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Bharat Bhushan on the peculiar dynastic politics of India and Pakistan

 Asif Ali Zardari says that he wants to be Pakistan’s “Sonia” if the Pakistan Peoples’ Party is voted to power in the coming elections. He told the Sunday Times in an interview: “If our party wins in February’s elections, I will not take a cabinet post but will act like Sonia Gandhi, as an advisory figure without a seat in Parliament.”
Zardari and Sonia Gandhi are in effect “outsiders” who do not carry the family charisma. Zardari’s desire to not assume direct power is comparable to the choice that Sonia Gandhi made in 1990. She had waited for eight years before she took control of the Congress Party and a full nine years after her husband’s assassination before she contested a parliamentary election.

Zardari wants to recast himself in the role of an elder statesman because like Sonia he married into a political family and does not carry the dynastic charisma. On top of that, his image is of “Mr. Ten Percent” — his misuse of government property and machinery during his wife’s prime ministership is legendary. It will take a long time for him to redeem himself.
He is in no position, therefore, to take over the leadership of the PPP when the party is in election mode. Making a virtue out of necessity, therefore, he has projected the acceptable face of Makhdoom Amin Fahim as the party’s prime ministerial candidate.

After Rajiv’s assassination, Sonia Gandhi also could not have gone headlong into politics. Her children were young and in no position to take over the Congress Party. She, therefore, chose the mild-mannered P V Narasimha Rao as Rajiv’s successor dismissing the claims of two other contenders — Sharad Pawar and Arjun Singh.
At that point Sonia had no choice but to choose an advisory role for herself. That is the only role that Zardari can hope to emulate. However, that role did not work very well for the Congress or for Sonia Gandhi. It is unlikely to work for Zardari either.
Sonia’s backroom role worked very well till mid-1993 with Prime Minister Rao running to her for every major decision. However, after defeating a no-confidence vote against his government in July 1993 he came into his own and decided to cut the apron strings.
This eventually led to a split in the Congress with loyalists forming the Tiwari Congress in 1995. In September that year, Sitaram Kesri was appointed Congress president by Rao. However, in less than two months the wily Kesri shifted allegiance to Sonia Gandhi — paving the way for the loyalists to return to the fold.
The Sonia-Rao tensions showed that the advisory role that Zardari seeks to emulate in fact is unworkable. The chair also makes the man. The next time around the Congress was in a position to participate in a government was in 2004. Once again for a variety of reasons never made public Sonia Gandhi did not want to lead from the front. At the same time, however, she did not want to repeat the mistake she had made 14 years earlier.

Another experiment, therefore, was attempted — that of appointing a CEO and designating him Prime Minister. By choosing a loyalist “outsider” who would find it difficult to win support at the hustings, it was virtually ensured that his freedom to act and sources of legitimacy would always be drastically limited. The model has worked pretty well with no challenge possible to the family’s supremacy.
Such convoluted leadership succession has become necessary in India because most political parties have become extensions of single individuals or families and, therefore, completely de-institutionalised. The only exceptions are the communist parties and the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party. This is also the case in Pakistan. There too only the avowedly Islamic parties are free of the stranglehold of families.
It is this reality which poses peculiar problems of leadership succession.
In the Indian case, not only the Congress but the Samajwadi Party, the Akali Dal, the DMK, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Telugu Desam, the Biju Janata Dal, the Shiv Sena, the AIADMK, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) and the parties of the Haryana patriarchs, Devi Lal and Bhajan Lal, also do not have any organisational structure to speak of. These are family run election machines with three primary characteristics.
One, the family acquires enormous public equity because of association with certain populist slogans or programmes of social transformation. These could be associated with promises to remove poverty, providing equitable development, protecting regional pride, protecting the interests of farmers, minorities or specific castes. An individual challenger cannot hope to enter politics with similar initial equity.
Two, these parties do not have institutionalised democratic structures which would allow challenges to be mounted and alternative leadership to come up. Yet they do have a skeletal structure put together with the sole aim of protecting the public equity of the family. Their local units are like franchise operations. The sole competitive political activity in these parties is for becoming a franchisee — hence the emphasis on loyalty and sycophancy. The franchisees also replicate the dynastic structure in their local domain.
Three, these parties exercise centralised control over collection and disbursal of funds. Of the entry level barriers to active participation in democratic politics in South Asia the biggest hurdle is of funding elections. This the family run parties control effectively.
They build up large war chests by being the sole effective facilitator between the governments they run off and on and those who seek service or concessions from the State. The largesse the State can distribute in our societies is huge and therefore the critical importance of the facilitators.
The peculiar nature of the family-run parties, therefore, requires that they prevent the emergence of any challenger. Challengers eat into the pie and threaten the political future of the family.
Should the leading family member be removed from the scene, some other family member is drafted to fill the gap. Thus in the extreme, a son, a daughter, a wife or a consort becomes the next leader in the case of emergency succession forced by assassinations and deaths or in the case of minor exigencies another family member becomes a proxy leader.

The examples of direct dynastic succession are many but consider how proxy leadership also stays within the family. Rabri Devi, for example, became the proxy chief minister when Lalu Prasad was removed on corruption charges; when Kamal Nath could not contest Chhindwara because his name figured in the “hawala” case, his wife stood in for him, and when Ajit Jogi met with an accident in the middle of an election campaign, his wife took charge of the election — there are examples galore of this phenomenon.
The problem that martyrdom or emergency succession poses is one of transferring the dynastic charisma to the next leader. The PPP’s problem is that the obvious inheritor of that dynastic charisma is Bilawal Bhutto Zardari; hence, the arrangement that the elder Zardari has worked out for himself. His desire to emulate Sonia Gandhi is not to seek legitimacy but a reflection on the structure of political parties in the subcontinent and the nature of succession in them.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who was catapulted into the history books when he became the first man to climb Everest, died last night at the age of 88.

Sir Edmund, who conquered the world’s highest mountain in 1953, had been suffering health problems since April after suffering a fall whilst in Nepal. While the New Zealander considered himself merely an average beekeeper, he was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers.

His feats were not confined to Everest and in later years he led expeditions to the South Pole and to the source of the Yangtze River. He also committed himself to humanitarian work among the Sherpas through his Himalayan Trust and was made an honorary Nepalese citizen in 2003.

Knighted in 1953, shortly after the British-led Everest expedition arrived back in London, Sir Edmund was admired for his humility and his unaffected manner almost as much as his mountaineering.

After returning from the summit, which was announced inThe Times on the morning of the coronation of Elizabeth II, the climber famously greeted a fellow expedition member with the phrase: “Well, George, we’ve knocked the bastard off.”

The explorer, who preferred to be called just “Ed”, was humble to the point that he only admitted to being the first man atop Everest long after the death of his climbing Sherpa companion, Tenzing Norgay, in 1986.

Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, described his passing as a profound loss. She said: “Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity.”

Greg Gregory, the photographer who accompanied Sir Edmund on the Everest expedition, described him as a “top character”. Speaking from Australia, Mr Gregory, 90, said: “He was a member of the team like everybody else and nobody knew until quite late on, when John Hunt, who was the leader of the summit expedition, decided who was going up there, that he would be the first.”

His achievement thrilled the world, as Everest had previously defied every attempt at conquest for more than 30 years. Sir Edmund later recalled: “We didn’t know if it was humanly possible to reach the top. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren’t at all sure whether we wouldn’t drop dead or something of that nature.”

As he was a New Zealander and therefore a citizen of the Commonwealth, British subjects celebrated his achievement as their own. His ascent was announced on the morning of the Queen’s coronation, with The Times trumpeting that Everest had been conquered and “all is well”.

Remarkably though, the climb went unrecorded in picture form. While Sir Edmund took the famous photo of his sherpa companion posing with his ice axe, he refused Norgay’s offer to take one of him. Norgay had never used a camera before “and the summit of Everest was hardly the place to show him how”, Hillary later said.

Sir Edmund had joined a trip led by the British climber Sir John Hunt up the southwest ridge. By the latter stages, all but two climbers were defeated by exhaustion, and only Sir Edmund and Norgay were able to continue to the summit on May 29.

He described the last moments before that triumph. “I looked upwards to see a narrow snow ridge running up to a snowy summit. A few more whacks of the ice axe in the firm snow, and we stood on the top.”

His taste for mountaineering began at 16, when he went on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu on New Zealand’s North Island. It was there that he saw snow for the first time. By the Second World War, Sir Edmund, who served in the New Zealand Air Force for two years as a navigator, had become seriously involved in climbing. Sir Edmund had climbed 11 peaks of over 20,000 ft (6,100m) before tackling Everest. Until he successfully completed his ascent, Sir Edmund had lived as a beekeeper in Auckland but the unprecedented feat of scaling the world’s highest mountain brought him a fame he could hardly have imagined. Later, he led expeditions to remote corners of the Earth. In 1958 he participated in the first mechanised expedition to the Antarctic.

His autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, was published in 1975, and in 1979 he published From the Ocean to the Sky, an account of his 1977 expedition on the Ganges. Sir Edmund’s life was darkened by the loss of his wife and a daughter in a plane crash in 1975. There was a son and another daughter from this marriage. He married again in 1989.

When Peter Hillary reached the summit of Everest in 1990, he and Sir Edmund were the first father and son duo to achieve the feat.

Sir Edmund devoted his energy to environmental causes and to humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Nepalese people. He made many other trips to Everest during his lifetime but never attempted to scale the mountain again. Returning in 2003, the 50th anniversary of his climb, he was appalled at the way Everest had become a virtual tourist attraction. He called for Everest to be “closed” for a while, to give it a rest.

Pen Hadow, the British adventurer and environmentalist, said Sir Edmund’s death “closes one of the great chapters of planetary exploration”.

On the eve of the launch of the Nano, Ratan Tata looks back on the four-year journey that led up to the most eagerly awaited launch in the history of India’s automobile industry.

Q: Are you feeling more apprehensive now than you felt at the launch of the Indica?

A: Not really. At that time, we did not know if the market, which knew us as a truck manufacturer, would accept us as a carmaker. We took somewhat widely publicised goals at that time. So at that time we were more nervous than we are today.

Q: What sparked off the idea?

A: In this particular case, you could not help but notice there were three-four family members on a scooter with a kid standing in the front, the guy driving and his wife sitting side saddle holding a little kid. When you are driving a car, you say to yourself to be careful, you know they may slip and fall. Add to that slippery roads and night time riding and you have a reasonably dangerous form of transport. That does not mean scooters should not exist—it’s an evolution of bicycles and it’s the path to prosperity. But, scooters as family transport seemed dangerous. I asked myself if we could put two wheels at the back to give the scooter greater stability. Would it make it safe for the occupants if you put a bar over the top? Last year, I was at Bertoni and to my surprise I found that BMW had produced a scooter with the same safety bars that I had thought about with rubber bumpers on the side and a seat which had a seat belt. Apparently it was not successful and BMW withdrew it.

I set about thinking if we could make a four wheel vehicle from scooter parts. At an ACMA (Automotive Component Manufacturers Association) meeting I even suggested an Asian people’s car—a really low-cost car that Malaysia, Indonesia and India could produce jointly. I got no response. The only person who showed encouragement was [Hero group's] Brij Mohan Munjal, but we never really took it further. We found later that using scooter parts is a real limitation.

So we changed tack. We decided to look at everything from scratch. I thought that we could have a car made from engineering plastics that would not be welded but use adhesives. But some of these concepts did not lend themselves to costs or volume manufacturing. So we moved on to a more conventional kind of car.

That led us to configure a small car which would be a full-fledged car. We started again in an evolutionary way. It started with a concept of being a four-wheeled rural car. Do we have roll up plastic curtains instead of windows? Do we have openings like autorickshaws have instead of doors, but have a safety bar? We had many such early concepts and we finally decided that the market did not want a half car. If we wanted to build a people’s car it should be a car and not something that people would say, ‘That is a scooter with four wheels or an autorickshaw on four wheels’. And so we decided to do a car and really pare the cost.

Q: What were the most challenging moments?

A: Perhaps the bigger, more visible issue is that we needed to benchmark ourselves against something. And we took the Maruti 800 as the benchmark in terms of acceleration—driveability should at least be equal to Maruti and in some areas it should exceed the Maruti. So we had to increase the size of the engine to give us the kind of performance we have now achieved.

The rest were issues relating to costs. Where do you put the fuel tank? How close is the filler neck to the fuel tank? How much tubing to the fuel tank? Those kind of issues.

Q: Any examples of the breakthrough you talked about?

A: We haven’t changed. It is a four-door car, five seat, rear engine and in many ways conventionally constructed. What has been done is in things like the door lock —it is the same lock on all four doors, they are not left hand and right hand door locks. When you see the car what will strike you is that we have packaged it really tightly. Most of the benefit we got on cost is because we used less steel. We just made the car smaller outside, yet big inside.

Q: Will this car change the group?

A: That’s not what it was conceived for. The kind of thing you would do to follow on from this would be different fuels—can we produce an electric version of the car? Can we produce a small hybrid version and really make this car the platform for a new set of personal transport needs? One thing we have established is that we have created an affordable personal transport that will take four or five people under all weather conditions, running on regular fuel and not on some exotic stuff.

Q: There has been criticism that this car will choke congested roads. Is that an elitist view?

A: We produce about 7 million two-wheelers a year. Today we must have 60-70 million two-and three-wheelers in the country. Last year we produced about 1.4 million cars and at some point we will exceed two million. Well, nobody says anything about that. It is only this car that is being targeted. You may say, ‘Well, the two-wheeler takes less space.’ Our car pollutes, if not less, then certainly not more than a two wheeler—not per passenger but as a vehicle. Our engine conforms to Euro IV and Bharat III—all two wheelers are Bharat II today. So, yes you may take a view that this small car will take less space than a large car. It will carry four people instead of the normal two on a scooter and therefore, instead of two scooters, you will have one car on the road.

That criticism also assumes that the small car will not replace a bigger car. You produce two million cars and you produce half a million small cars, so you produce 2.5 million cars. That’s not how it is going to work. We will cannibalise some of the existing low-end cars and two-wheelers, and even some of our own cars. The Indica too is going to feel the effects. So it will not be that it will be on top of everything and there won’t be a square inch of space on the road.

Second, we are looking at congestion in the top major cities. Have we got affordable family transport in the two tier and three tier cities? Is it their lot not to have a vehicle? The huge potential lies when India gets connected in the rural areas.

Q: Who are your potential customers?

A: Rather than look at it geographically, look at who might be the buyer of the small car. If you look in the US or Europe, in some garages that have a Bentley or two, or a high-end Mercedes, you may also find a Smart (a subcompact car from Mercedes). Because that person thinks that it is a fun extra car to have. Then you may have a person who needs utilitarian transport and is not looking for a lot of creature comforts. Then you look at someone who is thinking of owning or owns an existing small car—to him this makes sense because it is more fuel efficient and costs less. On the other side, you have someone who aspires for a car. And this can come from anywhere in the country.

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Ratan Tata unveiled his company’s Rs one lakh ($2,500) car – the cheapest four-door car in the world – in New Delhi, India on Thursday, January 10. The Tata Group has also made a bid to take-over Jaguar.

Nima Wangdi writes about a favourite Bhutanese pastime

As the mercury dips below zero, bringing to a close the agriculture and tourist season in the central district of Bumthang, nuts start to crack.

With nothing much to do, Bumthaps spent their winter days sitting outside their houses and shops soaking up the sun while leisurely cracking walnuts and scooping out their oily insides.

Cracking walnuts is a family affair and fathers take the lead role. Nuts are prised open, using a knife, and the pieces passed to the women and children, who carry needles to pierce the inside and pop it into their mouths and to dig out the bits stuck in the corners of the shell.

Sometimes, children break the walnuts with stones and, more often than not, end up smashing a delicate finger in the process.

According to Lemo, 58, from Kurje, there are two types of walnuts, locally known as Khachi and Kongda. “Khachi has a hard shell and can be cracked only with a knife or a stone, but the Kongda can be cracked open by the teeth,” said Lemo. “However, the Khachi is superior in taste and flavour.”

Lemo said that sometimes, when she consumes a lot of walnuts, more than a dozen, it gives her a headache and irritates the throat.

Bumthaps also grind the inside of the nut and use it to prepare suja (butter tea). Most of the dzongkhag’s supply of walnuts, one of the oldest fruit trees known to man, come from Chokhortoe.

Karma Namgay, 66, from Chokhor, said that walnut shells are as good as hard wood and when burnt in the bukhari (wood-fed heater) keeps the fire alive for a longer time and gives more heat.

The soft cover on the outer shell is also used as a dye to give a black colour to fibre. The walnuts are harvested in autumn and dried before they hit the local market. In Bumthang town, for Nu 5 you get two pieces of the Kongda walnut or three pieces of the Khachi variety.

“The thing about eating walnuts is that once you’ve had one, you feel like having more and more and it really affects your housework,” said an old woman from Saram in Chokhortoe. “I used to eat walnuts as a young girl and I still do today.”

 

Benazir Bhutto’s death is just the latest evidence of the disastrous legacy of western involvement in the country’s politics writes Pankaj Mishra

Last week the portrait of Benazir Bhutto as the last great hope for democracy in Pakistan had barely received its finishing touches in the world media when it was muddied by accusations that the former prime minister had sponsored jihadists in Afghanistan and India-held Kashmir.

Neither assertion is without a measure of truth. Yet both obscure the major events that have rendered Pakistan unstable, even ungovernable, for at least two generations: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979; the American decision to turn Pakistan into the frontline state for a global anti-Soviet jihad; and, more recently, the Bush administration’s corralling of Pakistan into the so-called war on terror.

Like many Asian countries, Pakistan stumbled from primeval chaos into postcolonial life, with an army as its strongest institution – which grew even more formidable after enlisting on the US side in the cold war. Six decades later, it is possible to see how in a less exacting climate Pakistan could have moved durably to civilian rule, as happened in Taiwan and Indonesia, two other pro-American dictatorships frozen by the cold war.

Such, however, was the scale and intensity of the CIA’s programme to arm the Afghan mujahideen that it couldn’t but retard political processes in Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq, who faced disgrace domestically and internationally after his execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, abruptly became a prestigious ally in Washington and London. Emboldened by American patronage, Zia brutally suppressed all opposition, which included some of the country’s greatest writers and artists.

Pakistan’s military strategists had long plotted to install a friendly regime in Afghanistan, which shares a fiercely autonomous and traditionally volatile Pashtun population with Pakistan. The CIA’s generosity gave them the perfect opportunity to impose their will in Kabul through proxies like the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who, like many Islamists feeding off US largesse, spent more time building private armies and bullying women than fighting the Soviets. Military officers seeking revenge for their humiliation by India in the war over Bangladesh in 1971 redirected US resources more radically to anti-India insurgencies in Punjab and Kashmir.

Pursuing their separate agenda, western cold war adventurers and their local allies deeply damaged Pakistan’s frail society. Three million Afghan, mostly Pashtun, refugees poured into Pakistan, along with cheap guns and drugs. Furthermore, political Islam – until then a marginal force in Pakistani politics – acquired buoyancy, and a radical edge, from the anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan. Pakistan knew a spell of civilian rule after Zia’s death in 1988. But elected leaders such as Benazir Bhutto could hardly supervise, let alone restrict, the cherished ventures of the all-powerful military intelligence elite, such as the backing of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban in Afghanistan’s destructive civil war, and the training of extremists for jihad in Kashmir.

The US cancelled its aid programme to Pakistan before the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan in 1989; it went on to impose sanctions on Pakistan for its nuclear programme. Visiting Pakistan in early 2001, I was struck by the anger Pakistanis of all classes expressed toward the US. Far from being a generalised Islamist hatred of American women wearing miniskirts, anti-US sentiment was rooted in particular grievances. Diplomats and ex-generals raged against US selfishness in leaving Pakistan to sort out the post-Soviet mess in Afghanistan; journalists and NGO workers described in anguished tones how the CIA-sponsored jihad strangled Pakistan’s democracy, endowing the military intelligence establishment with a sinister extra-constitutional authority.

In late 2001, George Bush’s resolve to eliminate al-Qaida and the Taliban with the help of the very same establishment inaugurated another cycle in which Pakistan’s long-delayed tryst with civilian rule would be again postponed by US priorities in neighbouring Afghanistan.

It is clearer now that Pervez Musharraf’s promises to the US could only be empty, no matter how sincerely he believed in them. Military and intelligence officers who had staked their careers on making reliable Pashtun friends were unlikely to launch more than a few token assaults on the Pak-Afghan borderlands, which even the British Indian Army couldn’t subdue.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration has persisted for almost seven years in the hope that the Pakistani military could be bullied or bribed into scoring successes in the global war on terror.

Many generals and spies probably couldn’t believe their luck as they received billions of US dollars for yet another phoney war. Paranoid western visions of crazy Islamists getting hold of Pakistani nukes ensured a steady flow of cash, which, as the New York Times recently revealed, the military mostly spent on objectives not remotely resembling those drawn up in Washington.

In any case, the Taliban and their sympathisers can’t be “eliminated”. The web of strategic tribal and ethnic alliances has represented the strongest Pashtun claims in recent decades as traditional rulers of Afghanistan’s ethnic mosaic. Even today, as the writer Rory Stewart has pointed out, “many Pashtun clearly prefer the Taliban to foreign troops”. In actuality, the Taliban can only be contained. But even that may remain a fantasy if foreign occupation continues to radicalise Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Musharraf has himself only just escaped assassination. Even though he grudgingly accepted Washington’s choice, Bhutto, as a civilian facade for military rule, he can’t be unaware that Pakistan’s stability depends on successful deal-making in the Pashtun heartland rather than in the White House. This lesson is not entirely lost on western policymakers. EU diplomats expelled from southern Afghanistan a day before Bhutto’s assassination were trying to reach out to the Taliban. But such peacemakers face their most influential adversaries among those who think that errant natives respond best to a bit of stick. Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, the Tory MP Michael Gove warned the west not to betray any “sign of weakness” to the Taliban.

Doubtless the Churchill wannabes that have proliferated since 9/11 would fight on their laptops to the last drop of Afghan and Pakistani blood. Intoxicated by their own cliches, they remain blind to how their warmongering in the cause of democracy in Afghanistan and Pakistan has boosted the most militaristic elements there, ruining even the basic hope of a violence-free life, not to mention the grand ambition of democracy.

The CIA’s anti-Soviet jihad not only ensured the dominance of the military intelligence establishment over elected government in Pakistan; it also spawned a new radical force, which now menaces military as well as civilian authority in Pakistan. We may praise or blame Benazir Bhutto for what she did or did not do, but as long as Pakistan remains hostage to failed western policies those aspiring to lead it can achieve little apart from personal power – along with a high risk of martyrdom.

· Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond

Xinhua 

Chicago-based artist Tu Zhiwei uses his art to depict key moments in China’s history

In an epic scene from hell, a vast fiery pit swallows piles of precious ancient bamboo books. Scholars roar and wail in despair, helpless as China’s first emperor orders the burning of “dangerous ideas.” Confucian scholars are buried alive, a sacrifice to unity.

A colossal canvas “Heads, Books, Pit” by Tu Zhiwei, depicts the high price of stability in the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) after the tumult of the Warring States Period (476-221 BC).

That third century BC “cleansing” in all its horror is rendered on a canvas stretching eight meters in length and two meters in width. It’s like a mural of an inferno.

Tu depicts the scene as though he had witnessed it himself. The oil painting is one of six huge works on exhibit at the Liu Haisu Art Museum, a major museum of contemporary art. The exhibition runs until January 16.

Tu, who lives in Chicago, is president of Oil Painters of America, a major association dedicated to the preservation of representational art. He is its first Asian president.

The canvas is part of his project to create 10 more colossal canvases on 10 epic topics from China’s history, in 10 years. “Heads, Books, Pit” was created over 18 years.

“Sounds incredible?” asks Tu. “Even today when I look back, I can hardly believe it myself.”

Born in 1951 in a poor village in Guangdong Province, Tu became passionately interested in art when he was very young. He learned painting on his own and was admitted to the oil painting department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. In 1987 Tu entered Drake University in the US state of Iowa.    

“As early as 1980 I started to touch the subject of Emperor Qin Shihuang’s burning books and burying alive Confucian scholars,” says Tu. “The tragic event even today is quite controversial, but it’s not my responsibility to judge this. I just want to try my best to mirror this historical event through my own imagination.”

During Emperor Qin’s reign, he brutally eliminated intellectuals across the land because he feared revolution.

Books, sources of ideas, were burned to ashes and often their writers buried alive, including Confucian scholars.

Their words were stifled, but Tu’s canvas gives them voice. He lets viewers “hear” the voices of struggle and anguish once again.

Reading extensively and visiting the Qin terracotta warriors in Xi’an, China’s first capital in Shaanxi Province, Tu began his epic work with small sketches. Then he enlarged it on canvas.

“It was very difficult to control the composition,” he says. “Painting a huge canvas is such a tough job, as you never end up reworking it.”

 Tu has a way of painting a colossal piece sanely – “otherwise you could sacrifice yourself on it.”

 ”Don’t paint too long in each session to keep some freshness, then put it aside, don’t even look at it for a while,” he says.

Due to its overwhelming size, Tu often had to run to his kitchen upstairs to get a complete view of his canvas downstairs in his large studio. Sometimes he had to shuttle between the kitchen and his studio for nearly every key brush stroke. “That’s why I have a sturdy body,” he jokes.

This is Tu’s first Shanghai exhibition and it features other colossal works, some turbulent in theme, some peaceful.

In “Hands, Rafts, Yellow River,” men struggle on a wooden raft caught in the middle of the surging Yellow River, China’s mother river. Every tensing muscle of the desperate men is visible as they try to turn the gigantic rudder.    

“Feet, Troops and Horses, the Earth” recreates Emperor Qin’s heroic military forces, painted in fiery tones, overcoming obstacles and holding off barbarian raiders from the north.

Another canvas, “Dancers, Bells, Ancient Music,” was inspired by the ancient bells and woodwind instruments of 2,000-year-old musical tradition. Unlike other canvases, this one radiates harmony and peace, joy and prosperity in everyday life.

“In 10 years I plan to finish 10 large paintings of 10 major events in Chinese history,” says Tu. “So far I have only finished six.”

Other canvases will depict the construction of palaces and imperial mausoleums, Buddhist life in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) and the treasures of Dunhuang cave art.

“It might take me another 10 years,” he says. “But I won’t give up, though the job becomes tougher and tougher.”

Namita Bhandare on Nicolas Sarkozy, sex and politics 

THE MANDARINS at the Ministry of External Affairs – how on earth did they come to be called mandarins? – are reported to be in a flap over India’s official guest at the Republic Day function. It’s not French President Nicolas Sarkozy who’s causing the fuss as much as his new girlfriend, now apparently his fiancee, Carla Bruni. There’s a fair chance that Bruni could join Sarkozy later this month when he begins his four-day visit to India. This is apparently causing the ‘mandarins’ to lose sleep.

How do they treat her? At official banquets, where do they seat her? How do they fit her in at the Republic Day parade? What about their sleeping arrangements: one room or two with an adjoining door? And what sort of protocol does one lay out for the First Girlfriend? It’s to sort out these prickly issues that MEA officials are reported to have met their French counterparts in order to avoid a possible diplomatic faux pas in the very near future.

It says something about the times we live in that since his election last year, Sarkozy has made the news as much – if not more – for his personal life as his policies. Most people would be more familiar with his Euro Disney tryst (where the story of the romance broke) than with his negotiations with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez over Colombian guerrillas. Certainly, Sarkozy has gone out of his way to flaunt his new girlfriend, travelling with her in December to Egypt – a trip that got him more coverage than his surprise visit to Afghanistan the same month to meet Hamid Karzai and address French troops.

The tabloidisation of Sarkozy has all the elements of a public relations coup and only in France could the news of a mistress actually boost the President’s ratings. It adds to the mystique that the glamorous and rich Bruni’s previous boyfriends have reportedly included Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton. The tabloids and even the mainstream press have fallen for the bait hook, line and sinker Contrast this with the theatre that is the US elections – where the trappings of family are essential accessories to presidential candidates and families like the Clintons, with their tortured angst, put in photo ops for the sake of Hillary’s fast-fading candidacy.

Sex and politics always makes for a pretty heady cocktail, though not always with happy results. In another part of the world, Malaysian Health Minister Chua Soi Lek had to resign after being caught in fagrante delicto with a woman who was not his wife. Ironically, nobody seems to have questioned Chua Soi Lek’s performance as a minister, and while his wife has stood behind him, his party seems to have been less forgiving and there is a nagging question about who leaked the DVD – and why.

Indian media have been generally circumspect about the personal lives of Indian politicians. Girlfriends, mistresses and second wives are part of the baggage and nobody really bats an eyelid. Everybody famously knew about a senior statesman’s long-time woman companion and her family that he adopted but nobody wrote about it – nor did it detract from his standing in his otherwise conservative party And stories of the extraordinary relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten are only now beginning to surface, 60 years after Independence, and have done nothing to dent the reputation of India’s first Prime Minister.

Sometimes the odd story does break through. The famous incident a few years ago when a senior Congress leader from Uttaranchal went missing for a day only to resurface in a highway guesthouse caused some red faces but no lasting damage. The leader went on to becoming the governor of a state. It’s only when sex and politics results in crime – as in the Amarmani Tripathi case, where a love affair gone apparently wrong resulted in the murder of poetess Madhumati Shukla – that heads roll.

We’ve stuck by the old rules, give or take. Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s rumoured girlfriend, Aroosa Alam, a Pakistani journalist, does make for a spicy story but one that has less to do with moral outrage than scoring political brownie points: his opponents have been insinuating that she’s an ISI agent. And when the mainstream press raises the story, it’s usually as a nudge-nudge gossip item than a fullscale news report.

Is there a lesson to be learnt from India? I think so. Two issues come to mind. The first: are those in public life entitled to a private life, and where does one draw the line? I can see the merit in knowing, for instance, whether my elected representative is a wifebeater or a dowry-taker. Do I really need to know whether he has one mistress or four? Unless he’s bestowing them with public monies or misusing his office for their benefit, I think not.

The second: by focusing on the private, and frequently trivial, details of the lives of politicians, are we in danger of losing sight of the bigger picture? Sarkozy’s detractors, for instance, allege that the Bruni romance story was timed to break just as Sarkozy was being roasted at home for playing host to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and signing deals with him worth 10 billion euros. And there’s a real fear in India that Carla Bruni – should she decide to come visit – could turn a serious, official visit into a media circus.

I suspect that as the media become more and more competitive, with TV channels racing for ‘breaking news’, Sarkozy-style stories could become more commonplace – sometimes as plants by manipulative politicians to boost their own ratings, sometimes as devices to bring down political rivals, and at other times as game to boost ratings and push up readership.

But we’d do well to remember that while we have every right to ask our politicians to be honest, efficient and effective, what they do in their off-hours is entirely their business.

Harsha Bhogle on the India-Australia cricket controversy

And so, inevitably, the tour moves on. It had to. The world of cricket is too small for the best and the richest to eyeball each other for too long. It is not over yet but everybody has an opportunity to take a backward step, so underrated and so crucial in a standoff. Cricket is, effectively, an eight-country sport, a small family, and there is no alternative to living together. Like good arranged marriages, we will have to swallow the odd moment of discontent, take sides and draw comparisons, but a divorce is not an option.

There were no more than three issues in this hullabaloo. The umpiring set the tone; and really, there is little anyone can do about it other than to intensify the search for the best and have stringent reviews. By the end of the match they, Mark Benson in particular, looked rattled. He took the fielder’s word since there had been an agreement to that effect when, in hindsight, he could have followed his own instincts, given the volatility of the situation. And sadly, Steve Bucknor had to go. The moment comes for everyone, as it will for you and me.

The second issue was the spirit of the game, a much disguised entity whom no one really recognises. I suspect the Australians have been forced, for corporate reasons, to take the moral high ground. But their players are not equipped to follow it at all times. It is difficult, in the heat of battle, to remember a mission statement and pull-back. And so, I believe, they are confused and nowhere is the confusion more manifest than in the statements they think they should make; or maybe are trained to make. Player after player, including the short-tempered captain, said they did nothing that violated the spirit of the game and continued making claims of integrity. And some were forced to say that integrity means different things when batting and when fielding. So, it is alright to stand and wait for the umpire’s decision when you know you are out but you should still be trusted to speak the truth with catches. In fact, trust is becoming too much of a burden to carry, for it cannot be interpreted conveniently.

The old Australian system was easier for the players to follow. We do our job and the umpire does his, they said; and while it did not always look good, it was consistent. Now with many stakeholders in the game, they are having to posture, to say the right things, to seek the moral high ground. It was always going to be naive to expect a fielder’s word to be taken, for they do not have a tradition in that area. Even the mighty Steve Waugh claimed a bump ball in the West Indies and certainly it would be ridiculous to take Ponting’s word. Even Gilchrist, who walks, feels the need to appeal when a player is clearly not out. Now, everyone does that, the Indians did too, but the problem lies in claiming the moral high ground. Rarely has it been more slippery.

So too, it is felt that it is fine to be abusive, often on deeply personal issues, but not fine to be racist. Neither should be allowed but you cannot have a situation where it is okay to appear wounded on one count and be completely over the top on another. When the English left after the Ashes, some of them were in shock at the intensity of personal abuse. Sadly, there is now only one way out and that is to ban chatter completely. Cricketers might scoff at this suggestion but they have lost the right to live any other way. And with all the debate over the usage of the word ‘monkey’, the definition of what is offensive and what isn’t will become impossible to recognise. Anil Kumble thinks the word ‘bastard’ is offensive, and it is, but a group of lads in a bar might freely use it and wonder what the fuss is all about. What is acceptable in one culture may not be in another. So, I’m afraid, no chatter. And that might just be the best thing to happen to the game. A lot of great players didn’t need to use their lips and the game will lose nothing.

The third issue is the judgment of the match referee. And this is where the ICC have a major decision to take. It is generally felt that the referee’s job is a good retirement posting. You continue to meet old friends, fly the world and watch cricket and don’t really do anything. And sadly, cricketing stature has often been equated with being worldly-wise and intelligent. Most cricketers are good at hurling a ball and belting it. They may have many other skills, but to assume that they do is dangerous and, indeed, we often expect too much from our cricketers, expecting them to have a considered point of view on most matters. Indeed, few have exposure to other facets of life and certainly very few are equipped to handle a volatile, near-legal hearing. A lawyer can’t bat and a cricketer cannot interpret law unless they have been trained in both professions. And so, a confused Mike Procter ends up accepting one man’s word over another. Unless that is swiftly squashed, the game will be mired in petty squabbles over whose word to accept. So far only mothers have been able to figure that out.

Now Procter has no option but to hand Brad Hogg a three game ban, and at this rate there will be more three game bans than traffic violations. Cricket will become impossible to police, and we will all spend more time playing us and them rather than enjoying a beautiful sport.

Cricket has no option but to ban chatter completely and who knows, in doing so, it might become the hard and pleasant game that all of us seek it to be.