Round-up of regional news

Inside Rao

What do you do when you are out of power, by now four times removed from the prime ministership of India and twice removed from the presidency of the Congress party? And also a possible jail term in the offing?

It could be India´s answer to Primary Colours. Former Prime Minister PV. Narasimha Rao has decided to come out with his fictionalised biography, The Insider. It promises to be an exciting ringside view of a turbulent political era through the eyes of someone who has been an important part of it all.

The book earlier generated interest when a magazine published excerpts detailing the protagonist´s love life. This time around, another magazine has published more varied excerpts along with an interview with the erudite Rao in which he says, "My role in the book is that of a political activist. I thought I had something to say as an insider."

Never has an Indian prime minister (sitting or retired) brought out a book on his life while still alive. And now the news is that it is slated for release by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at a grand function in the capital in April. In doing this, he will be returning a favour to his friend, Rao, who, as prime minister, had released Vajpayee´s own book of poems.

"The book of the season" is what the publisher, Penguin India´s David Davidar, has called Rao´s memoirs. But, the question is, will it sell? The most recent runaway Penguin hit was not a literary or political potboiler, but a book of cut and dried journalistic reports from the rural interiors of India. P. Sainath´s Everybody Loves a Good Drought has gone into four reprints of 10,000 copies each.

Will Rao the ´insider´ best Sainath the ´outsider´?

Monster cake

EVEN AS NEW Delhi's political cauldron was brimming over with potent concoctions of the khadi clad, the Indian Culinary Forum (ICF) was getting ready to whip itself into a frenzy. The Forum, defying all known geometry of the cake (always a circle or a square, never a long, long rectangle), was readying to bake an entry into the Guinness Book of records with the world's "largest" of the kind.

The cake was to have been an enormous 82.5-tonne, 3-km-long gastronomic monstrosity on Rajpath, stretching out from the Presidential Palace on 15 March. However, the inauguration of the new Parliament and rising day temperatures stopped the ICF from enjoying, as it were, a cakewalk on the Rajpath. They were refused official go-ahead for the proposed date.

But that has only made the organisers more obsessed. Now they say the venue will be shifted as "we can't take the risk of displaying the cake in the open in the month of April."

So from Presidential outdoors, the 'cake' – if we can call it that instead of the snake it would resemble – will now be 'constructed' in the comfort of an air-conditioned auditorium. Twenty-five of the city's best hotels are part of this mid-spring madness. Their puerile goal is to outweigh the 58.8-tonne cake baked by Alabama chefs in the United States.

The madness, allegedly, has a method too. The organisers say the proceeds will go to charity and the event is in celebration of India's 50 years of Independence. If that were not enough, Manjit Singh Gill, president of the ICF, adds, "We want to prove to the world the capability of Indian chefs."

But don't fall for that. In what seemed like a sharp indictment of Marie Antoinette, Devender Sharma of the Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security, shot off letters of protest to the press, the President and the Prime Minister. "When millions of people are below the poverty line and do not even get two meals a day, how can one organise such an event?" asked Sharma.

Point taken, but not everyone would lose sleep over moral correctness. The press in New Delhi was concerned more about the commuting hell in the making from this all-time first when a cake stops traffic. The absurdity only multiplies: apparently stunned by the sudden realisation that one of the key ingredients of the cake is the egg, animal rights activists R.P Jain and Laxmi Mody spoke up in defence of the thousands (presumably unfertilised) of eggs that would be destroyed to produce the culinary megalomania.

This is what people do when the politics of a country goes out of whack. They go cuckoo and start baking lengthy cakes.

Governor Prabhakaran

Following are excerpts from an interview with Minister and leader of Ceylon Workers Congress, S Thondaman, carried by the Sunday Leader of Colombo on 22 March, 1998. Ceylon Workers Congress is a party which represents "upcountry Tamils".

Q: You recently said that the north and east must be given to the LTTE for a period of five years and LTTE leader Prabhakaran be made the governor. What is the basis of your thinking?

A: …Now there is a war between the LTTE and the government. The government cannot divide the country and give half of it to the LTTE, so there must be some method to find peace. When I did not have a vote, former president J.R. Jayawardene invited me into his cabinet. Now, does this mean that the cabinet was given to me? No. This is what is not understood by our people. He invited me with a good heart and I accepted it. This gave me a sense of responsibility. Likewise, if the government can make Prabhakaran the governor for a specific period, then he would act more responsibly. It should be declared that Prabhakaran is the governor of the north-east province and will wield all the powers of a president of this country.

Q: In your view, what should be the next step after handing over the north and east to the LTTE?

A: What happened to Hong Kong after the agreement between the UK government and the Chinese government ended? Did not they come to a settlement? Was not Hong Kong handed back to China? So let something of that sort also happen here. After some time, let Prabhakaran as agreed upon by an agreement, give back the north and east to the government. There must be a give-and-take policy in this regard. Once Prabhakaran ends his period of office, the north and east would automatically come under the purview of the government in power.

Q: President Chandrika Kumaratunga, too, in an interview with a foreign magazine said she had considered giving the north and east to Prabhakaran for ten years. But when she came under criticism she said she was only joking. Now, how serious are you?

A: I am very serious about what I say. But with regard to the president saying it was only a joke, I would say this is why the minorities are suspicious of any Sinhalese government. But as far as I am concerned, I am very serious in saying this. Today not only are the people of the north and east suffering, but the entire country is suffering.

Q: Is it fair to give the north and east to the LTTE when they are not considered by all Tamil political parties as the sole representative of Tamils?

A: Maybe, maybe not. But today the government is preparing to negotiate because of them and not because of other Tamil parties. Now my question is what did the other Tamil parties do and what can they do? Even a democratic party like the TULF participated in the Vaddukodai resolution and after that they too kept away from this problem. All Tamil parties have done nothing to solve the problem.

Q: Do you mean to say that the LTTE could do something better than other parties?

A: They have already done much more than other political parties. Since the passing of the Vaddukodai resolution, tell me which Tamil party took an effective step towards solving the problem as the LTTE did? The only party which has made the government negotiate on the Tamil issue is the LTTE and not other parties. As far as I am concerned it is not my job to judge whether the LTTE is the sole representative of the Tamils or not. All I want is peace.

Columbus climbers

There is a 1956 book, The Ascent of Rum Doodle by W.E. Bowman, not very well known generally, but which most mountaineers would be familiar with. It is a spoof of mountain climbing in the grand old tradition of sahibs laying siege, with the help of an army of porters, to the mountain (in this case the highest of them all, Rum Doodle, standing at a majestic height of 40,000 1/2 feet).

The book is a hilarious account of how a disparate group of would-be mountaineers fumble about in a fictional "Yogistan" trying to conquer Rum Doodle. Finally, in a grand climax the leader leads his team up to the summit, which 'gives' pretty easily, only to realise that they are not on Rum Doodle, but on North Doodle, 5000 feet lower. "We had climbed the wrong mountain," the leader reports.

Cut to real life and the autumn of 1997. A "SAARC" team of mountaineers was brought together on yet another commemoration of India's 50 years of freedom to go and climb a mountain in the Indian Himalaya. The peak chosen was the previously unclimbed 6794-metre Gya, situated at the trijunction of Himachal Pradesh, Ladakh and Tibet. The expedition did not get off to a good start since the route decided upon was from the north which meant going by way of Ladakh (in Indian Kashmir), and the Pakistanis would not climb there. That initial hitch notwithstanding, a large group was assembled, consisting of mountaineers from Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India (it is not clear which other countries were included since the team leader has not put out a report), Sherpas and local porters.

The team went up to Himachal armed with a huge enlargement of the mountain face they were to climb, as well as much fancy equipment such as satellite phones and a global positioning system (GPS) so that they would know where they were.

The assemblage of climbers itself was by no means unimpressive. The team counted in it several Everest summiteers and climbing instructors and was led by Col H.S. Chauhan, principal at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling. As an Indian climber put it, "They could have climbed anything, let alone Gya."

And that's what they seem to have done. After tackling two very difficult sections, the summit was reached. Photos were taken, GPS observations made and the world informed by satellite phone about the "first ascent of Gya".

Back in Delhi, preparations were on to celebrate the conquest when a horrible discovery was made. They had climbed the wrong mountain. What was thought to be Gya was not in fact Gya.

The slides showed the real Gya further behind the peak that had been conquered. A postmortem revealed that the team had read the map wrongly and established base camp a valley too soon. Meanwhile, someone had forgotten to bring along the picture of the mountain. "The nadir of Indian mountaineering intelligence," said the above-mentioned mountaineer, forgetting for a moment that this was a South Asian team, albeit on an Indian mountain.

Back in Delhi, after the initial embarrassment was done with, it was decided to look for a face-saving measure, more so because this was a much-hoopla'ed effort at regional camaraderie, whose success had been much trumpeted. And so they went ahead and decided to call the peak Gya Sumpa/6480 m (meaning the 3rd peak of Gya), hoping that no one (including politicians) would notice. Till the time of going to press, they certainly hadn't.

Khichdi

WHEN IT BECAME known several months ago that Bangladesh's rice crop of last autumn had fallen below par, the government lost no time in importing 3.5 million metric tons to prevent a price rise. A hundred and twenty million Bangladeshis eat rice as a staple, and any government which knows its poll arithmetic knows there is only one way to deal with rice price. Unfortunately for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, there was more inflation in the offing.

Riots broke out in February when onions suddenly became very pricey. They were selling for the not unusual 15 to 18 taka per kg, when soon they were up at 50 taka. The blame was laid on low onion stocks due variously to last year's excessive rainfall, this winter's cold wave, and smuggling out to India, which too had a poor onion harvest this year. (In normal times, Bangladesh meets its surplus demand by importing Indian onions.)

The onions were important enough for Sheikh Hasina to call an emergency cabinet meeting. Traders were allowed to import the bulbs on an emergency basis, and the import tax was lowered from 37.5 percent to 7.5 percent for the period 3 March to 15 April.

Before the onion injury had healed, the Prime Minister was rubbed with a salt crisis. On the face of it, this was a 'manufactured' crisis, thriving on rumours of scarcity even though there was adequate supply. One Dhaka wholesaler, Sharif Uddin, said he was selling 300 25-kg bags a day whereas his normal was no more than 80.

Commerce and Industries Minister Tofael Ahmed claimed that there was no scarcity of salt in the market and attributed the scare to "a conspiracy of certain quarters against the government". Even so, the government put out a handout claiming that the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh (tcb) has taken steps to import huge quantities of salt, and that a shipload was already at the port.

However, something good seemed to have come out of the grain-and-condiments crisis, after all. After boycotting the Parliament for six months, the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party of Begum Khaleda Zia, decided to use an appropriate fig leaf to head back up the steps of the Sangsad Bhawan. On 8 March, the BNP announced that it was coming back "in the greater interest of the country as the prices of essentials are running high without checks".

This is how rice, onions and salt become the essential ingredients of a Bangladeshi political khichdi.

– Talat Kamal