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Dynastic dictatorship
China reveals its political secrets
by G. Parthasarathy
While India has periodically been described as a “dynastic democracy,” the time has now come after its 18th Party Congress for China to be described as a “dynastic dictatorship”. Outgoing leader Hu Jintao alluded to the concern and growing dissatisfaction in China over political corruption. He warned: “Corruption could even cause the collapse of the (Communist) Party and fall of the State”. The Party Congress had been preceded by the downfall of its rising star Bo Xilai, whose lavish and flamboyant lifestyle had led to the conviction of his wife for murdering a British businessman and revelations of the billions of dollars of assets that Bo and his family had acquired. This was followed by a a well-documented leak, quite evidently by Bo’s supporters, about ill-gotten wealth accumulated by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his family.China’s worst kept secrets about dynastic politics in the Communist Party became public when it emerged that four of the seven members of its highest decision-making body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, were “Princelings,” or descendants of first generation, Mao era political leaders. It is no secret that most “Princelings” including Party Chief Xi Jinping lead opulent life styles, with families having amassed huge assets and extensive business interests. With public awareness increasing because of extensive Internet connectivity, the contradictions between having an open economy linked to foreign markets on the one hand and a one-party, authoritarian political structure perceived to be unresponsive to pubic grievances on the other, are coming to the forefront in China. The 86-year-old former President Jiang Zemin, who has two sons with extensive business interests, played a key role in facilitating the rise of “Princelings”” to power, evidently to ensure that his sons “interests” are protected. Given the composition of its new leadership, China will continue to seek new ways to further open up its economy and maintain a high growth rate. But the “Princelings” are unlikely to bring any changes in the basic authoritarian nature of the one-party state apparatus. The new head of the party’s Propaganda Department, Liu Yunshan, is reportedly a hardliner who favours tightening controls on the use of the Internet. Tutored by the approach of Deng Xiao Ping, who was determined not to follow the disastrous path set by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union by experimenting with political reform and transparency, the new dispensation will be averse to increasing democratisation. It appears inevitable that China will continue on its path of rapid military modernisation, combined with an assertive line on its maritime and land boundary claims. One has recently witnessed aggressive Chinese postures resulting in a virtual military takeover around the disputed Scarborough Shoal, claimed by the Philippines, by naval deployments. A similar aggressive approach has been taken on recent tensions with Japan, with Chinese naval vessels entering territorial waters adjacent to the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. China has evidently been further emboldened by the American assertion that while the US does have a stand on freedom and maintenance of peace and stability in the South China Sea, it “does not take sides in (maritime) disputes”. China’s recent decision to depict the entire South China Sea, together with Arunachal Pradesh and parts of Ladakh as Chinese territory in maps on Chinese passports, has to be seen in the light of growing Chinese readiness to use force and military coercion to enforce its territorial claims. With jingoistic propaganda, together with a military build-up and coercion being used by the Chinese Communist Party leadership, evidently to divert public opinion away from domestic issues like high levels of corruption and absence of transparency, China is obviously in no mood to back off, or show any flexibility on its territorial claims along the Sino-Indian border. As Chinese passports are generally valid for 10 years, there can logically be no change in China’s territorial claims in this period. Given these developments, one cannot but be surprised by the statement of National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon brushing aside the serious implications of these Chinese actions, while voicing optimism that “we are in the process of agreeing on a framework to settle the boundary”. Have we forgotten that after agreeing to delineate the Line of Actual Control, the Chinese backed off on the entire process? Moreover, in 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao agreed that “in reaching a border settlement, the two sides shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in border areas”. This clearly signalled that there was no question of transferring territories containing settled populations and addressed Indian concerns on Chinese claims to Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Within a year, however, China was laying claim not merely to Tawang, but the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh. One can only conclude that the new “framework” the National Security Adviser spoke of to settle the boundary issue would be about as successful as the much-touted “Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism” with Pakistan, which was unceremoniously buried following the 26/11 terrorist attack in Mumbai. Just a day before the NSA spoke, Army Chief General Bikram Singh grandiosely described bilateral relations with China as “absolutely perfect” and ebulliently added that “mechanisms” were now in place to solve any issues between the two countries. This was an astonishing comment from the Army Chief, at a time when the Army wants additional strike formations, artillery and attack helicopters, apart from vastly improved communications on the border with China. Was it because General Bikram Singh feels that given the resource crunch and the imperatives of pre-election populist measures, the Army is unlikely to get its wishes fulfilled soon and needs to sound conciliatory to the Chinese? Moreover, do the other two Service Chiefs and the Defence Minister share this optimism that one can now rest easy as we have “mechanisms” to deal with this “absolutely perfect” relationship with China? These issues need to be debated now that Parliament is in session. New Delhi is now talking of getting superfast trains and rail equipment from China at a time when there is growing concern at our overdependence on second-rate Chinese power equipment, which has been prone to breakdowns. There are also serious concerns about the dangers to cyber security and our communications infrastructure posed by massive imports from China. Should we not insist on coproduction, combined with transfer or technology in such strategic sectors, with preference for cooperation with friendly countries like Japan, France and Germany, rather than China? Moreover, the experience in 1962 teaches us that while dealing with China, wishful thinking or ill-advised adventurism as practised in our post-1958 “forward policy” is best
avoided.
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Beyond control
by V.K. Kapoor
Change is fuelled by the passion of the young. In the present generation, the need to thrill has become a drab addiction. In this trajectory of social decay with the dramatic loss of innocence, the young want only fun and minute-to-minute distraction opportunity and temptation go along with the territory. Change ordinarily is very slow, but the cumulative change is very fast. For young people the pleasure principle is the only principle which counts. They have seen too little of life but want too much of it. They are high on life, low on information. They are always looking for the thrill of the forbidden and itching for risk and sensory overload. All reality is in a process of change and the process cycle in the direction of their opposites — life to death, positive to negative, energy to matter and back. It was a grand wedding. I knew the parents of the boy and the girl. Both of them displayed the grandeur of practising feudals. After a month or so, I bumped into the young man in Delhi Golf Club. I asked him about the young queen (his wife). He replied casually, “Uncle jee fit nahin baithe, ghre bhej ditti” (She did not suit me, I sent her home) and advised me that at least I should take beer as it is not harmful. I was shocked and checked with the parents of the girl. The mother told me very bitterly that the boy was a gay. A silent sin in the 50s, a deliberate defiance in the 60s, a fashion in the 70s, went public in the 80s and became an epidemic in the 90s. Gradually, gay clubs started coming up, and what used to be discussed in hushed tones became a topic of open discussion in clubs and coffee houses. A huge percentage of non-straights are found in creative circles. The demand for immediate pleasure, comfort and excitement became acceptable in civilised society. For the young, life has become a shrine for immediate gratification. A person connected with the film industry related the stories of a number of well-known personalities who were non-straights. Most of these people have what psychologists call type “T” personality -thrill-seekers fond of novelty, change, variety and experience. These people have unnerving appetites. They enthrall and haunt. Cellphone, booze and high infidelity are the new symbols of cool, middle class youngsters. Sex is neither taboo nor sacred. The sanctity of marriage has disappeared. Now it is love at first sight and divorce at hindsight. They are an unhappy and confused lot. Discontent is the medium of the age and anxiety is the murmur of times. The character of the present youth suggests two halves of an incoherent whole. The game of life allows no substitutions or re-plays. When one is looking for a cheap thrill, it often turns out to be expensive. If one does not know which port one is sailing to, no wind is favourable. Sometimes we become obsolete without knowing it Bob Dylan said: “Come mothers and fathers all over the land, and do not criticise what you cannot understand. Your sons and daughters are beyond your control, your old role is rapidly aging”.
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The importance of being Piro in Punjab
A dearth of reference points in the history of Punjab for empowered, disarmingly confident women has revived interest in a 19th century obscure poet whose life has become a topic of serious academic enquiry, transcending vernacular interest
Anshu Malhotra
Of late there has been a buzz about the nineteenth century obscure woman, Piro, from a relatively lesser known sect, the Gulabdasis, in Punjab. Punjabis in India (and Pakistan) in the know have let their imagination soar with her - a couple of plays have been written on her - Shahryar's Piro Preman, and Sawrajbir's Shairi. The latter has inspired friends from across the border and a play, based on the book has been performed by Pakistan's Ajoka theatre group led by Madeeha Gauhar in both Lahore and Amritsar. Latterly, the head of the branch of the Gulabdasis based in Hansi, Haryana, Sant Vijendra Das, has collected all of Piro's extant writings in a volume Sant Kavyitri Ma Piro, transliterating her writings from the Gurmukhi script to Devnagari, perhaps for the benefit of his sect's present followers and providing an exegesis of her work. Her collected work in Gurmukhi, Piro Kahe Saheliyon, has been recently edited and published by Veer Vahab of Fazilka. Equally enthused are academics, and her work has engaged scholars in Punjab and outside. Why this interest in Piro that has generated goodwill across borders, and has transcended the vernacular and cosmopolitan publishing and academic worlds? There are many reasons for this: the lack of warm human stories on the status of women in Punjab; Piro's own rather unconventional life, most of it available to us amazingly in her own cryptic and mystifying (and mystic) poetry; her ability to transcend Hindu/Muslim differences that became the bane of Punjab as India moved towards independence; her low caste origins particularly important in a Punjab seeing dalit assertion; and of course the quality of her writing. I will briefly shed light on some of these factors, underlining the importance of being Piro, in her times and in ours. Lack of narratives about women Punjab has been associated with prosperity and economic well-being since independence, more so after the green revolution. However, Punjab's story has been dismal in relation to human development indices, especially so in the manner in which Punjabis treat their women. A good indicator of Punjab's awry development is the female sex ratio here (893 women for every 1000 men) glaringly proclaiming the widespread prevalence of sex selective abortion, and an ever insidious demand for 'machine da kaka'. Contemporary Punjab seems bereft of heart-warming stories about its women. Also important to remember are that the recent attempts at dalit assertion have created divisive politics in Punjab, reminiscent of the religious antagonisms that created fractious borders in Punjabi hearts, as in its landscape. Historically Punjab has presented somewhat of a paradox. The British believed that the Punjabi Jats' women were hard working and enjoyed a good status. While the first part of the statement is indubitably true, the second part is open to debate. Likewise they believed that the Sikh religion in Punjab held women in high regard. Besides the invented histories of the Singh Sabha movement, there exists little concrete evidence of the same, except for Guru Nanak's statement of all men being born of their mother's wombs. Indeed the colonial officials' own figures for female infanticide indicted both the Jats and the Sikhs for this crime. Similarly despite the spread of education among women in the colonial period, thanks mostly to the efforts of the Arya Samaj and the Singh Sabha, Punjab singularly lacked women who were autonomous and agential. In the reams of published material produced by the afore-mentioned movements one hardly comes across women who wielded either the pen or their selves with any flourish or self-confidence. While historians in recent years have discovered and written copiously on women autobiographers in Bengal (Rashsundari Debi to Kailashbashini Debi) and Maharashtra (Ramabai Ranade to Parvati Athavale), besides other literary, journalistic and organizational ventures by them (Pandita Ramabai and Kashibai Kanitkar come to mind), there are few such stalwarts in Punjab. We have to wait till the twentieth century and the likes of Amrita Pritam to see the contribution of Punjabi women in the literary sphere. It is in this context that the discovery of Piro seems so heartening. Not only was she a person who seemingly chose the course of her own life and determinedly fashioned it, she was gifted with a literary flair and a sharp intellect. Her very existence, particularly because she came from the seams of society, beckons Punjabis towards better tales to relate about themselves, their women, and their caste and religious traditions. So who was she? A woman straddling social change While Piro straddled the pre-colonial and the colonial periods (she died in 1872), her life was shaped by spiritual and literary tastes of the former. Though not much is known about her life, she gives us a glimpse of it in an autobiographical fragment in a set of her Kafis or verses. We know that she was a Muslim prostitute who came to live in the dera of Guru Gulabdas, a Sikh Jat, unconventional and maverick in his persona as in his institutional choices, keeping his establishment open to low castes and following few prescriptive rules. Her move was so audacious that she suffered its consequences, described in her writing as a theatrical episode of abduction, rescue and miracles. She also spoke about her crisis as an instance of habitual conflict between Hindus (inclusive of Sikhs for her) and the Muslims, an overtly acrimonious drama, belied only by her writing that ridiculed and dismissed such creedal differentiation. Piro emerges as a person on the cusp of change, ushering in the modern impulse -in her autobiographic oeuvre or her prescience of the coming religious conflict. But also as a woman steeped in her sect's inheritance of Bhakti ethics and Sufi emotions, speaking profoundly of the emptiness of religious externalities. Besides her stunning and multi-layered autobiographical verses Piro wrote mystical poetry, verses jointly produced with her guru, and celebratory songs to be sung during the festive Holi season. It is the quality of her writing and the themes she explores that evoke admiration. She wrote in turns frankly, disarmingly, haughtily or with rancour. She presented herself as a woman, a low caste, a scathing critic of religious animosities, and a mystic who could invoke a Kabir, a Mira or even a Bulleh Shah. It is difficult to capture her myriad voices, a Piro sometimes beseeching, at others condemnatory, mystical and pious, obdurate and self-confident, but a few examples must suffice. On being a low caste woman, a prostitute besides, who nevertheless could not be debarred from the path of salvation she wrote: rakho sarni asaran ko houn sudar nari; jaat-ajaat na dekhiya, tum Kubjan tari;….tari Ganka Ajamal na paap vichare, Piro kehsi satguru tum neech udhare (Keep me at your feet for I am but a sudra woman; You did not bother about caste when emancipating Kubjan;….you did not consider the sins of Ganka, the prostitute, or of Ajamal; Piro says satguru you are benevolent to the low born). On defiantly doing away with the niceties and antagonisms between the Hindus and the Turaks she wrote zestfully: Javna asi pardes saiyon, Turak Hinduan pare kahavna; Asi tyag jana mat Hinduan da, nahin Turkan da kuj dharavana; Jithe pahuch na Turak te Hinduan di, saiyon aise makan mein javana; Piro Ram jharokre baith ki ni mujra kul jahan da pavana (We will go to a foreign land friends far away from Turaks and Hindus; We will sacrifice the doctrine of the Hindus nor keep anything of the Turaks; where neither Hindus nor Turaks can reach, let us reach such a place; Piro says sitting on Ram's window we will dance away the norms of the clan and the world). Evoking the past for present references Piro in her evocation of Bulleh says: Piro piya aap hai main bhin nahin piya (Piro herself is piya, not separate from him) reminding one of Bulleh's: Ranjha Ranjha kardi main aape Ranjha hoi (calling out to Ranjha I became him). And of Mira: Piro pi piyalrra matvari hoi (On drinking of the cup Piro became intoxicated); and of Kabir in his insistence upon the certainty of death and of this life to make a difference: Piro bandiye jag lai hun jagan vela, aise janam malavrra phir hoe na mela (Piro woman awake it is time to rise, You'll get but one birth). And finally an angry Piro upbraiding Hindus and Muslims for their fetishistic ritualistic religion in which there was no place for women: Kurre majab banaut ke kar kurre dave, lind much ko kat ke phir Turak kahave; Hindu bane banaut ke dhar janu choti, bane banaut na narian gal dono khoti (Making false religions and promises, You make Turaks by snipping the penis and the moustache; Hindus are made with janeyu and choti, women cannot be made thus, they are both wrong). It is these many moods of Piro that have lent her writing to multiple interpretations, indeed appropriations. For some Piro is the Punjabi example of a woman mystic in the likes of Lalla of Kashmir or the Rajput Mira, even though Piro most often puts herself in the company of low caste saints like Kabir or Raidas. For some, she is the helpless woman caught in a bad situation, however, with an inborn mystical insight, searching for an anchor, ultimately found in Gulabdas. For others she represents a woman's search for a true lover, a man a helpless woman must rely on. And for still others she is the agential woman, self-fashioning and adamant, despite her marginal origins, pushing the envelope of her times and circumstances. But for all Piro is a good story to tell, a woman who could help Punjabis overcome caste and religious differences. The writer teaches history in the University of Delhi and is working on a monograph on Piro, with a historical perspective.
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