIM leaders, clobbered to death allegedly by Trinamool supporters on 22 February in Burdwan.

It is hardly surprising that Trinamool supporters consider violence a legitimate political tool or that the new chief minister matches up to her immediate predecessors in insensitivity when women get raped or infants die in hospitals. The political culture in Bengal has long developed consolidated traits and standard currencies of power.

When the Left defeated the Congress in 1977, it marked the emergence of a new politics in the state. The feudal, anachronistic Congress leadership was replaced by a new order that was subaltern and contemporary. A welcome, if bloody, land reform drive fortified the Left base in rural Bengal. The communists, however, employed an ideologically much less respectable strategy to garner urban support.

Lakhs were lured to join the party with the promise of jobs. Thousands of cadres employed in mills and offices across the state soon ensured that the party had a stranglehold on the system that would keep it in power for three decades and reduce governance to a joke. The rot also spread to villages once the benefits of land reform wore off and successive generations demanded fresh incentives for backing the party.

This political culture has struck such deep roots in Bengal that Mamata’s support base comprises mostly those who resented this party raj only as long as their own party was not in power. Therefore, unlike 1977, the Trinamool victory in 2011 was no triumph of an alternative politics. It was merely a realignment of forces within a political equilibrium that both draws from and feeds a larger social decadence.

+++

I watched the Calcutta book fair erupt into a fireball from a window high up Chatterjee International, the city’s tallest building, across the road from maidan that housed the largest gatherings. That January afternoon in 1997, flames escaped one of the numerous stalls serving food, a commodity Bengalis certainly rate over books, and rode the late afternoon breeze drifting away to the river.

Criminally unprepared, Calcutta lost that battle in its early minutes. At that moment, it was difficult to imagine a bigger villain than the callous fire department. But, finding my way through smoke and cinders to Montmartre, the very aspirationally named arena for little magazines where most of my friends camped, I saw what the city had come to.

For each book burnt, one was stolen. People of all ages, hooligans and bhadrolok, carried away as many books as they could. Many ransacked the stalls that escaped fire. The unfeeling brazenness of that loot could have put even last summer’s London hoodies to shame.

In 2010, when a fire killed 43 people on the two top floors of a150-year-old city landmark, Stephen Court, there was not a sky-lift in sight. In the only state that has a fire service minister, it surely took more than inefficiency to conduct business as usual with the full knowledge that not a single highrise in the city’s business district could be secured in the event of a fire.

Last December, when a fire broke out in the basement of AMRI, one of Kolkata’s most expensive hospitals, the hospital staff locked the gate on local volunteers and doctors abandoned their patients to a slow, stewing death behind glass facades. Mamata cancelled the hospital’s licence, observing, rather ominously, that such a disaster would be understandable in government hospitals because they were cash strapped.

+++

Cash strapped. That has been Mamata’s defence against every criticism of her government. Without any fiscal strategy, she continues to pressure the Centre for handing out doles, while outshouting even the Left on securing a free ride for the poor. But many in Bengal learnt to appreciate this free-dom even before Mamata started fighting for it.

In the early 90s, few of my friends bought train tickets because they were not supposed to. Usually, students flashed their identity cards and moved on. As per railways data, 90 per cent of ticketless passengers caught in and around Kolkata pay the penalties on the spot. Clearly, it is not just the poor who do not pay their way.

While a joyride is par for the course across the country, in few other places would ticketless passengers with a sense of entitlement team up with ruffians to thrash officials and vandalise railway property. Equally commonplace is political encroachment on railways real estate. After Trinamool came to power, its trade union wing INTTUC followed in the footsteps of its Left counterpart and set up offices in railway stations.

No surprise, then, that the Left echoed Mamata’s demand for a fare rollback. Not too long ago, the CPIM sealed its case due political obstinacy over the nuclear deal. Today, if Mamata and her Trinamool bandwagon appear far more unreasonable, it is because they are still testing the limits of their new found power.

Soon after the Oly pub showdown, I met a political activist purportedly close to the chief minister, at Moulin Rouge, another Park Street institution. My latest article on paribartan had failed to impress him. Over a few drinks, his guarded critique turned belligerent. It was not possible to understand the change without living it, he said, adding that the masses behind didi could just walk all over sceptics in the media. Next, he lit up.

The manager came rushing. A few tense minutes later, our friend stubbed out the cigarette on his plate with a flourish. Then, ignoring my presence altogether, he looked the manager in the eye, sat back and hissed: “I’ll be watching you.”

Power corrupts everywhere. In Kolkata, even the illusion of power does.