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Tag: true events

A Soldier’s Sacrifice: A glimpse into Captain Vijyant Thapar’s life

Posted on by Penguin India

Captain Vijyant Thapar was twenty-two when he was martyred in the Kargil War, having fought bravely in the crucial battles of Tololing and Knoll. A fourth-generation army officer, Vijyant dreamt of serving his country even as a young boy. In this first-ever biography, titled Vijyant at Kargil, we learn about his journey to join the Indian Military Academy and the experiences that shaped him into a fine officer.

Told by his father, Col. V.N. Thapar and Neha Dwivedi, a martyr’s daughter herself, the anecdotes from his family and close friends come alive, and we have a chance to know the exceptional young man that Vijyant was. His inspiring story provides a rare glimpse into the heart of a brave soldier. His legacy stays alive through these fond memories and his service to the country.

Here is an excerpt from the prologue of the book that talks about his last few moments, and the reaction of his friends and family as they received the news of his martyr.

28 June 1999

Finally, the time had come. Men with faces covered with camouflage paint, with the white of their eyeballs visible in the dark, started moving forward silently like ghosts, clutching their AKs tightly. Muscles taut, jaws clenched, they advanced towards the crest. Robin raised his right arm and everyone froze as a shell burst in the sky some distance away, followed by a rattle of fire from the hill about 800 metres ahead. It was still dark but soon the almost full moon would rise and light up the entire area.

He looked at his sturdy G-Shock watch, which read 1945 hours, 28 June. In a few minutes, they would reach their destination. Around fifteen minutes ago, at 1930 hours, heavy artillery fire had started. He did not want to wait a minute longer than required, now that he was so close to the enemy. Suddenly, the machine guns opened up behind him. It was time. They held their breath in anticipation for the signal to move, their eyes fixed on the silhouette of the hill in front, from where flashes of fire were visible. And then it happened. A shell from the enemy guns landed in their midst.

29 June 1999

All of India was in the middle of Operation Vijay. The Indian Army was fighting almost impossible battles on the extremely tough and unforgiving heights of Drass and Kargil. After weeks of bloody struggle, the tables had turned. News of spectacular victories and stories of unbelievable courage of the valiant men in uniform were flooding the news channels, newspapers and magazines. While some just read the news with their morning cup of tea, others extended support to the officers and jawans by way of inspirational letters, cards and other gestures. This was the first time the country was privy to inside news from the war zone, thanks to the various reporters, who brought it right into their living rooms.

On this day, the country was waking up to the glorious news of another important feature, namely Knoll, being captured, ever so bravely, by the officers and men of the ‘Ever-Victorious’ 2 Rajputana Rifles, one of the most prestigious units of the Indian Army. But some families were destined to face the flip side of the victory. The painful side of war.

They woke up to the much-awaited call from the front. However, this time, they didn’t hear the voice they longed for.

A brother had no strength left to hold the receiver of the phone after hearing about his only sibling’s brave sacrifice.

A mother had her heart torn out as she was summoned home in the middle of her working day.

A father, who was always planning and building the brightest future for his son, bit by bit, had his dreams shattered into more pieces than he could count.

A young girl, who was busy counting the days until she would meet the handsome young officer her heart belonged to, was left abandoned.

A little child, who had perhaps learnt to smile again because of her angel in uniform, would never see his face again.

A friend, who was oceans away, had just dreamt of his best friend and woken up with a start, oblivious to what the phone call that would come barely a few minutes later had in store.

To the world he was but a man, but to many others he was the world.

The ‘world’, however, did come together, as the people of Noida made their way to Col Virender Thapar’s house on a hot Tuesday afternoon when they learnt of the brave sacrifice of a son of their own. The young boy—who had run on the streets and exercised in the parks till a couple of years ago, who had donned the smart uniform for barely six months after years of preparation—had breathed his last in the highest tradition of the Indian Army. They couldn’t wait to get a glimpse of the courageous son of their soil. The reaction the sacrifice of this young and valiant officer drew from an entire city was the first of its kind. Until that day, no other event had united the people of the city in such a manner. Men, women and children alike, with an overwhelming feeling of love and respect, came together in large numbers to pay respect to the fallen hero and extend their heartfelt support to the bereaved family. The brave soldier deserved the utmost respect from his country, and every person present was determined to give him just that.

Thousands of people surrounded his house and waited for him to arrive, wrapped in the tricolour. His family and friends tried to hold their own. Their eyes were wet and their hearts heavy despite being full of pride. No one said it aloud, but each one of them silently wished: ‘I wish it isn’t our Robin. Not our sweet Robin.’

Get to know the exceptional young man, and brave soldier, Captain Vijyant Thapar by reading his biography, Vijyant at Kargil. Order the e-book here.

The Impact of the Panama Papers in India

Posted on by Penguin India

The Panama Papers leak, which involved the leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records of ‘global’ law firm Mossack Fonseca based in Panama City, exposed corruption and tax evasion by politicians, celebrities and the elite who had stashed away wealth in secretive tax havens.

The leak not only shook the world but also made a case for a more equal society in an age of a widening rich–poor divide. The response from readers of the case and the government to the expose was overwhelming, and the agencies swung into action immediately.

Read on to know more about the untold India story of the trailblazing investigation.

The mother of all collaborations

The Panama Papers investigation was code-named ‘Project Prometheus’ after the character from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to human beings. Perhaps it was named so with the expectation that a huge fire would be kindled.

Prometheus would be the largest-ever leak in journalism history with 2.6 terabytes of data; the dump came from an anonymous source to reporters of Süddeutsche Zeitung, the secondlargest German daily; the leaked data was from a Panamanian law firm named Mossack Fonseca; there were many heads of state and corporate leaders in the leaked data that spanned four decades and was ‘live’ till early 2015.

 

Following the leads to discoveries and dead ends

Even as Ritu, Jay and Vaidy began digging into the India files, what actually helped them navigate the intriguing world of offshore business was access to the millions of files that were not necessarily related to India. Reading the internal mails revealed the level of compliance, rather the lack of it, observed by giant incorporators like Mossack Fonseca, the veils of secrecy they built and their eagerness to find a way out to cater to every demand put forth by a client, all for a fee.

Having accessed the leaked data, the three reporters had embarked on the search in the spirit of ‘feeling lucky’ and entered, wishfully, names from a list of public figures in business and politics. To their surprise, some of these searches immediately returned positive. Soon enough, though, dawned the first of many sobering realizations. It turned out that most of these hits were inconsequential.

Quite early in the deep dive, the reporters realized that the ICIJ’s secure servers were struggling to cope with the traffic generated by hundreds of diligent reporters logging in from all corners of the world. While the consortium had invested a lot of resources, the global collaboration was the first of its kind and in no way could one have anticipated the load till it became apparent.

To physically verify hundreds of addresses, the three reporters needed to utilize the reach of the formidable state network of the Indian Express. They broke down the address list state-wise. Typically, the client concentration was high in and around the metros and state capitals. Both Mumbai and Delhi checklists, for example, had over sixty addresses each. But there was enough fieldwork also to be done in the hinterland. Unfortunately, many addresses with only a name against a village or a PO (post office) returned nothing. Not surprisingly, most Indian villages have multiple individuals who respond to the same name, and it was impossible to pin down a client in the absence of additional details such as father’s name and so on.

 

The aftermath of the leak

The flutter was also evident among celebrity company owners who had figured in the list of 500-odd Indians named and also therefore in the India coverage. There were those who immediately wanted to wash their hands of the Mossack firms, others who rejigged their holdings and, surprisingly, even company owners who dug in their heels and increased their holdings despite their confidential offshore secrets having been outed.

The only persons to deny outright evidence of their offshore involvement found in the Panama Papers documents were Amitabh Bachchan and his daughter-in-law, Aishwarya Rai. While Rai’s media adviser tried to dismiss Ritu’s request for comments, Bachchan did not even bother to respond to repeated queries.

One measure of the impact of the Panama Papers was the excitement the investigation generated in the conference and seminar circuit. The ICIJ staffers as well as project members became sought-after speakers at events hosted across the world and this was true for the Indian team too. The model of collaborative journalism exhibited by the Panama Papers team and what the story meant for the future of journalism sans borders was the favourite topic of plenary sessions at several journalism talk shops.

The promptness with which the Indian government reacted resulted in the country joining others in formulating a global taxation response to the Panama Papers. It was a good signal and statement of intent that on 13 April—just a week after the exposé—when tax administrators from around thirty countries held a brainstorming meeting in Paris on the impact of the Panama Papers, a director-level officer from India’s CBDT was in attendance.

 

A month after the Panama Papers hit the stands and sent the global who’s who scrambling for cover, John Doe, the unnamed source of the leak, sent a stirring note to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper. The short essay underlined why it is, now, time for real action and how that starts with asking questions.

Read The Panama Papers to know more about the untold Indian side of the story!

A Narrative of Three Nations- An Excerpt from ‘1971’

Posted on by Penguin India

The year 1971 is etched into the minds of the billions that call the subcontinent their home. Post partition, the third Indo-Pak war cleaved through the land to make way for another nation to come into its own. For East Pakistani’s, it was a battle that led to liberation and the birth of Bangladesh. For Pakistan, it was the dismemberment that left behind a sense of loss. For India, 1971 was the war that established it as a nation of humanitarian sensibility and military power.

But what does 1971 mean for the victims and survivors of the war?

Anam Zakaria writes, ‘The war is not just a historical event or a story of gallantry or loss, the war is personal and intimate, the trauma as haunting even forty-eight years later.’   Turning the spotlight away from the state orchestrated narratives of victory and defeat, In 1971: A People’s History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, Zakaria draws attention to the festering wounds that victims of the bloodbath bear even today, giving those tormented by terrible memories of heartrending violence a space to voice their experiences.

Read on for a glimpse-

 

Three men, an officer and two sepoys barged in from the back door, pushing our maid to the side, demanding: “Professor Sahib kahan hai? (Where is the professor)?” When my mother asked why, the officer said, “Unko le jayega (We have come to take him).” My mother asked, “Kahan le jayega (Where will you take him?).” He repeated, “Bus le jayega (We will take him).”’

It was the night of 25 March, when Meghna, then only fifteen years old, had been woken up by her father, a provost at Jagannath Hall, a non-Muslim residence hall at Dhaka University. It was the night Operation Searchlight was launched, the Pakistan Army’s action to crush the secessionist movement in East Pakistan. Dhaka University, whose students were actively engaged in the resistance movement against Pakistan, would be one of the primary targets. The operation would unfold into a long, bloody war, first between East and West Pakistan and then between India and Pakistan, finally culminating in Pakistan’s surrender on 16 December 1971, and the birth of Bangladesh.

‘There was a lot of firing that night, but we assumed that it was the Dhaka University students, excited and eager to show their spirit to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was in town. By then, the firing had become a regular occurrence,’ Meghna told me. ‘Our flat was opposite Jagannath Hall, overlooking the Shahid Minar, the monument for the martyrs of the language movement of 1952. In fact, we were at the centre of all the things that were going on,’ she said, referring to how Dhaka University was one of the major centres of political activity, right from when the language movement started to the 1970s. ‘We even went to see Bangabandhu’s speech of 7 March (held at Ramna Race Course, now called Suhrawardy Udyan) and I remember, my father kept saying, “I don’t see any mediation. I don’t know what will happen.” He feared that the army would clamp down because there was no way they would let things continue as they were . . . The radios were broadcasting their own programmes in Bangla, there were marches happening, there was an active civil disobedience movement. But even then, my father thought the army clampdown would just involve forcing students to stop protesting and return to university, or at most translate into the arrest of teachers (who, the state thought, were instigating trouble). We could never have imagined what happened.’

On 7 March 1971, at the speech that Meghna attended with her father, Sheikh Mujib addressed lakhs of people. By now, Yahya Khan had postponed the opening session of the new parliament. As a result, ‘widespread violence erupted in East Pakistan . . . Mujib was under intense pressure from two sides. Leftist politicians and activists in East Pakistan demanded that he declare independence right away, while Pakistan’s military leaders flew in troops to make sure he would abstain from such a pronouncement.’ Against this backdrop, on 7 March, Sheikh Mujib delivered a historic speech, trying to steer a ‘strategic middle ground’ by emphasizing that until the regime met his conditions, all offices, courts and schools would be closed, and there would no cooperation with the government. Before ending the speech, he also declared, ‘This struggle is for emancipation! This struggle is for independence.’

In her third book 1971, winner of the 2017 KLF German Peace Prize Anam Zakaria takes a closer look at the conflicting narratives on the war of 1971 through the oral histories of various Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians.

 

Phunchok Stobdan Answers Our Burning Questions

Posted on by Penguin India

The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas by Phunchok Stobdan is an attempt to provide several unknown insights into the India-China, India-Tibet and China-Tibet relationships. The book tries to take into consideration the overriding power of the conflicting cultural interests that are linked to the geopolitical interests of both China and India. At the same time, the book suggests how Buddhism could become a potential source for recultivating awareness towards an India–China congruity in the current context.

In the interview below, Phunchok Stobdan talks about his book and more!

  1. What inspired you to write the book? 

 

Over the years, I have been receiving many compliments for my writings – essentially short commentaries, opinion pieces that I have been contributing to several media outlets and academic journals. The positive comments received from the readers motivated me further to elaborate my views on the subject, for the average reader knows little about the geopolitical complexity of the Himalayas.

There was certainly some fear that initially held me back from touching on the subject, but it my editor, Ms. Swati Chopra, Senior Commissioning Editor of Penguin India, who motivated me to undertake this project. I agreed with her because I had nothing to lose. I am very grateful to her.

 

  1. Were there any challenges? 

 

As always, writing on a sensitive subject like the Himalayas and Tibet is challenging not because the issues are at times shrouded in mystery as they are also mostly metaphysical in nature but because of the inbuilt political narrative that had been set for decades and embedded into the national discourse. Putting forward a contrary viewpoint and disturbing the status quo was challenging.

 

  1. Anything you would like our readers to know that would complement their experience while reading the book?

 

While I do not discount the importance of moral values and principle in the conduct of international politics, but the nature of world affairs have become more transactional especially after the end of the Cold War. India, for a very long time, has been playing a very opaque and open-ended game which has not endured well as it should have.  India’s strategic outlook towards the Himalayan region had been defined a long time go and continued to remain in practice despite the cost. On the other hand, the game pursued by India’s adversaries has been constantly changing. It is time to review our policies towards the Himalayas such as the one the country has with regards to Jammu & Kashmir. A robust policy like the one adopted for Ladakh by granting it a Union Territory status would alter the game in India’s favour.

  1. What are five reasons to read your book?

The Himalayas are no longer mystic and can’t be romanticized. Today, the Himalayas is a contested area – a theatre of competition by proxy among major powers.

This book important to understand:

a) The geo-cultural landscape of Buddhist Himalayas, its profile and the competing narratives that are being built over the years;

b) The dynamic interplay between the Tibetans vis-à-vis Himalayan Buddhist world, similarities and differences;

c) How the ‘Tibet issue’ and the discourse surrounding it has gradually overshadowed the Himalayan dynamics that has vilely blurt the Indian frontier outlook;

d) How the Chinese would eventually succeed in leveraging the critical issues of Himalayan Buddhism to meet its own geopolitical goals;

e) How India’s interests in the Buddhist Himalayas are rapidly getting compromised as compared to the Himalayan game played more perceptively by British India;

f) The Buddhist Himalayas are not a monolith region as generally perceived by people as there are inbuilt complexities and fault lines;

Finally to highlight how India has seemingly failed to grasp the dynamic interplay between sectarian affiliation and power politics — between the Tibetan plateau and the political landscape in the Indian Himalayas.

It is a case of missing the woods for the trees; clearly, understanding Himalayan complexity in India requires much more than bureaucratic bean-counting.

 

  1. Any particular sources you used to research into the India-China relationship?

 

The book is based on the official sources and vernacular media reporting. Some of the points identified are based on my experiences in the field; as a result of personal interaction with informed circles, participation in numerous conferences, seminars and discussions. Impressions gathered during my prolonged stay in Inner and Central Asia including personal visits to the Himalayan region (Sikkim, Bhutan, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Jammu & Kashmir and West Bengal) were used while writing this book. Being a native of the Himalayan region has definitely helped in writing this book.

 

  1. Do you think there will be any winners in this ‘great game’? Why? Why not?

 

Unless India evolves clarity of thoughts and objectivity, the Himalayan game is likely to remain in obscurity – largely driven by invisible actors without any tangible benefits for India. The real winner in the game should be safeguarding the interests of 1.3 billion people of India.

To know more about this Great Game, grab your copy of The Great Game in the Buddhist Himalayas today!

Queens of Crime – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Dysfunctional families, sexual abuse, sheer greed and sometimes just a skewed moral compass. These are some of the triggers that drove the women captured in these pages to become lawbreakers.

Queens of Crime demonstrates a haunting criminal power that most people do not associate women with. The acts of depravity described in this book will jolt you to the core, ensuring you have sleepless nights for months.

Based on painstaking research, these are raw, violent and seemingly unbelievable but true rendition of India’s women criminals.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter!

——————————————————————————–

The Drug Queen Of Mumbai

Back in Siddharth Nagar, her sons on either side, she wondered which door to knock on first. Four of her five brothers were married and living in their own rooms. She decided to stay in the room of her brother who was serving time in jail for murder. Two of her other brothers had served jail sentences for the same murder, but they were out now. Another brother, who had been arrested initially but had had nothing to do with the crime, had committed suicide in jail in protest.

She knocked on the door, the awkwardness of the moment weighing her down. The door, which led to a small eight-by-eight- foot room, was opened by her brother’s wife, Sumiti.

‘Didi! What a pleasant surprise! Welcome,’ her sister-in law greeted her and pulled the children into an embrace. She had been married for just a few months and didn’t have any children of her own.

Sumiti was quick to realize that something was amiss. After serving them tea, she said, ‘Didi, I’m with you. You don’t have to say anything.’

Her affection brought tears to Shantidevi’s eyes. ‘Thank you.’

The next morning, her sister-in-law left the house early, before Shantidevi woke up. But she had prepared a kadai full of poha for the three of them. Shantidevi woke her children up, helped them bathe outside using the bucket of water that had been kept ready for them, and then all of them ate gratefully.

That evening, Shantidevi asked her sister-in-law, ‘Can I get work here?’

Sumiti nodded. ‘I’ve already spoken to a lady in one of the apartment complexes not far from here. She will give you two hundred rupees for two hours. I’ll get you more houses to work in within a week.’

Shantidevi thanked her again. She was grateful because now she could earn her own money. It was the economic empowerment that she needed.

Soon, Shantidevi was working in three houses and was able to move into her own room in the same chawl. Now that she was earning Rs 600, she could hire a room for Rs 300. Her life was unremarkable for the next year. She was barely able to make ends meet with the meagre salary that

she earned. Her husband never bothered to check if she was all right. He was so heartless, thought Shantidevi, that he didn’t even inquire about the children. The lack of money started to pinch her. But what could an uneducated woman like her do?

One day, something unexpected happened. As she was walking back home along the Worli Sea Face after work, she felt weak and decided to stop for a few minutes at a bus stop nearby to catch her breath. She sat on the metal bench, held the pillar for support and closed her eyes. It is just weakness, she thought, and will pass soon. It did, and after a minute or so when she opened her eyes, she found that a man seated at the far end of the bench was staring at her.

She was about to give him a mouthful to nip whatever he had in his mind in the bud, but the man spoke first, ‘Sister, the world can be cruel. Are you feeling better now?’

His voice calmed her down, as did the fact that he had addressed her as ‘sister’. She nodded and wondered if she should get up and be on her way.

But before she could, the man spoke again, ‘And in Mumbai, there is only one god. Do you know who that is?’

‘Ganpati bappa.’

He laughed and then, his face turning serious, said, ‘No, the real god is money, cash, rupiya.’

The man was crazy, thought Shantidevi.

‘If you have the money, everything is great. But if you don’t have the money, you live the life of an insect in this city.’

A grasshopper flew out of nowhere and landed near his feet. The man raised his Kolhapuri chappal and stamped on it. ‘This guy here had no money, so I ended his life.’

She smiled for the first time. The man was right. She said, ‘But for money you need an education. Insects are uneducated.’

‘Says who? What if I told you that the man who lives on the tenth floor of this building,’ he paused and pointed towards a posh building behind them before continuing, ‘in flat number 1002, is uneducated and yet he is rich.’

‘That’s a lie.’

‘That’s not a lie, sister. I work for that man, which is why I know.’

Shantidevi got up and walked towards him. She sat on a bench three feet from him, saying, ‘How is that even possible, brother? Tell me about him.’

Little did Shantidevi know that this conversation would change her life.

Grab your copy of Queens of Crime today!

Maoism: Eight Things You’d Like to Know as a Global Citizen

Posted on by Penguin India

For decades, the West has dismissed Maoism as an outdated historical and political phenomenon. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People’s Republic of China and the legitimacy of its Communist government.

In Maoism: A Global History, Julia Lovell re-evaluates Maoism as both a Chinese and an international force. Starting with the birth of Mao’s revolution in northwest China and concluding with its violent afterlives in South Asia and resurgence in the People’s Republic today.

Here are 8 things you learn from this landmark history of global Maoism:

The 1940s was a frightening time for those who were intelligent and liberal

“Those suspected of deviation from Mao’s line were arrested and ‘screened’…Torture and intimidation became commonplace; satire was outlawed.”

~

As entertainment was restricted by Mao, people turned to reading

“There was, quite simply, not much else to do but read and talk: there were no private radios and few film projectors. They were allowed free time on Sundays to wash in the river.”

~


Mao was harsh against intellectuals as he felt inferior to them

“Some of Mao’s closest colleagues listening to his lectures were embarrassed by his bêtises and blatant plagiarism from Chinese translations of Marxist texts. Perhaps as a result of all this, Mao long harboured a sense of inferiority towards intellectuals that no doubt shaped his harshness towards them once in power.”

~


 Mao’s second wife was the last to know about her divorce

“She only learned that she had been summarily divorced and replaced by Jiang Quing two years later when she heard a translation of an article in the Soviet press referring to ‘Mao and his wife’.”

~

Mao believed rebellion was justified (just not against him!)

 “Mao’s love for rebellion fed also into his passionate belief in voluntarism: that as long as you believed you could do something,you could accomplish it – regardless of material obstacles.”

~

An American journalist wrote about how the Chinese had been brainwashed to accept Communism and many in the US believed him

“…he likened Chinese mind control to ‘witchcraft’, with its incantations,trances,poisons and potions,with a strange flair of science about it all, like a devil dancer in a tuxedo,carrying his magic brew in a test tube.’ ”

~

In the 1950s any connection with China was feared in the US State Department

“‘Connection with China was so feared that even people who were probably giving the sanest,most lucid intelligence in the US about China were driven out of office,’ ”

~

Xi Jinping was the first to give access to the archives of Mao-era China to researchers

“In a move unprecedented for a Communist state, the archives of Mao-era China had opened up in the first decade of the new millennium. Both Chinese and non-Chinese researchers could access vast quantities of government documents from municipal, provincial and country archives…”

Maoism: A Global History is a landmark book that sheds light on the political legacy of Mao.

 

 

Mayawati: Goddess of Justice, the Lioness of UP or the Iron Lady?

Posted on by Penguin India

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth. Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

Excerpted here is the author’s encounters with Mayawati as well as her journey in politics.

All of his rivals were accusing Mulayam of running a deeply corrupt administration that was lining the pockets of his fellow Yadavs. Into this breach stepped Mayawati, who aimed to build a winning plurality with the support of castes alienated by Mulayam’s Yadav centric administration. To build on her rock-solid base among Dalits, Mayawati decided on a bold strategy, reaching out to Brahmins, who are politically powerful everywhere but at 10 per cent of the population, double the India average, are particularly important in this critical state. Accustomed to a position of great power, the Brahmins felt marginalized by the Yadav government, but drawing them in to support Mayawati would not be easy: no one had forgotten her party’s old call on Dalits to ‘beat all the upper castes with shoes’. Mayawati appealed to Brahmins with an offer of power, not aid or job reservations. In fact, she didn’t campaign actively, appearing at one or two rallies a day—rather than the usual eight or nine typical of any state leader around election time. Instead, she focused her attention on a detailed and well-researched effort to find candidates—including Brahmin ones—who had the best chance to win in each constituency.

At this point in her career, Mayawati was becoming more and more dictatorial in her leadership of the BSP. It had no number two, no succession plan, no plan to make one. Reports from her camp said that Mayawati was subject to increasingly violent mood swings, that staff cowered in her presence, and that she single-handedly collected and managed the party’s funds. On her birthday, supporters came to her home and placed cash donations directly in her hands.

Mayawati personally picked BSP candidates and assigned them to constituencies. She was also said to be turning inward, increasingly shielding herself from the press and the outside world, and speaking only to her party lackeys.

When the results came in, Mayawati won more comfortably than we expected. She took a chunk of Brahmin and other upper caste voters disillusioned with the BJP. Coupled with her usual Dalit support, that was enough to propel Mayawati to power. With a little more than 30 per cent of the total vote, her BSP won 208 of the 400 seats in the UP assembly. It was the first time a Dalit party had ever won an absolute majority in an Indian state election.

***

In the five years since we had seen Mayawati rise to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, she had grown more and more regal. Other chief ministers had encouraged a cult of personality but none on the same scale as Mayawati, who was building towering statues of herself and her party symbol, the elephant, all over the state and its capital. When she came to power, Lucknow was building the ambitious new Ambedkar Park, and she had added as its centerpiece a monument to herself and other Dalit leaders, surrounded by elephants. In 2007, Mayawati had won by courting Brahmin voters and became the first important Dalit leader to draw significant upper-caste votes. But the taboo-shattering alliance soon unravelled.

Many of her Dalit supporters were angry at Mayawati for giving top posts to Brahmins, and by 2012, Mayawati had not only dumped the Brahmins as allies, she was blaming them for the corruption in her government.

We attended a Mayawati rally in Ghatampur, just outside the city of Kanpur, where the warm-up songs praised her as the Goddess of Justice, the Lioness of UP and the Iron Lady. Around 60,000 people poured into the rally grounds, most of them Dalits, waving the blue flag of the BSP and listening raptly to Mayawati’s every word, despite the fact that she was reading from a prepared text, barely making eye contact. Mayawati allowed very few other leaders on her stage, leaving the impression that she was accompanied mainly by a large fan that blew only on her. To the Dalits of UP, Mayawati was more a hero than ever, and few if any begrudged her regal airs. To the rest, she was running a government mired ever more deeply in corruption and favouritism for her own community. Stories abounded about how she personally dispensed all her party’s campaign funds, and distributed nominations to the highest bidders.

***

…Mayawati would ride her bicycle around town, talking to voters, breaking bread with them in their homes. These bonds helped propel Mayawati into the Lok Sabha seat representing Bijnor in 1989, but that was then. As her name and fame grew and Mayawati moved on to the chief minister’s office in Lucknow, her Bijnor supporters had come to see her more as the national hero of the Dalits, less as one of their own. Indian politics had, if anything, grown more intensely local.

Mayawati had long since abandoned her 2007 promise to run a government in ‘everyone’s interests’, and seemed to be retreating back into her caste comfort zone. A founding slogan of her party was a rallying cry to Dalits and a threat to Brahmins: ‘Vote Hamara, Raj Tumhara, Nahin Chalega, Nahin Chalega.’ The vote is ours but the power is yours, this can’t go on. Now, she was telling Dalits at her rallies: ‘Satta ki chabi hum isse jaane nahin denge.’ We got hold of the key to power and we cannot let it go.

Indian elections are lost by the incumbent more often than they are won by the challenger, and this was a prime example: Mayawati was toppled by her own self-infatuation, her statues and her failure to fix run-down schools with absentee teachers. With so many parties competing in winner-take-all system, a small swing in the vote is enough to oust a government. Between 2007 and 2012 about 5 per cent of the vote swung from Mayawati’s party to the Yadav’s, and that was enough to dethrone Mayawati and put the Samajwadi Party in power with a solid majority in the state assembly.

When Mayawati’s helicopter landed, three hours late, they were waiting and eager, shouting, ‘Behenji tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain.’ Sister you keep fighting, we are with you. They spoke of Mayawati as a hero who had refused to marry so that she could devote herself to fighting for the Dalits, and no one in the crowd begrudged for a second her increasingly regal ways. Let other politicians dress humbly, all in white to appear ascetic and close to the masses, Mayawati dressed up, hair dyed black, carrying a designer handbag, wearing diamond earrings and a fancy white shawl in the 38-degree heat.

Mayawati called the BJP a party of tainted candidates, criminals and defectors from other parties, and ridiculed it as the ‘Jumla Party’, the party of empty gimmicks. She accused the BJP of stashing its own cash away in safe havens before Modi withdrew all the big bills from circulation, of doing nothing to check rising attacks against Dalits, and of plotting to abolish the system that reserves a share of government posts for the backward castes. But there was also a strong caste tension between Mayawati and Akhilesh. Her vote base is the lowest castes who work as landless labourers in rural areas, while his Yadav vote base, one rung up the caste ladder, often works as supervisors overseeing Dalits and are thus often seen as their most direct oppressors. This clash was magnified by the general stereotype, which Mayawati played on relentlessly, of Yadavs as aggressive bullies. She promised to end the Yadavs’ lawless ‘jungle raj’, and put Samajwadi Party crooks behind bars. For all the cultural differences between south and north, Jayalalithaa shared much with regional leaders like Mayawati in UP or Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, whom we would see in action on later trips. They were ‘supremos’, big party bosses who ruled their parties with unquestioned authority. Many supremos are men, like the Yadavs of both Bihar and UP, and a growing number are, like Modi, single. What bound the three leading female supremos together was that they were all single, and had risen in the man’s world of politics by sheer force of will.

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma, in Democracy on the Road, offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth.

Know About A Sting-Op Through The Eyes Of Bhupen Patel

Posted on by Penguin India

Bhupen Patel in his book, The Anatomy of a Sting allows readers a glimpse into the exciting life of an investigative journalist through these narrative accounts. He has exposed a number of unethical activities during the course of his career, including mental asylums admitting patients without paperwork and investigations as well as illegal agents who provide Arab men with “temporary” wives. In this book, he reveals the process of and the efforts behind the scenes of various discreet investigations.

Here we give you a glimpse into one of the intriguing cases cracked by Bhupen Patel –

“To us, a sting operation is nothing less than a police investigation. The difference is that reporters learn on the job without any specific training. Also, we rarely have backup and definitely don’t have arms for self-defence. I decided to do some groundwork first and stepped out to check if the address provided in the classified ad was legitimate. Since I would be accompanied by a female colleague and it would just be the two of us, it was important to have an idea of the surroundings, the number of people there and the escape routes. I visited the office of Saathi Film International, located on the mezzanine floor of one of the industrial units of Anis Compound on the Andheri–Ghatkopar Link Road, a hub of small-scale industries in Mumbai. The ground floor had a few auto garages and spare parts shops. I was not surprised that the office did not have any nameplates or boards. From the dust on the shutters, it looked as though the premises had been shut for over a month. Apart from the door, a window was the only escape route from that small office.

I made inquiries with the staff of some of the shops in the locality but no one had a clue about the production house. A few things seemed clear to me—the company had hired the office just a few days ago and seemed highly suspect. It was unlikely that they would rent an office in this area, which didn’t have the remotest ties with Bollywood. Without any assistance or support from authorities, I wasn’t sure if the story was worth following up. But when I reported back to office, I realized I had to give it a shot.

The Virtual Spy

Once we decided to go ahead with the story, the next important decision was to pick our third and most important partner: the hidden camera. Back then, spy cameras were relatively new, unlike now when the city’s electronic stores on Lamington Road/DB Marg have a whole range at various prices. One can buy spy cameras for Rs 1500–2000, hidden in buttons, spectacles, watches, ties, etc. The ‘Made in China’ cameras can easily pull off three or four assignments without any glitches. But ten years ago, there was very little choice.

The products available were of inferior quality, and the better cameras had a lot of wiring and were tough to carry on your person. I was reminded of a senior reporter friend’s experience. He had been on a sting operation about bribes taken by policemen, and just when his assignment was about to end, his camera had betrayed him. He put his hand in

his pocket to remove cash but unfortunately unplugged the wires from the batteries, which popped out from his shirt. Since spy cameras were not as popular then, luckily for him, the officer bought his theory that he had unplugged the batteries of his hearing machine. I had to make sure I didn’t repeat this mistake.

The Pre-Production

 As a team, it was important for Ruhi and me to be on the same page. All our research was in place but we had to be prepared for the worst. It was important that we discussed the characters we were about to play—the names, backgrounds, families, experiences, qualifications, likes and dislikes, all of it. We decided that Ruhi would pose as a newcomer who had come to Mumbai to try her luck in the film industry. I became the friend who would accompany her to various casting agencies. We fixed the camera in Ruhi’s bag and I decided to wear a watch camera as a backup. We decided to meet somewhere close to the office of Saathi Film International the next morning.

Acting Begins

Location: Office of Saathi Film International

Posing as Ruhi Ahmed, who had dreamed of becoming the next Madhuri Dixit, and Bhupen Shah, her companion, we called on the office of Saathi Film International.We reached at noon, as decided. After going over the details once more, we tried to call the office number listed in the ad but it was temporarily out of service. So we decided to just knock on the door. We were welcomed by the strong stench of gutkha into a small room that had been divided into two, the walls of which were stained red with the constant spitting. I don’t know how Bollywood’s jhakaas man Anil Kapoor and ‘Aakhri Pasta’ Chunky Pandey continued to smile in the posters on the walls in that grimy room. The small space had a wooden table, four plastic chairs for visitors and a wooden shelf with the idols of Hindu gods and goddesses and lit incense sticks. We tried to sit close to the idols, not to pray for a successful sting or our safety, but for some relief from the unbearable odour in the room.

Two men were sitting on revolving chairs, with posters of many struggling actors around them. They were presented to us as big names in the industry, though both of us, as knowledgeable Bollywood buffs, had never seen them. But we played along and admired how they were transforming dreams into reality. I must credit them for their honesty of taking no credit for the career and success of the only two well-known faces on their wall, Anil Kapoor and Chunky Pandey. However, they did mention that they knew the two very well. Trying to come to the point, Ruhi asked them about the advertisement in the newspaper. Brandishing a broad smile, one of them said, ‘Maiiidumb, pahile intra-ducsun to kijiye’ (Madam, first introduce yourself). As per the plan we gave our fake ‘intra-ducsun’ to the man who identified himself as Mahesh Pancholi and his partner as Salim Sheikh. Since we were lying ourselves, we obviously doubted the credibility of their identities.They boasted about how the advertisement had got a tremendous response, which was clearly a false claim, especially with a defunct phone. Moreover, there was not a soul except for us. They went on to claim that after auditioning a series of actors, they had almost made up their minds to sign on two actors who they identified as Prashant Navle and Vaishali Patel. They were both experienced artists who had already done a couple of low-budget movies in the past. ‘Woh toh dedh lakh rupaya bhi de rahe hain phillam keliye,’ (they were even giving Rs 1.5 lakh for the film), boasted Pancholi. We pretended to be immensely disappointed and almost got up from our seats when he held my hand and said, ‘Sad mat hoiye, kuch karte hain. Phillam mein do lead chahiye . . . doosra jodi ab bhi bacha hai’”

Each account in The Anatomy of a Sting will keep you on the edge of your seat and allow a glimpse into the life of an investigative journalist.

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