Book Review: Residue, by Nitasha Kaul

In a world riven with prejudice, hatred and sectarianism, Nitasha Kaul, through her first novel Residue, gives us a host of characters who do not wallow in such muck. Leon Ali, the main protagonist, is a Kashmiri who grew up in Delhi. Despite an Islamic heritage, Leon is an atheist who doesn’t take sides easily. There’s a scene in London where Leon meets a number of Kashmiris from “Azad” Kashmir. Spurning their invitation to join them, Leon thinks, ‘honestly, you are not Kashmiri.’ Then there’s Keya Raina, a co-protagonist and a Kashmiri Pandit, who too grew up in Delhi and later moved to Bristol, in the UK, to become a liberal arts Professor. Agni, born Agnes, a Christian from Orissa, is a dancer who has broken through a number of barriers and is equally at ease with the world. Shula Farid who plays a very vital role in the story and its plot, lived a generation before Leon and Keya, but is equally secular and nice. Born to an atheist Muslim father who teaches mathematics at Shantiniketan and an East European mother with a Jewish heritage, Shula made the mistake of falling in love with and marrying Abhilash, a clever and successful civil servant, the odd man out amongst the various characters in this debut work, standing out on account of his orthodoxy and inflexibility.

Leon’s father Mir, an engineer and a communist, had deserted his mother and left for Berlin even before Leon was born, when the couple lived in the UK. Leon’s mother returns to India and brings up Leon single-handedly, the only contribution from her family being the occasional taunt or other unhelpful comment. Life in Delhi is tough for a single woman bringing up a son on her own. It gets even tougher if the mother and son are Muslims. From bullying and name-calling at school, to trouble finding decent accommodation, Leon and his mother see it all, but they persevere and survive.

Leon is inclined towards the liberal arts and he makes it to St. Stephens, where for a brief period he is part of the posh crowd, eats hot sams and g-jams with friends from the Rez and watches the ShakeSoc fellas do their rehearsals in the open. At Stephens, Kashmir is but a Led Zeppelin song. But the honeymoon period at Stephens doesn’t last for long. Leon’s lack of money and social status forces him to seek the company of his equals. Post graduate studies follow, but Leon is no longer motivated. Since Leon was born in the UK, he is British or rather, he is entitled to a British passport. Leon moves to the UK.

Just as at Stephens, Leon has a good time in the UK initially, until shit happens in the form of 9/11. Leon is forced to avoid certain areas and roads. Once in a night bus, he is called an Arab Pig and a Paki Terrorist. The internet chat rooms are full of hatred for Muslims, Islam and the infidels. The anti-Islam wave is contagious. Back home, Gujarat boils overs post-Godra. Leon needs to re-discover himself. He decides to go to Berlin to trace his father and in Berlin, he runs into Keya.

Kaul writes in simple Indian English which works well for her characters. There were a few times in the beginning of this 324 page book when I felt Kaul was digressing or dwelling too long on something instead of moving on, but on the whole, Kaul does get on with the job of telling a story and a very good story it turns out to be. Teaming up with Keya in Berlin, Leon manages to find traces of his communist father Mir Ali and his relationship with Shula Farid, then unhappily married to Indian diplomat Abhilash. Mir and Shula had found each other and plotted to get away from their respective worlds. It wasn’t an easy task since Mir was a communist, living and working underground, always on the run. We see Mir and Shula communicate with difficulty, at times leaving messages on the Berlin Wall! Kaul doesn’t tell us till we nearly reach the end whether Mir and Shula succeeded in breaking free. Also, in a way, the relationship between Leon and Keya mirrors that of Mir’s and Shula’s, with the further complication that Leon constantly worries that he might turn out to be a deserter like his father. You need to wait till the very last page to find out where that relationship is headed to.

On the whole, Residue left a very pleasant aftertaste in me and I recommend this book to all those who want to see this world become a better place, free of sectarian prejudices and all those who like to read a good story.

Book Review: Our Moon has Blood Clots, by Rahul Pandita

There are many recorded instances of victims of discrimination, violence or even genocide dishing out similar treatment to others. Kurds, long oppressed by the Arabs and later by the Ottoman Turks, were instrumental in the Armenian genocide during the First World War. Jews, who fled the Nazis and settled in Palestine, haven’t been too kind to Palestinians. In Sri Lanka, the LTTE was rather nasty to the Muslim community in areas under its control, at times forcing Muslims to vacate places like Chavakacheri and Jaffna enmasse. Poles, who were at the receiving end of multiple aggressors ranging from Russians and Germans to Tartars, are rather anti-Semitic even now. To a certain extent, the violence unleashed by the Kashmiri Muslim community against Pandits living in the Valley falls in this category. Kashmiri Muslims may claim with some justification that they have received a raw deal from the Indian government and the earlier Dogra rulers. However, their treatment of the Pandits whom they drove away from the valley in increasing numbers since 1990 will always be remembered as yet another instance of a majority community oppressing a defenceless minority community.

Rahul Pandita, currently an Associate editor at the Open Magazine, and author of Hello Bastar, an account of India’s Maoist movement, tells the story of how his family was forced to flee to Jammu from the Kashmir valley when he was fourteen and live in squalid camps where his mother never tired of telling people that their house in the valley had 22 rooms. Pandita’s favourite cousin Ravi stayed on in the valley and was killed along with two others as they travelled by bus. There is no doubt that countless other Pandits have similar stories to tell.

In Our Moon has Blood Clots, Pandita doesn’t offer any answers, despite the innumerable questions that pop up during the discourse. Pandita makes a half-hearted attempt to be neutral and unbiased, there are references to how Dogras rulers were ‘rough’ with the Muslim community and how Hindus in Jammu tried to exploit the refugees from the Valley, but the book is almost entirely the story of the Pandit exodus and Pandita doesn’t even try to present the other side’s point of view. I don’t blame him. Pandita’s pain is still too raw and fresh to even think of making an attempt to provide the other side of the story, though Pandita makes it clear that he has maintained his humanism throughout. Once at a television studio for a debate on human rights, as Pandita argued in support of a zero tolerance approach in respect of human rights violations in Kashmir, he was reprimanded by a drunk army general who reminded him that the militants whose human rights he advocated had forced him out of his home. ‘General, I’ve lost my home, not my humanity,’ Pandita retorted.

Pandita makes it clear that the atrocities (murder and rape) against Pandits were carried out by fellow Kashmiris, with a different religious persuasion, and not just by foreign militants who came from across the LoC. Pandita tells us that divide between the Pandits and Muslims existed much before 1990. Cricket matches between India and Pakistan always brought the differences to the fore. The Muslims in Kashmir supported Pakistan and the Pandits naturally rooted for India. On April 18, 1986, when Javed Miandad hit Chetan Sharma’s last ball for a six in Sharjah, ‘ít was as if it was Diwali in Kashmir. I think every cracker available in Kashmir was burst in the next one hour. People streamed out of their houses and on to the streets chanting Allah ho Akbar. In the nippy April weather of the Valley, people drank gallons of Limca to celebrate, the way they had seen cricket stars celebrate with champagne.' Earlier, on October 13, 1983, when India had played Pakistan in Srinagar, the first ever international cricket match held in Jammu & Kashmir, the stadium had erupted in support for Pakistan. Vengsarkar was hit with a half-eaten apple. Pandita and his cousin Ravi had watched with disbelief. Was it always like that? Did Kashmiri Muslims always support the Pakistani cricket team since the time of the Partition? Pandita doesn’t provide a clear answer.

Pandita uses Ravi’s father as a narrator to describe the lie of the land at the time of the invasion by tribal levies immediately after the Partition. One gets the feeling that at that time the divide between Pandits and Muslims wasn’t so wide, though it did exist. Pandita doesn’t make it very clear when exactly the Hindu-Muslim divide grew to the extreme proportions one sees now.

In 1990, did Governor Jagmohan encourage Pandits to leave the Valley so that he could take stringent measures against the militants? Pandita rubbishes this theory. According to Pandita, Jagmohan was helpless. The administration had collapsed completely and sections of the state police were sympathetic to militants.

Even before I reached the end of the book I started wondering why the Indian government wasn’t taking more steps to make it possible for Pandits to return to the Valley. Create settlements for them, my brain screamed. When I reach the end of Pandita’s memoir, I find out that the Indian government has done just that and it isn’t working very well. A few thousand needy Pandits have moved back to the Valley and live in protected settlements which lack basic facilities. When they venture out in public, they, especially women, are targeted and harassed. The divide between Muslims and Pandits remains as wide as ever.

An honest account and a very good one at that, Our Moon has Blood Clots is a must read for anyone interested in the Kashmir dispute.

Book Review: "Across the LoC – Inside Pakistan Administered Jammu and Kashmir" by Luv Puri

Luv Puri is a reputed journalist who has in the past worked for the Hindu and reported extensively on Pakistan and the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Currently a Fulbright scholar at the New York University, Puri has written a book which, like Puri’s first name, is compact and petite (though not as sweet) and seeks to ‘go beyond the official narrative and present an objective view of the situation on the ground in Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan Administered Jammu and Kashmir in particular and reconcile the contesting views of India and Pakistan’.

Puri succeeds to a large extent. The facts and statistics presented in Across the Loc are of the sort one doesn’t come across easily in the mainstream media. A fair amount of attention is paid to the demographics of J&K prior to 1947. Jammu and Kashmir were so different in many ways, not just in the percentage of Muslims in each region. We all know of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference. How many of us know of the Muslim Conference and its relationship with the Muslim League in undivided India? Do you know how well Jinnah got along with Sheikh Abdullah especially after Jinnah’s visit to the state in 1944? In simple terms, the National Conference was pro-India and pro-Congress and the Muslim Conference was pro-Pakistan and pro-Muslim League. However, the Muslim Conference’s leadership in Jammu did not see eye to eye with its leadership in the Valley. So much so that the President of the Jammu group announced at a press conference on 28 May 1947 that it stood for independence. Less than two months later, Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah, the leader of the Muslim Conference in Srinagar sought internal autonomy and accession to Pakistan in matters relating to defence, foreign policy and communications.

Puri’s account is very objective and balanced. He refers to India-held Kashmir as Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir or IAJK and Pak-held Kashmir is Pakistan administered Jammu and Kashmir or PAJK. The book is divided into six chapters and each of those chapters told me a lot of things I didn’t know earlier. For example, Puri tells us that after India recaptured lost territory during the 1965 War, retaliatory action was unleashed against the Muslims in the Mendhar area of Poonch district, suspected to have sided with Pakistan’s campaign. Apparently this led to large-scale displacement from IAJK to PAJK. The chapter on Mirpur and the role played by immigrants (to the UK) from Mirpur in the JKLF and other insurgent groups is very interesting. It is claimed that half the Pakistani immigrants in the UK are from Mirpur. Equally interesting is Pakistan’s attempt to show PAJK or Azad Kashmir to be an independent country, which is subject to an international dispute, and give it the trappings of a sovereign state with its own Supreme Court, President and Prime Minister, even though the Legislature of PAJK has to share power with the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council.

Where Puri fails to deliver is in the analysis department. Across the LoC is solid on fact, no doubt about it. However, the presented facts are not analysed and opinions put forth to the extent one would expect in a book of this nature. Much of the text consists of quotes from other books or from people interviewed by the author. Puri rarely puts forth a point of view and this can be immensely irritating. For example, when Puri talks of Darul Uloom, Asia’s largest Muslim seminary at Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, he says that ‘till the 1980s, 25 per cent of the students at the seminary came from outside India.’ Apparently, the Indian government has now cut down the number of student visas given to international students and their numbers have dropped. Puri says that ‘many scholars at Deoband feel that a liberal visa policy will contribute to infusing the true Deobandi pedagogy in its true spirit that is neither incendiary nor extremist.’ Okay, so far so good, but does Puri think that a more liberal visa regime would make sense? You never get to know since Puri does not spell out his stand.

Despite this shortcoming, Across the LoC is an excellent (or even mandatory) read for anyone interested in the Kashmir dispute.

Curfewed Night: By Basharat Peer – Book Review

I had read this book immediately after it appeared it print in 2008. Recently I happened to re-read it and found that it has lost none of its authenticity or relevance. A work of non-fiction by Basharat Peer, a journalist who now lives in the US, Curfewed Night is the story of Kashmir, Peer’s Kashmir and, my, my, what a tale it is!

The first dozen odd pages tell us the story of Kashmir prior to commencement of the insurgency in January 1990. Peer’s prose is excellent and his description of life in Kashmir reminded me of a collection of Armenian short stories (“We Of The Mountains”) I had read many, many years ago. Life in the valley was simple, sweet and straight forward. It also reminded me of Kerala a little bit, what with farmers holding government jobs – Peer’s father is the headmaster of a government school and his father a civil servant – working nine to five and taking care of their fields and crops after office hours.

Until the troubles erupted in 1990, Peer tells us that Kashmiris weren’t not too political. They supported the Pakistani cricket team when it played India but otherwise, their political affiliation with either side was lukewarm. Even Peer, the son of a Kashmiri civil servant, cheered for Pakistan. Peer doesn’t explain why this should be so. No, Peer doesn’t question Kashmir’s accession to India – he merely tells us that when Pakistani tribesmen supported by the Pakistani army invaded Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh decided to join India and that Sheikh Abdullah, who was a friend of Nehru, supported the Maharaja.

In the beginning, Peer’s narrative is essentially what he himself saw in those turbulent days rather than a holistic one. Peer is very sympathetic to the Kashmiri freedom movement and dreams of joining the militants. Once again, there are no long drawn (ideological) explanations as to why Peer wants Kashmir to be independent rather than be a part of India. Peer tells us that the militants killed many Pandits and those who survived left the Valley. Many classrooms became half empty. Some of Peer’s friends went off to join the militants and never returned. Peer makes it clear that the Pandits’ departure made him sad, but his support for the militants doesn’t abate as a result.

The average Kashmiri’s support for the insurgency is shown to be tempered with pragmatism. Ordinary people do their best to dissuade militants from attacking convoys near their houses out of fear of having to bear the brunt of the army’s retaliation. Just as in Mirza Waheed’s “The Collaborator”, Peer too shows the Indian army and paramilitary forces as overwhelmingly strong and powerful. Peer doesn’t hesitate to tell us of casualties suffered by the militants, but is silent on the number of soldiers or paramilitary men killed. For example, Peer tells us how once JKLF militants attacked an Indian army convoy that passed by their village. All villagers fled to the neighbouring village before the attack began. No, no one even thought of warning the army, though, before fleeing, they did (unsuccessfully) plead with the militants to attack the convoy elsewhere. Peer and his family returned the next day and they found bullets inside their house. We are not told of the outcome of the attack on the convoy – most probably Peer thought it irrelevant to his story.

One of the best things about Peer’s tale is that he manages to bring out the human side of the militants’. Peer tells us how Asif, a militant, gave up fighting.

'One day our commander told us that we had to attack an army convoy. I picked up my Kalashnikov. We were about to leave and I began shivering. I was too scared and death seemed so real. I left soon after that. My commanders were kind enough to let me go.’

If you thought that Curfewed Night is all about violence and anger and hatred, you couldn’t be more wrong. Peer does not fail to see humour even when the talk is of fighting and death.

'One morning a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ The slogan meant, ‘Who is the greatest?’ But no one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again and there was silence – then the adolescents in the last row, the backbenchers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that in reply to the slogan, we were supposed to shout ‘Allah o Akbar!’ (God is great.) He shouted again, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ He was answered with a hesitant, awkward ‘Allah o Akbar’. For about a year after, we teased him.'

I don’t mind repeating yet again that Peer writes very well. When Peer wants to elaborate how school students and teenagers idolised militants, he says:

‘Militants wore Kamachi shoes and boys wanted Kamachi shoes. Militants replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets and boys replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets.'

After about sixty pages on militancy in Kashmir, Peer starts telling us of how he moved to Delhi, studied at the Aligarh Muslim University and later Delhi University and then found employment as a journalist. After the shift to Delhi, I started to understand Peer a lot better. Suddenly, he became someone like me, someone I could understand, even relate to, in certain respects.

The attack on the Indian Parliament made life difficult for Peer on account of his Kashmiri origin. Unable to find a Landlord who would agree to have a Kashmiri Muslim tenant, Peer considered leaving Delhi, until a kindly Kashmiri Pandit landlady gave him a roof over his head. Peer devotes a number of pages to the Syed Geelani story pursuant to the attack on the Indian parliament. Geelani was convicted by the trial court under POTA solely on the basis of a semi-coherent two and a half minute phone call made on the day after the attack. Later the Delhi High Court acquitted Geelani, quite rightly in my opinion.

Once Peer decided to tell Kashmir’s story, he went out of his way to meet victims of torture by Indian security forces, displaced Pandits and even Indian soldiers - to find out their point of view. He succeeds admirably with regard to torture victims and Pandits, but I thought his effort with Indian army men was not very impressive.

Curfewed Night is a slim volume, it does not exceed 250 pages, but is crammed with information about Kashmir. There are stories of funerals of militants, of militants switching sides and joining the Kukka Parray, of (failed) attempts by fundamentalists like Asiya Andrabi to impose a Saudi style of Islam in Kashmir and how much it takes to bribe minor bureaucrats and policemen so that relatives of innocent people killed in the violence can get some compensation. Peer also throws in bits of Kashmir’s history here and there and one gets to know of its Buddhist heritage and how it became a part of the Mughal Empire.

The only factual error I could find was when Peer tells his readers that ‘Kashmir was the largest of the approximately five hundred princely states under British sovereignty as of 1947’ Wiki tells me that it was Hyderabad. Kashmir came in at number two. In these matters, I trust Wiki more than Peer.

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – A Book Review

'Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips and says, "the job is not that hard you see, you just .....................'

The opening sentence of Mirza Waheed’s novel gave me the feeling that I was reading one of those Soviet era books set in the years following the October revolution and that ‘Kadian’ was possibly the abbreviation of an Armenian name. But no, Captain Kadian is employed by the Indian army, has been deployed in Kashmir for a three-year tour of duty and is responsible for most of the unnamed Protagonist’s nightmares. Though ‘Kadian’ is not a common Indian name, Wikipedia informs me that there exists a Jat clan called Kadian and we are told by the author that Captain Kadian is ‘young, handsome, north Indian. A Punjabi perhaps, a Jat probably.’ A humble Gujjar lad, the Protagonist is a collaborator who runs dirty errands for the cruel Captain Kadian, who the Protagonist hates and fears in equal measure.

I began to hate The Collaborator even before I crossed the first twenty pages. Set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, The Collaborator depicts the Indian army as extremely ruthless and cruel. There are mentions of large scale massacres and mass-rapes where all women in a village are raped. I do know that truth is the first casualty in any war and that there have been human rights abuses by Indian security forces, but I felt that the ‘allegations’ in The Collaborator are over the top. More importantly, it shows the Indian army as overwhelmingly strong, powerful and successful in fighting the insurgency, practically killing insurgents at will. No sooner do a number of Kashmiri boys trained in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cross over into India than the Indian army crunches into action and kills off most of those crossing over at a time of the army’s choosing. In fact the author goes to the extent of telling us, through Captain Kadian, that the Border Security force (BSF) is even tougher and nastier than the Indian army. There is one instance where the BSF’s intelligence unit, the G-Branch, is shown as giving the army a lesson in mountain warfare when some militants were holed out in a few caves and the army didn’t know how to clear them out!

However, as I progressed, I got to know the Protagonist better, and even his fears and dreams, I started appreciating The Collaborator better. The Protagonist, who remains unnamed till the end, does not appear to support Azadi in any serious manner. True, he is petrified of the Indian army and the black cat commandoes who carry out the occasional cordon and search operation and dawn raids. He admires the Kashmiri insurgents who are always shown as inferior in strength to the Indian army, whose soldiers are very shown to be very fit and strong. He is fearful of the ruthless and cruel Pathans, Afghans, Arabs and Chechens who have contempt for Kashmiris’ fighting abilities. He gets bugged when a militant group broke up video rental shops, torched cinemas, dragged frightened little girls out of school, checked their hands for nail polish and sent them home in knee-length burqas. We hear that Gujjars are not trusted by other Kashmiris, though some of them do become insurgents. Slowly we get to know that the Protagonist’s father, the village sarpanch, had fought the tribal raiders from Pakistan just after independence. The sarpanch is liked by the villagers who saved him from the insurgents’ wrath.

After all his friends cross the Loc and go to Pakistan and he is the only teenager left behind in the village, the Protagonist too tries to follow then over the LoC. As he proceeds towards his rendezvous with the guide who is to take him across, he thinks thus of Pakistan: ‘A place of which I had an obscure vision, an image, as being the country where we boys went to become militants and which supported us and welcomed us with open arms, and where they were all Muslims and were in fact sending their own sons to fight alongside us, but a place I did not really know. It was, now I understand, and still is, a khayal, just an idea.’ The Protagonist does not make it across since he is turned away by the guide, with a gentle reminder of his father’s past fighting tribal raiders and accepting government grants.

Captain Kadian uses the Protagonist for a dirty chore. The chore itself is unrealistic (I would rather not reveal what it is and play spoil sport) and descriptions of Captain Kadian’s operations are equally unrealistic, as explained earlier. The soldiers are there in strength in the Protagonist’s village since it is very close to the LoC. Around there, ‘the Indians kill just about everyone. Who will know and object, leave along protest, in this remote, cut-off wilderness? You know, sometimes I wonder – because for Kashmir, there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything – what if they have their own pasture of dead boys on the other side of the border? Their own stash of the infiltration residue? Young men who lost their lives while learning to walk the perilous path to freedom. Treachery is a word everyone should learn.’ One hears an old man tell the Protagonist of elite Makara soldiers who even eat people, old people mostly. The Protagonist seems to believe every word he hears. Later when the Protagonist’s friends leave him behind and cross the LoC, the village is at the receiving end of the army’s raids. Curfew is imposed for days at a stretch.

Kashmir has a new governor, a man very stern and ruthless, who is described as ‘the former leader of the demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of forced, compulsory vasectomies.....’ Though not mentioned by name, it is very obvious that the reference is to Jagmohan Malhotra who was the governor of Jammu & Kashmir from 1984 to 1989 and then for a few months in 1990. I found this implicit reference to Jagmohan a bit confusing since in the beginning of the novel, there is a reference to a dead militant’s watch which keeps ticking and shows the date as ‘16 April 1993’. The blurb on one of the side flaps of this book says ‘It is Kashmir in the early 1990s......’ From May 1990 to March 1993, Girish Chandra Saxena was the Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and not Jagmohan, but hey, this is fiction and one shouldn’t nitpick, right?

Towards the end of the novel, one hears of the insurgents torturing the guide and his family who they (wrongly) suspect of having helped the Indian army. By that time, the villagers have had enough of searches and curfews. They all pack up and leave, all except the Protagonist and his parents. Where do the villagers escape to, with all their cattle and other belongings? Do they cross the LoC in the middle of the winter? I was half-expecting them to, since they had nowhere else to go. But no, to escape from the Indian army, they flee to ‘India’! By this stage, I had started liking the Collaborator.

A lot of the information that is conveyed to the reader by the Protagonist is hearsay. A man is snatched from the Protagonist’s village by black-cat commandoes who turn up in LMG-mounted gypsies. The Protagonist tells us that from a distance, the commandoes looked like a ‘pack of animals’. After the snatched man is returned to the village, theories abound. One theory is that he was not harmed at all since he readily divulged all that he knew. Another theory is that ‘he was tortured day and night by Kashmiri Pandit police officers, bent on revenge after their tragic exodus from the valley...... Another theory was that ‘he was made to pee on an electric heater while they threw ice-cold water over him; they pierced a red-hot knitting needle through his...... Finally the Protagonist goes to visit the victim one afternoon and without being asked, the victim lifts up his kurta and shows the area above his groin which has small, etched black pits all over the pubic area.

Captain Kadian trusts the Protagonist sufficiently enough to give him a pistol. The Protagonist hates Captain Kadian enough to want to use it on Captain Kadian. Does the Protagonist summon enough courage to do so? Do please read this extremely interesting book, written in exquisite prose, to find out. Exaggerations notwithstanding, it is a very good read.

The Author of The Collaborator Mirza Waheed spent his childhood in Srinagar, read English Literature at the University of Delhi and later worked as a journalist in Delhi for four years. Since 2001, he has been living in London where he works for the BBC's Urdu Service as an editor.

Book Review: A Journey by Tony Blair

The Journey

It was meant to be “The Journey”, but a last minute editorial change made it “A Journey”. We’ll never know the reason why. Most probably, it was a case of eleventh-hour nerves and a desire to avoid the charge of being pompous. A Journey is a political memoir but Blair does dwell on various aspects of his personal life very often, telling us how became reliant on alcohol at one point. However, many chunks from Blair’s personal life are carefully avoided, such as his recent conversion to Catholicism, though towards the end of the book, Blair says that he has always been more interested in religion than in politics.

What Makes A Politician?

Politics is not for the faint hearted. What is it that makes a man or a woman pursue capricious voters (who are usually interested only in their personal welfare) and make a career out of it? A successful politician has to be someone who enjoys being in the limelight, is willing to be subjected to scrutiny and is good at communicating with the public. A good politician is someone who wants to make a difference. Blair is a successful politician and a good one. Blair wants to make a difference. More importantly, Blair, like any other politician wants the entire credit for what he does. Blair takes his journey very seriously. For him, it is The Journey. Blair believes that he is a man of destiny, a man meant to make a difference to millions of people not only in the UK but also in the rest of the world.

The Ends Justify The Means

In his 700-odd page tome, Blair devotes a fair amount of space to explain how the son of a self-made barrister and Tory politician became interested in politics and joined Labour. Blair is not in politics for power alone. Yes, he is interested in power. The detailed descriptions of his tug of war with Gordon Brown make that amply clear (see the last paragraph). But Blair also believes that he is the best man for the job. When Blair indulges in politicking, he is doing it not just for himself, but for the good of everyone – no sarcasm intended here.

Book Layout

Though this book traces Blair’s political life from his childhood till the time he quit as Prime Minister, it is written thematically, rather than chronologically. For example, there are chapters devoted to the Iraq War, Princess Diana and to the intervention in Kosovo. I should confess that my main motive for reading A Journey was to understand Blair’s rationale for the invasion of Saddam’s Iraq.

Iraq War

Blair makes a special mention of the fact that in February 2003, over a million Britons marched in London against the Iraq war. The million-man march is mentioned more than once. Does this faze Blair? No. To quote Blair, “there had never been a larger demonstration, reminding me of my isolation and the responsibility of the decision I was about to take”. Blair takes responsibility for the decision he took. Does he regret his decision? Would he have done differently with the benefit of hindsight? The answer to both questions is a hesitant No. Blair says that his objective in talking about Iraq is not to persuade his readers of the rightness of the cause, but to merely persuade that such a cause can be made out and that his decision may have been right. Blair takes a great deal of pain to delve into Saddam’s human rights record and the fact that Iraq had a programme for production of chemical weapons. True, they did seriously believe that Iraq still had them – why else would Saddam obstruct UN inspections? However, if Saddam had not been removed from power, Blair believes that Iraq would have once again reverted to its old game and recommenced production of weapons of mass destruction. Many Iraqi children died as a result of malnourishment and lack of medicines during the era of UN sanctions. Whose fault was it? Saddam’s of course, for choosing to not buy food and medicines and wanting to show the world that UN Sanctions were causing deaths. I agree with this bit of Blair’s assessment and analysis, but on the whole, Blair leaves so many questions unanswered. Weren’t their other regimes which had a worse human rights record than Saddam’s Iraq? What about North Korea? Iran anyone?

Blair says that so many people told him that the Shia Iranians would never forge an alliance with Sunni groups in the middle-east. But they did, for short-term tactical reasons. In a way, he makes it clear that the USA and UK could have done better with their predictions for the post invasion scenario. They should have expected the long-oppressed Shia majority to reassert itself and possibly align with Iran. They should have expected Iran to intervene in Iraq so as to build a sphere of influence for itself in Iraq. They should have expected the Al Qaeda to enter Iraq.

Towards the end, Blair gives a clue to the main drivers behind the Iraqi invasion. He says, “the region needed a fundamental change. And this change was to be of a different character. In the 1980s we had armed Saddam as we had the mujahideen in Afghanistan, so as to thwart Iran in the one case and the Soviet Union in the other. It was a tactical move, but a strategic mistake, This time we would bring democracy and freedom. We would hand power to the people. We would help them build a better future. We would bring, not a different set of masters, but the chance to be the masters, as our people are of us. And hadn’t we shown that such idealism was indeed achievable? In Afghanistan they were preparing for their first election, and the Taliban at that time was seemingly banished. In my first term we had toppled Milosevic and changed the face of the Balkans. In Sierra Leone, we had saved and then secured democracy after the ravages of the diamond wars. We had the military might of America, not to say that of Britain and others. There was no way that Saddam could resist….”

In other words, Iraq was do-able. The belief in the existence of weapons of mass destruction created the grounds to do it. In any event, Iran or North Korea or Cuba were not do-able.

UK-USA Special Relationship

Blair takes the special relationship with the US for granted. In any event, he does not take up much space in justifying it. Instead, he says that the British like their leaders to stand tall internationally. Do they? I am not too sure. Blair says “Brits would want to know that in Toulouse people would recognise me. Our leaders should stand out, and if not cut a dash, at least make an impact. The problem is, as time has gone on and the world has changed, and Britain’s relative size and weight have shifted, it becomes harder to do so. Not less desirable, just harder.” One is left with no doubt that Blair wanted to stand tall internationally. “Those who thought that our closeness to America was a problem in the rest of the world, could not have been further from the mark. On the contrary, it gave us immediate purchase. There was no greater nonsense that that our alliance with the US lost us standing in the world. The opposite is the case.” Blair cites the example of Harold Wilson who did not support the US on Vietnam and still lost the 1970 general election.

First Names Please

Blair ranks George Bush very high not only in terms of integrity, but also intelligence. Making a convincing case, Blair says only a very intelligent person could have ended up as the President of the United States of America. Blair refers to George Bush as ‘George’ throughout the book. However, Bill Clinton, who Blair is says he was just as close to and who is ‘progressive’ (while George Bush is admittedly ‘conservative’) is referred to as ‘Bill Clinton’ or ‘President Clinton’ throughout, except when Blair talks of the Monica Lewinsky incident and in a very few others instances. I wonder why. Blair screws up his courage and actually refers to Vladimir Putin as 'Vladimir' a few times. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall and listened to a real conversation between Blair and Putin. ‘Vladimir,..’ Blair begins and holds out his hand with a warm and open smile. ‘Anthony…,’ Putin responds and clasps Blair’s hand, and they start talking earnestly. Was it ever like that, I wonder?

Hilary Clinton

There are very few references to Hilary Clinton, too few I thought, though Hilary assumed office more than a year after Blair resigned as Prime Minister. Blair mentions Hilary’s visit to the UK as the US representative at the time of Princess Diana’s death. And then Blair tells us how Hilary stood by Bill Clinton when the Monica Lewinsky incident broke. Does Blair think Bill and Hilary remain married for political convenience? Do read this book to find out.

Barack Obama

Obama too does not occupy much space in Blair’s journey. Yes, Blair admires Obama’s communication skills and election campaign, but does he ideologically agree with this fellow progressive? For example, Blair praises Obama’s Cairo speech. “The speech was carefully calibrated. The hand of friendship would be offered, even to Syria and Iran. It was in part an apology, and taken as such. The implicit message was: We have been disrespectful and arrogant; we will now be, if not humble, deeply respectful. But join us, if you will.” “The trouble is: respectful of what, exactly? Respectful of the religion of Islam, President Obama would say, and that is obviously right; but that should not mean respectful of much of the underlying narrative, which many within Islam articulate in its politics today.” Mind you, on this issue, I am more with Blair than with Obama as I have explained in one of my earlier posts.

Nicolas Sarkozy

Sarkozy (sometimes Nicolas Sarkozy, sometimes just Nicolas and sometimes just Sarkozy) on the other hand is spoken of with warm admiration. “He was fascinating company – engaging, energetic and with that captivating French bravado around women, life and laughter that I loved. I liked too the fact that he was a ‘my way or no way’ person. He had the spirit certainly to demand change, and to get it or go. And I was very sure that was the only way to get the necessary reforms fast. But, as ever, it is one thing to propose in theory; another to execute in practice. In that first flush of limitless possibility which characterises the new incumbent, I saw something of my own feeling ten years before. ‘It will get tougher,’ I warned him.”

China and…. India

India finds a few mentions, usually in the same breath as China – “possibly we have not yet internalised the true significance of China’s rise (or indeed that of India)”; ”…and will not India and China, each with three times as many citizens as the whole of the EU put together, once their economies have developed sufficiently, as they will do, reconfigure entirely the geopolitics of the world and in our lifetime?”

Israel and Palestine

With regard to Israel and Palestine, Blair says he understands the Palestinian position and finds Israel unreasonable in some respects, but on the whole, he feels that the Palestinians and their supporters are not trying hard enough to find a solution. I fully agree with Blair. During the Israel/Lebanon war of 2006, Blair refused to condemn Israel, though Israel’s actions caused a lot more damage to the Lebanese than Israel suffered on account of Hezbollah’s rockets. “Hezbollah were and are an urban guerrilla movement. They target civilians deliberately. Their weapons are poorer, so they kill relatively few. They assume the posture of the plucky underdogs. Israel is a government with a well-armed and well-trained army and air force. They do not target civilians. But their only weapon, in a civilian setting, where the guerrilla movement is located, is deterrence. Therefore, they use their force to try to deter further attacks. Inevitably, large numbers of civilians are killed. They quickly assume the mantle of oppressors.” I fully agree with Blair’s position and his analysis. I had taken a similar view with respect to Israel’s invasion and bombing of the Gaza strip in 2009.

Pakistan and Kashmir

Kashmir is mentioned a few times in the same breath as other hotspots such as Sri Lanka and Kosovo. Blair tells us of a conversation with Musharraf regarding the linkage between Pakistani nationalism and Islam (General Zia’s doing) which is rather interesting. “The connection between the two, Musharraf explained, had furthered radicalism in the country, heightened the issue of Kashmir and made reconciliation with India harder. ‘Surely’, I said, ‘economic development is the key challenge for Pakistan.’ Of course,’ he said, ‘but the reality is today Pakistani politics is about nuclear weapons and Kashmir.’ What can we do to help?’ I asked, expecting an answer to do with aid or India. ‘Do Palestine,’ he immediately shot back. ‘That would help.”

Gordon Brown

The tussle with Gordon Brown is dealt with at length, the initial friendship, the tussle to be leader of the Labour party as it came close to power in the mid-nineties, the unspoken promise to step down after two terms (was it ever made?), the friendship (almost like a married couple), the quarrels, Brown’s attempt to bully Blair into stepping down….. let me not say anymore. Blair writes very well, in limpid and functional prose which is a pleasure to read. Do read about Blair’s Journey and find out for yourself.