With pals like Nihalani, Badals need no foes

Harish Khare

I tend to think that the Badals (that means the father, the son and the brother-in-law) make a very smart and very shrewd team, but I am sure no one on the Badal bench would have thought of asking the censor board chief Pahlaj Nihalani to come and pinch-hit for them in this match against Anurag Kashyap and his Udta Punjab.

Well, it only shows what happens when underequipped men (or women) are asked to guard the ramparts. Mr Nihalani's behaviour in the controversy can only be described as deeply disappointing. For anyone holding a public office, his utterances should embarrass even the most saffronite of the saffronites. This, though, is a matter to be sorted out between this small man and the other small men who appointed him as our censor chief. 

The creative community can only keep its fingers crossed. It is reassuring that so many Bollywood artistes, such as Priyanka Chopra and Aamir Khan, did not feel intimidated and have spoken out against the censor board's overreach. Even that very careful man, Amitabh Bachchan, has been constrained to protest Nihalani's war on Udta Punjab. 

The Badals are streetsmart enough to realise the damage Mr Nihalani has done to them. He has simply confirmed the rumour. Punjab does have a drug problem. In his clumsy handling of Udta Punjab, the censor chief has invited attention to the political dimension of the drug problem. 

I thought it was downright silly of Mr Nihalani to suggest publicly that the Udta Punjab producer had taken money from the Aam Aadmi Party for making this film. In one stroke, the Censor Boss has done an enormous favour to the AAP, and, correspondingly, has further damaged the Badals' already bruised image. This was one Nihalani intervention the Badals could have done without. He has made the Badals look guilty. 

Nihalani could have made a reasonable case that he was trying to curb vulgarity in films. From all accounts, Kashyap has been very, very creative with using expletives and other colourful phrases. A principled position on using explicit cuss words would have produced a different debate. But then, Mr Nihalani could not help being himself. He reduced the whole thing to a mohalla-level brawl.

Admittedly, one film or a controversy about a ban of a film does not bring about a total transformation in the public mood. But Punjab’s political mood is definitely in a flux. The Udta Punjab episode is one more turn of the screw against the ruling party. A totally avoidable headache. 

A Kolkata-based cousin wanted me to read a small monograph, Doing Time with Nehru, written by her school-friend, Yin Marsh. The monograph is a first-person account of how the ethnic Chinese community was treated once the India-China war broke out in 1962. Yin, then 12 years old, found herself among 2,000 Chinese-Indians who were rounded up, quarantined and interned in a camp in the Rajasthan desert.

The internment was a clumsy affair. The lower-level Indian bureaucracy had no idea how to keep an ethnically different group as prisoner. Yin and her family were tickled to learn that they were housed in the same bungalow “where Nehru lived when he was interned by the British years before, so we felt very privileged. It felt like we were ‘doing time with Nehru’.”

Though most of us remember the humiliation of our defeat in the 1962 war, this monograph reminds us of our dormant racism, how even a great, large-hearted man like Nehru countenanced this utterly unfair treatment of the ethnic-Chinese. Yin writes of a “The Foreigners Act and Order” that was passed in November 1962 and which gave “license to the native Indian population to harass the ethnic Chinese in many different ways.”

The internees were mostly offspring of mixed marriages and had been living in north-eastern India for generations, yet they were subjected to a hostile treatment. “This impression stayed with me for a long time after we left the camp and drove home the point of how arbitrary and unjust the Indian government policies had been.” The border war lasted just a month but the internment camp operated for five-and-a-half years. 

Yin writes that though “with the passage of time and maturity, I have overcome the anger that has been bottled up for years”, she reminds us that “this shameful chapter in India’s history was successfully suppressed for fifty years.”

THIS week, the journalistic fraternity lost an old-fashioned practitioner of the craft. KK Katyal, long associated with The Hindu, passed away. 

For years, he led The Hindu's national reporting team in Delhi. For some years, he was my boss at the newspaper, but he always treated me, and all other junior colleagues, with respect and consideration. 

He belonged to the pre-electronic media era, when journalism was a serious calling and journalists were taken seriously and respected. And, he was very respected. 

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he remained single-mindedly devoted to journalism and its inherent nobility. No ambassadorships for him, no high-commissionership either. No hankering after a Rajya Sabha seat. 

His family came from Jhang (now in Pakistan), and in his later years, he became an active voice in promoting greater interaction among Indian and Pakistani journalists, as a necessary requirement for a better relationship between the two countries. He deserves a last salute.

WE are told that a number of gurus are going to be descending on Chandigarh in the run-up to the Mega Yoga Event on June 21. Sri Sri Ravishankar has already put in an appearance. Other yoga-entrepreneurs are scheduled to arrive and do their bit to create a 'mahaul' for the Prime Minister's Event. 

These swamis remind me of a drill that used to take place in the insurgency-infested Kashmir valley some time ago: a ‘road-opening party’ was sent out to ‘sanitise’ a route before a substantial posse of soldiers and officers could be allowed to traverse that stretch of the road. The sarkari babas are doing a similar exercise.

From media reports, it can be gathered that many serving army and police officers attended a reception for Sri Sri Ravishankar at a private residence. I do not know if these officers consider themselves as the baba’s devotees. Nor do I know if the service rules frown upon such intermingling between officers and religious figures. But, it would be most unfortunate if any serving officer saw any collateral benefit from being seen in proximity with a godman who is known to enjoy the Prime Minister’s political confidence.

I think a totally unhealthy precedent was set last year when the Chief of the Army Staff persuaded himself to join Narendra Modi’s yoga show at Rajpath. Now, junior officers feel emboldened in crossing the line.

The argument that “yoga is above politics” is a false pretence. The political nexus of these babas is hardly a secret. And everyone knows how these sarkari babas use their political connection to advance their business interests. 

They all want to become raj prohits, if not raj gurus. Perhaps, they have in mind Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari as the role model. Old-timers still recall the tall, muscular, well-toned yoga master make a remarkably striking figure in a single white linen dhoti, as he strode in and out of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s residence. He was written about in the national and international media for his proximity to and influence over Indira Gandhi, how he had the ear of that prime minister and how he could get this or that minister in and out of her cabinet. He had his own aircraft, his own ashram-city, and his own television show on Doordarshan. 

Whereas Swami Dhirendra Brahamchari operated during the austere, socialist days, the modern-day sarkari babas make a prosperous breed in these days of corporate greed and middle class affluence and confusion. Yoga is becoming a handy camouflage for both political and business calculations.

And, after that reinvigorating Surya Namaskar, do have a cup of coffee.

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