JRD is dead. So is Lalit Kala Akademi. Sinners win. We're like that only.

 Air-India is thinking of selling its art collection, one of the finest treasures in India. A rough estimate by officials  is that its monetary value may be around Rs 350 crore. This will be financially insignificant  to a company which has a debt of Rs 43,777 crore and accumulated losses (in the last five years) of Rs 27,700 crore. So why are they selling the family jewels?

It must be, primarily, the plebeianism of the  government mind. That was what reduced Air-India from the proud flag-bearer it was in J.R.D. Tata's days to the icon of incompetence it became in  the hands   of politicians and bureaucrats. That was also what took some of our universities  and institutions like Lalit Kala Akademi from glory to ignominy. It takes quality  to produce quality. For many years now the quality that made India bright and beautiful has been on the decline.

It was  quality  that helped Air-India rule the air waves in the early days. JRD's professionalism – after all, he was India's first licensed pilot – made the airline respected. Commercial Director Bobby Kooka's flair made it beloved. Kooka was one of the movers behind the art collection. The frontline collector was Jal Cowasji, Air-India's publicity chief. He was a recognised art connoisseur and was encouraged by the management to buy and commission works of art. Air-India's offices in the leading cities of the world became famous for their specially-commissioned murals by Indian artists.

Naturally Air-India became a patron of the soon-to-be-celebrated masters who constituted the Progressive Artists Group of the 1950s Bombay. People like M.F.Husain, K. H. Ara and B. Prabha would be given free tickets in lieu  of paintings.  Air-India also collected antiques, old clocks, jewellery and studio photography.

The general public  got a taste of the treasure  in 2008 when Air-India brought out a coffee-table book (Mapin Publishing) with 201 colour illustrations and analyses by four experts. It is a feast of a book. But it was also a sad reminder – that only a couple of generations  ago we had cultivated minds that could think of collecting and preserving such exquisite achievements of the human imagination, and that we have lost it.

What we have instead are destroyers. They flourish in a cynically corrupt political environment, as is evident from the continuing Lalit Kala Akademi  scandal. This 58-year old institution has held no exhibition since 2003, there is no inventory of works, many works have disappeared and diversion of funds is rampant. The main culprit is known and has been publicly named.  The Akademi's  last chairman, Ashok Vajpeyi, issued a long order in 2011 relieving the man, Secretary Sharma, of his post. The Legal Department of the Ministry of Culture cancelled the order and reinstated Sharma.

An acting chairman took over for a period of six months ending July this year. This was  Balan Nambiar who not only endorsed Vajpeyi's  assessment of the Secretary but went public about it. Saying that the Akademi's  main problems were “dishonesty, cheating, mismanagement and swindling of finances”, Nambiar described the Secretary as “the one individual who has systematically destroyed the Akademi over the past decade. His ten years as the Secretary is the worst  period of the Akademi”.

  

Ashok Vajpeyi is a distinguished poet and critic whose reputation as a culture administrator is enhanced by his experience as a civil servant. Balan Nambiar is an internationally  renowned multimedia  artist. How is it that such authorities are upstaged by  petty wirepullers  and their petty godfathers in the Ministry of Culture? How is it that the Minister of Culture  has no eyes to see what all others see? Why is it that the Vajpeyis  and the Nambiars of today, like the JRDs of yesterday, are cast aside for parasites to prosper?

To ask such questions is like asking why Suresh Kalmadi was kept at the helm of Commonwealth Games even after he had shamed the country before the eyes of the world. The answer to all  questions is the same: We are like that only.

With irresponsible MPs, arrogant MLAs, we stand as a disgraced nation

MPs deliberately wasting an entire session at a monetary  cost alone of Rs 170 crore. Dozens of MLAs  going on private pleasure trips abroad  at public expense.  Never has democracy  been so openly disgraced in our country. If there is  anything more offending than these acts,  it is parties putting the blame on one another. All of them are really the same. All of them are irresponsible and unethical when it comes to spending taxpayer's money on their private agendas.

Currently a 17-member team from Karnataka, many of them with families in attendance, is visiting South American countries with a thoughtful stopover in Dubai.  Eighty MLAs from Maharashtra are rearing to land in Europe in a month or so. If they went quietly  without too many pretensions, the public outrage would have been less. But they display arrogance in justifying their indulgence. One freebooter from Karnataka  even argued that their junket expenses were nothing compared to the expenses on  terrorist Ajmal Kasab. How obnoxious can politicians get in their insensitivity.

The disregard for public opinion must be due to elections being decided not by voters but by courtesy of party bosses, financiers and sundry fixers. The few leaders who show lip sympathy for public opinion make lame excuses. “I am helpless because the Speaker had cleared the trip”, said Karnataka's Chief Minister. But the Chief Minister is a member of the special board, along with the Speaker and some others, who approve proposals like  junkets. Besides, after the way  B.S. Yeddyurappa ran the Government, no one will say that the Chief Minister of Karnataka is helpless in any situation. It is the state that is helpless before a chief minister.

The Congress and JD (S) leaders blamed the Government for allowing the legislators to go. But what about their own party people? The Karnataka team already in South America includes six Congress MLAs and two from the JD (S). Why did not the two party  high commands   order  them to stay home?

MLAs forget party labels and act in unison when it comes to their own privileges and emoluments. They are law makers with constitutional  authority and if they make laws that suit only them, the rest of us have no way of stopping  them. The recent move – hopefully abandoned since – to make Air-India's pilots and station managers attend personally to the comforts of travelling MPs is still fresh in memory.

Karnataka MLAs forgot their party differences and  collaborated early on to pass a rule that an MLA was entitled to one foreign and two domestic trips during his term. This was bad enough since it had no purpose other than giving MLAs  a free jaunt at taxpayer's expense. Then they went and expanded the rule, making two foreign trips part of an MLA's “rights”. In their generosity  to themselves, they also ruled that  (a) they did not have to submit all the bills of expenditure and (b) they did not have to submit a report on their study.

  

That made “study tours” a great convenience. No report means more freedom to study shopping patterns in  Lima, Peru and attractions in the entertainment quarter of Rio de Janeiro. Not too many bills means yet more freedom to squander the Rs 20,000 allowance they get per day in foreign exchange. The allowance of course is from the public exchequer. In Moscow the study tour can become a teaching tour with our MLAs  instructing Vladimir Putin on how to end dissidence through the art of resort politics, an Indian speciality. There's no dissidence that cannot be erased with a few crores – even in rubles.

The Speaker and Chief Minister of Karnataka are said to have told MLAs to cancel forthcoming junkets. Don't be fooled. What they mean is postpone by a couple of months by which time they hope the people will have forgotten the current furore. These are types who believe that squeezing the country is their right. Who will save us from these turbulent priests of evil?

How about Abolishing the Parliament? Loss is nil. And look at the savings

  

It's not just Parliament that is paralysed. India is paralysed.  At one level, bills are stuck, files don't move. At another, eyes are shut, minds are closed. All that happens is: Politicians get their allowances and their perks without let or hindrance. Galbraith saw a  functioning anarchy in the 1960s. Today, even as an anarchy, we are unable to function.

The irony is that what party leaders say of their opponents is absolutely true. Except  that it applies as much to them as to their opponents. Consider Sonia Gandhi's charges. “Stalling Parliament is a matter of shame and regret”. True of the BJP today, true of the Congress yesterday. “Blackmailing has become the bread and butter of that party”. True of the BJP today, of the Congress yesterday.

Consider the BJP leaders' charges. “A staple diet of the Congress is kickbacks and commissions”. True of the Congress today, of the BJP yesterday, and of the BJP state governments today.  “Coal reserves distribution is nothing but chori”. True of the Congress today and true of the BJP yesterday and today if we replace “coal reserves” with iron ore and  denotified lands. It is true of the NCP, Samajwadi, JDU, DMK and the rest of them, too. Everywhere in everything, there is nothing but chori.

Let us not forget how the stalling of Parliament originated as a parliamentary practice. This “matter of shame and regret” was invented  by Sanjay Gandhi.  In the 1977 election following the Emergency, he and his mother were defeated. In the 1980 elections they won and Sanjay went all out to show his might. As a 1987 book put it: “Sanjay Gandhi inducted [into Parliament] young, ambitious, inexperienced rowdies whose contempt for procedure and penchant for violent means” destroyed the character  of Parliament. (In Pursuit of Lakshmi. By Lloyd and Rudolph).

Shouting down opposition MPs was the daily routine of the rowdy brigade.  That culture has continued.  Recall the famous TV footage that showed Sonia Gandhi exploding in anger when L.K. Advani described  UPA-2 as illegitimate. She asked her partymen to stand up and attack Advani.  Dozens of obedient Congressmen stood up and shouted and disrupted Advani. Sonia acted like Sanjay Gandhi.

Of all the disruption campaigns we have seen in the recent past, the BJP's current one is the most puerile.  Its stand is: “The Prime Minister must resign. We won't let Parliament function until he does”. What kind of parliamentary practice is this? Next time they might as well say: “Voters must give us a majority. Or we won't allow the legislature to meet”.

Yashwant Sinha is one of the few balanced men in the BJP's front benches. Even he was reduced to compiling a list of the occasions when the Congress prevented Parliament from functioning .  As if one wrong justifies another wrong.  In fact, the very transgressions of the Congress gave the BJP a golden opportunity  to show how it was different. If the BJP had steadfastly supported the idea of Parliament proceeding with dignified debates, it could have won a great moral victory. But to do that, a party has to have a certain level of civilisation and a willingness  to put the national interest above its partisan interests. The tragedy of India is that we do not have a single party today that  puts the national interest first. 

Which raises the question: Why do we need a non-functioning Parliament? There was a logically thought-out political philosophy in the 19^th century that suffered from the name given to it  – Anarchism. But its premises were  sound. It argued, for example, that people were benign by nature but corrupted by government, that government was intrinsically  evil and it was preferable and possible to abolish it. We need not go that far, but it seems undoubtedly preferable to abolish a Parliament that spends national wealth at the rate of Rs 26,000 a minute and yet refuses to function. To what purpose is this waste?

Kalam writes of flowers and rockets, but not about the Sonia problem

As an author A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is lucky. Only he can get away with the “Dear reader” tone and child-like style of writing and still sell a million copies. It must be his never-say-die optimism and the innocence he carries on his sleeves that make him the most popular President ever.

But don't underestimate him. He knows where to be tough and where to act like a politician. These aspects of his persona are usually hidden behind his perennial smile. But a lifetime spent hobnobbing with Indian politicians, the wiliest in the business, has taught him a trick or two.

His latest, Turning Points, came out at a time when nominations for the presidential election were up in the air with Kalam's name prominently figuring in them. Mamata Bannerji and Mulayam Singh Yadav proposing Kalam's name (along with Somath Chatterji's and Manmohan Singh's) to Sonia Gandhi was one of the factors that forced Sonia to formally announce Pranab Mukherji's choice as the Congress candidate. It was known that Sonia did not want Pranab to be President because he had a tendency to be independent.

The politicking over the presidential candidates had revived memories of Sonia Gandhi's widely believed ill-will for Kalam. From the time Sonia opted out of the prime ministership following the 2004 election, there were reports that she had turned resentful of Kalam. Some reports mentioned that Kalam had advised her that her foreign origin might create problems for her becoming Prime Minister. No confirmation of this came from any side, but the story of Sonia falling out with Kalam had gained enough ground for the American embassy in Delhi to report it to Washington as WikiLeaks revealed.

Since it was publicised that Turning Points would deal with the non-appointment of Sonia Gandhi, there was considerable interest in the book. But those expect any information on the controversial topic will be disappointed. For one thing, Kalam reaches the topic leisurely, on the 134^th page of a 176-page book. Twelve chapters test the reader's patience, with Kalam talking about his lectures, his talks with children, his suggestions on governance, his poems, his list of good deeds, his visits abroad, his improvements to the Mughal Gardens, the virtues of medicinal plants, rejuvenating the heart of India, etcetera.

Finally he came to “the three situations” that engaged his personal feelings. Actually he listed four. The first was the cabinet decision to dissolve the Bihar Assembly, a crisis that almost made him resign. The second was the Office of Profits Bill which he returned for reconsideration. The third was capital punishment cases on which he found many unfair assumptions. And the fourth – at last – was inviting the Congress to form the Government in 2004.

Kalam writes on the subject without saying anything. He merely says that he was ready to appoint Sonia Gandhi as Prime Minister and that, to his surprise, she put up Manmohan Singh for the job. So what about all the circumstantial evidence supporting Sonia's hostility to Kalam, what about the Congress cold-shouldering him, what about those American diplomatic cables? Not a word. In fact his account is so cheerful, about pleasantries being exchanged and so on, that we would think the two were buddies. This is Kalam the politician at his best.

Readers of the book have to be satisfied with the few points he makes elsewhere with firmness. When politics degrades into adventurism, he says, ruination would follow. We must graduate from political politics to developmental politics, he says. He also criticises Parliament for not debating seriously practices that cannot meet the standards of public probity.

In the course of all this, Kalam gives unstinted praise to P.V. Narasimha Rao. “I found Rao very perceptive on defence issues.... He had a long-term vision of building robust systems of defence application”. This is about a man who is a non-person in Sonia Gandhi's book and is denied mention in official Congress records. So now we can guess at least one reason for Sonia's dislike of Kalam.

Horror erased the joy of Independence in 1947. How valid is joy today?

Independence day can be an unsettling experience if you spend it reading about how it all began in 1947. Today we rejoice, we fly the flag proudly and say Jai Hind with confidence. All of which is right. But to forget the mass killings and horrendous human tragedies that marked the occasion 65 years ago would be unwise – because the mentality that led to the gory partition riots is still around as is clear from the Assam riots, the Mumbai violence and the sudden exodus of northeast people from places like Bangalore.

If mere rumours can spread panic today, we can imagine the scale of atrocities that accompanied independence. There are books and films that tell us about them. A book that many may not read is D.F. Karaka's Betrayal in India. That's because Karaka was seen as a social snob. In the 1950s-60s Bombay he and R.K. Karanjia were rival polestars, one editing Current, the other Blitz. Karanjia was the people's editor, identifying himself with popular causes. Karaka was a rich, British-educated, dressing-for-dinner kind of man, famous for throw-away sentences like, “at the luncheon table of J.R.D.Tata, I sat opposite Pandit Nehru”, and how “Madame Chiang Kai-shek did me the honour of asking me to tea”. In the course of the celebrated feud between the two editors, Karanjia called D.F.Karaka Damn Fool Karaka, and all Bombay laughed.

But Karaka was a gifted journalist. His contacts were unmatched and his columns were read. Betrayal in India is an account of what partition meant to the people of Punjab and how the masses felt let down by the new government that assumed power. On both issues his thesis is not new. We know now that partition brought out “not the surgeon's healing knife but the butcher's destructive axe”. We also know that freedom and power made patriots turn into predators. But Karaka said it in 1950, when the wounds were till bleeding and the masses still believed that Jawaharlal Nehru would lead them to justice and prosperity. Three generations later, we can say: Yes, what a let-down.

Memories of the “undeclared civil war “ in Punjab in August-September 1947 produce shocks even today. Calcutta had seen massacres earlier but at partition time Mahatma Gandhi lived in places like Noakhali and wrought what the British editors of The Statesman described as a near miracle. In Punjab there was no Mahatma. There were fearsome formations. The Muslim League had its National Guards who wore uniforms and “were reminiscent of the Nazi SS”. The Sikhs had their Shahidi Dal and the RSS had its armed wing. It was open war and there was no government machinery capable of controlling the warring groups.

Karaka describes the arrival of a refugee train from Pakistan at the Amritsar station. Later that same day a train going from India to Pakistan also stopped at Amritsar. The train from Pakistan had been savagely attacked three times and the survivors, as they reached Amritsar, said at least 2000 passengers had been massacred. The train to Pakistan was clandestinely shunted to an isolated track near the Khalsa College where its passengers too were attacked. Savagely.

In both trains “men, women and children lay dead in the most ghastly positions... Many a head and hand lay dismembered. Mouths gaped wide in horror, fear and pain.... Who were all these people dying like flies? They were poor, unarmed, defenceless peasants. They certainly had no political consciousness and had never been concerned with issues like partition and boundaries. They were only counted in hundreds and thousands as one counted heads of cattle”.

In the next chapter, Karaka recounts how “a new class of Indian now emerged on the Indian scene, the khaddar-clad, Gandhi-capped, black-marketeering patriot”. He talked of politicians and businessman who made a killing by illegally cashing 1000-rupee notes following their demonetisation. Karaka was lucky. He did not live to see Bofors, the Commonwealth Games and the 2G spectrum bonanza. The betrayal of India continues.