Freedom

Don’t insult pasta

This is the tenth installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

I have a word of advice for the readers of this column: Do not make fun of pasta. My religious sensibilities will be offended, and I shall compel the government to take action against you.

You see, I belong to a religion called Pastafarianism, and we worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). We follow a religious text called the Loose Canon. If we stay true to its principles, we shall get to Heaven, where there are beer volcanoes and stripper factories. What’s more… wait, why are you snickering? Are you making fun of the FSM? Do you not realise that I am protected by Indian law against being offended?

Section 295 (a) of the Indian Penal Code is on my side: it protects me against “Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” It states: “Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of [citizens of India], [by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise], insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to [three years], or with fine, or with both.”

Section 295 (a), let me inform you with pride in our penal system, is a non-bailable offence. Sure, like other Gods, my FSM is capable of taking care of itself, and may well choke you with its meatballs. On the other hand, why should I not act as its tool, and choke you with mine? (I am speaking metaphorically, of course, as devout people often do.) Pastafarians have been rather tolerant in India so far – not to mention sparse – but members of other religions have used 295 (a) with immense relish.

For example, when the Indian cricket team was touring South Africa, a kind gentlemen had filed a case under 295 (a) against Ravi Shastri. No, it was not incited by his cliché-ridden commentary, which is offensive for other reasons. It was because he said that he enjoyed eating beef, conveniently forgetting the exalted status Cow has in our country: Being his Mother is just one of Her responsibilities.

Just a month ago, a gentleman named Ranjit Parande was arrested by the Mumbai police under 295 (a) for publishing The Santa and Banta Joke Book. I can imagine how offensive the Sikh community must have found it: I shiver with disquiet when I think of pasta cookbooks. And a few days ago, a gentleman named Vishnu Khandelwal, described as “a devout Hindu” by reliable news sources, filed a case under 295 (a) against Arun Nayar and Liz Hurley. His religious sensibilities were offended because the couple did not adhere to all the Hindu customs required at the wedding. Look, forget the wedding: to begin with, Nayar is rich, and I am offended by that alone. On top of that he gets to apply his lips to Hurley’s, and FSM knows where else. Just the thought offends me! Ban sex!

Sorry, I admit I got a bit carried away there. We certainly shouldn’t ban all sex – but if it is found to offend anyone’s religious sensibilities, we should rethink our laissez faire attitude towards it. We must not follow the West in these matters. They are promiscuous, and look what they have ended up with: hip hop!

I know you can argue that India is a free country, and people should be allowed to say what they want. But that is a misconception. Our great leaders, in their infinite wisdom, merely got political freedom for our country. They understood the consequences of allowing personal freedoms, and put many restrictions on it. For example, while Article 19 (1) (a) of the constitution seems to allow you free speech, Article 19 (2) allows limits to it on behalf of concepts such as “public order” and “decency and morality.” These terms are at the discretion of our presumably devout judges, and can be interpreted liberally – we are a liberal nation.

The most widespread religion in our country, of course, is faith in our system of governance. In an earlier column, I had blasphemously dared to criticize our government. A kind reader instantly set me on the correct path by pointing out Section 124 (a) to me: “Sedition: anyone who by words or expression of any kind brings or attempts to bring or provoke a feeling of hatred, contempt or disaffection towards government established by law shall be punished with life imprisonment.” An editor in Surat was arrested last year under this law, and I am grateful that I have been shown the light.

You might now argue that anything one says can offend someone or the other, and if giving offence is a crime, free speech becomes impossible. Yes it does, and I find that delightful: No more cracks about meatballs. You just have to learn to deal with it, though I sincerely hope it does not offend you. That could be a problem.

Mughal entitlement

The Telegraph reports:

[S]he has blue blood running in her veins, no mixes anywhere. Her name is Sultana Begum and she is the great granddaughter-in-law of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Neither the Bengal government nor the Centre has — in her own words — bothered to help her or shown any respect to her bloodline.

Well, why should they? I can’t think of a good reason why our tax money should go towards helping someone purely because she is the heir of a former emperor. Her sense of entitlement is baffling. She is welcome to private charity dispensed willingly, but to demand that the hard-earned money I pay as taxes go to her upkeep is outrageous. Such shamelessness.

On the other hand, if I was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s descendant, I’d want the Kohinoor back. “That’s mah stone,” I’d yell. “Give me mah stone, and mah throne while you’re at it. And where’s the harem? I want an harem. Organise!”

Where your taxes go: 19

Subsidies for pilgrimages. The Times of India reports:

In its determination to protect Haj subsidies, particularly in view of the ongoing elections in UP, Centre has told Supreme Court that it was ready to offer similar support, at state expense, to pilgrimages organised by other communities.

Positing its offer as being in sync with the “secular ideals” of the Constitution, Centre virtually made a policy announcement by agreeing to provide financial assistance to Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains and other religious communities.

This is not secularism. To me, secularism has two implications:

1 A complete separation of state and religion.

2. Every person in this country having the right to follow a religion of their choice, as long as they don’t impose it on others.

The right to follow a religion of your choice, of course, is completely different from a right to having your religion sponsored by other people’s money, which is nothing short of theft. Do remember, after all, that “state expense” comes from my pockets and your bank account and suchlike. Money does not fall from the skies, and even if the government actually printed money to afford these subsidies, inflation would result, which is an indirect form of taxation.

If Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh genuinely believe that pilgrimages deserve to be funded, I recommend that they shell out their own money for the purpose. There is no justification for taking away our hard-earned money and spending it on building votebanks for themselves.

(Link via SMS from little n.

Where your taxes go: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. Also see: 1, 2, 3.

My essays on taxes and government: Your maid funds Unani, A beast called government.)

The Nehru-Gandhi legacy of shame

This is the ninth installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Last week I caught an episode of the charming show, Koffee with Karan, in which Karan Johar was chatting with Shobha De and Vijay Mallya. I enjoy the rapid-fire round on this show, because it reveals much about the celebrity-culture of our times, as well as about our celebrities. One question Johar asked De and Mallya on the show stood out: “Rahul or Priyanka?”

Now, Johar wasn’t asking De and Mallya which of the two Gandhis was better looking or suchlike. He wanted to know who they preferred as a politician. There was an implicit assumption that one of them is certain to be a future prime minister. This has nothing to do with with their political skills or leanings, of which little is known. It is all about their last name, which is the most powerful brand in the biggest market of India: our democracy.

Rahul understandably wants to exploit this, and build the brand: a few days ago, while campaigning in UP, he spoke of how the Babri Masjid would never have been demolished had the Gandhi family been active in politics. It’s natural for Rahul to invoke the Gandhi brand, given the resonance it carries in this country. But it’s also somewhat ironic. Despite their iconic status among our economically illiterate masses, the Nehru-Gandhi family has been nothing but disastrous for our country.

Jawaharlal Nehru was one of our foremost freedom fighters, but the freedom he fought for was restricted to the political domain. Once the British had been ousted, he replaced them with a new oppressor: the Indian government. He distrusted free trade, and once famously told JRD Tata that profit was “a dirty word.” He shackled private enterprise with a license-and-regulation raj and tried to build a command economy where the state was all-powerful. His fatal conceit, to borrow Friedrich Hayek’s phrase, ensured that India limped into the modern age while other Asian countries, once behind us, leaped ahead.

One can be charitable and say that the well-intentioned Nehru was a creature of his times. It is hard to give his daughter similar benefit of the doubt. Indira Gandhi not only took Nehru’s policies forward at a time when it should have been obvious that they weren’t working, she systematically began to strip away the little economic freedom that existed in the country. In colleges it would make good material for a course titled “How To Savage An Economy 101.”

She nationalised all our big banks. She stopped foreign exchange from kick-starting the country’s development, and thus creating employment and productive growth, with the Foreign Exchange Regulation act in 1973. The Urban Land Ceiling Act of 1976 distorted land markets, thus raising land prices and aggravating the problem of slums in cities.  The Industrial Disputes act (1976 and 1982) distorted labour markets and acted as a disincentive to industrial expansion. And so on and on.

With our natural strengths, India should have dominated labour-intensive manufacture and become a manufacturing superpower decades before we started doing well in services, but Jawarharlal and Indira never let that happen. The consequences of Indira’s policies look dry in economic terms, but by perpetuating poverty and shackling growth, they unquestionably had an impact on millions of lives.

Indira attacked more than economic freedom, of course. The emergency was a period of shame for our country, and yet, quite what you’d expect from a leader who took ruling India as a birthright. Her son, Sanjay, had authoritarian instincts even more pernicious than hers, but we were thankfully spared his rule. Rajiv Gandhi, when he took over, seemed a good man, if an inexperienced one. But can naïvete – he was in his 40s during his prime ministership – serve as a suffiicient excuse for, say, Shah Bano, or the foolish intervention in Sri Lanka?

Sonia Gandhi, while she had the character to refuse the prime ministership, also has all the wrong ideas. Her doubts about foreign investment and her support for well-intentioned but short-sighted programs such as the Rural Employment Guarantee Act demonstrate that the lessons of the past haven’t been learnt, and that the communists in the UPA aren’t the only forces holding back India’s progress.

It would be unfair to hold this shameful legacy against Rahul Gandhi. Even if political leadership comes to him as inheritance, he may turn out to be his own man, and recompense for the sins of his forefathers. But here’s what worries me: the best we can do, in our elite drawing rooms watching elite TV shows reading elite papers like Mint, is hope that he turns out well. Of his coming to power, there is no doubt at all. Isn’t that scary?

“Momma, momma, he called me Donkey”

Like babies we are, seriously. Something offends us, and off we run to mommy demanding that punishment be handed out.

First there was the matter of the anthem and the flag. And now, more news keeps flooding in of babies running to momma. First, a gentleman named Vishnu Khandelwal has filed a case against Arun Nayar and Liz Hurley for having a Hindu wedding. He says that they “hurt the sentiments” of Hindus and intended to “malign the spiritual sanctity of Hinduism and Indian mythology.”

Elsewhere, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee has lashed out at Mandira Bedi for “dancing on the ramp wearing a tattoo of Eik Omkar Sikh’s religious symbol on her back [sic].” The secretary of this formidable organisation has apparently said that “the religious sentiments were severely hurt due to her act.”

My sentiments are routinely hurt by watching Bedi make a mockery of cricket, especially when she makes fun of the Duckworth-Lewis system without having the slightest knowledge of how it works, or an alternative to present. I don’t go running to momma, though, because that’s not what adults do. Anything anyone says holds the possibility of offending someone or the other, and the only way to stop all offence would be to stop free speech altogether. (That’s not an unlikely trend: 1, 2.) Even if Momma is drunk on power—hell, especially if momma is drunk on power—we children really should behave.

Damn, I hope you aren’t offended by this post!

Even an anthem’s got feelings

CNN-IBN reports:

Infosys Chief Mentor and Non-Executive Chairman NR Narayana Murthy landed in a mess on Tuesday after it was revealed that he may have unwittingly insulted the national anthem during a function at the company’s Mysore campus on April 8, where President APJ Abdul Kalam also took part.

It seems the anthem got up and walked off in a huff, and later called its friend, the flag, to whine about being insulted. “I hate being insulted like this,” it said. “You and I should emigrate and then, without us, the nation will have nothing to be proud of. Whaddya say?”

“Quite right,” said the flag. “I’m tired of this pole, in fact. You have no idea what nonsense it gets up to.”

Anyway, here’s a heated Ryze discussion on the subject. I think someone should just implant a chip in the brains of all these uber-patriots that plays the anthem 24/7. They’ll have to sleep standing up then.

(CNN-IBN link via email from reader Siddharth Chhikara. Ryze link via email from MadMan.)

Update: It seems that Sachin Tendulkar has committed “a crime under section 2 of the prevention of insult to national honour act of 1971.” He allegedly “cut a cake in the colours of the national flag during the Indian team’s stay in the West Indies last month.”

Do you think our “national honour”, whatever that is, can be endangered by the cutting of a cake? Pah!

The mullahs and Musharraf

Gautam brings my attention, via email, to a story about how radical clerics from Islamabad’s Red Mosque are demanding that a minister be sacked from Pakistan’s government because she dared to hug a foreign man. As it happens a Pakistani journalist who is a friend of mine sent me an email a couple of days ago about this very mosque, in reaction to my piece on General Musharraf, “General Musharraf’s Incentives”. With his permission, and keeping him anonymous for obvious reasons, I reproduce some of it below:

To add further fuel to the theory that it is entirely in [Musharraf’s] interests to prolong this war against terror, this war against extremism, I wonder if you have been following the curious case of the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa in Islamabad?

In short, it is a madrassa illegally occupying government land in the heart of the capital, staffed by thousands of burqa-clad women and run by some hardcore maulvis who are, for all intents and purposes, running a state within a state.

They have Taliban-type aims – they have set up a department of vice and virtue – and recently kidnapped some women claiming they were running a brothel. And then some policemen too. Now they’ve set up a parallel court on their premises, they go around threatening dvd rental stores and take down license plate numbers of female drivers in the capital to harass them for being non-shariah compliant later. All this in the capital. With the President on one side and the PM on the other and all the intelligence agencies nearby.

Basically, the government is not doing anything about it, ostensibly because “they are women and we don’t want to hurt them and we’d rather negotiate with them”. (Balls – that didn’t stop them beating up Asma Jehangir last year when she tried to run a marathon.) The belief is though that it acts as a scary reminder of what the country may lurch towards if the President wasn’t around fighting the forces of extremism and playing saviour.

My friend also pointed me to an article by Masood Hasan in which Hasan describes Pakistan as “a banana republic which has run out of bananas.” Heh.

And also, via email from Quizman, here’s a letter by Hameed Haroon, the publisher of Dawn, about how Musharraf is clamping down on the press. In any case, Musharraf’s shameful behaviour during the Mukhtaran Mai affair should be enough indication of how deeply illiberal he is. He’s masterfully built an image of himself in the West as a moderate moderniser, but that facade is slowly and surely falling apart.

Update (April 12): Nitin Pai writes in to add some nuance:

The mullahs of Lal Masjid are not the same chaps that were long held as bogeys. Leaders of the MMA have not only have had little influence over this business, but they have actually criticised the Lal Masjid brigade for, well, politicising religion. The Lal Masjid brigade has everything to do with Khalid Khawaja-Hamid Gul & Co which are parts of the establishment. Since your post is about Mush using the Mullahs, I thought it is worth pointing this out.

(Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that Mush controls Gul & Co entirely. They may be trying to replace one Mush with another.)

Don’t regulate either ghee or endorsements

This piece first appeared on Rediff.

Indian cricket has many problems, but imagine the following scenario: An investigative committee formed by the BCCI finds out that the reason many Indian players are unfit is pure ghee. On their time off, it seems, many of them eat food cooked in pure ghee, and as a result put on weight and become lethargic. It starts with Virender Sehwag, spreads to Sachin Tendulkar, and soon they all became pure ghee addicts and lost their vigour on the field.

The mandarins at the BCCI come up with an obvious solution: ban pure ghee! Or rather, ban the cricketers from having any food cooked in it, even in the off season. “Our cricketers are losing their focus on cricket because of pure ghee,” they argue. “We can only counter this with strong action.”

It’s obvious what is wrong with the above scenario, isn’t it? If the players are unfit, they should be punished for that alone. If they don’t perform, drop them. They will soon enough do whatever they need to in order to get their place back, including renouncing pure ghee, if that’s what the problem really is. Focus on their fitness and performance alone, and try to regulate no more than that. Pure ghee is just a red herring, a convenient excuse for a system that does not focus enough on pure merit.

So are endorsements. The BCCI has announced that it will henceforth regulate the endorsements of its cricketers. “A player will endorse not more than 3 sponsors or products,” their statement reads. “No Sponsor can contract more than 2 players.” And so on.

The primary logic behind this is that endorsements distract players from their performance on the field. This is a popular view – thus this populist action by the BCCI – but even if it was true, is it any of the board’s business what players do in their free time? The BCCI’s only concern should be how their players perform on the field, which should be the basis of how they treat those players.

It is a common view that cricketers owe their massive endorsement deals to the fact that they play for the BCCI, and thus the BCCI should have the right to control their endorsements. But by that logic, your employer would want control over all your purchases, and your boss could show up at your house at midnight and demand that you change the furniture. If that were to happen to you, would you not ask him to get off your private property?

A player’s image rights belong to him alone, and this is respected in other sports across the world. You will not find Wayne Rooney asking either Manchester United or the English soccer authorities for permission to endorse a product. Sure, Man U and England have a right to demand that Rooney not do so in Man U or England colours, because those are trademarked material. But Rooney belongs to no one but himself.

You could argue that the BCCI, as a private body, has the right to put whatever clauses it wants in its contracts, and the players have a right to walk away if they object. Indeed. But consider that Indian cricketers have nowhere else to sell their wares: as Niranjan Rajadhyaksha pointed out recently (free registration required), the BCCI has a monopsony on the game. It can use this to strong-arm players to agree to just about any terms. That does not mean that those terms are correct.

Apart from systemic reform, Indian cricket also needs attitudinal change at the top. The board must introduce a meritocracy, and evaluate the players on nothing other than performance and attitude. If they simply do this dispassionately, there will be no need to blame either pure ghee or endorsements for what their players do wrong. They should, simply put, treat their players according to how they perform at the office, and not try to influence their behaviour at home.

Comments are open.

Cricket banned as “young boys go astray”

IANS informs us that cricket has been banned in a few villages in Haryana because, in the words of a panchayat head, “[t]his game is making the young boys go astray.”

When will these old fogeys understand that drugs and rock & roll and cricket and sex and so on are all just red herrings. There’s just one thing that makes the youth “go astray.” And that is youth.

That’s both sublime and tragic, but you can’t ban it, can you? Huh?

(Link via email from Lalbadshah.)