Politics, thus, hovered right across the first day of these engaging literary debates. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, raised eyebrows amongst a packed audience as he strayed surprisingly far from the theme appointed to his conversation, ‘The Disappointment of Obama’. Remnick, whilst clearly outlining his policy disagreement with many of Obama’s obvious failings on Guantanamo, Palestine and the environment, stressed that he did not feel let down by Obama, when compared with all the Presidents of his time.  Obama, he said, had won the Nobel Prize just for not being George Bush. Predictable cheers from an audience draped across lime green seats below a blue and white block-printed Mughal tent.

But the all-knowing gods were hanging around these literary men and women all day, starting with a stirring rendition of the Sikh Gurbani from Madan Gopal Singh in a scholarly line up designed to exam the poetic vision of the Sikh Gurus. That spirituality also took on a political edge. Singh radically interprets the term ‘Bhav Khandana’ (Teri Aarti huye) as having a gendered identity, a female spirit or God, an idea derived from the Sanskrit roots of the term, which he says he regrets sardonically that no one else buys.  Controversy was hanging around the fringes of Diggi Palace all day, it seems.

And so, to Mohammed Hanif, whose afternoon session felt like a soothing afternoon cup of tea, deflecting with humour  some rather bizarre questions about his symbol as sex god in Pakistan, a country where one’s choice of God lets the law discriminate, often with violent repercussions, around you. Perhaps little wonder then that Hanif chose to write about the country’s beleaguered Christian community in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, a human and amusing take on what he describes as a “humble little love story”.

 Of Gods and Men, then. Jaipur, Day One.

20^th January 2012.

The controversy over whether Salman Rushdie will or won’t attend the Festival has been causing a mild stir across front pages in India all week, since the Darul Uloom Deoband Islamic seminary pressured organizers into trying to withdraw their invitation to Rushdie. Although India’s intelligentsia is up in arms, the country’s media and politicians are silent, or worse, pandering to the myopia which threatens the plutocracy. This is old hat in a country that for decades has allowed a conspiracy of silence to cover up any serious debate about freedom of expression.

 Grounded in censorship laws that stemmed from the British Empire, India’s artists and writers often have experienced a democracy more concerned with insult than ideas. Insult to right wing Hindu sentiment, created politically in the early 1990s, led to the retreat and eventual death in exile of MF Hussain, the great Indian artist who dared to paint images that inspired him. It mattered that he was Muslim, and that he sometimes chose to depict Hindu goddesses, never mind that it is precisely that cultural interchange of Islam and Hinduism that has created modern India. Nobody please mention the Kama Sutra. There should have been a national uproar that an artist of his standing was forced to seek refuge away from its democratic borders. Instead, there was mostly an embarrassed silence. Likewise, there should have been incredulity when charges of sedition were first postulated against author-activist Arundhati Roy for her comments on Kashmir that were allegedly anti-Indian. She was a national heroine when she won the Booker, but when she broke the conspiracy of silence on uncomfortable matters, she was moulded into a national pariah. The Indian author Siddhartha Deb also found himself in court last year when an injunction was slapped on a chapter of his book, The Beautiful and the Damned, without warning. Two weeks ago Balbir Krishnan, an artist from Uttar Pradesh, was attacked in Delhi, ostensibly because his artistic themes of homosexuality offended and ‘provoked’ religious sentiment.  The attempts to lock Rushdie out of his motherland are just another illustration of what happens when the State allows the language of insult to dictate its law and policy. It is a dangerous basis for the ban which inevitably seems to follow these calls, and a serious blunt edge to the vibrancy with which democracy can flourish.

The consequences of this attempt to silence authors and artists goes far beyond whether an Islamic seminary doesn’t like The Satanic Verses, although it is doubtful anybody agitating against Rushdie has even read it, not least because it remains banned in India. If insult is the permission for provocation and violence, silence is the tool by which impunity prospers. The failures to bring justice against the perpetrators of mass violence in Gujarat, Punjab, Assam and Kashmir are the flipside of a democracy which likes to snuff out difficult questions before they are voiced. A failure to protect freedom of expression can in the end lead to a failure to protect the most basic human rights of all.

 In a country that is so tolerant of eccentricity and diversity, intolerance should be tossed carelessly away, pushed back behind the shoulder of the law. It is high time for the nonsense of the fatwa to be decried. State silence in the face of alleged religious insult is a greater threat to democracy that the Satanic Verses could ever become. Come on India. Un-ban the book.

January 19th 2012, India

 In this elegant seaside ville, where blazer-clad gentlemen sip beer from sherry glasses and their coiffured women-folk gulp local the local wine,Txakoli,  from morning to night without so much as a hiccup, some of the greatest artistic splendours of the region can be found. Whilst it is true that Bilbao houses some of the world’s finest modern art at the Guggenheim (Richard Serra’s formidable, if nausea-inducing installation ’The Matter of Time’  at this sitting) and at its own impressive Museum of Fine Arts, the Basques are out to impress with their original creativity on the groaning counters of the tiny pinxto bars  that surprise tourists at every corner.

Groaning counters

Brits, for all the nineteenth century Gothic architecture across the city’s sandy beach that oddly reminisces Bournemouth, beware. This is not Ready Salted Crisps and Pint of Ale territory. Cross the fusion of Barcelona with the rich aesthetic of the French Riviera, and you might begin to tingle with the sensory overload which the Basque brain and mighty appetite have conspired to craft. A tourist is a mere victim to the inspired modern splendour of the pint-sized treats. We soon realised it would be insulting to resist Spain’s north-westerly temptation.

Take Zeruko(Calle Pescadería 10), just as an example. Sea urchins lie intriguingly sliced across a plate by the gilded gold artichokes, stuffed generously with foie. Baby elver eels fill a tequila glass like elfin strands of spaghetti, pierced with a yolk gelled with tapioca on a stick.

Piles of Serrano ham are draped across crusty, oiled bread and the wild mushrooms of the season are splashed artistically across a perfectly round fried quail’s egg. Mushrooms on toast will never taste the same again. Tiny splatters of morcilla (blood pudding) are coated with pistachios and jam, like an Arabic treat. Hot, griddled scallops are lined over fluffy bread rounds, and a steak sandwich arrives, freshly seared across caramelised mushroom, launched towards the burning anticipation of the worker from across the street who is grabbing a quick lunch. Dessert, the Bob Limon, is a Heston Blumenthal-esque creation of an air sponge, surrounded by a lemon mousse that resembled a fluffy egg, the yolk being fashioned by the orange skin of an apricot injected with a sweet jus that seeps out as you crack it. A homemade blackberry licorice rounds off the treat, and we walk onto the road, giddy with the excitement brewed in this den of culinary magic.

Angula baby eels

Bob Limon

The path to walk off the feast was lined with fat anchovies buried under papaya at Bar Txepetxa,  pumpkin-stuffed ravioli soaked in a rosemary foam and a creamy chanterelle risotto spoonful at Astoria 7, a cinema-fuelled hit of a hotel which also offered the most originally presented patatas bravas we have enjoyed, and groaning counters of gratinated scallops, roasted pepper and anchovy tarts and other bread-based treats at Bergara in the trendy, residential neighbourhood of Gros.

 We still had no way of knowing, however, that A Fuego Negro (31 de Agosto 31) would reduce us to tears with their mini-Kobe beef burgers, their txitxarro sashimi and their mini-doner kebabs that brought shame to vans everywhere across Europe. We could not know that the bakaloo enkarboo would be roasted cod set across smoky pepper seeds, and that the friendliest service would ensue if we could say thank you in Basque, rather than Spanish (ezkarrikasko, if you are wondering) and we could not know that the off-season faded Belle Epoque glamour of a town that feels more French than Spanish could leave us longing for still more.

 Luckily, then, Bilbao has the tuna and lamb skewers, and langostines wrapped in finely shredded potato curls at Panko (Marqués del Puerto 4), all chewed over in the packed company of a local crowd. Fortunately, for Bilbao, Las Cepas (a wine bar so recently opened on Juan De Ajuruaguerra that the paint was still wet) offered us the creamiest arroz negro (squid-ink risotto rice topped with the crunchy,crispy squid tentacles) and all the melt-in-the-mouth albondigas (meatballs) that its artistic visitors could flick a paintbrush at.

Dali, Goya and Picasso would be punch-drink proud.

Jeff Koons' Poppies outside the Guggenheim

November 25th 2011

Revealed in no particular order of importance, much as this week’s X factor results, the Palestinian bid for statehood appears to have collapsed, just days after its UNESCO success, owing in no small part to the failure of France and the United Kingdom to stand by their soliloquies on democracy and human rights; Obama and Sarkozy have been caught expressing their true feelings for the “lying” Israeli leader off-camera, and the British Prime Minister and the heir to the royal throne have intervened internationally in support of their footballers’ right to wear the poppy (those same footballers themselves caught in a frenzy of hyped allegations about racism) in a friendly match against Spain.

What is the connection, you may ask, wearing a puzzled face? In the theatre of international relations, the answer is, of course, “the mask”.

Let’s start with the poppy, the wearing of which now appears to have become a default act of patriotism, even ignoring the fact that the majority of the population probably could not answer the Trivial Pursuit question of ‘which act is said to have precipitated the First World War?’ It does not matter whether those thousands of innocent deaths – the deaths of the young soldiers sent to the frontlines in the face of certain slaughter – brought any discernable benefit to the country, or whether John Terry and Frank Lampard could name those benefits today. What matters is the position, internationally, that we support our troops, unquestionably. The same position that the British media adopted towards the Iraq war eight years ago, without questioning whether it was more patriotic to bring back young men and women from a war that was entirely unnecessary and unjustifiable, not to mention unlawful, for reasons that were never truthfully spelled out. The poppy has become the mask behind which we can believe that the wars fought in our name have been honest and earnest, pursuing democracy and human rights, whilst studiously ignoring what either of those notions actually entail.

One thing that both democracy and human rights ought to bring, for example, is a legal and social culture of non-discrimination, a fundamental duty that States must promote within their borders in order to be worthy of any democratic label. A failure to acknowledge universal support of the right not to be discriminated against in the provision of goods and services, in the distribution of assets and wealth by the State, as well as the non-segregation of citizens, are amongst the most fundamental rights of them all. Indeed, it was the converse position on discrimination, namely ethnocide and genocide in the Second World War, that led to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948. Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, speaks the Preamble of the Declaration that arose as a direct consequence of the Holocaust.

Yet today, the Israeli state discriminates against its Arab and Muslim citizens in so brazen a fashion, putting up a mask of democracy so thoroughly, that few outside its  borders fully appreciate the scale of its discriminatory practices. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has slammed Israel for these practices which prevent Palestinians from exercising their most basic civil rights, including the right to freedom of movement within its borders, rights to access and security of land, rights to education and employment as well as public privileges, as well as the right to return. Israel’s official, and illegitimate position, is that the Convention does not apply to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Yet the policies of segregation are so deeply embedded in Israel’s legal landscape that nothing short of a blanket equality provision, such as those created in post-apartheid South Africa, would begin to redress the balance created. The effective requirements of discrimination law might enable the beginnings of a single, fair and equitable state for both Jewish and Palestinian peoples, but there is no political appetite for this. The only remaining answer for a people de-humanized within their own borders is to seek political independence. Yet the international community, for all their talk of human rights and democracy, is unwilling to support their bid for independence either.

The only remaining hope, then, for the Palestinians, is for the international community to speak out with passion against a legal regime that segregates the communities in a way that America ought to be ashamed to support, given its own recent history. The sad, terrible truth for Palestinians is that nobody dares speak up for them in a forum that really matters. Amongst the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the fear of upsetting the United States is so great that Britain and France dare not engender its wrath by voting in favour of Palestinian statehood.

Obama and Sarkozy are right to say that Netanyahu has lied and bullied his way into a position where nobody dare criticize Israel publicly. They are wrong, though, to be so afraid to need to make their own criticisms behind a mask of secrecy. In order to force change for the Palestinian people, the world’s leaders need to have the formidable belief and purpose that David Cameron and Prince William have shown the global community this week in pursuit of the fundamental right to wear the poppy.  Palestinians are, perhaps, slightly more fed up than Obama. They, too, have to deal with Netanyahu every single day. If only the Palestinians had the patriotic fortunes of pinning everything on the petals of a poppy.

November 13^th 2011.

The transatlantic relationship is forged as much by a grand messiah complex as by their devastated market policies.  A common propaganda of ethical integrity, bringing civilised values to the wider world in the battle of good versus evil has been hardly dampened by three wars, none of them successful. The war in Afghanistan sits like an ugly blister on the side of their national nose, swollen with a cancerous pus just out of their immediate vision. The war in Iraq has been reduced to a “lesson” in what to be done the next time, casting away any shadows from the Bradley Mannings and David Kellys of a collective conscience. WMD is a national joke with no fallout. There is impunity for  their decision makers, for the people who are directly responsible for the deaths and damage caused to thousands, if not millions. The stains on their armies, even as human rights lawyers talk of maybe hundreds more ‘Baha Moussas’ are dismissed as a few bad apples. In the US, body bags are buried from cameras and in the UK, the average man still believes the British army are a force for good in the world. Civil liberties and human rights laws won and built over centuries are flicked away as an unnecessary entrapment  created by hungry lawyers. And their big business profits whilst they pander to a distorted vision that they saved the Middle East from itself, even as their spooks laze by the marble-lined pool of other dictators.

All this collective destruction in the name of an enemy that barely exists, and barely existed. As Barack Obama exhorts the wane of Al Qaeda in his 9/11 memorial, the ghost of Osama Bin Laden must be dancing with his girls in paradise.  His greatest accomplishment was surely not the killing of 3000 innocent people on that day but the planting of the great new fiction that Al Qaeda was a global army that could pull the West away from itself. The fiction frog-spawned. For ten years, the governments of the US and UK have relied on that fiction to pummel wars and promote an agenda that has left domestic policies, and populations, in tatters.

Today, the US and UK need to look long and hard in that tenth anniversary mirror, and reflect on who is better off today. It would be gracious for one of their leaders to remember and record that the crashing of those planes into the Twin Towers led to the deaths of countless thousands more. Iraq Body Count puts estimated deaths there alone now at over 1 million. The vanity of Britain and the US must end. Alice stared into the Looking Glass and announced: Yes, We Can.

If the leaders of Britain and America dare look into the fabled mirror, they ought finally to understand that they did not save the world.

No, Messrs Obama and Cameron, We Can’t.

September 11th 2011.

London

As Egyptian youth have crowded onto their national squares to protest as peacefully as possible that their repressive government steps down, English youth seek to burn and destroy their own communities, without even being able to express why.

Free stuff versus Freedom. Politics versus Playstations. One society demands an end to tanks on the streets whilst the other is almost begging for tanks to fill the streets.

What’s wrong with them, everyone is asking? When did our society all break down?

A few, eager to push their own political causes, respond that their rights are not met, their needs are ignored. Perhaps this is true. Young men and women of job-seeking age in the inner cities unquestionably feel the despair of no prospects, no hope, no future, and the immediate pain of government cuts. But many of the kids last night were mere children, too young to seriously question their futures, interested only in what they could grab and run, without a thought for the damage done to life or livelihood.

Do the youth of Cairo and Damascus, with even less prospects, hope or future, seek to destroy rather than build?

Arab, Greek and Spanish recent riots have been entirely political, focused on a goal, people determined to ensure that they were heard. Riots are made by the unheard of society, said Martin Luther King. But away from the specific events of Saturday night in Tottenham which were at least in part triggered by the death of Michael Duggan, it would be a surprise if any or many of the kids rampaging through the streets last night, or tonight in Manchester, have even heard of Michael Duggan. What are the politics of these riots? True it may be that these rioters represent an unheard section of society, but last night was not about being heard. It was more about mentality of the herd, spread by BBM as they claimed streets and bicycles and flatscreen televisions.

It was not about shaping society, like in Tunis or Cairo, but puncturing it.

These balaclava-covered youngsters might hate the police, but they cant articulate why they prevented fire brigades reaching burning buildings. Perhaps we didn’t give them the tools to articulate why. Or the schools didn’t. Or their parents didn’t. Or the social worker didn’t. But, they knew that people might die if the fire brigades were blocked. And still they blocked. Are they the sharp-edge-symptom of a society that finds it easy to blame, and less easy to accept blame?  Is British society to blame for the scenes more reminiscent of war-time Beirut, Baghdad, Bosnia or Benghazi than the leafy suburbia of Ealing or Clapham?

Perhaps our society has accepted low level violence as a norm for too long? Boorish British behaviour abroad, teenagers bandying about knives in schools or on buses, wars against other countries bearing the language of the enemy? Is that why these teenagers brought might London to its knees, so that we may have a taste of the civil strife we have inflicted on other nations? Not even the fiercest apologist could seriously suggest that. Given the age and greed-grabbing character of the rioters last night, morality was hardly a concern. So, whose fault is it?

Perhaps we, as a society, strived hard to pretend that the violent and impoverished estates on the back step to our grossly expensive houses did not exist. Perhaps we walked past without ever looking. Perhaps we collectively agreed not to make eye contact with groups of children and teenagers on the street when they passed, in case we “brought trouble on ourselves”, in case they were members of gangs. The gangs that terrorise each other in those violent and impoverished estates that can be found in every borough in the capital. Perhaps we ignored the boredom that faced these children as youth centres and libraries and social welfare programmes were cut, and cut and cut. Perhaps we never saw the irony of what it meant to be “at war”, as we fought wars away from home, not realising that the wealth of our democracy had not reached everyone. Perhaps we thought it was ok to have a society divided into where we could go, and where we dared not go. Perhaps we took our eyes of internal infernos after September 11th and placed them firmly on external ones. And most definitely maybe we forgot to notice the people who could not take part in our consumerist addiction, the consumerism on which our society is now founded.

And we could go on, and on , and on. We could blame ourselves, and we would be right to do so because societies don’t break down without participation from everyone, just as they don’t become cohesive without common glue.

But to blame ourselves without blaming these children, without questioning their parents and guardians, would be irresponsible and stupid. These riots were not about political alienation or what it meant to live on the fringes of society, even if that might form part of the story. The riots were built not just on greed, but on an utter lack of respect and value, for anybody else or anything else. They burned homes and communities, it seems, just because they could. Because they felt no respect or value or link to those communities. A shopkeeper in Ealing described the ravaging hordes as “feral rats”. Bands of boys and girls in balaclavas who actively set out to menace local populations and hold them to ransom whilst they looted for fun, and the thrill of it.

Make no mistake, we need to blame these children. Their stupidity, selfishness and violence have wrought destruction and despair on much of Britain over the last 48 hours. They need to be forced to take responsibility for actions conducted in the spirit of impunity on a lazy summer night. Their actions bear no resemblance to the fortitude and bravery of the youth of the Arab Spring, who have tried to force their leaders face up to the consequences of state brutality, conducted in the spirit of impunity.. We need to blame the parents too, and a culture in which a responsible adult is no longer entitled to question a child who is not their own. Anger, boredom and frustration are no apology for the behaviour of the rioters over these last couple of days, for there is nothing political about wanton destruction.

But then, once the blaming, naming and shaming is done, we need to ask the fundamental questions of our society and our political system.  What does it mean for the fringes of our consumer society when they can’t get in, or climb in, or be allowed into the worship of goods that they cannot afford? Why and how have we built a society in which our teenagers do not need to fight for the right to vote but still feel disenfranchised to the degree that they can hold our cities hostage? And how have we managed to create, or allowed to stagnate, a section of our young population where respect and community mean nothing at all?

Down the other end of that telescope, however, Syrian and Egyptian teenagers must be scratching their heads and asking tonight: why are these people waging wars on their very own people? Why are they burning their neighbours’ houses and cars?

London

August 9th 2011.

Identity shifts

Amongst the familiar assortment of nineteenth century miniature paintings of the Lahore court, and a resplendent set of warrior’s armour from that same nineteenth century court, the exhibition’s unusual touch lies in the emphasis placed on the literary and photographic perspectives of nineteenth century European travellers to this sacred city which lies at the spiritual centre of Sikhism, one of the world’s youngest religions. A world timeline pits Amritsar’s development against global events and is a useful barometer of how the city began to develop and change between the Middle Ages and the Victorian era. The gradual shift in attitudes towards an individual identity, both in an Indian and an international context are demonstrated by well-considered curation that explore external perceptions of a culture that is not well-known beyond its immediate historical context.

“The fascinating Eastern-ness of it all”

Amristar’s mysticism, “the fascinating Eastern-ness of it all”, has long fascinated travellers to India, even up to the modern day. Set in a dusty northern Indian city just before the plains give way to the grace of the Himalayas, the splendour and serenity of the Golden Temple seem always to have come as a distinct surprise to the visitor, “an illustration of an Arabian night fairy scene”, said J.B. Ireland in 1859. “It is called golden because the upper part of it is gilt all over, like the dome of the Isaac’s Church in Petersburg. There is a great deal of mosaic work on the marble of the temple and nothing can be prettier than the gilding of the interior, which is more like what people in England associate with the Alhambra than anything else which occurs to me. It is very small, little more than a chapel. The Capella Palatina at Palermo comes into one’s mind, but the feeling of the Golden Temple is quite different, and much more riant”, wrote Montstuart E. Grant Duff in Notes of an Indian Journey (1876). Amritsar, set in the crossroads of the Greek, Persian and British invasions into India, somehow reflects it all.

Black and white

The exhibition features paintings and photographs only as far as 1959, partly because the temple has not changed greatly in the last fifty years and partly because the advent of colour photography meant that modern coppery images of the temple do not convey the sense of a distinct past that the curators intended viewers to reflect upon. In particular, there was a deliberate decision not to bring the exhibition up to date to reflect major political shifts and disturbances in the late twentieth century, notably the invasion of the temple by Indira Gandhi’s government and subsequent massacres of Sikh communities in Amritsar and north India in 1984. With so much other material focusing on that period, the individuals concerned with the project wanted visitors to reflect on what the past meant to Sikh identity, and how that was viewed by outsiders, rather than the definitions which have been cast upon it by insiders and outsiders today.

Juga Singh, one of the organisers, explains that there is a common tendency by people to cling onto their past, or more accurately, their nostalgic vision of a past. “But the past is not static”, he says, “and if people try to claim it is such, they are warping their own past and history. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion, himself was a revolutionary forging change in a time of great disturbance in India, but like all the Gurus of the Sikh religion, they were sages of their particular eras. They saw the need to re-interpret knowledge in a modern way in their time, and now people need to do the same”. The message is not lost as I walk around the exhibition. It forces you to ask why the building was built, why it has such strong Moorish and Muslim architectural features such as the Ramgarhia minarets, why the temple was built where it was, and how its features and tenements changed over time.

Why, I ask Singh, was the pool of immortality which surrounds the central tenet of the Temple so small when there is such a large area of space for buildings? Singh explains that in India, historically there was no sense of congregation. Prayer, he says, was a personal contemplation between the believer and his god. The idea of congregation came from the Islamic and Christian traditions, and thus a space for congregation is created in the faith, through the langar food hall and external bunga buildings which were centres of learning until they were demolished in the reform movements of 1947, post-Partition.

Post-Partition

The 1959 break in the exhibition is also an unspoken acknowledgement of the substantial changes that the religion, and its chief city, were undergoing during the first half of the twentieth century. There is early twentieth century film and aural footage, which hauntingly sings out the religious hymns, or kirtan, by Muslim rababis, representing Bhai Mardana, the Sufi Muslim companion to the religion’s founder, Guru Nanak. The Muslim singers were a composite part of the temple’s structure until Partition forced them out. By the late 1950s, the tradition of Muslim singers in the precinct had disappeared along with the thousands of Muslim residents of Amritsar who had crossed over to Lahore and Pakistan when the new borders were determined in 1947. The demolition of the bungas also marked the determinative shift from a more inclusive Sikh identity, which reflected a bygone India, to a more fundamental need to identify who constituted a Sikh.

Davinder Toor, one of the chief lenders to the exhibition, explained to me that even in today’s India, a Sikh may frequently visit a Sikh gurdwara, a Hindu mandir (temple) and the shrine of a Muslim Sufi saint. None of that precludes him from considering himself a Sikh, and the exhibition shows that Amritsar itself defined itself in those terms during the nineteenth century. Photographs show Tibetan people and Hindu Sadhus wandering around the pool. The exhibition focuses on these subtle twists and turns in identity without ever forcing the visitor to resolve the questions posed.

Perspectives from the inside-out?

I asked Davinder Toor why they focused on European perspectives of Amritsar, rather than Indian viewpoints. “It’s appropriate to the theme of British Indians and of the exhibition taking place in London”, he says. “It focuses on the ‘outside looking in’. People who are outside a culture can have a unique viewpoint of it, and that is a valuable asset in itself. We see that the early travellers reflected positively on the inclusiveness of Amritsar, and that is something which today’s generation and community need to consider themselves.”

Set against black and white images of the ancient heart of Amritsar, whose buildings and lanes looks remarkably similar today , the words of Robert Chauvelot, author of Mysterious India (1921) ring in my ears as I leave the gallery:

“This sacred metropolis contains a marvel which the most blasé eye cannot contemplate without profound artistic emotion…There are no other guardians to protect these riches from theft or spoliation other than a few old turbaned fellows who are without arms. One would say that a sort of sacred terror protects their temple against any profane or sacrilegious violence.”

I left the exhibition contemplating whether the spiritual riches of an inclusive faith could survive in a world increasingly dominated by the need to demonstrate an allegiance to a particular God, and a particular way of being. I left wondering whether the serenity instilled by that inclusive approach, and so evidenced by the reflections of the past, brought together here at the Brunei Gallery, would bring food for thought to our multicultural, multi-faith London. Are there lessons in the past for us all, regardless of our religious identities?

July 14th 2011

London

Political bankruptcy: Regression not progression

Pakistan has been running on empty for decades. This political bankruptcy has been fuelled by its ostensible ally, the US in the furtherance of its Cold war policies and latterly in the creation of a so-called AfPak policy, as well as an obsessive hatred of India that has left it lurching dangerously towards the regression of its western neighbours of Afghanistan and Iran, rather than chasing the progression being sought on its Eastern borders in India and China. For a country where the masses are slumming in poverty, illiteracy and political indifference, Pakistan has been on the verge of dangerous bankruptcy for years. As the world starts to pose the questions as to what, who and when Pakistan knew that they were sheltering America’s most wanted target  – and there can be absolutely no doubt that significant numbers of people in Pakistan did know Bin Laden was living in a preposterous mansion in the hill-station like atmosphere of Abbotabad  – it is time to pierce the veneer of an allied relationship and for Pakistanis, and their allies, to force the country’s politicians to come clean. If that will not happen, as the incompetent President and Prime Ministerial team continue to hold their country to ransom, it is time for the world to seriously reconsider relationships with a country whose dysfunctionality has torn apart its own life, and is wrecking lives outside its borders too.

The tangible folly of nuclear 

A decade ago, India and Pakistan came close to their fourth war since Independence. Both countries are armed with nuclear weapons. Both countries were backed in their quest for madness by further support and sales from the US, UK and Israel. Notwithstanding the many legitimate questions to be asked about the nuclear capabilities in both countries, the threat posed by Pakistan’s nuclear folly is tangible and terrifying. Governments are routinely toppled in Pakistan, and then controlled by shadowy forces lurking in the army, intelligence and fundamentalist groups that play to popular prejudices spawned by a lack of basic education which is instead provided by madrassas backed by Saudi Arabia and the Taliban. Meanwhile, the governments of the last decade have pandered to US demands to use the country as a base from which to attack Afghanistan, whilst simultaneously allowing it to drone-attack the Pakistani civilian population. Hatred of America and India leaves this suffering population in between rocks of hate, with no tools to get past the self-destruct button which seems to be being slowly pressed over Pakistan across the last decade. That twilight zone has fostered a culture in which the intelligence agencies can and do control the tiniest  fraction. In those circumstances, there can be little doubt today that Pakistan’s ISI not only knows about the ‘terrorists’ it is harbouring, but actively supports them. BL will not have been the only one.

A few questions for the ISI

Here are just a few questions one might be thinking of asking the ISI today:

1)   Who owned the house in which BL was living?

2)   Who built it, on what date and under whose instructions?

3)   Did anyone in that mansion pay taxes? If not, why not?

4)   How many people lived in the house?

5)   Who provided the general security for the house?

6)   Under whose name was electricity, water and other civil provision supplied?

7)   Who were the nearest neighbours?

8)   Couriers no doubt delivered mail and parcels. Who were the courier companies? Who watched them?

9)   Where did the household buy its food from? Did nobody ever notice them, or their staff as they went about the daily business of living?

10)                  If BL was, in fact, in need of dialysis, were there doctors visiting the house? Who were they?

11)                  Did the local military academy, perhaps akin to Sandhurst, perform routine checks to establish who was living down the road from them? In a country that has become victim to bombings and targetings, if no such checks were performed, why not?

12)                  Is it even possible that neighbours in a wealthy suburb chose not to enquire about the new millionaires down the road who perhaps kept themselves to themselves?

A burial at sea

There are many valid questions about the operation this morning, not least why America would choose to bury Bin Laden at sea so rapidly without at least allowing independent press verification of the body. The conspiracy theories are already at work and America has just made its own job much harder for absolutely no reason at all. Another 12 hours even could have ensured such verification, and suppressed decades of rumours about what is already being discussed as a martyrdom amongst some commentators on some of the Arabic news channels.

But the tough questions are for Pakistan..

But the real questions this morning are about how the world intends to react to Pakistan’s incompetence, negligence or wilful support for terrorist activity that is not only corroding its own country from within, but which has spat out that venom to its neighbours, and the world at large. In truth, BL had become an irrelevance over the last years, amidst two massive wars and then the uprisings that have become known as the Arab Spring. But the political, military and intelligence culture in Pakistan that has allowed its own population to become both victims, both physically and intellectually, is now dangerously out of control and with no sign that that an equivalent Arab spring is on the horizon in Pakistan after years of corrupt, vengeful and twisted leadership, the pretence of an allied relationship with Pakistan must be over.  It is neither in Indian, American or British interest to sever ties or diplomatic dialogue with Pakistan completely for it is only the head of an almost irrelevant snake that has been cut off by this killing, and Pakistan will need an intelligent form of support to be pulled through these dark days. The Pakistani Taliban, after years of nurture and influence both from Saudi Arabia and the ISI, appears to be running out of control within Pakistan’s borders and the outside world needs to know what is happening inside. Either the world waits  on tiptoes to see what happens next, or it forces Pakistan to answer the tough questions which it owes to its own people, and to the world. Pakistan has been running on empty for decades, and if it will not or cannot control the lunacy which leaks down from the highest levels of its own government, reliant on a blanket policy of impunity both at home and abroad ,it is time for the external fuel lines to be cut sharply. In a decade where the word “terrorist” has become used as an excuse for a calamity of other atrocities on people, including attacks on civil liberties across the world, it should still be legitimate to require a state which actively deploys hatred as a policy tool to come clean or to be sidelined from the global community. Pakistan’s bankrupt political system should no longer be tolerated or mollycoddled in the interests of somebody else’s ‘big picture’.

May 3rd 2011.

This is particularly true on the day that Syria’s Assad appears to prepare for open war on his own people, whilst the British Prime Minister declares that Britain has to be prepared to remain in Libya “for the long haul”. This is also the week that the Bahraini Crown Prince, responsible for a merciless suppression of his people during recent weeks, had to decline his royal wedding invitation on the grounds that matters at home were somewhat troublesome. Headlines on these matters piqued public interest for a few seconds before conversations reverted to the guessing games surrounding Kate Middleton’s dress. Oh, what a convenient week to bat away inconvenient arguments on consistency.

Pimms and cucumber sandwich, anyone?

A trilogy of reactions and a decade of war

Three Arab states. Three brutal dictators unleashing the power of their security forces on their own people, who dare to demand the right to elect their own representatives. Three very different reactions from the West, and indeed from the cowardly Arab League. Military Intervention. Middle Ground. Silence.

True it is that every situation must be judged on its own merits. But the silence over Bahrain and the hobbling that preceded today’s prompting on Syrian sanctions should lead even the most trusting individual to question why the government simply cannot tell us the truth about their intentions in Libya. As impossible as the ‘to-intervene-in-Libya-to-prevent-bloodbath-in-Benghazi-or-not-to-intervene’ question was for many to conclude, our government has a long and ignoble history of invasion and occupation on false pretexts. It is hard to believe we are already one decade from the invasion of Afghanistan, and eight years in Iraq. Several inquiries later and truth is none the wiser. Over the same period, our government silently has supported a continued policy of US drone attacks on Pakistan soil, killing many innocent civilians and contributing to a poisoned atmosphere in a country already poised dangerously on the brink. But all of this has been done, according to our governments, to help the local populations. As Afghanistan squanders its way backwards into worsening rights for women, and a Taliban now rising not only over its own mountains, but into Pakistan as well, that argument sounds derisively funny, or it would if it was not so bleak. So too would the pervasive presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq if so many thousands of ordinary Iraqis had not been killed since the invasion in 2003. Regrettably, it seems our governments usually are able only to condemn human rights abuses and violence where there is a hidden, ulterior motive that they are not at liberty to reveal to their populations. As always, the battered human rights of Palestinians in the face of arrogant Israeli evasion of UN Resolutions themselves underlines that point.

To say or to do?

Indeed, even when is merely a distinct possibility rather than an actuality, our government has an odious way of concealing its intentions. Tony Blair marched straight over to India in late 2001, as the country teetered on the brink of a fourth war with its neighbour Pakistan, holding himself out to be a peacebroker whilst in fact on a British arms’ sale cold call. Credit to Cameron where it is due; at least he was open about putting British profit in arms’ sales above tha value of human life in the Middle East on his ill-advised jaunt of arms fairs just four months ago.

In the spirit of that same honesty, both the British and the Libyan people deserve to be told exactly what is the aim of this current stalemate in Libya. Civilians are being massacred in ever-greater numbers and, to that end, the terms of the UN Resolution clearly have not been met. Whilst almost the entire world is likely to agree that Libya’s people cannot be free until Qaddafi either leaves or is assassinated, there is no UN mandate to kill him and a policy that drags a country into civil war, even unintentionally, cannot be in anyone’s interests. Civil war has clearly begun across the Mediterranean, so much so that Sarkozy and Berlusconi are begging to suspend their passport-free Schengen zone tonight. God forbid that refugees from war should try to enter Fortress Europe. Priorities are priorities after all, they grumble. European jobs and money first. What was that they were saying about humanitarian intervention?

Meanwhile, our esteemed Ambassador to Middle East Peace, Mr Blair of Edgware Road, appears to have fallen into an implausible silence. Peace-brokering is much harder, it seems for him, than warmongering. Cameron should not seek to emulate his predecessor any further.

And then to Syria..

The world dare not intervene in Syria, for too much is at stake. The Syrian army is much stronger than Libya’s, and the West is unable to broker any sense of victory in North Africa. Moreover, Syria’s links to both Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Iran mean that any military intervention in that country  would be liable to throw the region into potentially devastating turmoil. But if the number of dead, shot down in cold blood by the Syrian security forces, is too small to win even enough votes for a UN Resolution condemning the violence, and any measure of sanctions unlikely to bring immediate relief to Syria’s city-dwellers under fire, the lack of consistency in the West’s approach to these remarkably similar situations stinks of something black in the lentils, as they say in India.

Or Bahrain?

Today, even as British and European weapons are unleashed on Bahrainis, the British government insists that ‘dialogue’ is the way forward with Bahrain. How fortunate for those dictators who happen to be chums with that other repressive, lunatic regime, the House of Saud. They know that sticks and stones may break their people’s bones, but words will never hurt them.

It’s time to recognise the failure of the Libyan intervention and pull out

A month ago, the world watched and waited with baited breath to see whether a swift victory in Libya might dispel those instinctive fears that invasion was a terrible idea. There was an outpouring of collective hope over reason that lessons had been learned by a generation of western politicians who had never known war. Today, as Syrians are massacred by a maniac President who buys into his own cult of personality  and Bahrain is forced into silence by a Crown Prince who ‘deeply regretted’ that he could not attend a jolly wedding because of an inconvenient situation at home, Britain and the West’s venture in Libya looks ready to crumble. Faltering under the pressure of an intervention that surely risks causing more casualty now than it sought to prevent, the intervention no longer seems to be saving lives. Residents of Misrata, lying in hospital beds tonight, may be proof that one city’s slaughter merely was transferred to another.

The only acceptable option for Cameron, Sarkozy , Berlusconi and their merry gang is to pull out of Libya directly. Unbearable though it may be to accept that Qaddafi outmanoeuvred them, they need squarely to accept that in preventing one massacre, remaining in Libya may be causing many more. There is no proper opposition in Libya to carry this plan, or hope, forward. A bunch of ragged fighters is whom the West relies upon to succeed in its airborne mission. None of this is to blame the West for Qaddafi’s murderous missions, but reflects the reality on the ground a month after this intervention began. There is neither appetite, nor moral or legal authority for a military mission which becomes a drawn-out war intended to assassinate Qaddafi, whilst pulling his people into civil war. The Libyan catastrophe will not doubt be condemned as a crushing defeat for the allies – and no doubt underlines the very concerns highlighted at the outset of this campaign about what it was intended to achieve – but it is the only reasonable life-saving measure that can be taken before considerable further harm is done to Libya’s people. Moreover, it is the only way that the world may believe that there were good intentions behind the collective attempts to prevent genocide.

To remain in Libya now is both to contribute or cause further bloodshed and to invite the nauseating disbelief that hovers over all the government interventions, invasions and wars over the last decade. Neither the tax-paying publics of the warring governments, nor the bystanding victims of their occupations, have ever been told the truth about those. If we remain, it will be another war which was entered into by our politicians without ever telling us why. Sure, we can guess that the motive was glossy with black gold, but how did that ever help the people of Iraq?

The heroics of populations who come out in protests, knowing that they are likely to be gunned down is beyond the imagination of most of us having an indifferent row about the merits of a trussed-down proportional representation vote, or muttering gaily about royal wedding dresses. But we are a nation at war, again. And though Cameron has warned us today that we are in it for the long haul, most of us could barely grasp the fear and terror that the fact of war, or its duration, must bring to the people on the other side of that war. Cucumber sandwich, anyone?

April 26th 2011

London.

As Qaddafi murders his own people, the rest of the world has watched for almost a month, freshly timid after the failed missions that cling, claw-like, to Iraqi and Afghani soil. As much as Obama doesn’t want to be the old Bush, Cameron is delighted to be the new Blair. Determined enough to speak out early on the no-fly zone, to the guffaws of those around, this is the same man who went to the Middle East to sell arms “in the British economic interest” amidst the upheaval of Arab Revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, even as Bahrain and Yemen were beginning to uncurl their lips and unleash their own weapons. It is too early to praise Cameron’s insistence on the no-fly zone, and much too early to have any sense of what is actually being discussed behind the scenes. But, with the deep unease that this conflict is causing in so many people, it is what is behind the scenes that ultimately will decide whether this action should have been taken at all.

I have been deeply conflicted over this military action for days. Almost everyone with whom I speak agonises over wanting the massacres to be stopped whilst failing to trust the coalition forces to stop either it or themselves. There is none of the moral certainty of Iraq in 2003. The mania unleashed by the Mad Dog on his people has caused the world to want to find an urgent way for it to stop. Military intervention has seemed to be the only way to prevent an immediate brutal massacre in Benghazi, so perhaps there was no alternative for a responsible international community, equally mindful of the consequences of inaction. Lessons learned from sitting idly on our haunches in Rwanda, particularly, as a nation was slaughtered under the shaded eyes of the international community, brought new purpose to liberal interventionism.

But then Afghanistan and Iraq tore every shred of trust and moral fibre from the politics – and those who report on it daily – in the West.  It is impossible to trust the sanctimony being squeezed out of those same lips now. Watch them all cross their fingers behind their backs as they promise Operation Odyssey Dawn has nothing to do with economic interest, or that the goals of the operation are clear, limited and achievable. Still, Qaddafi is crossing his own fingers as he declares a ceasefire whilst wreaking murderous revenge on his people, and kidnapping journalists so that nobody can see the truth anywhere. And all of us are crossing our fingers when we say that this is not really a war that will take civilian casualties, or play into the propaganda-stained hands of a despot, ready to hostage his entire population.

Saturday was the day the West went back to War. This time it is sanctioned by both the United Nations and the Arab League, who unacceptably have failed to commit their own forces to match their words. Watching cruise missiles and aerial bombardments light up the night skies of North Africa brings back stark memories of Tony Blair’s opening gambit against Iraq in 1998 as well as haunting echoes of the Balkans, another humanitarian crisis that was unfolding rapidly and murderously. But even as Qaddafi fires forwards and retreats backwards, the coming days and weeks will become harder by the hour, short of a surprise assassination attempt from the inside imminently.

What is the endgame, I keep asking myself? A no-fly zone cannot exist in a pacific bubble – it needs enforcement and military might both to create and to police it. Nonetheless, both Amr Moussa’s domestic political pressures and inevitable civilian casualties could lead to a sudden turnaround in Arab public opinion, which will matter increasingly as the attacks from Western bombing campaigns continue. How deeply did the UN consider the potential consequences of its cleverly drafted paragraph 4? How many “necessary measures” will be taken to enforce the UN Resolution? And, critically, who decides what those “necessary measures” are, or should be? These difficult questions need answers, and whilst the situation is evolving by the hour, the politicians need to have worked out these answers before their planes took off from European bases. The mission ostensibly is to stop war crimes being committed on the Libyan population by their despot leader, but this has a frightening potential to end up as a major own goal.

As Qaddafi murders his own people, politicians and people alike have been praying that an Egyptian (or a Tunisian) solution can be found. The hand-wringing and delay that accompanied such entreaties were understandable, commendable even, for this was the sign of an alliance which finally understood that people could bring democracy to themselves, in time, un-imposed and without the strings of friendly puppets dancing to a master’s tune. The West’s interference in the Middle East has a long and sordid history, tied up with colonial domination, Israeli politics, arms sales and oil. It is not easy to shrug that reputation off, as the politicians who daily cry wolf well know.

But the same hand-wringing and delay gave a tyrant -armed by Blair, Berlusconi, Sarkozy and also by Cameron – valuable time to unleash his ammunition and fire power so that the embers of revolution might be quickly swept away. The UN Resolution almost certainly came too late, but reports from Libya suggest that the fact of it was well-received, giving the desperate a tiny glimmer of hope. This, then, is the principal reason to support this action. Libya is not owned by the Qaddafi clan, but it is ransomed by it now. People need help, and they need it now.

It is too easy to dismiss this mission as being hypocritical, or purely oil-driven. Both of those statements are invariably true, particularly in the immediate wake of brutal suppression in Bahrain and Yemen this weekend which is extremely unlikely to be the subject of Western intervention. Italy, for example, relies on Libya for a substantial percentage of its energy output and it would be naive in the extreme to ignore that as it offers out its bases for French, British and American warplanes. There is little doubt, however, that if Libyans had been slaughtered in Benghazi by Qaddafi this weekend, most of us would have condemned our own governments in countries who could have stopped it for their inaction. Criticism also ought to be meted out unreservedly right now to the Arab League right now for failing to commit its own troops to the actions which it requested in its own backyard.

Whatever the true motive and success of this military action, it is worth remembering a few facts whenever Cameron, Sarkozy and Berlusconi mutter platitudes about the abhorrent human rights abuses being committed by the man who, by 2004, had become Europe’s favourite cuddly dictator. The EU granted export licenses for €834.5m worth of arms exports to Libya in the first five years after the arms embargo was lifted in October 2004. Now, they are shooting him down for using those same weapons.

The echoes of former failures ring loudly in the world’s collective eardrum.  The world want to believe this military action could prevent massacre in Libya. It wants to believe this war could right atrocious wrongs committed on the Libyan people. Every sane person must be hoping it does so. But, deep down, there are too many questions about where it will end, and what can even be achieved without intelligence on the ground. When the aerial bombardments have no military targets left to pinpoint, what will they bomb when Qaddafi takes refuge amongst his civilian population, fist raised in triumph against the United States? And do they even know the rebels they don’t yet wish to arm, but may have to in order to avoid an ‘occupation’? What will be the impact of arming an untrained, un-politicised and undefined population of rebels? Could a split Libya be acceptable to Libyans, and how could such a split even happen when the majority of the Libyan population are terrorised by the Qaddafi clan? Will the warplanes pull out if Qaddafi outplays them all but remains ostensibly in power? What are the real intentions behind these actions, and when will we see them play out? What will happen if Bahrain explodes next weekend, or thousands of protestors emerge on the streets of Jeddah only to be shot down by the same troops now advancing in Bahrain? And, just what if Israel unleashes firepower on Gaza again, or Lebanon? And, and, and.

Like almost everybody I know, I remain deeply conflicted over this intervention, nay war. There is almost certainly not a singular definitive answer, and if Qaddafi is gone within a matter of days, the spirit of the Resolution may have been successful. But, in truth,  I fear the weekend’s action was too much, too late. I fear the tragedies of what has come before. And, I cannot help but remember that on the most Eastern shores of the Mediterranean, the many UN Resolutions on Palestine remain unfulfilled and strictly unenforced.

For the sake of the people of Libya, I hope that my worst fears are proven wrong.

20^th March 2011.

For details of arms exports to Libya from Europe see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/01/eu-arms-exports-libya