With the horrors of the deadly virus still in the air, this would appear to be like a remarkable fairy tale in the post-Covid pandemic scenario, almost like a dream come true, almost like the Sound of Music multiplied many times over. It is quite unbelievable, but true.

Across the dense forests and zigzag hilly terrain, full of water bodies, rivers and lakes, interspersed with sloping meadows, land turned into jhoom (burnt land,  shifting cultivation) and allowed to discover its own bio-diversity untouched by human intervention for years, and lush green paddy fields, a dream is truly and slowly coming true. The dream of Ajendra and his wife Madhavi Reang. And, surprisingly, even during the pandemic and lockdown, the dream flowered.

Next to the green density of the Chittagong Hill Tract across the Bangladesh border, in the Karbook subdivision of Tripura, are several scattered and distant villages inhabited by the Reang community. Soft-spoken, gentle and beautiful, these hard working communities lack basic infrastructure – not an unusual phenomenon in distant tribal locations across the mountains, plains and forests inhabited by the tribals in various parts of India – from Abhujmarh in Chhattisgarh to Niyamgiri in Western Orissa. In the Northeast, particularly, invisibilized by mainstream India and its media, the communities live far away and undisturbed, but often without any amenities: roads, health centres and hospitals, schools and colleges, and drinking water.

In the region bordering the Chittagong Hill Tract, the 50,000 odd tribals of the Reang community lack especially one important thing: education for their children. For their children to be educated is a deep and internalized longing that cuts across caste, communities, religions, geographies and inherited histories in most parts of India. Everyone wants good education and health systems for their children and their communities.

That is why the dream is flourishing and unfolding every day in village Shimbhua, at the St Thomas School and hostel, run by Ajendra and Madhabi, his wife. In a context where there are literally no teachers in most schools, and where children have to walk for miles in the dense forest to reach their schools and return home, both of them have set up a school which is becoming a role model.

There are 300 students in their school, 200 of them hostelers. So who are these kids?

These are mostly toddlers, little ones, barely three years or less, girls and boys, and some kids older than them. The little ones are helped by the older ones– for instance if they wet their pants, or need to go to the toilet. The girls live in separate quarters, cleaning and sprucing up the place, still active despite the heat.  It is a hot afternoon, so the boys have had their meals and are now resting, on the ground, on the beds, two in one, deep asleep, in their separate hostel. The kids play football, cricket and other games. Many of them were enjoying a break at the empty bus stop near the school, laughing, screaming and playing. They waved with joy when they saw us.

The question is why and how have their parents, who live in distant tribal settlements in the forest, often with no transportation, chosen to trust the couple and left their little ones in their care? And how does this confident couple manage so many kids next to their house?  And how do so many kids live in harmony and peace, without missing the comfort of their own homes and their parents and siblings?

In a context whereby most schools do not even have teachers or in a context when secondary education is all but absent in many tribal hamlets in the north of Tripura, this school in the south, close to the border of Bangladesh, is becoming a landmark in primary and secondary education.

There are 13 teachers in the school, both male and female, and all of them are young, confident and committed. A young woman teacher came out of the girls hostel, shook our hands and welcomed us, speaking English. The other teachers joined in the discussion on the problems and difficulties facing the people, and how the Forest Rights Act and the Gram Sabha have been missing in this area, though people still own community and individual lands in the forest, mostly for jhoom cultivation.

Madhabi studied in Rudrapur in Uttarakhand, though she could not  complete her graduation. There is a Reang community there, so she could travel all the way there for higher education. Now, she is a full-time and dedicated teacher in the school, also taking care of the hostel and the meals with the cooks.  One of the cooks is differently abled, but fully involved in the discussion.

Says Ajendra, “I have a dream. We are working to introduce studies up to Class 10. Three students might actually go to college one of these days. These little ones are our life here – we take care of them like their parents. Their parents and community trust us. You see, the lack of education is so stark and parents really want to get their children educated. That is why we have created a hostel as well for girls and boys.”

Around 100 students are day-scholars, while 200 students live in the hostel. Many of their parents visit them almost every week on two-wheelers or auto rickshaws. They bring fruits and food which is collectively shared. Ajendra is a well-off farmer, and owns a car, one of the very few in the area. The day-scholars pay Rs 300 per month, while those in the hostel pay Rs 1200 per month, which includes fees.

“We are committed to bringing in high quality education. If you have suggestions for alternative curriculum, or reference material, please do tell us,” said a teacher, when it was suggested that perhaps they could look into the innovative and imaginative methods used by the NGO, Pratham, to sharpen the minds of the children, to expand their imagination and knowledge systems about daily life and meaningful associations, and to make them more confident in learning the ways of their own indigenous community and the outside world, recognizing objects and their social meanings, while celebrating the world of story-telling and mathematics alike.

So what do they do if there are kids who are too naughty? “Well,” said Ajendra, “three kids did not let us sleep. They would scream at the top of their voice. So we took some advice from our elders. We rubbed a little salt below their teeth when they would scream. That would make them quiet.”

Indeed, the communities here are gearing up to fight a protracted and peaceful struggle for their inherited forest rights in the face of official and unilateral announcements by the authorities that they cannot cultivate or use ‘forest department land’, including for jhoom cultivation. This land, which is essentially their traditional community land for hundreds of years, is precious to them, and they love and protect the forests.

Hence, this school is an eye-opener. It only proves that a new generation of tribal children are getting ready to inherit their history, culture and civilization. And their forests, fully equipped with new knowledge systems and skills.

Amit Sengupta is Executive Editor, Hardnews and a columnist, currently based in Kolkata

Courtesy: https://countercurrents.org

The post When Forest Rights meets Right to Education appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The political undercurrents are changing rapidly and unpredictably in the huge state of Uttar Pradesh where Assembly election are due next month. The stakes are high for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that is in power in not just the state, but also at the centre – the impact of the Assembly election could be felt in the 2024 general elections. The BJP is clearly worried.

The political churning in the recent past, which shall continue in the days to come, and the spate of high-profile resignations from the BJP government and party, has left the hardliners in the BJP-RSS and Sangh Parivar rather disturbed and shaky. Weeks before the final countdown to the UP Assembly polls, the odds are heavily pitched against the BJP, despite its huge and expensive ad-blitz, and its branding itself with a misnomer: ‘Uttam Pradesh’. A misnomer, because UP and Bihar are still listed as the worst states in all Human Development Index (HDI) indicators, and the situation has got even more worse under the fanatic, divisive, polarising and tyrannical regime of Yogi Adityanath.

Besides, the dead bodies floating on the Ganga during the second wave of the pandemic, and the dead bodies hurriedly buried near the shores of the river, along with a total collapse of the health infrastructure, has not been forgotten by the people of UP. The wounds are still simmering, despite the ad campaign glorifying Yogi and his government.

For starters, three top ministers hailing from Other Backward Classes (OBC) have resigned from Yogi’s cabinet, including heavyweight Swami Prasad Maurya. Along with them several MLAs too have chosen to quit. Almost all of them have joined the Samajwadi Party (SP). Days before the elections, this is real bad news for the party in power, and, clearly, its 80-20 communal politics and Muslim-bashing on the sly, with Yogi emerging as another extreme Hindutva icon to replace Narendra Modi, is neither selling, nor jelling on the ground.

The BJP is so predictable when it is on a weak wicket, that it becomes blatantly brazen and transparent. There is no iota of complexity or nuance. So Yogi’s first declaration after the announcement of the polls, while it seemed a clear violation of the model code of conduct, was that 80 per cent people of UP will vote for him while the 20 per cent will go elsewhere. For all concerned, the implied message is as bad as that of ‘kabristan and shamshan ghat’ earlier.

If this is not the deliberate division of the legitimate citizenship and voting rights of the electorate on religious grounds, and if this is not a violation of the model code of conduct, then what is? And why has the Election Commission (EC), yet again, chosen to stay mum?

So Akhilesh Yadav, SP leader, whose rallies were drawing huge crowds before the online and smaller crowd-control compulsions were introduced by the EC, responded cryptically – that what a discredited Yogi really means is that 80 per cent people are going to vote for him, while only 20 might stick on with the BJP this time! Maurya went a step ahead after joining the SP, declaring that the figure of 15 per cent is a better bet for the BJP.

Indeed, Akhilesh has stitched up a formidable alliance network beyond the strong support base of the MY factor – the Muslim-Yadav factor. He has roped in a variety of smaller OBC formations and parties, including those who have split from the BJP, many of them carrying substantial electoral influence across multiple constituencies among their backward caste-based supporters. Significantly, even while, as usual, a huge number of Muslim candidates will be given tickets as earlier, the SP has not fallen into the BJP trap of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and carried on its campaign outside the religion paradigm, trying to take all the castes and communities along. Indeed, this is a crucial factor in the current poll scenario in the state.

More so, Western UP has reiterated yet again that it will vote unanimously against the BJP this time. With the farmers’ very angry and disgusted at the BJP’s arrogance, and with Modi and Yogi having completely alienated them, they are out to teach Modi and Yogi a lesson this time. With Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) aligning itself with the SP, and with his rallies too drawing huge crowds earlier, as in Meerut, the SP-RLD will mark a decisive shift in at least 55 seats in Western UP and its vicinity.

Significantly, the farmers are also very angry because they have not been paid crores reportedly overdue for the sugarcane sold to the sugar factories in the region, and because of the betrayal of the Modi government on the promise of Minimum Support Price (MSP). The lockdown and pandemic has made their economic situation much more tough, and, clearly, they are nursing their wounds. This will all get translated now, as the election season heats up, despite the pandemic and the third wave.

Besides, the artificial polarisation and communal divide which was manufactured by the bloody social engineering of fake love jehad etc before the 2014 polls in what was always a peaceful and harmonious region, having completely failed this time, the BJP might fare very badly in Western UP. With Mayawati weakened and having turned herself redundant, keeping totally silent on atrocities on Dalits and women, as in Hathras, the Dalits will definitely join the other farming communities in voting against the BJP.

Indeed, the Hindutva card which united all the castes, including the dominant land-owning castes with the landless Dalits, versus the so called enemy manufactured by the BJP’s hate politics, namely the Muslims, has all but totally collapsed. The massive rally in Muzaffarnagar marked a political rupture when it resurrected an old ethos and an old synthesis of two slogans. This is when Rakesh Tikait, from the dias, united the slogan followed by the collective chorus of the huge crowd spilling over beyond the rally ground: Har Har Mahadev and Allah Hu Akbar! This was yet again a reassertion of the unity and brotherhood of the past between various communities, across caste and religion, which marks this laid back, prosperous, peaceful and fertile green revolution belt of India.

The rabble-rousers, including the top leaders of the BJP in the region are not even able to visit their own constituencies, such is their dilemma and the local hostility they face from the farming community. Local BJP supporters chose to hide in their villages during the farmers’ protracted struggle. Others clandestinely helped the farmers in the struggle. Some of the ministers and MLA, who have resigned from the Yogi cabinet, hold enough clout in the area. With heavyweight Imran Masood from Saharanpur set to join the SP, the entire opposition vote will get pooled in together with no fear of splitting.

Swami Prasad Maurya is no ‘also ran’. He has been the number two in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) earlier, a two-term minister, and four-time MLA. His daughter is an MP from Badaun.He is MLA from Padrauna. He joined the BJP recently and he seemed to have tested the waters too early despite holding the position of a top minister with a crucial ministry. His resignation letter, and the crucial timing of his resignation, along with other ministers and MLAs is a clear sign that all is not well within the BJP.

Top caste-based politicians are sensing the shift in the mood on the ground. Almost all those who quit have said that the Yogi government cares two hoots for the poor, the Dalits, the backwards and farmers. This is a significant political constituency, and a significant ideological stance, and this also reflects the brazenly biased stance in Yogi sharing and distributing power with only one dominant caste – the Thakurs, which is his caste, and whose influential men in powerful positions have been ruling the roost in the state, much to the anger of the Brahmins and other communities.

With Thakurs ruling the roost, the angst and anger of the influential Brahmin community in UP, which has almost always had high stakes in political, bureaucratic and institutional power, has multiplied many fold. They seemed to have held back their angst amidst all the all-prevailing ‘Thakurvaad’ unleased during the Yogi regime. Sources within the community are of the opinion that this time the Brahmins are going to take revenge against the BJP, which would once field the likes of Atal Behari Vajpayee from Lucknow. Disgruntled and alienated, they will vote shrewdly and tactically, as they did once for Mayawati, in what was an unique alliance of the ‘Savaranas’ with the Dalits.

Apart from Maurya, Dharam Singh Saini, Minister for Ayush and MLA from Nakur constituency in Saharanpur, Mukesh Verma, MLA from Shikohabad in Firozabad, and Awasthi Bala Prasad, MLA from Dhaurahra in Lakhimpur, have quit. All hold huge support base in their respective areas. Lakhimpur, with the killing of farmers crushed under a cabinet minister’s son’s vehicle, is anyway, seems a lost cause for the BJP, especially in the rural areas.

Apna Dal (S) MLA from Shohratgarh, Amar Singh Chaudhary, a BJP ally, has also quit to join the SP. Chaudhary is a  a backward caste leader. Awasthi, a four-time MLA and Brahmin leader, had joined the BJP from the BSP in 2016. He had won the 2017 polls, defeating SP’s Yeshpal Singh Chaudhary of the SP. Earlier, he had won on a BSP ticket from Mohammdi in Lakhimpur, defeating SP’s Imran Ahmad.

Bhagwati Sagar, a Dalit MLA, left the BJP and joined the SP with Swami Prasad Maurya. “Eating with a Dalit cannot wash away the sins of the chief minister,” he said, pointing at Yogi eating in the house of a Dalit to prove his pro-Dalit credentials – rather late in the day for a Thakur. 

Another crucial factor in the UP elections is that apparently there is simmering tension between Yogi and Modi, and it is showing. Modi went on a spree of inaugurations in the recent past in UP. His sartorial and prominent promotion of his own self at Varanasi recently was too transparent, even while Yogi was pushed to the background. Are they at loggerheads, is the question political observers are asking.

Yogi had covertly and overtly, reportedly, started a subtle campaign that he will contest from Ayodhya. That seemed to be his first priority and desire. This was interpreted as the desire to usurp the mantle of Modi and symbolically become an Hindutva icon from the holy city, where the BJP and Sangh parivar illegally demolished the Babri Masjid, and thereby acquire the image of a supreme leader. This was not liked by the powers that be in Delhi.

Hence, Yogi was denied the ticket from Ayodhya. Not only that, his second choice, Mathura, another potential lollypop for the BJP’s divisive politics, too, was denied to him. Gorakhpur was forced down his throat – with a clear message that this is your traditional turf, so stay there, and don’t jump the gun, don’t spread your wings, and protect your own turf.

So rattled has been the paradigm shift on the ground with the resignations of OBC ministers and other MLAs, that the BJP is now  shifting the politics of communalism from 80-20 to that of caste. The BJP is clearly desperate in the given circumstances. Party spokesperson Sidharth Nath Singh, therefore, declared in Lucknow, “There is one biggest OBC leader with us and his name is Narendra Modi.”

So whatever will happen to the incumbent chief minister, a Thakur? And what about the time-tested politics of Hindutva, kabristan and shamshan ghat, and 80-20?

There is another Freudian slip which will come to haunt Modi in the run-up to the assembly polls in UP. Amit Shah had earlier said that the victory of Yogi is a must in UP this time because this will pave the way for the BJP victory in 2024. This implied that Modi is dependent on Yogi’s victory for 2024. That puts Modi on a weak wicket – why should he, the supreme leader and the most important Hindutva icon of the party with a fanatic support base, be dependant for his fortunes in the future to Yogi?

Indeed, this is a typical Catch-22 scenario for both Modi and Yogi. To be, or not to be. Either way, the signals from the ground at this moment is as clear as daylight: it’s Disadvantage BJP.

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The post BJP on the back foot in UP? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Undoubtedly, it was a great and overwhelming victory in the whole of Bengal. Against the entire might of the Central government, the financially and politically powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) electoral machinery, with an Election Commission apparently toeing its line, accused by the Trinamool of open bias and prejudice. And with all the money and muscle power, pomp and show, led by the two biggies of the BJP-led regime in Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Both of them literally parked themselves in Bengal, their helicopters eternally hovering over the sky in the rural and urban landscape, like a sign of their unprecedented power and privilege, though the crowds at their fledgling rallies became thinner and thinner, especially in rural areas. Indeed, the rallies by Yogi Adityanath were a damp squib, empty chairs and empty maidans, in once case only cows hanging out.

And Prashant Kishore, yet again, proved to be right. A management and electoral strategist par excellence, he had predicted much before the campaign began, that the BJP will not cross 100 seats in the Bengal assembly polls. All astute ground reporters, who were not overwhelmed by the hype and hyperbole of the BJP propaganda, as some high-profile journalists from Delhi on quick visits to the state were so prone to, soon found out that the ground reality is quite in contrast to the high voltage campaign and sloganeering by the Hindutva party.

Reporting for SabrangIndia, this reporter covered the rural interiors and observed and listened to the people, especially women. He found that their hearts were beating in a different manner in rural Bengal, and the BJP deception was just what it was – organised deception.

Indeed, while not playing the prophet psephologist, SabrangIndia reported that the ground was slipping everyday from under the BJP’s feet, and Mamata Banerjee on a wheel chair was succeeding on the planks of her massive welfare and development programmes, especially in rural areas, and especially among women, the marginalized working class, and the minorities.

Indeed, across Bengal, in both rural and urban areas, the secular stream within Bengal’s intellectual, radical and progressive inheritance, retaliated very strongly against the BJP propaganda of hate politics – branding people from Bangladesh as infiltrators and outsiders. Almost all the celebrities – actors, writers, filmmakers, artists and academics rallied against the politics of hate. Videos and songs reasserting the radical, secular and aesthetic inheritance of Bengal was resurrected, reaching out to millions.

Surely, Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, was never considered an enemy nation in West Bengal, with its shared cultural, political and social history, and the deep bonds of nostalgia and longing which continues beyond the Partition. Surely, refugees were never treated as outsiders in Bengal, neither during the 1971 war of liberation in Bangladesh, nor thereafter. Instead, they were reintegrated and respected for their dogged stoicism, hard work and resilience in a new land, with its inherited history and shared borders and collective consciousness, especially by the communists in post-Independence India. The anti-Muslim propaganda among the post-1981 refugees, now legitimate citizens with proper papers, was therefore only marginally successful in a state where the secular ethos has been entrenched even during the pre-colonial times.

Truly, Prashant Kishore’s analytical prediction proved right in the final analysis. So did the ground reportage of SabrangIndia. Women were the key, especially rural women. Modi’s crass ‘Didi-o-Didi’ call not only boomeranged, but was also viewed with huge disgust and repulsion by the women in Bengal. Even the entire city of Kolkata voted overwhelmingly against the BJP – they could not win even a single seat in the mahanagar. The Left and Congress were decimated, even in traditional Congress strongholds like Malda. Khela Hobe was finally and fully victorious, despite bad and biased umpiring, and hate politics was roundly defeated – showing the secular way to the entire country.

Showing the way, that is what the farmers and their leaders asserted collectively at the packed Press Club of Kolkata before the campaign began in the state. They said that the freedom fighters and revolutionaries of Punjab and Bengal, among other regions, fought against the repression of the British; only they, therefore, can bring down the BJP. “Destroy its arrogance. Bring it to its knees. If Bengal defeats the BJP, the farmers’ struggle will get a big boost. And the entire country will find a way to win the battle in 2024. Bengal should show the way,” said the farmer leaders.

Predictably, the entire country rejoiced the victory of the secular forces in Bengal. When Mamata Banerjee visited Delhi for the first time after the victory, she was greeted overwhelmingly, including by the secular media. There arrived a sudden buzz that she, alone, with her street fighter’s instinct, guts and fearlessness, and her steadfast and straight fight against Modi, can defeat the formidable BJP machinery backed by the corporates, in 2024. That she, indeed, should lead the opposition alliance.

Journalists said that even in the bureaucracy and among the corporates there was a hush-hush whisper that Mamata will mark the nemesis of Modi. That a rattled, solitary and ageing Modi has lost all ground and credibility, and that people are really looking for a real, authentic, fighting and honest secular alternative. And Mamata fits the bill in a general scenario comprising the TINA factor – there is no alternative!

Meanwhile, Prashant Kishore, still working with Trinamool Congress, declared that he will leave his established and successful trade of electoral battles and strategic management and marketing of political parties during the polls. It was quite surprising given that he has had a reasonably impressive track record of success with successive political parties, from Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), Jagan Reddy’s YSRC in Andhra Pradesh, to Amrinder Singh’s Punjab, among other political parties. He was the key in masterminding the victory of Narendra Modi in 2014 in the parliamentary polls with his innovative poll gimmicks.

Come to think of it, he was truly a brilliant mercenary, hitting the jackpot with his team and sheer electoral acumen, getting the correct pulse on the ground, winning one poll after another. Ethics and ideology can be damned.

That is why it came as a surprise when he joined JD(U), in alliance with the BJP in Bihar, with Nitish Kumar way behind in terms of his number of MLAs when compared to the BJP’s, and thereby playing second fiddle, despite being the chief minister. This, when this same man marked another brazenly opportunist U-turn by going against the BJP in the earlier assembly polls, because he wanted to suddenly cultivate the secular image yet again— he was given the impression that he is prime ministerial material and can take on Modi. He even refused to join Modi on a dias of political leaders in the NDA alliance.

Despite claiming to be a so-called socialist, true to his shifty character, he had earlier betrayed Laloo Yadav’s RJD, by toppling the secular government in alliance. Nitish was junior partner in terms of numbers and yet Laloo gave him the CM’s chair. Surely, Laloo, despite the hounding, arrests and long terms in prison under the Modi regime, has not compromised ever with the Hindutva party. He, along with the communists and Congress, remain the only three formations which have refused to align with the BJP or NDA at any cost over the years.

Even in alliance with the BJP, the JD(U) seemed decimated with a rising Tejeshwi Yadav leading the opposition battle, and they really would not have won against the RJD’s Mahagatbandhan, if those disputed last few seats had gone to the RJD alliance. Clearly, there were unconfirmed reports and allegations that these last few seats were given away to BJP, often with very thin margins, due to some covert hanky panky. 

In these circumstances, Prashant Kishore joining the party of Nitish, and that too as vice-president, with Nitish giving him certain conspicuous powers, while showering public praise, reflected for the first time the political ambitions of this poll strategist. Sources said that Amit Shah recommended him to Nitish. In the course of this sudden shift, he lost his way; he criticized the CAA and Nitish dropped him. He was sacked.

Soon after the decisive victory against the BJP in Bengal, he openly criticised Amit Shah, saying that his electoral skills are overestimated, and that he has lost one election after another where he has called the shots. And then came his secret and high-profile meetings with the Gandhis: son, daughter and mother.

Apparently, he gave a powerful and effective presentation of how the party can be revived organisationally in the grassroots. And that he will do it if given extraordinary powers and if he is admitted in a top position in the hierarchy. Besides, he should have a decisive say in ticket distribution.

The project did not take off – insiders, including veterans, did not agree. A man without ideology cannot suddenly become a big leader in Congress, it was stated, though how many such big leaders in the Congress really stick to an ideology is a matter of dispute – considering the defections to the BJP all around, and the total failure of the old guard in countering the fascist forces, with Rahul Gandhi single-handedly taking on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Then began the saga of revenge. A miffed Prashant Kishore went to town saying that Rahul Gandhi does not know the ropes and Modi and the BJP are going to be formidable electorally for a long, long time, and Modi is here to stay and that he is not going to go away so easily. The Congress did not respond.

His next move was predictable. In the good books of Mamata Banerjee as a trustworthy master strategist, he made a grandiose plan of projecting her as the only real leadership alternative to the Congress and a possible alliance leader. That is, as a future prime minister leading a rainbow coalition. Besides, he convinced her to spread her footprints outside Bengal, something she had tried earlier too, but was not able to succeed.

Hence, from the airport in Dabolim to the remote end of Arambol in Goa, you can see a series of huge hoardings of Mamata Banerjee and ‘Goa Trinamool Congress’. Same is the story across the scenic landscape beyond Calangute, Vagator and Anjuna beaches on the other end. An influential former chief minister from the Congress in Goa was made the Trinamool vice president. Several other alliances with local parties, and defections, including from other parties, Congress and independents, were engineered; a buzz was created in the state, especially among the Christians, that the Trinamool is the now the sole alternative which can defeat the BJP. Mohua Moitra, very modern, very secular, and fluent in English, was posted in Goa as party-in charge.

Behind this new social engineering outside Bengal, one could see the mind of Prashant Kishore operating. He had sensed the total disgust with the incumbent government of the BJP in Goa, with shifting chief ministers, and currently a lame duck and ineffective chief minister with no mass base at the helm. He had also seen that AAP, despite its lofty promises, including freebies and free pilgrimages, was still on a weak wicket in the state – Christians did not trust its secular credentials. And most crucially it was transparent that the Congress was in tatters – despite winning the maximum number of seats in the last assembly polls (as in Manipur) they just did not have the skills or will to muster up a majority government. The BJP, as in Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh earlier, and later in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, engineered a stream of defections from the elected MLAs of the Congress.

So why should people vote for the Congress, when its ideologically opportunist MLAs could so easily defect to the BJP? That became a strategic propaganda tool in the hands of the Trinamool, which has put forth its secular agenda with a mix of old-style pluralism and soft secularism. For instance, given the fact that the Hindu electorate is still 60 per cent and above in Goa, despite the strong presence of the Christians, there is still doubt that a section of them will not vote for the BJP. So, in the last rally in the state, Mamata Banerjee was reciting ‘Chandi Path’ and other Hindu mantras and scriptures, which she is very good at, even while castigating the BJP for its communal politics, and asserting that her party makes no distinctions between various religions and communities, and is truly secular.

Tripura became a battle ground in recent times because the Trinamool has a real chance to score big here in the long run. With a majority Bengali population, closely aligned to the cultural, social and political ethos and inheritance of Bengal, with a shared history and language, and with a totally discredited BJP regime led by an ineffective and immature chief minister, which has failed on all its lofty promises, the Trinamool entered Tripura in a big way after its victory in Bengal which had strong repercussions in Tripura. While Manik Sarkar is still hugely respected, the CPM seemed weak, and the people seem to be sick and tired of the BJP.

The Tripura government reacted in panic. It blocked the entire team of Prashant Kishore in a hotel. It indulged in violence against visiting Trinamool leaders from Bengal. It filed false cases against a Trinamool woman youth leader from Bengal – a rising star. It even attacked the CPM offices in desperation.

Not only that, communal polarisation was done before the local elections. Muslim localities and mosques were allegedly vandalised. The VHP etc seem to be given a tacit clearance to go ahead and do what they like. Local journalists were terrorised or subverted or cajoled with advertising revenue, as the Editors Guild of India report has clearly. Several cases against journalists and social media users were filed who were writing about the violence in Tripura. And journalists from Delhi and elsewhere were hounded, even detained and arrested, for no rhyme or reason, on preposterous charges.

Indeed, as the Editors Guild fact-finding report said, there are two predominant fears of the BJP regime in Agartala. The media from Delhi and elsewhere, reaching the state to report objectively and with no partisan intent; and the rise of the Trinamool Congress in the state. That is why this desperate resort to communal polarisation and violence against the Muslims, using the Durga Puja violence in Bangladesh as a plank.

The Tripura government clearly forgot that Bengal did not react in the same manner, and that the Bangladesh government retaliated with an iron hand against assorted Islamic fundamentalists, while assuring the Hindu community of total protection and safety – and this secular response was led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, her cabinet, and her entire party on the ground. Indeed, the ruling party of Awami League declared that they will take on the fundamentalists on the streets of Dhaka and other cities and towns.

However, coming back to Prashant Kishore and his revenge politics, after much painstaking and time-consuming efforts, he was able to break the opposition Congress in Meghalaya. At least 12 of its MLAs and its legislative leader defected to the Trinamool. This was a war declared against the Congress.  The Congress top leadership, still, chose silence, barring sundry leaders.

In her first visit to Delhi after her victory, Mamata Banerjee had made a high-profile courtesy call to the residence of Sonia Gandhi, with whom she apparently shares an old bonding, based on her long stint with the Congress as a fiery youth leader. The next time, she refused to meet her, even while she met other leaders of political parties.

During her visit to Mumbai, she met Sharad Pawar and Aditya Thackeray. And she made a controversial statement: that the UPA does not exist, implying that the Congress does not deserve the leadership or an important role in a future opposition alliance. Not only that, she passed a snide remark against Rahul Gandhi. The Congress, still, refused to react.

This is when Sharad Pawar stepped in. The wily old veteran politician, who has stitched up a secular and reasonably steadfast alliance against all odds with the Shiv Sena against the BJP in Maharashtra, stated openly that there can be no opposition alliance without the Congress. Sanjay Raut, Udhav Thackeray’s right-hand man, and the editor of Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece ‘Saamna’, came to Delhi to meet Rahul Gandhi. He said Rahul and Priyanka are trying their best to revive the Congress at the grassroots and need all the support. He also said that Mamata Banerjee should rethink her position vis-à-vis the Congress, and that opposition unity is a must to defeat the BJP.

Meanwhile, in the south, the DMK, in alliance with the Congress in Chennai in a DMK-led majority government, categorically declared that there cannot be any alliance of the opposition without the Congress. The signals were sharp and clear for both Prashant Kishore and Mamata Banerjee — that opposition disunity for personal ambitions will only help Modi and the BJP.

Since then, a kind of silence has fallen like a shadow over the revenge politics of Prashant Kishore. Mahua Moitra has announced that they are open to welcoming Congress in their alliance in Goa. A superbly grounded, brilliant politician and mass leader, with a sharp sense of reality, Mamata Banerjee has since then stopped using the same language against the Congress. Besides, she might have been informed of the buzz in Delhi from her close confidants in the media and in her party stationed there.

Unlike her first visit after her victory, when there was a huge buzz of deep appreciation and affirmation in Delhi circles, including in circles within the bureaucracy and in the media, that she is a possible PM contender and therefore should be backed, this time there was angst and anger. Why this sudden arrogance, instead of flexibility and consensus? Why this unbridled ambition after such a huge outpouring of goodwill? Why this immature move against the Congress, which still has a solid vote base in India, when the fight against Hindutva and Modi is so crucial and the future is still uncertain?

The possibility of Pawar having instilled good sense in Didi is a sign of hope. The possibility that the happenings in Goa or Meghalaya will not destroy the larger opposition unity in Delhi is real. The possibility that the wind is shifting decisively and Modi is becoming weaker by the day is also real.

All the signs are out there. Modi and Yogi seem to be at loggerheads in UP, they seem unsure and uncertain, and they are clearly on a sticky wicket with the farmers in Western UP and Punjab pitched against them, and no communal polarisation on the ground, among other factors. The economy is in severe distress, and almost millions of people or more are jobless, with the poverty line increasing by over 75 million, and a huge chunk of the middle class becoming poor or getting into the lower income groups.

Even in these dire circumstances, with a lame duck puppet of a finance minister without independent vision or economic strategy, unlike for instance Joe Biden, Modi is refusing to pump in any investment in the economy, neither in the public sector, nor in job creation, even while the vast unorganised sector is in acute suffering, bordering on semi-starvation and trapped in mass unemployment.

The promise of full and double vaccination by December, 2021 has failed, despite reasonably good success in the first and second dose vaccination across the nation by a better and efficient Union health minister. Demonitisation and GST have been a total failure, while the small-scale industry has all but crashed.

Besides, India’s foreign policy has gone for a total toss, even while most of the neighbourhood has turned hostile or distant, or aligned economically and strategically with China. China has been so aggressive in usurping Indian territory that it is only matched by Modi’s passive response to this aggression – so, pray, whatever happened to the red eyes and the 56-inch chest when it comes to China?

With the Democrats wary of Modi who backed Trump, he is seen as a right-wing, sectarian, undemocratic PM within the White House establishment and in the American media. And with the Western nations not really in awe of him, Modi seems to have no friends in the advanced bloc, or even in the Middle-east, as in Saudi Arabia. All the millions spent on all the numerous foreign trips have really come to naught, when it comes to a successful foreign policy with Modi at the helm.

And with his best Right-wing supremacist buddies in a bad shape – it is all bad news internationally for Modi – Bolsonoro in Brazil, mired in corruption charges, is on his last leg; Benjamin Netanyahu has been defeated and dumped; Boris Johnson is struggling to stay afloat amidst serious backlash from his own party; and Donald Trump has lost it all – despite denying Covid and opposing vaccination, and now taking a booster shot! And dictators Vladimir Putin and Xi Jin Ping care two hoots for the current regime in Delhi.

Besides, veteran journalists point out that all is not seemingly well with the big guns in big business who have been backing Modi and reaping huge benefits in return. There are reports that things are not quite hunky dory for the BJP when it comes the powerful tycoons within the corporate sector.

Within this big perspective, the vast arena of empty chairs in a Punjab rally to be addressed by the PM, and the drama of security breach etc, are clear indicators of a pessimistic and sad finale of a Hindutva icon who appears to be on his last phase. Even Satyapal Malik, holding a constitutional position as the governor of Meghalaya, quoting Amit Shah on Modi’s mental frame, is a kind of bitter reality check, and tells more than it hides. Significantly, there has been no official denial on this from either the PMO, or home ministry or the BJP.

In these circumstances, with his staunchly fanatic and fundamentalist support base restricted to 31 per cent and above, Modi is just trying to retain this last remaining bastion at all cost, even while all is quiet in the BJP and RSS inside circles. There are unconfirmed speculations that the RSS might not consider him as a leader in 2024.

In these circumstances, the Prashant Kishore doctrine bestowing political and electoral immortality to Modi might not be so prophetically correct. In these circumstances, Mamata Banerjee, as much as the Congress and the Opposition, will have to play its cards more carefully, tactfully and with much nuance and discretion. Surely, it is qualities like maturity, wisdom, flexibility, consensus and strategic insight to defeat the enemy – that are crucial. Not blind ambition.

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The post With her poll strategist this time, Didi might be missing the wood from the trees! appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The unilateral extension of jurisdiction of the Border Security Force (BSF) in the border areas of states like West Bengal and Punjab, and without any consultation with the state governments, has yet again created a conflict scenario between the Centre and the states, with both governments opposing it vehemently. In West Bengal there have been widespread protests, including in Kolkata, and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has openly raised the question in public spaces and in a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi recently. So much so, in a visit to the border area of Dinajpur, Banerjee called up the police to take strong action against any arbitrary action by the central para-military forces, even as locals, including farmers whose land are located in buffer zones in all the border areas, including in North Bengal, cite cases of arbitrary behaviour of the BSF.

Indeed, the killing of people, including Bangladeshis, allegedly branded as infiltrators or cow smugglers in the border areas have led to protests in Kolkata and the rest of Bengal. Filmmakers, actors, Left and civil society groups, held meetings at College Street and press meets at the Press Club of Calcutta, against the brutality.

Human rights activists argue that even while Bangladesh is a friendly country, with absolutely no history of animosity, and while people across the border share bonhomie and brotherhood besides a shared cultural and social history, then, what is the need to have such huge barbed wire borders with para military forces getting powers across 50 km in federal territory? They point out that undoubtedly there is a communal angle behind his enforced polarisation, even while there is huge resentment in Bangladesh against the continuous diatribe against infiltrators by BJP politicians, including the use of language such as ‘termites’ earlier by the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, condemning legitimate citizens of India, even while the communal and anti-Constitutional Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was vehemently opposed in Assam and the whole of Northeast, and the rest of India.

On December, 2021, civil society organisations came together to hold protests across the districts in Bengal and in Kolkata, and submitted deputations at regional centres of the BSF to protest the unilateral decision of the union home ministry to increase the jurisdiction of the paramilitary force. On the occasion of the 57^th Raising Day of the BSF, Paschim Banga Khet Majoor Samity (PBKMS) and other organisations submitted deputations under the banner ‘Amra Simantabasi’ (We, the border people) at their regional centres in districts across West Bengal. In Kolkata, a protest march from Minto Park culminated at the paramilitary force’s Eastern Command headquarters with the submission of a petition to the commanding officer.

The union ministry on October 11, 2021 brought out a notification proclaiming an amendment of a 2014 notification to extend the jurisdiction of the BSF to 50 km inside Indian territory in the international border in Punjab, West Bengal and Assam. The paramilitary force will now be able to conduct search, seizure and arrest in an area of up to 50 km inside Indian territory which will be similar to the imposition of martial law on a large number of residents, according to human rights activists.

“We condemn the unilateral decision of the central government to infringe upon the subject of law and order which is an exclusive domain of the state government. The political leadership also did not feel the need to initiate a dialogue with the opposition as well as the civil society to discuss the need for bringing out the notification,” said the organisations.

People in the border areas have routinely complained about the alleged “high-handedness” of the BSF personnel time and again and civil society groups have brought out reported incidents of violation of human rights ranging from illegal detention to torture and violation of dignity of women. Many such cases have been widely covered in the media Bengal.   

The human rights groups are therefore demanding that the paramilitary force should remain at the international border and not disrupt the normal lives of the people. The continuous presence of armed personnel in villages should be avoided. All complaints on violation of human rights by the paramilitary force should be impartially probed. As ordered by the Supreme Court of India in the Anuradha Bhasin case, Section 144 should cease to be continuously in force in the border areas. The notification of the union home ministry on the new jurisdiction of the paramilitary force should be revoked immediately. Often, the land and ponds of the farming community fall on the other side of the barbed wires. They should be allowed access to them from 6am to 6 pm. The paramilitary force should adhere to its constitutional limits and uphold the fundamental rights of the population residing in the border areas, especially the provisions of Article 14 (right to equality), Article 19 (freedom of movement in Indian territory) and Article 21 (right to life).

The organisations which stand in solidarity with these demands include Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Manch (Masum), Members of Right to Food Network, West Bengal, Shramajivee Mahila Samity, among others.

In an incident which created outrage in Bengal, three persons were killed in alleged firing by the BSF in December at a village along the India-Bangladesh frontier in Cooch Behar district. The dead were reportedly accused as cattle rustlers. The firing took place at Satbhandari village near the West Chamta border outpost in the early hours between 3 A.M and 4 A.M, according to police. The village on the border is near Sitai police station in Cooch Behar.

Sumit Kumar, the district police chief, said BSF personnel posted at the West Chamta border outpost noticed movements along the international border. The personnel challenged the men but were allegedly confronted by around 50 cattle smugglers, according to Kumar’s version, as reported to him by BSF officers. He said they attacked the BSF personnel with bricks and machetes, prompting the BSF to open fire. BSF sources said the force had no option but to fire, according to reports.

“Two bodies were found lying on the Bangladesh side of the border fence. They seemed to have been hit by bullets. They are reportedly Bangladeshi nationals. Their identities are yet to be established,” Kumar said. Another body was found in a village on the Indian side of the border. “Based on the preliminary investigation, we can say that all three have died in the course of the same incident,” the Cooch Behar police chief said.

The Indian who has died has been identified as Prakash Barman, 35, a resident of Chamta village. Chamta is around 1km from the firing spot. He was hit by a bullet in the head. Prakash’s family and neighbours said that he was a ‘dangowal’, a cowherd, and was not involved in cattle rustling.

“Some people had come to his house last night and he had gone out with them. Today morning, his family members came to know that his body had been found. We fail to understand why the BSF shot him in the head? Also, if he had gone to the border, why was his body found in Chamta, which is 1km from the fence?” asked a neighbour. Prakash is survived by his parents and wife.

Jagadish Barma Basunia, the Trinamul MLA of Sitai, has openly voiced his dissent. “The victim was a daily-wage earner and he used to also work as a cowherd at times… We want a complete investigation to know how he died. There have been earlier instances of BSF personnel entering villages that are not on the border and resorting to similar atrocities. The district police should find out the truth,” he said. 

Trinamool Congress MLA from Dinhata, Udayan Guha, said, “The Centre should control the BSF, otherwise, terrible things will happen any time. I have been a witness to BSF atrocities since I was young. They continue to torture people who stay in the border area. The BSF cannot kill anyone under any circumstances. This is why we had voiced our opposition to enhancing the jurisdiction of the BSF.” Guha added, “The BSF also covers the river bank. It is their duty to stop smuggling. They patrol the area 24×7. How can someone cut the fence without their help? If our first line of defence is weak, how will the country be protected?”

He made the remarks even as Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, state Chief Secretary Harikrishna Dwivedi and Bengal Home Secretary Bhagwati Prasad Gopalika had then met to discuss border-related issues. “Why did Prakash Barman die after being shot in the head? Smuggling at the border is not possible without the help of the BSF. I am the MLA of the border area. I know the problems of the people there,” the MLA told reporters at a press conference.

“I met Prime Minister Narendra Modi today over a number of state-related issues. We also spoke on the BSF’s jurisdiction extension issue and demanded that this decision be withdrawn,” Mamata Banerjee was quoted by a news agency after her meeting with Modi recently in Delhi.

Indeed, the West Bengal Assembly has passed a resolution against the Centre’s decision to extend BSF’s jurisdiction, amid opposition by BJP legislators. With outrage all over the state, a weak, divided and depleted BJP finds itself yet again on a sticky wicket. West Bengal and Punjab have passed similar resolutions on the issue.

The resolution in Bengal stated that the new BSF jurisdiction was against the country’s federal structure, as law and order is a state subject. The notification exceeded the provision of the BSF Act and would lead to coordination issues between the state police and the BSF.

“We demand that this decision be withdrawn immediately as enhancing the area of jurisdiction of the BSF is a direct attack on the country’s federal structure… We have nothing against the BSF as a force, there are many good officers, but at the same time, there are others who torture people residing near the border. This is an attempt by the Centre to control a portion of the state,” senior minister Partha Chatterjee said. Chatterjee also pointed out that if the BSF is not able to stop infiltration and illegal activities within the 15 km range, as earlier, how is it possible that it will “succeed in doing it within 50 kilometres.” He further said on the floor of the House, “We have seen the kind of atrocities that BSF perpetrates on people. A child who has witnessed his mother being touched inappropriately under the garb of frisking, when she returns from the field, can never be patriotic, no matter how many times you chant ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ in front of him. These incidents give birth to anti-social elements.”

In October this year, Masum had written to the NHRC chairman about “an incident of abduction and killing of a poor, marginalised, innocent villager from Char Rajapur Paschim Colony village under Raninagar police station area in Murshidabad district of West Bengal. The victim was doing some agrarian work in his own field located in a ‘char’ (alluvial plain on a river) across the border fencing, about 1 km from the Indo-Bangladesh border inside Indian territory when he was taken by the Border Guard of Bangladesh (BGB). The next day his dead body was seen floating in the river with handcuffs on his hand”.

 The agricultural land in which he was working is located inside Indian territory but outside the fencing, the letter said. According to locals, there were other villagers working in the fields nearby when the BGB personnel came into Indian territory and abducted the victim, but they managed to escape. The incident raises questions on the safety and security of Indian citizens along the border.  

In another petition to the NHRC, the human rights organisation working for decades in the border areas, has pointed another case of “brutal torture by the BSF personnel attached with Khagribari BSF Border Outpost, Battalion no. 169, on an innocent marginalised Scheduled Caste person from Satgram Manabari village of Mathabhanga-I Block and Mathabhanga police station area of Cooch Behar district in West Bengal”. Sarada Barman, the victim, was severely injured and taken to the Mathabhanga Sub-Divisional Hospital. A complaint was lodged regarding the incident on October 10, 2021.

 According to Masum, Sarada Barman, a mason, sustains a family of 7 with his meagre income. His house is located near the Khagribari BSF camp. On October 24, 2021, at around 7:30 pm, he, along with his wife and younger son were sitting in their courtyard. A few BSF personnel posted near the fencing put torch lights on them. Barman, from his courtyard, asked them why they were doing so? A BSF constable, Biswajit Prakash, came to Barman’s courtyard in a motorcycle and started beating him with his baton. Barman was brutally beaten up on his forehead, ears, back, waist and fingers and suffered critical injuries. The perpetrator then pushed Barman in a pond beside his courtyard. As Barman screamed in pain, few neighbours came and helped him. Nalini Ranjan Roy, a neighbour, informed that it is a regular practice of the BSF to put torchlight on the women of the village, whenever they are seen after dark, said Masum.

Kirity Roy, Secretary, Masum, has demanded that the BSF should be posted in actual borders and not inside villages, the whole incident must be investigated by a neutral agency appointed by the commission, the guilty personnel involved must be booked and prosecuted and security and safety of the victim must be protected. Similar incidents of brutality has been reported in the local areas over the years and in recent times, including atrocities on women.

In a meeting in Kolkata, several eminent people came out against the new BSF jurisdiction. Justice Samaresh Banerjee, former judge of the Calcutta High Court, spoke about the legal aspect on the border issues. He described Article 21 of the Indian Constitution and stated that any other authority of India do not have any right to kill anyone in the name of national security. He proposed that a detailed list of the victims of torture should be drafted. 

Mental health worker, Mohit Ranadip, highlighted the mental breakdown of the victims of sexual, emotional and physical torture. He constantly communicates with people in the villages in the border areas, and finds that it seems like an eternal saga of siege. Sujato Bhadra from APDR stated that it is the responsibility of the government to ensure the protection of life and liberty of each and every citizen. The government should take the initiative to organize training on human rights for police, BSF, military force personnel. He suggested forming a monitoring committee to deal with the unlawful activities of the security force.

Kartik Pal from CPI(ML) Liberation spoke about the continuous implementation of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code for an extended period of time in the border areas, disturbing the daily life of the villagers. Academic Bolan Gangopadhyay said that as a human rights activist she has visited different erstwhile enclaves. She wrote the story of misery of the residents in leading newspapers. She suggested creating pressure on the state government to shed light on the issue of killings. 

In recent five years, according to Masum, there have a total of 240 cases of BSF torture, 60 cases of extra-judicial execution by BSF and 8 cases of disappearance among which in 33 cases in which the NHRC has recommended compensation to the victims or their next of kin. If the BSF jurisdiction is increased, arbitrary detention, illegal arrest etc, will become more frequent.

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‘Sardar Udham’: a new film by Shoojit Sircar, a sensitive, brilliant and offbeat filmmaker, has been released on October 16, 2021. A totally unconventional, mysterious and fascinating subject, the character of Udham Singh has yet to be fully understood and deciphered so as to meaningfully portray and depict him in full glory with its inner life, contradictions, incredible journeys and infinite passion. Hence, the film is a brave move by a group of committed and progressive group of creative people with their roots in the National School of Drama in Delhi and the independent and progressive theatre movement of the past.

The film thereby enters a fantastic terrain of a dark and colourful life dedicated to the freedom of his country from the yoke of British colonialism – the protracted struggles, the ideals and magic of an irrepressible revolutionary who kept digging against all odds for two decades, and waited and strategized, to achieve his singular aim: revenge and justice for a massacre which shocked the entire nation in the early years of the freedom movement.

Sher Singh, Udham Singh, Frank Brazil, Ude Singh, Mohammad Singh Azad: Udham Singh lived a kaleidoscopic life camouflaged with multiple names and identities, imagined homelands and unknown geographies, celebrated rainbows and tragic tales. All his adult life he was chasing the relentless dream of freedom from British slavery and colonialism, with his steadfast belief in stoic revolutionary ideals, a committed secular and pluralist consciousness, with a vast network of committed and permanent comrades, even if many of them were ephemeral or just passing by. He travelled the world as a revolutionary with the Ghadar party, suffered and struggled, moved from abject and homeless poverty as a small boy to a sudden life of flamboyance, assumed new identities and changed names, camouflaged his face and character, smuggled revolutionaries across the American-Mexican and other borders, distributed arms and ammunition in India, spread propaganda in remote villages with leaflets and insurgent politics, and wowed to end the British rule in India.  

However, amidst a colourful, secretive and hard life, and long journeys to distant countries, engaged with multiple tasks for the revolution, for 21 years he was chasing only one singular dream, single-mindedly and with a stoic passion unimaginable to an ordinary human being: to avenge the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar on April 13, 1919. And to kill the ruthless, racist and remorseless man who ordered and presided over the massacre – Lieutenant Governor Michael ‘O Dwyer, the dictator and ruler of British Punjab.

On April 13, 1919, a huge and peaceful protest meeting was being held at Jallianwala Bagh. There were earlier announcements that all protests and meetings are banned. However, the organisers were sure that their peaceful protest, as a part of the non-violent freedom struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi, will face no difficulty from the administration. No one had even remotely imagined what followed next and shook India and changed the course of its history.

Brigadier General Reginald ‘Rex’ Dyer was the man chosen by Michael O’Dwyer to execute his unprecedented orders. Dyer blocked the narrow exit as the peaceful protesters, unaware of what was to arrive, prepared for the meeting. There was also many ordinary folks who were simply spending their time, resting, eating, meeting, in the Bagh like most days. The firing was ordered almost immediately.

For the next few minutes, there was a hail of bullets and people fell, dead and injured, hit by the bullets. Children too were shot. Bodies piled up, the dead, the dying and the alive and wounded trapped in the catastrophe. The people groaned, screamed and cried but no one even got a drop of water to drink. All through the night those who were still breathing lived with the dead, slowly dying. No medical or other relief was allowed. No one was allowed to move out or move in. The injured waited in pain to die. This was a genocide which India will never forget – nor will the British.

Anita Anand has written a meticulously researched book on the life and times of Udham Singh, perhaps the only such book written on the revolutionary tracing his entire life from birth to death, from a small village in British Punjab to Amritsar, Basra, Baghdad, the Ugandan Railway Company, London, Mexico, America, Europe, and finally back to London for the final act of revenge: ‘The  Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (Simon and Schuster, 2019, pages: 373).  Indeed, Anita Anand’s own grandfather was at the Jallianwala Bagh moments before the killings started.

Indeed, in an era whereby history is being subverted, distorted and degraded by the forces of Hindutva and the ruling dispensation in Delhi who did not participate in the freedom movement and backed Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, this book should be a prescribed text for students in colleges and university campuses across the country. The resurrection of Udham Singh is the resurrection of the very idea of revolution, and the infinite quest for freedom and justice.

Writes Anita Anand: ‘‘It happened so fast it did not feel real. Dyer gave the order. His second in command, a man named Captain Crampton, repeated it, shouting out for all to hear. Whistles rang out from the line of uniformed men. They took aim, squeezed their triggers and fired… Sergeant Andrews, who was standing right at the side of Dyer, described the scene as if it formed before him in slow motion:

The whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground, a flutter of white garments… I saw no sign for a rush towards the troops… After a bit, I noticed that Captain Briggs was drawing up his face as if in pain and was plucking at the General’s elbow… Dyer seemed quite calm and rational. Personally, I wasn’t afraid. I saw nothing to be afraid about. I’d no fear that the crowd would come at us.’’

Anita Anand writes, “Men and children fell clutching their faces and chests, tearing flesh and ripped organs, creating a red mist over the place where they lay. The sight of children having their limps shattered by bullets and their eyes shot out before him was too much for Amritsar’s superintendent of police, John Rehill, who had been asked to show Dyer’s men the shortest route to the garden. After a few moments witnessing the scene he could stand it no more and walked out of the Bagh as the soldiers continued to swivel and fire. He would be so traumatized by what he had seen that he would never be able to speak of it. He would become a rampant alcoholic in the years that followed.’’

‘‘No discrimination was made between targets. The son of the local doctor, a 13-year-old boy named Madan Mouhau, used to visit the garden every day to play with his friends. A bullet, aimed at his head, found its mark and shattered his skull.’’

The children who were later identified included: Sohan Lal, 9, Gian Chand, 15, Mohammed Shariff, 12, Abdulla Baksh, 15, Nand Lala, 12, Mohan Lal, 12, Harnam Singh, 15, Guru Brahman, 15, Nikmu Mal Girdhari, 14, Sunder Singh, 15, Sohan Singh, 15, Tara Singh, 15, Labhu Ram, 14, and Murli Mal, 12. There were at least 20,000 people at the Jallianwala Bagh that day, including many who were just hanging out, eating and resting, while scores of vendors sold Amritsari street food.

No one knows if Udham Singh was at the spot on that tragic day or not. No one really knows his whereabouts on that day. Like many aspects of his mysterious life, a huge expanse lies in twilight zones, hidden in strange shadows. Was he among the injured that day and did he survive the massacre – the answer remains shrouded in mystery.

Even Anita Anand, who painstakingly separates myth from the reality in this voluminous book, looking for both the shadows and the clarity of light, says that according to legend, Udham Singh was among the injured that day. He picked up a handful of blood-soaked earth and he vowed to avenge the massacre.

Indeed, more than 20 years later, he achieved his dream, as he waited, strategized, schemed, and worked for the liberation of his country. He killed Michael O’Dwyer, 70, even then an influential proponent of the colonial and racist apparatus, right on the dias, on March 13, 1940, in a packed meeting organized by the East India Association in London. Udham Singh had taken his revenge.

The British went into a tizzy. A big section of the ruling dispensation and its followers in the British society had felt no remorse or guilt at the massacre. No one was punished. It was therefore a shock coming after two decades.

British interrogators were also completely fooled by Udham Singh. He gave his name as Mohammad Singh Azad, a significant mix of multiple religious identities signifying both secularism and the spirit of revolutionary freedom. He gave the British multiple versions including one story that he had no intention to kill the man, it was merely an accident. The British just could not find out the micro details of his shadowy past, or his links with well-known revolutionaries, including inside the Ghadar party. He kept them going round and round with multiple, cooked up stories.

The assassination of Michael O’Dwyer created mass ripples across the British empire including in the freedom movement in India. The revolutionaries in India, especially, were thrilled and filled with a new fire of struggle. Even the non-violent movement led by Gandhi received a fillip. Udham Singh, suddenly, became a household name all over India, much like another legend from Punjab, Bhagat Singh.

Significantly, Udham Singh reportedly met or saw Bhagat Singh at the Mianwali Jail in Lahore. The man who eluded the police in several countries despite major intelligence tip-offs about his movement and underground activities across the globe, was finally caught by the police in Amritsar earlier, even while he dressed and posed as a well-off gentleman dressed in western clothes. The cops had no clue about his identity even then. They followed him across the lanes and grabbed him from behind. He was reportedly tortured and asked to confess.

Apparently, even then, he led the cops through multiple narratives, neither disclosing his real identity or his connections with the revolutionary underground movement. The cops just could not figure out who he really was or his real connections with revolutionaries in England, Europe, Mexico and America, or his other adventures. Finally, chasing a clue, they found a suitcase full of arms and ammunition.

Udham Singh landed in jail. Even in the jail he started his revolutionary campaign among the prisoners. He was beaten up brutally and sent into solitary confinement. However, he would return and continue to do what he wanted to do: anti-British propaganda and campaign to overthrow the British.

He was thereby sent to Mianwali Jail in Lahore where he reportedly met a man much younger to him, an intellectual, thinker, atheist and Marxist, who was soon after hanged: Bhagat Singh.

Bhagat Singh was reading Lenin moments before he was hanged, according to legend. Udham Singh was an illiterate who perhaps had never read Lenin or Marx, though he was actively engaged with the communists and Ghadar party in America and elsewhere. The hanging of young Bhagat Singh shook Udham Singh deep inside. Henceforth, the much older revolutionary would call the young martyr his one, only and ultimate Guru.

Udham Singh was born in a very poor family. His ailing mother died very young. His name was Sher Singh as a child. His brother was Sadhu Singh. His father, a poor worker, lived in abject poverty. Looking for work, he trekked with his little sons to Amritsar. Tired, hungry and weary, he died on the way.

Some wandering priests found the two little boys. They were taken to a distant relative. The relative took care of them despite his own economically weak condition. He then found a benevolent Sikh who ran an orphanage, and the big-hearted man happily adopted the two orphan children.

From an orphan, an unemployed young carpenter trying to work in the army and the Ugandan Railway Company in the Middle-East in the lowliest of ranks,  to a globe-trotter, smuggling arms, revolutionaries and anti-British literature, Udham Singh travelled across Europe and America with his connections with the international Ghadar movement. He did several jobs in America, lived both overground and underground, apparently married a woman with whom he travelled to multiple places changing jobs, while continuing with his revolutionary work. She would really never know that this man was destined for an obsessive goal which had driven him with one-dimensional zeal for so many years: Revenge. And justice for Jallianwala Bagh.

Udham Singh left his wife and comrades to come back to London to fulfill his mission. He made the supreme sacrifice in revenge of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He was quickly hanged on July 31, 1940, at Bradbury in England.

He was quickly hanged because the British did not want a huge public trial whereby the gruesome narratives of the massacre would yet again be resurrected with meticulous details in the public domain. Nor did they want Udham Singh, alias, Mohammad Singh Azad, to spread his anti-British tirade in the trial, because by then he had already become an icon, a role model and a hero for the revolutionaries and freedom fighters in India and abroad. Hence, they hanged him without even a proper trial.

Earlier, on June 5, 1940, the jury gave unanimous verdict. Udham Singh was found guilty of murder.

According to Anita Anand, when asked by the judge if had anything to say, Udham Singh came out with a sheaf of papers, his last testimony. Predictably, the media did not report it.

He had written in those bundle of papers:

I am not afraid to die. I am proud to die. I want to help my native land, and I hope when I have gone that in my place will come others of my countrymen to drive the dirty dogs – when I am free of the country. I am standing before an English jury in an English court. You people go to India and when you come back you are given prizes and put into the House of Commons, when we come to England, we are put to death. In any case I do not care anything about it, but when you dirty dogs come to India –the intellectuals they call themselves, the rulers – they are of bastard blood caste, and they order machine guns to fire on the Indian students without hesitation. I have nothing against the public at all. I have more English friends in England than I have in India. I have nothing against the public. I have great sympathy with the workers of England, but I am against the dirty British government. Your people are suffering the same as I am suffering through those dirty dogs and mad beasts – killing, mutilating and destroying. We know what is going on in India… hundreds of thousands of people being killed by your dirty dogs….

‘‘The judge ordered prison officers to drag him from the dock. As he was pulled away, Udham was heard to scream: ‘You people are dirty. You don’t want to hear from us what you are doing in India, Beasts. Beasts. Beasts. England, England, down with imperialism, down with the dirty dogs…’ His distant voice was heard shouting: Inquilab! Inquilab! Inquilab! Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!…’’

Udham Singh’s remains are buried in Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar. His statue holding a fistful of blood-soaked earth has been erected outside the site of the massacre. His relentless quest for justice and revenge thereby remains etched across time and space in the history of resistance, struggle and liberation. He was truly one of the greatest and bravest of revolutionaries and martyrs in the history of all revolutions. Contemporary India needs not only the resurrection of his memory and life and times as a tribute to his greatness, it needs him as an eternal icon of inspiration and idealism.

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Will it be a mild variant as in the first wave, or will it be a killer virus as in the third wave? From Alpha to Delta to the next one, what is it going to be like in its multiple mutations? Or, truly, and magically, and happily, has it finally disappeared from the scene in overcrowded India? If it is so, is it back to normal as in the pre-pandemic days?

And that is the dilemma, and there seems no clarity. In other countries, especially in Europe or the Scandinavian countries, governments have formally announced the end of lockdowns and how and why life can be resumed normally. In France you need vaccination proof to enter restaurants. In Norway, people celebrated all night in the pubs and streets recently after the lockdown was finally lifted and Norway was declared safe and sound by the government. Ditto with Sweden etc. Many parts of America, which are fully vaccinated, like Boston, have allowed public spaces to reopen with Covid protocol.

However, in India, the confusion hangs, like much of the other things which are forever in limbo. There are no clear instructions or clarifications offered by the government – the states seem to be simply following this tacit cue from the Centre, with absolutely no clarity. Are we still living in the pandemic times of isolation, with fear and uncertainty in the air, or, is it all hunky dory now, back to business?

The metros in Delhi are packed, more so in peak times. Physical distancing is impossible though most passengers are wearing masks. The shopping malls are throbbing in all the metros with thousands of footfalls. The Press Club of India is regaining its old reputation as a watering hole and a shared space of camaraderie and exchange of ideas – even as it hosts press conferences. Local markets are bustling with people. There are routine and regular traffic jams in Delhi and Kolkata, and other cities. Domestic flights are apparently full – even as fares have been hiked during this festive month.

As in recent times in the hills of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, when thousands of tourists from Delhi etc, following no Covid protocol, thronged the tourist centers such as Shimla and Mussorie, thereby apparently creating fears of another wave among the local hill-people, the tourist flow might yet again boom. Will the boom bring another wave across the different tourist destinations? There is indeed a huge section of rich people who just don’t care – for them the pandemic is just a minor obstacle to the insatiable hedonism of their daily life of excess and consumerism. So, it was normal for them to take selfies with no masks, and walk around the markets with no physical distancing. Many of them actually were collectively jumping into a water body near Mussorie.

In the pre-election phase in 2019, India was stalked by unemployment which was stated to be the highest in 45 years. Efforts were made then by the central government to hide and fudge the data. With over approximately 140 million people jobless in India in the post-pandemic scenario, including in the corporate sector, and thousands of unemployed migrant workers refusing to return to the cities which are yet to offer full-fledged employment, some sections of the working class are back to work, including daily wage workers. According to a Pew Research Centre study, millions among the middle class have been pushed into low-income groups.

The number of the poor in the post-pandemic era has increased by 75 million in India, according to the Pew study – which means a huge crisis among a huge population trapped below the poverty line. The poor constitute now about 130 million of the population, and the number has increased massively during the pandemic. Almost half of the women workers in the unorganized sector seem to have disappeared, even in cities like Delhi; they are now being called the ‘Missing Women’. Almost 47 per cent of women in the organized sectors have lost their jobs permanently.

This is an unprecedented crisis of unprecedented magnitude. It seems there is mass malnourishment, hidden hunger and invisible suffering around the remote rural and small-town interiors and in urban ghettos, especially in the Hindi heartland. It needs strong and emergency measures on a war-footing.

However, only some states seem to have moved in with great efficiency and effective relief measures to combat this social and economic crisis, especially among the poor, such as West Bengal and Kerala. In UP and Bihar, the condition remains as abysmal as ever.

Except for PR exercises and image management, there seems no effort from the Prime Minister and his government to tackle this massive national crisis. Indeed, the Prime Minister seems more concerned about this grandiose multi-million Central Vista project, then this mass economic and social crisis stalking the vast Indian landscape.

There are reports of malnourishment and hunger among the poor, especially women and girl children. There are fears of child marriage increasing among girls and a vicious spiral in child labour and human trafficking due to abject poverty and economic deprivations. The working class and daily wagers, including the likes of street vendors and small shopkeepers, have no option. They have to come out and work, and look for job opportunities, and earn something for their daily survival after such a prolonged phase of unemployment and scarcity. “If Covid does not kill us, hunger will,” is a common refrain among the unorganised working class.

In this largely bleak scenario, in Kolkata, and West Bengal, people seem excited about the Durga Puja this time though the thrill and the chill is missing in the air. It was so quiet, subdued and restricted last time, hence the manifest anticipation and great expectations. Popular markets like Garihata, or the shopping malls, and the famous Park Street, are jostling with people – a large number of them without masks. In local markets like the Garia vegetable and fish market, thousands of people are out on the streets, while shared autos are working full-time with packed passengers, some without masks.

In Kolkata, the night curfew has been suspended for 10 days during the Durga Puja, so, everyone seems happy – the shopkeepers, the food-joints, and the nocturnal creatures looking for celebration. The concept behind the suspension of the night curfew is interesting: this will lead to less overcrowding in the day time – and some people will thereby choose to only come out in the night. Even before Puja, restaurants and bars are back with customers, while people are on a shopping spree. Largely, most care a damn for any Covid protocol.

However, there are large number of people still living in isolation, or refusing to go out into public spaces, including senior citizens. Many offices across India are shut and it is still work from home. Others are only going out if and when it is of utmost importance. Many have not moved out of their homes since summer and the second wave. Others are waiting for the festive season to end. Most others are still in a dilemma – because there were warnings that the third wave might arrive in September-October.

“What is the point of buying and wearing new clothes during the Durga Puja, if there is dying and death everywhere once again due to Covid,” said a senior woman consultant in a multinational company, now living in home isolation in Kolkata for more than two months since March 2020. Her doctors have categorically told her to be patient and stay at home. The doctors are also cynical – the manner in which thousands of people are crowding the markets in Kolkata, who can stop the third wave?

A 70-year-old retired professor in Bangalore, has postponed his plans to travel to a loved one in October. Covid cases have been rising in the building complex where he lives. He wants to go out, since he is fully vaccinated, but he is hesitant and not sure. Restrictions have been imposed in his apartment complex. No one is sure, really, especially those who are senior citizens, or, those who want to take precautions since they are aware that this disease tends to spread in crowded places. 

A social activist said, “In Kerala the cases might be rising now. It is now being called the second wave in Kerala. This is because they tackled it so well during the first wave and when the entire country was being ravaged by the second wave. They had functioning oxygen plants, fully equipped and totally free government hospitals, a chain of medical, community and social networks across the towns and villages, panchayats and local collective networks always ready to help, an efficient information system, organized and mass-testing, and a highly sensitive and responsive health ministry and government machinery. People were not afraid that the private hospitals will fleece them, or, that they will die due to lack of oxygen, beds or specialized medical support. That is why they were confident that they could cope with the killer Covid. This is how they controlled Nipah even now, and earlier. Even in Kolkata, where private hospitals charged exorbitantly high rates during the second wave, the free government hospitals were fully-equipped and effective, with the best doctors and health workers. This is not the case with many parts of India, including in Delhi, as it was witnessed during the second wave. Hence, the fear of an impending catastrophe with no government or community support system stalks large parts of the nation. Treatment in private hospitals have financially ruined so many people.  Many people fear that they will be left to their fate if they get the disease.”

So, what to do now? Stay in isolation? Wait for the third wave? For how long?

No one seems to know and while others don’t seem to care. The central and state governments are mum. The medical authorities are silent. The doctors and frontline health warriors are worried, and so are those who are facing a tough and depressing task in tough and prolonged isolation, especially single men and women, or, the elderly, who live all alone in alien cities, often, with no support systems. The jobless are broke, jobs are not coming by even in the corporate sector, instead, there is mass retrenchment; and savings are fast dipping. Only those employed in the bureaucracy, in universities and colleges, and government jobs, seem to be having a nice time with regular salaries.

Interestingly, in late August, news reports came out which were a warning, and rather alarming. Surprisingly, there have been no follow-up on this important revelation in the media, and even the authorities in Delhi, or, in the states too, have chosen to keep quiet for reasons still not known. A panel of experts, constituted by the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM), predicted a third wave of Covid-19 across India between September and October. It seriously recommended rapid mass vaccination as the only effective way to stop it. The reports stated that the panel was instituted under the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). That means, this expert committee was reporting to the highest authorities in the country – namely, the home minister and the prime minister. The report was apparently submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

The experts expressed the fear that children might also face a risk as the adults did in the second wave. It was stated that the pediatric infrastructure in the Indian hospital and medical establishment, both in the private and public sector, is still not fully equipped to tackle a major health crisis in terms of Covid among children.

The report categorically stated: “Leading experts have repeatedly warned of an imminent third Covid-19 wave in India. Epidemiologists predict a series of surges till we achieve herd immunity through infection or vaccination and the disease becomes endemic.”

The report quoted the predictions made by IIT Kanpur earlier which had posed three likely scenarios, apparently based on a mathematical model. First, the third wave could peak in early October with 3.2 lakh positive cases every day. Second, if new, virulent variants emerge, the third wave could peak in September with likely five lakh positive cases per day. (These two scenarios have, as of now, proved wrong.) And, third, the third wave could make a late surge in late October with two lakh positive cases every day.

This report had also presumed that herd immunity could be achieved if around 67 per cent of the population become immune – by infection for a certain period, and by vaccination. However, what will happen if unpredictable, much more deadlier and virulent variants mutate, especially when a large population is not vaccinated, remains in the realm of uncertainty and speculation. In that case, only full vaccination of 80 per cent of the population could stop the killer virus.

The good news is that under a new and more actively engaged Union Home Minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, the frustratingly slow and uneven process of vaccination, and the acute lack of vaccines across many states, prevalent till recently, has been overcome now. Free vaccination has been initiated in a mass scale and there seems no shortfall of vaccines as of now. Almost 65 per cent population has got one dose and around 25 per cent have been fully vaccinated. This percentage seems to be rising with a daily count, though it can be multiplied many times more on a war-footing. At this count, the challenging task of total and full vaccination across India for adults by December might seem a not-so-difficult target. According to official statistics, critical cases have plummeted to less than 25,000 per day all over the country.

The confidence level in the Union health ministry is also high given the fact that it has stated that vaccine production in the country has shot up. So much so, there are efforts to rectify the failed international promise made by the Indian government to supply vaccines to African countries. It failed the promise because it was running terribly short of vaccines since April 2021, despite the lofty claims made by the prime minister at World Economic Forum’s Davos Dialogue in January 2021.

However, the ministry is of the opinion that the vaccine supply to the African countries and elsewhere can be started by October, given the high level of vaccine production in India in the current scenario. This is part of the global deal under ‘Covax’ signed by India. Covax is a vaccine-sharing global body.

The Serum Institute of India has apparently doubled its output of the AstraZeneca shot to 150 million doses, according to reports. Earlier, surprisingly, before it had stopped exports in the summer of 2021 due to what seemed a total botch-up and acute shortage of vaccines, the central government in Delhi had donated or sold 66 million doses to around 100 countries.

Reuters has reported that the African Union has accused the manufacturers of denying the African nations a fair chance to buy vaccines. The African Union has asked India, and other manufacturing nations, to lift export restrictions. Over 5.7 billion plus doses of vaccines have been reportedly administered globally. However, only 4 per cent of the African people have got vaccination till now. Only 9 African countries have vaccinated 10 per cent of their population. The rich nations, predictably, despite promises to Covax, has betrayed the poor nations and chosen to only prioritise their own population, though it is an established theory that this is a global disease and will continue to spread if any part is left unvaccinated.

Indeed, in India now, it almost seems like the pandemic has disappeared and so has the virus. Is it really so? Or, is it a mere deception?

Several parts of the world have been under lockdown. Auckland brought in a shockingly hard lockdown after only one case of Covid which arrived from neighbouring Australia apparently, because New Zealand was in a literal bubble with a zero case scenario, though vaccination, surprisingly, had been low. As the cases started rising in this efficient and small country, run by an equally efficient, pro-people, and democratic Labour Party leader, Jacinda Ardern, Auckland was put under tough restrictions. 

Australia itself has been going through strong phases of lockdown in what is called its ‘second wave’. In Vietnam, which literally started with a zero case scenario last year, lockdown is back. Indonesia suffered mass deaths and mass cremations in burial grounds in recent times, perhaps as worse as the cruel Indian summer, and, yet, it is still struggling. In Europe the prosperous ‘western bloc’ such as Germany, France, Denmark etc have had mass vaccination, while the ‘eastern block’ such as Poland, Slovenia, Hungry are lagging behind.

South Korea, Japan and Malaysia have given more vaccine doses per 100 people – it is much better than what the US could do. In South Korea, vaccination has stopped hospitalization for most people. In Japan, crucial cases have lessened by half in September, to just about 1,000 cases a day. However, the situation in Japan is still not safe — 31,000 cases of hospitals have been reportedly recently. It was as high as 230,000 in late August.

In America, the supporters of Donald Trump and the ‘Red Republican Areas’ in the map are still witnessing a surge of Covid cases with a large number of hardliner Republicans and others refusing to get vaccinated. After his post-presidency promise to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days, Joe Biden has announced stricter measures – compulsory vaccination of 100 million health workers, federal contractors and others in the private sectors, and most CEOs have come along with him.

The New York Times in a survey has created graphs which show that all those states which voted Trump have high Covid cases and are unvaccinated, unlike those which voted for the Democrats. Biden has said that the section of the population not getting vaccinated are allowing the virus to spread and thereby threatening those who are already vaccinated and stopping the process of economic and social recovery. He has said in a press conference at the White House that other critical patients like those with heart and other ailments are not able to get treatment because the unvaccinated people are now over-crowding the health centers and hospitals after being afflicted with the virus.

He has now pushed third booster shots for those above 65, health workers, frontline workers like grocery store owners, etc, and there are 80,000 pharmacies giving the shots free of cost across the country. Biden, 78, has himself taken a third booster shot. However, his opponents are calling him a dictator saying that not getting vaccinated is in an individual right and he has no business to interfere in their individual decisions. Surprisingly, several frontline health workers are refusing to take vaccination in America, so they are being replaced by other professionals, including from the security apparatus.

Given the global circumstances, India still remains in a twilight zone. There is still no clarity. While thousands are out in public spaces, there is no roadmap about the future, or, what is the action plan for the nation. If another surge of the deadly virus suddenly arrives, there will be perhaps less panic this time, and there will be more preparation, but, yet another phase of lockdown and collective and individual crisis will stalk the nation. People will continue to suffer across the spectrum, especially those in the margins.

If it does not arrive, then, will the nation’s economic and social life continue as usual – with absolutely no clarity or future course of action? Will there be a massive economic boost and mass job creation? Will offices, cinema halls and campuses be forever shut? Will travel become safe and secure? Will the private hospitals stop fleecing? Will government hospitals take charge and give free treatment, and total and full confidence to the people? Will the millions of jobless get back on their feet? Will the social and personal isolation, the depression and emotional crisis faced by millions of people, who are compulsively avoiding public places and crowded spaces, ever end?

The answer is not blowing in the wind. Only the questions loom large. 
 

The post Is a third wave of Covid-19 coming this festive season? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The recent victory of the BJP in 70 plus seats in the assembly, while emerging as the main opposition, and its stupendous and surprising gain of 19 seats in the last Lok Sabha elections in 2019, have been attributed to the effective grassroots mobilization of the RSS in both the electoral and non-electoral arena in the state.

It is believed that the RSS worked quietly, but efficiently, especially during the first pandemic/lockdown, and in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan, and its presence was felt in many areas, thus helping the BJP penetrate many new areas electorally. Indeed, the RSS/BJP positioned itself in spaces where the Left had declined decisively, while constantly improvising its tactics. So much so, a sizeable section of the Left support base, which considered the Trinamool Congress as the main enemy, switched over to the BJP.

However, the Trinamool Congress’ landslide victory in the recent assembly polls, despite the BJP’s two ‘Gujarati supermen’ unleashing huge money, muscle and media power to capture Bengal, has exposed the hype about ‘the rise and rise’ of the RSS-BJP in Bengal. While the RSS is credited with providing relief in some areas during the last two years of social, economic and health crisis in the state due to the pandemic and recurrent lockdowns, its efforts have been no match for the Mamata Banerjee government’s highly popular social and economic welfare schemes, especially at the grassroots.

“In West Bengal, the RSS works secretively and in the remote interiors. They remain in the shadows. This was their pattern even when they were not so strong during the Left Front rule. This largely continues to be their pattern now under the rule of the Trinamool Congress, though they are politically more stronger, and have the backing of the Centre.  If they have done relief work during the pandemic, it must have been done secretly, and only in their core areas among their core support base,” said a social activist.

There is no doubt that the RSS has grown in the last few years, after the decline of the Left forces, and especially in the interiors, from Jangalmahal to Cooch Behar. For instance, the RSS has been very active among the tribal communities in Jangalmahal – namely, Bankura, Purulia, West Midnapore and Jhargram, close to Jharkhand. Ironically, this area became the hotbed of the Maoists during the last phase of the CPM rule, and in the early days of the Trinamool’s rise. That short phase is now all but over.

The RSS has also successfully made inroads among tea plantation workers and other communities in North Bengal, even while Darjeeling has been their victorious Lok Sabha constituency with remarkable consistency. The BJP had earlier penetrated the Gorkhaland agitation, and despite the splits in the movement, it still retains a stronghold on the ground.

Significantly, after the assembly polls recently, certain BJP leaders have given a contentious call for the division of West Bengal, and the creation of a different state or union territory of North Bengal. Its top leaders in Kolkata and Delhi, while overtly not supporting the demand, have been tacitly playing a double game on this controversial issue.  BJP MP from Alipurduar, John Barla, has demanded that a new union territory should be with certain districts of North Bengal. The BJP won seven of the eight Lok Sabha seats in North Bengal in the last Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

According to a news report in the Hindustan Times, the various fronts of the RSS and Sangh Parivar operated around 40 help desks across Bengal during the first lockdown in the cruel summer of 2020 when the mass exodus of thousands of migrant workers from their work places began – on foot – across the streets and highways of India. Almost 121 unions affiliated to the Sangh Parivar distributed food and sanitisers among 1.60 lakh families at 665 locations in 23 districts, according to reports, while tarpaulins, food and relief material was provided in Amphan-hit areas as well. The National Medicos Organisation (NMO), allegedly aligned to the RSS, along with volunteers, held 80 medical camps in East Midnapore and the South and North 24 Parganas, which were hit by the cyclone. Around 25,000 people got medical care, with the help of 80 doctors, 250 volunteers and the BJP medical cell, while masks and medicines were distributed.

Social activists claim that since the RSS chooses to work in the interiors, often in tribal areas, it is not always easy to document their work. For instance, their schools, known as Shishu Mandirs, are active across North Bengal, and they have made significant inroads into the tea gardens, despite the presence of other mainstream parties in the region, including the CPI-ML (Liberation) and the CPM. They often use social philanthropy and community activity to influence and capture mass support on the ground, even while ideological indoctrination of Hindutva among children starts early.

For instance, in the heart of the Naxalite movement in North Bengal, in Naxalbari, they have set up a flourishing school on a sprawling campus — the Sarada Vidyamandir. From the 1990s, till this day, the school has attracted both parents and children of local communities, even while it is well-known that the RSS runs it. A journalist points out that one can clearly see a pattern – the rise of the school’s prestige often moves in tandem with the RSS-BJP spreading its social and political wings in the area. And its best indicators are their political gains in elections – as much as huge increase in vote percentages. Indeed, in the recent assembly elections, the BJP candidate won the Matigara-Naxalbari constituency in this area with a big margin.

A similar phenomenon can be seen in the Jangalmahal region of Bengal, which is largely inhabited by tribals, and which, until the Left rule of more than three decades, suffered huge deprivation, stark poverty, underdevelopment and marginalization. This phenomenon has changed in the last 10 years with the Trinamool government at the helm, and the social and human development index has changed for the better.  However, the RSS continues to be active here, though it did not reflect in the elections this time in a decisive manner.

However, for a secretive, ‘cultural organisation’, with a sectarian and polarizing civilizational and political agenda, which reportedly had its first ‘shakha’ in the neighbourhood of Maniktala in Kolkata in March 1939, the high has always been marked with an equally pronounced low. Indeed, its record in public spaces has been very modest, though now it has reportedly around 1,800 shakhas across Bengal.

Since that first ‘shakha’ directly under the physical presence and leadership of its principle ideologue, MS Golwalkar, RSS, the original fountainhead of Hindutva which controls the BJP, and all its fronts, has not really made massive headway in Bengal, especially in urban spaces, or, in the cultural, educational and intellectual terrain. (The BJP, for instance, lost in all the constituencies of Kolkata in the recent assembly polls).

Social activists are of the view that the RSS never really could capture the political, cultural and intellectual imagination of the people in Bengal before and after Partition. Even in the recent assembly polls, the slogan of ‘Jai Shri Ram’ just did not click in a state where people are so passionately ‘shakti-worshippers’ (Durga, Kali, Saraswati etc), and followers of the Bhakti-vaishnav tradition of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and the secular spirituality of Ramkrishna Paramhans.

The RSS tried its best to penetrate the refugee colonies of the homeless people who came from across the ‘East Bengal’ border after Partition, during and after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and, later, in the 1980s. However, they simply could not succeed among these displaced, but stoic and resilient people, who started their life anew from scratch in various refugee colonies in tough and difficult conditions.

These hard working communities remained staunchly secular supporters of the Left in essence and spirit, and the Left protected and helped them find a new beginning in West Bengal. There was never any sectarian division between the people of East and West Bengal historically – instead, there have always been dominant reasons for enduring cultural, linguistic and social unity. Even among smaller sections of the new Hindu refugees, the RSS-BJP’s gains, using hate politics and communal discourse, have been minimal. However, they have succeeded in a big manner in places like Coochbehar which borders Bangladesh.

Political observers also point out that among certain sections of Bengali refugees, including those who have become upwardly mobile and educated, a simmering communal and sectarian feeling continues to remain entrenched. Over the years it could not find social and political expression, especially during the Left rule. Now, with the rise of the BJP, this sectarian instinct has resurfaced and is reflected in the growth of the BJP.

One of the biggest difficulties which the RSS-Sangh Parivar fronts have faced is that since the Trinamool  Congress government has acquired power, the party and the administration has moved in massively and decisively in the social sector, especially in the sectors of health and education, and  especially among women and girls, which has directly helped families and communities in basic sustenance and aspirational growth. Even during the long phases of the lockdown and the pandemic, the West Bengal government has provided ration and food to the working class and low income groups across Bengal. The reporter is witness to people across the rural and small town areas testifying that the state government provided rice, wheat, cooking oil, pulses etc, every month to every family – which helped them cope with longs spells of unemployment during the pandemic.

Said a woman selling puri-sabji near Panchphota in South 24 Pargana, “Me and my husband have started this food cart providing hot breakfast to people. We could only do this because we got ration every month free of cost – given by the government.”

Even in Kolkata, in an area like Kumortuli, which is the epicenter of artists and sculptors who make the famous statues of goddesses during the festivals, there are several very small scale industries, running in ‘little factories’ with extremely low budgets. Almost everyone around this area said that there was organized and regular distribution of ration and food presided over by the local Trinamool MLA even during the most difficult phases of the lockdown when everything was shut. Not only food, during the lockdown, medical help and hospital beds were arranged by the local MLA. No wonder, the popular and accessible MLA, Dr Shashi Panja, has won yet again from the area.

After the formation of the new government in May 2021, food and ration is actually being distributed at the door-step, and this process was on during the lockdown as well even as the second wave surged. This reporter witnessed this promise made by Mamata Banerjee in her last rally in Nandigram before the polls. This also follows the ‘government at your door-step’ scheme which unfolded months before the polls.

The latest popular scheme which has drawn good response among the poor and low income groups in Bengal, especially among women, yet again, is the ‘Lakshmi Bhandar Scheme’, which too was part of the Trinamool Congress Election Manifesto. The welfare scheme, announced by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, allows female heads of economically weak families to receive a monthly allowance of Rs 500. Families belonging to Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities are eligible to receive Rs 1,000 per month. The scheme is run by the Department of Women & Child Development and Social Welfare.

Indeed, among the several welfare programmes run by the West Bengal government, those involving women, and especially in the health and education sectors, have been a roaring success. For instance, all district government hospitals have given free medical treatment during and before Covid. The specialized hospitals like MS Bangur and Beleghata Infectious Diseases (ID) Hospital in Kolkata too have provided state-of-the-art medical treatment free of cost.

Indeed, their remarkable work during the first and second wave has drawn international attention for these two hospitals, especially for the Beleghata ID hospital, which has outstretched its brilliant record in terms of research and professional expertise in dealing with Covid in just about two years. Besides, both the hospitals are being credited with the most dedicated doctors, nurses and frontline health and sanitation staff, along with medical services, perhaps among the best in India. In fact, the daily meals provided to Covid patients in Beleghata hospital is a good example of its outstanding record: Tea and biscuits twice in the morning and evening, eggs, toast, apples and bananas for breakfast, fish, egg curry, rice, chapattis, vegetables and fruits for lunch and dinner. Plus, filtered water, hair oil, soap, comb, washing powder and sets of new cotton pyjamas and shirts, among other things.

In the health sector, the Swasthya Sathi health insurance scheme has been a big success, especially in rural Bengal and among economically weaker sections, though it covers the entire population.  It’s a basic health cover of Rs 5 lakh for the secondary and tertiary care for every family, per annum. Women who are guardians or are heading the family, will be given the insurance card, though it will cover the entire family, including her own parents if she is married and has shifted to another household. All government and private hospitals are included in this scheme whereby patients will get free, cashless treatment. This has been a huge relief for women in rural Bengal, and among the poor, even while the card is held by the women guardians of the family.

Said a Dalit woman in Nandigram, “Not only me, you can check out across the village here. All women have got this card. It’s a big help and a big security for people like us, especially during such uncertain and insecure times like the pandemic.”

Besides, two other famous social sector schemes continue to help and inspire girl students across rural and small town Bengal, though schools have not opened. One is ‘Kanyashree’, which is one of the original flagship programmes started by Mamata Banerjee, and which has got international recognition. It helps girls financially over a long period of time, to go through primary, secondary, and, finally, higher education, and thereby get out of the trap of marriage, social bondage or compulsive child labour. This has been clearly reflected in the higher enrolment of girls in schools with their drop-out rates decreasing rapidly. Indeed, Bengal has a very high literacy rate, and, now, girls are one of the biggest catalysts in this upward swing.

Besides, the ‘Sabooj Sathi’ scheme has been a roaring hit — thousands of cycles have been distribute to girl students from Class 9 and 12. Indeed, 90 lakh plus cycles have been distributed for girl students. Hence, it is a normal sight in villages and small towns of Bengal to see girls and working women on cycles, which is a big step forward in terms of mobility and empowerment.

“Yes, my daughter too has a cycle gifted by the Trinamool government. Like the other school girls here, she loves her cycle. We are happy when she goes out to school cycling,” said a BJP supporter of the Namashudra Matua community in Thakurbari in North 24 Pargana.

Courtesy Covid Response Watch, Countercurrents

Amit Sengupta is Executive Editor, Hardnews and a columnist with Sabrangindia, currently based in Kolkata

The post RSS grows in West Bengal, but no match for Didi’s outreach during Covid appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Joe Biden did not begin the Big Botch-Up in Kabul. George W Bush started it all, and Barack Obama and Donald Trump continued the golden legacy. Backed by the top brass of the political and war machine of the American establishment. A journalistic bombshell of our times, a new book of scathing revelations by a seasoned investigative reporter of The Washington Post, exposes it all.

(‘The Afghanistan Papers: a Secret History of the War’, by investigative journalist Craig Whitlock)

George W Bush, president of the United States during the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, and the man who started the original ‘war against terror’, did not apparently know the name of his own supreme commander in the ‘war’ in Afghanistan. Not only that, he simply could not ‘make time’ to meet him – seemingly, so skewed were his priorities.

Earlier, The New York Times had reported (September 19, 2001): Speaking with unusually raw intensity, President George W Bush says that he wants the militant Islamic leader Osama bin Laden brought to justice “dead or alive”… “There are no rules,” Mr Bush said during a visit to the Pentagon. “It’s barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective that is beyond comprehension, and they like to hit and then they like to hide out… But we’re going to smoke them out,” he said… His comments appeared in part spontaneous, reflecting a rage that seems to have been building for days, and that aides say was stoked by the horror he witnessed Friday on his visit to New York.  “I want justice,” he said. “There’s an old poster out West that said, ‘Wanted, dead or alive.’”

(In one chilling discovery reported by The New York Times, the body of a male air crew member from one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center was found in the rubble bound hand and foot, and the body of a flight attendant was found with her hands bound.)

Two years later, his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in a memo to his intelligence chief, actually admitted that he simply had “no visibility into who the bad guys are”. This was two years after the formidable American war machine had unleashed its full might inside the landlocked country. Not to be outdone, his successor, Robert Gates, said later: “We didn’t know jack shit about Al-Qaeda.”

On the war in Afghanistan, complained Army General Dan McNeill, “There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there.” The officer had operated ‘twice’ as the US commander under the Bush administration.

“There was no coherent long-term strategy,” said David Richards, a British General who led US and NATO forces from 2006 to 2007. “We were trying to get a single coherent long-term approach — a proper strategy — but, instead, we got a lot of tactics.”

Other military officials claimed that the Americans “flubbed the war from the start, committing missteps on top of miscalculations on top of misjudgments”.

“We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia.

“We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” said Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute. He was the ‘White House War Czar’ under Bush and Barack Obama.

Obama promised to end the war, like Bush had done earlier, with much fanfare. Hence, NATO and American officials held a ceremony in Kabul to mark the occasion.

“A multinational colour guard paraded around as music played. A four-star general gave a speech and solemnly cased the green flag of the US-led international force that had flown since the beginning of the conflict.”

Obama called the day “a milestone for our country”. He said that America was now safe and more secure after 13 years of war. “Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” he declared.

In a bizarre statement stretching scientific logic to its limits, Army General John Campbell, 57, commander of the US and NATO forces, asserted that since the start of the war, ‘life-expectancy’ for the ‘Average Afghan’ had increased by 21 years. “You time that by about 35 million Afghanis represented here in the country, that gives you 741 million years of life,” he announced.

Writes Craig Whitlock, investigative reporter of The Washington Post: “But for such a historical day, the event seemed strange and underwhelming. The president didn’t actually attend; Obama issued his remarks in a written statement from Hawaii while he relaxed on vacation. The military ceremony took place in a gymnasium, where several dozen people sat on folding chairs. There was little mention of the enemy, let alone an instrument of surrender. Nobody cheered.”

SEASONED JOURNALISTS KNOW about the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam, a war where the mightiest military empire lost a protracted and bloody battle with the guerilla forces of one of the smallest countries in the world. The world also knows about ‘Deep Throat and the Watergate Scandal’ with then US President Richard Nixon as the protagonist, while two intrepid journalists chased the story with incredible grit and maturity. Now, we have an explosive and exclusive investigation and expose of the Afghanistan war, which documents and exposes unprecedented goof-ups and confessions of failure at the topmost levels, and at such a massive scale, that the entire ‘American Empire’ seems to be so hollow and crumbling after a two-decade war.

It seems so shallow and rusted within, that all the war rhetoric, muscle-flexing, chest-thumping and money power seems such a big fake. In the final instance, it all turned out to be an infinite wasteland of human resources, over a graveyard of dead bodies and dead dreams, scattered across the rugged expanse of Afghanistan, from Kabul to Kandahar, and Herat to Helmand. Even while the Taliban is back once again, with the US playing footsie and Pakistan back as the behind-the-stage king-maker.

‘The Afghanistan Papers: a Secret History of the War’, by investigative journalist Craig Whitlock, has thoroughly and totally exposed the American political, defense and war machine! It has laid bare the lies, half-truths, propaganda and subterfuge hatched by the formidable Pentagon top brass and White House, the top military and strategic big guns, their sundry underlings, the huge parasitic networks of entrenched industrialists, arms-dealers and manufacturers, contractors, mercenaries and miscellaneous cartels, the embedded journalists and propaganda machinery — and all this under the watch of successive presidents: George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump. And let us not even count the billions and trillions which apparently went down the drain in Kabul and beyond – so where did it all go?

If Joe Biden has inherited the glorious ruins of a grand botch-up, then all the war medals for this apocalypse now should go to his illustrious predecessors. Clearly, the 20-year-old Afghan War has been perhaps the biggest foreign policy and strategic/military disaster for a hegemonic and imperialist war machine which has inflicted violence and destruction across the Post-War global landscape to reassert again and again its dominant narrative of supremacist, military and capitalist power, driven by the insatiable greed of its profit industry of construction, destruction and reconstruction, even while ‘blood for oil’ became the principle doctrine of war in the Middle-East in recent times.  

First published in parts by The Washington Post in 2019, ‘The Afghanistan Papers’ should rattle the American State and superstructure, its much-touted beliefs in democracy and truth, and all its shaky skeletons in the cupboard. More than that, it should shatter the ethical conscience and public consciousness of the American civil society.

This is because these disclosures prove with evidence, often straight from the horses’ mouths, of how the top army and political brass, led by various US presidents, have made a fool of the American people by manipulating public opinion through a continuous and organized web of lies and deception, fake and doctored news, and official declarations, speeches, text and rhetoric.

The sensational hardback edition, running into 346 pages with meticulously documented endnotes and references, has been published by Simon and Schuster. It has been launched globally on August 31, 2021. It is already creating waves.

Craig Whitlock is a seasoned journalist and investigative reporter with The Washington Post. He has reported from more than 60 countries across the world. He has been a beat reporter for seven years covering the Pentagon and US military. Earlier, he has been a foreign correspondent for the newspaper covering Al-Qaeda, terrorism and conflict zones in the Middle-East, Pakistan, North Africa and Europe. He has seen the “mess” in Afghanistan upfront while covering at least four defense secretaries and several war commanders.

For his reportage on Afghanistan, he has received the George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Freedom of Information Award, and the Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award for international reporting. He has been a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

“Like many journalists, I knew Afghanistan was a mess…” he writes. “…But I wondered if everyone had missed the big picture.”

His book starts with an important quote as a prelude, recording a historic moment for independent and ethical journalism in the US, and across the world, and as a tribute to journalists who chose to stand against the establishment if need be, and to tell the truth on the ground, against all odds. “Only a free and unrestrained Press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free Press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

This is a statement by Justice Hugo L. Black of the US Supreme Court, in the New York Times Co. v. United States, also known as the ‘Pentagon Papers Case’, June 30, 1971. In a 6–3 decision, the court ruled that the US government could not block The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War.

Over several years of painstaking and meticulous investigations, Whitlock has obtained thousands of documents, oral testimonies, official memos and notes, interviews, published and unpublished testimonies, confessions and statements, often expressed directly by the top brass of the American power and military apparatus. In page after page, chapter after chapter, this book is a bitter revelation and a scathing indictment of a bloated regime which prides itself as the most powerful State apparatus in the world, while self-congratulating America as the “greatest nation in the world” — for mythical reasons it alone knows.

Writes Whitlock, about what has been a fake narrative repeated again and again as a public spectacle: “President Barack Obama had vowed to end the war and bring all the troops home, but he failed to do so as his second term neared an end in 2016. Americans had grown weary of endless conflict overseas. Disillusioned, many people stopped paying attention…”

Indeed, like the fake ceremony described above, replete with typical ‘Obamesque’ charm and deception, it was crystal-clear that both, the US president and his top general, were playing a stage-managed show with a lot of pomp and patriotism thrown in. The damned, bloody war was nowhere ending. Afghan and American troops and civilians would continue to die for many years to come, as it happened in ravaged Syria in the following years.

This reporter covered the American elections in 2016 from New York and Boston. One of the reasons the young, educated pro-Bernie Sanders millennials hated Hillary Clinton was because of a certain video which had circulated widely during the 2016 presidential polls. It showed her devilish and unbridled ecstasy when shown how Muammar Gaddafi, soaked with blood all over, has been captured, beaten into pulp and tortured on the streets, and then bayoneted to death in perhaps one of the most grotesque and brutal forms of ‘mob-lynching as justice’ awarded to a former head of state.

(In Syria, for instance, a mindless and multi-pronged war by multiple actors, continued, from Damascus and Alleppo and beyond. This mindless war left millions dead, brutalised, trafficked and devastated, turned cities into morbid installations of melted, destroyed rubble, forced women such as from the Yazidi community into dehumanizing sex slavery at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists, and gave rise to another sinister ‘Caliphate’ – the ISIS — backed by all kinds of sinister forces and diabolical players from behind the infinite war rubble in the Middle-East. This was a war first conceived and crystallized by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (then the next presidential hopeful, backed by an ‘anti-war’ Obama). Barack Obama had earlier received a Nobel Peace Prize much too early in his presidency even as the world rejoiced the arrival of the first black president in the history of the United States.)

Writes Whitlock: “The Washington Post and other news organizations had exposed systemic problems with the war for years. Books and memoirs had delivered insider accounts of pivotal battles in Afghanistan and political infighting in Washington. But I wondered if everyone had missed the big picture… How had the war degenerated into a stalemate with no realistic prospect for an enduring victory? The US and its allies had initially crushed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in 2001. …What went wrong? No one had conducted a thorough public accounting of the strategic failures or provided an unsparing explanation of how the campaign fell apart. To this day, there has been no Afghanistan version of the 9/11 Commission, which held the government responsible for its inability to prevent the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Nor has Congress convened an Afghanistan version of the Fulbright Hearings, when senators aggressively questioned the war in Vietnam. With so many people from both parties responsible for a multitude of errors, few political leaders have wanted to assign or accept blame…”

In the summer of 2016 Whitlock received a “news tip that an obscure federal agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, had interviewed hundreds of participants in the war and that many had unloaded pent-up frustrations” in a project called ‘Lessons Learned’. This project was meant to “diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan”.

“Only a free and unrestrained Press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free Press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.” –  (Justice Hugo L. Black of the US Supreme Court, in the New York Times Co. v.   United States, also known as the ‘Pentagon Papers Case’, June 30, 1971)

According to Whitlock, “That September, SIGAR began to publish a series of Lessons Learned reports that highlighted problems in Afghanistan. But, the reports, weighed down with leaden government prose, omitted the harsh criticism and finger-pointing that I heard the interviews contained. An investigative journalist’s mission in life is to find out what truths the government is hiding and reveal them to the public… So I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with SIGAR seeking transcripts, notes and audio recordings of the Lessons Learned interviews. I argued (that) the public had a right to know the government’s internal criticisms of the war — the unvarnished truth…

“At every turn, SIGAR delayed and resisted the requests — a hypocritical response for an agency that Congress had created to provide accountability for the enormous sums of taxpayer dollars being spent on the war. The Post had to file two federal lawsuits to compel SIGAR to release the Lessons Learned documents. After a three-year legal battle, SIGAR finally disclosed more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with 428 people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials. The agency redacted portions of the documents and concealed the identities of most of the people it interviewed. But the interviews showed that many senior US officials privately viewed the war as an unmitigated disaster, contradicting a chorus of rosy public statements from officials at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department, who assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan…”

Among other documents, interviews and oral testimonies, Whitlock also obtained hundreds of classified memos about the war in Afghanistan that Defense Secretary in the Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, dictated or received between 2001 and 2006. They were called ‘snowflakes’ by Rumsfeld and his staff; these included “brief instructions or comments that the Pentagon boss dictated to his underlings”, often many times a day.

“…Speaking frankly because they assumed their remarks would not become public, US officials confessed to SIGAR that the war plans had fatal flaws and that Washington had wasted billions of dollars trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation. The interviews exposed the US government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade. Many of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public. They said officials at (the) military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — routinely distorted statistics to make it appear (that) the United States was winning the war when that was plainly not the case…”

 In the chapter, ‘Afghanistan Becomes an Afterthought’, Whitlock writes how Bush and Obama heralded the end of the war as a public relations exercise, though it was all stage-managed and fake.

“Six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, on May 1, 2003, the commander-in-chief boarded another flight to deliver another victorious speech with a military audience as the backdrop… Thousands of sailors cheered as Bush stepped off the plane and exchanged salutes with crew members on the flight deck. The president mingled and posed for photos before changing into a civilian business suit to give his speech as the sun dipped over the Pacific Ocean. Standing in front of a billowing red-white-and-blue banner proclaiming ‘Mission Accomplished’, Bush announced that ‘major combat operations have ended’ and thanked the US military for ‘a job well done’ in Operation Iraqi Freedom… In fact, the worst in Iraq was yet to come and Bush’s visit to the aircraft carrier would haunt him as the biggest public-relations blunder of his presidency…It also overshadowed an equally nonsensical claim that his defense secretary had made hours earlier about the war in Afghanistan…” 

In a joint press conference with Hamid Karzai in Kabul, Rumsfeld echoed the ‘Bush script’, that major combat operations are over in Afghanistan. “The bulk of this country today is permissive, it’s secure,” he said.

Whitlock reports: “But, as in Iraq, the fighting in Afghanistan was far from over. Combat operations would re-intensify and turn much more deadly. More than 95 per cent of US casualties in America’s longest war had yet to occur. In oral-history interviews, Army officers who served in Afghanistan in 2003 said Rumsfeld’s assertion that combat had ended was absurd.

‘We used to laugh,’ said Lt. Col. Mark Schmidt, a Special Forces officer with a background in psychological operations. ‘There was still plenty of fighting going on… Quite frankly, we were just going around killing people. We’d fly in, do a mission for a few weeks, then we’d fly out —and, of course, the Taliban would just flow right back in…’”

Whitlock writes: “..Most U.S. officials wrongly assumed the Taliban would never pose a serious threat again. In his ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, Bush declared flatly: ‘We destroyed the Taliban.’”

In the chapter, ‘At War with the Truth’, Whitlock writes that during his trip in 2012 to Afghanistan, 73-year-old CIA director, Leon Panetta, apart from other PR disasters, had to deal with a massacre, typically something insane, which has been repeated again and again in different forms, in similar wars – from Vietnam to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Syria and Palestine. Even recently, after the bomb blast at the Kabul Airport which killed scores of civilians, Taliban guard and US Marines, the drone attack by the Americans reportedly killed an entire Afghan family in Kabul. This war had too many similar stories of innocents dying all over at the hands of the Taliban, other terrorist groups, and the US and NATO forces.

 “A few days before his arrival, a lone US soldier, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, strode into two Afghan villages in Kandahar province in the middle of the night and inexplicably massacred 16 sleeping villagers, most of them women and children. The mass murder inflamed Afghans and the Taliban exploited it as propaganda fodder…,”  reports Whitlock.

Panetta termed his visit in the backdrop of this massacre as “very encouraging”. The campaign, as I’ve pointed out before, I think, has made significant progress,” he told reporters in Kabul. “We’re on the right path. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”

The Obama administration followed this bluff and bluster with distorted statistics very similar to what the Bush administration had reportedly done earlier. According to Whitlock, Obama’s staffers in the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department took this hyperbole of distortion to an entirely new level — “hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false”.

Writes Whitlock:  “‘We have broken the Taliban’s momentum,’ Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a Senate committee in June 2011. As evidence, she quoted an array of metrics: Afghan schools had enrolled 7.1 million students, a seven-fold increase since the fall of the Taliban; infant mortality had decreased by 22 per cent; opium production was down; hundreds of thousands of farmers had been ‘trained and equipped with new seeds and other techniques; and Afghan women had received more than 100,000 micro-finance loans’…”

 “Now, what do these numbers and others that I could quote tell us?” said Hillary Clinton. “Life is better for most Afghans.”

In contrast, much later, auditors discovered “many of the statistics” dished out on life-expectancy, enrolment in schools, infant mortality, among other human development index, was based “on inaccurate or unverified data”.

The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, later told the Congress in January, 2020 that officials “knew the data was bad” and yet chose to exaggerate — “bragged about the numbers anyway”.  Sopko said the lies were part of “an odor of mendacity” that was integral to the depiction of the war by the US adminstration, writes Whitlock.

The investigations found that in the interviews recovered from the project, ‘Lessons Learned’, military officials and advisers made extra efforts to systematically mislead the American public. Apparently it was routine tactics at the military headquarters in Kabul, at the Pentagon and at the White House, to skew statistics so as to prove that the US was actually winning the war, though this was not the reality on the ground.

In one such interview, an army colonel, Bob Crowley said, “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.” He was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to US commanders in 2013 and 2014.

“Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone,” he said.

 “At military headquarters, “truth was rarely welcome” and “bad news was often stifled,” Crowley said. “There was more freedom to share bad news if it was small — we’re running over kids with our MRAPS (armoured vehicles) — because those things could be changed with policy directives. But when we tried to air larger strategic concerns about the willingness, capacity or corruption of the Afghan government, it was clear it wasn’t welcome.”

Interestingly, and funnily, John Garofano, a Naval War College strategist, who advised the Marines in Helmand in 2011, disclosed that a huge amount of time and effort was spent in “churning out color-coded charts that heralded positive results”. “They had a really expensive machine that would print the really large pieces of paper like in a print shop,” he said in a Lessons Learned interview. “There would be a caveat that these are not actually scientific figures, or this is not a scientific process behind this.”

Donald Trump fought the presidential elections in 2016 on the patriotic ploy of ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ unleashing racist and white supremacist currents, an inherited brand of hate politics and collective phobia of immigrants, as well as promising to back-out of all the wars in which America has been trapped in other parts of the world.

Whitlock depicts an ironic study which reflects how frivolous and risky it all became when it came to Trump. “Before he won the 2016 presidential election, the real-estate mogul and reality TV star had complained loudly about the war’s expense and demanded that Obama pull out. In keeping with his slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ he denounced any foreign-aid programmes that resembled nation-building… ‘Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home! — he tweeted in 2012. We have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out! — he tweeted in 2013. A suicide bomber has just killed US troops in Afghanistan. When will our leaders get tough and smart. We are being led to slaughter! — he tweeted in 2015…’”

However, once Trump assumed power in January 2017, he ran into serious difficulties. His aides in the cabinet and the Pentagon top brass told him in as many words that “it could be cataclysmic to withdraw abruptly. If the Afghan government collapsed or the war spilled over to nuclear-armed Pakistan, he would own the problem,” they told him.

“Trump agreed,” writes Whitlock. “However, unlike other presidents, he had scant respect for the generals running the war and no patience for detailed policy deliberations…Trump hated any hint of weakness or defeat. His Defense Secretary, James Mattis, had committed the grievous error of suggesting just that in June when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘we are not winning in Afghanistan right now’. General Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the same mistake six days later when he confessed during an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington that ‘Afghanistan is not where we want it to be’.”

Citing an interesting event which tells a typical story so characteristically Trump, Whitlock reports that the president was invited to the Pentagon by Mattis for a “wide-ranging discussion about the importance of NATO and other military alliances…” Trump agreed, but was fed up with the lecture soon enough.

“In particular, he blew his stack when Mattis and Dunford talked about Afghanistan. Trump called it a ‘loser war’. He trashed the commanding general in Kabul, Army General John Nicholson Jr., saying: ‘I don’t think he knows how to win… I want to win…’”

According to Washington Post journalists Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, Trump said in the meeting: “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

Indeed, The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock opens up an uncanny can of worms which will be deeply worrisome and embarrassing for the top brass in the American and NATO establishment, of the past and present, howsoever thick-skinned they might appear to be. Indeed, it might just take away the halo some of them have surrounded themselves with in this eternally mysterious, sinister and diabolical game-play of the ‘war against terror’. The painstaking investigative documentation is a reminder to voters and citizens of America, and all nations, to take all official rhetoric and propaganda with a big pinch of salt. More than that, it yet again heralds the great victory of great journalism in the era of ‘post-truth, new normal and fake news’: showing truth to power!

A must read for journalists and all concerned, those who like to walk in and around the corridors of power, and especially for those who love to pump their chests in patriotic glory at the mere mention of ‘war’.

(The author is a senior journalist, media commentator and academic and presently Executive Editor Hardnews. The piece is Exclusive for Sabrangindia)

The post EXCLUSIVE: Craig Whitlock exposes the Secret History of the War in Afghanistan appeared first on SabrangIndia.

“Dadu, Dadu…Get up Dadu. Eat something. Take your medicines. Drink a glass of water. Wake up Dadu. Oh Dadu…”

‘Dadu’ means grandfather in Bengali. When she utters the word, with deep sweetness and warmth, and when she repeats it again and again, cajoling the patient to wake up, it resurrects a stream of childhood memories and a deep sense of human warmth for the highly critical Covid patients at different stages of illness and recovery at the specialized Beleghata Infectious Diseases (ID) Hospital in Kolkata.

It is also called the Beleghata ID Covid Hospital, because, after the pandemic, it has been turned into a specialized Covid hospital. Run by the state government, its reputation has soared extremely high in a short span of time for specialized treatment of Covid patients. In the last ten years, under the current government of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the Belaghata ID Hospital, the specialized Bangur Hospital in south Kolkata and other hospitals, have been upgraded considerably and become a good example of some of the finest health care available in the public sector anywhere in the country.

In one of its wards during the peak of the second surge, with two huge dormitories housing several patients, the young nurse is trying her best. “Dadu, Dadu… wake up, eat something,” she says, “take your medicine.”

But, the old man refuses to listen to her pleas. He has been in this state for six days at least. Except for a piece of white cloth and diapers around his thighs, he is bare-bodied. In his state of unconsciousness, he jerks off the oxygen mask, even as one nurse after another come by and fix it. There are drips on his arms. He has not eaten for long it seems.

A dark, big and strong man, with powerful hands and muscles, very tall, he screams in a high pitched and hoarse voice every now and then. It’s a scream of great angst, as if coming from deep suffering. It shakes the Covid ward, this sound of human anguish.

When he wakes up after six days, he looks around, refuses to talk, is subdued, shy and silent, and not quiet there in his mind.  He instantly throws away the oxygen mask, and lifts the barriers on the bed physically, with great strength, even while the astounded patients tell him not to. He wants to go to the toilet. He doesn’t seem to register what other patients or nurses are telling him. Clearly, he is not mentally stable.

When the doctors come, after a lot of cajoling, he utters his name, much too softly. Where does he live? “Raastar dhaare,” he says, literally ‘on the street’. The doctors have to press their ears near his lips. He is hardly audible.

He is a homeless man with no address who lives on the street, somewhere in Kolkata. He is probably a worker, a loader, a man who lifts heavy weights, or has done hard labour all his life. He listens to the nurse now, puts on his oxygen mask, eats his food, and remains as silent as ever. All the patients treat him with respect, they try to help him, or politely appeal to him to wear his oxygen mask. Some get him water, fix his bed, re-assure him. He looks at them with gratitude, but in total silence. Until he drifts again, back to his long spell of semi-consciousness, accompanied by those screams every now and then.

Across his bed is a professor of chemistry. His mother and father died last week — of Covid. His sister, also an academic, is also suffering with Covid. His face reflects deep sadness. He is calm and stoic. He is mourning.

He loves his cough syrup, till the time other patients put a stop to it, because he is coughing all through the night. The cough syrup gives him a quick siesta and perhaps mental relief at odd hours of the day. He is amiable and soft-spoken, but his oxygen levels are not normalizing.  He and some other patients are not able to sleep in the night; they are breathless, they are coughing endlessly, some have high blood pressure, others have co-morbidities like diabetes.

After a few days, the professor suddenly reaches across to me, a journalist. He speaks haltingly about the tragedy in his family. How he is now trapped by Covid, like his sister. And, yet, he has to cope with this intense tragedy.

“Do you read detective fiction,” the professor asks, suddenly. “Yes,” says the journalist. “I love them. Especially Sherlock Holmes, Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, PD James and Hanning Mankel. Have your read them.” He says, “Have you read the railway detective stories situated in 19th century in England by Keith Miles under the pseudonym Edward Marston. Incredible.? Have you read The Last Train: A Tokyo Mystery by Michael Pronko, located in Japan. Can I email it to you?”

The professor is like all the others here, patients who are struggling with their own critical illness, abject physical weakness, personal and family tragedies, financial crisis, unemployment, fear of the future. Yet, while the virus has ravaged the body, the human spirit is still going strong. And the hospital, somehow, with its all-encompassing health care and humane treatment, gives all of them a sense of courage, reassurance and optimism. No one is insecure or paranoid, there is no fear of death lurking in the air – they know they are in safe hands.

And everyone is forever reaching out, the patients, helping each other, fixing the oxygen meter, sharing water and fruits, pepping up each other with laughter, discussing politics, cinema, elections, advising each other to go it slow, walk one step at a time and breathe deeply when you go to the bathroom, drink a lot of water, have another cup of tea, sharing biscuits, some extra milk, a story here, a story there. There are others who are cleaning the bathroom and asking others to keep it clean.

A patient walks fast, as if he is ‘normal’ now, returning from the toilet; so, another patient quickly warns him: “Slow. Walk slow.”

A worker in the Calcutta Muncipal Corporation, also a patient, likes only Hindi songs from Bollywood of the 1970s. He plays them loud and refuses to lower the volume. Another patient is watching a Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen classic on his mobile, so happy with the movie that he shouts out aloud – “Oh, I can watch this movie a million times!”

A 94-year old patient is as strong as he can be and insists on walking alone with his stick to the toilet. And, yet, a 70-year-old patient, his neighbour, volunteers to walk with him and wait. He can’t eat solid food, so his neighbour organizes milk, bread and boiled eggs for him. His oxygen mask slips off and he does not really care. So, the nurse scolds him, “Dadu, wear your mask. Now.”

There is a man who runs a small tea shop – his little business has been down for months.
There is a retired school teacher ailing for weeks. There are patients who have recovered and don’t need oxygen, but they are still not fully fit, and the doctors are not giving them a discharge slip.

The sanitation staff keep the place spic and span. They wipe the floors several times, clean the bedpans, help the patients with diapers, collect the garbage, and not once can you hear a grumble. They do their work with remarkable efficiency. Other hospital workers arrive with tea and biscuits twice, and three meals a day: bread, eggs, bananas, apples, fish, rich, chapattis, curd. The meals are delicious and wholesome.

Indeed, these workers too are ‘Frontline Corona Warriors’ who are risking their lives, like the doctors and nurses, day after day – with a smile on their lips. Many patients are now friends with the workers, sharing chit-chats, joking, asking for extra tea and biscuits.

A thin, young man tells another patient not to throw stuff on the ground. Keep the place clean, he tells him. The patient doesn’t mind. “Yes, you are right.”

The young man keeps quiet for days. “What do you do? I ask. He is reluctant. “I am a poor man,” he says. “There has been no earning since the lockdown.”

He runs a small pressure cooker servicing shop, which is shut. He is from Purulia and remembers his childhood of utter poverty and backwardness all around. “The adivasis had to walk miles to fetch one mud tumbler of water. Despite the forests around, the area is parched for long spells. Now, this government has changed all that – there is piped water, roads, public transport, schools, hostels for girls. I still remember the flutes played by the adivasis when I was a child. I can never forget their lilting melody!”

When he was discharged, hail and hearty, he did not have even one rupee in his pocket. But he was a happy man. A neighbour had volunteered to pick him up, though the hospital would provide a free ambulance for patients to drop them home after they were discharged.

The virus is terrible – it ravages the lungs first, and then the organs. Some patients have recovered, literally from the edge. It took a patient 27 days in the hospital to fully recover –but the doctors were adamant that he will only be discharged after he is totally fit.

“When I came here I was like a curled-up banana—totally unconscious, my body ravaged. They gave me life-saving medicines, including highly expensive drugs, they took care of me day and night, they saved me,” said a patient.

“Gods and goddesses are not in the temple, mosque or church. They are here. Look at the manner they are risking their own lives to save us,” said another patient.

All the patients are on oxygen – which runs 24 hours. There has never been a moment of crisis in terms of oxygen supply, or 24 hours medical and health care (and food/drinking water), including the supply of expensive and inaccessible drugs, even during the peak of the second surge with an overwhelming rush of patients.

The nurses are mostly young, equipped with their PPE and masks, which is suffocating and hot, as one nurse said, working 24 hours non-stop in daily shifts, stretched to their limits, with total dedication and commitment, tired and weary, but with not one word ever spoken in anger, irritation and despair. They would take care of each patient with meticulous detail and diligence, giving them medicines three or four times a day, checking oxygen levels, pulse rates, ECG etc, monitoring the most critical patients with special care, while reassuring them again and again, fixing their blankets, their masks, their oxygen machines.

Indeed, they would feed some patients with their own hands, or make them eat food with such warmth and persuasion, that the entire ward felt a wave of gratitude for their relentless and unconditional dedication. The nurses would be up all night in their cabin, and with the crack of dawn the nurses in a new shift would arrive –bringing cheer and hope in the ward of Covid patients. One day a nurse went from bed to bed with an injection, so, some elderly patients said, “Dhonyobad.” (Thank you.) “Don’t say Dhonyobad,” she said. “Instead, give me Aashirwaad. (Blessings)”

The doctors, mostly young, would come on the dot, move from bed to bed with their case histories, take extra care of critical patients and would be always calm, responsive, accessible and reassuring. All queries and doubts were answered. Not one patient would be discharged without the person being totally cured. Every patient had his oxygen levels, blood pressure and pulse measured several times in the day.

One patient was unruly, rude and refused to cooperate, not taking medicines given by the nurses, refusing to wear the oxygen mask, creating a ruckus, and wanting to go home immediately. The young doctors would appeal to him with patience and politeness, explaining to him the danger of leaving the hospital, and how grossly expensive it will be for him to be treated in a private hospital or at home with oxygen cylinders and expensive medicines.  He would be adamant, but the young doctors would hold his hand and appeal to his good sense – “Stay back, please!” And he did, finally, stay back.

Amidst the infinite shadow of distress, dying and death, surrounded by the deadly infectious disease and Covid patients 24 hours, these ‘Frontline Corona Warriors’ – mostly young doctors and nurses, stretched to their professional, physical and emotional limits, many of them away from the comfort of their families and homes for weeks, risked their lives every day and every moment, without a moment of hesitation or doubt. They were truly the great harbingers of hope in a totally hopeless situation – the stoic symbols of life against death, at the Beleghata ID hospital in Kolkata. This journalist saw them upfront for days in a Covid ward as a patient in early May.

Indeed, there is this unimaginable humanism, compassion, warmth and care, combined with amazing dedication, commitment to their occupation, and professional efficiency, which marked the highly organized and streamlined health care system at the sprawling Beleghata ID Hospital, with its totally free medical and health care. It has an inbuilt, inherent and ingrained mechanism which not only treats all patients with absolute equality and dignity but is an incredible example of authentic health care for ordinary people.  It is something rare and precious in a country like India – the synthesis of professional brilliance and specialization, and amazing compassion and humanity.

This was yet again best exemplified when a young doctor and nurse came for inspection at around midnight. They saw the homeless man, without a mask, sleeping. He had not touched his food. So, the nurse went up to him, and said, “Dadu, Dadu, wake up. Eat your food. You have not taken your medicines.”

And the young doctor, repeated, slowly massaging the old man’s head with his fingers, “Dadu, Dadu, get up, eat, take your medicines.”

Amit Sengupta is Executive Editor, Hardnews and a columnist, currently based in Kolkata

Courtesy:  COVID RESPONSE WATCH

The post One Day in a Ward in Kolkatta battling Covid-19 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

During the peak of the second surge of the deadly killer virus in summer this year, parts of urban India were trapped in daily despair —  amidst a non-stop spiral of dying, death and desperation. The mighty Indian State led by a ‘powerful’ Hindutva icon had literally withered away, and the rich and the poor were on their own, left to their destiny as it were, as the shadow of stark sadness stalked the emptiness of the urban landscape in lockdown.

The circumstances were truly horrifying: a senior Delhi-based journalist, with an oxygen cylinder at home, would seek a bed in at least 50 private and government hospitals, but to no avail. Finally, he would get a bed with no oxygen in a cricket stadium without doctors or nurses, and only volunteers with tea and biscuits. As his oxygen cylinder started depleting, his wife had to rush to organize a cylinder – and carry it to the stadium – since there were no ambulances around and the private ambulances anyway charged a packet.

There were professors of elite colleges in Delhi, their entire family stricken with the disease, driving their own cars, from one hospital to another, unable to get a bed or oxygen cylinder. Certain medicines and oxygen cylinders moved into the black market quickly at huge rates. Hundreds of ordinary folks waited on pavements outside the hospitals, with no luck. Social media was full of desperate calls for help, medicine, beds, oxygen. Known and unknown, friends and relatives – they were all dying, or waiting for a stroke of hope. It was a deathly chaos all around and there was no miracle waiting to happen.

While parking lots, parks and footpaths were turned into crematoriums in certain locations, or the skyline became black with the smoke of the burning bodies elsewhere, certain governments like in UP erected make-shift barriers outside the cremation sites to block journalists from reporting the relentless funeral processions. There would be endless queues outside crematoriums and graveyards for a funeral or burial, while hundreds of dead bodies were found floating in the Ganga, or, buried with a saffron landmark on the sandy shores of the river in UP.

Patients in the Hindi heartland, and in Maharashtra and Gujarat, literally, were gasping for breath. And, in Gujarat, they fudged the numbers of the dead; but the newspaper pages were full of obituaries.

Not so in West Bengal. The Covid situation was much better managed here, even at its peak, even when all the hospitals were full and patients were waiting outside the Emergency ward in Kolkata’s government hospitals. The ‘safe homes’ were full, but they were not critical patients. There was a scramble for beds and private hospitals had their share of profit, undoubtedly.  Private ambulances charged huge amounts to transport Covid patients.

However, the government hospitals, with totally free medical and health care, like the sprawling Bangur and Beleghata ID hospitals, were superbly managed, doctors, nurses and frontline health workers stretched their limits 24X7, and patients from across the class spectrum were treated with great efficiency, equal dignity and care. The state’s Swasthya Sathi health insurance scheme, launched in 2016, provides basic health cover for secondary and tertiary care up to Rs. 5 lakh per annum per family.  In December 2020 the scheme was extended scheme to cover the entire population of the state.

West Bengal also has the maximum number of hospital beds and ventilators in the public sector in India. As per a recent study, ‘COVID-19 in India: State-wise estimates of current hospital beds, intensive care unit (ICU) beds and ventilators’, which used National Sample Survey and National Health Profile data, Bengal has 78,566 beds and 1,964 ventilators, in government hospitals  – the highest in the country.

Thanks to all this investment in healthcare infrastructure, even in the most difficult phases, the crisis did not reach the state of abysmal failure and chaos as in Delhi, and, other northern Indian cities, where the health infrastructure basically collapsed.

In the state-of-the-art Beleghata ID Hospital, for instance, known now as one of the best and most specialized Covid hospital in India, there was a huge rush and beds were not easy to get either in the general ward or in the ICU during the early phase of May when the second surge peaked in Kolkata. However, there was no scarcity of oxygen or important drugs at any stage during the second surge, and medicine and food was free for patients admitted in the hospital, with patients under constant supervision in the wards.

Outside the Emergency section of the hospital, many patients waited for a bed all through the day. Even in the night, as ambulances rushed to the hospital with patients gasping for breath, the rush was not overwhelming – though the hospital was almost always full and beds were not easy to get. Doctors and nurses would rush out of the Emergency to measure the oxygen levels of patients wanting to be admitted. A senior doctor wrote down a full prescription for a patient regretting that there was no bed available, he should take this medicine, stay at home, and come back in the morning. And, yet, there never was a huge queue outside the Emergency; the rate of infections had shot up, but the situation never really became impossible.

In March and April this year, just before the second wave of Covid hit West Bengal, the vast countryside had seemed totally devoid of the fear of the epidemic, as this reporter discovered while covering the assembly elections. From the high profile constituency of Nandigram in East Midnapore, to Thakurbari and Bongaon in North 24 Paraganas, to the famous Phurpura Sharif sufi shrine in the Hooghly district, Covid seemed to have disappeared from the countryside, even as the second wave ravaged other parts of India. Thousands were attending election rallies. No one wore masks, well, almost no one, in the rallies, on the streets, or in market places. Most rallies had no physical distancing and no masks – the prime minister celebrated one such huge BJP rally near Asansol in the last phase of the elections in April.

In rural areas in Bengal, the markets were open, daily wagers were looking for work, local trains were full of passengers returning from Kolkata. The ‘shared autos’ were fully occupied — no one wearing masks. The Howrah and Sealdah railway stations in Kolkata were packed with people. Bow Bazaar, the crowded retail market in Kolkata, had thousands coming in and going out.

Covid restrictions were enforced for the first time in the state by the Election Commission after the results of the elections were announced on May 2. Despite the perception that a new ‘Bengal strain’ has emerged, as the virus mutated, and that every second person in Kolkata was testing positive, there was no panic in the air. Due to the fear of Covid, the Trinamool Congress had asked the Election Commission (EC) to hold the last phase of the elections in one phase in April. The EC refused.

Even before the election results were announced, Mamata Banerjee made a series of ‘official announcements’: that the entire administrative and health machinery be in full alert, the fight against Covid was her first priority, oxygen had been procured from the industry, all hospitals were fully prepared, and several safe homes and back-up temporary hospitals had been created.

Meanwhile, free vaccination for those above 45 stopped due to the unavailability of vaccines. Thousands of citizens were waiting for their second dose, as in the sprawling state-of-the-art Bangur Hospital in South Kolkata, run by the state government. There was an air of uncertainty all around.

Then the second wave arrived.  The number of cases rose very high, there was a scarcity of beds, the private hospitals made a lot of money; and, yet, it was not a mass tragedy as it happened in the Hindi heartland. Nor did the health infrastructure and the administrative machinery collapse, as in many parts of India, with doctors, nurses and health-workers – in full control of the crisis, especially government hospitals, which gave fully free medical treatment to all patients. West Bengal and the city of Kolkata responded with reasonable efficiency and sensitivity to the Covid crisis in the midst of a lockdown and all hospitals in full alert.

Parts of civil society in Bengal responded too with great concern and care. Independent citizens joined in to help. A young IT professional tied up with his friends and the government to provide quick Covid tests during the peak period when it was getting difficult to get  tests done and the results were coming in very late. This team would send a technician in 24 hours to the house of the patient and the results, fully verified and registered in the government website with the Aadhar card number of the patient, would be delivered the next day.

Others, men and women, quickly set up home-made kitchens, delivering food to the patients who were too weak , many of them living alone, The Jadavpur Commune, runs by students and former students, which provided food throughout last year on the streets to vendors, workers, daily wagers, bus drivers, even cops, continued their work, with the food cooked in the special Jadavpur University community kitchen.

Similarly, the Street Hawkers Association, like last year, continued to provide dry rations to people on the streets and in working class areas.  The Bangla Sanskriti Manch provided food, oxygen cylinders, medicines and ambulances even in remote areas, especially in Birbhum.  Meanwhile, the West Bengal Doctors Forum,, a forum for protection of rights of doctors and patients, created an accessible 24 hour telemedicine consultation service. The ‘Red Volunteers’, young and committed activists of the Left, worked across Kolkata and in remote parts of Bengal, using social media and a highly-efficient network to help Covid patients who were seeking out beds, oxygen, medicine, food, counseling.

“We do it for our peace of mind. We are not doing social work or philanthropy. We have to just do it. We can’t sleep peacefully, otherwise. And we do it without any discrimination, whatsoever. We are responding to a huge crisis and human suffering. We just can’t sit at home and watch it all. It is our responsibility,” a Red Volunteer told this reporter.

Amit Sengupta is Executive Editor, Hardnews and a columnist, currently based in Kolkata

Courtesy: Covid Response Watch, Countercurrents.org

The post The Bengal response to Covid appeared first on SabrangIndia.