Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 4

Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath APRIL 2023

26

cover story / politics

26
The Sangh’s Fixer
How S Gurumurthy lengthened the RSS’s shadow
over industry, politics and the economy
sujatha sivagnanam

S Gurumurthy’s name does not often feature in the limelight, but his 56
impact over the past fifty years is undeniable. He has played a significant
role in shaping politics and economics, particularly under the direction
of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. A quintessential backroom dealer,
Gurumurthy has ensured that the Sangh always has favours to call in from
media barons, business moguls and even political rivals. His path through conflict
the halls of power has led to him being one of Narendra Modi’s most 56 Blurred Lines
trusted economic advisors, even precipitating the government’s disastrous Mizoram’s uncertain efforts to provide sanctuary to Chin
demonetisation decision. His interventions are based on a vision that is
central to the RSS’s core tenets and his own upbringing: establishing Brahmin refugees
influence over political and economic life. angshuman choudhury

APRIL 2023 3
 the lede perspectives

communities
8 Tongue Tied
What pushes Tibetans in India to work for
Chinese companies
tenzing dhamdul
16
communities
10 New Wine in Old Bottles
Lebanon seeks to get back on the wine map government
amid economic crises 16 Alignment Issues
jenny gustafsson India’s approach to the Ukraine crisis might doom its G20 show
sushant singh
communities
12 Out in the Storm politics
How the Philippine government forces its 20 Weak Links
poor to brave each typhoon The present form of Bihar’s grand alliance cannot counter the BJP
laura fornell sagar

books
98

technology
80 The Bangalore
Ideology
How an amoral technocracy
powers Modi’s India
mila t samdub

the bookshelf 96
80
editor’s pick 98

4 THE CARAVAN
 True media needs true allies.

India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever.

We need allies like YO U .

D I G ITAL PLA NS D I G I TAL + P R I N T P L A N S

now
assured
delivery by
registered
post

+ Unlimited access to all stories on The Caravan + Unlimited access to all stories on The Caravan
website (including archives) website (including archives)

+ Home delivery of monthly print issues

D
E

ONLY ONLY
D

ANNUAL ANNUAL
N
E
M

L1600 L2400
M
O
C

at just K4.38/day. at just K4.93/day.

E
R

D2400 D3600

ONLY ONLY
2 YEARS 3 YEARS
at just K3.84/day.
L2800 at just K4.11/day.
L6000
D4800 D9600

ONLY ONLY
3 YEARS ANNUAL
at just K3.42/day.
L3750 OVERSEAS PACKAGE $170
D7200
at just $0.47/day.

ONLY
3 YE AR
Delhi Prakashan Vitran Pvt. Ltd., E-8, Jhandewalan Estate, Rani OVERSEAS PACKAGE $400
Jhansi Marg, New Delhi-110055 at just $0.37/day.

Please Note:
Name:
• It will take 5-7 working days to process your subscription.
• You will receive an email and SMS on your registered e-mail ID
E-mail: and mobile number, respectively. Kindly ensure that you have
entered your primary correspondence.
Mobile No.: • For further information, please contact our subscription
department. Phone (Toll free number) : 1800 103 880. Landline:
011 41398888 (extn: 119/221/264) Mobile/SMS/WhatsApp:
Address: 08588843408. Email: subscription@delhipress.in. You can also
subscribe online at www.delhipress.in.subscribe
• *For Speed Post, kindly pa]EREHHMXMSREPWYQSJƇTIVIHMXMSR
for less XLEROQWERHƇTIVIHMXMSRJSVFeyond 1000
Payment Mode: kms. (For subscription in India only)

Paytm (Transaction ID: )

Cheque/DD (Cheque/DD No.: )

*Favouring DELHI PRAKSHAN VITRAN PVT. LTD payable at par
 editor Anant Nath
executive editor Hartosh Singh Bal
consulting editor Sushant Singh
senior associate editor Puja Sen
books editor Maya Palit
creative director Sukruti Anah Staneley
associate editor Ajachi Chakrabarti
contributors web editor Surabhi Kanga
assistant editors Amrita Singh,
Abhay Regi and Mehak Mahajan
THE LEDE 8 Tenzing Dhamdul is a Tibetan refugee and a research associate at the Foundation for Non- assistant editor (hindi) Vishnu Sharma
Violent Alternatives, a non-profit organisation that studies Tibet. staff writers Sagar, Nileena MS,
10 Jenny Gustafsson is a journalist and writer based in Beirut. She is the co-founder of Switch Aathira Konikkara and Sunil Kashyap
contributing writers Dhirendra K Jha,
Perspective, a storytelling workshop and training project, and Mashallah News, a collaborative Prabhjit Singh, Jatinder Kaur Tur and
online platform on society and culture in West Asia. Nikita Saxena
12 Laura Fornell is a freelance journalist who has reported on a variety of topics, with a special editorial fellow Jessica Jakoinao
interest in social and environmental issues. reporting fellows Sujatha Sivagnanam,
Eram Agha and Tusha Mittal
multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar
PERSPECTIVES 16 Sushant Singh is a consulting editor at The Caravan. multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray
20 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. fact-checker Swetha Kadiyala
social-media and audience editor
REPORTAGE 26 Sujatha Sivagnanam is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. Anandita Chandra
AND ESSAYS 56 Angshuman Choudhury is an associate fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. senior software engineer
Anjaneya Sivan
photo researcher Devadeep Gupta
BOOKS 80 Mila T Samdub is a researcher at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. senior graphic designer
Paramjeet Singh
COVER Illustration by Shagnik Chakraborty junior graphic designer
Shagnik Chakraborty
hindi translator Parijat P
trainee journalist (hindi)
Ankita Chauhan
editorial manager Haripriya KM
contributing editors Deborah Baker,
Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury,
Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume,
Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot,
Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy,
Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth
Subramanian and Salil Tripathi
editorial interns Ishika Chauhan and
Monica Dhanraj
graphic design intern Lamiya Huda
photo intern Ryan Thomas
social-media intern
Sushmita Balakrishnan

editor.thecaravan@delhipress.in

facebook.com/TheCaravanMagazine

subscribe subscription@delhipress.in website www.caravanmagazine.in @thecaravanindia

edited, printed & published by
Paresh Nath on behalf of Delhi Press Patra
Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. E-8, Jhandewalan
Estate, New Delhi - 110055 and
printed at PS PC Press Pvt. Ltd.,
DLF 50, Industrial Area, Faridabad,
Haryana - 121003 and published at
Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd.
E-8 Jhandewalan Estate,
New Delhi - 110055
editorial, advertisement
& publication office
E-8, Jhandewalan Estate,
Rani Jhansi Marg, New Delhi - 110055,
Phone: 41398888, 23529557
email: advertising@delhipressgroup.com
Other Offices
ahmedabad: 31, Ground Floor, Narayan
Chamber, Nehru Bridge Corner, Ashram
Road, Ahmedabad - 380009
bangalore: Flat No. 001, Ravi Kiran
Apartments, No. 12, Plain Street,
Off Infantry Road, Bangalore - 560001
chennai: 14, First Floor, Cison’s Complex,
Montieth Road, Chennai - 600008
Phone: 044 - 28554448
patna: 12, Ashiana Tower,
Exhibition Road, Patna - 800001
mumbai: A 4, Shriram Industrial Estate,
Wadala, Mumbai - 400031
Phone: 022 - 24100844
kolkata: 16 A, Amrita Banerjee Road,
Kalighat, Kolkata - 700026
kochi: G-7, Pioneer Towers, 1, Marine
Drive, Kochi - 682031, Phone: 0484 -
2371537
lucknow: B-G/3, 4, Sapru Marg,
Lucknow - 226001, Phone: 0522 - 4045544
secunderabad: 122, Chenoy Trade
Centre, 116, Park Lane, Secunderabad -
500003 Phone: 040 - 27841596, Mobile:
8688065543
jaipur: Geetanjali Tower, Shop No 114
Opp. Vyas Hospital, Ajmer Road,
Jaipur - 302006, Phone: 0141 - 3296580,
Mobile: 9529020226
bhopal: B-31, Vardhawan, Green Park,
Ashoka Garden, Bhopal - 462023
Title The Caravan is registered with
Govt. of India as trade mark.
ISSN 0971-0639
Rates
inland One copy R200. 75 p. per copy
air surcharge in following areas: Silchar,
Dibrugarh, Agartala, Tezpur, Imphal,
Akaras and Nepal.
international subscription airmail
US $ 75 (12 Issues)
express delivery saarc countries
US $ 140 (12 Issues)
express delivery europe &
south america US $ 219 (12 Issues)
express delivery to the rest of the
world US $ 219 (12 Issues)
subscription should be remitted through
money orders, cheques/ bank drafts drawn
in favour of Delhi Prakashan Vitran Pvt.
Ltd. at E-8, Jhandewalan Estate,
New Delhi - 110055
Copyright notice
© Delhi Press Patra Prakashan Pvt. Ltd.,
New Delhi - 110055. INDIA.
All materials published in this magazine
(including, but not limited to articles,
quotations, extracts, or any parts of the
article, photographs, images, illustrations
also known as the “Content”) are protected
by copyright, and owned by delhi press
patra prakashan pvt. ltd.
You may not modify, publish, transmit,
participate in the transfer or sale of,
reproduce create new works from,
distribute, perform, display, or in any way
exploit, any of the Content in whole or
in part.
This copy is sold on the condition that the
jurisdiction for all disputes concerning sale,
subscription and published matter will be
settled in courts/forums/tribunals at Delhi.
Readers are recommended to make
appropriate enquiries and take appropriate
advice before sending their money,
incurring any expense or entering into
a binding commitment in relation to an
advertisement. The Caravan magazine
shall not be liable to any person for loss
or damage incurred as a result of his/her
accepting or offering to accept an invitation
contained in any advertisement published
in The Caravan.

6 THE CARAVAN
 Thank you for
supporting
The Caravan

Amit Gupta Ruha

Sayali Jaz Gaikwad
Najeeb

The more you can help,

the more we can do
We cannot do this without you. We investigate powerful
people, uncover scams, hold governments to account and
report hard facts on conflicts and crises, all because we are
independent of any outside interests. And since we answer
to nobody but you, our readers, we need your support to
keep our journalism alive.

Contribute here, caravanmagazine.in

THE LEDE
Tongue Tied
What pushes Tibetans in India to work
for Chinese companies / Communities
maciej wojtkowiak / alamy photo

/ tenzing dhamdul China suppressed the 10 March uprising, Tenzin

“After the protest, I must fill this belly, support
my family and pursue my ambitions,” Tenzin, a
Tibetan in exile whom I met in September 2022,
told me. He did not wish to disclose his full name.
He has participated in the protests outside the
above: An assembly Chinese embassy to commemorate Tibetan Upris-
of Tibetan
ing Day, on 10 March, nearly every year. He works
schoolchildren
inside a Tibetan for a Chinese multinational company, as a service
Children’s Village in facilitator, and possesses a skill highly valued in
Himachal Pradesh. India: fluency in Mandarin. Tenzin is just one
To accommodate among many self-contradicting Tibetans in India,
Tibetan escapee who have given in to the allure of working at
children, until they
companies that are either Chinese-owned or do
learnt Tibetan,
TCV middle-school
business with China.
libraries had It is hard to miss the irony of Tibetans in exile
Mandarin books earning a living from a language that forcefully
and magazines. replaced theirs in occupied Tibet. In 1959, after
Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and thousands
of Tibetans sought asylum in India. The Indi-
an government allowed them to set up various
institutions to preserve their culture and way of
life. Several families in occupied Tibet smuggled
their children across the Himalayas in the hope
that their children could live better lives under the
guidance of the Dalai Lama.
While India–China relations have spiralled
downwards, especially on the geopolitical front,
it never seems to impact their high level of trade.
In July 2022, Anupriya Patel, the Indian minister
of state for commerce and industry, informed the
Lok Sabha that imports from China had increased
by almost thirty percent in the past five years.
This trade requires linguistic intermediaries,
fluent in both Hindi and Mandarin, who are also
aware of the etiquettes of both nations. Tibetans

8 THE CARAVAN

came to be seen as perfect candidates
to fill the vacuum. However, studying
the pull factors, without the push, is
half the story—it creates the illusion
of choice, driven solely by economic
considerations.
“Tibetans in India are greatly limited
by their capability because of structural
changes in employment,” Tashi Phunt-
sok, an assistant professor of economics
at the University of Calcutta’s Vidyasa-
gar College, told me. “The legal status
of Tibetan as a foreigner is one of the
primary reasons which has also forced
them to migrate out of their settle-
ments and take up odd jobs. And many
who know Chinese join Chinese MNCs
for their livelihood and survival.” As
non-citizens, Tibetans are not eligible
for government jobs, which pushes
them to pursue employment in the
private sector. There have been some
developments under the 2014 Tibetan
Rehabilitation Policy, but its implemen-
tation has been less than satisfactory.
This predicament is not confined
to India. The killing of 32-year-old
Tsultrim Nomjour Tsang by his Chinese
co-workers at an Asian restaurant in
the French town of Saint-Léonard, on 11
July 2022, is a case in point. “The prob-
lem of young people arriving in France
is that they don’t speak our language
and often have the only solution to work
in Chinese restaurants where they are
not always well treated,” Céline Men-
guy, a press officer for the Tibet office
in Paris, told News in France.
A 2021 report by the Tibetan Action
Institute highlighted the predicament
of the residents of occupied Tibet.
Tibetan children, forcibly separated
from their families, are subjected to a
highly politicised education, primar-
ily in Mandarin, in Chinese boarding
schools. They are compelled to work
as low-level employees because of
systemic conditions that leave them
little means to get by. The report also
warned of the grave impact of the co-
lonial boarding experience on Tibetan
children and their families, including
psychological and emotional trauma,
and the “implications for whole gener-
ations of Tibetans and the long-term
survival of Tibetan identity.”
Tibetan schools in India, on the other
hand, offered Mandarin as a way to
fight fire with fire. As I recall from my
days at the Tibetan Children’s Vil-
lage—an integrated community in exile
for the care and education of orphans
and refugee children from Tibet—in
Bylakuppe in Karnataka, and later at
the TCV in Suja in Himachal Pradesh,
there were refugee children as young
as ten years of age. To accommodate
them until they learnt Tibetan, our
middle-school libraries had Mandarin
books and magazines. After growing
up, they taught Mandarin to those
interested in our school, so it could be
utilised in the future in resolving the
Tibet–China conflict, especially in light
of the Sino-Tibetan dialogue of the ear-
ly 2000s. This dialogue formally ended
in 2012. There have been no major
developments since.
Tibetans have had limited oppor-
tunities to put their linguistic skills
to meaningful use. Not all can be
absorbed within the Central Tibetan
Administration, the government in
exile, based in Dharamshala. Moreover,
India’s New Education Policy, 2020
omitted Mandarin from its list of for-
eign languages offered in schools by the
Central Board of Secondary Education.
This is a counter-intuitive move for
India. The country lacks major infra-
structure to support the language and
only began to seriously teach Mandarin
to its army personnel in the past six
years.
Tibetans like Tenzin, who facilitate
services in Chinese-oriented firms, are
still a tiny minority compared to the In-
dian workforce that occupies high po-
sitions. He appreciated how there was
no real identity-based discrimination,
even from Chinese colleagues. But,
when probed further, he admitted that
“a sense of animosity remains between
us.” A large portion of his anxiety,
perhaps, stems from how people out-
side the industry view his job. Lately,
Tibetans have received bad press due to
their involvement in multi-crore scams
linked to Chinese loan apps and face
suspicion by the police and investiga-
tive authorities.
“The ubiquitous influence of money
is understandable,” Tenzin Thinley, a
political-science student at Methodist
University, in the United States, told
me. “However, it is hard to grapple
APRIL 2023
the lede
“I sleep late at night
after work, thinking
whether my job is doing
more harm than good for
Tibet,” Tenzin said. “But
one thing I am certain of
is that it helps my large
family out financially. I am
conflicted. Yet I try my best
in constantly following the
developments on Tibet.”
ww
with the fact that Tibetans are willing
to work in dubious Chinese firms under
the pretext of their Mandarin skills,” he
continued. “I think it stems from that
asinine thinking that somebody will do
something regarding this, while I go
about my way. It destroys the essence
of our Tibetan struggle.” This is a point
in tune with the younger generation
of Tibetans, emphasising resistance to
Chinese overtures towards the Tibetan
community and a desire to return to
their homeland.
“I sleep late at night after work,
thinking whether my job is doing more
harm than good for Tibet,” Tenzin said.
“But one thing I am certain of is that it
helps my large family out financially.
I am conflicted. Yet I try my best in
constantly following the developments
on Tibet.”
“Tibetans working under Chinese
companies have an underlying motiva-
tion to create personal capital that they
could not with normal jobs,” Phagpa
Tsering Labrang, a former security
minister in the CTA, told me. “Howev-
er, they fail to comprehend the optics of
employment under the Chinese. Since
a majority of Tibetans working under
the Chinese are straight from Tibet, it
is as if you escape Chinese rule to work
under the Chinese.”
Tenzin could not partake in the
protests held in March this year, owing
to work commitments. However, as
always, he continues to confront and
debate with Chinese netizens on the Ti-
bet issue. “Tibet is my life,” he said. “I
know Mandarin but I am not Chinese. I
always pray and wish for a Free Tibet—
Bhod Gyalo!” s
9
the lede
New Wine in Old Bottles
Lebanon seeks to get back on the wine map
amid economic crises / Communities
/ jenny gustafsson
“This is when it all happens. The
harvest time is our playground,” Eddie
Chami said, surrounded by vines, as
he stood on a mountain slope in Bousit
village, wearing a T-shirt and a khaki
hat. It was early morning, the best
time to harvest fragile grapes. Further
ahead, a group of men and women were
carefully cutting fruits from vines. “We
won’t take these,” Chami pointed to a
few low-hanging grapes. “We always
leave the small ones for the birds.”
Similar scenes play out across Leb-
anon each fall. It is a small country
but has one of the longest-standing
wine-making traditions in the world.
The Bible describes it as a place of fra-
grant wines. And it was here, as is tra-
ditionally believed, that Jesus turned
water into wine. But with a dwindling
economy, despite their rich culture of
making wine, natural winemakers in
Lebanon face the challenge of existing
perceptions surrounding the country;
one does not think of wine when they
hear its name. The country has, it
seems, been consonant with political
upheaval and disruption, the last in line
being the explosion at the Port of Beirut
in the capital city.
“Lebanon is the first place where
wine was traded, when the Phoeni-
cians had trading posts in the whole
Mediterranean,” Michael Karam, a
wine expert, told me. “The French
were not even in the game then.” After
first emerging in the nearby Caucasus
around 6000 BCE, viniculture took
root in Lebanon. Its fertile Bekaa Valley
possesses a unique micro-climate per-
fect for growing grapes: warm and dry
summers, rainy winters and high alti-
LETTER FROM
LEBANON
10
tudes. “We never have to intervene a lot
in our wines, nature does everything
for us here,” Farah Berrou, a podcaster
on wine based in Beiruit, said.
In a corner of the Bekaa Valley—not
far from the ruins of a spectacular
temple the Romans once built for
their wine god, Bacchus—is Couvent
Rouge, the winery where Chami is a
partner. Surrounding it are vast fields
with vines planted in neat rows. “Some
fifteen years ago, all of this was can-
nabis,” Chami said, as we drove past
the winery in his pickup truck. During
the civil war of 1975–1990, Lebanon
emerged as one of the main producers
of hashish in the world. Much of that
production has continued until today.
“It gives you a quick profit so many are
tempted, especially since the govern-
ment gives zero support to farmers,”
Chami said. “We are trying to intro-
duce wine as an alternative.”
Even many who were not marijua-
na farmers have turned to the wine
business. By the end of the civil war,
the number of wineries in Lebanon was
reportedly just ten. Today, the exact
number is unknown—given the numer-
ous boutique and micro-wineries—but
Berrou estimated there are at least
sixty. Well-established producers like
Chateau Musar and Ksara, who store
their wines in an old monastery, are
being joined by a new generation that
is experimenting with local grapes and
natural methods.
On a mountain top in the coastal
Batroun area, is a minimalist con-
crete building overlooking the hills.
Around 2010, Maher Harb returned to
his parental home here, after years of
working in Saudi Arabia and France,
and studying biodynamic farming. Now
he grows Merwah, one of Lebanon’s
two indigenous grapes. “Sometimes
people say that our local varieties are
uninteresting, but I want to prove them
wrong,” he told me. All his wines are
made in natural ways, without inter-
fering with the fermentation process.
THE CARAVAN
It might be unpredictable, Harb told me,
but he “believes in uncertainty.”
Chami and his partner, Abdullah Richi,
who comes from Syria, are also making
natural wine. Last year, they started
storing wine in clay amphorae, which is
an ancient practice with roots in Georgia.
“Sadly, the only man here who knew how
to make [amphorae] passed away,” Richi
said. “I wish we could get amphorae from
Idlib in Syria, where the craft is still
alive, but the war stops us.”
Interestingly, it was natural wine that
put Lebanon on the wine map for the
first time. Just as the civil war started,
Serge Hochar, the eldest son of a wine-
making family, packed his bags with
wine and went traveling. His charisma,
and the merit of his wine, opened the
eyes of global wine experts to Lebanon’s
wineries. In 1979, the legendary wine
critic Michael Broadbent priced his
Chateau Musar. Five years later, Hochar
became the wine industry’s first ever
“Man of the Year,” awarded by Decanter
magazine. “Dad loved to talk. He would
converse about anything: philosophy, cul-
ture, history,” Gaston Hochar, one of his
three sons, told me. “To him, wine was
part of the human existence.” Chateau
Musar’s office in Beirut was damaged
in the explosion in August 2020. But the
greatest loss for the family had come in
2014, when they lost Serge Hochar in a
swimming accident in Mexico. “We’re
continuing his legacy,” Gaston said. “He
had his own philosophy about wine that
we’re trying to stay true to. He used to
say, ‘I prefer something that is not perfect
but is true.’”
While Chateau Musar was always
the face of Lebanese wine abroad, it
did not represent most of the wine in
the country. Lebanese wineries have
typically made classical wine, often with
French names and flavour profiles. That
is, until recently. “There’s a new interest
in experimentation,” Karam observed.
“People realise that you don’t have to
put grapes in oak barrels to make good
wine.”
 the lede

left: Workers
pick grapes in
the northern
mountains of
Lebanon. Lebanese
winemakers are
trying to get
the country—
where wine and
winemaking have
historical roots—
back on the wine
map even as the
currency has lost
a staggering 98
percent of its value.

At the end of another mountain road, not far
from Harb’s winery, is the Mont d’Almaz mi-
cro-winery. Paulette Saade, one of the owners, sat
on the verandah when I met her in August 2020.
She was visiting Lebanon from Venezuela, where
her ancestors had emigrated. “We wanted to do
something here in my husband’s native village.
Now, we’re making small quantities of wine each
year,” she said. Her nephew, Gilbert Azar, runs the
winery in her absence. They sell their wine in Leb-
anon, but it is becoming harder with the ongoing
economic crisis. The currency has lost a staggering
98 percent of its value, and the inflation is among
the highest in the world. “We buy our flasks from
Belgium and corks from France. Everything must
be paid in dollars. Our lira is worth nothing now,”
Azar told me. “I decided to not do any distribution
at all, only to sell to people coming to the winery.”
All winemakers in the country have been facing
similar issues, including constant electricity cuts.
Diana Salameh, an oenologist who makes wine for
different wineries, said that this caused big prob-
lems. “It is particularly hard during the fermenta-
tion process. If it’s not the right temperature the
flavours of the wine won’t develop the way they
should,” she told me.
jenny gustafsson
“There’s a new interest in
experimentation,” Karam observed.
“People realise that you don’t have
to put grapes in oak barrels to make
good wine.”
ww
These challenges hark back to the civil war,
when Serge sold his wine with stories of picking
shrapnel from the grapes. Lebanese wine, just like
the country, came to be associated with conflict.
“It’s about time we change that. We are more than
that and we make better wine than that,” Salameh,
wearing a silver necklace with a pendant shaped
like a wine bottle, said.
Karam agreed. Any bottle sold in any corner
shop in the country, he said, was of excellent
quality. But production in Lebanon is still relative-
ly small. The country makes less than ten million
bottles per year, Karam said, far behind giants like
France and Italy. Still, Karam puts his trust in the
winemakers. “They tend to do what the Phoeni-
cians did thousands of years ago, go abroad when
things aren’t well at home.” s

APRIL 2023 11
the lede
Out in the Storm
How the Philippine government forces its
poor to brave each typhoon / Communities
/ laura fornell
Teresita Boljoran, now a widowed
mother in her early fifties, has been
cleaning houses since 2010 to support
her family of six. In 2013, the super ty-
phoon Haiyan—locally known as Yolan-
da—destroyed her house on the island
of Malapascua, in Cebu province in the
Philippines. Yolanda was one of the
most powerful typhoons ever recorded
in the country, affecting more than 14
million people and claiming over six
thousand lives. “For a year, we lived in
makeshift tents on the beach until we
were able to rebuild the house thanks
to several [government] aids,” Boljo-
ran told me, in May 2022. Many such
typhoons on Malapascua have forced
her to rebuild her life from scratch.
“Although I always live with the uncer-
tainty of what might happen,” she said,
“I don’t intend to leave here.”
Each year, about twenty severe cy-
clones, which cause torrential rains
and heavy floods, hit the archipelagic
state comprising thousands of islands.
The worst affected are the poorest,
who live in fragile structures on the
coastland and are exposed to extreme
weather conditions. In 2022, five
tropical cyclones made landfall in the
Philippines, triggering floods and land-
slides. Like most years, they resulted in
deaths, property destruction, damage
to agriculture and infrastructure, as
well as displacement of thousands of
people and disruption in their liveli-
hoods.
Every so often, after each disaster,
the term “Filipino resilience” is heard
in the media. While the term originally
just characterised a population that
must pick itself up after each catastro-
phe, it now helps state authorities wash
their hands clean of responsibility in
mitigating losses and making sustaina-
ble urban planning and infrastructure
investments. It implies that Filipinos,
especially the most vulnerable, should
be able to overcome any difficulties on
12
their own. Filipinos are undoubtedly
resilient, as was evident in my inter-
views with them about their losses. But
the romanticisation of this supposed
“resilience” places the burden of each
catastrophe on the poor, further vic-
timising them, instead of on the gov-
ernment.
“My mother-in-law had to go to
work in the United Arab Emirates and
sends us money every month for the
day to day,” Evora Ortilano, a 24-year-
old who briefly lived in Manila as a
domestic worker, said. In October
2020, Typhoon Molave—locally
known as Typhoon Quinta—swept
away the house where she lived with
her husband and his family at the
Lazareto beach on Mindoro Island,
located off the south-western coast
of Luzon. They have not been able to
rebuild it and now live with relatives
in the same neighbourhood. Evora’s
husband has been doing odd jobs, but
the family is entirely dependent on her
mother-in-law.
LETTER FROM
PHILIPPINES
Of the 15 cyclones recorded in the
Philippines in 2021, the last one, Ty-
phoon Rai, was the strongest. Typhoon
Rai—locally known as Super Typhoon
Odette—hit the country in December.
It left seven provinces in ruins over a
period of two days. The typhoon af-
fected nearly 8 million people, leaving
hundreds of thousands of people dis-
placed, homeless and without access to
food and clean water. This was at a time
when Filipinos were already facing the
socioeconomic impact of the COVID-19
pandemic.
Around noon on 16 December 2021,
Odette made its first landfall across
the island of Siargao in south-eastern
THE CARAVAN
Philippines. It destroyed Sanciana Er-
eno’s childhood home. This petite and
determined 70-year-old woman had
seen many typhoons. “As on so many
occasions, we were evacuated before
the imminent arrival of the typhoon
without being able to take anything,”
she recalled, “but this time when we
were able to return, we saw that Odette
had destroyed everything and we had
been left with nothing.” After a week
at the evacuation centre, Ereno moved
in with her sister, who took her in for
three months. Thanks to the money
sent by several of her children who
live and work in Manila, she was able
to rebuild her house, located just a few
meters from the sea, with wood, sheet
metal and plastic. “I always live in fear
of what might happen,” Ereno told me.
“But I don’t want to go live anywhere
else.”
In the Taytay municipality, on the
island of Palawan, the Cortez fami-
ly found themselves homeless after
Odette. Since then, the couple and their
two children, one aged 16 and the other
20, have had to split up between the
homes of several relatives and only see
each other on weekends. “We’re look-
ing forward to getting back together
and raising our house here again,” Ruby
Cortez told me, as she stood next to the
rubble of what was her home for more
than twenty years. “But we haven’t re-
ceived any help and we have no savings,
so we don’t know how long we’ll have
to live apart.”
In the Liloan municipality, on the
island of Leyte, Odette destroyed the
humble neighbourhood of Caducan.
All residents were evacuated to Liloan
National High School, including the
Manlimos, a family of three women.
The Manlimos lived there for two
months until they were able to rebuild
something close to a shack. “The gov-
ernment helped us with some materials
with which we have been able to raise
this minimal structure we have now,
but it’s not enough,” Ruffa Manlimos,

a 31-year-old single mother, told me. “Every time
it rains, we have to put up plastic to protect our-
selves, but we don’t have any more money, so we
will finish it as we can and for the moment we
manage as best we can.” Ruffa and her four-year-
old daughter, Princess, who was traumatised by
the typhoon, live with Marielou, her 59-year-old
mother. Marielou spends her days lying on the
ground unable to move due to a stroke she suffered
four years ago. They hope to finish building the
house before the next typhoon.
On 17 July 2019, Grace Poe, a senator, filed a bill
that echoed the voices raised inside and outside
of Congress, tired of the lack of solutions. The bill
sought to provide for the management, control,
regulation and utilisation of rainwater runoff.
A hearing was held in November 2020 by the
senate’s public-works committee on the flooding
caused by two typhoons through Luzon in the
midst of the pandemic. During this, Poe argued
that, while the increasing frequency and intensity
of typhoons can be primarily attributed to climate
change, the loss of lives and properties was to be
blamed on poorly planned urban developments
without provision for runoff flows and deforesta-
tion in rural areas.
oscar espinosa
the lede
Instead of romanticising the resilience of Fil- below: Teresita
ipinos, Poe said, the “government needs to step Boljoran and her
up and put them out of harm’s way. Filipinos are grandson sit by
their humble
indeed resilient, but there are disasters that can be
house that was
avoided.” Her comments once again highlighted rebuilt after being
how this approach normalised the vicious cycle destroyed by a
of poverty in these vulnerable populations, as super typhoon. Each
they get used to accepting the possibility of losing year, about twenty
everything again year after year. It detracted from severe cyclones
hit the Philippines,
their suffering and brought no relief from the re-
forcing others like
ality they had to face after every disaster. The bill her to start over
has still not been passed. from scratch.
“When we settled in 2004, we had nothing, just
a table that we turned into a bed at night,” Gay
Baliña told me, as her husband, Vicente, smiled
wistfully. Last year, they lost their home, in Suri-
gao City, to Odette. “Now we have to start again
from scratch.” The couple, who are in their late
forties, live literally above the sea, in a settlement
of shacks installed on wooden walkways, with
their seven-year-old daughter, Gayvin. They stay
in a tiny overcrowded room that barely fits a bed,
carrying on as best they can, selling fish and ba-
nanas. “We know it can happen again,” Baliña
said. “We just hope it won’t be as strong as this
one.” s
APRIL 2023 13
The CaravanԝƹɨȈȶǼɰ
ʰɁʍɨljǼʍȢƃɨɁɥȈȶȈɁȶɰ
ƃȶǁƃȶƃȢʰɰȈɰǹɨɁȴ
ƃʍɽȃɁɨȈɽƃɽȈʤljȚɁʍɨȶƃȢȈɰɽɰ
ƺɁʤljɨȈȶǼɥɁȢȈɽȈƺɰӗǼȢɁƹƃȢ
ƃǹǹƃȈɨɰӗȃljƃȢɽȃƺƃɨljӗ
ɨljȢȈǼȈɁȶӗƺʍȢɽʍɨljӗ
ɽljƺȃȶɁȢɁǼʰƃȶǁȴɁɨljӝ

caravanmagazine.in/caravan-columns
PERSPECTIVES
Alignment Issues
India’s approach to the Ukraine crisis
might doom its G20 show / Government
/ sushant singh
The meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Del-
hi, on 1 and 2 March, was deemed a success for
“Brand India.” But it all depends on how we define
success. The first three G20 summits, held in the
wake of the 2008 financial crisis, saw concrete
outcomes: policy and institutional initiatives that
stabilised the global banking system. This was no
longer the case in 2022, with the escalation of the
Russia–Ukraine war. At its Bali summit, the G20
merely issued a joint communique, stating that the
participating leaders had agreed to disagree on
Ukraine—this was seen as an achievement. This
year, with India holding the rotating presidency,
the countries could not even agree on a joint state-
ment. Instead, India issued a “Chair’s Summary
and Outcome Document,” with a footnote stating
that Russia and China did not agree to two para-
graphs.
There was no family photograph of the partici-
pants. Many foreign ministers timed their arrival
to skip the dinner thrown by their host, S Jaishan-
kar, and went on to issue rather trenchant state-
ments about the war. There was more consonance
in the meeting, on 3 March, of the foreign minis-
ters of the Quad countries: Australia, India, Japan
and the United States. This was accompanied by
the Raisina Dialogue, an annual public diplomacy
event of the ministry of external affairs run in
partnership with the private think tank Observer
Research Foundation, between 2 and 4 March.
There was much pomp and show around the Rai-
sina event, including hugs, photo-ops, speeches,
sound bites and, in general, social-media content
for the government officials, ministers, analysts
opposite page: and journalists present. What was noise to the
The meeting of G20 ears of objective observers sounded like music to
foreign ministers
the supporters of the Modi government.
in Delhi, on 1 and 2
March, was deemed In all the events, India has been keen to avoid
a success for “Brand the biggest issue that dominates current geopol-
India.” itics: Ukraine. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
16 THE CARAVAN
opening address to the foreign ministers skipped
any mention of the war, focussing instead on
geoeconomics and the problems of the Global
South, such as food and energy security, disaster
resilience, financial stability, transnational crime,
corruption and terrorism. Stating that this is a
time of “deep global divisions,” in which “multi-
lateralism is in crisis,” he appealed to the foreign
ministers “to focus not on what divides us, but on
what unites us.”
It found no takers, as the G20 was divided
among three distinct blocks: the G7 group of de-
veloped countries, the Russia–China grouping and
a loose cluster of other countries that are friend-
ly with both blocs, including Indonesia, Brazil,
South Africa and India. This was evident from the
February meeting of G20 finance ministers and
central-bank governors, in Bangalore. Modi’s hope
of an “ambitious, inclusive, action-oriented” meet-
ing that “will rise above differences” was blown
to smithereens. When a meeting of ministers and
officials who deal with economic issues failed
on geopolitical fault lines, the Modi government
would have been quite naïve to expect a meeting
of foreign ministers to ignore the current geopolit-
ical turmoil.
Moreover, the questions of declining demand in
Europe and the food and energy insecurity in de-
veloping countries are a direct consequence of the
Ukraine crisis. It is not possible to discuss these
symptoms without talking about the malaise. New
Delhi’s glib formulations of being neutral work
when India absents itself during votes on the crisis
at multilateral fora, because it is only one of the
members. As a leader of the G20, it cannot run the
show while sitting on the fence. The Modi govern-
ment will have to find a more nuanced and princi-
pled position on today’s most pressing geopolitical
issue if it does not want to see the G20 summit in
September—where Modi expects to head a parade
of 20 global leaders in a moment of crowning glory
for the vishwaguru—implode spectacularly in full

courtesy g20 archive
public glare. Merely proclaiming that
today’s is not an era of war, as Modi did
in Uzbekistan in September 2022, is not
going to work anymore.
Modi’s push for greater global influ-
ence and a more prominent leadership
role will be inhibited by deepening di-
visions between the great powers. Even
in its middle-of-the-road approach,
the Modi government now seems to be
tilting towards the West. That is the
impression conveyed by Jaishankar
at the Quad meeting. The Japanese
foreign minister, who had skipped the
G20 meet due to his parliamentary
obligations, flew to Delhi specifically
for the Quad meeting and the joint
public appearance of the four ministers
at the Raisina Dialogue immediately
after. Their joint statement focussed on
APRIL 2023
perspectives
China’s behaviour in the region, even
though the country was not mentioned
by name. For example, it underscored
their “steadfast commitment to sup-
porting a free and open Indo-Pacific,
which is inclusive and resilient.” Even
more important was the salience of
security issues in the joint statement,
especially since India had so far been
insisting on maintaining a purely
17
alignment issues · perspectives
non-security character for the Quad. Unlike the
other three members, India is not a treaty ally and
shares a land border with China. At the Raisina
panel, Jaishankar summed up the discussion
with an emphasis on maritime security. The
Quad statement mentions several steps that will
be taken up within the Quad Maritime Security
Working Group, which will meet in Washington
later this month.
The unanimity and intent went missing when
it came to Ukraine. The Quad statement could
not even call it a war, as the Modi government
was unwilling to go along with such a formula-
tion. Although there were many pious comments
opposing the threat of nuclear weapons and
underscoring the need for a “comprehensive, just
and lasting peace in Ukraine in accordance with
international law,” there was no condemnation
of the Russian invasion. But even this restrained
statement riled up Russia, whose foreign minister,
Sergei Lavrov, criticised the Quad, though he did
not directly target India. He said the West was
pushing a certain agenda and playing one country
against the other.
The diplomatic high of hosting
a summit, with all its attendant
razzle-dazzle and high-pitched
verbosity, may work as a domestic
public-relations campaign for Modi,
heading into next year’s general
election, but it will not meet any
geopolitical aims
ww
The Chinese response was equally sharp. It
said that “state-to-state cooperation needs to be
consistent with the trend of peace and develop-
ment, rather than be about putting up exclusion-
ary blocs.” In his first press conference, the new
Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang said that the
real purpose of the United States’ Indo-Pacif-
ic strategy was “to encircle China” by seeking
to “form exclusive blocs, stir up confrontation
and undermine regional integration”—in effect,
creating “an Asia-Pacific version of NATO.” This
characterisation leaves no doubt about the way
China views India.
Over the past three years, India has been unable
to reverse the loss of control to China over border
areas in Ladakh. Jaishankar’s meeting with Qin
on the side lines of the G20 did not lead to any
breakthrough, as the two sides continue to stick
to their arguments, talking past each other. As the
Modi government has given up its demand for a
restoration of the status quo as it existed before
18 THE CARAVAN
the situation changed in early 2020, Beijing is
content with maintaining the current situation on
the Line of Actual Control, while keeping all the
options open to place New Delhi under greater
pressure in the future. India’s avoidance of the
Russia–India–China trilateral meeting this year
will be of little consequence, especially when it
is scheduled to host both Vladimir Putin and Xi
Jinping, in June, for a Shanghai Cooperation Or-
ganisation summit.
The Modi government’s China policy is not con-
fused. It is weak and concessionary. This timidity,
rationalised by Jaishankar as a consequence of
China being a much bigger economy than India,
remains the weakest link in New Delhi’s bid for
a place at the global high table. A country that is
unable to safeguard its territorial integrity, or even
publicly talk about it, is unlikely to win the confi-
dence of other countries. The West’s courting of
India is solely for its interest in countering China.
Shifting the Quad towards a security agenda may
win the Modi government many plaudits from
Western and pro-US Indian commentators, but it
runs the risk of putting India directly in Beijing’s
crosshairs. Whether or not India wants to take
sides in the emerging cold war between the United
States and China, the perception of it making a
choice will bring a fresh set of challenges.
Addressing two sessions of the Communist Par-
ty of China’s National Congress, in October 2022,
Xi accused the United States of leading a strategy
of “containment,” “encirclement” and “suppres-
sion” of China. The communist regime in Beijing
has often seen India through the prism of another
superpower: the Soviet Union earlier and now, the
United States. China sees India as being a party to
the US policy of containment and encirclement. If
the US narrative of containment is undergirded by
a contest of democracy and authoritarianism, and
the suppression includes moving technology-in-
tensive supply chains to other countries in Asia,
India will find itself posited even more directly
against China.
Even a successful hosting of the G20 summit
will not wish away India’s China challenges. A
failed summit will, however, make the situa-
tion worse. Unless the Ukraine crisis magically
resolves amicably before September, the summit
is doomed for failure. It could render the grouping
as defunct and irrelevant. The diplomatic high of
hosting a summit, with all its attendant raz-
zle-dazzle and high-pitched verbosity, may work
as a domestic public-relations campaign for Modi,
heading into next year’s general election, but it
will not meet any geopolitical aims. This event
may be staged as Modi’s personal accomplishment,
but it is unlikely to be India’s moment of success
and glory. s
 TOP WEB EXCLUSIVES AT
HINDI.CARAVANMAGAZINE.IN

ʈķë˻ Ňð̙ķúŁŘ˲ɫàĵ̙ŏ˥ǔʉ Ⱦŏë˻ ŎëŐ̙åŐ

ŐĺňëȶŎĵńë̙ĵ˲ňëŎ̙ŊŐ ÓŋķëĊňɆńëň̙Ŏ˴ōëŐńðŏ
Óńðń̙Ř˲ċŕȒëŘĸëń̙ř˷ ĵ˦Ŀňðċń̙Ř˲Ř˻ ŕ˷ŇëĊňĵ
Ŏ˦Ɂŏ̙ňņëŐņ

 D      !

Ċĵńňð̙ÓŘŐņëŐ̙řúķð ŌňëŐŘ̙ĵ˲ċŘȫĵë
ŏ˦Ŋð̙Ŏ˴Ŏ˥ĎɆŒŎ̙åŐ ķúńëĶúŐûĵı̙Ř˥Ň̙Œ˲ň˲
äŌðŘð̙ĵ˲Ōðĺ̙ŌŘŊë ŕëŒë̙ĵúÖ̙ňřñ
ĵı̙ńëļð̙Řìŭŏńë

   

ĊņŖëřðň̙ŘŋŐɫŐëȠŒ ĻƽðŘķł˽ Ŏ˴ÓŁëňð̙ĵë

ķë˻ Ňð̙ĵı̙ōĿĵı̙ȠÖ̙ōëŐń ċŕŐúŇ̙ĵŐň˲ŕëŒûĵú
ļúŁ˽ ú̙ŏëƼë ĊňŖëňë̙Ōňëň˲ĵ˲ČŒà
ŘðŊðÔŐ̙ŊŐ̙ÔÖĿð̙Řŕ˵ɲ

   

Ó˻ Ň˲Őð̙Ř˥ŌřɫňŐ̑ǂ ŌðŌðŘð̙ĵı̙Łôȫŏ˦ŎƟ
˴ ð
ņëōúŒĵŐɬķúĕŕņ̙ŊëňŘŐ̐ ʈŎúņð̙ȫŕ˲ȏňʉåŐ̙řŎ
åŐ̙àŎàŎ̙ĵŒŌ˥ķò̙ĵı ōëŐń̙ĵ˲Œúķ
řȶŏë

    

perspectives

Weak Links
The present form of Bihar’s grand alliance
cannot counter the BJP / Politics

/ sagar
“We are just waiting for the Congress,”
Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bi-
har, said at a rally in Purnea district, on
25 February. Kumar, who represents the
Janata Dal (United), was speaking at the
first formal congregation of a new grand
alliance of seven political parties that
have come together to fight the Bharati-
ya Janata Party in Bihar during the 2024
general election. He did not clarify why
they were waiting for the Congress. But,
while the alliance will field only one
candidate in each constituency, crucial
details—such as a seat-sharing agree-
ment, a roadmap and a common mini-
mum programme—remain undecided.
Organised by the JD(U), the rally
was attended by representatives of all
its alliance partners: the Congress, the
Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Hindustan
Awami Morcha, the Communist Party
of India, the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) and the Communist Party
of India (Marxist-Leninist). In their
speeches, the representatives said that

20 THE CARAVAN

a united front was needed to stop the BJP from
destroying the credibility of constitutional insti-
tutions, controlling the media, misusing investi-
gative agencies, supporting oligarchs and causing
unemployment, inflation and social disharmony.
Barring the last three points, resolving these
issues would appeal more to politicians than op-
pressed-caste voters, whose custodians most par-
ties in the grand alliance claim to be. For instance,
ordinary citizens do not have to worry about raids
by central agencies as much as members of the
Congress and the RJD. The speakers also did not
counter the BJP’s caste hegemony or its weaponi-
sation of the Hindu identity—problems that could
hold far more weight for voters.
This is hardly the first time such an alliance has
been forged. In August 2017, the former JD(U)
leader Sharad Yadav appealed to 17 parties to
come together on similar planks to fight the BJP
and save their sanjhi virasat—shared legacy. He
never clearly defined the term but called the Con-
stitution “a mirror” to this legacy. During the 2019
general election, the RJD led a grand alliance in
Bihar. Ahead of polls that year, the RJD leader Te-
jashwi Yadav called for extending the cap on res-
ervations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes
and Other Backward Classes from fifty percent to
ninety percent. But the RJD lost the election and
conveniently forgot about this. An alliance in Ut-
tar Pradesh of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Rash-
triya Lok Dal and the Samajwadi Party also failed,
but it had not campaigned on any Bahujan-specific
agenda.
Opposition leaders had assumed that a unified
front and lofty promises—such as saving the Con-
stitution—would make them win the general elec-
tion. Except for the RJD, all other parties were
highlighting issues such as unemployment and the
economic crisis under the Narendra Modi govern-
pti
ment. But the BJP was easily able to counter these
allegations by doubling down on its nationalist
rhetoric.
The opposition could draw valuable lessons
from its defeats to the BJP, especially in the 2019
general election. The BJP has demonstrated over
the years that merely forging alliances does not
guarantee electoral success. It has shown that
the party aims to win by hook or by crook and, if
all methods fail, its government can always make
shocking announcements that make voters inde-
cisive.
APRIL 2023
perspectives
left: Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav—Bihar’s chief
minister and deputy chief minister, respectively—on the
first day of the budget session of the state assembly,
in Patna, on 27 February 2023. Instead of reaching out
to their traditional voters with radical policies, grand-
alliance partners appear to have removed even residues
of the social-justice agenda from their politics, despite
the JD(U) and RJD being in power in Bihar.
Bihar’s new grand alliance, however, does not
appear to have learnt from the past and seems
unprepared to face the BJP’s machinations. It is
shying away from countering the BJP’s core poli-
tics on religion and caste. Instead of reaching out
to their traditional voters with radical policies,
the alliance partners appear to have removed
even residues of the social-justice agenda from
their politics, despite the JD(U) and RJD being in
power in Bihar. Coupled with strategic issues is
the absence of clear terms and conditions of the
coalition, which makes it even more vulnerable to
be weakened and broken by the BJP.
The ease with which the BJP can do this can be
understood from the grand alliance’s response to
the recent action in a decade-old case that accus-
es the RJD president, Lalu Prasad Yadav, of ex-
changing land in lieu of jobs in the Indian Railway
Catering and Tourism Corporation or IRCTC, be-
tween 2004 and 2009. Days after the JD(U) broke
away from the BJP and formed a government with
the RJD, in August last year, the Central Bureau
of Investigation raided 16 locations in connection
to the case, including the house of the RJD legis-
lator Sunil Singh, who is considered close to Lalu.
Only a fortnight after the February 2023 rally, the
Enforcement Directorate also raided the houses
of Tejashwi—Lalu’s son and the deputy chief min-
ister of Bihar—and his sister Rohini Acharya in
the same case. “There’s a limit to politics that is
defamatory,” Tejashwi told the media. “Since the
government was formed raids have been conduct-
ed, but they have found nothing.”
Contrast this with how other parties have re-
sponded to such raids in recent times. When the
CBI arrested Manish Sisodia, the former educa-
tion minister of Delhi, his Aam Aadmi Party con-
sistently said that Sisodia was only arrested be-
cause the BJP could not stand how successful his
education model had been. Last year, the Enforce-
ment Directorate raided locations linked to an aide
of Hemant Soren, the chief minister of Jharkhand.
Soren responded by approving a 75-percent res-
21
weak links · perspectives
ervation for locals in private jobs and increasing
reservations in government jobs and educational
institutes for SC, ST and OBC communities to 77
percent. He projected the raids as an attack from
the BJP on the social-justice measures being car-
ried out by an Adivasi chief minister.
Being in power in Bihar, Kumar and Tejash-
wi could also have implemented substantive
measures for their traditional voters. Kumar had
previously raised the demand for reservations in
private sector jobs. Implementing this, as well as
the 90-percent reservation for oppressed castes
that Tejashwi had earlier asked for, could be a wa-
tershed moment for the state. But the duo has not
expressed any intention to usher in these changes.
In fact, Kumar and Tejashwi have refrained
from using a big political weapon they possess. In
January, Bihar began conducting a caste-based
census, which has been a longstanding demand
of OBCs, to get reservations proportionate to
their population. Ignoring the value that such a
move can hold for social justice, both Kumar and
Tejashwi have called it an exercise for economic
development. Kumar never speaks of the census
resulting in increased reservations for oppressed
castes. While Tejashwi occasionally mentions this,
he makes it a point to also add that the “survey”
would benefit upper castes as well. This approach
will nullify the political advantage of the census.
Tejashwi’s feeble approach to social-justice
issues could be rooted in an understanding that
he needs upper-caste support. In May 2022, he
apologised to Bhumihars, an upper-caste commu-
nity, for his father’s “mistakes”—Lalu’s legacy of
focussing on oppressed castes and ignoring their
oppressors. Tejashwi pointed out that in the re-
cent election to the legislative council, he gave five
tickets to Bhumihar candidates.
The threat that the BJP will lure Kumar back
into its fold looms over the alliance. When the CBI
conducted its raids last August, the BJP leader
Sushil Modi, a former deputy chief minister of Bi-
har, targeted Kumar’s lieutenant and the JD(U)’s
national president, Lalan Singh. Modi alleged that
Singh had provided the CBI evidence to implicate
Lalu in the case but, disgruntled after he was not
made a union minister in the last cabinet reshuf-
fle, had forced Kumar to break the alliance with
the BJP and tie up with the RJD. He insinuated
that Kumar—who, he claimed, had asked Singh to
share the evidence—was a hypocrite for not speak-
ing up about the allegations against Tejashwi. In
Bihar’s new grand alliance does not
appear to have learnt from the past and seems
unprepared to face the BJP’s machinations.
ww
22 THE CARAVAN
a subsequent media interaction, Modi said that
Kumar was happy about the investigation into the
Yadavs, since it eased the pressure he was facing
from the RJD to make Tejashwi the chief minister.
Kumar has, so far, not taken a stand on the
matter. He has neither condemned the BJP for
misusing investigative agencies nor shown soli-
darity with Tejashwi. “What do I have to say?” he
said about the raids. “Those who are doing it are
doing it, and those on whom it is being done are
already giving answers.” While he did point out
that such raids had happened in 2017 when the
JD(U) and RJD were in alliance as well, he has,
in recent times, also taken stances that agreed
with the BJP. In the first week of March, the me-
dia circulated fake news about Tamils assaulting
migrant labourers from Bihar. While Tejashwi
blamed the BJP for this, Kumar sought an official
response from the Tamil Nadu Police. That same
week, six parties, including the Congress and
RJD, wrote to the prime minister about the mis-
use of government agencies, but the JD(U) was
not part of this group.
The suspicion that Kumar may again join hands
with the BJP becomes stronger if one looks at the
last time he parted ways with the RJD. In July
2017, the CBI raided the Yadavs in another corrup-
tion case, following which Kumar asked Tejashwi,
who was the deputy chief minister at that time as
well, to issue a clarification about the allegations
against him. Kumar also asked the RJD to consid-
er whether to ask Tejashwi to resign in light of the
allegations. RJD leaders resisted these demands,
which led to a split in the grand alliance. Kumar
later insinuated that the RJD had tried to lure leg-
islators from the JD(U).
Kumar repeated a similar allegation against
the BJP in December 2022, claiming that he had
severed ties with the BJP as it was trying to break
the JD(U). He does not seem to have asked Tejash-
wi for any explanation after the recent raids, but
Sushil Modi said in an interview that this may be
due to Kumar’s “compulsion” to remain in power,
since the union home minister, Amit Shah, has
claimed that the BJP will never ally with Kumar
again. However, these statements may just be a
way to pressure him to break off his alliance with
the RJD.
Meanwhile, Lalan Singh has been countering
the BJP aggressively on the matter of the raids. In
September, he called Shah “the mastermind of the
conspiracy” and claimed that the home minister
had raised the alleged IRCTC scam to break the
grand alliance in 2017. “Nitish Kumar got separat-
ed, and it was a mistake,” Singh said. “What hap-
pened to the IRCTC case between 2017 and 2022?
Nothing happened! Because there was nothing in
it.” In another interview, Singh said that the issue
weak links · perspectives
was sent to the CBI for an investigation as far
back as 2008. “The CBI didn’t find anything in its
preliminary enquiry and closed the file,” he said.
“When Mamata Banerjee became India’s railways
minister”—in 2009—“she too sent it for a CBI in-
vestigation. After that also, the CBI shut the mat-
ter by saying it didn’t find any evidence. Now, sud-
denly, when Nitish Kumarji has joined the grand
alliance and the RJD has wholeheartedly accepted
this move, how have they found evidence?” The
BJP’s Bihar unit responded by uploading an old
video of Singh raising questions about Tejashwi’s
involvement in the case. In the face of Kumar’s
silence, the words of even a senior party leader
like Singh mean little.
Meanwhile, there seems to be little progress in
finalising the details of how the alliance plans to
fight the general election. At the February rally,
Akhilesh Singh, the president of the Bihar Pradesh
Congress Committee, asked Kumar to form a co-
ordination committee to establish mutual trust
among workers and decide who will fight from
where. The previous week, Tejashwi said, “If we
have to defeat the BJP and RSS, we must all come
together and prepare a roadmap, prepare a strate-
gy—only then can we fight.” Tejashwi added that
he had argued in different meetings that the re-
gional parties should drive this process, with the
Congress leading the charge in seats where it is
directly contesting against the BJP.
At the national level, however, it is still unclear
what the opposition to the BJP will look like in
2024. It is not known whether Congress or re-
gional parties will lead the alliance. In the second
week of March, 16 parties participated in a meet-
ing called by the Congress president, Mallikarjun
Kharge. Two major regional parties—the Bharat
Rashtra Samiti and the Trinamool Congress—did
not attend the meeting. On 1 March, Tejashwi
and Kharge attended the birthday celebrations of
MK Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu and
leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, but
Kumar was absent. Meanwhile, in January, the
BRS president and chief minister of Telangana, K
Chandrashekar Rao, invited the CPI(M)’s Pinarayi
Vijayan and the AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal—chief
ministers of Kerala and Delhi, respectively—and
the SP president Akhilesh Yadav for a meeting.
Leaders from Bihar’s grand alliance were not
present.
In parallel to its predatory operations, mean-
while, the BJP has continued to promote its ide-
ology. In November, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, a
Brahmin member of parliament from Bihar and a
junior minister at the centre, organised an eight-
day summit that was reportedly supposed to be
attended by Hindu clerics from around the world,
including the chief of the Ram Janmabhoomi
24
Unless the JD(U) and the RJD counter the BJP on
their core ideology, organise and fulfil their voters’
radical demands, simply betting on a unified
opposition will be fruitless.
ww
Nyas, Nritya Gopal Das, as well as five chief minis-
ters. According to Dainik Bhaskar, the summit was
a part of a strategy to appeal to the Bahujan voters
of the JD(U) and RJD. The BJP reportedly cleared
seventeen acres of farmland in Buxar district and
bussed in over a hundred thousand attendees
for the event, at the centre of which was a grand
yajna, a ritual. The sarsanghchalak—supreme lead-
er—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mohan
Bhagwat, inaugurated the summit.
Choubey has projected Buxar as the karma-
bhoomi—workplace—of Ram, and the BJP calls
Sitamarhi the birthplace of Sita. Several places
including Sitamarhi, Buxar and Darbhanga, in
Bihar will be brought under the Ramayana circuit,
a union-government project for religious tourism.
The union government has also assented to build-
ing a road from Ayodhya to Sitamarhi.
Unlike the RJD and the JD(U), the BJP does
not fear losing Bahujan votes while working on its
core ideology of expanding Hindu beliefs among
the masses. Over the past year, the Vishva Hindu
Parishad, the RSS’s religious wing, has organised
several meetings in Bihar’s villages. In these meet-
ings, false ideas that the Hindu Right promotes,
such as an increase in Muslim population and
“love jihad,” are being peddled.
Over the last six months, the JD(U), the RJD
and the Congress—the biggest parties of the alli-
ance—have refrained from effectively countering
the BJP’s main talking points. These include the
construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya, an op-
position to and an alleged change in population—a
reference to an alleged increase in the Muslim
population—which Shah mentioned on his recent
visit to the state. In fact, a promising critique by
RJD leaders of the Hindu identity through verses
of the seventeenth-century epic Ramcharitmanas
was met with internal protests from JD(U) lead-
ers. As a justification for their silence on these
issues, opposition leaders often argue that they do
not want to bat on the BJP’s pitch. And yet, they
often try to promote their Hindu identity. This
argument is only a convenient excuse to pander to
Savarna voters.
In such a scenario, the BJP seems to have an
upper hand in controlling Bihar’s electorate and
its representatives. Unless the JD(U) and the RJD
counter the BJP on their core ideology, organise
and fulfil their voters’ radical demands, simply
betting on a unified opposition will be fruitless. s
THE CARAVAN
 True media needs true allies.

India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever.

We need allies like YOU.

Democracy just cannot survive without a free press. And certainly,

a country like India, which is so diverse, can absolutely not survive
without a free expression of facts and views. And because the
mainstream media is now shutting its mouth, out of greed or out of
fear, the role of magazines like Caravan becomes all-important. It
is very important that all of us should subscribe to magazines like
Caravan, so that they get an independent source of funds and can
continue to be doing completely independent and fearless work.

ARUN SHOURIE, Journalist and Politician

My favourite literary genre is long nonfiction, and no

one does a better job of it than Caravan magazine in
India. I recall that the very best review that I read
about my book The Difficulty of Being Good came as
a very thoughtful, analytical, independent-thinking
article on it. And that’s really the tenure of Caravan,
so go and read Caravan magazine.

GURCHARAN DAS, Author and

Former CEO, Procter & Gamble

I’ve been a reader of The Caravan for several years, and I

think it’s in a position which is very, very important, because
it provides nuanced, detailed stories of issues that are
really going to impact the future of India. I think it’s one of
the very rare publications now that seem quite fearless in
their approach, which is why I respect what it’s doing, and
recommend that more readers join in and share the work that
Caravan is doing.

SHUBHA MUDGAL, Hindustani Classical Vocalist

reportage

THE SANGH’S FIXER

How S Gurumurthy lengthened the RSS’s shadow
over industry, politics and the economy

{ONE}

the country’s most important politicians and
industrialists walked into a brightly lit hall
in Chennai on 18 January 2015. Among them
were the senior ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun
Jaitley, Piyush Goyal, M Venkaiah Naidu and
Ravi Shankar Prasad, and the former deputy
prime minister LK Advani. Also in attendance
were powerful Tamil politicians, including the
heads of three regional outfits. Amit Shah, the
Bharatiya Janata Party president at the time,
used the opportunity to iron out their possible
alliances in the state. The actor Rajnikanth ate
well that day, as did the head of the national
broadcaster. Also walking under the gold-
painted eaves were prominent industrialists:
the heads of Larsen and Toubro, India Cements,
TVS and Amalgamations. They had all reached
the quiet Brahmin-majority locality of Mylapore
in Chennai for the wedding of Malavika,
the daughter of the chartered accountant
Swaminathan Gurumurthy, with the son of
a wealthy Tamil Brahmin businessman. The
newspapers reported it was a simple middle-
class wedding, with “simple … south Indian
vegetarian fare.” Simple, like the accountant
professes to be.
Perhaps the most surprising attendee was Ajit
Doval, India’s national security advisor, who
was chaperoned by Manoj Kumar Sonthalia, the
chairperson of the New Indian Express Group.
Not a single photo from the event ever made it
to the newspapers. Sonthalia personally shooed
away the New Indian Express photographer who
had arrived to cover the nuptials. “That’s how
Guru wanted it to be, simple with no publicity,
and I obliged,” Sonthalia told me. “It was a
family wedding, and I was playing host.”
Nothing about Gurumurthy’s person
suggests such company. I met him five times
during the course of reporting this story, either
at his firm’s modest office or at his spartan
home. He had no airs about him. He spoke
with a slow certainty, carefully enunciating
his words and maintaining a faint smile and
intensely inquisitive eye contact. The tone of
his speech was often more convincing than its
content. He was quick to laugh and profuse in
his modesty.

REPORTAGE / POLITICS
SUJATHA SIVAGNANAM

26 THE CARAVAN
 the times of india group

APRIL 2023
27
reportage
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
Few men have had as oversized an impact on
Indian politics and economics as Gurumurthy.
While his name often misses the limelight,
he has left an expansive shadow over the past
fifty years, shaping industry, politics and the
economy under the directions of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh. Starting as the auditor of the
Indian Express Group, he rose to be its editorial
advisor and was central in the newspaper’s battle
to dethrone former prime ministers Indira and
Rajiv Gandhi. He also led the newspaper’s failed
28 THE CARAVAN
battle against Dhirubhai Ambani’s Reliance
Industries. In the early 1990s, Gurumurthy was
key in cobbling together alliances for the BJP
as well as in coordinating between the RSS,
the BJP and the union government during the
demolition of the Babri Masjid. He was the face of
the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the RSS’s economic
wing, which fought a failing battle against opening
up the economy to foreign interests. He was an
influential voice in building an anti-corruption
campaign that preceded Narendra Modi’s
election as India’s prime minister. Under Modi,
Gurumurthy has perhaps become one of the most
significant voices in determining Indian economic
policy, even precipitating the government’s
disastrous demonetisation decision, in November
2016.
Demonetisation, Gurumurthy told me, was only
the first step in an expansive economic programme
whose vision he shares with the RSS. “You know,
without demonetisation there could have been
no GST,” he said. “Without demonetisation, there
could not have been a Jan Dhan Yojana. Without
demonetisation, there could have been no way
you could have implemented direct payment
transfer.” Each of these policies, and many more,
have Gurumurthy’s firm ideological stamp, as
does the NITI Aayog—the country’s apex public-
policy think tank—that came into existence,
replacing the Planning Commission, after a cabinet
resolution that he helped draft. The vision he has
shaped through these institutions is central to
the RSS’s core tenets and his own upbringing: the
establishment of Brahmin influence over political
and economic life.
Despite his storied past, there is a certain
omertà about him. Over two dozen journalists,
industrialists, politicians and bankers refused to
speak to me when I told them I was working on
a profile. More often than not, they maintained
silence not because of fear but a deep respect
and friendship they said they shared with
Gurumurthy. He seemed to have friends nearly
everywhere I looked, even among leaders of
political parties opposed to Hindu nationalism.
Among his friends were foreign-educated bankers
and businessmen, senior journalists and Delhi
lawyers who speak to reporters about their
favourite restaurants and tailors in London and
Hong Kong.
“They find me mysterious, because I’m nothing
like them,” Gurumurthy told me. “They know I
don’t want their money. So, they trust me.” His
frugal but stubborn manner has made him one of
the RSS’s most effective assets in winning over
business moguls and politicians. He has also had
access to the vast network of the Tamil Brahmin
community in entrepreneurial, political and

bureaucratic circles. “I am important because I
realised the value of not seeking money, the value
of not seeking power,” he said. Only, the latter
seems untrue.
While he unfailingly stressed his own
unimportance, he also routinely name-dropped
his influential friends. Many of the tales he shared
were unverifiable, despite my best efforts. His bios
on his website, as well as those of the institutions
he works at—including the Reserve Bank of India
and the Vivekananda International Foundation—
all have the same paragraph announcing his
importance: “He was rated among 50 most
powerful persons in India in 1990 [Gentleman
magazine]; as the 8th most powerful [Business
Baron magazine 2004]; as the 17th most powerful
[India Today magazine in 2005]; as the 50th most
powerful person [India Today 2015]; as the 25th
most powerful person [India Today 2016] and
as the 30th most powerful person [India Today
2017].” Behind the bio seemed a man who had
always wielded his modesty as a weapon but was
uncertain where that left him after his many
friends and few enemies had all passed.
gurumurthy would have been among the last
generation of Tamil Brahmins who grew up in
rural India. He was born in 1949, in Banampattu,
a village on the outskirts of Vizhupuram, a major
road and rail junction in Tamil Nadu’s South
Arcot district. It was a tough period. “I think,
around 1950, for five–six years we had no rain,”
he told me. His father, an only child, made his
money primarily from rent. “Those who had jobs,
whether it is clerk or teacher, those families faced
no hardship,” Gurumurthy said. “Those who
did not have jobs, they had to sell their land for
anything—a marriage happened, a child was born,
everything. So, that’s how my father had to sell
his land.” He added that his father still had “a very
high personal respect in society.”
When Gurumurthy was about to turn five,
his father died, worsening the family’s already
tottering finances. His mother, a homemaker
who took up a job making papadums, kept the
family afloat. “I used to sit with her to make
small papads,” Gurumurthy said. “She would
The vision he has shaped
through these institutions
is central to the RSS’s
core tenets and his own
upbringing: the establishment
of Brahmin influence over
political and economic life.
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
tell me stories as she made them. I used to lie on previous spread:
her lap and listen, mostly from Ramayana and S Gurumurthy at an
Mahabharata.” Two of Gurumurthy’s brothers left event in Chennai
in January 2020.
for Madras to shore up the family’s income.
While his name
Gurumurthy switched schools twice in his early often misses the
years. When Kaliyaperumal, who lived nearby, limelight, he has
entered the sixth standard, he was surprised to left an expansive
find a boy much younger to him sitting by his shadow over the
side. Gurumurthy had been exceptionally bright past fifty years,
shaping industry,
as a third-standard student, so his teachers
politics and the
had decided to promote him to middle school. economy under the
Kaliyaperumal told me that the two used to directions of the
walk five kilometres to school, a large municipal RSS.
establishment neighbouring the railway station
and named after K Kamaraj, one of the state’s first opposite page:
Under Modi,
non-Brahmin chief ministers.
Gurumurthy has
While Gurumurthy was awaiting his final perhaps become
school results, he met a chartered accountant one of the most
whose name he cannot remember. He was very significant voices in
taken by the man, enough to drop his plans to determining Indian
study engineering and instead aim for a career economic policy,
in commerce at Vivekananda College, run by the even precipitating
the government’s
Ramakrishna Mission. Transitioning from Tamil
disastrous
medium to English, he said, was not hard. “I had demonetisation
lots of encouraging teachers, and some swamijis decision, in
from the Ramakrishna Mission helped me November 2016.
specifically.” Demonetisation
Gurumurthy stayed with his elder brother, was only the
first step in an
who ran a small factory and was an ardent
expansive economic
Congress supporter. In 1968, he joined the Student programme whose
Congress. The party split the following year, with vision he shares
a left-leaning caucus following Indira Gandhi with the RSS.
after her expulsion. Kamaraj was the leader of the
party’s old guard, and the majority of the Tamil
Nadu wing, including Gurumurthy, remained with
his Congress (Organisation). “In Congress circles,
I was a very sought-after worker,” Gurumurthy
told me. In 1972, he said he met Kamaraj in a
closed-door meeting to discuss the future of the
actor MG Ramachandran, who had been expelled
from the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a
party Gurumurthy deeply despised because of its
anti-Brahmin rhetoric.
Soon after college, Gurumurthy wrote the
chartered accountancy exam, securing high ranks
in both the intermediate and final test. His good
performance grew his ambition. He told me that
he received several job offers to be the financial
officer of well-placed companies but made a
habit of tearing to pieces the appointment letters,
because he wanted to start his own practice and
maintain control of his own time. He eventually
joined a Marwari-run chartered accountancy
firm—Gurumurthy rarely ever uses a business’s
name, usually preferring to address it by the caste
of its owners. “I wanted to understand how these
Marwaris function,” he said. “It was one of the
most educating experiences for me.”
APRIL 2023 29
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
That was where he made his first
contacts among the country’s big
industrialists. The firm was the
statutory auditor of the Ruias, a
Madras-based Marwari family that
founded the conglomerate Essar.
“They started their little business
here,” Gurumurthy told me. “From
here, they went to Bombay and made
big money. But they still remain my
close friends.” He wanted to stress
that they were never his formal clients.
Essar is currently stuck in chronic
indebtedness, accompanied by a lack of
transparency. Gurumurthy likely said
this because many have been curious
about which firms he audits and he
prefers not to reveal the identity of
his bigger clients, which reportedly
include the liquor baron Vijay Mallya
and the Chhabria family, both of whom
have faced criminal proceedings
for their business practices. When
asked about these two companies,
Gurumurthy denied auditing their
firms but admitted to advising Mallya
on a demerger and the Chhabrias in a
family dispute. He claimed that it was
a chemical company owned by Mallya
because he, “never took fee from liquor,
cigarette, hotel, non-veg businesses,”
and that the Chhabrias did not pay him
a fee but instead, “helped [with] some
charitable work.”
In 1971, Gurumurthy formally
joined the RSS and became a regular
participant at its shakha—branch—in
Mandaveli, a Brahmin neighbourhood
bordering Mylapore. “Many Congress
people were in RSS, many RSS people
were in Congress,” he said. “In 1971,
the DMK began attacking people who
were Congress sympathisers. We were
all beaten up. Then we decided that
we must have some defensive training.
That’s when I joined.” Gurumurthy
left the Congress in 1975. The RSS is
the only organisation he has been loyal
to since. During the seventies, he also
wrote for several newspapers under
the pseudonym Nachiketas, a reference
to a character from Hindu myth who
gave up material desires to achieve
immortality.
A year and a half into his tenure
with the Marwari firm, Gurumurthy
met Gowri Kanthan, another
chartered accountant, at the Kanchi
30
Kamakoti Peetham, one of the most
influential Brahminical monasteries
in the country. After their very
first conversation, Kanthan asked
Gurumurthy to join his firm. “I was
getting R1,200 before that, which,
in those days, was a huge amount,”
Gurumurthy told me. “He wasn’t
offering as much, just R750. But Gowri
Kanthan told me I could learn more
under him, so I took a cut on my income
and switched to his firm.”
Gurumurthy called Kanthan “one of
the most brilliant minds I have come
across—a person who can mix law
and accounts, which was very strange
combination. Many people did not
know the relationship between those
two then. You see, the analytical mind
of a chartered accountant is actually
needed for law.” Kanthan ran a large
firm, with four partners and seven
accountants. It handled some fairly
large clients, such as Thiru Arooran
Gurumurthy’s takeover
of the Indian Express
account seems to be the
first of many coups he
has pulled against the
many people he claims
are his dear mentors.
Sugars, one of Tamil Nadu’s oldest and
largest producers of sugar and ethanol,
founded by VS Thyagaraja Mudaliar, a
trustee of the famous Tiruvur temple.
It also did regular consultancy for
the Brahmin-founded TVS Motor
Company. Its largest client, however,
was The Indian Express Group, a media
empire spanning the country in seven
languages and read daily by some five
million people, against which Indira
Gandhi had started a crusade shortly
before the Emergency. The group also
included a labyrinth of companies
acquired over the years and controlled
through a trust.
Gurumurthy told me that he was
handed over the Indian Express brief,
in 1974, because nobody else wanted
it. “There were CBI cases, there
were other cases against them and
nobody thought it would survive.”
THE CARAVAN
BG Verghese, the editor of the Indian
Express at the time, wrote that one of
the first cases Gurumurthy handled
concerned a fictitious purchase of
several thousand tonnes of paper from
a company that did not exist, which was
then used to secure bank loans. Though
Ramnath Goenka, the group’s founder,
was acquitted, his son Bhagwan Das
was convicted. At the time, the senior
Goenka was charged with a litany
of crimes, including misusing funds
which belonged to the Tirupati temple,
where he was a trustee—the case was
later dismissed.
Gurumurthy became vital in cleaning
Goenka’s financial tracks. Goenka even
laughed and told him, “Guru who will
commit all these wrongs, and make
you an expert. You must pay me fees
for me to give you these cases.” When
asked point blank if he gained Goenka’s
favour by helping hide his financial
misdemeanours, Gurumurthy wrote
in an email, “All cases against Goenka
had predated my becoming his adviser.
I only helped to fight his cases. During
my tenure as adviser not a single case
of financial misdemeanor or illegality
was filed against Goenka—except the
cases—almost 300—cooked up by the
Rajiv Gandhi regime all of which were
dismissed by courts.”
After being handed the brief,
Gurumurthy studied the group’s
financial and legal troubles. “I made
a thirty-page document, outlining
how Indian Express affairs should
be arranged so that there will be no
company law violations, et cetera,”
he told me. On reading this, Goenka
wanted to meet him but, since he was
in Bombay, asked Bhagwan Das to
do so instead. “BD Goenka asked me
whether I will join Indian Express,”
Gurumurthy said. He declined,
wanting to start his own practice, and
instead offered to serve as an exclusive
consultant for three years. The
Goenkas agreed. Gurumurthy refused
Kanthan’s offer to become a partner in
the firm, claiming that it was “already
a bit overcrowded.” In his emailed
response to a question about whether
Kanthan was comfortable about his
takeover of the Express account,
Gurumurthy wrote, “I never took any
work away from him. He was my guru.

We worked together for a long time—almost 4
years after I set up my practice.”
Gurumurthy’s takeover of the account seems
to be the first of many coups he has pulled
against the many people he claims are his dear
mentors. He first met Ramnath Goenka, in 1975,
at the group’s Madras estate. “His first words
to me were, ‘You look like a college student,’”
Gurumurthy recalled. He agreed, telling Goenka
that this was because he had been underground
hk rajashekhar / the india today group / getty images
for months, fighting the Emergency. “‘You must
understand that I’m an RSS worker,’ I told him.
‘And I want such persons,’ he told me. This is how
we started our relationship.” Goenka was 72 years
old at the time. Gurumurthy was 27. Within a year,
he was advising all the biggest opponents of the
Emergency, including the future prime minister
Morarji Desai, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh leader
CA Deshmukh and the trade unionist George
Fernandes. In a decade, Gurumurthy had risen
from poverty to handling the accounts of the
biggest thorns in Indira Gandhi’s foot.
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
At the time, Goenka was attempting to save above: Mohan
his paper. The Indira Gandhi government had Bhagwat attending
been trying to institute a takeover by appointing an RSS event
in Chennai.
its allies to the group’s board of directors. This
Gurumurthy,
gave Gurumurthy another opportunity to prove like many Tamil
himself to the newspaperman. After initially Brahmins, started
threatening Goenka’s son and daughter-in-law off as a Congress
with arrest, Vidya Charan Shukla, the information supporter but
and broadcasting minister, blocked a tax switched loyalty
to the RSS as
avoidance case against the group from getting
the Dravidian
past a settlement commission. The commission movement became
had raised an objection in the case. The country’s a dominant force in
senior-most lawyers, including Nani Palkhivala, Tamil Nadu.
had told Goenka that the commissioner’s objection
amounted to a rejection.
Gurumurthy told me that, for three months
during this period, he was staying at the Indian
Express guest house in Delhi. There, he spent
a lot of time talking to the Dinamani editor AN
Sivaraman about the legality and constitutionality
of governments being dismissed. This gave him
an idea. “You see, there is a distinction between
APRIL 2023 31
bhawan singh / the india today group / getty images
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
above: Ramnath proroguing a parliament and adjournment of
Goenka, the it,” he said. “A prorogued parliament cannot be
proprietor of the dissolved. Then I drew a parallel from that to our
Indian Express, is
case. That is why the commissioner’s objection has
widely known as a
champion of press to be withdrawn. If the commissioner withdraws
freedom for his the objection, the settlement application comes
fights against Indira alive for consideration.”
and Rajiv Gandhi. When he told Goenka this, the news baron said
What is much less it was a good idea, but somebody had to break it
discussed are his
to Palkhivala, who had already given his final
historically close
links with the RSS. opinion. Gurumurthy told me that Goenka called
the lawyer and said, “Nani, I am sending you a
Vamana avatara”—the dwarf-like Brahmin avatar
of the Hindu god Vishnu. “You listen to him for
my sake.” Palkhivala revised his opinion after
hearing out Gurumurthy, and the application
was revived and finally accepted. Goenka was
delighted with the accountant, who said that the
two soon became inseparable. The news baron
would take Gurumurthy to his biggest political
meetings, “whether it is Jai Prakash Narayan or
Kripalani,” he told me. “I was just in my twenties.
Who will have this kind of opportunity? And I
was introduced as the right-hand man of Ramnath
Goenka, his advisor.”
last november, I visited Gurumurthy’s
hometown. I arrived to find a two-storey home,
32 THE CARAVAN
by far the largest in the agraharam, with a big
hall decked with a swing. It had the high ceiling
of the homes of landed gentry in the movies.
Gurumurthy told me that much of the house was
a recent renovation. Just nearby was a temple
that he had built and continues to manage.
Aazhwaar, the priest there, who was his friend
from school, offered to show me around. He did
not seem embarrassed at all to walk shirtless, his
sacred thread shaking with his steps. He took
me to the temple and, after looking me up and
down, offered, “The temple is open to all.” He
complained that most of the boys he grew up with
had left the agraharam for jobs, never to return.
It was then that I noticed the silence. The
otherwise evident bustle of Vizhupuram seemed
to have ended abruptly at the borders of the
Brahmin colony. Of the 32 houses there, only
eight had people living in them. Many of those
who had moved did so in the second wave of
Tamil Brahmin migration to the cities, as the
Dravidian movement passed strict tenancy
legislations and ensured greater representation
among revenue officials, who were able to crack
down on exploitative landlords in the late 1960s.
“Gurumurthy wanted to stay connected to his
roots and so he renovated the old house a few
years back,” Aazhwaar said.

Like Gurumurthy, many residents
of the agraharam might not have
grown with fabulous wealth but got
opportunities that others further down
the caste pyramid could not dream of.
Priests offering to teach English or being
hired in the anointed halls of religious
establishments that others were barred
from entering—Gurumurthy’s poverty
was a very different one from what a
majority of his countrymen faced. He
seemed to have learnt different lessons
from it, too. “I find two ways of a poor
person reacting,” he told me. “A poor
person with culture will never become
violent, a poor person who lacks culture
will tend to become violent. Those with
culture will work and improve their
life.”
{TWO}
while gurumurthy proved to be a vital
asset for Goenka, he also ensured that
the RSS could always call in favours.
In 1981, S Vedantam, the coordinator
of the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Tamil
Nadu unit and former TVS employee,
came to Gurumurthy with a problem.
He had been visiting Kanyakumari
in southern Tamil Nadu, and told
Gurumurthy that there had been
many conversions to Christianity
in the region. “We need to build ten
schools at least to stop the conversion,”
Gurumurthy recalled him saying.
“For that we need R25 lakh.” In a
series of autobiographical articles in
Thuglak, a satirical Tamil monthly
that Gurumurthy edits, he writes that
he took Vedantam to Goenka, who
referred him to Mahesh Yogi. “Guru,
Mahesh Yogi is caught in a big income
tax case and has been levied a R50 crore
fine,” Goenka told him.
Mahesh Yogi was a godman who
had built an international empire,
with followers including The Beatles.
(He later floated a political party that
was active in 74 different countries
and even won a seat in a Croatian
regional assembly.) He had been under
the scanner of the tax authorities
in 1970, prompting him to move his
organisation’s headquarters to Italy.
But the authorities remained after
him. Gurumurthy writes in Thuglak
that, during this period, Mahesh had
been staying in Goenka’s guest house
in Delhi. According to the financial
information Gurumurthy received,
“from 1967 to 1974, Yogi had collected
donations of R25 crore worth for his
trust in Uttar Pradesh. He was the
managing trustee and he had a few of
his relatives as employees in the trust.”
The R50-crore fine was the government
asking him to return concessions it had
granted to the trust, because family
members are usually not allowed to
have high-paying trusteeships. Goenka
promised Gurumurthy that he could
arrange R25 lakh for the VHP’s schools
in Kanyakumari if Gurumurthy solved
Mahesh’s problem. “Palkhivala himself
said he can’t do anything about it. Why
don’t you give a try?”
After a night of reading through
various Hindu texts, Gurumurthy told
Goenka that “if a person becomes a
sanyasi, the law considers it as civil
death.” He said this could be used to
argue in court that Mahesh had no
legal kin. The income tax department
bought the argument and waived the
fine. Mahesh funded the VHP’s schools
in Kanyakumari, seven of which are
still running, according to Gurumurthy.
In 1985, Vedantam also got the Birlas,
nominally on the other side of the
Emergency battle, to fund a hostel for
Hindu boys.
Gurumurthy’s influence was
recognised within the RSS very early
in his career. In 1975, soon after he
started handling the Indian Express
accounts, and only four years after he
joined the Sangh, Madhukar Deoras,
the sarsanghchalak—the RSS’s supreme
leader—at the time, attended his
wedding. The organisation has invested
little in Gurumurthy. The reward has
been paid many times over, winning
them crucial finance and allies among
captains of industry.
I met Viveck Goenka, Ramnath’s
grandson and current chairman of the
Indian Express group, at his office in
Mumbai. He was courteous and kind.
Over his shoulder was a wall with
several photos of him shaking hands
with Modi. “I first met Gurumurthy
during the Emergency,” he told me.
“Suryanarayan Rao, an RSS leader,
was in hiding in our house inside the
Express building.” At the time, Rao
APRIL 2023
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
Priests offering to
teach English or being
hired in the anointed
halls of religious
establishments that
others were barred
from entering—
Gurumurthy’s poverty
was a very different one
from what a majority of
his countrymen faced.
was the prant pracharak—provincial
leader—of the Sangh in Tamil Nadu.
“He was actually staying in my
bedroom for more than a year, and
RSS workers from across Chennai
would come to meet him, including
Gurumurthy.”
Viveck told me that, soon after this,
Gurumurthy and his grandfather
became inseparable. “They were like
husband and wife at the time, trying
to form the Janata coalition. Half
the time they were together.” The
Emergency had ended as abruptly as it
began. The Indian Express had almost
buckled under the pressure. Near
the end of 1976, Goenka was ready to
make Khushwant Singh, the editor of
the Illustrated Weekly of India and an
unrepentant admirer of the Emergency
and Sanjay Gandhi, the newspaper’s
editor.
On 4 January 1977, after a night of
running through the group’s finances,
Gurumurthy met Goenka at his house
in Madras and told him, “Ramnathji,
we cannot carry on for more than one
month. At this rate, we’ll have to close
down.” Goenka replied, “Don’t worry,
da, something will happen at the end
of this month.” Two weeks later, Indira
Gandhi announced that a general
election would be held in March.
Gurumurthy told me that Goenka was
very close to the network of astrologers
in Delhi. “Guru, in Delhi, politics is run
by astrologers,” he recalled Goenka
telling him. “The astrologer who Indira
Gandhi went to had told her she will
win elections. I just hope she takes his
advice.”
33
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
Indira was routed in the election,
and an uneasy coalition between
communist parties, the Hindu Right
and breakaway Congress factions
took over. Goenka had a major role in
the formation, with Indian Express
journalists such as Arun Shourie even
writing out the speeches of Indira’s
opponents. The unstable coalition
collapsed within three years, and
Indira and her son Rajiv ruled through
most of the 1980s. Goenka was initially
a fan of the younger Gandhi. In a 1985
interview with the US documentary
filmmaker Jack Anderson, he said that
he would die in peace knowing that the
country was in the hands of a young
and honest man. Gurumurthy, who
was sitting behind Anderson, waved
his hands vigorously and mouthed
the words, “Don’t say this.” After the
interview, he told Goenka, “I don’t
know Rajiv Gandhi, but his mother was
definitely not honest, and this fellow
inherited her wealth. I felt you should
not have committed yourself.” Goenka
responded by accusing Gurumurthy
of hating the Nehru-Gandhi family. “I
know how to use that family,” he said.
Gurumurthy recalled having the last
word. “I’m telling you today, you will
be fighting Rajiv Gandhi next year.” He
was proven right.
sometime in the late 1970s,
Gurumurthy told me, Goenka marched
into his office, fuming. “Guru, you tell
me who owns Indian Express,” he said.
“You, sir,” Gurumurthy replied.
“Who owns Times of India?”
“The Jain family, sir.”
“Who owns PTI?”
“You do, sir.”
“No Guru, no to all. They are all
owned by Ambani.” Goenka showed
him a sheaf of Indian Express articles
that read like Reliance propaganda.
“Guru, he is a demon, a behenchod”—
sister-fucker. “We have to investigate
him. We have to destroy him.”
Gurumurthy said that Dhirubhai
Ambani had told Goenka that he
could buy any Express journalist. “But
Goenka knew that I couldn’t be bought,
however much money it was. That’s
why he asked me to be the one to take
down Ambani.” As in every other
instance from Gurumurthy’s stories
34
which I could not independently verify,
the scene had a dramatic edge.
India’s Polyester Wars were in full
swing, with Dhirubhai Ambani’s
company pushing its way to the top
through its vast political connections
and brash street violence. The
company’s writ ran large in Delhi,
reportedly with the help of Ambani’s
close associates Pranab Mukherjee,
who was the union finance minister at
the time, and RK Dhawan, then Indira
Gandhi’s personal secretary. Goenka
was a close ally to Reliance’s rival,
Nusli Wadia, of Bombay Dyeing. They
had been introduced to each other by
CA Deshmukh, the Jana Sangh leader,
and used to have a meal together every
month.
By then, Gurumurthy had risen
further up the Indian Express pecking
order. Goenka had fired Shourie—he
had a habit of firing anyone who grew
too powerful at his newspaper—and he
wanted a trusted lieutenant as editorial
advisor. Gurumurthy said that he told
Goenka, “I don’t want you to officially
“Guru, in Delhi, politics
is run by astrologers,”
Gurumurthy recalls
Goenka telling him.
appoint me editorial advisor. You
call me your advisor, but I don’t want
an official post.” They arranged the
unofficial transfer of power through
an interview with the Illustrated
Weekly of India. Goenka told the
magazine that Gurumurthy was his,
and the newspaper’s, only advisor. The
interview was the magazine’s cover
story, titled “The arm of the Patriarch.”
Wadia had handed Goenka a large
brief of documents pertaining to
various Reliance illegalities. Based on
the documents Wadia shared, between
May and September 1985, Gurumurthy
prepared four volumes in which he
compiled every crime Reliance had
allegedly committed in the preceding
decade. “It was very clear that he had
very little to do with the investigation
against Reliance—the major work was
done by Wadia,” AS Panneerselvan, a
senior journalist who was with Business
THE CARAVAN
World at the time, told me. “The story
was just planted by a corporate rival,
and what Gurumurthy lent was his by-
line.” Several other contemporaries I
spoke to said the same. Viveck Goenka
pointed to Wadia’s overreach. “Nusli
Wadia came into the picture and the
coverage went overboard,” he told me.
“It went on and on for many months,
and people started getting tired.
Nobody would want to read a paper
when half of it was about Ambani.”
However, it is clear that Gurumurthy
collected information from other
sources, too. He told me the anger
that drove his work came from an
assassination attempt. Jamnadas
Moorjani, a Sindhi textile trader, was
the head of the All India Crimpers
Association and led a campaign against
the business practices that Ambani
was profiting from. In February 1986,
a gang of men attacked Moorjani with
long knives. In The Polyester Prince, a
biography of Ambani, the Australian
journalist Hamish McDonald writes
that Moorjani, who barely survived
the attack, passed on information
to Gurumurthy, who “also built up
contacts with bureaucrats, bank
officials and even Reliance employees
who were uneasy about some of the
company’s transactions.” McDonald
claims that Gurumurthy also used
Wadia’s contacts abroad, including
the British solicitors Lee Lane Smith
and the private detective agency
King’s Investigation Bureau, to trace
mysterious shell companies that were
linked to Reliance. (When asked about
this Gurumurthy said, “I never used
Wadia’s contact abroad. Goenka was
very clear that we have not to get too
near Wadia nor keep far away from
him.”)
Gurumurthy’s first article, on
Ambani raising debt by offering
attractive interest rates and then
converting it to cheap equity, appeared
in early 1986. The second article
looked at how the investments by
the overseas shell companies could
quickly deplete the country’s foreign-
exchange reserves. The third article
was about how Reliance “smuggled”
a government-run petrochemical
company with Mukherjee’s help.
Gurumurthy warned that India risked

afp / getty images
having its government “controlled from the
boardrooms of industry.” His next article delved
into how banks were lending to several small
companies, many of which shared addresses with
Reliance offices, with Reliance shares as security.
In three months, Gurumurthy published 12
articles about Reliance. “From R375, the value of
their shares had come down sixty-two rupees, just
because of our work,” he proudly told me.
Many of these practices are similar to the
allegations made by the investment firm
Hindenburg Research about the Adani Group—a
close ally of Modi. However, when I spoke to
him, Gurumurthy seemed dismissive of any
claims of illegalities in relation to the group.
“There is a paradigm difference between our
Reliance Investigation which was pro-bono and
Hindenburg’s which was clearly not,” he said.
“Next my case against Reliance was actually case
against the government because everything was
sanctioned by the government then. Much of what
needed government sanction now does not. The
rules have changed.”
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
in september 1986, Rajiv Gandhi summoned above: A 1999 file
Gurumurthy to Delhi. Gurumurthy told me that photo of the textiles
he waited outside the prime minister’s office for baron, Nusli Wadia.
Several journalists
four days but was never called in. On the fifth day,
contemporary to
he found that Rajiv had left for a summit of the the Indian Express’s
Non-Aligned Movement. Goenka began enquiring crusade against
into the prime minister’s behaviour. They found Reliance have
that Ambani had met Rajiv recently—the Hindi- pointed out that
cinema actor Amitabh Bachchan had reportedly Gurumurthy’s
articles were largely
arranged the meeting. Reliance had applied
based on material
for funding from a foreign firm. “If that was handed to the paper
not approved by the controller of capital issues, by Wadia, who was
Reliance would have gone bust,” Gurumurthy Reliance’s largest
told me. “Ramnath Goenka was damn sure it rival.
would not be sanctioned. He had got an assurance
from the government that it would not. But, on 19
October, it was.”
Goenka suffered a mild stroke that day.
Gurumurthy was arguing a tax case in Vijayawada.
He rushed to Goenka’s bedside. Gurumurthy
said that Goenka told him, “Guru, you were right.
You have to finish Rajiv Gandhi. You are Goenka,
Indian Express is in your hands. I want to die
APRIL 2023 35
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
seeing this country out of the hands of
this family.” Gurumurthy claimed, in a
theatrical fashion, that he swore an oath
to Goenka: Rajiv would be pushed out
of office. He made one request, though.
“I said, ‘I want Arun Shourie. Without
him I cannot do this.’ Arun Shourie
was in Times of India. I went there and
met him. He agreed to join as executive
editor on 1 January 1987.”
That month, India Today later
reported, Gurumurthy visited New
York to “scout around for detective
agencies” that could look into Reliance,
Rajiv Gandhi and their allies. “Several
names were suggested to him,” the
report added, “but Gurumurthy says
he found they were all too expensive
for him.” Goenka knew that, while
Rajiv was a Reliance ally, his finance
minister, VP Singh—who was seen
as tough on corruption—and the
Enforcement Directorate, which
answered to him, were hot on the heels
of Ambani. On returning to Delhi,
Gurumurthy met Bhure Lal, the head of
the ED, and suggested that the agency
hire the US detective agency Fairfax
Group to look into Reliance. Verghese,
Goenka’s biographer, writes that
the news baron assured Lal that the
Indian Express would hire him if the
government dismissed him because of
the investigation, a fact Lal confirmed.
Lal himself had little to say of
Gurumurthy. “He is an honest, humble
and highly intelligent person,” he told
me. “I talk to him occasionally. He is
an intellectual. I would seek his advice
from time to time even back then.”
Many of Reliance’s
practices are similar to
the allegations made
by the investment
firm Hindenburg
Research about the
Adani Group—a close
ally of Modi. However,
Gurumurthy seemed
dismissive of any claims
of illegalities in relation
to the group.
36
The India Today report claimed
that, in November 1986, Michael
Hershman, the president of Fairfax
Group, visited Delhi and met
Gurumurthy, Lal and Wadia. It alleged
that Wadia paid for Hershman’s hotel
room. Wadia denied meeting him or
paying for the stay. A month later, the
Enforcement Directorate officially
hired Fairfax, which was asked to
investigate Reliance on 15 counts.
Gurumurthy told me that he gave
Fairfax additional orders. “We had
given an indirect assignment to them
to investigate Quattrocchi,” he said.
Ottavio Quattrocchi was an Italian
businessman, close to Rajiv and Sonia
Gandhi, whom the CBI later accused
of being the conduit for funds in the
Bofors scam. “On the record, it was
about industrialists,” he told me. “But,
off the record, it was this.” In his
autobiography, Shourie writes that
they zeroed in on Quattrocchi only in
the 1990s, but Gurumurthy claimed
that, as early as 1986, he had pointed
Fairfax towards the businessman.
“Gurumurthy could have known about
Quattrocchi at the time but I certainly
didn’t,” Shourie said. When asked about
this, the chartered accountant said,
“Quattrocchi’s role did not commence
with Bofors. His name had figured in
fertilizer plant deals.” He continued,
“Our hypothesis was Q would lead to
Sonia. I came of know of Bofors pay off
only in early 1987 before my arrest.”
In January 1987, the month Shourie
rejoined the Indian Express, VP Singh
was suddenly ousted from the finance
ministry and shifted to defence.
Gurumurthy was handling another
project for Goenka at the time.
President Zail Singh, who had been
close to Goenka when he was home
minister under Indira Gandhi, was also
unhappy with Rajiv. “Goenka told Zail
Singh, ‘I can’t meet you, but my advisor
will,’” Gurumurthy recalled. “The man
who brought the news from Zail Singh
was Chandraswami, so I went to the
meeting with him.” Chandraswami was
a godman who counted industrialists,
newspaper barons and politicians of
all stripes among his friends, making
him an oversized player in Delhi’s
shifting politics. When they reached
Rashtrapati Bhavan, Zail Singh asked
THE CARAVAN
to speak outside. “He told me that
Rajiv Gandhi had bugged the entire
building,” Gurumurthy said.
On the lawns, Zail Singh told
Gurumurthy that Rajiv had been
undermining him for months. For
months, files had not been sent to
him for approval and no minister had
officially called on him. He asked for
advice on how to proceed. Gurumurthy
told me that he asked the president to
write a letter to Rajiv Gandhi detailing
all this. Zail Singh, he recalled, nodded
and said, “You are going to give me a
copy of it, aren’t you?” Gurumurthy told
me that he wrote the letter, however,
once the Indian Express’s involvement
became public knowledge, its editor, S
Mulgaonkar, took official credit. (KC
Singh, who was deputy secretary to the
president, writes in his autobiography
that he had drafted the letter himself—
“Many claimed later that they drafted
the letter. At best they had probably
added a line or two.”) Gurumurthy
seemed to walk back his claims in
response to my emailed questionnaire.
“I don’t know who is KC Singh. I
need not have to claim any credit for
drafting the letter of the president to
the PM. The draft letter corrected by
Mr Mulagaonkar the then editor of IE
was recovered from my room in the
Indian Express Guest House.” In any
case, the Indian Express published the
letter a day after Zail Singh delivered it
to Rajiv. It accused the prime minister
of unconstitutional behaviour and
misinforming parliament. That same
day, 13 March, Gurumurthy was
arrested.
It was a coordinated raid across the
country. The CBI raided the Express
guest house in Delhi, where Goenka
was staying. Wadia happened to be
there, and the CBI claimed to have
found a blank sheet of paper with the
ED’s letterhead. It also found several
documents being burnt outside, as
part of what Verghese calls a “clean-
up operation.” Gurumurthy’s business
partner A Janakiraman was arrested
in Bombay. Gurumurthy himself was
in Madras, and the CBI arrived shortly
after midnight. “You could not wait till
morning to deliver the good news?”
Gurumurthy recalled asking the officer
who arrested him.

It was only the next morning that he was told
why he had been arrested. The CBI claimed that
Gurumurthy had given Fairfax official government
secrets. As proof, it presented a letter, purportedly
written to Gurumurthy by Fairfax’s vice-president
Gordan McKay, discussing an investigation into
the properties of Amitabh Bachchan and his
politically connected brother Ajitabh. The letter
also mentioned Wadia. It was almost immediately
proven to be a forgery, since it was printed using a
brand only commonly used in India.
In jail, Gurumurthy said, the CBI treated him
well. “We used to interrogate him for hours,
but we knew he didn’t do anything wrong,” an
officer involved in his arrest told me. “It was only
pressure from above that made the CBI arrest
him. He was clean, explained everything clearly,
answered every question we asked.” The officer
told me that one of his superiors, Radhakrishnan
Pillai, raised the issue with the bureau’s director,
arguing that, “whatever the charges against
Gurumurthy might be, it was done for the welfare
of the nation. So, we should be filing a case against
the times of india group
the party who are acting against the welfare of
the country and not the person who exposed
the culprits.” After ten days in CBI custody,
Gurumurthy was released. He was defended in
court by Arun Jaitley and Ram Jethmalani.
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
The Indian Express was also involved with Zail above: Devi Lal
Singh in another major plot. Shourie writes that of the INLD, then
Goenka had sent a letter to Zail Singh, through BJP president Atal
Bihari Vajpayee
the BJP leader Vijaya Raje Scindia, telling him
and Janata Dal
that the newspaper would support him if he leader Mulayam
were to dismiss Rajiv Gandhi. He also sent a Singh Yadav during
dismissal letter that the president simply had a private meeting
to sign. Shourie mentions that, the moment he in Delhi in 1989.
got to know about this, he hurried to Zail Singh Gurumurthy used
his newfound
and asked him not to sign the letter, arguing that
fame, following his
“the new government will never be able to face arrest by the CBI, to
the House. And the move would have revived become a central
Rajiv’s stock.” Gurumurthy characterised the cog in building the
plot as a show of idealism instead. “We wanted opposition alliance
to remove Rajiv Gandhi,” he told me, “but in a to Rajiv Gandhi.
legitimate way.” When asked again about this by
email, Gurumurthy again back-paddled. “It was
Ram Jethmalani who was advising Zail Singh to
dismiss Rajiv. Goenka was against it as he knew
enough politics that that would boomerang,” he
wrote.
Gurumurthy experienced “a huge explosion of
popularity” following his release. “Everyone was
saying the government should apologise to me,”
he said. “In parliament discussions, Rajya Sabha,
people were standing up and saying the man must
be given some high award like the Bharat Ratna.
I was such a private person. Now, even my own
APRIL 2023 37
the sangh’s fixer · reportage

below: Then union friends thought I am a big man.” Soon after he
finance minister left jail, he visited the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham,
Yashwant Sinha where he had met Gowri Kanthan almost two
inaugurating a
decades earlier. The shankaracharya—high priest—
Swadeshi Mela in
Bangalore alongside asked him if he had read a recent edition of The
Gurumurthy, who Hindu. Gurumurthy said he had not, since he had
was the national been in jail at the time. When he read the paper, he
co-convenor of found that “all kinds of rotten things were written
the Swadeshi about me.” He told me that he understood what
Jagran Manch.
the shankaracharya was trying to tell him: fame
Even after accusing
the government would be accompanied by mud-slinging.
of corruption and The BJP informed Gurumurthy that it would
criminality, for often be fielding him in the upcoming Rajya Sabha
siding with the BJP election. He again went to the shankaracharya,
neoliberals rather who asked him if he had read a 1919 speech by MK
than RSS purists, the
Gandhi. At a conference, somebody asked Gandhi
SJM continued to
receive government
if Brahmins can enter politics. Gandhi responded
funding. by saying that Brahmins can be in politics but
they cannot be in electoral politics—that is for the
Kshatriyas. “It struck me as something profound,”
Gurumurthy told me. “Gandhi was a believer
in varna dharma”—Brahminically sanctioned
caste occupations—“and that should mean that
entering electoral politics would be blasphemous.”
Gurumurthy said that this was why he never
entered the electoral fray, deciding instead to
influence politics from outside.
gurumurthy ensured that his newfound fame
did not go to waste, becoming a central cog in
cobbling together the National Front alliance that
would oust Rajiv, in 1989. He already had plenty of
contacts with various regional satraps, including
Advani, the BJP president at the time; the BJP
leader Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the leader of
the opposition in Rajasthan; Chimanbhai Patel,
a former chief minister of Gujarat who, after
being expelled by the Congress, had become a key
supporter of the Janata Party in the state; and Devi
Lal, the chief minister of Haryana. VP Singh had
also resigned from the Congress and become the
de facto face of any potential opposition to Rajiv.
The first major dispute among the coalescing
alliance was what the focus of the anti-Rajiv

38 THE CARAVAN

campaign would be. Gurumurthy
told me that Devi Lal, Lalu Prasad
Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav
were keen on keeping anti-corruption
as the primary plank of the alliance,
but the BJP was more interested in
its campaign for the demolition of
the Babri Masjid. There were other
reasons for the disagreement. “See,
in 1986, when I started the campaign
against the Ambanis, there was a lot
of pressure on the BJP to side with
the Ambanis,” Gurumurthy said. “But
they were maintaining the balance.”
He recalled meeting Advani in May
or June 1986. “I told Advaniji, ‘This
anti-corruption campaign is going to
be a huge problem for the Congress.
He said, ‘I don’t think this anti-
corruption campaign is going to have
such an impact on them.’ He said, ‘I
am struggling. My party is dirty. This
is a very dangerous thing for a leader.’”
(Advani did not respond to questions.)
After the BJP stepped into a key
position in the alliance, Gurumurthy
somehow had to find a way to align
their Ram Janmabhoomi demands with
the anti-corruption planks of the rest of
the opposition. “That was a lot of very
tense moments, each person having a
view and persuading him,” he said.
VP Singh, a critic of the Ram
Janmabhoomi movement, had
announced that he would not join a full
alliance with the BJP and would only
hold indirect seat adjustment talks.
Gurumurthy, however, found a friend
in Devi Lal, who had been introduced
to him through the doctor JK Jain,
another chronic political interloper,
like Chandraswami or Gurumurthy
himself. Jain, a protégé of Jan Sangh-
founder CA Deshmukh, had won fame
by running a film studio that made
films starring opposition leaders,
including Devi Lal, NT Rama Rao, Bal
Thackeray, Subramaniam Swamy, HD
Deve Gowda and Chandrashekhar.
Jain also ran Surya, a magazine, owned
by a close aide to Vijaya Raje Scindia,
which had become the BJP’s vehicle
for spreading salacious gossip about its
opponents.
Gurumurthy convinced Devi Lal
to formally establish the Janata Dal
alliance, alongside Mulayam Singh
pti
and Lalu Prasad Yadav, in Bangalore,
Following the implementation of the Mandal
commission report, the BJP’s largely Brahmin
top brass was pushing to the fore the campaign
to demolish the Babri Masjid. Over the next few
months, Gurumurthy was the key go-between for
the BJP, the VHP and the government.
stealing a march on the dithering VP
Singh. That night, Lal and Gurumurthy
flew to Bombay and spent the night
at Goenka’s penthouse. Goenka gave
Gurumurthy free rein to manage
the nitty-gritty of the alliance and
seat-sharing. “Goenka was only at
thirty–forty percent capacity then,”
Gurumurthy told me.
VP Singh had still not been won over.
On the instructions of the BJP leader
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Gurumurthy
went to meet Singh, along with Jaitley
and the lawyer Raian Karanjawala.
He recalled telling the future prime
minister, “If you lose this election, it
would be a major loss to your prestige.
You could even lose your deposit.” VP
Singh reminded Gurumurthy that, if
they lost, Goenka would lose the Indian
Express, which was already knee-deep
in debt. “We have waited enough,”
Gurumurthy replied. “I will give you
three days’ time. Today is Friday
morning. By Sunday evening, unless
you announce, Ramnath Goenka, Arun
Shourie and Gurumurthy will go on the
front page of the Indian Express and say
you have let down the country. That
will be the end of this movement.”
When they left, Gurumurthy
recalled, Jaitley was upset. “Guru, you
have spoilt the whole thing,” he said.
Gurumurthy argued, “This man cannot
take a decision on his own. We have
every right to push them. We are the
moral fighters. What did they fight? We
fought. With sleepless nights and no
money, we investigated, exposed and
shook Rajiv Gandhi.” VP Singh folded,
and a formal alliance was made.
Gurumurthy said that he also
managed the final seat-sharing
arrangements, holding negotiations
over several days with Vajpayee,
VP Singh, Arun Nehru and Arif
Mohammed Khan, former Congress
leaders who had jumped ship, and
APRIL 2023
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
KN Govindacharya, Advani’s “special
assistant” and a key planner of his Rath
Yatra. “Atalji’s strategy was that we
should get UP decided first and then
we will decide where the BJP is strong,
like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and
Gujarat,” Gurumurthy said, adding that
they made decisions constituency by
constituency. “Govindacharya was an
encyclopaedia—this caste, that caste
is there.” The deal was struck, and
the National Front, a shaky alliance
of the Janata Dal and regional players
with outside support from the BJP and
the Left, came to power. “That is why
Sunday magazine wrote that, more
than all the BJP, it was Gurumurthy
who was responsible for defeating
Rajiv Gandhi,” Gurumurthy said,
laughing uproariously. “Of course,
then it became Gurumurthy is having
mesmeric control over RSS and BJP. All
this campaign went on in newspapers.
Nothing affected me.”
In August 1990, VP Singh passed
what would be one of the most
influential and far-reaching policy
decisions in the history of independent
India: the implementation of the
Mandal commission report, which
ensured affirmative action for Other
Backward Classes in education and
government employment. The Indian
Express became one of the main
platforms criticising the policy, which
challenged upper-caste dominance, and
gave extensive coverage to upper-caste
students protesting against it.
The BJP’s largely Brahmin top brass
was pushing to the fore the campaign to
demolish the Babri Masjid. “I was very,
very intensely associated with the Ram
Janmabhoomi movement—shaping
it, drafting the VHP’s statements and
all,” Gurumurthy told me. “By the late
1980s, the movement had welled up,
and the BJP was in two minds, whether
to get directly into the movement or
39
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
support it from outside. I had a major
role to play there. I said support for the
movement is different, but you have to
say we support the construction of the
temple.”
Over the next few months,
Gurumurthy was the key go-
between for the BJP, the VHP and
the government. In April 1993, the
BJP released a white paper that
claimed that the Chandra Shekhar
government—which came to power
with Congress support, in 1990, after
a split in the Janata Dal—had been
willing to amicably settle the dispute
over the Babri Masjid, but Rajiv Gandhi
had sabotaged any agreement. The
white paper mentioned Gurumurthy
several times. It mentioned, for
instance, a meeting held at Express
tower that was attended by VP Singh,
shortly before he became prime
minister, as well as Deshmukh,
Madhukar Deoras and his successor as
RSS sarsanghchalak, Rajendra Singh,
along with Goenka, Gurumurthy and
Prabhash Joshi, the Indian Express’s
Hindi editor.
In October 1990, the white paper
stated, Gurumurthy had a four-hour
meeting with VP Singh, in which he
asked the prime minister to have the
government acquire the disputed
land and hand it over to a VHP trust.
It mentioned three further meetings
between the two, including one in
which Advani had been present.
The prime minister did not act and
was soon ousted from office. Two
years later, RSS and VHP workers
demolished the Babri Masjid, and
Indian politics changed forever.
{THREE}
as gurumurthy reached his political
zenith, he was muscled out of the
Indian Express. Goenka had taken
seriously ill in 1989 and spent the
next two years in and out of hospital.
Ever since his condition worsened,
there were questions over the group’s
future. (Bhagwan Das, his only son,
had died in 1979.) A draft deed for a
trust to oversee the newspaper was
drawn up, with Deshmukh, Wadia,
Gurumurthy and the TVS chairperson,
Venu Srinivasan, touted as possible
40
trustees. Goenka, however, had second
thoughts. On 18 January 1990, he
announced his grandson Viveck as his
heir apparent, with Wadia, Deshmukh
and Gurumurthy as witnesses.
Gurumurthy’s relationship with
Goenka soon soured.
Gurumurthy blamed Wadia for this.
“Wadia asked me to get some license
for importing parasailing equipment or
something,” he told me. “I said, ‘This
is none of my business. I won’t do it.’
Then he turned against me and he had
become very close to Viveck. They
then coopted Arun Jaitley and all.” He
notched it up to family jealousies, too.
“Goenka was such a towering person.
His level of dependence on me became
a huge responsibility. See, the man has
a vision for the country, for politics, and
he was totally, totally dependent on me.
And so, I also became a target within
the family.” When asked about this,
Viveck said, “It is a matter of record
that I have never gone on the offensive
in, what I believe, is the politics of
individuals in the succession battle of
The Indian Express … to the extent that
Ramnathji sought our involvement,
Mr Gurumurthy and I were, in a way,
fellow travellers, till he wanted us, but,
yes, we chose different paths.” (Wadia
did not respond to questions.)
There is a simpler explanation,
though. Verghese writes that Goenka
did not like anyone else who grew
too influential within the Indian
Express. Goenka distanced himself
from Gurumurthy, he adds, because
the latter had “presumed too much
in usurping his powers and treating
the paper as his own.” A few weeks
after VP Singh’s government fell,
Gurumurthy, who was the newspaper’s
editorial advisor, financial advisor and
legal consultant, wrote to Goenka that
he would no longer tender any advice
In backing Manoj Sonthalia to take over the
Indian Express, Gurumurthy opposed all three
of his biggest benefactors: Ramnath Goenka,
the Kanchi shankaracharya and the RSS. He did
not give a clear reasoning for his choice, but the
Sothalia-run New Indian Express’s editorial line
has now become inseparable from Gurumurthy.
THE CARAVAN
on legal matters. Goenka, in turn,
issued an office order that he alone
would issue editorial directions.
Soon after Goenka’s death, on 5
October 1991, a major dispute over
the future of the newspaper broke out
between Viveck and his cousin Manoj
Kumar Sonthalia. Gurumurthy’s
decision to back Sonthalia was odd.
When Goenka’s health began failing,
he went to the Kanchi shankaracharya
for advice. Sonthalia, Viveck told me,
was the grandson who had shown
most interest in managing the paper.
But the shankaracharya told Goenka
to pick Viveck, who was running an
engineering company at the time.
“When talks were going on,” Viveck
told me, “I had Nusli Wadia, Nanaji
Deshmukh and Venu Srinivasan with
me, but Gurumurthy took Manoj’s
side.” In doing so, Gurumurthy opposed
Goenka, the shankaracharya and
the RSS. He did not give me a clear
reasoning for his choice. When pressed
for a reason he simply wrote, “I did back
Manoj as what was done to him was
wrong,” and added that he helped bring
a settlement between Sonthalia and
Viveck. When the paper finally split,
after a settlement in 1999, Sonthalia’s
New Indian Express Group controlled
the southern operations of the
newspaper, and Gurumurthy became
inseparable from its editorial line.
While the dispute simmered,
Gurumurthy kept himself busy. He was
among the founding members of the
Swadeshi Jagran Manch, led by the
RSS ideologue Dattopant Thengadi, a
Maharashtrian Brahmin. Alongside
the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a labour
union, and the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh,
a farmers’ union—both of which were
also founded by Thengadi—the SJM
completes the troika determining the
RSS’s economic philosophy.
 Gurumurthy heralded the SJM’s fight against
the liberalisation of the Indian economy during
the early 1990s. He conducted a financial
investigation and a protracted political campaign
against the US power giant Enron’s construction
of a large power plant south of Bombay. “It was
a monumental investigation on Enron I did,” he
told me. “At least two months I worked.” The
investigation was largely an endeavour to prove
that Enron had tried to muscle its way into the
Indian energy sector through illegal means and
that it would be charging the Maharashtra State
Electricity Board far more than would be fair.
Three decades later, the study does not hold up to
scrutiny. When pressed, the chartered accountant
again claimed, “Every word of my report came
true.”
Gurumurthy’s report claimed that Enron’s plant
would be far costlier than its contemporaries,
which was only true because it included Enron’s
sanjay sharma / hindustan times
costs from building a jetty and fuel-handling
facilities. It claimed that the plant would produce
more power than Maharashtra required, which
seems almost naïve in retrospect. The report also
claimed that the MSEB would be bankrupted
by buying electricity from the company. The
BJP–Shiv Sena coalition government in the state
eventually sanctioned the Enron plant—with a above: Dattopant
few minor concessions to the protesters—but the Thengadi, the
MSEB has survived. While questions can still founder of the
SJM and Bharatiya
be raised about the tendering process for the
Mazdoor Sangh.
plant—there was no competitive bidding—much of Thengadi’s
Gurumurthy’s work regarding the plant’s financial views, which
feasibility has been proven false. have singularly
But Gurumurthy marked it as a win. “It created shaped the RSS’s
a body of opinion that you cannot develop power economic vision,
are an obscurantist
sector through foreign investment only,” he told
attempt at re-
me. “Enron became an example.” This is a position establishing an
he has maintained before, too. In 1995, he said, idyllic Hindu past
“Nobody respects the weak.” He said that if a and the caste
“third-rate deceptive company” like Enron was system.
shown its place, it would send the message that
India would not allow itself to be “raped.”
After the SJM’s failure to stop the Enron plant,
it switched to largely cultural issues, opposing
beauty contests and Michael Jackson concerts.
But Enron was only the first of several clashes it
had with the BJP. While the BJP had consistently
pushed for some form of economic liberalisation,
1991 put it in a fix. “The Congress took away our
economic platform, and is now taking away our
political base,” an article in the RSS mouthpiece
Organiser complains, adding that “as the economy
opens up it will be exceedingly difficult to keep
APRIL 2023 41
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
below: A garment the middle class away from the Congress.” The
factory employee BJP attempted, at least notionally, to maintain the
in Tirupur. While RSS crusade against foreign companies, with its
Gurumurthy
state government in Delhi famously closing down
celebrates the town
as a symbol of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, in 1995. However,
success of caste its tone quickly changed.
capital, not a week For the 1999 general election, the BJP promised
goes by without a “moratorium on contentious issues,” including
reports of the the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the constitutional
abuse of workers,
status of Kashmir. It also distanced itself from
deaths of migrant
labourers and “swadeshi,” the SJM’s policy of economic
vicious malpractice nationalism, and argued that “the country cannot
in the industry. do without FDI.” The Vajpayee government
also introduced the Insurance Regulatory and
Development Authority Act, which allowed
foreign companies into the insurance sector, a
move consistently opposed by the SJM.
Gurumurthy, a friend of Vajpayee, was the
SJM’s point man in Delhi at the time. He told
me that the finance minister, Yashwant Sinha,
said that he had wanted the bill to place a cap of
49-percent foreign investment in the insurance
42 THE CARAVAN
sector, while a cap of 26 percent would be placed
by government notification. “From that day, you
will be under pressure to take it to 49 percent,”
Gurumurthy recalled telling Sinha, adding that
Vajpayee, who was also in the room, agreed
with him. The cap was placed at 26 percent, a
midpoint between the SJM purists and the BJP’s
neoliberals. Sinha confirmed this event.
Other battles were conclusive losses for
Gurumurthy. In February 2000, the government
completely removed caps on foreign direct
investment in mining, films and pharmaceuticals.
The SJM, under Gurumurthy’s leadership,
accused the Vajpayee government of an “anti-
swadeshi and anti-people agenda.” Thengadi
called Sinha a “criminal.”
While parroting an opposition to the influence
of big capitalists in politics, Gurumurthy
maintained friendly ties with major industrialists.
In 2002 and 2003, for example, he was working
with Rahul and Shishir Bajaj—whose family owns
a major chunk of India’s two-wheeler, insurance,

steel and home appliance industries—
and trying to resolve a family dispute.
He remained a close friend with Rahul
Bajaj despite the dispute persisting for
five more years.
Even after accusing the government
of corruption and criminality, the
SJM continued to receive government
funding from agencies such as the
Council of People’s Action and Rural
Technology. A 2001 article in Outlook
notes that government agencies
gave R1.1 crore to the SJM. The
organisation’s budget increased from
R8.87 lakh, in 1997, to R8 crore, in 2001,
with travel bills alone accounting for
R30 lakh a year. By the early 2000s,
the SJM had essentially become a
high-profile event management group
organising swadeshi trade fairs. In the
decades to come, Gurumurthy himself
would become a vocal supporter of
privatisation and deregulation, at least
when conducted by the BJP.
thengadi’s economic philosophy is
explained in his magnum opus Third
Way, which is largely an obscurantist
attempt at re-establishing an idyllic
Hindu past and the caste system.
Dismissing both communism and
capitalism, while cherry-picking
from history and scripture, the book
argues that political power should be
managed by “deliberative bodies based
on professional representation,” which
respect “small cells of knowledgeable,
experienced, selfless and respected
persons, such as Acharya-Kul”—
learned leaders, a term usually used to
denote Brahmins. In a society where
occupations are largely defined by
caste, Thengadi’s propositions are
merely a call to reinforce this under the
tutelage of a Brahmin leadership.
Gurumurthy has worked towards
the same economic principles, though
he claims to have specific differences
with Thengadi. “Caste in economics is
prosperity,” the chartered accountant
told me, explaining that, in 1992, he
had travelled around the country to
mansi thapliyal / reuters
see how traditional centres of industry
were functioning. “Ludhiana, Batala,
Rajkot—I travelled everywhere,” he
said. “There, I found this caste-based
entrepreneurship was the driving
force of development. I found this
While parroting
an opposition to
the influence of
big capitalists in
politics, Gurumurthy
maintained friendly
ties with major
industrialists.
Ramgadia community, this Patel
community. I mean, they were
amazingly developed.” He explained
that industrialists and traders of the
same caste would lend to each other at
lower interest rates or, often, without
interest at all. Gurumurthy added that
he then contacted P Kanagasabapathi,
a professor of economics—they
had previously worked together
in organising a swadeshi fair in
Coimbatore—to conduct a study on how
caste affects local economies.
Kanagasabapathi is a former vice-
president of the Tamil Nadu BJP.
During the 2019 general election, he
was touted as the party’s candidate
from Coimbatore. Gurumurthy
supported his candidature, but it
was ultimately overruled. When I
met him at the office of the Indian
Economic and Cultural Centre—a small
refurbished apartment with his table
in what must have been a bedroom—
he was soft-spoken and academic. “It
was Gurumurthy who asked me to
do a study on jaatis,” he told me. “As
far as local industries are concerned,
businesses are concerned, communities
have a positive impact. There are
examples everywhere. The Sivakasi
firework industry is mostly owned
by the Nadar community. Magamai,
a collective fund of the Nadar
community, allows for loans to their
community members at lower interest
rates. Communities have always played
a positive role in culture, temples and
businesses.”
Gurumurthy frequently cites
Kanagasabapathi’s research, which was
compiled in a book titled Indian Models
of Economy, Business and Management.
“The whole economic establishment
was floored by this approach,” he told
APRIL 2023
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
me. “A community, when it expands,
the community linkages, the mutual
dependence, the mutual trust, this
is social capital. Even Swaminathan
Anklesaria Aiyer”—a Tamil Brahmin
economist and a consulting editor at
the Economic Times—“wrote after
we did this study that caste is social
capital. That’s how Karur, a small town,
produced two large banks.”
Kanagasabapathi told me that, in
2003, a delegation of moneylenders
from Karur had approached
Gurumurthy for help. “Karur is known
for finance entities, some six hundred
are registered,” he said. “Every entity
will have five to ten partners, and they
lend money to business owners who
know them personally. The RBI had
issued a directive that any finance
entity cannot borrow from more than
twenty people. The Karur people told
us there are people who give them
money and there are borrowers who
borrow money from them without
issue. Why should the government
interfere? We arranged a meeting with
banks, entrepreneurs and finance
entities. We made a report and sent it
to the central government. The issue
was solved.” Gurumurthy added that
Tirupur, a garment-manufacturing hub
where most industries are owned by
the dominant Gounder community, was
the best example of how caste identity
created wealth. He teaches about it
often at SASTRA university where he is
a “distinguished professor.”
The picture Kanagasabapathi and
Gurumurthy painted of Tirupur is
far rosier than reports of the place.
I worked as the Tirupur district
correspondent for the New Indian
Express and later Simplicity—a local
online news portal. While it is true that
the garment manufacturers employed
millions and developed a R35,000-
crore economy, there were frequent
reports of the abuse of workers and
vicious malpractice in the industry.
Tirupur is a town of poorly constructed
rowhouses where generation after
generation of migrant workers stay to
eke out a living at ginning factories
whose cotton dust will send them to an
early grave. The town initially attracted
labour from Dalit communities in the
surrounding region, then Adivasis from
43
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
further afield in Tamil Nadu and now
relies almost exclusively on Bahujan
labourers from north India. The
sumangali system, in which adolescent
girls were contracted to work for three
years to earn a lump sum at the end
of their contract—which often went
towards paying for their weddings—
was commonplace in ginning factories
outside the city. There were reports of
girls being locked into hostels without
being allowed to meet their families.
There were also reports of factories
forcing them to take pills so they
work even during their periods. Child
labour has occasionally been reported
in the town. Worker suicides are
commonplace.
Others too fundamentally disagreed
with the auditor’s thesis. “What
Gurumurthy says is utter bullshit,” a
Tirupur-based factory owner, from
the Gounder community, told me.
“Tirupur’s growth is not just because
of the Gounder community. People
from all communities contributed
towards the growth of the city. Those
like Gurumurthy, without knowing
the ground reality, say anything
they want.” When pushed to answer
specifically about how Tirupur has
treated its workers, Gurumurthy back-
tracked and wrote in an email, “I did
not argue for Tirupur as success story
… My purpose at that time was to build
national confidence which I did.”
after kanagasabapathi helped
organise the swadeshi fair at
Coimbatore, he received a tantalising
offer from Gurumurthy. “You see,
Gurumurthy was very close friends
with Prime Minister Modi even when
he was chief minister of Gujarat,” he
told me, adding that Modi often came
to Gurumurthy for economic advice.
(Gurumurthy denied this, saying he
went to the state only thrice when
Modi was chief minister.) In the early
2000s, Kanagasabapathi said, Modi
wanted help reviving some traditional
industries in the state. “We were
called to Gujarat for the study on kite
industry.”
Kite-making in Gujarat is an
unorganised sector. Manufacturing
is largely conducted at home by a
handful of caste clusters. It represents
44
the sort of cottage industry that,
Thengadi argues, must be preserved.
On the advice of Gurumurthy and
Kanagasabapathi, the Gujarat
government began a cluster
development scheme and attempted
to increase demand by organising kite
festivals in various states. The turnover
of the industry has grown manifold
and was an early aid in helping Modi
posture as both an economic success
story and a scion of local culture. It
was not an economic intervention that
the chief minister quickly forgot and
had the right blend of RSS swadeshi
thought and wider advertisability that
endeared Gurumurthy to Modi.
Gurumurthy had helped the chief
minister in other critical ways. Four
months after Modi took office as
chief minister, anti-Muslim violence
swept the state. Mobs killed over a
thousand people, and over a hundred
and fifty thousand were displaced.
RB Sreekumar, who was an assistant
director general of police at the time,
told the GT Nanavati commission—
which was investigating the violence—
that he had sent to the government and
the director general of police several
reports that implicated supporters
of the Sangh Parivar, demonstrated
the anti-Muslim bias of government
officials and showed “the general
subversion of the Criminal Justice
System.”
The Gujarat pogroms opened a short-
lived rift in the BJP. While sections
of the party were critical of Modi, he
counted carefully those who backed
him. In 2011, Sanjeev Bhatt, who was
the state police’s deputy commissioner
for intelligence also filed a petition to
the commission which claimed that,
while on a family holiday with Tushar
Mehta, Gujarat’s additional advocate
general at the time, he had seen a slew
of emails from the Special Investigation
Team that had investigated the
pogrom. He claimed Mehta had
The Kite-making cluster project was not an
economic intervention that the chief minister
quickly forgot and had the right blend of RSS
swadeshi thought and wider advertisability that
endeared Gurumurthy to Modi.
THE CARAVAN
forwarded these emails to Gurumurthy.
According to Bhatt, Gurumurthy read
the reports, prepared a note in response
and sent it to Ram and Mahesh
Jethmalani. Mahesh has admitted to
NDTV that he did defend an accused
in a related case in the Supreme Court.
Gurumurthy also reportedly forwarded
the report to N Ram, the editor-in-chief
of The Hindu. (Ram denied receiving or
having read the report.) The affidavit
mentions that Gurumurthy forwarded
another set of emails pertaining to
the violence to the Jethmalanis and
drafted a memorandum demanding an
investigation into Teesta Setalvad, a
civil-rights activist who was fighting
cases on the behalf of some of the
Muslim victims. Gurumurthy also
allegedly sent the memorandum to
Modi and his junior home minister,
Amit Shah.
In 2015, Bhatt’s lawyer Prashant
Bhushan released some of these
emails. Bhushan told me that the
emails showed Gurumurthy’s illegal
involvement in the Gujarat cases.
“Gurumurthy was basically acting as
an advisor to the accused persons,” he
said, calling him part of a “criminal
nexus” between Mehta and the
accused. That same year, the Supreme
Court dismissed Bhatt’s focus on
Gurumurthy in the case, dismissed
his claim that two of the emails were
sent and declared that there was
no illegality, criminal conspiracy
or subversion of justice in sharing
other documents with the chartered
accountant. However, Gurumurthy, and
others who featured in the emails were
not even asked to explain themselves.
In response to a questionnaire
Jethmalani said the matter had been
scrutinised by the Supreme Court and
dismissed. He said, “In any event the
SIT reports which were sent to my
email contained no material which
could help any accused person.” When
I asked Gurumurthy about the case, he

vijay kumar joshi / pti
did not want to add anything on the record, merely
saying, “These allegations were all subject to strict
judicial scrutiny by the SC and it has given its
judgment.” (Mehta did not respond to a detailed
questionnaire.)
When Modi was sidelined by parts of his party
and the country’s industrialists—Rahul Bajaj,
the CII president, publicly criticised him at a
summit in 2002—Gurumurthy stood by him.
This has paid off. “We have been associated since
1979–80, when he entered the BJP,” Gurumurthy
told me. “We have shared many things together,
all the problems he had in the Parivar and
his relationship with others. We had worked
together to solve these difficulties. That way, my
relationship with him has been purely as a person
who, he felt, understood him.”
By the late 2000s, as Modi’s business-friendly
star rose within the BJP, Gurumurthy began
distancing himself from the SJM. “Thengadiji
shaped the largest labour movement, so labour
became the dominant idea in his mind,”
Gurumurthy complained. “The idea of labour
is limited to a certain sector of the economy.
I said India is seventy to seventy-five percent
self-employed. So, your economics is only
employer–employee economics. I don’t agree
with it. I never agreed with his overall economic
philosophy.” Gurumurthy instead positioned
himself as batting for small industrialists, traders
and the petite bourgeoisie. As the influence of
these communities grew within the BJP, so did
Gurumurthy’s currency within the RSS. Thengadi,
like Janakiraman, Goenka, Advani and Vajpayee,
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
was left behind by Gurumurthy as he further above: Anna Hazare
climbed the ladder of power. “See, after 2007 along with Arvind
or 2008, I distanced myself from SJM because Kejriwal and Kiran
Bedi addressing
of my own inability to give time for their public
the media in Delhi
programmes,” he explained. during the India
Shortly before the 2009 general election, Against Corruption
the BJP created a “black-money taskforce” to campaign. Hazare’s
investigate what it claimed was a vast amount much-publicised
of India’s untaxed wealth stowed away in Swiss hunger strike during
the campaign was
banks and tax havens. The members of the task
preceded by a
force included Gurumurthy, Doval—who had seminar, chaired
retired from the Intelligence Bureau fours year by Ajit Doval and
before—the finance professor R Vaidyanathan Gurumurthy in
and Mahesh Jethmalani. Though the findings of the Vivekananda
the task force did little to aid the BJP in the polls, International
Foundation, which
Gurumurthy was asked to lead it in 2011.
included Kejriwal,
The same year the task force was set up, Bedi, Hazare,
the Vivekananda Kendra, founded by an RSS Ramdev, among
leader in the 1970s, set up a think tank named others.
the Vivekananda International Foundation.
Gurumurthy was named to the VIF’s executive
committee and eventually replaced Doval as
chairperson. He was also key in helping it get
the finances it required. “After this L&T issue
was resolved, Birla wanted to pay me fees,”
Gurumurthy told me, referring to his aid in
ensuring that the engineering firm Larsen &
Toubro pulled out of UltraTech Cement, owned
by the Aditya Birla Group, by selling its entire
stake, in 2009, and ending a six-year acrimonious
relationship. “I said, ‘I don’t want anything,
but can you donate money to VIF–ten to twelve
crores?’ He donated the money and that became
the base of VIF. Of course, we also collected other
APRIL 2023 45
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
small donations and we had about R18
crore with which we started it.” (VIF
and Kumar Mangalam Birla did not
respond to emailed questions.)
In April 2011, the VIF organised a
two-day seminar on “black money.”
The attendees included Doval and
Gurumurthy, Subramanian Swamy,
Govindacharya, the godman Ramdev,
the social activist Anna Hazare, the
anti-corruption campaigner Arvind
Kejriwal and the retired police officer
Kiran Bedi. Soon afterwards, Hazare
and Ramdev began much-publicised
hunger strikes against corruption,
accusing the ruling Congress-led
government of having abetted it. (When
asked Gurumurthy said, “Our meeting
had nothing to do with the Anna
Hazare fast … Only at the meeting I
remember Kiren Bedi announcing that
there would be a meeting on Lok Pal
Bill but not any fast.”) This snowballed
into a major anti-corruption movement
that helped Modi ascend to power in
2014. It was not a favour Modi forgot.
46
{FOUR}
ratan tata called gurumurthy one
evening in 2007. The industrialist
sounded worried, Gurumurthy told me.
The previous year, his conglomerate
had decided to invest in direct-to-home
broadcasting, under the banner of Tata
Sky, but the telecom ministry, headed
by the DMK leader Dayanidhi Maran,
was delaying the necessary approvals.
“He rang up and told me the Marans
were threatening him,” Gurumurthy
said. “They were blackmailing him
and saying that he must send one third
of Tata Sky to them.” The Accidental
Prime Minister, a memoire of the
Manmohan Singh years, by his former
media advisor Sanjaya Baru, adds more
details. “Dayanidhi had summoned
Tata to a meeting in Delhi in the latter’s
own Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh
Road,” Baru writes, “and tried to
browbeat him into doing a deal that
would favour his brother Kalanidhi’s
Sun TV.”
THE CARAVAN
Gurumurthy said that he agreed
to help Tata. “I told him to tap the
conversations between himself and
Maran. We wanted to do it through
Rupert Murdoch”—an Australian
media baron whose company owned a
fifth of Tata Sky. “Murdoch’s secretary
recorded the conversation.” After that,
Gurumurthy told me, he asked Tata to
write to Manmohan Singh about the
conversation and threaten to go public
if the prime minister did not intervene.
Baru confirmed that Manmohan
received a message from Tata about
the Marans, but it is unclear what
followed. Eventually, Gurumurthy
said, Tata asked him not to make the
conversation public. “I said, ‘Ratan, I
am not your agent. I am a media man.
You have shared all of this with me for
publication.’” He published a report
about Tata being extorted. “Ratan
was very upset,” he told me. “He had
his own reservations. He didn’t want
to fight them. But, when the Marans
tried to get his denial, he didn’t deny
pti

the story.” Gurumurthy added that he has since
salvaged his relationship with Tata, by “solving
a problem between him and Kumar Birla.” (Tata,
Maran, Singh and Murdoch did not respond to
questions about this incident.)
Tata is only one of India’s biggest business
families that owes Gurumurthy a favour. In
most cases, he won favour by managing family
disputes. In July 2004, Priyamvada Birla, the
matriarch of the Birla clan, which always had
deep Congress leanings, died. Shortly before her
death, unbeknownst to her family, she had signed
over her R5,000-crore fortune to the chartered
accountant RS Lodha. The family challenged this,
turning to Gurumurthy to manage the dispute.
“Neither the rise of Vajpayee, the fall of Vajpayee,
the rise of UPA or the rise of Modi, have meant
anything to me in terms of the relationship I build
with these people,” he told me. “In 2004, even
after Vajpayee lost, it was BK Birla who openly
declared that he will take Gurumurthy’s advice
to fight the case.” As of 2020, the legal battle was
still continuing but, in the process, Gurumurthy
has deeply endeared himself to another major
business house.
Gurumurthy argued that the big family
corporations trusted him because of his simple
image. “In none of these cases have I ever taken
any money,” he said. “I don’t want to get obliged
to any of these fellows. My lifestyle doesn’t
demand any money.” A closer look at his dispute
resolutions shows that he is often reached because
of his extensive Tamil Brahmin network, rather
than his perceived incorruptibility. A good
example is his involvement in the dispute over
Thirumalai Chemicals.
The Tamil Brahmin advertising mogul RK
Swamy, one of Gurumurthy’s closest friends,
reached out to him to handle the dispute on behalf
of NS Iyengar against his brother NT Iyengar, who
claimed the company for himself. Gurumurthy
asked NS Iyengar for a retainership—evidence
that he does accept payment in at least some
cases. He was then approached by his friends
PV Parthasarathy, the Brahmin owner of the
magazine Kumudham, and N Rangachary, another
Tamil Brahmin who chaired the Insurance
Much like the settlements he
had brokered among the Bajajs
and the Birlas, the one with
the Iyengars also fell through.
And yet, Gurumurthy left the
dispute with more friends
than when he entered it.
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
Regulatory and Development Authority. They opposite page:
convinced him that NT Iyengar had a sounder Gurumurthy and
case. Rather than representing either party, Kumar Mangalam
Birla, the chairman
Gurumurthy served as a mediator between the
of the Aditya Birla
brothers. He called this an act of charity. “In group, at a function
family mediation I don’t accept fees,” he told in Bengaluru.
me. “I only want that satisfaction.” When asked Gurumurthy claims
specifically about the role of his vast network of he helped solve a
friends in helping him play a role in industrial financial de-merger
for Birla and in
disputes, he wrote, “Two persons fighting bitterly
return Birla gave
will not come to me for settlement unless they the Vivekananda
trusted my integrity and not because of any International
powerful connections or network … I need not Foundation E12
have to speak for my integrity.” crore of the E18
Much like the settlements he had brokered crore the think-tank
started with.
among the Bajajs and the Birlas, this one also fell
through. And yet, Gurumurthy left the dispute
with more friends than when he entered it. He
told me that he remains a key advisor to both the
Tatas and Birlas. Several Tamil journalists I spoke
to said that Gurumurthy’s importance to the
political world followed the same modus operandi
as the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham. The monastery
is widely rumoured to exercise its political
influence on the state by helping politicians store
their wealth and evade taxes, while Gurumurthy
gains his favours managing the finances of some
of the country’s largest industrialists. In an
emailed response the chartered accountant denied
managing anyone’s finances and said, “I was more
a legal and strategic adviser.”
the influence Gurumurthy continues to maintain
over the editorial line of the New Indian Express is
tough to overstate. Shortly before the star-studded
wedding of his daughter, Gurumurthy contacted
the executive editor of the New Indian Express
with a story. A former editor told me that he
listened in to the conversation. Gurumurthy, they
recalled, insisted that Kalanithi Maran, who was
being investigated by the ED, had fled the country
and that the newspaper should immediately
publish the news. The story turned out to be
untrue, and Maran sued the paper for criminal
contempt. “The legal officers of the newspapers
demanded proof of the travel from the editor, who
obviously called Guru,” the former editor said.
“But Guru told the editor that he has no proof and
wished him a ‘happy stay in jail.’ There was no way
we could tell the court that the story was planted
by Gurumurthy. That just was not done at the New
Indian Express.” (The chartered accountant denied
this event ever took place.)
The former editor told me that the first
thing they would often hear when entering
the newspaper’s offices was a phone ringing.
Every morning, they said, Gurumurthy would
call Sonthalia, the chairperson and managing
APRIL 2023 47
the sangh’s fixer · reportage

director, “and say, ‘I don’t like this, this and this lakh in advertising revenue from the Gujarat below: Manoj
from today’s issue of the newspaper.’ Dutifully, government and R88.01 lakh from the union Sonthalia, the
the CMD will pull up someone in the editorial.” government when Modi was prime minister. chairperson and
managing director
In 2015, the Dravidar Kazhagam was holding The former editor saw Gurumurthy’s editorial
of the New Indian
a beef-eating festival and a thaali removal influence as an extension of his business ties. “His Express. A former
ceremony—Periyarists consider the mangal sutra ability to push anything that he wants to into the editor-in-chief at
a sign of the enslavement of women—and the New pages of the newspaper was the biggest weapon the newspaper
Indian Express had some of the best coverage of that he used to intimidate businessmen,” they said. said that Sonthalia
the legal battle for permission prior to the event. “Wielding that weapon in conjunction with his was beholden
to Gurumurthy
The former editor told me that, a day after the chartered accountancy skills, he threatened into
because he had
event, Sonthalia called them and said, “How submission many a businessman who did not want powerful political
can we cover this, isn’t it illegal?” They replied their financial irregularities to be known to our connections that
that, if someone voluntarily removes their thaali readers.” Sinha put it simply. “For Gurumurthy,” Sonthalia lacked.
or eats beef, that is no breach of Indian laws. he said, “the newspaper was just a tool to use.”
They recalled that Sonthalia replied, “Guru says When pressed about his editorial influence,
it’s illegal. That’s all that matters. Remove it.” Gurumurthy wrote, “I was the adviser to Manoj.
(Sonthalia denied this incident, calling it “baseless And even today I am. He has insisted that I should
and false.”) read his paper every day and give my views.”
Aditya Sinha, who took over as the newspaper’s (Sonthalia, oddly, denied this.) New Indian Express
editor-in-chief in 2007, told me that, when he did not respond to questions about these incidents.
joined, “I wanted to make lot of changes, make Sinha recalled a moment from the 2009 general
it an editorially strong paper. Gurumurthy shot election. The BJP leader Varun Gandhi, Rahul’s
down that dream very quickly. He wanted a paper cousin, had given an inflammatory speech at
editorially subordinate to him—editorial strength a rally. “We were in office when we found out
mattered nada to him. He wanted his things to about the speech,” Sinha said. “The BJP leader
be done, that’s all, and he used the paper.” Sinha said he would chop off Muslim men’s hands. We
told me that, in his office’s directory, there were were all shocked hearing that, that saying such
only two names listed as advisors for stories. One things had become so normal. I met Gurumurthy
was Gurumurthy. “He used to practically dictate shortly after that speech, when he was trembling
articles to people there,” Sinha recalled. “His in excitement. He told me, ‘Aditya, you mark my
words were so recognisable.” words. Varun Gandhi is the future.’” (When I
Sinha said that every article Gurumurthy
pushed was part of some personal crusade. One
day, he told me, Gurumurthy arrived at the office
with Rahul Gandhi’s college marksheet. “Rahul
had failed in one of those subjects. I personally
thought it didn’t matter. Academic competence
means little. But he gave it to me expecting
me to publish. That’s simply the kind of man
Gurumurthy is.” (Gurumurthy denies this incident
taking place.) Sinha said that Gurumurthy’s
influence over the newspaper largely came from
his close ties to Modi, which he often flexed. “One
day, he called me and, out of the blue, said ‘Speak
to Narendrabhai.’ I didn’t have any questions for
the prime minister, so I politely said a few words
and put the phone down,” Sinha told me. “He
didn’t follow any of the rules other writers had to
adhere to. He had ultimate liberty. Sonthalia was
beholden to Gurumurthy because he had powerful
political connections that Sonthalia lacked.” Sinha
speculated that Sonthalia hoped Gurumurthy
would bring in government advertisements for
the newspaper, a charge Sonthalia denies. “This
happened in Gujarat, when Modi was the CM,
and when NDA was in power in the centre,” Sinha
said. Sonthalia said that during Modi tenure as
chief minister the newspaper received R34.77

48 THE CARAVAN

asked him about this, Gurumurthy
simply said, “Ridiculous.”) Sinha
left the New Indian Express in 2011,
having changed little about the place.
“After I left the Express,” he told me,
“I happened to read a few articles
that made me stop. I could hear
Gurumurthy’s voice somewhere in the
background of those articles.”
{FIVE}
the first of modi’s initiatives that
Gurumurthy told me he played a
role in was the founding of the NITI
Aayog. Formed in 1950, the Planning
Commission had been the primary
organisation through which the
country’s large-scale socioeconomic
and industrial policy-making had
taken place. It had frequently been a
target of the RSS, which saw it as an
unrepresentative body with leftist
leanings. In his first Independence Day
speech, Modi announced that he would
dissolve the commission. Gurumurthy
told me that he soon got to work on the
cabinet resolution that would establish
the NITI Aayog, on 1 January 2015. “In
that document was the intent of what
will work in and for India,” he said.
“If you want to know whether SJM’s
views have been officially accepted
by the government, just look at the
NITI Aayog document. I had a role
in drafting it. And it’s visible that it is
absolutely our view.” Alongside a litany
of buzzwords, the document promises
“a Bharatiya approach to development.”
Gurumurthy had a simple thesis for
India’s unprecedented unemployment,
low growth numbers and other
economic ills, which he called “a
decade of economic destruction.” He
argued that, between 2004 and 2008,
money was rushing into India. This
foreign money became bank deposits,
and the government simultaneously
brought down import duties, which
led to a major rise in Chinese imports.
“We had only a small deficit before,”
Gurumurthy said, “but, in the next six
years, capital goods import went up
to $100 billion.” The banks, now flush
with cash, invested heavily in capacity-
building, primarily the steel and
cement industries, but, following the
2008 financial crash, these industries
became non-performing. Gurumurthy
claimed that most economic failures
during Modi’s tenure are only attempts
at reviving an economy that had
been sunk by previous governments.
“Everything he has tried has only
been course-correction measures. See,
because of NPAs”—non-performing
assets—“banks did not have money.
When the banks were about to recover,
COVID hit.”
In Gurumurthy’s reading, the glut
in the Indian market during the UPA
years created a larger problem. “If
you look at five years of Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, he generated 5.5 percent
growth, and the stock market rose by
thirty-two percent, real estate prices
by thirty-one percent, gold prices by
thirty-eight percent, but it created 16
million jobs,” he argued. “Then you
look at the next six years. GDP grew
by ten percent, real-estate prices by
three hundred percent to twenty-one
hundred percent, depending upon the
area. Gold prices went up by three
hundred and thirty-eight percent, the
stock market by three hundred and
thirty-two percent, but only 2.7 million
jobs were created.” As if reading off
Gurumurthy’s script, Modi quoted
several of these figures in the 2014
campaign, painting jobless growth as
one of the primary economic maladies
he would tackle.
Gurumurthy argued that much of
the country’s economic growth during
this period could be chalked down
to asset inflation. “It was what I call
phoney money, unproductive money,”
he told me. “What sub-prime lending
did in America, the cash economy did
to the Indian economy.” The chimera
he saw as buoying this trend was
high-value notes—R500 and R1,000
notes that accounted for over eighty
percent of the cash in circulation. The
numbers produced by the black-money
task force led by Gurumurthy were
also frequently cited by Modi. In the
A month into Modi’s first term as prime minister,
Gurumurthy was invited to meet the new cabinet.
He gave a presentation outlining his economic
thesis. The answer he had always advocated was
simple: demonetise all S500 and S1,000 notes.
APRIL 2023
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
campaign, he promised that, in his
first hundred days in office, he would
recover black money deposited abroad
and distribute R15 lakh in the bank
account of every Indian. On his first
day in office, the government created
an SIT to look into black money. A
month later, Gurumurthy was invited
to meet Modi’s new cabinet. He gave a
presentation outlining this thesis. The
answer he had always advocated was
simple: demonetise all R500 and R1,000
notes.
In a televised address on 8 November
2016, Modi declared that the two
denominations would no longer be legal
tender. The decision was as sudden
and secretive as it was catastrophic. “It
will cause some hardship to you,” Modi
said. “Let us ignore these … In country’s
history, there comes a moment when
people will want to participate in the
nation-building and reconstruction.
Very few such moments come in life.”
Nearly a quarter of the country’s
ATMs ran dry. Many of those that still
had money had not been recalibrated to
dispense the new R2,000 notes. More
than four hundred thousand trucks
were stranded, as toll plazas initially
refused to accept the demonetised
notes. Farmers had insufficient cash
to purchase seeds, fertilisers and
pesticides, which led to a noticeable
fall in agricultural wages and rising
food costs. In the first quarter after
demonetisation, 1.5 million jobs were
lost, with significant losses in both
large industries, such as cement and
steel, but far more in the far larger
unorganised sector. According to The
Wire, over eighty people died, mostly of
hunger, in the month following Modi’s
announcement, while opposition
parties put the figures much higher.
Reeling under public pressure, the
government shifted the goalposts
several times. At first, it claimed that
the move would eliminate corruption,
terror-funding and black money. When
49
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
the data did not support these claims,
Modi said that the move was aimed
at making India a cashless formalised
economy. Gurumurthy told me that
he sent a note to the government on
how it should explain demonetisation
to critics. He recalled that Modi
called him and said, “Guru, I need
you to explain this to people. Go give
interviews about it.” He went on to
give a series of interviews, calling
demonetisation the equivalent of
a “financial Pokhran,” referring to
India’s nuclear tests, and arguing that,
when people have excess cash, there
is always an urge to buy unnecessary
things, which leads to “irresponsible
and heartless spending.”
When I spoke to him, Gurumurthy
was averse to taking full credit for the
government’s move. “You see, I had
made this argument for years but I
didn’t even know they accepted it until
it happened,” he said. He talked with
his characteristic softness; his words
only slightly louder than the religious
slokas reverberating from another
room. “It is not one man’s advice alone.
It’ll pass through many. Maybe they
accepted my advice. It is not like I sat
with the PM and said, ‘You do it.’”
Gurumurthy waved off concerns
about the effects of the policy as
lies created by the media. “You see,
difficulties were anticipated,” he
said. “See, anybody who would have
died at home”—he stopped to laugh
uproariously—“would have been
counted as a demonetisation death.
That’s the way the media projected it.
Many people told me, ‘You have given
a formula for Modi to die.’ ‘Modi is
finished,’ many people rang up and told
me. But the media could not transform
all this into an anti-Modi agenda.”
J Jeyaranjan, the vice-
chairperson of Tamil Nadu’s State
Planning Commission, told me that
demonetisation was bound to fail,
regardless of how it was carried out,
because it was based on a fundamental
misunderstanding about untaxed
wealth. “The popular perception is
that black money is something given
in suitcases to politicians and bosses,”
he said. “In reality, a large amount of
wealth is laundered and left untaxed
primarily through the under-invoicing
50
of products. If a product’s value is a
thousand rupees, the importer asks the
supplier to make a bill for six hundred
rupees, so that, when it is imported,
tax will be levied only for that lower
amount. The Indian buyer then pays
the full amount, a thousand rupees,
through both legal means and illegal
transactions. Given the vast amounts
of imports India has, any industry
can launder large amounts of untaxed
wealth in this fashion.”
This process is not news to
Gurumurthy. After all, his own
investigation into Reliance helped
highlight this process. A November
2022 report by Mint points to a $12
billion disparity between the value
of trade that China claimed to have
with India and what India claimed to
have with China. This likely illustrates
“Gurumurthy was not
an economist in the
first place. He is an
auditor claiming to
be an economist, with
half-baked ideas,” the
development economist
Jeyaranjan said.
the process of money-laundering that
Jeyaranjan described. “That $12 billion
shortage is only from China,” he told
me. “Imagine what the total amount
would be if we factor in every other
country’s data.”
Jeyaranjan said that such
fundamental misunderstanding of
economic functions was not surprising
in the union government’s actions.
“They have gotten rid of any of the
actual economists who manage
policy,” he said. “Gurumurthy was
not an economist in the first place.
He is an auditor claiming to be an
economist, with half-baked ideas. So,
what about people who have really
studied economics? His understanding
is also filled with hypocrisy. At some
point, he was talking about swadeshi—
everything should be Indian—and
now he has transformed into a perfect
advocate of neoliberal policies.”
THE CARAVAN
When I asked Gurumurthy about
his shifting stance on privatisation, he
said that times had changed. “When
the tsunami of globalisation came,
there were no alternative opinions,”
he told me. “The Marxists were only
talking about governmentalisation.
We said no. What we can do ten years
later, fifteen years later, twenty years
later, don’t do that now. It’s not that
there should be no privatisation at
all. You have to do it in stages.” The
SJM’s literature from the period does
not reflect this stance. Gurumurthy
suggested that, even in the early 1990s,
he was supportive of privatisation
in certain sectors. “You said you are
running hotels. Privatise it. You are
running transport, privatise it. But,
under no circumstances should there
be privatisation of banks.”
The industries he supports the
privatisation of are some of the
country’s largest employers, with
reservation policies that ensure
millions of Bahujan families can live
off a stable income. Gurumurthy did
not offer an explanation of why the
Modi government was pushing towards
privatising two public-sector banks and
a government insurer. The distinction
Gurumurthy seemed to stress was that,
while the government should not sell
assets to foreign corporations, there
was no problem in selling them off to
Indian oligarchs, regardless of how it
affected India’s poor. This approach has
been plainly visible in the government
“asset monetisation” programmes over
the past few years.
The effects of demonetisation,
and the goods and services tax that
followed, are plainly visible in Tirupur,
the city that Gurumurthy often
praises, and among small industries,
the segment of the economy that he
claims to be the champion of. Most
small businesses there largely depend
on cash. By state government records,
Tirupur’s knitwear industry suffered
a R16,000-crore loss as a result of GST
and demonetisation, and the state
has lost 50,000 small and medium
industrial units in that time. Their
effects were visible on the ground, with
cavernous factories and warehouses
suddenly running empty, and silent, by
the end of the year.
 the sangh’s fixer · reportage

manvender vashist / pti

Gurumurthy’s singular answer to aid small
businesses has been the creation, in 2015, of the
Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency,
which provides loans to small enterprises and
individuals, largely by relaxing risk norms. “The
first expression of the India-centric approach
is the innovative agenda to ‘fund the unfunded’
58 million micro and small businesses in the
non-formal sector,” he wrote in The Hindu, a
month before the MUDRA bill was introduced in
parliament. “These 58 million non-formal micro
businesses generate millions of rural and semi-
urban entrepreneurs and provide 128 million jobs
… Yet, this Kamadhenu of job creation gets only 4
per cent of its credit needs from banks.”
The results of the scheme have been far from
promising. India Today’s analysis of the loans, in
2019, showed that the average amount dispersed
in loans in the four previous years was just
R45,034, less than half the average per capita
income at the time and too small to launch a
new enterprise or provide jobs. Only 1.3 percent
of the loans exceeded R5 lakh. A 2019 survey on
the scheme by the labour ministry claimed that above: Workers
11.2 million jobs had been generated between remove the Yojana
April 2015 and December 2017 but noted that Bhawan sign at the
newly named NITI
5.1 million beneficiaries—accounting for almost
Aayog building in
half of all loans—were self-employed or ran their Delhi. “If you want
business with the help of unpaid family members, to know whether
hardly erasing widespread unemployment, as SJM’s views have
Gurumurthy had promised. been officially
Gurumurthy blamed the failures of the accepted by the
government, just
MUDRA scheme on bankers, a community he
look at the NITI
has frequently demonised. (In 2022, the All Aayog document,”
India Bank Employees’ Association demanded Gurumurthy said,
his removal from the RBI board after he called referring to the
employees of public-sector banks “scum.”) “It is cabinet resolution
not the fault of the government,” he told me. “It is that established
the think-tank.
the fault of the banks, because they wanted to keep
Gurumurthy
control over it. They should have franchisees to reportedly authored
lend money—it is only that person from that place the resolution.
who will know how to give and recover money.
Bank managers do not know.” This signalled a
return to the age-old exploitative practices of
caste lending. “The model I suggested was, you
must make use of the traditional moneylender

APRIL 2023 51
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
mechanism,” he added. “He will go
and deliver the money on cycle, collect
it on cycle. Only he knows who to
give to and how much.” Like much
else in Gurumurthy’s policy arsenal,
loans are determined not on sound
economic study but on a myopic, and
often obscurantist, vision of recreating
ancient Indian social systems.
for established economists at home
and abroad, Modi had been a tough man
to place on the economic spectrum. A
2014 headline asked, “Is India about
to elect its Reagan?” Five years later,
another headline bemoaned, “I Wanted
Ronald Reagan. India Kept Electing
Bernie Sanders.” Having assiduously
avoided press conferences during his
nine years in office, the prime minister
rarely talks about economics in clear
terms. Besides the occasional election
promise or investor summit speech,
plump with buzzwords, rarely has an
Indian or foreign audience received a
clear explication of Modi’s economic
philosophy. A rare exception to this
was on 12 May 2020. It was 49 days
into the nationwide lockdown to tackle
the COVID-19 pandemic, when Modi
dourly addressed the country.
“Such a big disaster is a signal for
India, it has brought a message and
also has brought an opportunity,” Modi
said. “This vision of India turning
crisis into opportunity is going to
prove equally effective for our resolve
of self-reliant India.” The video was
announcing the first fiscal package
rolled out by the government to deal
with the disastrous economic fallout
of the pandemic, called Atmanirbhar
Bharat—self-reliant India. The
rambling speech was pockmarked
with Sanskrit verses, a seeming re-
affirmation that his economic policy
would have its roots in Hindu religious
scriptures. For weeks before Modi’s
speech, the top brass of the RSS was
echoing the same language. Six days
earlier, Dattatreya Hosabale, the
Sangh’s sah sarkaryavah—joint general
secretary—told journalists that a “new
model” of socioeconomic order, “based
on self-reliance and swadeshi ideas,”
was the need of the hour. On 26 April,
the current sarsanghchalak, Mohan
Bhagwat, had called for a “new model
52
of development” based on self-reliance.
The official aim of the policy is to
increase local manufacturing towards
autarkic ends. Gurumurthy signalled
this was a natural progression of the
global economy. In his first speech
since being added to the RBI board,
he said that globalisation was now
“irrelevant,” praising the US president,
Donald Trump, for his protectionist
policies. While the broad goals of the
policy were outlined by Modi and the
RSS, the specific nuts and bolts of the
policy came from the finance minister,
Nirmala Sitharaman. On 16 May,
Sitharaman announced that private
players, even those without any prior
experience in the industry, would be
allowed to mine coal and minerals,
without any limit, and to price them
without any regulatory oversight.
Additionally, the Mineral Laws
(Amendment) Act removed restrictions
on the end use of coal, removing the
priority given to power generation—
nearly seventy percent of India’s
electricity comes from coal. Over the
past three years, as an astonishing 111
Discordant as views
were in the past
between Keynesian
economists and
neoconservatives, they
have both been replaced
by an array of yes men
and Hindu ideological
workhorses, who shape
policy as they will.
coal blocks were auctioned off, most
of them to a small handful of Indian
magnates, the country entered a severe
coal crisis. This has done little to stop
rampant privatisation, though, with
Sitharaman branding further auctions
in 2023 as “asset monetisation.”
Sitharaman also announced the
deregulation of the agricultural market.
Previous legislation required that
foodgrains be sold in government-
mandated markets to ensure fair
pricing. The new deregulation, farmers’
THE CARAVAN
unions feared, would allow for the
same handful of large corporations—
primarily Adani Wilmar and Reliance—
to gain monopsonies on grain. Unlike
with the mining legislation, the
agriculture laws eventually had to
be withdrawn after unprecedented
farmers’ protests for nearly a year and
a half. Both the coal and agriculture
policy address the specific tenet of
Thengadi’s Hindu economics that calls
for the government to be only a “patron”
to industries, which should instead be
“governed by Dharma.” Additionally,
both these changes underline a process
by which wealth is increasingly
accumulated by a handful of oligarchs,
nearly all of whom are upper-caste.
The more glaring examples of how
Atmanirbhar Bharat was pushing
towards Hindu economics and its
stated ends of caste stratification came
in June 2020, when the ministry of skill
development and entrepreneurship
announced a “skill-mapping” exercise.
One of the first states to take up the
ministry’s offer was Uttar Pradesh,
which announced the Vishwakarma
Shram Samman Yojana to incentivise
“traditional trades.” To qualify for
the scheme, a worker has to be involved
in “traditional trades,” which are nearly
always caste-specific occupations.
If a worker qualified for the scheme,
they would be offered training
and loans from the government to
practice their craft. This is evidently
the legislative answer to Thengadi’s
complaint that “most of the 3,000-odd
traditional trades became obsolete
or uneconomical,” which “resulted
in the breakdown of the traditional
caste-system.” He adds that the state
should not interfere with, or encroach
upon, these caste occupations, “for
these were inherent because they were
necessary to the sound exercise of the
social Dharma.”
During a video conference to
announce the inauguration of the
scheme, Modi said that Ajay Singh
Bisht, the chief minister of Uttar
Pradesh, had “implemented the central
government’s scheme in a qualitative as
well as quantitative way” and “clubbed
them with the goal of the Atmanirbhar
Bharat.” Though Gurumurthy denied
pti
the link between Atmanirbhar Bharat
 the sangh’s fixer · reportage

and “Hindutva,” several senior RSS members
admitted to The Caravan’s staff writer Sagar
that the mission, alongside the MUDRA scheme,
implements Thengadi’s philosophy of Hindu
economics.
This is unsurprising, given the evident takeover
of the country’s economic-planning institutions by
RSS acolytes. Early in Modi’s first term, important
positions were still held by those professionally
trained in economics, but they all made swift
exits. Raghuram Rajan, the former RBI governor,
and Arvind Panagariya, the first vice-chairperson
of the NITI Aayog, have both returned to
academia, while the former chief economic
advisor Arvind Subramanian has left the country.
Their influence has been replaced by
Gurumurthy’s colleagues at the RBI board,
all of whom are cut from similar cloth. Satish
Marathe, a banker who previously served on the
management board of the National Cooperatives
Development Corporation, is a former member
of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad—
the RSS’s student wing. Others are personally
linked to Modi, including Manish Sabharwal, an
informal advisor to the prime minister who runs
a manpower development company, and Sudhir
Mankad, who was the chief secretary of Gujarat
during Modi’s tenure as chief minister. Pankaj
Patel, a businessman whose company was founded below: Cho
by a founding member of the Resurgent Group Ramaswamy
of Gujarat—a rival organisation that was set up (extreme left)
and Gurumurthy
when the CII criticised Modi for his handling of
(extreme right) at
the 2002 Gujarat violence—is also on the board. a Nadar Investors
Like several of the others, Mankad and Patel were Forum meet.
not academically trained in economics. The board Without a political
also has industrialists who are close friends of leadership much of
Gurumurthy, such as Venu Srinivasan. Discordant the Tamil Brahmin
community looked
as views were in the past between Keynesian
to Ramaswamy—
economists and neoconservatives, they have both given his closeness
been replaced by an array of yes men and Hindu with both MG
ideological workhorses, who shape policy as they Ramachandran and
will. Jayalalithaa—to be
“See, the major measures which have the de facto voice
for their concerns in
happened in India, none of these fellows had any
the halls of power.
contribution,” Gurumurthy told me, referring to It is a position
the foreign-educated economists he had marked Gurumurthy has
as his personal enemies. Their foreign education gleefully taken after
was proof enough to Gurumurthy that they are Cho’s death.
unworthy to speak for the country. “I mean, they
have all been a thorough failure,” he said. “All
these great reformists abused Modi’s reforms. See,
reform for them is only letting foreign investment
and divesting. You know this is all carbon-copy,
photocopy, copycat economics. What is the Indian
way of reforming? These are the Indian way of
reforming.”

APRIL 2023 53
the sangh’s fixer · reportage
opposite page: quite unusually for the founding day of a media
Gurumurthy at the organisation, the event was preceded by verses
53rd anniversary from the Bhagavad Gita. The seated crowd,
of Thuglak. Few
were, like the readership of the news magazine
men have had as
oversized an impact Thuglak, mostly Tamil Brahmins. The event felt
on Indian politics more like a Brahmin association meeting than
and economics as anything else. The foreign minister and guest
Gurumurthy. of honour, S Jaishankar, also a Tamil brahmin,
stood on stage, bespectacled and finely-coated.
“We have seen for too long attempts to distance
us from our history, from our traditions and
from our culture,” Jaishankar said, bordered
on either side by large photos of Gurumurthy,
the magazine’s editor. He spoke of everything
on India’s diplomatic plate, from the Ukraine
conflict to partnerships within the Global South
and natural-disaster management. Every third
sentence in Jaishankar’s forty-minute speech was
punctuated by mild claps from the audience. They
seemed tired, though, having clapped raucously
during Gurumurthy’s speech before. Soon after
the event began, readers were invited to ask
questions. Gurumurthy answered all of them,
while Jaishankar sat mutely.
Thuglak was founded, in 1970, by the Tamil
Brahmin playwright and satirist Cho Ramaswamy.
The magazine, named after his most famous
play, became a Bible for the Tamil Brahmin
community, expanding their voice to criticise
the DMK and prime ministers the community
was unfriendly towards, such as Indira Gandhi.
Without a political leadership after the death of
C Rajagopalachari, in 1972, much of the Brahmin
community looked to Ramaswamy—given his
closeness with both MG Ramachandran and
Jayalalithaa—to be the de facto voice for their
concerns in the halls of power. It was a role the
satirist played well, with the readers’ questions
section, in particular, becoming a hallmark of
the magazine. Gurumurthy, a close associate
of Ramaswamy for decades, told me that he
considered the man a dear mentor in the world of
journalism.
As Ramaswamy aged, the Kumudham
group—which runs several news and religious
magazines—was due to take over Thuglak. “A
few Kumudham staff were allotted seats at
Thuglak office, it was about to happen,” a senior
journalist who was privy to the magazine’s
functioning told me, on condition of anonymity.
“But, unfortunately, Cho passed away before
the deal was finalised, in 2016, and Gurumurthy
suddenly came into the picture. He summoned
the top brass of Thuglak and told them that they
should make a statement that it was they who
requested that he take over the magazine. Cho’s
family was sidelined and they were not at all
happy.”
54 THE CARAVAN
After I sent a questionnaire to Gurumurthy,
Sriram, Cho’s son, called me out of the blue
despite having ignored several dozen calls and
messages requesting an interview over the past
three months. He told me that he was on board
with Gurumurthy taking over as editor as that
was the “logical decision because of Gurumurthy’s
association” with his father. He was only one
of several people associated with Thuglak who
contacted me shortly after I sent questions to
Gurumurthy, with the chartered accountant even
forwarding me text conversations he had with
others in relation to the questions I had asked. The
Kumudham group and Thuglak did not respond to
a detailed questionnaire.
Soon after Gurumurthy took over, the magazine,
always right-leaning but careful in its positions—it
ran a black cover to protest the demolition of the
Babri Masjid, for example—became a mouthpiece
for the chartered accountant. Nearly every
question asked at the 2023 founding day lavished
praise on Modi, with one of the questions being
simply, “What is the secret of Modi’s success?”
Gurumurthy, for his part, is now called Thuglak
Gurumurthy by much of the Tamil press, a marker
of his primacy in his community, which exercises
vast political, economic and social influence.
When Gurumurthy was introducing the foreign
minister, he read out a series of messages the
latter had sent him two days earlier: “Came down
yesterday with viral fever. Most problematic I
can’t speak … Doctor says at least three four days
of rest and no travel … Have to cancel PM’s summit
today also.” Jaishankar had told Gurumurthy
he would be missing the event. However,
minutes later, he received another message
from Jaishankar, “I thought about it. There is so
much of expectation … I have no right to say no.”
Jaishankar started his speech by explaining why
he chose to attend. He said it was for the stature
of Thuglak and Gurumurthy. “I can only say,” he
added, “that an invitation from him can only have
one response.”
Gurumurthy smiled, nodding his head as the
audience cheered. There is an oft quoted refrain
in books and articles about the Polyester Wars,
speaking of all those rivals of the Ambanis who
have disappeared over the years while Reliance
stands tall. “Who remembers Swan Mills?” the
journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta wrote in his
obituary to Ambani. “Or Kapal Mehra of Orkay?
seshadri sukumar / alamy photo
Even Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing is a pale
shadow of what he would certainly have liked
to be.” As much as Ambani thrived after the
Polyester Wars, so did Gurumurthy, expanding his
influence over whichever industrialist, ideologue,
politician, news baron or minister he stood
beside. s
 the sangh’s fixer · reportage

APRIL 2023 55
 Mizoram’s uncertain efforts to
provide sanctuary to Chin refugees

REPORTAGE / CONFLICT
ANGSHUMAN CHOUDHURY

APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
as we trundled downhill along the
treacherous dirt track, made muddy by
rain, I wondered how those routine-
ly negotiating this path did not lose
their mental bearings—or a few spinal
discs. Our Mizo driver was nonchalant,
piloting our pickup truck with ease.
Peering through the foliage running
along the trail, we saw neat rows of
hutments, with green asbestos roofs,
sprawled over a stretch of low hills. We
could also see a river snaking through
the valley.
The ten-kilometre trail originates
in Farkawn, a village in Mizoram’s
Champhai district, and snakes down-
hill to the Tiau River, which forms the
border with Myanmar. It is frequented,
among others, by Mizo sand miners and
members of the Chin community—one
of the eight national races recognised
58
by the Burmese government. Under the
free-movement regime devised by the
governments of India and Myanmar,
in 2018, people living within sixteen
kilometres of the border can cross over
without travel documents.
Forty-five minutes after leaving
Farkawn, we finally reached the end of
the trail. A swing bridge made of ropes
and wood, swaying almost indistin-
guishably with the wind, connected the
banks of the muddy river. I could see
signs of human habitation on the other
side, including a small check post and a
few people ambling around in military
fatigues. That, I recognised, was rebel
territory.
On the morning of 10 January, four
months after my visit, Burmese jets
pounded this valley with bombs. Their
target was Camp Victoria, the general
THE CARAVAN
headquarters of the Chin National Front
and its armed wing, the Chin Nation-
al Army. Ever since the coup d’état of
February 2021, the CNF has been part
of a nationwide coalition resisting the
military regime in Myanmar. According
to a statement issued by the National
Unity Government, a parallel civilian
administration, five people were killed
in the airstrike. When the jets returned
the following day, the NUG added, they
destroyed the camp’s clinic.
Sources close to the CNF told me that
the attack was not unexpected. In No-
vember 2022, the Chin Human Rights
Organisation, that documents atrocities
in Chin State, published secret intelli-
gence about the military junta’s plans
to bomb Camp Victoria, located along a
horseshoe curve of the Tiau. The mem-
os leaked by the CHRO included several

targets, including the clinic and civilian quarters,
previous spread: that were bombed by the jets.
Artillery strikes Farkawn residents told The Guardian that two
by the Burmese
bombs had landed on the Indian side of the border.
army destroyed
over a hundred and The local chapter of the Young Mizo Association,
sixty buildings in the most influential civil-society organisation in
Thantlang, a town the state, claimed that the jets had also breached
in Chin State, on 29 Indian airspace. The YMA alleged that similar
October 2021. breaches had taken place several times over the
past two months and circulated a photo showing
below: On 10
January 2023, personnel of the Assam Rifles—the paramilitary
Burmese jets unit responsible for guarding the Myanmar bor-
pounded this valley der—inspecting a crater that had purportedly been
with bombs. Their formed by one of the bombs.
target was Camp The remoteness of the valley, which even hin-
Victoria, the general
ders the patrolling capability of the Assam Rifles,
headquarters of the
Chin National Front.
makes it difficult to ascertain what happened. One
video, which the CHRO claims was “captured by a
Mizo citizen journalist,” shows what appears to be
a bomb landing somewhere close by, followed by
smoke emanating from the valley below. Myan-
mar Witness, a group that collects, verifies and
analyses open-source intelligence, announced that
it had “assessed allegations of at least one strike
impacting Indian sovereign territory and believes
this likely did occur.”
The sole eyewitness who made a clear public
statement was a Mizo trucker, who claimed to
have been on the Indian side of the border during
the bombings. A video, seemingly captured by him
and shared by the CHRO, shows the shattered
windshield of his truck. He told reporters that,
as he stood by the river waiting to collect sand,
a piece of shrapnel pierced the back of his truck,
punctured the headrest of the driver’s seat and
exited through the windshield.
A senior Assam Rifles officer and the district
magistrate of Champhai dismissed these claims,
conceding only that some shrapnel pieces had
been recovered from the Tiau riverbed. On 19
January, Arindam Bagchi, a spokesperson for the
ministry of external affairs, denied any breach of
Indian airspace. “Such incidents are a matter of
concern for us,” he said. “We have taken it up with
the Myanmar side.” Neither government has made
any further comment.
A day after Bagchi’s statement, the NGO Coor-
dination Committee, a conglomeration of various
Mizo civil-society organisations, submitted a
memorandum to the union home minister, Amit
Shah, expressing its “deep concern” over the
bombings and “the distress and panic caused upon
the local inhabitants.” The memorandum urged
angshuman choudhury
the government “to speak and act in defence of
its citizens and ensure that the Indian territory of
Mizoram, either on land or in air, is always vigi-
lantly safeguarded from potential foreign military
intrusions.” It added that since the Chins “are our
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
blood related tribes from the Zo ethnic stock, we
deeply empathize the inhumane suffering and
human rights violations caused by the ongoing
Myanmar political crisis. India, as the world’s
largest democratic country, should not be a silent
spectator to the ongoing human rights violations
and inhumane treatment of innocent civilians in
its immediate neighbour.”
Neither the home ministry nor the Mizo groups
have released any further updates. The issue
appears to have been managed, if not resolved,
behind closed doors. Those living along the
border, however, remain in fear as the war rages
on. “What if the Myanmar army mistakes us as
armed people and bombs our land?” a mechanic
from Vaphai, a village fifteen kilometres north of
Farkawn, told The Print. “We need some protec-
tion from the government and a show of India’s
military strength.”
All of this brings into sharp relief not just the
transborder nature of the war in Chin State but
This fluid transborder space is
welded together by a powerful
ethnic fraternity that continues
to mould, and even overwhelm,
the geopolitics of modern
nation states.
also the delicate triangular relationship between
Mizoram, New Delhi and Myanmar, which has
long been shaped by a complex, interlocking set of
political and security orders managed by state and
non-state actors on either side of the border. This
fluid transborder space is welded together by a
powerful ethnic fraternity that originated in medi-
aeval times but continues to mould, and even over-
whelm, the geopolitics of modern nation states.
on 1 february 2021, Myanmar’s worst fears came
true. Armoured vehicles and tanks rolled through
the capital, Nay Pyi Taw, and major cities, includ-
ing Yangon and Mandalay. Nearly a decade after
the country began its difficult transition from a
military dictatorship to a parliamentary democ-
racy, the generals, some of whom had midwifed
the transition, emerged from the barracks to seize
power. Three months earlier, the National League
for Democracy, led by the Nobel laureate Aung San
Suu Kyi, had won a general election in a landslide.
The military alleged election fraud and arrested
Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and senior NLD
functionaries.
There was great pain and tragedy in this
dramatic relapse. As Myanmar began opening
59
blurred lines · reportage
up, sometime around 2010, an entire generation—
armed with smartphones and cheap internet, and
endowed with civic freedoms and social mobility—
had begun to dream. It seemed as if the political
economy of conflict that had shackled Myanmar
for six decades was finally collapsing. The older
generations, who had experienced only bloodshed
and tyranny, took solace in the belief that their
children would grow up in a different country.
The coup, however, did not evoke just shock and
awe; it also spurred a moment of great nation-
al rejuvenation. Almost immediately after the
military imposed a state of emergency, dissolved
the parliament and arrested the civilian leader-
ship, large parts of the country erupted in protest.
Initially spearheaded by medical workers and civil
servants, a civil-disobedience movement blos-
somed across Myanmar. “We can no longer be the
slaves of military dictators, content with the pen-
nies they spare us,” Min Ko Naing, a veteran of the
anti-military struggle, wrote a day after the coup.
The junta has suppressed civic protests with lethal
violence and used draconian laws and intimida-
tion to clamp down on dissidents—it has killed
over three thousand people and arrested twenty
thousand others. But the people of Myanmar have
refused to back down.
The Spring Revolution, as the resistance came
to be known, is now led by a host of political and
civil-society figures. Besides the NUG and the
Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, a
60 THE CARAVAN
coalition of deposed lawmakers that serves as the
legislature of the parallel administration, these
include the National Unity Consultative Council,
a multi-stakeholder political forum, as well as
general strike committees and other subnational
bodies. The revolution has moved beyond the pu-
tative goal of defeating the junta and aims to cre-
ate a federal democratic union—a long-cherished
dream of Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, including
the Chins.
As the military and police moved to crush the
nonviolent protests, a people’s insurgency began to
take shape. Various civilian militias, armed with
hunting rifles, gas guns and pipe bombs, sprang up
throughout the country. These “people’s defence
forces” have become the main pillar of armed
resistance across Anyar, the Bamar heartland
from which the military has traditionally drawn
popular support and legitimacy. The participa-
tion of Bamars in these PDFs makes the Spring
Revolution different from the insurgencies of the
past. Never before has Myanmar’s ethnic majority
so openly and comprehensively risen up against its
military.
After over half a century of unilaterally im-
posing its mandate on the people, through a mix
of brute force, coercion and inducement, the
Tatmadaw—as the military has traditionally been
called in Myanmar—finds itself in a full-fledged
war with its own people. So visceral and pervasive
is the disdain for the generals in people’s minds
that they now refuse to use the term “Tatmad-
aw,” a valorised title rooted in the legacy of the
Burmese royalty. Instead, they now use the more
neutral sit-tat, which plainly translates to “mili-
tary.” Another term they use is more point-blank:
“terrorists.”
It is not just the PDFs that are fighting the
military. The junta is also facing resistance from
rebel groups that have long dominated Myan-
mar’s peripheries, which are inhabited by ethnic
minorities. Officially referred to as Ethnic Armed
Organisations, these groups have shaped post-
colonial Burma by continually challenging the
Bamar-dominated state’s majoritarian politics
and demanding the autonomy promised in the
1947 Panglong Agreement. In 2015, the Myanmar
government signed the Nationwide Ceasefire
Agreement with eight EAOs. (Two others joined
in 2018.) The Suu Kyi government, which took
office a year later, opened its tenure by organising
a peace conference, which it dubbed “21st Century
Panglong.” Several influential EAOs refused to
sign the NCA and continued to fight the military,
but the peace process created momentum towards
a permanent reconciliation.
The coup of February 2021 killed this process,
dashing hopes for even a limited agreement and

quashing what little trust minorities
had begun to repose on the state. Many
EAOs, including those that had signed
the ceasefire, returned to the battle-
field with renewed vigour, either on
their own or in collaboration with the
PDFs. The first EAO to pull out of the
agreement was the CNF—an organisa-
tion, born in the simmering hearth of
an earlier revolution, whose origins and
history are intimately tied not just to
Mizoram but to the Indian deep state.
there are many accounts of the CNF’s
birth. In his seminal book Burma in
Revolt, the Swedish journalist Bertil
Lintner writes that the organisation
was formed in 1985, under the lead-
ership of John Khaw Kim Thang.
According to Mondes Rebelles, a French
encyclopaedia of guerrilla movements,
it was raised in 1987, with approximate-
ly two hundred combatants. However,
a study by the researcher Peter Swift,
based on interviews with over three
dozen Chin revolutionaries, found that
the CNF was officially formed on 20
March 1988—two years after the Indian
government signed a peace accord with
the Mizo National Front, an armed
group that had fought for self-deter-
mination and is today the state’s ruling
party. Swift notes that the CNF was not
raised by young rebels in Chin State but
by a small band of old Chin nationalists
in Mizoram’s capital, Aizawl.
“The CNF and its armed wing, CNA,
are modelled around the MNF and its
erstwhile armed wing, the Mizo Na-
tional Army,” Avinash Paliwal, a senior
lecturer in international relations at the
University of London’s School of Ori-
ental and African Studies, told me. The
CNF had no trained cadre at the time of
its establishment but, over the next few
months, a series of events transformed
it into a nascent fighting force.
On 8 August 1988, university stu-
dents, including many Chins, organised
a nationwide general strike against
the military regime, which had seized
power in 1962. A new junta brutally
crushed the protests, killing at least
three hundred and fifty people and
injuring over a thousand. Many fled to
remote regions to avoid arrest or mo-
bilise armed resistance. Among those
who fled to Chin State, several crossed
over into Mizoram. The Rajiv Gandhi
government, rooted in the Nehruvian
legacy of supporting democracy in
Burma, embraced the refugees, many
of whom were political activists. In
a step that would scandalise India’s
mainstream commentariat today, the
government opened a refugee camp in
an unfinished prison complex out-
side Champhai—as well as at Saiha, in
southern Mizoram, and at Moreh, in
Manipur—and dispatched rations for
the new arrivals.
Inhabited by restive students in-
censed by the military’s repression of
peaceful protests back home, as well
as by Chins who had been living in
Mizoram before the 1988 uprising, the
camps became the womb of the Chin
armed movement. In November, some
of them came together to raise the
Burma Democratic Front, with the aim
of consolidating a pan-ethnic strug-
gle against the junta. The BDF soon
merged into the CNF, and the CNA
emerged as a new armed unit.
The first batch of CNA recruits com-
prised eight Chins living in Champhai.
By January 1989, Swift notes, the CNF
had successfully recruited most of the
camp’s population. Its Aizawl-based
leadership also drew in BDF leaders
The coup killed the
peace process, dashing
hopes for even a
limited agreement and
quashing what little trust
minorities had begun to
repose in the state.
living in other parts of Mizoram. Sev-
eral of these recruits were dispatched
across the border to Kachin State, to
be trained by the more experienced
Kachin Independence Army.
Over the years, the CNF steadily em-
bedded itself into the Chin social fabric,
fighting when it needed to and nego-
tiating when it had to. It also made its
presence felt at prominent international
fora, such as the United Nations Work-
ing Group on Indigenous Populations.
On 27 July 1995, Thang, the CNF’s
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
founder president, delivered a pas-
sionate speech at the working group’s
session in Geneva. He talked about
not just the military regime’s brutality
against the Chins but also the dismis-
sive attitude of Bamar leaders, includ-
ing Suu Kyi, towards the discrimination
his people faced. In this way, the CNF
combined the struggle for ethnic rights
with the national resistance against the
military—a framework that has become
the primary platform for the Spring
Revolution.
The journalist Martin Smith writes
that, by mid 1990, a hundred CNA guer-
rillas had received training from the
KIA, “and they appeared to enjoy free
access along the unpoliced Mizoram
border.” This was aided by a historical
relationship between Mizos and Chins
that has never truly been mediated by
international borders, but there were
strategic reasons, too. The CNF’s trans-
border existence was made possible by
the sparse presence—and, sometimes,
complete absence—of the Indian and
Burmese states along their remote fron-
tiers. This gave the group carte blanche
over vast swathes of territory. Like
other EAOs, it operated as a parallel
security actor, claiming a de facto man-
date to police the border. It was able
to create a distinct political economy,
whose vestiges remain potent.
The CNF’s control over a strategic
border region gave it significant lever-
age over not just other armed groups
but also the Indian government. It
levied a tax—twenty percent, according
to one report—on rebel groups, such as
the United Liberation Front of Asom,
that received weapons from Chinese
grey markets through Upper Burma.
This meant that the CNF had a measure
of control over the flow of arms and
intelligence that decided the degree
and direction of political violence in the
Northeast. This compelled New Delhi
to deal with the group to protect its
own strategic interests. In an article for
the Journal of Defence Studies, Briga-
dier Rumel Dahiya, who commanded
a major counterinsurgency operation,
in 1995, against the ULFA, the People’s
Liberation Army in Manipur and the
All Tripura Tiger Force, reveals that
the CNF played both sides, moving
materiel for the groups through Chin
61
 blurred lines · reportage
this spread: territory before leaking information about their
Protests against movements to Indian security forces. According
the coup by to the journalist Rajeev Bhattacharyya, the CNF
General Min Aung
snitched on Indian insurgents when the latter
Hlaing (below)
spread across refused to share some of the arms with it. On one
the country, and occasion, Dahiya writes, CNA cadre even killed a
abroad. The junta PLA leader.
has suppressed “The Chin rebels were part of India’s overall
protests with lethal area denial strategy for Indian insurgent groups
violence and used
in Myanmar,” Paliwal told me. “This was at a
draconian laws
and intimidation moment when the Myanmar army was not highly
to clamp down on supportive of Indian security requirements and
dissidents. was tied up in its own anti-democracy-movement
battles.” India’s ties with the CNF, he said, “were
tactical, limited in scope and scale, and primarily
developed to ensure an ongoing intelligence pipe-
line from Myanmar’s Chin and Rakhine states.”
In 2012, the CNF signed a bilateral ceasefire
agreement with the Myanmar government before
joining the NCA, three years later. However,
three months after the February 2021 coup, it
ditched the agreement and signed a pact with
the NUG. Since then, it has trained and fought
alongside PDFs in Chin State, mounting one of the
fiercest and most well-coordinated insurgencies
in the country, turning its picturesque homeland
into an impenetrable fortress. The military has
responded savagely, burning down entire towns
richard baker / in pictures / getty images
62 THE CARAVAN
to punish their populations and cut them off from
the rebels.
“We, the Chin people, are peace-loving but,
throughout our known history, we never submitted
to injustice or subjugation,” Salai Za Uk Ling, the
CHRO’s deputy executive director, said at the sev-
enty-fifth Chin National Day celebrations in Delhi,
on 20 February 2023. “When General Ne Win
staged a coup, in 1962, and imposed an autocratic
rule, we rose up in rebellion against tyranny. When
the Burmese military staged the coup for the sec-
ond time, in 1988, we rose up in armed rebellion.
When General Min Aung Hlaing”—the chairper-
son of the State Administration Council, the junta
currently in power—“staged the coup in 2021, and
India’s ties with the CNF,
Avinash Pahliwal said, “were
tactical, limited in scope and
scale, and primarily developed
to ensure an ongoing
intelligence pipeline from
Myanmar’s Chin and Rakhine
states.”

all peaceful dissents were crushed, we,
the Chin people, were the first in the
nation to rise up in armed rebellion
against tyranny and oppression.”
While it is impossible to confirm
casualty figures during an active
conflict, the Chinland Joint Defence
Committee, an umbrella group of the
CNF and PDFs in Chin State, claims to
have killed over two thousand Burmese
soldiers in the state so far. Sui Khar,
the vice-chairperson of the CNF, told
me, last year, that the CJDC controls
nearly ninety percent of the state’s
territory, with the military confined
to only urban and semi-urban pockets.
More recently, he told me that, in terms
stringer / getty images
of population, it controls seventy-three
percent of Chin State. He added that
it was coordinating with the NUG and
willing EAOs from other regions to
build a national strategy.
Unlike other EAOs, the CNF is
actively providing training to other
PDFs at Camp Victoria. When I met
Khar, a jovial man with the infectious
air of a natural leader made wiser by
years of nimble politicking, he claimed
that over a thousand men and women
were being trained there. The camp
used to be a modest peacetime base
for the CNF, which had agreed to
limit its troop movements to certain
demarcated areas. Since the coup, it
has become a strategic nerve centre,
with separate facilities for administra-
tive work, training, medical treatment,
catering and housing. At times, it also
doubles up as a humanitarian support
centre for Chin villages affected by the
conflict.
Khar told me that Camp Victoria also
hosts representatives from PDFs from
other regions, such as Magway and
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
Sagaing. It was, therefore, no surprise
that the Burmese military attacked
the camp despite the risk of breaching
Indian territory. “We knew it was only
a matter of when, rather than if, they
would attack,” a senior CHRO official
told me. “Camp Victoria is more than
a military base. It is a symbol of Chin
resistance and a place of sanctuary for
civilians to take shelter and receive
medical treatment.”
“The junta is now short on human
resources so it is increasingly relying
on airstrikes,” Khar said. “Destroy-
ing Camp Victoria is one of their key
objectives.” He speculated that the
strikes were part of a larger plan to
clear the way to finalise voter lists in
the state. “We will not allow the junta
to hold elections in Chin State by any
means,” he said, adding that he was
worried about the regime’s pathological
63
blurred lines · reportage
brutality. “The junta might use chemical weapons
in the future.”
For the military regime, Chin State is truly a
nightmare. The immediate strategic reason is
that the treacherous hilly terrain is perfect for
guerrilla warfare. The conventionally structured
and trained Burmese army has struggled to make
gains in this part of the country. However, the
other reason is equally crucial. As in the past,
the Chin resistance is anchored in the powerful
Mizo–Chin transborder space. The historical rela-
tionship between the people of the two states has,
once again, provided succour and belongingness.
This cross-border relationship continues to shape
As Myanmar went up in flames,
New Delhi did what successive
empires have done: tweaking
its border control regimes to
accommodate the timeless
reality of Zo fraternity.
New Delhi’s approach to the military regime next
door, acting as an arbiter of executive morality,
political ethics and strategic decision-making.
after cyclone komen struck Bangladesh, in 2015,
heavy rainfall lashed western Myanmar. One of
the worst affected regions was Chin State—the
country’s poorest province, with three-fourths
of the population living below the poverty line.
The landslides and inundation caused widespread
devastation. By the end of the year, 132 people had
died across the country, and almost 1.7 million
had been temporarily displaced. The Myanmar
government mobilised around $156 million for
the flood response, drawing from the national
reserves, foreign donors, the private sector and
civil society.
Help also came from Mizoram. The YMA’s
central committee sent truckloads of aid to Chin
State. The Presbyterian Church asked its con-
gregations to contribute to relief efforts. Local
musicians held concerts in various public squares
across Aizawl. The state’s chief minister, Lal
Thanhawla, who belongs to the Congress, wrote to
his Chin State counterpart, offering “solidarity to
all affected citizens of Myanmar, who are our kith
and kin.” By contrast, the Narendra Modi govern-
ment at the centre was silent.
In a 2018 article, Kirsten McConnachie, a
professor of sociolegal studies at the University of
East Anglia, wrote that these fundraising initia-
tives generated a certain “language of co-ethnicity
and kinship” that was not prominent before. She
64
noted how Mizos “constantly described the ben-
eficiaries as ‘our brothers and sisters in Burma’” below: As the
rather than as foreigners, which she described as junta crushed
nonviolent protests,
“an important labelling shift.” This shift was evi-
various civilian
dent even after the coup of February 2021, which militias, known as
triggered a massive wave of refugees from Chin “people’s defence
State. Just as they had in 2015, Mizos immediately forces.” sprang up
began to mobilise coordinated humanitarian sup- throughout the
port for the displaced. Fundraising concerts were country.
again held in Aizawl, as were vigils and protests
against the coup. The language of kinship resur-
faced, with the chief minister, Zoramthanga, and
other politicians referring to the refugees as their
“brothers and sisters.”
This cross-border fraternity is far from new.
Mizos and Chins share common ethnographic
roots dating back to the mediaeval period. Most
historians agree that they are bound together in
what is known as the “Mizo–Chin–Kuki” group, an
ethnic cluster that originated in the Yunnan Pla-
teau of south-eastern China and, driven out by po-
litical persecution and violence during the eighth
and ninth centuries, gradually migrated to Burma’s
Irrawaddy Valley before heading further west.
The individual terms of this ethnic triad are
fluid. The historian David Vumlallian Zou writes
that the Kuki–Chin people were initially “igno-
rant of these terms” and accepted them only much
later, as they experienced internal sociopolitical
recalibrations and colonial modernity. They are
mentioned in the royal chronicles of Manipur and
Tripura, written during the fifteenth century.
British ethnographers attached the term “Lushai”
to the inhabitants of the Lushai Hill Districts—
the former name of Mizoram—and often used
“Lushai” and “Kuki” interchangeably. “Mizo” is of
more recent origin. Joy LK Pachuau, a professor
of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, writes
that the term is politically, territorially and ritu-
alistically anchored to the Indian nation state and
the distinct sociocultural interactions that took
place within it.
All three sets of people share an umbrella iden-
tity known as Zo. This identity, which came into
the political mainstream only in the postcolonial
period, has today become the nucleus of an irre-
dentist movement to unify the Mizo–Chin–Kuki
people into a single ethnic homeland, arising from
kaung zaw hein / sopa images / getty images
the fracturing of their contiguous ethnic space
through the carving out of India, Burma and Ban-
gladesh. While each community has developed its
own distinct identity, and political reunification
remains a distant dream, a feeling of solidarity
remains. This muscle memory of ethnic unity has
persistently defied colonial compartmentalisation
and postcolonial borders.
As Myanmar went up in flames and Chins
fled to their “second home” across the border,
THE CARAVAN

New Delhi found itself having to do
what successive empires have done:
tweaking its border control regimes to
accommodate the timeless reality of
Zo fraternity. But this is not a simple
story. It is enmeshed in complex and
uncomfortable questions of fragile fed-
eral bargains, drying state coffers, an
obstinate foreign policy and subtle, but
critical, fissures in time-tested ethnic
fraternities.
“it has been reported that illegal
influx from Myanmar has started,”
the ministry of home affairs wrote
in a letter to the chief secretaries of
Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram
and Nagaland, on 10 March 2021. It
drew attention to a letter it had sent
to all state governments, four years
earlier, “wherein instructions were
issued to sensitize all law enforcement
and intelligence agencies for taking
prompt steps in ‘identifying the illegal
migrants’ and initiate the deportation
processes expeditiously and without
delay.” It reminded the states that they
“have no powers to grant ‘refugee’
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
status to any foreigner and India is not
a signatory to the UN Refugee Conven-
tion of 1951 and its 1967 Protocol.” A
home ministry official told the Indian
Express that, although the ministry was
keeping tabs on the situation in Myan-
mar, “we cannot allow all and sundry to
enter the country.”
Four days before the directive from
New Delhi, the deputy commissioner
of Champhai, Maria CT Zuali, told the
media that she had received a letter
from the administrator of Falam, a dis-
trict in Chin State, asking her to appre-
65
blurred lines · reportage
hend and deport eight police personnel
who had fled to India to avoid having
to follow the junta’s orders. The letter
used diplomatic blackmail, asking that
Zuali comply with the request “in order
to uphold friendly relations.” Although
Zoramthanga had said that his govern-
ment would “provide shelter and relief
to those who take refuge in the state,”
Zuali said that she would await direc-
tions from the union home ministry.
For a while, Aizawl waited for New
Delhi to respond, hoping that it would
keep the border open. But, on 18 March,
Zoramthanga put his foot down. He
wrote to Modi, making it clear that
the Mizoram government would not
listen to the centre on the refugee
issue. In a tone rarely heard from the
leader of a party that is allied to the
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, he wrote
that the home ministry’s letter “is not
66
acceptable to Mizoram. I understand
that there are certain foreign policy
issues where India needs to proceed
cautiously. However, we cannot ignore
this humanitarian crisis.” Three days
later, he held a meeting with the NUG’s
foreign minister, bypassing New Delhi’s
official policy of only engaging with the
junta.
Zoramthanga’s tenacity, backed by
the Mizo society’s overwhelming sup-
port for Chin refugees and the MNF’s
political leverage as a BJP ally, laid bare
the Modi government’s ham-fisted, and
ignorant, handling of the crisis. New
Delhi had to retreat. It no longer insists
on deporting refugees and has not
moved ahead with plans to construct a
fence along the Myanmar border. The
Assam Rifles relaxed its border-sealing,
implemented in the early days of the
influx. Even the home minister, Amit
THE CARAVAN
Shah, who has previously referred to
asylum-seekers as infiltrators, offered
to provide some humanitarian aid to
the Chins.
The Mizoram government and civ-
il-society organisations were subse-
quently able to prop up a coordinated
humanitarian response to the refugee
crisis. They did so with paltry assis-
tance from the union government and
international NGOs, relying instead on
local structures such as village-level
committees and church bodies. As of
27 January 2023, a state government
official told PTI, Mizoram was hosting
over thirty thousand refugees from
Myanmar. Actual estimates are higher,
str / afp / getty images
possibly as many as fifty thousand. This
is in addition to the Chins who were
already living in Mizoram before the
coup, numbering anywhere between
seventy thousand and a hundred

thousand—over ten percent of the state’s popula-
tion—and often shuttling back and forth across the
border. The dispersed nature of the Chin popula-
tion in Mizoram, most of whom live outside the
camps, makes it difficult for the state government
to zero in on exact figures.
The humanitarian response—an unprecedent-
ed subnational effort, especially in a country
that has not signed the Refugee Convention—is
underpinned by the solidarity between Mizos and
Chins, and Christian ideals of humanitarianism.
Various churches in Mizoram have historically
been at the forefront of mobilising aid and public
opinion in favour of Chins fleeing persecution,
violence and natural disasters, whether it was
the crackdown following the 1988 uprising, the
famines of the 1990s, the floods of 2015 or the
2021 coup. “You know, we do it because of our
Christian values,” a senior bureaucrat in the state
government told me. Moreover, the firmly rooted
character of the Mizo–Chin relationship makes
it nearly impossible for New Delhi to “manage”
the border. No Indian government can afford to
gloss over the fact that the mental map along the
borders of the Northeast looks very different from
the political one.
In my conversations with senior Assam Rifles
officers posted in Mizoram, it became clear that
they recognise the inevitability of refugees cross-
ing the open border because of the violence next
door. Some of them sympathised with the plight
of the asylum-seekers. However, the border force
draws the line at narcotics and arms smuggling.
Since the coup, it has made several drugs busts
along the border and a few arms seizures. In
January 2022, the union government accorded
special powers to the Assam Rifles under the
Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act,
allowing it to independently carry out searches
and seizures without involving the state police.
One could see this as New Delhi’s way to reinforce
its writ over the permeable border. Modern nation
states often use the suppression of illicit networks
as justification to militarise their frontiers.
The Assam Rifles finds itself in a delicate spot
between a central government that is paranoid
about refugee inflows and a state government that
will not accept border restrictions. Due to its com-
plicated history in Mizoram, it has conditioned
itself, since the 1986 peace deal, to work amicably
with the local population. In such a context, it
is hardly in a position to posture against ethnic
solidarities.
Senior officers posted in Mizoram are aware
of this reality, and the force has a broad set of
operating norms that guides its response. For
example, it has its own ways to distinguish rebels
from refugees. “If someone is carrying weapons,
blurred lines · reportage
they are a fighter—if not, they are refugees,” a opposite page:
senior officer told me. “We do not allow rebel On 8 August 1988,
fighters to use Indian territory as a staging base university students,
including many
for attacks against the Myanmar military.” This is
Chins, organised a
a mutual norm that routinely features in bilateral nationwide general
discussions between India and Myanmar, though strike against the
both countries have ignored it from time to time. military regime.
It is an open secret that injured rebels often cross With a new junta
over for treatment in Mizoram. In December 2021, brutally crushing
the protests, many
Reuters spoke to a former boxer who was being
fled to remote
treated for a broken arm after being shot while regions. Among
trying to ambush an army patrol in Chin State. those who fled to
Nevertheless, the official statements of the Assam Chin State, several
Rifles label all refugees as “illegal immigrants.” crossed over innto
This is in line with the legal doctrine of the Indian Mizoram.
state towards asylum-seekers and undocumented
next spread:
migrants, who automatically become “illegal” the After Cyclone
moment they cross over into India without valid Komen struck
papers, whatever their reasons may be. Bangladesh, in
The complex engagement between Aizawl and 2015, heavy rainfall
New Delhi over the refugee issue is about more caused floods in
than centre–state relations. Here is a government western Myanmar.
By the end of the
of a small border state impressing upon a securi-
year, 132 people had
ty-obsessed union government the inviolability of died, and almost
1.7 million had
Zoramthanga’s tenacity, backed been temporarily
displaced.
by the Mizo society’s support
for Chin refugees and the MNF’s
political leverage as a BJP ally,
laid bare the Modi government’s
ham-fisted handling of the
crisis.
ethnic relationships and transborder spaces. This
has implications beyond domestic politics, as the
Zoramthanga government has forced the Modi
government to moderate, even marginally so, its
foreign policy towards Myanmar.
Much like its predecessors since the 1990s, the
Modi government remains eager to placate the
Burmese generals for multiple reasons, including
boosting border security, advancing Indian proj-
ects, securing energy interests, facilitating trade
and commerce, and, most notably, balancing Chi-
na’s influence in the neighbourhood. It has gone
out of its way to cosy up to the Burmese military,
through coordinated operations, bilateral exercis-
es, high-profile visits and arms sales. Nay Pyi Taw
has occasionally responded by taking nominal
action against Indian insurgents taking shelter in
Myanmar, which is why New Delhi does not want
to be seen as harbouring dissidents.
The Modi government does not want to repeat
what it sees as the “strategic mistakes” of the
1990s by openly backing the pro-democracy move-
APRIL 2023 67
afp photo / ye aung thu / afp / getty images
blurred lines · reportage
ment. It continues to diplomatically
engage the junta and has, on occasion,
even hindered the cross-border net-
works of EAOs, such as the CNF. But
Zoramthanga’s headstrong interven-
tion on the refugee issue has undercut
its deference to the junta’s sensitivities.
For the postcolonial Indian state, there
is a bigger lesson in all this: the border
worlds have a mind of their own.
as i was finishing my interviews with
a small group of Chin refugees housed
in a Synod Revival Church compound
in Sihphir, a village in Aizawl district,
an autorickshaw pulled into the narrow
driveway. It was packed with young
children returning from school, around
four kilometres away. As the children
noisily got out of the autorickshaw, a
70
few of them giggled and smiled at us.
These were not the first smiles we had
seen in the makeshift camp. Earlier, a
young mother holding her child had
smiled at us. We were told that the baby
had been born in the camp, a month
earlier. Three other women were preg-
nant. There was hope—of returning
home, of a better future.
At the time, the Sihphir camp was
housing seventy Chin refugees belong-
ing to eleven families. As I wandered
through the compound, I noticed
clothes and blankets being hung out
to dry. I was told that these had been
donated by residents of the village. The
small outhouse where we spoke to some
of the refugees was loaded with med-
ical supplies. A whiteboard displayed
the names of individuals, both Chin and
THE CARAVAN
Mizo, who had provided financial and
material aid to the camp. We were told
that all the refugees had received two
doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and that
four of them worked at a nearby stone
quarry, earning around five hundred
rupees a day. Despite the relative safety
the camp affords the refugees, they
have few avenues to financial self-reli-
ance.
The Sihphir camp residents, like
most refugees in Mizoram, had identity
cards supplied by the state government.
These “temporary certificates” are
not equivalent to refugee cards and
are only meant to distinguish the new
arrivals from the local population. They
do not even mention the term “refu-
gee,” instead using the more neutral
“Myanmar Nationals in Mizoram.” The

back of the card reads, “This is for identification
only and shall serve no other purpose, official or
otherwise.”
The camp had a mix of ordinary Chins fleeing
the violence and those with political backgrounds
who escaped persecution. I met a former police
officer who defected and joined the civil-disobe-
dience movement. “They asked me to shoot at my
own people, so I refused,” he told me. A teacher
who had joined the protests, and fled after being
threatened with arrest, told me that she organises
Chin language lessons for some of the children in
the camp. “Here, they only learn Mizo as part of
their school curriculum,” she told me. “There’s no
problem with that, but I just don’t want them to
forget their native tongue.”
The camp leader, an elderly man with a slightly
wizened face, told me that he used to be a senior
NLD figure in southern Chin State. He fled to
Mizoram, two months after the coup, to avoid ar-
rest. Like most NLD leaders, he had been charged
under the draconian Section 505 of the Myanmar
Penal Code, which has been used liberally to go
after peaceful dissenters. On 14 February 2021, the
junta amended the section to make any criticism
of the coup punishable with three years in prison.
The human-rights group Free Expression Myan-
mar estimated that almost ten thousand people
were charged under the law that year.
Almost all NLD legislators have been charged
under Section 505. I met a dozen of them at a
youth hostel on the outskirts of Aizawl. It was
angshuman choudhury
smaller than the Sihphir camp but had better liv-
ing conditions. Whereas the residents of the camp
had been living in large common halls, separated
only by makeshift partitions made of bedsheets
and mosquito nets, each legislator and their family
had a room to themselves. The legislators were
vocal about their situation. One of them, from
Sagaing Region, located to the north of Chin
State, told me that she fled after the army raided
her village. “They cut off the internet, because
of which I couldn’t get in touch with the CRPH,”
she said, referring to the committee of deposed
legislators. “So, I had to cross over to Mizoram.”
Another legislator from Sagaing said that she left
after the local administration put out a warrant
for her arrest. “They put up my picture all around
above: The
the township. My life was in real danger.”
refugee camp at As seasoned politicians, they were conscious of
Zokhawthar, a trade the local and national contexts in India. “It is only
entrepôt on the because of the Mizoram government and people
Myanmar border, that we are able to lead a good life here, but we
was a cluster of need legal protection so that we can avail proper
flimsy bamboo
healthcare and also travel out of Mizoram,” one
structures with thin
roofs spread over legislator said. “We want to travel to Delhi so that
a field adjoining a we can directly speak to our Indian counterparts
school. and explain our situation to them.” Beyond some
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
limited assistance from the YMA and state legisla-
tors, they said, no help had arrived so far. Another
legislator said that the United Nations High Com-
missioner for Refugees should have intervened.
“We should at least have been given UCCs”—un-
der-consideration certificates, an interim docu-
ment issued by the UN agency to asylum-seekers
before they are issued refugee cards. Some of them
said that they were dissatisfied by New Delhi’s
passive attitude. “The Indian government should
take a humanitarian approach,” one legislator told
me.
The refugees who managed to reach the state
capital, particularly the legislators, were living in
well-maintained establishments and cared for by
the administration and civil society. Those living
near the border, however, have a different exis-
tence. These include refugees in makeshift camps
in Champhai district. The biggest among these
is in Zokhawthar, a trade entrepôt on the border
connected by a “friendship bridge” with Rikhaw-
dar, a town in Chin State. Since the coup, Rikhaw-
dar has been the scene of violent clashes between
the Myanmar army and local PDFs.
As we stood on a high vantage point on our way
to Zokhawthar, we got a clear view of the two bor-
The Zoramthanga government’s
humanitarianism involves a
bargain: New Delhi is willing
to look away from the Chin
influx but only if Aizawl avoids
blowing the trumpet on its
asylum policy.
der towns, separated by the Tiau. Salai Thang Kee,
a Chin refugee who had been accompanying me as
an interpreter, pointed to a distant hilltop. “That’s
where the junta forces have set up a new camp,” he
told me. All I could see were two small structures.
Kee swung his finger to another hill, right beside
the first one. “The PDF controls that area,” he
said. A few days earlier, there had been reports of a
fierce battle in Rikhawdar. The Burmese army had
also raided a small village called Haimual, around
five kilometres north-east of Rikhawdar, setting
fire to a number of houses and forcing residents to
flee. Two teenaged siblings—the children of a PDF
commander—went missing after the raid and were
later found dead in a nearby jungle.
When we visited the Zokhawthar camp, a
cluster of flimsy bamboo structures with tin
roofs spread over a field adjoining a school, a local
leader of the YMA, which manages the temporary
facility, told us that dozens of refugees had arrived
71
blurred lines · reportage
right: When
Zoramthanga met
Narendra Modi,
in December, he
offered mellifluous
praise, tweeting
that India was
“truly blessed” to
be led by the prime
minister.
pti
a week after the Haimual raid. She said that there
were a hundred and twenty families in the camp.
“Most of the huts you see here were made by the
refugees themselves,” she added. Some of the
refugees had found odd jobs around the town,
and around fourteen hundred children had been
enrolled in local schools. The YMA leader told
me that they had received R21 lakh from the state
government, as well as support from international
NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Ac-
tion Aid. The World Health Organisation had also
chipped in during the pandemic. Apart from the
recent arrivals, most refugees had been vaccinated
for COVID-19.
The Chin Hills were clearly visible from the
campgrounds, and the sounds of the fighting could
often be heard. “Just yesterday, there was a big
explosion there—maybe an RPG attack by the mil-
itary against the PDFs,” one of the refugees told
me. (The local Assam Rifles commander, whom I
met later that day, said that it had been a landmine
explosion.) As we walked out of the camp, we saw
72 THE CARAVAN
a small medical facility across the road. The sign at
the gate said that it was funded by Medical Mercy,
a Canadian charity. We went in and met the sole
doctor present at the time. She told me that they
catered to all the refugees in the camp, including
pregnant women, but were only equipped to deal
with minor ailments. “For serious cases, we send
the patients to Champhai or Aizawl,” she said. I
asked her if they treated injured fighters too. “Yes,
we have,” she replied.
On a day punctuated with rain, in keeping with
Mizoram’s whimsical weather, I stood in the
middle of the friendship bridge, as people casual-
ly walked from one side to another. In my mind,
I was doing something extraordinary, standing
in no man’s land, literally hanging between two
nations. For those walking around me, however,
all of it was mundane—they were just crossing a
bridge over a river. As the skies rumbled over us,
we noticed a dark cloud rapidly approaching from
above the Chin Hills. It soon crossed the Tiau and
burst into a fierce downpour over Zokhawthar.

As we dashed to take shelter, Kee joked
that Chin State was sending rain, and
not just refugees, to Mizoram. We
laughed and agreed that both were
mostly welcome on this side of the
border.
“take pictures, but do not put them on
Facebook,” a refugee at a camp in Aiza-
wl district told me in broken English,
breaking into a laugh. “Of course,” I re-
plied, followed by an awkward chuckle.
As I thought about my conversations at
the camp during the scenic drive back
to the capital, the subtext of what he
had said became clear to me.
The Zoramthanga government’s
magnanimous humanitarianism in-
volves a bargain: New Delhi is willing
to look away from the unabated Chin
influx into Mizoram but only if Aizawl
avoids blowing the trumpet on its own
asylum policy. The state administration
knows that the Modi government is
wary of political activists and serving
officials who joined the resistance in
Myanmar and then fled to Mizoram. It
also knows that the junta, a close ally of
the Modi government, wants them back
to prosecute them. So far, Aizawl has
held its ground.
Sometime last year, Wunna Maung
Lwin, the junta’s foreign minister at
the time, claimed, in a letter to his
boss, Min Aung Hlaing, that Aizawl
had acquiesced to a request from the
Myanmar consulate in Kolkata to
deport some of the political exiles. This
instantly alarmed many Chin refugees.
We responded by asking whether the
government would be able to provide
security to the refugees if they go
back,” Lalchamliana, Mizoram’s home
minister, said in an interview after the
letter was leaked on social media, in
August. “Since the Myanmar govern-
ment has not given an answer, there
are no plans to deport refugees.” The
junta was left red-faced. In February
2023, amid a cabinet reshuffle, Hlaing
dismissed Lwin as foreign minister.
Conscious of these complexities, the
Zoramthanga government has found
ways to tactically balance its passionate
pro-refugee rhetoric with some policy
moderations and public propitiation
of the Modi government. First, it has
employed NGOs and church bodies as
intermediaries while disbursing aid,
instead of involving its own officers.
Second, it has tried to keep some of
the refugee camps, especially those
that are directly supervised by the
Aizawl district administration, out of
the media glare. Third, it has carefully
depoliticised the issue, especially in
public. Almost every senior official
in the state government I spoke to in
Aizawl, last September, repeatedly
underlined the purely “humanitarian”
nature of the asylum policy. The corol-
lary of this is that it is not a “political”
policy meant to antagonise New Delhi
or challenge its Myanmar policy. When
Zoramthanga met Modi, in December,
he offered mellifluous praise, tweeting
that India was “truly blessed” to be led
by the prime minister. “India’s position
on every front has become stronger
than before under his supervision,” he
added, thanking Modi for his “valu-
able time & consideration” towards
Mizoram. Two months earlier, he met
Amit Shah to discuss the refugee situ-
ation and invited him to inaugurate a
new Assam Rifles base.
This subtle centre–state bargain is
also visible in the security domain. On
one hand, according to some sources,
the Zoramthanga government remains
averse to the idea of fencing the state’s
border with Myanmar. On the other,
the police has ramped up coordina-
tion with the Assam Rifles on border
management, particularly on curbing
the contraband trade, whose profits are
shared by elements on both sides of the
border. On 8 February, senior officials
from the Mizoram Police, the Assam
Rifles, the Central Board of Indirect
Taxes and Customs, and the Direc-
torate of Revenue Intelligence held a
meeting to formulate strategies to crack
down on smuggling, particularly in
Champhai district.
Aizawl’s dilemma, however, is not
just about maintaining balance in its
political ledger with New Delhi. The
Zoramthanga government is get-
ting jittery about the rising refugee
numbers. As a small, cash-strapped
state with limited revenue channels
and parliamentary representation,
Mizoram’s ability to host a large
refugee population is contingent on a
sustained flow of financial assistance
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
from external entities. Nearly every
government official I met in Aizawl
grumbled about the lack of central aid.
One senior bureaucrat explained to me
that the state government was helping
displaced Chin students continue their
education in Mizoram by accepting
Burmese school-leaving certificates
and even sending textbooks, through
local NGOs, to those who could not flee
Myanmar. He immediately added that
the rising number of refugee enrol-
ments in Mizo schools was putting the
state’s education system under stress.
There is also the issue of asy-
lum-seekers from the Chittagong Hill
Tracts, in Bangladesh, fleeing into
southern Mizoram due to ongoing
clashes between the Bangladeshi army
and the Kuki Chin National Front, a lit-
tle-known armed group. So far, around
four hundred refugees—who belong to
Aizawl’s dilemma is not
just about maintaining
balance in the political
ledger with New Delhi.
The Zoramthanga
government is getting
jittery about the rising
refugee numbers.
the Bawm subgroup within the Mizo–
Chin–Kuki fold—have settled in Parva
III, a village in Lawngtlai district.
The state government and Mizo civil
society have welcomed them as well.
But the inclusion of the Bangladesh
government, which accuses the KCNF
of having ties to an Islamist outfit and
of procuring arms and training in Chin
State, in the cumbersome geopolitics
surrounding the refugee crisis could
further complicate Aizawl’s position
as a small provincial entity lodged be-
tween larger forces. New Delhi would
not want Dhaka, with which it shares a
warm relationship, to think that rebels
in the restive Chittagong hills are
using Indian territory as a conduit to
Myanmar.
In January, K Vanlalvena, a Rajya
Sabha MP who belongs to the MNF,
alleged that the Border Security Force,
73
blurred lines · reportage
opposite page: which polices the Bangladesh border, had “pushed
The MNF insurgency back” many Bawm refugees—around six hundred,
and the experience according to one report. (The BSF dismissed the
of negotiating
claim.) On 10 March, the Assam Rifles apprehend-
with the Indian
state to secure ed two KNCF members in Lawngtlai district’s
greater autonomy Hmunnuam village. But Mizoram continues to
played a central defy the politics of securitisation. Soon after Van-
role in introducing lalvena accused the BSF of pushing back Bawm
a uniquely Indian refugees, the YMA held a protest in Aizawl, which
colour to the Mizo
was joined by several senior ministers. “For Israe-
identity.
lis across the world, Jerusalem is their main city,”
the YMA’s general secretary, Lalnuntluanga, told
The Print. “Similarly, for all the Mizos, wherever
they are, their heart is very close and attached
to Mizoram.” Lalnuntluanga’s analogy evoked a
popular myth that the Mizo–Chin–Kuki people
are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, who were
pushed out of their homeland by the Assyrians in
722 BCE.
According to some bureaucrats I spoke to, the
Modi government has indirectly funnelled some
aid for asylum-seekers in Mizoram. When asked
about this in the legislative assembly, in Sep-
tember, Lalchamliana denied knowledge of any
such aid but claimed that the state government’s
disaster management and rehabilitation depart-
ment had disbursed R3 crore. It is likely, though
unconfirmed, that this money came from New
Delhi. Even if it did, it is a paltry amount, given
the enormity of the crisis. For Mizoram, the lack
of funds is a real problem, made worse by the
absence of an active ecosystem of international
NGOs, as is the case with Rohingya refugees in
Bangladesh. It is not the only problem.
“you know, Mizo and Chin are like brothers,” my
Mizo driver told me as we headed to Aizawl from
the airport. “That’s why we have welcomed them.
They are our guests. There are many of them in
Mizoram, but they are Burmese and we are Indi-
ans. So, one day, they will have to go back.” I could
not get his words out of my head throughout the
trip, wondering whether the vaunted Mizo–Chin
bonhomie was just vacuous rhetoric. The reality is
far more complicated.
While the Mizo identity is a subset of the Mizo–
Chin–Kuki, or even the more recent Zo, ethnic
fold, it has a deeply territorial legacy. It is an
identity that secured a distinctive ethnic quality
precisely because it developed within the socio-
political contours of postcolonial India. The MNF
insurgency and the experience of negotiating with
the Indian state to secure greater autonomy played
a central role in introducing a uniquely Indian
colour to the Mizo identity. This was aided, Joy
Pachuau writes, by the inner-line permit—first
introduced by the British in the 1870s and later
adopted by independent India—which “fixes and
74 THE CARAVAN
frames the Mizos in a geographical state, within a
political entity called Mizoram.”
When the MNF signed the 1986 peace accord, it
not just ended an era of violence but also achieved
full statehood for Mizoram. Many Mizos hold
this recent history—the political stability, eco-
nomic progress and social order that the accord
brought them—close to their hearts. They do not
want to lose this sense of normalcy on account of
those they see as “outsiders.” This is why Mizo
nationalism, in its modern form, can sometimes
take on an exclusivist and even chauvinistic hue.
The marginalisation and, in some cases, forced
displacement of Chakmas, Brus and Maras by
certain Mizo groups is a case in point. It is guided
by a desire to maintain demographic sanctity and
a sense of territorial ethnonationalism.
For the Chins, access to Mizo
society depends on how pivotal
sociopolitical actors define who
is, and who is not, an outsider at
any given point in time.
For the Chins, this means that their access to
Mizo society may not always be unconditional. It
depends on how pivotal sociopolitical actors in
Mizoram—in a way, gatekeepers of Mizo society—
shape the narrative on hospitality and define who
is, and who is not, an outsider at any given point
in time. They police what scholars such as Kirsten
McConnachie and Joel S Migdal have called “vir-
tual checkpoints,” as opposed to the physical ones
guarded by security forces. The historian Bianca
Son and the sociologist N William Singh write
that the YMA, which they describe as “the mirror
of Mizo society,” has a history of blaming Chin
refugees for engaging in illicit activities, such as
crossing the border without passes, brewing boot-
leg alcohol and peddling drugs, even though many
Mizos participate in the same activities.
Political dynamics have also added to the fric-
tion. In 1995, the Mizo Zirlai Pawl, the state’s larg-
est student organisation, carried out a campaign
to push Chakmas—the largest ethnic group in the
Chittagong Hill Tracts, many of whom fled to the
Northeast during the 1971 Bangladesh War—out
of Mizoram. According to a CHRO report, this
ouster led to the ruling Congress losing three
crucial seats in the next election, which brought
Zoramthanga to power for the first time. The
Congress retaliated, the report adds, by urging
str / reuters
the MZP to launch a similar campaign against the
state’s Chin residents, who tended to vote for the
MNF. When the MZP demurred, citing the ethnic

ties between Mizos and Chins, the Con-
gress asked the YMA to intervene.
With a slogan of “foreigners are for-
eigners,” the YMA mobilised its signif-
icant social clout against the Chins. In
2003, after a Chin man was rumoured
to have raped a minor Mizo girl, it
launched another campaign to “clean up
foreigners,” Son and Singh write. “Some
600 Chin were repatriated to Myanmar,
many of whom faced serious punitive
actions by the Burmese Government
including jail time, heavy fines and
worse, execution.” A similar anti-Chin
campaign was initiated in 2010, after
the rape and murder of another Mizo
girl. A 2009 report by Human Rights
Watch found that many Chin refugees
in Mizoram lived in constant fear of
being harassed, reported or deported by
the state authorities and the YMA.
During her fieldwork, in 2014–15,
Kirsten McConnachie observed a
deep distrust of Chin refugees among
her Mizo interviewees. “Every single
time there is a drug haul and arrests
it always will be Myanmarese,” one
of them told her. Pachuau writes that
the Burmese are often blamed for “all
crime in Mizoram, from petty theft
to gruesome murders.” However,
McConnachie argues that, among all
“outsiders” in Mizoram, “only the Chin
have a possibility of belonging.” When
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
complaining about the BSF’s actions,
for instance, Vanlalvena contrasted the
Indian state’s refusal to accept Chris-
tian Chin–Kuki refugees with its accep-
tance of the Buddhist Chakmas, calling
it “discrimination on ethnic grounds.”
Anti-Chin discrimination appears to
have dissipated over the past decade,
especially among young Mizos, who
receive real-time updates on the con-
flict in Chin State. While referring to
the YMA’s previous hostilities against
Chins, Malsawmliana, the group’s
assistant secretary, said in a recent
interview that “such kind of things will
not occur again.” There is also an active
attempt to build bridges. The cultural
75
blurred lines · reportage
group ChinTube released a special
rendition of the song “We Are the
World,” jointly performed by Mizo and
Chin singers. Benjamin Sum, a popular
Chin singer who fled his hometown of
Falam after the junta indicted him for
his anti-coup activism, has become a
potent symbol of Mizo–Chin solidarity,
holding several concerts in Aizawl to
raise funds for the resistance. How-
ever, echoes from the past can still be
heard. “We retaliated so effectively,”
an MZP spokesperson told Frontier
Myanmar, “so they don’t dare to do the
same mistakes that they did before.” He
warned Chin refugees not to “return
our hospitality in a bad way.”
Even the Zoramthanga government
has taken steps to moderate its hu-
manitarianism. In September, it issued
an unusually stern order, directing
76
Chin refugees to not apply for Aad-
haar cards, obtain a driving license
or register to vote. It also asked them
not to purchase land or run businesses
without the government’s approval.
The following month, the YMA urged
the government to build “compact”
camps so that the refugees are not
scattered across the state. While an
official in the state home ministry told
East Mojo that there were insufficient
funds to construct such camps, officials
in the Assam Rifles, as well as the
state’s excise and narcotics department,
said that smuggling and other crimes
by refugees had increased during the
Myanmar crisis. In February, the state
government barred asylum-seekers
from registering births and deaths.
As the crisis stretches on, there is a
real possibility that the authorities will
THE CARAVAN
apprehend more Chin refugees, who
often fall into the trap of illicit activi-
ties due to poverty and disillusionment.
This could, in turn, widen the gulf be-
tween Mizos and Chins, and reanimate
some of the discriminatory impulses of
the past. As in the past, certain sections
of Mizo society might cite a few in-
stances of illicit or criminal activity by
some Chin individuals to undermine all
Chin refugees, which could then create
pressure on the state government to
withdraw support. Equally concerning
is the possibility of New Delhi using
this potential chasm to dial up pressure
on Aizawl to deport refugees.
With the next assembly election
scheduled later this year, the refugee
issue might feature in the campaign
rhetoric. An Aizawl-based journal-
ist, however, told me that there is an

informal consensus among the state’s political
below: parties to not turn the refugee issue into a political
A community football. One can only hope it stays that way.
kitchen in the
refugee camp at
the Synod Revival salai thang kee, who accompanied me to the
Church compound refugee camps in September, was a man of music.
in Sihphir. Throughout our journey, he spoke about his love
for song-writing. He listened carefully to my fa-
vourite songs as they played on the car’s speakers.
When I put on a playlist of old Hindi songs, his
face lit up with joy. He swayed to the melody, even
though he did not understand a single word. He
also made me listen to his own compositions, all
recorded back in Myanmar, on a massive tablet
that he was using instead of a cell phone. His latest
song, “The Moonlight of Aizawl,” was a heartfelt
ode to the picturesque capital of the state that had
given him refuge after he fled Myanmar, with his
wife and two young sons, weeks after the coup.
Kee told me that he wanted to record the song
in a proper studio and produce a music video
to accompany it. On 31 December, he sent me
a link to the video. He had managed to rope in
the young Chin musician Milley Sui. The video
shows Sui singing against the backdrop of drone
shots of Aizawl’s stunning skyline. During one of
our recent video calls, he flipped the camera to
show me his two sons. One of them was occupied
with a laptop, while the other scribbled away in a
notebook. Kee was particularly proud of his elder
son, who, he said, is a brilliant student. “He knows
everything! He makes fun of me for not being able
to speak good Mizo.”
There are many like him who have created a
new home for themselves across the border. For
them, Mizoram is not quite a foreign land, offering
a strong sense of cultural familiarity. Kee, and
others like him, remain grateful to the people,
and government, of Mizoram for their hospitality,
which allows them to live a safe and stable, if not
“normal,” life. However, many of them hope that
the Modi government would be more assertive in
protecting them and supporting the pro-democra-
cy movement in Myanmar.
As New Delhi grows increasingly closer to the
junta, the Burmese people are getting frustrated. I
could discern this bitterness not only among Chin
refugees in Mizoram but also among prominent
Burmese exiles in Thailand. Some of them have be-
gun to draw disturbing similarities between the In-
dian and Chinese attitudes to the junta, with both
governments maintaining a veneer of neutrality but
increasingly tilting towards the military regime.
angshuman choudhury
The activists expect democratic India to project it-
self as the antithesis of authoritarian China but see
little difference between New Delhi and Beijing.
“The Indians and Burmese should be closer,
my friend,” Kee, who uses the name David for
APRIL 2023
blurred lines · reportage
his activism, told me. “They are people who have
crossed the turning points of history together and
shared the good and bad of history together.” He
was particularly keen on India working closely
with the Chins. “Chin State is a resource-rich
region,” he said. “From natural gas to the world’s
best orchids, we have it all. The CNF, CDF”—the
Chinland Defence Force, one of the local PDFs—
“and other armed organisations are owned by the
Chin people and were formed to protect these
natural resources. The Indian government should
work closely with them for mutual development.”
Salai Dokhar, a Chin refugee who runs the advo-
cacy group India for Myanmar, told me that Bur-
mese youth feel that the Indian government has
betrayed them. “They expected a lot of help from
the only neighbouring democracy—the largest
in the world—to not just end the military dicta-
torship but also overcome Chinese and Russian
influence in Myanmar,” he said. “However, India
is only providing specific support to the coup gov-
An Aizawl-based journalist
said that there is an informal
consensus among political
parties to not turn the refugee
issue into a political football
during the upcoming assembly
election.
ernment, which is no longer a viable option to deal
with Myanmar, even for China.” He added that if
India steps up to support democracy in Myanmar,
other countries in the region would do so too.
Sui Khar, the CNF leader, argued that India
is undermining itself in Myanmar. “Min Aung
Hlaing has played India by trying to show that he
can do a lot for Indian interests, but that is not the
case,” he said. On 27 February, Bibekananda Bhat-
tamishra, the Indian consul general at Sittwe, the
capital of Rakhine State, accompanied Min Aung
Hlaing on an inspection of the city’s port, which is
a key node in the Kaladan project, an India-funded
multimodal transport corridor meant to connect
Kolkata with the Northeast through western
Myanmar. But Hlaing “can’t help India in complet-
ing the Kaladan and India–Myanmar–Thailand
projects,” Khar added. “Only we and the Arakan
Army”—an EAO based in Rakhine State—“can do
that as we are in control of areas through which
these project routes pass.” When I told him that
India was worried about the Chinese presence in
Myanmar, he said, “India is playing by the book,
but the Chinese are not.”
77
blurred lines · reportage
The CNF, in particular, is keen to forge a tighter
relationship with the Indian establishment. In
January 2022, a CNA unit reportedly raided a ma-
jor PLA base in Sagaing Region. The veteran secu-
rity analyst Anthony Davis claimed that a “well-
placed ethnic source with detailed knowledge
of the operation” had told him that the assault
targeted the Manipuri outfit’s general headquar-
ters, “from where the group had been launching
cross-border raids.” When I asked Khar about
the raid, in September, he confirmed that it had
indeed taken place. “We have concrete evidence
that the Indian militants joined the Burmese
army during the operation in Chin State,” he told
me in a subsequent interview. “Since our enemy’s
friend is our enemy too, the CNF attacked their
camps in Chin State early last year.” His mention
of Chin State, and not Sagaing, suggests that there
were multiple offensives against the PLA. “We
can help India counter the militant threat but we
lack resources,” Khar added. “So, we need their
support.”
The Modi government has
chosen to bet on a regime that
shelters Indian insurgents,
allowing them to potentially use
Myanmar as a base for attacks
against India.
“There is clear evidence the junta has been
providing not just sanctuary but actively using
India-based rebels as their proxies and arming
them,” the senior CHRO official told me. “Both the
CNF and the CJDC have resolved to fight against
the drug trade, which some of the India-based
groups have long been implicated in.” A recent
survey conducted by the United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime indicated a fourteen-percent
spike in Chin State’s poppy cultivation in 2022,
with the cultivation concentrated in the moun-
tains north of Tonzang, close to the Indian border.
Chin sources who know the area well confirmed
to me that this is the area where the Zomi Revolu-
tionary Army (Eastern Command), a newly raised
unit of an older insurgent group, is operating as a
proxy for the junta forces.
Despite these emerging realities directly af-
fecting India, the Modi government is unlikely to
shift gears on its Myanmar policy anytime soon.
It firmly believes, mistakenly so, that the Burmese
military is the paramount guarantor of India’s
security interests. It is not as if New Delhi does
not have contacts with anti-junta forces in Myan-
mar, but these are subterranean connections that
78 THE CARAVAN
it has not leveraged so far. This lack of sustained
communication between India and the Burmese
resistance can have adverse consequences for both
sides.
On 20 March, The Irrawaddy reported that,
according to Chin rebels, Assam Rifles person-
nel had twice entered a village in southern Chin
State’s Paletwa Township, which lies along the
Kaladan route, over the past month. CDF members
claimed that, during an incursion on 13 March, the
paramilitary force fired in the air and detained
Chins who had ties to the anti-junta resistance.
After I asked a senior officer about this, the
Assam Rifles released a statement denying the
allegations and claiming that it had merely been
carrying out a border pillar verification without
actually crossing over into Myanmar. It blamed
the firing on a possible clash between the local
PDF and the Burmese army. But the damage was
done. The allegations likely added to growing
suspicion against India in Myanmar.
The Modi government has chosen to bet on a
military regime that is giving shelter to Indian
insurgents and allowing them to potentially use
Myanmar as a base for attacks against India.
Moreover, it is using one of its proxies, which is
meant to guard Myanmar’s border with Thailand,
to police a shadowy city where young Indians,
most of whom were trafficked from Tamil Nadu,
are being forced to work for illegal Chinese
companies. Gautam Mukhopadhyaya, a former
Indian ambassador to Myanmar, argues in a recent
article that India’s faith in the Burmese military is
“inexplicable.” While Myanmar has acted against
Indian insurgent groups in the past, he writes,
“it has more often played ducks and drakes” with
these groups, “harbouring and maintaining a cosy
relationship with them over decades ostensibly on
‘humanitarian’ grounds and using them to settle
internal scores when opportune, while objecting
to any corresponding gesture to Myanmar refu-
gees or insurgents on India’s part.”
The business of geopolitics, statecraft and
security rarely operates on altruist principles.
There are aberrations that surprise and subvert,
and there are dogmas that dig deep. So, while an
inflexible and tunnel-visioned government in
New Delhi is balanced out by an adaptable and
benevolent counterpart in Aizawl, binaries are not
useful for anyone trying to understand Mizoram,
Myanmar, India and everything in between.
There are policy decisions that are hard to ex-
plain, statements that are difficult to rationalise
and rhetoric that is impossible to defend. Amid all
this, two realities are clear as day: the Burmese
people’s struggle for freedom and Mizoram’s
defiant humanitarianism. The rest, I would argue,
is white noise. s
 True media needs true allies.

India needs bold, fair journalism more than ever.

We need allies like YOU.

I think what we need a lot more of is free, thinking press. Press

which is unafraid, press which actually explores and gets into the
nitty-gritties, which isn’t just there as one of news but continues to
explore and dig deep, and is unafraid to do so. And it is that to my
mind that Caravan represents, and which we need more of—good,
well-reasoned journalism, which is unafraid and which has a voice.
So keep it up!

NAINA LAL KIDWAI, Chairperson, Max Financial Services

I read Caravan because I find it to be a journal that tells,

investigates, and delves into important stories, on what’s going
on in the country today. Caravan is not influenced by corporate
interest or political alignments, and investigates in a genuine
sense the real stories that we need to know.

ORIJIT SEN, Artist

I do enjoy reading Caravan and I get a lot of pleasure out of it. And
it forces me to think. The research that goes into the writing of
the articles, the way they are written and the subjects chosen, are
thought-provoking, in the sense that you think beyond the obvious.
In the process of doing this—like in everything that is thought-
provoking—you ask questions, you have doubts and you want
to explore the freedom of asking questions and expressing your
doubts and trying to get answers. And I find that I do enjoy it very
much, because it forces me to do that.

ROMILA THAPAR, Historian

BOOKS
The Bangalore Ideology
How an amoral technocracy
powers Modi’s India
/ TECHNOLOGY
MILA T SAMDUB
opposite page: Women
working at a telephone-
instrument manufacturing
factory in Bengaluru,
Karnataka, in the 1950s.
80 THE CARAVAN
“the fundamental nature of government is a platform,” the
tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani declared in the 2015 book Re-
booting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which he co-au-
thored with the software engineer Viral Shah. “We are talking
about radically reimagining government, its purpose, its role
and the way it carries out its functions, with technology at its
core.” A campaign to realise this promise had been underway
since 2009, in the form of the Aadhaar biometric identifica-
tion system and the various digital systems that mushroomed
around it. Nilekani and his coterie were now prescribing this
approach to all domains of the state, from healthcare to educa-
tion. The Indian state has since built countless platforms—for
identification, payments, healthcare, e-commerce—for govern-
ment and private companies to use.
Aided by the Narendra Modi government, which aggressive-
ly portrays itself as an efficient technocracy and has harnessed
technology to maximise its own power, such infrastructures
are now in use on a massive scale. Indians use the CoWIN
platform to register for COVID-19 vaccinations, their Aadhaar
details to open a bank account, the Unified Payments Interface
to pay for groceries and a host of digital systems to access wel-
fare schemes. The effect of this—often forced—digitalisation,
we are told, has been a “digital revolution” that has resulted in
vast improvement in the life of the average citizen.
As Modi’s Digital India becomes ubiquitous, older forms
of technocracy are being whittled away. In 2015, the Modi
government replaced the Planning Commission—the seat of
postcolonial technocracy—with the NITI Aayog, the national
institute for transforming India. This finally put to rest the
supposedly out-of-date, out-of-touch institution that relied on
sample surveys and five-year plans. Modi’s favoured techno-
crats are not the economists, statisticians or social scientists of
the old order but a group of savvy bureaucrats masquerading as
CEOs. The bureaucracy itself is being radically altered by the
introduction of lithe digital systems designed in Bengaluru-
based startups.
 dinodia photos / alamy photo

APRIL 2023
81
books
the bangalore ideology · books
Older forms of data are being done away with,
too. The census, which was conducted every ten
years since 1872, through war and famine, was
due in 2021 but has repeatedly been postponed; it
is now scheduled for late 2024. Various surveys,
which were released regularly since the 1950s,
have been suppressed, obscuring data on poverty,
unemployment and economic growth. These inde-
pendently collected statistics, the data journalist
Rukmini S notes in her 2021 book Whole Numbers
and Half Truths, are increasingly being replaced by
administrative data that make an accurate evalua-
tion of the Indian economy and social life difficult,
if not impossible.
In an environment where data is more plentiful
but less informative than ever, the core of Digital
India’s appeal lies not in concrete evidence of ef-
ficacy but in an aura of transformation. Produced
by the government and its entrepreneurial allies
in the startups of Bengaluru and the business
houses of Mumbai, this aura convinces us that we
live in a new India, where even street vendors use
micropayments. In Digital India, technocracy is
not only a way of governing but a potent project of
political branding.
This hype about a digital golden age is based
on claims that are historical in nature. For the
new technologically savvy present to constitute a
meaningful transformation, it must have been pre-
ceded by a backward, inefficient past. Arun Mo-
82 THE CARAVAN
han Sukumar’s 2019 book, Midnight’s Machines:
A Political History of Techonology in India, is the
most comprehensive attempt yet to construct this
history. It distils complex social, economic and
technical factors into a narrative of the triumph of
technological innovators in the face of adversity.
India’s quasi-socialist decades are anathema to
Sukumar, an enthusiast of the liberalisation that
began in the 1980s. Combining a screed against
elite politicians, a soft spot for soft Hindutva and
an unquestioning celebration of new-age techno-
crats such as Nilekani, Midnight’s Machines is a
transparent expression of what might be called
a “Bangalore Ideology,” the form of technocratic
neoliberalism that is the fountainhead for Digital
India.
Operating at the interface of the state, think
tanks and the private sector, Sukumar is a con-
summate insider and beneficiary of this trans-
forming India. He headed the cyber initiative at
the Reliance-funded think tank Observer Re-
search Foundation, which is intimately involved
with the policies of the Indian state under Modi.
He is currently a core volunteer at the Indian
Software Product Industry Roundtable, or iSPIRT,
the body that made Aadhaar accessible to private
players and is now working to export this model to
the rest of the world. He is also the son-in-law of
Amitabh Kant, the former CEO of NITI Aayog and
currently India’s G20 “sherpa.”
Focussing on an earlier moment in the 1950s,
Nikhil Menon’s Planning Democracy, published in
2022, argues instead that today’s data-driven tech-
nocracy should be traced to the pioneering use of
statistical techniques in the Nehruvian period.
For Menon, the Indian state’s “data revolution”
began in the 1940s, with the work of the physicist-
turned-statistician-turned-planner Prasanta
Chandra Mahalanobis, who founded the Indian
Statistical Institute and eventually spearheaded
the Second Five Year Plan. By recounting the
history of statistics and economic planning from
the 1940s to the 1960s, Menon suggests that what
appear to be the unprecedented technological
upheavals of the present are directly traceable to
major experiments in the past.
Even in the high noon of postcolonial moderni-
ty, the state’s technocratic policies required popu-
lar outreach and support, and Menon documents
with great acuity the odd alliances that resulted.
Some, like an ill-fated collaboration between the
Planning Commission’s policy wonks and the
Bharat Sadhu Samaj, an organisation of Hindu
clerics, foreshadow the alignments of the present.
Though Menon’s arguments are persuasive, he
overstates the continuities between the 1950s and
the present, and has trouble accounting for what
is distinctively new about Digital India and the
 the bangalore ideology · books

broader socioeconomic situation in the country

under Modi.
Critically reading Sukumar and Menon along-
side a range of other recent writings—by Nasir
Tyabji, Ajantha Subramanian and Nafis Aziz
Hasan among others—we can begin to piece
together a more complex picture of how the state’s
use of technology has changed and how it has
remained the same in the seventy-five years since
Independence. Together, these texts reveal Digital
India to be a new strain of a disease that is as old
as the postcolonial state. Ever since its origins in
the United States, in the early twentieth century,
the central conviction of technocracy has been
that technology—and, by extension, a small cadre
of technical elites—can stand above politics to
secure the most optimal outcomes for society. This
paternalistic conceit became a cornerstone of gov-
ernance in newly independent India and continues
to be so today.
But, as digital technology makes its way uneven-
ly but indefatigably into everyday life, through
mobile phones, QR codes and facial recognition,
the government and private companies are gain-
ing unprecedented access to people’s lives. More
familiar and more extractive than before, today’s
technocracy facilitates an upward distribution of
wealth while functioning as shiny branding for a cal services as a dominant sector in the Indian
violent regime. The longstanding argument that economy and the nation’s wholehearted embrace
technology can stand above politics is more spuri- of technology. The sweeping argument across the
ous and more dangerous than ever. four ages is the technocratic notion that “political
intervention manipulated and hindered techno-
sukumar frames Indian history since 1947 as a logical progress.”
battle between politics and technology. He blames The leitmotif of political manipulation, accord-
a succession of meddling politicians for holding ing to Sukumar, is an episode from the 1950s. As
India back for the first decades after Indepen- part of their commitment to the nation’s develop-
dence. This history is divided into four “ages.” ment, the scientists of the National Physical Labo-
In the initial Age of Innocence, the early Nehru- ratory channelled their energies into inventing a
vian state, flush with idealistic optimism, estab- solar cooker for the masses, an idea that had origi-
lished dominance over technology, setting the nated in the political establishment. The device,
tone for ages to come. But, according to Sukumar, it was hoped, would see massive uptake in the
Nehru’s India was naïve about technology and its countryside, cutting fuel costs and playing a major
possibilities, ultimately leading his grand vision role in ending the chronic hunger that bedevilled
of planned nationwide industrialisation to failure. the country. The device received a major national
With the first prime minister’s death and the loss and international PR blitz, being covered in papers
of the 1962 war against China, “Innocence” gave such as the New York Times. News of Nehru enjoy-
way to “Doubt,” inaugurating an era of left-leaning ing a solar-cooked meal was circulated widely in
populist governments. In Sukumar’s telling, the the Indian press.
state’s dominance over technology began to so- Despite years of development and political buy-
lidify in this period. in from the highest levels, the scientists failed to
By the 1980s, the people’s aspirations for tech- produce a working consumer technology. Owing
nological development could no longer be sup-
pressed. During this Age of Struggle, tech-savvy
politicians and bureaucrats began to shrug off the
In Digital India, technocracy is
scepticism of the previous two ages, laying the not only a way of governing
ground for the Age of Rediscovery. Sukumar’s fi-
nal age, through which we are living today, began
but a potent project of political
in 2000 and coincided with the rise of technologi- branding.
APRIL 2023 83
the bangalore ideology · books
below: Indian to Nehru’s demands, they continued to work on
industrialists Azim the cooker even as it became increasingly clear
Premji, Mukesh that it was not working. According to Sukumar,
Ambani, Kumar
the project failed because of “its attempt to ap-
Mangalam Birla,
Cyrus Mistry, Anil pease politicians and pander to popular senti-
Ambani and Anil ment.” He calls it “a cautionary tale against chan-
Agarwal at the nelling science for political ends.” This may be a
inaugural session stretch but it is still somewhat reasonable.
of the Digital India In Sukumar’s hands, however, this cherry-
project in Delhi, in
picked incident becomes the basis for a radical
2015.
reappraisal of Nehru. A far cry from the prime
opposite page: minister who said he would have preferred one
Prime Minister technocrat to any four bureaucrats and called
Narendra Modi dams “the temples of modern India,” Sukumar’s
looking into a Nehru harbours a “scepticism towards technol-
phone after casting
ogy and its ability to modernize a nation in its
his vote in the Lok
Sabha election,
truest sense.” He was “convinced that Indians, if
on 30 April 2014. exposed overnight to the awesome power of tech-
His government nology, would become beholden to it.” This is not
has aggressively the industrialising moderniser we are otherwise
pursued familiar with, but a technophobe who believes
digitalisation, that humans lacked the “moral capacity” to use
calling it a “digital
technology rightly.
revolution.”
This conviction, Sukumar argues, caused Nehru
to channel the Indian state’s resources towards
projects to “nativize” or “Indianize” technology.
He claims this legacy continued in Indira Gandhi’s
exhortations to “appropriate technology” and has
resonances in the valorisation of jugad—impro-
vised technology—today. To save his people from
the dangers of technology, Nehru committed to
follies like the solar cooker and the ambitious, but
eventually ineffective, Community Development
saurabh das / ap photo
84 THE CARAVAN
Scheme, which was aimed at developing knowl-
edge and preparedness for industrialisation in
rural areas. Sukumar writes that the solar cooker’s
failure “should have prompted Nehru and his
advisors to correct course, to turn their resources
to supporting private innovation (and failure), and
create an environment for collaboration between
the Indian scientist and the entrepreneur.” In-
stead, he claims, it turned “India’s, and Nehru’s
own, gaze away from ‘niche’ technologies, towards
big industrial projects.”
By the end of the 1950s, Sukumar writes, “India
had a lot of turbines, metallurgical equipment
and mining machinery, but few motorbikes on the
road, air conditioners in offices, tractors in farms
or televisions in homes. Except for reading about it
in newspapers, journals or magazines, most Indi-
ans had not come face-to-face with technology in
any meaningful way.”
Reading Sukumar, it appears that Nehru single-
handedly crafted the nation’s economic policy
stung by a dysfunctional kitchen device. This is
far from the truth. Several scholars, including the
postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee, the eco-
nomic historian Tirthankar Roy and the historian
Casting Nehru as anti-
technological is an innovative
escalation of the Nehru-bashing
that has been characteristic of
the last few years.

of science Dhruva Raina, none of whom
Sukumar cites, have used various
approaches to trace the ideology that
undergirded Nehruvian industrialisa-
tion as far back as the 1920s and the
concrete plans to the deliberations of
the National Planning Committee in
the 1930s.
Further, notwithstanding Sukumar’s
kneejerk call for private innovation,
whether the private sector could even
have produced innovation in the 1950s
is not settled. In fact, over the last two
decades, the economic historian Nasir
Tyabji, whom Sukumar does not cite
either, has developed a persuasive
argument that, far from being visionary
capitalists, most Indian businessmen of
the period were immured deep in feu-
ajit solanki / ap photo
dal networks. In his 2015 book, Forging
Capitalism in Nehru’s India, Tyabji sug-
gests that they were more interested in
using their profits to make a quick buck
in rural moneylending rather than in-
vesting in research and development or
new technology. The neoliberal lament
for the lost decades of Nehruvianism
assumes the existence of an alternative
that may never have existed.
The early postcolonial state’s
economic commitment to large-scale
industry should not be personalised as
Nehru’s technophobia but understood
as a pragmatic response to economic
conditions. Early postcolonial history
was characterised by a scarcity of for-
eign exchange and a negative balance of
payments. In this situation, depending
on foreign imports of manufactured
goods risked making India beholden to
Western powers. Instead, India chose
to develop its own industrial capacity,
which would eventually have enabled it
to manufacture more consumer goods.
There were good reasons, in other
words, for the state to spend its scarce
resources building dams and steel
mills rather than importing refrigera-
APRIL 2023
the bangalore ideology · books
tors and motorcycles. While Sukumar
nods to these conditions, they do not
figure meaningfully in his account of
Indian technological development in
the period.
Casting Nehru as anti-technological
is an innovative escalation of the
Nehru-bashing that has been charac-
teristic of the last few years. It allows
Sukumar to set up the populist binary
that pervades the rest of the book, in
which “technology,” understood by Su-
kumar as consumer-facing machines, is
on the side of an Indian people who are
locked in a perpetual struggle against a
political and scientific elite.
With no new archival research to
back it up and an uncertain grasp of the
existing literature, Sukumar’s reap-
praisal of early postcolonial history is,
at best, an exaggeration and, at worst, a
distortion. This is not an isolated mis-
take but a general pattern in a book that
sputters along on selective citations,
85
the bangalore ideology · books
reductive hyperbole and an outsized
focus on personality. Sukumar is not in-
terested in explaining why history took
the course it did. Instead, he neatly
apportions blame in a way that feeds
directly into his politics in the present.
the postcolonial history of technoc-
racy conventionally begins with the
Planning Commission, the powerful
institution that promulgated five-year
plans for India’s mixed economy based
on extensive statistical surveys. With
his focus on consumer products, Su-
kumar has little to say about planning.
86
But, in Planning Democracy, Nikhil
Menon revisits the commission’s his-
tory through one of its most prominent
figures, PC Mahalanobis, and the In-
dian Statistical Institute. In his career,
Mahalanobis provided the basis for
the government’s industrial policies of
import substitution that were central to
the postcolonial state. This was India’s
first technocracy.
Most historical writing on planning
has understood it as a straightforward
means of realising the path to develop-
ment that Nehru and Congress elites
decreed for newly independent India.
THE CARAVAN
Depending on one’s position, planning
has been seen as a genuine commit-
ment to the development and uplift-
ment of an impoverished former colony,
a heavy-handed attempt to impose
socialism from above, or—in a well-
known argument made by Partha Chat-
terjee—a means of installing a cadre of
unelected technocrats like Mahalano-
bis as major decisionmakers to serve
elite class interests. But, in all these
narratives, the techniques by which
planning was carried out—chiefly those
of statistics—were seen merely as the
means of providing scientific respect-

ability to a political schema that was already set in
below: A National place. The technocrats who oversaw the planning
Register of Citizens were little more than politicians’ yes men.
centre in Guwahati,
By placing Mahalanobis and statistics front and
Assam.
centre, Menon shows how statistical techniques
fundamentally enabled the policies that came to
be. The edifice of the planned economy was built
on what Menon calls a new “data infrastructure.”
The consumer needs, resource usage and man-
power and machinery requirements of the entire
country had to be counted, so the economy could
be made “tractable.”
Statistics was the “digital revolution” of its
time. The numbers that undergirded the planned
economy were collected using a new method of
enumeration: the large-scale area-based ran-
domised survey that Mahalanobis pioneered in
the 1930s and 1940s. The surveys allowed the
postcolonial state to develop a snapshot of its
economy. The sophisticated data-processing
this required led to the import of the first digital
computer to India, in 1955. Looking through the
tables of the Second Five Year Plan, in which the
Nehruvian economic order found its definitive
expression, one finds detailed numbers for every-
thing from pairs of shoes manufactured to miles
of road constructed to tonnes of iron smelted. If
this level of granular detail sounds matter of fact
today, when ubiquitous networked devices pro-
duce endless streams of data, it was a remarkable
feat at the time.
Eventually, Menon notes, statistical techniques
dominated planning, the ISI controlled the Plan-
ning Commission and Mahalanobis became the
country’s chief planner. Much more than a yes
man, he was a major institution builder, a political
power broker and even a de facto diplomat. His
globetrotting networking with scientists and poli-
ticians on both sides of the Iron Curtain enabled
the ISI’s work to spread globally and, today, many
of these techniques are standard procedures in
national statistics.
Although elite technocrats like Mahalanobis
decided how resources would be distributed to
hundreds of millions of Indians, they did so with
a claim to utter neutrality. Even as their work
propped up the entire postcolonial economic
order, the statisticians disavowed politics. Always
seeing himself as true scientist, who remained
wary of economists, Mahalanobis
intended to approach the economy as he did
physics, with the expectation of a single value-
anupam nath / ap photo
neutral answer. It was why he often brushed
aside questions regarding his own politics or the
political ramifications of his prescriptions for
the economy. All of that was politics, he said. ‘I
am interested in physics.’
APRIL 2023
the bangalore ideology · books
This supposedly neutral development strategy
was commonly accepted in the 1950s, but the Sec-
ond Five Year Plan did not live up to its promise
to radically improve India’s growth and had to be
scaled back almost immediately. Menon devotes
only a few short lines to this outcome. “Put sim-
ply,” he writes, “imports considerably outpaced
exports.”
Menon’s history stops at the very moment that
the plan was introduced into the world as an
agenda for economic action. Though he devotes
the second half of his book to the state’s attempts
to publicise planning among its populace, he has
nothing to say about the people as citizens whose
material realities would be affected by the plan’s
The new technologies of
governance through data have
reshaped, almost always for the
worse, the practice of welfare,
rights and citizenship.
statistical calculations. By limiting itself to the
interface between statistics, planning and the
state, Planning Democracy does not, unfortunately,
attempt an insight into the vast impacts of Maha-
lanobis’s statistical planning on the lives of most
Indians.
technocracy is, today—as it was in Mahalanobis’s
day—paternalistic, extra-institutional and unac-
countable. The notion that technocratic decisions
can be separate from politics is the source of
technocracy’s continuing appeal. The origins of
the modern idea of technocracy can be traced to
the United States of the 1910s, when a coterie of
economists and planners around the pioneering
social scientist Thorstein Veblen founded a move-
ment that came to be called Technocracy Inc.
Their central conviction was that technology and
technical knowledge could be used to secure the
most optimal outcomes for society, free of political
motivations. Sukumar is an exemplary, though
unorthodox, partisan of this school of thought in
India today.
In his final chapter, Sukumar describes the ideal
technocrat. “A technocrat, as understood in the
true sense of the term, should meet three require-
ments,” he recommends. These are an “unyielding
belief in the promise of technology to resolve social
or economic problems; the occupation of a formal
role within government that enabled a technologi-
cal enterprise; and the commanding of loyalty and
compliance from peers and colleagues of the same
vocational or professional background.”
87
the bangalore ideology · books
The usual suspects of progressive
technocracy, however, are largely
absent from this history. Mahalanobis
meets Sukumar’s requirements—per-
haps more than anyone in postcolonial
history—but only merits three passing
mentions in Midnight’s Machines, one
of which is a vitriolic comparison with
M Visvesvaraya, the civil engineer
who became the diwan of Mysore in
the 1930s and 1940s: “before this data
savvy technocrat, the great PC Maha-
lanobis was but a number-cruncher.”
Sam Pitroda, the US-returned engi-
neer who oversaw the introduction of
electronic telephony to India in the
1980s, usually a staple of histories of
computing in India, is only mentioned
thrice. The excision of Pitroda enables
Sukumar to make the inflated claim
that “Nilekani is the first entrepreneur
to steer a technological venture for the
public sector.” Instead, Sukumar cel-
88
ebrates an unlikely trio as a counter-
canon of technocrats: Visvesvaraya,
Nilekani and the physicist Vikram
Sarabhai, who headed India’s space
programme.
Despite Sukumar’s seemingly objec-
tive list of “requirements,” the tech-
nocrat, for him, is a fuzzy, undefined
figure. These three very different men
are united only in being savvy politi-
cal entrepreneurs, navigating between
the state and private industry with
an oracular feel for the direction of
technological and political change.
Sukumar’s ideal technocrat resembles
nothing more than a venture capitalist,
a character who, in Silicon Valley my-
thology, has nearly godlike powers to
intuit and invest in the next big thing.
Sukumar does not shy away from the
comparison. In his own words, “if the
Indian state was a start-up, Sarabhai
was its angel investor.”
THE CARAVAN
Though these men came from im-
mensely privileged backgrounds, Suku-
mar takes great pains to describe them
as channelling popular aspirations for
technology. To do so, he selectively and
strategically deploys caste, religion and
class critiques—the question of gender
does not ever arise, as every player in
this story is a man. Even as Sukumar
rightly calls out their contemporaries’
elitism, he easily lets his own chosen
technocrats off the hook.
Thus, he notes that the nuclear
physicist and institution builder Homi
ritesh shukla / nurphoto / getty images
J Bhabha “milked affluent Parsi net-
works to finance expensive projects.”
Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who led the
Council of Scientific and Industrial Re-
search in the 1940s and was, according
to Sukumar, “Nehru’s Man Friday,” and
KS Krishnan, who set up the National
Physical Laboratory, are both described
as “upper-caste men who hailed from

Though Menon’s arguments
are persuasive, he has
trouble accounting for what
is distinctively new about
Digital India and the broader
socioeconomic situation in the
country under Modi.
families of letters, and in some cases, considerable
means.” The government’s scientific establish-
ment, Sukumar writes, was ruled by the “bhadral-
ok class” and “dominated by Bengali Brahmins
like S.N. Bose.” (The caste critique is not at all
misplaced, but the details are sloppy. Bose was not
Brahmin but Kayastha.)
But Sukumar changes his tune when describ-
ing his chosen threesome. Sarabhai, the scion of
one of Gujarat’s wealthiest industrialists, had a
private physics lab at his disposal in his child-
hood, and family networks played a large part in
his rise. Yet, while Sarabhai’s peers “struggled to
make technology relevant for the average Indian
citizen,” the physicist was able to do so, Sukumar
writes, since he could “straddle the worlds of the
Cambridge-educated scientist and the amdavadi
baniya with equal ease.” Recast as a relatable Am-
davadi Baniya—hailing from Ahmedabad, where
the mercantile caste group is dominant—Sarabhai
almost sounds like a man of the people.
While Sukumar describes Nehru as scepti-
cal of technology, he reserves quiet praise for
the orthodox Congress leader Madan Mohan
Malaviya, who founded the Hindu Mahasabha.
Malaviya and Visvesvaraya are described as “the
intellectual progenitors of a school of thought,
alive and well in India today that argued tech-
nology would inevitably improve the citizen’s
the bangalore ideology · books
way of life.” Sukumar writes of “the watchful opposite page:
guidance” of Visvesvaraya, who “commanded People stand in a
enormous respect from policymakers even after queue outside an
ATM in Allahabad,
independence.” In fact, Visvesvaraya was such a
Uttar Pradesh, on 13
rabid casteist that, in 1918, he resigned as diwan December 2016. Five
to protest the institution of reservations for days earlier, Modi
non-Brahmins. Sukumar excuses this by writing, had announced
“whether this reflected his paternalistic attitude demonetisation.
or a deep-rooted mistrust of the political class,
one cannot tell.” If this recasting of upper-caste
aggrievement and Baniya entrepreneurialism as
mass sentiment sounds familiar, that is because
it is: these are also key rhetorical manoeuvres in
the populist playbook that the Hindu Right draws
from today.
technologies reveal their power most bluntly
when they fail, and it is the marginalised who
often pay the price. But failure does not fit into
Sukumar’s schema except when it can be used
to bash elite politicians. The Bhopal gas disaster
of 1984, one of the deadliest industrial accidents
of all time, merits a scant half page of analysis.
Likewise, the state of environmental collapse
that is devastating the country and its citizens is
not alluded to at all. In fact, Sukumar celebrates
the notorious insecticide DDT without a single
word about its adverse environmental and health
impacts.
Sukumar has next to nothing to say of the
structural forms in which technology shapes
society. He does not mention the well-documented
entrenchment of upper-caste farmers through
the Green Revolution, the facilitation of increased
atrocities against Muslims and other minorities by
social media or the disastrous consequences of the
implementation of Aadhaar in welfare distribu-
tion. In her illuminating 2019 book, The Caste of
Merit, the anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian
describes how engineering education and the
APRIL 2023 89
the bangalore ideology · books
cultivation of the information tech-
nology sector as a site of upper-caste
opportunity has strengthened the
Brahminical order. This is, of course,
entirely beyond Sukumar’s purview.
Instead, Sukumar focusses on what
he calls technology’s “awesome power,”
which has the potential to break down
social cohesion. This idea is drawn
from the political scientist Robert
Putnam, who argued that the rise of
technologies such as television in the
United States during the 1960s re-
sulted in an atomisation of society and
an erosion in civic-mindedness. This
narrative of technology’s “dis-social
tendencies” appeals to common-sense
fears—of the sort that parents draw on
when they chastise children for spend-
ing too much time looking at screens—
but not much evidence. To attest to
these ill effects in postcolonial India,
90
Sukumar cites only a 2017 survey of
thirty-five hundred youths that showed
that smartphone usage has increased
without a corresponding increase in
volunteerism—hardly the gold standard
of empirical evidence.
Sukumar prefers ill-defined fears
about technology causing social break-
down over the concrete catastrophes
caused by the forms of technological
development pursued by the postco-
lonial state. This suits him well. If
we see technology and its failures as
political, the solutions to the problems
it causes become a matter for politics.
But seeing technology as a mysti-
cal individualised domain, separate
from the business of living together,
allows room for a mystical solution to
its problems: a cadre of technocratic
soothsayers who can guide society
with a stable hand.
THE CARAVAN
Sukumar does not provide any evi-
dence for the notion that technocrats
are more efficient or efficacious than
politicians. He does not need to. In Su-
kumar’s hands, a technocracy becomes
a rhetorical appeal to the aspirational
middle-class upper castes that see them-
selves as victims of politics and of messy,
hierarchical, outdated systems of power.
This is the populist drama practised by
the Aam Aadmi Party and perfected by
the Bharatiya Janata Party, elevating
entrepreneurs over politicians, con-
sumer goods over industry, CEOs over
pallava bagla / corbis / getty images
planners, meritocracy over reservations
and technology over politics.
much has changed between the tech-
nocracies of Mahalanobis and Nile-
kani, between Nehru’s commitment to
scientific planning and Modi’s embrace
of Digital India. How did we go from a
 the bangalore ideology · books

opposite page: technocracy of sample surveys to one of real-time shortly applied to domains as separate as literacy,
An Indian startup databases? Neither Sukumar nor Menon answer drinking water, immunisation and oilseeds. In
company office this question. 1988, the social scientist Harsh Sethi wrote that
in Bengaluru,
The major economic shift in this period was this model played “on our disgust with our non-
photographed in
2016. In recent the rise of a massive software services industry functioning and ineffective institutions.” It was,
years, Indian in India after the 1990s. This is a history that has in other words, a foretaste of the present, in which
bureaucracy has been catalogued in detail by the journalist Dinesh the public–private partnerships that undergird
been radically Sharma in his 2015 book, The Outsourcer: The Sto- Digital India have been built on promises of trans-
altered by the ry of India’s IT Revolution. While the dominance parency and efficiency.
introduction
of this industry has had a tremendous economic Meanwhile, Menon, focussed on the 1950s, is
of lithe digital
systems designed and social impact on the country, for Sukumar, intent on asserting that “it was the country’s so-
in Bengaluru-based its chief effect was to open up an Indian “psyche” cialistic planned economy that brought [comput-
startups. that had long been constrained by the state. After ers] to the subcontinent, long before its liberaliz-
the rise of outsourcing, Indians began to “ascribe ing capitalist avatar.” This is true but also untrue,
below: A bust of the a sense of purpose to technology.” By the turn of for computers are no longer what they were in
M Visvesvaraya—a
the millennium, he writes, the world “had reached Mahalanobis’s time. As they became miniaturised
civil engineer
who became the
out directly to Indian coders” and the Indian state, and networked, computers could be used in more
diwan of Mysore “long a mediator of the relationship between tech- places to generate more data, more frequently. The
in the 1930s and nology and the citizen, could only watch as they mainframes used at the ISI enabled very different
1940s—at a public stepped up to the occasion.”
museum dedicated
to him in Bengaluru,
Yet Sukumar misses the way the state itself was Though his chosen technocrats
morphing in the 1980s and 1990s. The return to
Karnataka. In
India of Sam Pitroda, a techie who had made mil- came from immensely privileged
1918, Visvesvaraya
resigned as diwan lions in the United States, to transform Indian te- backgrounds, Sukumar takes
to protest the lephony from analogue to digital switching is the
institution of stuff of tech legend, though it is largely ignored by great pains to describe them as
reservations for
non-Brahmins.
Sukumar. Run by the extra-institutional Centre channelling popular aspirations
for Development of Telematics, the telecommuni-
cations mission, as it was called, rapidly improved
for technology. To do so, he
and increased the scale of telephony in India. selectively and strategically
With its success, as the scholar Itty Abraham has
argued, the “mission mode,” a new mode of tech-
deploys caste, religion and class
nological development was inaugurated. This was critiques.
ryan thomas for the caravan

APRIL 2023 91
the bangalore ideology · books
opposite page: forms of governance from the ubiquitous con-
The tech billionaire nected devices of the present.
Nandan Nilekani, The anthropologist Nafis Aziz Hasan speaks to
who pioneered
the changing forms of data-enabled power in his
Aadhaar. For the
author Arun Mohan contribution to Overload, Excess, Creep, an excellent
Sukumar, Nilekani is recent book focussed on “an internet from India.”
a messianic figure, According to Hasan, the Relational Database Man-
a “technocrat who agement System, a new software introduced in this
came in from the period, enabled data to move and be manipulated
cold.” He writes,
from a distance, through a network, for the first
“The technocracy
that Nilekani has time at scale. Introduced in India after the liber-
nurtured looks alisation of imports spurred by the New Computer
poised to have a Policy of 1984, the RDBMS proliferated both in gov-
profound impact on ernment and private industries during the 1990s.
India’s governance.” Hasan writes that these new databasing tech-
nologies undergirded several of the major shifts in
the functioning of the state that began in the early
1990s. From Indian Railways ticketing systems
to the management of land records, the RDBMS
slowly remade the paper-based bureaucracies of
the state. Many attribute the rise of the private
fulfilment of state functions to the new economic
incentives of liberalisation. By allowing data to be
operated upon at a distance, Hasan argues, it was
the RDBMS that enabled private operators to take
on large portions of governmental work, eventu-
ally resulting in the large-scale public–private
partnerships that are characteristic of governance
today. Perhaps more than any other factor, it is
these databases that have enabled Digital India’s
fantasy that every single instance of something—
be it a person or a parcel of land—can be tracked
and analysed by the government. The RDBMS
caused the very meaning of data to shift from
the sample surveys that produced aggregate data
about broad sectors to granular and ubiquitous
data about everything.
A large portion of Hasan’s evidence comes from
ethnographic interviews with engineers and tech-
nicians who coded and deployed these infrastruc-
tures. Rather than selling grand designs, these
informants are forthcoming about the systems’
failures and the labours necessary to keep things
running. According to them, the increasing pro-
liferation of the RDBMS increased the number of
errors and the amount of repair needed to keep
governmental records functional.
In the age of the networked RDBMS, local bu-
reaucrats have been transformed into data entry
workers. If citizens once mobilised community
networks and local pressures to prevail upon local
bureaucrats, today they must beseech them to re-
pair and maintain their existence on dysfunctional
government databases. Hasan notes how farmers
waiting for these repairs experience digitisation
as “a form of harassment often physical, involving
multiple trips to offices, courts, hiring and paying
advocates, waiting for months sometimes years
92 THE CARAVAN
to have their errors resolved”—a far cry from the
glossy images promised by Nilekani and Suku-
mar. He describes this as a “form of temporary,
circuitous low-grade suffering” which amounts to
“slow violence.”
This extends far beyond land records into all
areas of governance that are digitised, such as
welfare, healthcare and even the very fact of citi-
zenship, as in the ruthless National Register for
Citizens process in Assam. As long as the errors
remain unresolved, many Indians live in a state of
precarity, deprived of the benefits or rights that
they are constitutionally guaranteed. This is the
reality that activists, journalists and ethnogra-
phers of Digital India have repeatedly uncovered.
The new technologies of governance through data
have reshaped, almost always for the worse, the
practice of welfare, rights and citizenship.
Nilekani is, for Sukumar, the messianic figure
of this database state, a “technocrat who came
in from the cold.” After liberalisation, the gov-
ernment appeared to have given up its role of
purveying technological advancement, he writes,
“until Nandan Nilekani stepped into the picture.”
Nilekani applied the approach of a nimble-minded
CEO to the “gigantic, lumbering corporation”
that was the Indian state. Once Aadhaar had been
rolled out, by hook or by crook, to over a billion
Indians in five years, Nilekani argued for the
replication of the Aadhaar model—an approach in
which the state builds platforms that private com-
panies can use—as a solution to all of India’s most
difficult problems.
“The technocracy that Nilekani has nurtured,”
Sukumar writes, “looks poised to have a profound
For the engineers of Bengaluru
and their allies in neoliberal
think tanks, the BJP’s Hindutva
politics is the necessary
condition to put their designs to
work.
impact on India’s governance,” dramatically reor-
dering the state and opening up new avenues for
private profit and innovation. Sukumar calls this
“the Gilded Age of Koramangala,” after the Ben-
galuru neighbourhood in which many startups are
headquartered, clearly seeing it as a positive shift.
The historical gilded age in the nineteenth-centu-
ry United States, he argues, was not only a period
of incredible accumulation of private wealth but
also a time when state capacity grew, paving the
way for the welfarist policies of the New Deal era
of the 1930s.

The unspoken implication for our
Indian present is that the mounting
inequality and violence of the present
will lead to a better future for everyone.
Of course, there is plenty of evidence
to counter this kind of neoliberal snake
oil. After the RDBMS, the introduc-
tion of Aadhaar-based platforms has
made welfare more exclusionary and
citizenship more precarious, a major
blow to the country’s already weak
social-security net. Nilekani, less coy
than Sukumar, has called this what it
is: “trickle-up.”
pallava bagla / corbis / getty images
at the same time, technocracy’s inter-
face with political ideology has shifted
dramatically. In the past, technocrats
in India usually claimed association
with progressivism and secularism.
Nehru hoped that widespread “plan
consciousness,” or awareness of the
five-year plans, could even make the
“‘crooked paths of provincialism, com-
munalism, casteism’ less tempting.”
That was not the history that came to
pass. Today, technocracy and Hindutva
have become easy bedfellows. Yet, for
all its apparent unlikeliness, this pair-
ing has a longer history, which Menon
recounts in one of the more entertain-
ing parts of his book.
Beginning in 1956, the minister of
planning, Gulzarilal Nanda, an austere
and deeply devout moderniser who
subsisted on a “diet of milk, fruit, boiled
vegetables and nuts,” spearheaded a
novel initiative. The Planning Com-
mission recruited India’s sadhus with
the aim of spreading the plans “to the
unlettered and religious millions in fa-
miliar idioms.” The holy men, initially
dismissed by the Hindu Mahasabha as
“Congress sadhus,” formed themselves
APRIL 2023
the bangalore ideology · books
into an official body, the Bharat Sadhu
Samaj. However, they ended up devot-
ing most of their time to organising
cow protection rallies and other thinly
veiled communal activities. “It is likely
that they were more interested in the
[state’s] patronage than the Plans,” Me-
non writes. “They probably only paid
lip service to planning, while pursu-
ing their own conservative social and
religious agenda.”
The sadhus’ career as servants of the
state ended in disaster. On 7 Novem-
ber 1966, a cow protection rally called
by the BSS resulted in over a hundred
thousand sadhus attacking parliament
and rioting through central Delhi.
Forty people were seriously injured
and eight died in the violence. By the
evening, a curfew had been declared,
and the army was patrolling the streets.
Tukdoji Maharaj, who had founded
93
praful gangurde / hindustan times
the bangalore ideology · books
the body, went on to become one of the
founding vice-presidents of the Vishva
Hindu Parishad. Long after its state
patronage had ended, the BSS would
participate in the Ram Janmabhoomi
movement and cheer on the destruction
of the Babri Masjid, the foundational
moment of Hindutva’s ascendancy as a
national political force.
As Partha Chatterjee once put it,
“rational strategies pursued in a politi-
cal field … have the unpleasant habit of
producing unintended circumstances.”
In India, even the forces of an avowedly
94
secular and apolitical technocracy had
to be filtered through the categories
of mass politics: caste, community,
religion. But, for many, the distinction
between technocracy and religion was
not clear in the first place. “To Nanda,
the material couldn’t be separated
from the spiritual,” Menon writes.
“Economic development was but a
mode of national spiritual regenera-
tion. It was a different way of abstract-
ing the economy: while technocrats
like Mahalanobis saw the economy in
statistical schedules and input-output
THE CARAVAN
tables, Nanda and the Sadhu Samaj saw
the economy on a continuum with the
spiritual.” Sukumar makes a similar
point about one of his favoured techno-
cratic figures, Madan Mohan Malviya,
who “cared deeply about the uplift-
ment and rejuvenation of his religion,
which he believed would occur through
technology-led modernization.”
The compact between technocracy
and religion—the ur category of mass
politics in the last few decades—has
only amplified since the 1950s. Modi,
Sukumar argues in one of his finer

insights, offers the vision of “a once-glorious
Hindu past that can be realized with tools of the
future.” Unfortunately, Sukumar abandons this
line of thinking and suggests in short order that
“the Prime Minister has been able to sustain his
advocacy of technology free of the trappings of
dogma or ideology.”
He goes even further, arguing that “communal
violence in India is no longer manifested in the
form of large-scale riots but as micro-aggressions
involving localized rumors on Facebook, Twitter,
Tik Tok or WhatsApp.” The year after the book’s
publication, 53 people, mostly Muslim, were killed
in communal violence in north-east Delhi, which
the bangalore ideology · books
The compact between left: Student
organisations
technocracy and religion—the protest outside IIT
Bombay following
ur category of mass politics in the death of
Darshan Solanki,
the last few decades—has only an 18-year-old
amplified since the 1950s. student. Solanki,
who hailed from a
was sparked in no small part by the circulation of a Dalit community,
died by suicide
hateful speech by a BJP politician on social media.
on 20 February
Even describing the lynchings of Muslims that 2023. According
have become commonplace in recent years—which to his family, he
Sukumar was surely aware of—as “micro-aggres- faced casteist
sions” is a criminal understatement. discrimination from
Today, the Hindu Right is the centre that any- fellow students.
In her 2019 book,
one desirous of power must engage with. Neither
The Caste of Merit,
Sukumar nor his hero Nilekani is a Hindu nation- the anthropologist
alist. But, for the engineers of Bengaluru and their Ajantha
allies in neoliberal thinktanks, the BJP’s Hindutva Subramanian traces
politics is the necessary condition to put their how engineering
designs to work. Being largely upper-caste Hindus institutes such
themselves, they would not have found the com- as the IITs have
become the sites
promise too difficult to stomach. Modi, Sukumar
of upper-caste
suggests, is, after all, only “a technocrat eager to opportunity.
understand and embrace innovation.”
in 1995, the digital theorists Richard Barbrook and
Andy Cameron diagnosed the Californian Ideol-
ogy, “a heterogenous orthodoxy for the coming
information age,” combining free-market ideals,
hippie anti-authoritarianism and technologi-
cal determinism. In India today, the Bangalore
Ideology combines anti-political populism, the
hijacking of the state and soft Hindutva. Because
of its power to coerce at scale and in the name
of the people, the state is central to this school
of thought. If, as Menon put it, Calcutta—where
Mahalanobis set up the first ISI—once conquered
Delhi, today, with Nilekani at the helm and with
the likes of Sukumar as his propagandists, Benga-
luru is conquering Delhi.
In 2023, this ideology has become the common
sense of how India should be governed, shared
by all major political forces in the country. At the
launch of Midnight’s Machines, the panel discuss-
ing the book included both Amitabh Kant and the
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor. The book’s dust
jacket carries glowing blurbs by distinguished his-
torians of modern India. Even as the book courts
the BJP, it also channels the imaginations of the
opposition Congress and everyone else in between.
The Bangalore Ideology justifies the power and
privilege of a new ruling coalition of Hindutva
politicians and digital capitalists. It allows Digital
India to retain all the extra-institutionalism and
unaccountability of older technocracies while
facilitating a project of extraction cloaked in a
rhetoric of populism. s
APRIL 2023 95
THE BOOKSHELF

UNDER THE WATER IN A

BHASHA GAZE BROKEN POT
MODERNITY AND A MEMOIR
INDIAN LITERATURE
Yogesh Maitreya
PP Raveendran

The book presents a critique of modernity within Indian lit-
erature of the last two centuries. It looks at the aftermath of
colonialism, print capitalism, translation, realism and ideas
surrounding the region and the nation, as well as focussing
on particular authors such as Madhavikutty and MT Vasude-
van Nair.
Yogesh Maitreya’s memoir explores personal experiences
of his upbringing and family, cinema and literature, how
writing and the Ambedkarite legacy shaped his political
consciousness and his decision to go into publishing and
set up Panther’s Paw, as well as his observations of India’s
systemic casteism.

oxford university press india, S1,795, 368 pages penguin random house, S499, 320 pages

WHEN ARDH MOTHER MUSE

SATYA MET QUINTET
HIMMATWALA
THE MANY LIVES Naveen Kishore
OF 1980S’ BOMBAY
CINEMA

Avijit Ghosh

This study looks at the aesthetic, social and technological
shifts in Hindi cinema that occurred in the 1980s, such as
piracy and video cassettes changing how cinema was viewed
at home, an increasing number of film stars being elected to
parliament and the popularity of disco, police dramas and
action comedies.
The book, following on from the author’s previous poetry
collection Knotted Grief, explores bereavement, the mother–
child relationship, longing, dreams, storytelling and
language, memory and its loss.

speaking tiger, S599, 392 pages speaking tiger, S399, 136 pages

96 THE CARAVAN
 THE BOOKSHELF

HOSTILE FEAR AND

HOMELANDS OTHER STORIES
THE NEW ALLIANCE
BETWEEN INDIA Dalpat Chauhan
AND ISRAEL Translated by
Hemang Ashwinkumar
Azad Essa

The journalist Azad Essa studies India’s interaction with
Israel in recent years and examines ideological, military and
political relations between the two nations, the origins of
Hindutva and Zionism, India’s shifting stance on Palestine
and the Indian diaspora’s relationship with the Israeli lobby
in the United States.
This collection of short stories by the Gujarati writer Dalpat
Chauhan explores, in different settings, Savarna violence
against Dalit communities as well as resistance and anger
against it. It questions and unravels dominant narratives and
silence on caste oppression within history and mythology.

pluto press, S1,618, 240 pages hamish hamilton india, S499, 220 pages

COME, TAKE A FATE’S GAME AND

GENTLE STAB OTHER STORIES
SELECTED POEMS
Kodagina Gouramma
Salim Barakat Translated by
Translated by Huda Deepa Bhasthi
J Fakhreddine and
Jayson Iwen

This book presents the first English translations of writing
by the Kurdish-Syrian author Salim Barakat, one of the most
well-known contemporary writers in Arabic. It features se-
lections of work from different stages of his career, including
excerpts from his long poems.
This book compiles 21 short stories by the renowned author
Kodagina Gouramma that were published posthumously
after she died in a swimming accident at the age of 28. Trans-
lated from Kannada to English, the stories explore dowry
practices and other patriarchal structures, widowhood, vio-
lence against women, heartbreak and love.

seagull books, S499, 104 pages yoda press, S499, 200 pages

APRIL 2023 97
 Editor’s Pick
world history archive / alamy photo
on 6 april 1994, Hutu extremists in
Rwanda began a genocidal campaign
that killed more than eight hundred
thousand people, most of whom be-
longed to the minority Tutsi commu-
nity. Around 2 million Rwandans fled
the country, and over three hundred
thousand children were separated from
their families.
Although the Hutu and Tutsi had
distinct histories and cultural prac-
tices, centuries of intermarriage and a
common language made these iden-
tities fluid. However, German and
Belgian colonists, who indirectly ruled
Rwanda in the early twentieth century
by propping up an absolutist Tutsi
monarchy, accentuated the differenc-
es and inequalities between the two
98
groups. A Hutu uprising in 1959, and a
coup two years later, brought a violent
end to Tutsi rule—twenty thousand
Tutsi were killed, while over a hundred
and fifty thousand fled the country.
Ethnic tensions periodically flared
up, with massacres of the Tutsi being
carried out in 1963, 1967 and 1973. In
1990, the Front Patriotique Rwandais,
a militant group created by Tutsi exiles
in neighbouring Uganda, invaded the
country. Three years later, the Rwan-
dan president, Juvénal Habyarimana,
signed a peace treaty with the FPR that
provided for power-sharing and the
repatriation of Tutsi refugees.
Hutu extremists opposed the treaty
and ratcheted up anti-Tutsi propagan-
da. On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying
THE CARAVAN
Habyarimana was shot down—it is
unclear whether the FPR or Hutu ex-
tremists were responsible. The killings
began that night. The next morning,
members of the presidential guard
assassinated the caretaker prime min-
ister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moder-
ate Hutu who had been demonised for
her role in the peace talks. An interim
government, made up of Hutu extrem-
ists, was sworn in. The Rwandan army
and the Hutu militias Interahamwe and
Impuzamugambi carried out massacres
throughout the country, in which over
two hundred thousand Hutu civilians
participated. The genocide ended in
July, after the FPR again invaded the
country and expelled the interim gov-
ernment.