The paradox of Pope Francis - Hans Kung

Published on National Catholic Reporter (http://ncronline.org)

The paradox of Pope Francis
Hans Kung | May. 21, 2013 Pope Francis
Essay

Who could have imagined what has happened in the last weeks?

When I decided, months ago, to resign all of my official duties on the occasion of my 85th birthday, I assumed I would never see fulfilled my dream that -- after all the setbacks following the Second Vatican Council -- the Catholic church would once again experience the kind of rejuvenation that it did under Pope John XXIII.

Then my theological companion over so many decades, Joseph Ratzinger -- both of us are now 85 -- suddenly announced his resignation from the papal office effective at the end of February. And on March 19, St. Joseph’s feast day and my birthday, a new pope with the surprising and programmatic name Francis assumed this office.

Has Jorge Mario Bergoglio considered why no pope has dared to choose the name of Francis until now? At any rate, the Argentine was aware that with the name of Francis he was connecting himself with Francis of Assisi, the world-famous 13th-century downshifter who had been the fun-loving, worldly son of a rich textile merchant in Assisi, until at the age of 24, he gave up his family, wealth and career, even giving his splendid clothes back to his father.

It is astonishing how, from the first minute of his election, Pope Francis chose a new style: unlike his predecessor, no miter with gold and jewels, no ermine-trimmed cape, no made-to-measure red shoes and headwear, no magnificent throne.

Astonishing, too, that the new pope deliberately abstains from solemn gestures and high-flown rhetoric and speaks in the language of the people.

And finally it is astonishing how the new pope emphasizes his humanity: He asked for the prayers of the people before he gave them his blessing; settled his own hotel bill like anybody else; showed his friendliness to the cardinals in the coach, in their shared residence, at the official goodbye; washed the feet of young prisoners, including those of a young Muslim woman. A pope who demonstrates that he is a man with his feet on the ground.

All this would have pleased Francis of Assisi and is the opposite of what Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) represented in his time. In 1209, Francis and 11 “lesser brothers” (fratres minores or friars minor) traveled to Rome to lay before Innocent their short rule, consisting entirely of quotations from the Bible, and to ask for papal approval for their way of life, living in poverty and preaching as lay preachers “according to the form of the Holy Gospel.”

Innocent III, the duke of Segni, who was only 37 when he was elected pope, was a born ruler; he was a theologian educated in Paris, a shrewd lawyer, a clever speaker, a capable administrator and a sophisticated diplomat. No pope before or after him had ever had as much power as he had. Innocent completed the revolution from above initiated by Gregory VII in the 11th century (“the Gregorian Reform”). Instead of the title of “Successor of St. Peter,” Innocent preferred the title of “Vicar of Christ,” as used by every bishop or priest until the 12th century. Unlike in the first millennium and never acknowledged in the apostolic churches of the East, the pope since then has acted as the absolute ruler, lawgiver and judge of Christianity -- until today.

The triumphal pontificate of Innocent proved itself to be not only the high point but also the turning point. Already in his time, there were signs of decay that, up until in our own time, have remained features of the Roman Curia system: nepotism, favoritism, acquisitiveness, corruption and dubious financial dealings. Already in the 1170s and 1180s, however, powerful nonconformist penitent and mendicant orders (Cathars, Waldensians) were developing. But popes and bishops acted against these dangerous currents by banning lay preaching, condemning “heretics” by the Inquisition, and even carrying out the Albigensian Crusade.

Yet it was Innocent himself who tried to integrate into the church evangelical-apostolic mendicant orders, even during all the eradication policies against obstinate “heretics” like the Cathars. Even Innocent knew that an urgent reform of the church was needed, and it was for this reform that he called the glorious Fourth Lateran Council. And so, after long admonition, he gave Francis of Assisi permission to preach. Concerning the ideal of absolute poverty as required by the Franciscan rule, the pope would first seek to know the will of God in prayer. On the basis of a dream in which a small, insignificant member of an order saved the papal Basilica of St. John Lateran from collapsing -- so it was told -- the pope finally allowed the Rule of Francis of Assisi. He let this be known in the Consistory of Cardinals but never had it committed to paper.

A different path

In fact, Francis of Assisi represented the alternative to the Roman system. What would have happened if Innocent and his like had taken the Gospel seriously? Even if they had understood it spiritually rather than literally, his evangelical demands meant and still mean an immense challenge to the centralized, legalized, politicized and clericalized system of power that had taken over the cause of Christ in Rome since the 11th century.

Innocent III was probably the only pope who, because of his unusual characteristics, could have directed the church along a completely different path, and this would have saved the papacies of the 14th and 15th centuries schism and exile, and the church in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation. Obviously, this would already have meant a paradigm shift for the Catholic church in the 13th century, a shift that instead of splitting the church would have renewed it, and at the same time reconciled the churches of East and West.

Thus, the early Christian basic concerns of Francis of Assisi remain even today questions for the Catholic church and now for a pope who, indicating his intentions, has called himself Francis. It is above all about the three basic concerns of the Franciscan ideal that have to be taken seriously today: It is about poverty, humility and simplicity. This probably explains why no previous pope has dared to take the name of Francis: The expectations seem to be too high.

That begs a second question: What does it mean for a pope today if he bravely takes the name of Francis? Of course the character of Francis of Assisi must not be idealized; he could be one-sided, eccentric, and he had his weaknesses, too. He is not the absolute standard. But his early Christian concerns must be taken seriously even if they need not be literally implemented but rather translated into modern times by pope and church.
Poverty: The church in the spirit of Innocent III meant a church of wealth, pomp and circumstance, acquisitiveness and financial scandal. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis means a church of transparent financial policies and modest frugality. A church that concerns itself above all with the poor, the weak and the marginalized. A church that does not pile up wealth and capital but instead actively fights poverty and offers its staff exemplary conditions of employment.
Humility: The church in the spirit of Innocent means a church of power and domination, bureaucracy and discrimination, repression and Inquisition. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis means a church of humanity, dialogue, brotherhood and sisterhood, hospitality for nonconformists; it means the unpretentious service of its leaders and social solidarity, a community that does not exclude new religious forces and ideas from the church but rather allows them to flourish.
Simplicity: The church in the spirit of Innocent means a church of dogmatic immovability, moralistic censure and legal hedging, a church of canon law regulating everything, a church of all-knowing scholastics and of fear. In contrast, a church in the spirit of Francis of Assisi means a church of good news and of joy, a theology based purely on the Gospel, a church that listens to people instead of indoctrinating from above, a church that does not only teach but one that constantly learns.

So, in the light of the concerns and approaches of Francis of Assisi, basic options and policies can be formulated today for a Catholic church whose façade still glitters on great Roman occasions but whose inner structure is rotten and fragile in the daily life of parishes in many lands, which is why many people have left it in spirit and often in fact.

While no reasonable person will expect that one man can effect all reforms overnight, a paradigm shift would be possible in five years: This was shown by the Lorraine Pope Leo IX (1049-54) who prepared Gregory VII’s reforms, and in the 20th century by the Italian John XXIII (1958-63) who called the Second Vatican Council. But, today above all, the direction should be made clear again: not a restoration to pre-council times as there was under the Polish and German popes, but instead considered, planned and well-communicated steps to reform along the lines of the Second Vatican Council.

A third question presents itself today as much as then: Will a reform of the church not meet with serious opposition? Doubtless, he will thus awaken powerful opposition, above all in the powerhouse of the Roman Curia, opposition that is difficult to withstand. Those in power in the Vatican are not likely to abandon the power that has been accumulated since the Middle Ages.

Curial pressures

Francis of Assisi also had to experience the force of such curial pressures. He who wanted to free himself of everything by living in poverty clung more and more closely to “Holy Mother Church.” Not in confrontation with the hierarchy but rather in obedience to pope and Curia, he wanted to live in imitation of Jesus: in a life of poverty, in lay preaching. He and his followers even had themselves tonsured in order to enter the clerical state. In fact, this made preaching easier but on the other it encouraged the clericalization of the young community, which included more and more priests. So it is not surprising that the Franciscan community became increasingly integrated into the Roman system. Francis’ last years were overshadowed by the tensions between the original ideals of Jesus’ followers and the adaptation of his community to the existing type of monastic life.

To do Francis justice: On Oct. 3, 1226, aged only 44, he died as poor as he had lived. Just 10 years previously, one year after the Fourth Lateran Council, Innocent III died unexpectedly at the age of 56. On July 16, 1216, his body was found in the Cathedral of Perugia: This pope who had known how to increase the power, property and wealth of the Holy See like no other before him was found deserted by all, naked, robbed by his own servants. A trumpet call signaling the transition from papal world domination to papal powerlessness: At the beginning of the 13th century there is Innocent III reigning in glory; at the end of the century, there is the megalomaniac Boniface VIII (1294-1303) arrested by the French; and then the 70-year exile in Avignon, France, and the Western schism with two and, finally, three popes.

Barely two decades after Francis’ death, the Roman church seemed to almost completely domesticate the rapidly spreading Franciscan movement in Italy so that it quickly became a normal order at the service of papal politics, and even became a tool of the Inquisition. If it was possible for the Roman system to finally domesticate Francis of Assisi and his followers, then obviously it cannot be excluded that a Pope Francis could also be trapped in the Roman system that he is supposed to be reforming. Pope Francis: a paradox? Is it possible that a pope and a Francis, obviously opposites, can ever be reconciled? Only by an evangelically minded, reforming pope.

To conclude, a fourth question: What is to be done if our expectations of reform are quashed from above? In any case, the time is past when pope and bishops could reckon with the obedience of the faithful. The 11th-century Gregorian Reform also introduced a certain mysticism of obedience: Obeying God means obeying the church and that means obeying the pope. Since that time, it has been drummed into Catholics that the obedience of all Christians to the pope is a cardinal virtue; commanding and enforcing obedience -- by whatever means -- has become the Roman style. But the medieval equation, “Obedience to God equals obedience to the church equals obedience to the pope,” patently contradicts the word of the apostle before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem: “Man must obey God rather than other men.”

We should then in no way fall into resignation; instead, faced with a lack of impulse toward reform from the top down, from the hierarchy, we must take the offensive, pushing for reform from the bottom up. If Pope Francis tackles reforms, he will find he has the wide approval of people far beyond the Catholic church. However, if he just lets things continue as they are, without clearing the logjam of reforms as now in the case of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, then the call of “Time for outrage! Indignez-vous!” will ring out more and more in the Catholic church, provoking reforms from the bottom up that will be implemented without the approval of the hierarchy and frequently even in spite of the hierarchy’s attempts at circumvention. In the worst case -- as I already wrote before this papal election -- the Catholic church will experience a new ice age instead of a spring and run the risk of dwindling into a barely relevant large sect.

[Theologian Fr. Hans Küng writes from Tübingen, Germany.]

Source URL (retrieved on 05/30/2013 - 16:49): http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/paradox-pope-francis

BlackBerry's hometown waits in hope of a renaissance

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/17/blackberrys-hometown-wait-hope-renaissance


The graphic designers took their inspiration from the clean lines of the Farnsworth House, a modernist gem near Chicago designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe. The typeface was created by Canadian Rod McDonald, who specialises in clear lettering for the partially sighted.

On a snowy day in Waterloo, Ontario, local residents and businesses are demonstrating visible support for the ailing smartphone company and its vitally important new products
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Juliette Garside in Waterloo, Ontario
The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2013
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BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins unveiling the BlackBerry 10 mobile platform on which 7,000 jobs in BlackBerry's hometown alone depend. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

On market day in the small Canadian town of Waterloo, Ontario, the snow covers the car parks, and horse-drawn buggies pull up alongside the pickups. Founded two centuries ago on the prairie between the Great Lakes, Waterloo is home to the global smartphone maker BlackBerry, 500 tech companies and an institute of quantum computing, but it was first settled by German Mennonites, a religious sect who reject the inventions of the machine age.

Working the land, raising barns and crafting hardwood kitchens for the many local technology millionaires, the Mennonites and their town have thrived on BlackBerry's success. But the community's future prosperity hinges on the efforts of a more recent German immigrant, BlackBerry chief executive Thorsten Heins. Appointed 13 months ago, his mission is to arrest the decline of a company whose value has crashed from a peak of $80bn (£51bn) in 2008 to $7.5bn this year.

"A year ago I felt the universe was in disarray," says Heins. "Now all the stars have really lined up." Sporting a blue shirt embossed with the company logo, his phone in a holster hung from his belt, Heins is hosting a tour of BlackBerry's sprawling 22-building headquarters.

It is two weeks after the splashy New York event, attended by BlackBerry's new creative director, the musician Alicia Keys, and beamed to press conferences in seven cities, at which Heins unveiled his company's first true internet phone, the Z10, and the BB10 operating system on which it runs.

Back home, the streets are lined with messages of support. "Proud to be powered by BlackBerry" reads the sign outside the VW car dealership. There are discounts at burger joints for customers with the right phone, and the baristas in Starbucks wear BlackBerry T-shirts. With 7,000 of its employees in Waterloo alone, every finger is crossed for the company.

BB10 took two years and 15 acquisitions to build, at a time when the firm then known as Research in Motion (RIM) was suffering the greatest upheaval in its history. In January last year, it was in a tailspin: Apple and Google had stolen its crown, with phones that were almost as powerful as laptops. RIM had played no part in the latest wave of the personal computing revolution, spending the years since the iPhone's 2007 arrival pushing email phones in emerging markets rather than improving technology, and its best-selling product was outdated.

An investor revolt wrested control from founder Mike Lazaridis and his co-chief executive Jim Balsillie. Heins took their place and set about slashing costs, eventually announcing 5,000 redundancies. He hired two Wall Street banks to seek out potential buyers, and announced the company's first loss in eight years. But Heins also redoubled efforts on the firm's biggest ever project – the building of BB10.

The Europeans brought in as his lieutenants are bullish, naturally. "We want to regain our position as the number one in the world," says Kristian Tear, the Swedish chief operating officer who came from Sony. "It could be the greatest comeback in tech history," claims marketing boss Frank Boulben, formerly of Orange. "The carriers [mobile networks] are behind us. They don't want a duopoly."

Between them, Google – whose Android software is used by Samsung, HTC and many others – and Apple accounted for 85% of handsets shipped last year, according to research firm Gartner. BlackBerry's share has fallen to 5%. Few software companies survive more than one change of operating system, and while BlackBerry leapt from making pagers to phones in the late 1990s, not everyone is confident of the same success this time. Balsillie, who unlike Lazaridis no longer holds a seat on the board, filed papers last week revealing that he had sold all his shares in the company.

"I took this job not just because I love restructuring," says Heins. "I did it because I loved the core of innovation that I saw at RIM." Many advised him to jump on the Android bandwagon, or follow Nokia's lead by taking financial incentives from Microsoft to use its Windows Phone system. Instead, he decided to follow the course set by Lazaridis, who in 2010 had bought a Canadian firm called QNX, intending to use its technology as the building block for a new generation of phones.

Like Linux, on which Android is built, QNX is a basic operating system on which the interfaces of different machines can run. While most such systems are monolithic – if one area malfunctions the whole system can crash – QNX is more stable because it uses independent building blocks or "kernels": if one breaks, there is no domino effect. As a result, it is used in the computers of nuclear power stations, high-speed trains, space shuttles and heart monitors. It is also in 60% of the engine electronics in today's high-end cars.

BlackBerry's ambition does not stop with smartphones. It now extends to connecting individuals to computers running the machines in their lives. These could be remote-controllable washing machines, switching themselves on when electricity is cheapest; cars that book their own service appointments; or dashboard touchpads that guide vehicles and pipe entertainment to their passengers.

That, says Heins, is why he chose the harder path of building BB10. "We will be extremely aggressive at investing into this mobile computing domain. We understood that if we want to create the future we have to do something really dramatic and that was building the new platform."

Thorsten Heins on the BB10 and whether BlackBerry has completed its turnaround

And so the company decided to draw on its own resources. The graphic designers took their inspiration from the clean lines of the Farnsworth House, a modernist gem near Chicago designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe. The typeface was created by Canadian Rod McDonald, who specialises in clear lettering for the partially sighted. And the engineers found a way to view more than one application at once – say the calendar and email – a conundrum Android and Apple have not yet solved.

The device's success, if it comes, will owe much to Alec Saunders, a former Microsoft employee and University of Waterloo graduate who led BlackBerry's battle to persuade developers to create as many apps as possible before BB10's launch. He joined in August 2011, in the middle of the period that is known internally as "The Crazy", and on the very day 2,500 staff were let go.

His first task was to dismantle some of the "completely unreasonable, almost Monty Python-esque" ways of working the company had with outside developers – such as the 144-page contracts no small business could digest. Saunders set out to be the developers' friend by being as open as possible. Thousands of free prototype phones were handed out last summer, the BB10 development timetable was made public, and 44 "BlackBerry Jam" shindigs for developers were held in 33 countries.

Local teams chasing local content were appointed in almost all of the 20 most prolific app-producing nations. Only Japan, where BlackBerry is withdrawing from the market, and South Korea, where Samsung is hard to work around, were left off the list. There were financial incentives too – $100 for the most basic apps, and a guarantee of $10,000 revenue in the first year for the most popular. When the Z10 made its worldwide debut in the UK, it came with 70,000 apps. By the time it reaches the United States in March, there will be 100,000.

"What we accomplished was monumental," says Saunders. "We persuaded developers to build apps for a platform without the prospect of being able to make any money for months, and they did it."

The company says that the Z10 performed three times better during its first week in the UK than any previous BlackBerry smartphone. That's a vague metric – and claims that UK stores ran out of stock were undermined by analysts Canaccord Genuity, which found most branches received less than 15 handsets each. We will know more on 28 March, when BlackBerry's next set of financial results are published. Ambitions about using QNX to connect to the real world do not a business plan make – BlackBerry's future rests on sales of its new phones.

Tellingly, the company's bankers, JP Morgan and RBC Capital Markets, remain on standby, ready to negotiate a sale. Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business in 2005, has expressed an interest.

Heins says BlackBerry's independence is in the balance. "Are we out of the woods? No I don't think so. I think we need to still continue working at it and the strategic review is still part of it. As management we always need to assess the options that we have at our fingertips."

At today's price, a takeover could put at least $13m in cash and share options in the chief executive's pocket. But BlackBerry's stock is at a 10-year low: the creation of a true smartphone and what the industry likes to call an "ecosystem" of apps should make it far more valuable to a buyer than the company Heins took control of a year ago. Should BlackBerry meet its Waterloo, it will mint a few more millionaires in the process.

QUAND UN GRAND ARBRE TOMBE IL ENTRAÎNE DE SON PASSAGE D'AUTRES.

When Big Tree Falls is a short story by acclaimed Malayalam author N. S. Madhavan, adapted into an award winning feature film Kaya Taran by director Sashi Kumar.

Kaya Taran (or Chrysalis) is set in Meerut city during November 1984, about a Sikh woman and her young son who have taken shelter in a nunnery during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

The title of the story refers to widely rebuked statement by Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, who is thought to have trivialised the murder of 2700 sikhs in Delhi, allegedly by supporters of his ruling party Indian National Congress, by remarking that when a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake.

The phrase is from a statement he made in New Delhi on November 19th 1984, at a Boat Club rally commemorating his late mother's birthday: “Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.” [1][1][2]

................

Remembering 1984

Come November and people remember its fourth day. That was the day when the anti-Sikh genocide occurred. And recalling that brings back memories of 1984, the year it all happened. It was a year that scarred a nation’s soul. It was a year that witnessed Operation Bluestar, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh genocide and the ascendancy of Rajiv Gandhi as India’s Prime Minister. It was a year that will be remembered for decades to come. This is what I remember of 1984, recounts Rajinder Puri.

I WAS a freelance journalist and wrote a regular column for Bombay’s Sunday Observer. Jitendra Tuli, a former journalist and close friend, was working with WHO. He approached me and asked if anything could be done to defuse the tension in Punjab. Apart from journalism, I had dabbled in politics, and focused somewhat on Punjab.

"Of course," I snorted. "If the government wants to, it can easily settle the dispute!"

"I knew you would say that", he said. "Rajiv Gandhi would like to settle it. Would you meet him?"

"Has he said that he wants to meet me?" I asked suspiciously. Over the years my articles on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty had not been exactly flattering.

"Yes. He really does want to solve this problem! If you can be of any help that would be great!"

We agreed to meet with Rajiv. There was no question of my visiting him of course, or of him visiting me. We decided to meet at the residence of a mutual friend of Tuli and Rajiv, Romi Chopra. I had a nodding acquaintance with Romi. Some years earlier I had an office in the same building where he worked as an advertising executive.

I met with Rajiv, Tuli, Romi and his father at the latter’s residence. The elder Chopra had worked in the protocol division of the External Affairs Ministry. He had been acquainted with Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi. In spite of the deference with which Romi and his father treated Rajiv, it was clear that Rajiv had affection for both. He protested but weakly before polishing off mushrooms on toast plied to him by Romi.

The atmosphere was cosy. To make conversation, we talked of this and that. There was a brief reference to Farooq Abdullah. Rajiv said that Farooq wanted to meet him, but he was not sure if he should. He said this with a thoughtful frown. It seemed to me that he was enjoying his role and hadn’t yet got over becoming a political celebrity. I remember talking about panchayati raj with him. He wondered if villagers were yet ready to govern themselves.


"That’s the only way they will learn to fight the mafia that exists in each village and district," I said. At the mention of the word, mafia, his head jerked and his eyes swivelled towards me . It occurred to me then that we use the word loosely. With his Italian connection he understood something quite different by it.

We finally talked about the subject that had brought us together. The reference to Punjab was brief. He said that Mrs Gandhi would accept any reasonable solution proposed by Bhindranwale and Longowal. "Try and get something quickly," he said. I assured him that I would. I promised to contact him immediately on my return. On that note we parted.

I had met Bhindranwale only once before. At that meeting we had a long discussion after which I wrote a column on the subject. In our first meeting Bhindranwale had been at great pains to say that he was not a terrorist. The Press continued to describe him as one, he said angrily. "Will you write that I am not a terrorist?" he had asked.

"Yes, I will", I said. And I did. Bhindranwale gave me a long account of how the government had discriminated against the Sikhs because it refused to appoint a commission of inquiry despite dozens of Sikhs being slaughtered by the Nirankaris at the Mehta Chowk incident.

For my meeting to be useful I knew that it would not suffice to meet him as a journalist. Bhindranwale had to be alerted about the mission on which I was coming. My elder brother, Prikshat, was a general in the Army. He was Engineer-in-Chief at Army Headquarters. Bhindranwale’s elder brother, Captain Harcharan Singh Rode, was posted at Jalandhar and served under Brigadier Sukhi Randhawa, also of the Engineers.

I asked my brother for assistance. He telephoned Brigadier Randhawa who explained the problem to Captain Rode. The captain agreed to help. He said he would alert Bhindranwale about the purpose of the visit. Then he would personally escort me to the Golden Temple where Bhindranwale was staying.

Through another political channel I had arranged to meet Longowal. He too had been briefed about the purpose of my visit. Both Longowal and Bhindranwale stayed in different parts of the Golden Temple complex. There was smouldering hostility between the two. The Akalis had appointed Longowal to lead the struggle against the government.

Captain Rode left me in the waiting room and went inside to confer with his brother. Within minutes he returned and asked me to enter and meet Bhinranwale. "Take all the time you want," he said. He warmly shook my hand and left for Jalandhar. After my meetings with Bhindranwale and Longowal I would return by train to Delhi. I had earlier checked into a hotel for an overnight stay.

Bhindranwale was alone in the room. I told him about my meeting with Rajiv. We talked for over 70 minutes. He summoned all the demons that tortured his mind. There was a conspiracy to eliminate and subvert the Khalsa, he said. Otherwise why would the Hindu government in Delhi have protected the Nirankaris? The Nirankari Guru insulted the Guru Granth Sahib, he said. He sat at a higher elevation than the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scriptures, while giving his public discourses. Why did the government not act against the Nirankaris after they massacred innocent Sikhs at Mehta Chowk...?

The words tumbled out like a rambling river of woes. "Look at the Jews," he said. "They are less than a crore surrounded by crores and crores of Arabs. The Jews keep the Arabs at bay. There are over two crore Sikhs. You think the Sikh’s bone is weaker than the Jew’s bone ?"

"Of course not," I said. "Look, if the Sikhs really want to create Khalistan and are prepared to die for it, I have little doubt they will succeed. But what do they really want? What do you want? Do you want Khalistan?"

"I have never asked for Khalistan," he said. "But if they give me Khalistan on a golden plate, I won’t refuse it!"

"That’s clear then, " I said. "You don’t want Khalistan! So what do you want?"

"I want to protect the identity, honour and tradition of the Khalsa, " he declared with some passion.

"Okay", I said. "That means preserving the spiritual tradition of the Khalsa. That is the mission of a true sant. You do that. The Sikh youth look up to you. They will heed you. Demand a radio and TV channel from the Golden Temple. Look after the spiritual side of the Sikh race. Why bog yourself down with petty political issues like the sharing of river waters and the status of Chandigarh? Why not let Longowal look after these and bargain with the government? Your task is higher. You must address yourself to Sikhs all over the world!" He thought for a while. "Very well," he said. "You can tell the Dictator to hammer any settlement with the government. I won’t come in the way." By Dictator he meant Longowal, who had been appointed leader of the Akali struggle. He used the word Dictator with some slight contempt.

"Can I tell him that?"

"Yes, you have my word."

After a few perfunctory remarks, I departed. I was elated. I was confident that Longowal would cooperate. His main hurdle had been cleared.

The next day I called on Longowal. I reached at the appointed hour. There were a couple of Akalis in the room. One of them said that Longowal was in the bath, and asked me to wait. I knew what was happening. Longowal knew that I had already met Bhindranwale. By making me wait he was showing my place and his! I could not help observing the difference between the Sikhs surrounding Bhindrawale and those surrounding Longowal. Bhindranwale’s lieutenants were youths, mostly with fair skins, some with light eyes, sporting swords and spears, wearing saffron turbans and coarse tunics over bare legs. They had an air or innocence mingled with intensity, so often seen among fanatics and true believers. The men around Longowal were fat and sleek, with blue turbans, dressed in polyster tunics and pyjamas. They looked like conference-hall politicians.

After an hour had passed, Longowal entered the room. He greeted me politely. "I was washing my hair," he murmured. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

I assured him that it was alright. "I said. "I thought it better to first get a blanket assurance from him that he would not object to proposals put up by you. He has agreed. After all he is not political. You have to protect the political interests of Punjab."

Longowal’s face softened and he looked pleased. After that it was smooth sailing. We talked for an hour. We talked of politics and politicians. We deplored the current crop of politicians. We talked about the Partition. How the British had manipulated events. "If just fifty leaders had been eliminated in 1947, India would have remained united," he said.

Eventually we came to the minimum demands of the Sikhs for a settlement with the Central Government. I cannot recall the exact demands, but they were unexceptionable. Something about the river waters, the status of Chandigarh, the principles by which the future of Abohar and Fazilka might be settled, broadcasting facilities for the Golden Temple, declaring the immediate area around the Golden Temple a holy place with some administrative rights for the Golden Temple authorities, and other mundane issues. For the most part, Longowal wanted to abide by previous, or future, adjunction by the courts. He appeared eminently reasonable.

Going by the meetings with both Bhindranwale and Longowal, a settlement seemed to be clinched. I buoyantly returned to Delhi to apprise Rajiv of these developments.

* * *

Just a few hours hours after Mrs Gandhi was killed on October 31, I visited the Bharatiya Janata Party office at Ashok Road. I was a member of its National Executive. There was a hushed atmosphere in the room. L.K. Advani thought there would be tremendous sympathy for the Congress. The party’s Punjab leader, Baldev Prakash, echoed this sentiment. Others thought that public grief would know no bounds. I had already toured parts of the city by car. I found no grief even though people knew she had been killed. This surprised me. I shared my experience with the BJP leaders. Vijay Kumar Malhotra said I must be mistaken. I must have confused shocked silence with lack of grief.

"Come with me and I’ll take you around," I said. We got into my car and drove around. We stopped at different places and asked people if they knew what had happened. The response we got at a petrol station where I stopped to fill my car was typical.

I asked the petrol station attendant in a hushed tone, "Have you heard the news?" He continued his chore without batting an eye. He said laconically, "You mean about her being shot? Yes, we have heard."

Vijay was as stunned as I was by the strange public apathy and unconcern over the assassination. When I dropped Vijay at the party office, he got out of the car without a word. This total apathy continued for almost the whole day. Then a relative of Arjun Das, a close follower of Sanjay Gandhi, stabbed a Sikh in one part of the city. Around the same time President Zail Singh, a Sikh, visited the All India Medical Institute where Mrs Gandhi’s body lay. A few miscreants stoned his car.

The next day the anti-Sikh riots began. It was a systematic massacre. Sikh homes were earmarked, and then torched. Sikhs were pulled out of their homes and killed or burnt alive. I witnessed the carnage at several places. A mob burnt a shop near Regal Cinema in Connaught Place while a policeman looked on silently.

"Why don’t you stop them?" I snarled.

He shrugged. "What can I do?" he said with a smirk. This continued for several days. I visited Atal Behari Vajpayee’s residence at Raisina Road. From the verandah where we stood, we heard a mob intercepting a car outside on the street. We rushed to the gate. Some of Vajpayee’s aides accompanied us. There were urchins and youths with a can of petrol surrounding a car. Vajpayee shouted from the gate. I advanced menacingly towards the urchins mouthing vile expletives in Punjabi. The urchins evaporated. We returned inside. Later I learnt that the same mob went farther and set fire to a car with a Sikh locked inside. He was burnt alive.

If the police wanted, the situation could have been controlled easily. In fact, I witnessed policemen urging lumpen youth from shanty colonies to burn and loot. The miscreants were seen carrying TV sets and other articles from burning shops while policemen watched benignly. I visited the dwellers of Pandu Nagar, a shanty colony near Patel Nagar.

One ragged youth told me, "We keep awake all night fearing the Sikhs will attack us!"

"But it is you who have terrorised the Sikhs and burnt their shops," I said.

"Yes," he said. "That’s why we fear they will come at night to take revenge!"

The Sikhs were in no position to take revenge. Along with Ram Jethmalani, I visited the camps set up for homeless Sikhs. They were outnumbered and terrorised. I visited some of the worst sites like Khichripur in East Delhi where poor defenceless Sikhs were brutally killed while their wives and children watched. The rich Sikhs of Punjabi Bagh and South Delhi lost homes, shops and factories. The poor Sikhs living in shanties and resettlement colonies lost lives. And this was all done by mobs from poor slums and shanty colonies, with the police watching silently.

The Army offered to control the situation at the first signs of an ugly situation. The government bluntly ordered the Army to desist. Only after the carnage, after more than three thousand Sikhs had been slaughtered, after forty to fifty thousand had been rendered homeless, did the government take steps to stop the violence. Once the government moved in, the violence stopped almost immediately.

The government did not, as it normally does, promptly announce a commission of inquiry to probe the genocide. Private inquiries by public-spirited citizens of repute did the job. The Peoples Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) and the Peoples Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) jointly conducted a probe. The various unofficial inquiries came to a common conclusion. Congress Party leaders had conspired to unleash the genocide.

The Congress itself projected a very different view. In a public speech after the genocide, Rajiv Gandhi said: "When a big tree falls, the earth trembles!" Years later a Sikh in Chandigarh, Sher Singh Sher, recounted in a public speech Gandhi’s words and then tauntingly asked: "Were there only Sikhs sitting under that tree?"

Rajiv Gandhi in a public speech in Bihar on December 2, less than a month after the genocide, said that the same extremist elements that killed Indira Gandhi later engineered riots in Delhi to destabilise the nation. In subsequent speeches he repeated this. He said that a deep-rooted conspiracy to assassinate his mother was financed by outside sources. In other words, he alleged that the assassination and the genocide were part of a single conspiracy.

If Rajiv Gandhi is to be believed does it not follow that the general election that immediately followed these events was also a part of the same conspiracy? For over two weeks during the election campaign, close on the heels of the genocide, the government TV channel—there were no cable channels then—repeatedly showed the same scene on TV screens across the nation. Congress sympathisers surrounding Indira Gandhi’s dead body chanted: "Blood to avenge blood!"

As a result of the mass hysteria generated, a political novice obtained the largest mandate ever accorded to any leader in independent India. Rajiv Gandhi won with a substantially bigger majority than either Pandit Nehru or Indira Gandhi ever did. Going by Rajiv Gandhi’s logic, if there was indeed a single conspiracy behind the assassination and the genocide, its biggest beneficiary was Rajiv Gandhi himself.

Thus did 1984 end. It became a defining moment in the history of India. Seven years later, Rajiv Gandhi himself was assassinated. A woman who was a human bomb, sent by the LTTE on a suicide mission, staying in a house owned by a prominent Congress leader, walked up to Rajiv Gandhi in a public meeting to take his life. From being the unwitting beneficiary of conspiracy, Rajiv Gandhi became its victim.

Excerpts from an article being published by a new magazine, National Review in its forthcoming issue.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20031102/spectrum/main1.htm

I blame the English for India's backwardness

Philip Collins From: The Times January 05, 2013 12:00AM
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/philipcollins/article3647507.ece

WHILE he was in custody in Ahmednagar Fort in 1944, at the pleasure of the British, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote The Discovery of India, one of the great prison notebooks. Disguised as a history of the nation, it is a manifesto for a modern India.

"It is obvious," says Nehru, that "she (India) has to come out of her shell and take full part in the life and activities of the modern age."

The designation of the nation as female has never been more grimly appropriate in the wake of the funeral of a 23-year-old medical student, now known as "India's Daughter", who was gang-raped on a night bus in Delhi on December 16.

This is a democratic country that, for five years up to last July, had a woman president. It is also a nation in which child marriage, female infanticide, sex trafficking and domestic violence are problems so serious that the only country in South Asia with a worse UN ranking for gender inequality is Afghanistan. It is not without cause that a throng of angry women marched on Wednesday in Delhi to demand changes to the law.




The six men accused of raping India's daughter will be subject to that law, although it is to be hoped that neither summary justice nor the death penalty is meted out to them. But the central point of Nehru's history is that the culture has to adapt, too, and the continued mistreatment of women is just one index among many to show that so much in Nehru's demand for modernisation remains unfulfilled.

No visitor to India, however gilded, ever leaves without an impression of poverty that lingers forever: a withered hand in the window at the traffic lights or a terrible physical deformity displayed on the pavement for the alms of passers-by. According to the UN Development Program, 37 per cent of Indians live below the poverty line. There are more poor people in the eight poorest Indian states than in all of the 26 poorest African countries combined. Incredibly, when its growth rate took off between 1996 and 2011, India was one of only three developed countries in which levels of hunger actually rose.

A UNICEF report last year showed that one in three of all malnourished children in the world is Indian. An extraordinary 58 per cent of children under five show stunted growth because their mothers were underfed during pregnancy.

All across India, failures of public policy hold the country back. Four in 10 adults cannot read, and only one in 10 Indians uses the internet, a lower rate than Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

The conventional explanation for the tolerance of destitution is that Hinduism offers both consolation in another world and a divine alibi for the caste system. The distance between the political class and the electorate, in age, outlook and behaviour, is larger in India than in any democracy.

Corruption is the most serious manifestation of this gap.

For all that, I still blame the English for the slow modernisation of India. Not the usual English villains who went to India, but the ones who stayed at home. The London School of Economics did as much damage to the Indian economy as the sort of hapless regional officials lampooned in George Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days. This is because the main intellectual influence on Nehru, that brilliant and flawed architect of democratic India, was a kind of Fabian socialism left out too long in the sun.

From Harrow, Cambridge and London, Nehru took a belief in a planned economy with him back to India. The economy of the newly independent India after 1947 duly became known as "the licence raj". That was because a licence was needed for the business equivalent of breathing. Foreign trade and investment were discouraged and every transaction subjected to a bewildering variety of pettifogging regulations.

The history of the British Labour Party can be written as a slow lesson that trying to control a complex economy is damaging. Unfortunately, its sister party, Congress in India, took the Fabian theorists at their word.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repealed some of this when he was finance minister in the early 1990s, but the legacy of planning still distorts the Indian economy. Mumbai, for example, has the potential to be a great world city. Its recent promise has attracted the former farm hands of Maharashtra in their thousands. Unfortunately, they arrive to find feces in open sewers, filthy water, traffic-choked roads and trains bursting to the point of danger.

This all goes back to the fact that, in 1964, Mumbai authorities set strict limits on the height of buildings, citing English urban design. Instead of going up, Mumbai spread out. The result? Space in central Mumbai is more expensive than it is in Singapore. The transport network is crumbling under the weight of commuters travelling from illegal slums on the edge of the city. Across India, 93 million people live in urban slums and buildings under construction or on the pavement.

The world will be safer and better if a democracy such as India is a major player than if global power is left to China or Russia. The film of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children captures the excitement and the fragility of the moment in August 1947 that India gained its freedom. From its birth, India was beset by fears its democracy could not survive, but for 65 years, with a brief hiatus under Indira Gandhi's state of emergency between 1975 and 1977, it has thrived.

India needs to read Nehru's diagnosis again. He asks the right question, just so long as they don't also let him supply the answer.

THE TIMES


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/indias-woes-over-lack-of-womens-rights-began-in-britain/story-fnb64oi6-1226547820737

RE-post from Times of Inda : Yann Martel

Children are like wonderful Russian novels that go on forever.

Yann Martel on his thrilling Indian experience
Haimanti Mukherjee, TNN Oct 23, 2012, 12.00AM IST

Man Booker Prize winner and the writer of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, tells us why religion matters even in a schismatic world like ours, and about the "wonderful, horrible" place called India

Canadian novelist Yann Martel talks exclusively to Bombay Times ahead of the release of the film Life of Pi, adapted from his 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning book of the same name. He tells us how a couple of backpacking trips to India changed his life forever.


Excerpts...

US President Barack Obama wrote a hand-written letter to you saying "Life of Pi is an elegant proof of God and the power of storytelling"...
That was a thrill. I send a 101 books to my (Canadian) Prime Minister and he ( Stephen Harper) never wrote back to me. He never wrote me an individual letter. And here, I have the President of the United States, and I'm not even American. I was thrilled, I was delighted.

Why do you keep on sending books to your PM?
I think a world leader who does not read, or want to know about the other — by which I mean an experience or a life very different from his — would have a blinkered vision. Fiction is the best way to explore the other.

Considering you've known India for some time, what book would you ask Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to read?
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy. It's the story of an ordinary man. And those stories are always most powerful. The protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, gets sick and slowly starts to die. The book's on how he reacts to his death, the reaction of people around him. It's funny, entertaining, deep, sad, and you totally believe it. I would send out that
for Mr Singh.

What has India taught you?
Oh God! India has taught me so many things; it is a wild, crazy, horrible, wonderful place. It's given the world Mahatma Gandhi, ashrams, the idea of a guru, it's given us wonderful food, beautiful way of dressing, extraordinary geography, stunning architecture, a diversity of language, I am idealising Hinduism here but there is something amazingly tolerant about it. Because of Hinduism, there are so many millions of Gods, and the Gods do not bother anyone. That's why so many religions thrive there. So many religions don't thrive in Europe because they are much more intolerant. Christianity is much more exclusive. Also, it's the largest functional democracy in the world. And at the same time, it's also a horrible place — it's got poverty, it's corrupt. But you know, India lies in one place at one moment, that's what I love about the country.

You've talked about always wanting children...
If you ask me, those are the best books I've ever written — my children. Lola is 16 months old and Theo is three years old and we (he and his wife Alice Kuipers) have another baby due in April. Children are like wonderful Russian novels that go on forever.

The Western world has a way of making people too rational and mechanical. Did your trip to India made you believe in religion, the mystical?
I studied philosophy in the University, which in the West, is guaranteed to make you an agnostic. The first thing you do when you study philosophy is fake half truths about God, and these truths don't work. It's very hard to be a believer in the study of western philosophy. I was very much a secular, materialist Westerner when I got to India in my mid-30s, for the second time. In Canada, religion is marginalised, it's only at the edge of things. In India, for better or for worse, religion is still a part of the mainstream. You see temples, mosques, and churches.... You see symbols of religion, you see religious behaviour. Intellectually, I started asking myself open-minded questions, like what does it mean to have faith in visions? That was sort of a bidding process of writing Life of Pi.

Did you ever think Life of Pi could be turned into a movie?
Well, it was a very difficult story to film. It's a complex book, but they had a wonderful director behind it ( Ang Lee), a great studio, who had the money and the means to pull the most difficult and bizarre scenes off. The film is very faithful to the book and it's visually sumptuous.

Why did you choose the name Pi Patel?
In mathematics, Pi is an irrational number which means it's a number that goes on forever. Yet it's constant in science, so we use this irrational number to get to the rational understanding. It's that contradiction that I liked. To me, religion is like that — an irrational number, it doesn't make sense on its own, but it helps make sense of the worl