Exit polls of hatred

It is likely that those exit polls were mere wishes of the bootlicking media or perhaps an exercise in enriching themselves through stock market manipulation. On the latter account, the international situation might have rained on their aspirations.

But one cannot discount the possibility of those exit polls being true. One just has to imagine the ramification of that reality. This was not an election where sinister motives were cloaked under a blanket of progress and inclusiveness.

Communalism of the worst kind was in open display; the hatred particularly against Muslims was the theme of the entire campaign. Maligning of history and progressive historical figures remained foremost on their agenda.

If Modi wins that means Indians will have voted for that unhinged hate and bigotry without any excuse. Not that they voted for anything else in 2014. Lest they forget, the worst dictator in the history was approved by his people repeatedly for his zealousness for violence against the vulnerable. That didn't stop from him from ending ignominiously.

Unraveling of a malevolent clown

Modi has lost his mind or to put in simple terms, he has become mad; he’s behaving on the campaign trail like a panic stricken barmy nut. The most crucial phases of the current elections are almost; the question is why all of a sudden he has become so pathetic? Not that he was not always pathetic but there’s a symptom in his rantings that alternate with his self-pitying groveling. That has all of a sudden become a comic spectacle.

At this point, it wouldn’t matter much whether he wins as everyone has witnessed him into turning a complete lunatic. The metamorphosis of Modi from an authoritarian kook to a raving lunatic remains a mystery or perhaps not or maybe he knows something that we don’t; maybe the truth is about to catch up with him and five years of deceitful fudging of economic data were not enough to save him from falling in an abyss. Truth be told, he dragged everyone into the abyss with him. Surprise remains, why everyone is surprised?

Didn’t he use deceit to evict his predecessor to become the chief minister in Gujrat? Didn’t he incite and preside over genocide in the aftermath of Ghodra tragedy and didn’t he create an atmosphere of fear and terror during his time in Gujrat? Didn’t as the prime minister in last five years usher in an ambience of hate and criminality? Didn’t he choose to not utter a word when his followers unleashed lynching in the name of cow? Didn’t he remain silent when intellectuals opposed to him were murdered? Then, surprise to what end? We might as well enjoy the spectacle of his mental unraveling; the malevolent clown might yet win to continue his vision of hatred and deceit.           

Low life cretin

It was in June 2017, Modi attended the St. Petersburg International Forum meeting and for that occasion, Megyn Kelly from NBC was there to interview Vladimir Putin. During the course of that meeting, at one point  Putin, Modi and Kelly were walking together. Modi started drooling like a louche at flamingly blonde Megyn Kelly and told her, with a shamelessly grinning open mouth with all yellowish dark teeth, suitable for an underworld thug, that he had seen her profile picture with an umbrella on Twitter. Megyn Kelly responded with a characteristic nonchalance, "Oh really! Are you on Twitter?" Modi with his foolishly still open grinning shook his head in affirmative in manner of a famished dog being offered a bone. 

One would assume him from that incident him to be a docilely anodyne but foolish person but in reality Modi throughout has been a sinister human with a dark soul without a trace of any compassion, who manipulated himself into power through unethical machinations and unbound duplicity. It's his record in the government throughout and in particular as prime minister that reflects on his lowliness as a human being. His every action has been aimed to spread in hurt in the most vulnerable sections of the society. 

However, the worst in him comes from the fear of losing power and being voted out of power. And for that reason the electioneering brings out his inner darkness in him. No depth is too deep for him. Last time, fearing loss in Gujarat, he spread canard that the former prime minister, his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, a saintly scholar was hatching a conspiracy with Pakistan to win those elections.

Fresh in the midst of the current elections, he once against stooped that low that any human being would find it gross. Fearing loss to Rahul Gandhi, he resorted to attack his dead father. Rajiv Gandhi was blown to pieces by a Sri Lankan terrorist during an election campaign in 1991. But then Modi had also called Sonia Gandhi a Congress widow and characterized Rahul and Priyanka as autistics. Surprise is not that Modi acts like an ugly cretin, the unfathomable facts remains that there exists people who support such a creepy cretin. 

How do such people get themselves up in the morning and look into a mirror and not think of Akhlaq and Pehlu Khan, who were lynched by very thugs of Modi and who never uttered a word of remorse? Those were not the only people killed during the five years of Modi. There remains a long catalogue of heinousness that will grow in his next term. 

Conman

The man, who used disingenuous schemes to oust his predecessor from his own party and then used his office to foment, ignite and incite the worst riots against Muslims in the country went on to use that notoriety to tighten the stranglehold on the state in parallel with running a mafia like government indulging in extrajudicial methods to eliminate any potential rivals or to implicate the official who dared to stand up to him, ultimately conned overtly communalized population of the country to put him power at the center and that power he brazenly used to empower the worst of the worst in the country and in worst of the cases played havoc with education and research with precedent given to obscurantism; inflicted the pain on the most vulnerable through misguided and ill intentioned demonetization; damaged reputation of the country through hair brained policies in managing external affairs; almost started a war against nuclear powered neighboring country; he’s out there once more making attempts to get re-elected, which given gullibility of electorate could very well happen. That’s the story of the conman, Modi and that’s the story of India heading into oblivion.

To the brink and back

The two countries India and Pakistan armed with nuclear arsenal almost went to war and then returned from the brink; the danger might not be yet completely over. Or maybe be it will never be. The circumstances that triggered those crisis emanated from a suicidal detonation on a main highway in Kashmir that killed over forty Indian security personnel, which involved Adil Ahmed Dar in his late and the vehicle that he rammed into a convoy was laced with huge amounts of explosives. 

That attack sent shock through the entire region followed by nationalist hysteria throughout the India with calls for boycott of Kashmiris and launch of hostilities towards Pakistan. The Indian reaction was predicated on the inference about culpability of Kashmiri with abetment and support from Pakistan. That all started within a time span that would be under any normal circumstances and in saner societies considered too short for acquisition of any irrefutable evidence to make a leap of accusation on Pakistan. But then India under current political dispensation can neither be considered normal nor rationale. 

And rationality never formed any part of Indian thinking in dealing with Kashmir. It would be foolhardy to overlook the background of the person who committed the suicide attack on the Indian security convoy in the first place. He belonged to a region in Kashmir that has been embroiled in a virtual war, particularly since India under Modi embarked on what it called a 'muscular policy'. And almost like all Kashmiris, had been a victim of excesses perpetrated by Indian security forces in the region that could be in various forms ranging from every day humiliations to outright tortures.  

To be continued....

Rajiv Kumar

A tale of two braggadocios cuckoos

One of the most common themes that joins populists of all hues is their ability to indulge in fact free bragging. They do it with aplomb and convince unthinking gullible with an élan and that's how throughout the history populist with authoritarian outlook have been able to ride to power only to indulge in wanton misuse. Present day world is awash with such populists holding and abusing power. The sustenance for continued power requires manufacture of the fictitious issues and crisis and pretense of having solved those problems that did not exist to the applause of the gullible followers and self-congratulations.

Modi and Trump exemplify classic cases of personae indulging in fact free hyperboles and patting themselves in the matter of every second sentence they utter. Modi erupted on the national scene of bragging since 2013 and in the process has run India almost into ruin. Trump on the other hand has been in business of bragging for a long time but was never considered anything more than a clown until he landed into the presidency of the United States. Ever-since assuming the office, the biggest achievement of Trump has been to concoct facts, things and crisis that don't exist. And then of course a daily dose unmitigated lies and bragging.

What happens when these two braggadocios cuckoos run into each other? The outcome will of course depend who happens to be the bigger braggart and as it turned out Trump chewed Modi like a chicken cartilage during his reality show like cabinet meeting. Modi, the braggart, has been bragging to the biggest braggart in world about the library he built in Afghanistan. Not only both Trump and Modi are braggarts who hate dealing with facts but they both also happen to be cuckoos.

-Rajiv Kumar

Iqbal Khandey

This morning I read the news about demise of Iqbal Khandey. That news with tinge sadness also brought back nostalgia of the days, which would be very hard for anyone to fathom in this age. I must have become acquainted with Iqbal around 1974 through an extended clan of Ganais of Mattan. I remained focused on friendship part of the familiarity rather than to understand complex relatedness of Ganais. Iqbal at that time was studying in Amar Singh College while I was in the Government Degree College Anantnag. He would frequently visit our college mainly to meet our common friend Gulzar Ganai, who as I understood was also closely related to him. One occasion that has stuck in my memory for the reasons that perhaps underscore the essence of those times was that we, Iqbal, Gulzar and I, were standing outside the main gate of the college in 1974 and wanted to go to the town in a horse driven ‘tonga’ as none of us was ready to undertake that journey of about two kilometers on foot. But there was a cache: the ‘tonga’ ride would cost 25 p per person but we three persons combined did not have 75 p on us. That was nothing out of ordinary; not having any money was a rule not an exception in those halcyon days. Somehow I salvaged us from the predicament when I spotted an acquaintance who borrowed me a weathered one rupee note and we merrily took a ‘tonga’ ride to the town.

In 1975 we both graduated from our colleges and joined the university. Iqbal went to the English department and I after certain detours ended up in Chemistry. We never interacted in the university and Iqbal didn’t stay there for a very long and left his masters course to pursue IAS, which he cleared after 1975. I always had perceived him as an academic not a bureaucrat, but then academia in those days, that too in Kashmir, was a kind of last resort for failed careers. I did later meet Iqbal on a few occasions subsequently. On the eve of the 1983 elections Kashmir, I together with Gulzar went to see Iqbal in his office. He was, at that time, the Deputy Commissioner Anantnag. He was in some meeting and it was a while when came out and the first thing he uttered was that the official machinery has been directed to intercede on behalf of and in favor the National Conference in polls, which the latter went on win with a thumping majority. Last time I met Iqbal was in 1992. Owing to my sabbatical trip to Germany and dislocation, the university had held back my salary for almost a year. Iqbal was by then a secretary of some important government department. I went to see him at his official residence in Jammu and he then walked with me to the residence of Ajit Kumar who at that time was secretary education department. It was during that short walk I realized the folly of having approached Iqbal for a personal matter. Not that there was any change in his demeanor; he was as usual courteous and affable. It was my personal aversion to everything bureaucratic.

On a day in 1974, Iqbal together with a few Ganais came to my place and he picked up ‘Summer of 1942’ book from my shelf to borrow and to never return. That was the point when I resolved to never ever lend a book come what may. And thanks to Iqbal, I can boast of a personal library of over a thousand books made several times over in different places in different countries. 

Iqbal was always fun with a nasal accent that belied steely resolve; he was deeply erudite with eclectic knowledge; despite everything, he was a romantic at heart.

Emergency-an historical perspective

I have been reading Coomi Kapoor's book on emergency published in 2015 and it has proved to be more revealing than I had bargained for, but not in the manner I had expected. That period remains strongly etched in my memories, and I always have considered that act of Indira Gandhi as completely unconstitutional and constituted an unnecessary subversion of the entire system. Nevertheless, Coomi Kapoor's book has forced me to rethink the entire issue through an historical perspective. In the aftermath of the declaration of the emergency and the excesses carried out under its name, the true causality  had become and remains obscure until this day. 

What no one talks and that book, between the lines, reveals is that crescendo of opposition agitation prior to the emergency and its organization was under the complete control of RSS. Coomi Kapoor herself had been associated with RSS in many manners. The book has a foreword written by Arun Jaitely, who only sometimes back wrote one of the most shallow accounts of that era. 

More importantly, most of the leading lights of opposition were guided by RSS. Indira Gandhi might have had a purpose in declaring that emergency but its operations were taken over by thuggish Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie of Punjabi mafia. And the outcome was a horrible period in the Indian history. Curiously, many of the leading persons from that mafia later became part of BJP.

Validation of Einstein at universal scale

In the span of last one month, three separate reports validated different aspects of Einstein's theories on universal scale. One study, published in Science on June 22, showed bending of light as predicted in General Relativity at a galactic scale using two distant galaxies. Another study, published in Nature on July 5, validated the equivalence principle of universal free-fall, from General Relativity, using a three star system, two dwarfs and a pulsar, about 4.2 light-years away. And finally a study, published in Nature Physics on July 16, and based on two-year data analysis of atmospheric neutrinos from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory failed to find a violation of Lorenz symmetry. Lorenz symmetry forms the basis of Special Theory of Relativity.

That actual vindication of Einstein might come from another report indicating that quantum field theory might after all not be explaining the entire reality and discovery of phenomenon expounding the transformation of quantum fuzziness to 'realism' might be close. Einstein never was comfortable with quantum uncertainty.

Votaire

Secularism embodies separation of the state and church and mutual non-interference. The concept developed in reaction to the excesses of the Catholic Church in middle ages. One of the main proponents of secularism was the enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire who spent last decade of his life crusading against the church. When Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778, he was refused a Christian burial. It was after the revolution that triumphant French National Assembly in 1791 forced Louis XVI to recall his remains to the Pantheon. The dead ashes were escorted through Paris by a procession of 100,000 men and women and the funeral car had the words: "He gave the human a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom." Voltaire did not give democracy and he rather gave a cry to challenge the ideas that were forced down on people. But it was the Church against whom he reserved his ultimate wrath.