www.openthemagazine.com 50 12 OCTOBER /2020 OPEN VOLUME 12 ISSUE 40 12 OCTOBER 2020 CONTENTS 12 OCTOBER 2020 5 6 8 14 16 18 22 28 LOCOMOTIF INDRAPRASTHA MUMBAI TOUCHSTONE SOFT POWER WHISPERER IN MEMORIAM OPEN ESSAY The House of By Virendra Kapoor NOTEBOOK The sounds of our The Swami and the By Jayanta Ghosal Jaswant Singh Is it really over Jaswant Singh By Anil Dharker discontents Himalayas (1938-2020) for Trump? By S Prasannarajan By Keerthik Sasidharan By Makarand R Paranjape By MJ Akbar By James Astill and TCA Raghavan 32 32 BROKEN BOLLYWOOD Divided, self-referential in its storytelling, all too keen to celebrate mediocrity, its reputation in tatters and work largely stalled, the Mumbai film industry has hit rock bottom By Kaveree Bamzai 40 GRASS ROOTS Marijuana was not considered a social evil in the past and its return to respectability is inevitable in India By Madhavankutty Pillai 44 THE TWILIGHT OF THE GANGS 40 Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has declared war on organised crime By Virendra Nath Bhatt 22 50 STATECRAFT Madhya Pradesh’s Covid opportunity By Ullekh NP 44 54 GLITTER IN GLOOM The gold loan market is cashing in on the pandemic By Nikita Doval 50 58 62 64 66 BETWEEN BODIES AND BELONGING MIND AND MACHINE THE JAISHANKAR DOCTRINE NOT PEOPLE LIKE US A group exhibition imagines Novels that intertwine artificial Rethinking India’s engagement Act two a multiplicity of futures intelligence with ethics with its enemies and friends By Rajeev Masand By Rosalyn D’Mello By Arnav Das Sharma By Siddharth Singh Cover by Saurabh Singh 12 OCTOBER 2020 www.openthemagazine.com 3 OPEN MAIL [email protected] EDITOR S Prasannarajan LETTER OF THE WEEK MANAGING EDITOR PR Ramesh C EXECUTIVE EDITOR Ullekh NP By any criterion, 2020 is annus horribilis (‘Covid-19: The EDITOR-AT-LARGE Siddharth Singh DEPUTY EDITORS Madhavankutty Pillai Surge’, October 5th, 2020). The world has never seen (Mumbai Bureau Chief), such a long crisis that literally eats up a whole year. This Rahul Pandita, Amita Shah, V Shoba (Bangalore), Nandini Nair might as well be called ‘the Long 20th Year’. Human CREATIVE DIRECTOR Rohit Chawla civilisation is scarred by the deep losses of life and ART DIRECTOR Jyoti K Singh SENIOR EDITORS Sudeep Paul, property and unending miseries. India’s trademark Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), ‘jugaad’ too has drawn a blank this time. No one has an Moinak Mitra, Nikita Doval AssOCIATE EDITOR Vijay K Soni (Web) idea about how to get out of this mess till the vaccine ASSISTANT EDITOR Vipul Vivek is out—and after that about how to come out of the CHIEF OF GRAPHICS Saurabh Singh social and economic mess. The coronavirus pandemic SENIOR DESIGNERS Anup Banerjee, Veer Pal Singh is ‘nature’s fury unleashed in free verse’. Possibly even PHOTO EDITOR Raul Irani nonsense verse. All predictions have failed so far. De- DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR Ashish Sharma spite over half a year’s existence, we know close to noth- NATIONAL HEAD-EVENTS AND INITIATIVES ing about the virus. Every finding about its spread and a day when the recognition Arpita Sachin Ahuja amour propre AVP (ADVERTISING) nature turns out false with the next batch of evidence. of the in women Rashmi Lata Swarup Every time there is a palpable drop in the number of would come first. GENERAL MANAGERS (ADVERTISING) Uma Srinivasan (South) cases, the virus comes back with a new challenge. As Arun Kampani everytime we scale a new peak, we realise there’s a NATIONAL HEAD-DISTRIBUTION AND SALES Ajay Gupta higher point, we are then able to see from where we BETTER LATE REGIONAL HEADS-CIRCULATION D Charles (South), Melvin George have reached. Where is the Everest of Covid-19 cases? Indian agriculture has (West), Basab Ghosh (East) Like Ulysses, I feel ‘ maybe the gulfs will wash us down/ finally got its much needed HEAD-PRODUCTION Maneesh Tyagi It maybe we shall touch the happy Isles.’ The only silver reforms (‘The Farmer SENIOR MANAGER (PRE-PRESS) Sharad Tailang lining in all of this is that when communities recog- Unfettered’, October 5th, MANAGER-MARKETING nise their interconnectedness, they do not fail to come 2020). But opposition Priya Singh CHIEF DESIGNER-MARKETING together. With science anchoring us, we shall win. parties are still singing to Champak Bhattacharjee Sangeeta Kampani an old tune and failing the CFO & HEAD-IT Anil Bisht country and its farmers. CHIEF EXECUTIVE & PUBLISHER They have not understood Neeraja Chawla that when it comes to the All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner THE BOOK OF THE HINDUS WOMEN IN THIS WORLD new farm legislation, ‘ is prohibited. Bibek Debroy is one of our We in India can fully relate God is in the details’. Editor: S Prasannarajan. Printed and published by Neeraja Chawla on behalf best contemporary scholars to Mehr Tarar’s essay on There is nothing in these of the owner, Open Media Network Pvt Ltd. Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd, and a true polymath (‘A Dirge women and the sheer laws which calls for 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad-121007, (Haryana). for Desire’, October 5th, 2020). maiming of the female agitation. These only help Published at 4, DDA Commercial He wears multiple hats of personality behind the veil make more lucrative options Complex, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. economist, Sanskrit scholar of ‘honour’, something that for India’s beleaguered Ph: (011) 48500500; Fax: (011) 48500599 and translator and with shamefully occurs in both farmers who have become To subscribe, WhatsApp ‘openmag’ to 9999800012 or log on to elan—as was evident in his the countries (‘No Country resigned to the exploitation www.openthemagazine.com or call our Toll Free Number piece on the many Gitas of for Women’, October 5th, of dalals and mandis. The issue 1800 102 7510 Hindu theology, specifically 2020). But the good thing is simple: if I want to sell my or email at: [email protected] the Kama Gita. I do tend to is that we are beginning to produce in the market— For alliances, email [email protected] take a contrarian stand on see an attitudinal change in offline or online—I should For advertising, email the popular claim, made by the new generation which have no problems with [email protected] For any other queries/observations, Debroy too, that Hindus do is sensitive to gender issues. where and how I get the email [email protected] not have a primary holy book I am sure women will build best price. Both the options and I have written about on this positive change are now open for farmers. Disclaimer ‘Open Avenues’ are advertiser-driven marketing it myself. The Vedas are further and as Kaifi Azmi Farmers are being grossly initiatives and Open assumes no responsibility for content and the consequences of using accepted by all Hindu texts as said so eloquently, ‘kadr teri misled by opposition parties. products or services advertised in the magazine foundational by stating that is tareekh ne jaani hi nahi/ That is the real tragedy of Volume 12 Issue 40 ‘vedokhilo dharmamoolam’ (the tujh me sholay bhi hain, sirf Indian politics today. The For the week 6-12 October 2020 Vedas are the root of ashqfishani hi nahi’ (There is Government should talk to Total No. of pages 68 all dharma). a lot more to women than the farmers directly . Ramakrishnan Srinivasan tears). Hopefully, we will see Ashok Goswami 4 12 OCTOBER 2020 LOCOMOTIF By S PRASANNARAJAN THE HOUSE OF JASWANT SINGH ONOUR IS THE word that recurs in the self- journey of an officer, a gentleman, an administrator, and, in the expressions of Jaswant Singh. A Call to Honour— end, a lone man whose sighs and sorrows went unnoticed in the a nod to his idol Charles de Gaulle—is what he other House that shaped his political life. calls his memoirs, in which a dutiful nationalist The inflection points in the journey were exhilarating as well strikes a fine balance between ancestral morality as demoralising; they were also a nationalist’s hard choices. It was Hand territorial affinity. It was “a call that had to be honoured”, exhilarating when he was Prime Minister Vajpayee’s chosen man whether it was the formation of India’s first right-wing to bring India from the residual fog of the Cold War to the sunset government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee or managing the of anti-Americanism. As India’s interlocutor in a transformative aftermath of the Pokhran nuclear tests of 1998 or breaking period, he enjoyed every moment of it, making a few American out of the behavioural traps of Third Worldism and friends along the way. As our uber diplomat JN Dixit once told me, anti-Americanism. He served as a “caravaneer”—he could he was “India’s first public-school educated, anglicised foreign not resist a resonant archaism borrowed from the desert— minister after Nehru.” The refinement helped when India needed of a moment in India’s life that required “re-routing from the a language freed from ideology. Then there was Kandahar— unrealistic idealism of a past that was long gone to the needed the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 and the hostage realism of a new, demanding and an impatient age, between exchange. It was painful pragmatism that took him to Kandahar. the fixities of a handed-down wisdom and the needed dualism For some, it was surrender to terror. He was the man in the sordid of our times.” When I met him in his office in South Block in picture, and the picture never revealed what raged within him.