TEXT BY LORA TOMAS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RUDRA RAKSHIT

Opposite the entrance to Taleju Temple is a pile of rubble that seems to be held in place by a piece of green string. Oddly, the National Art Gallery is open. But not the Shiva Guest House with its terrace and its gaggle of tourists. Durbar Square is a dismal sight, despite its beauty.

It was in October that we last visited Bhaktapur. The mornings were crisp and silent, except for the rising murmurs of worshippers around temples and unlikely sacred spots. Women swirled about smearing stones with holy paste, touching them, stroking, kissing, and chanting: “Let all be well with the world, let the heavens not collapse on to our heads. Not today.”

Ceilings have caved in, doors and plans unhinged, pillars cracked, and people fatally trapped in the midst. This “mesocosm out of time”, as anthropologist Robert I. Levy saw Bhaktapur, has been jolted back to the terrifying present. Some of the centuries-old temples, like Batsala Devi at Durbar Square, gave in, weak at the knees. Relieved of their elaborate body, the foundations have remained, stark in their simplicity.

Deeper into the labyrinthine streets, many of the houses have been completely disassembled by the shock and offered back all their bricks for the taking. Latticed wooden windows, too.

International rescue teams comb the debris, their dogs trained to sniff out any breathing life underneath. Those who survived are huddled in the city’s open courtyards. All across, dozens of hand-written notices ask for relief: for 20, 40, 120, or 200 people. The numbers vary. The things they need are the same: water, food, medicine.

When the ripples of the quake pulsed through the intricate 18th-century Chyasilin Mandap at Durbar Square on April 25, its steel skeleton met them, prepared. If it had been razed in the last notorious earthquake in 1934, it was made resistant by architects Götz Hagmüller and Niels Gutschow, who reconstructed it in the late Eighties from old etchings and photographs. Its original carved-wood pillars, found supporting other houses, have been merged with new woodwork. The rest has been a guided flight of imagination. It is a process that awaits the city once again.

Bhaktapurians have already started to pick up the pieces, sort out the wreckage, recycle what they can. Rabindra Puri, an artist and architectural conservationist who has been building and renovating Bhaktapur and elsewhere in the traditional Newa style, has no choice but to start anew as well.

As things stand, the bhajan singers no longer gather to perform in the ravaged patios of Taumadhi Square. It’s uncomfortably silent. Not far from the still-standing Kal Bhairav Temple, two peepul trees, turned yellowish from excessive adoration, are now boundary markers between a spacious tent and a community kitchen. Every evening, rounds of wailing women pass each other at different points of the ancient mandala, mourning, one by one, too many of its dead.

How you can help:

Donations for heritage restoration can be made to the Rabindra Puri Foundation for Conservation

Swift code: NMBBNPKA
Beneficiary a/c – 00300000711C

Donations and help to the Bhaktapurians can be sent to the accounts and addresses listed on:

Bhaktapur Relief and Rehabilitation Efforts

Clean Up Nepal

(Read Lora Tomas and Rudra Rakshit’s essay on conservation and architecture of Bhaktapur here.)

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIA ALLANA

A cool breeze followed Wessam as he walked out of the Western Union office near the Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu. He bought four cream-filled doughnuts for his young daughters. Four thousand dollars had been transferred into his account a short while ago. The world was beautiful again, he thought, looking at trees that were just beginning to flower. He would pay the money to the pesky Nepali immigration officer as the fine for overstaying in the country with his four daughters, an infant son, his wife, and his 80-year old mother.

It would be the final step in the Syrian family’s long and arduous journey. They were fleeing a war at home, and in search of a new homeland. The journey had taken them across continents, cost a great deal more than they could afford, and had ended abruptly with a short stint in a Nepali jail as victims of human trafficking.

“Back in our hotel, no sooner had I pulled back the lid on the tin of sardines did the earth convulse in a state of seizures,” Wessam says.

“Bashar, ya khara (Bashar, you shit), ” his 11-year-old daughter screamed, an instinctive reaction to years of shelling, the ominous shaking of the ground that had been their companion at numerous locations across Syria as the family ran in search of a refuge. But unlike that volley of bombs, this rumbling lasted much longer. By some accounts, the earthquake that hit Nepal on the afternoon of April 25, with a magnitude of 7.8, lasted for 64 seconds. It has so far claimed more than 7,000 lives.

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“I felt as though I was break-dancing,” says Wessam’s nine-year-old-daughter, demonstrating a quick shuffle opposite a hospital bed under a UNICEF tent that had been erected three days after the earthquake.

Only a few seconds had lapsed—seconds that felt longer than most hours—when the family ran across the street to the safety of the Teaching Hospital. They saw their neighbouring building break in half like a cracked walnut. They were among the first to arrive at the hospital, and found a space on the wall that abutted the landscaped gardens.

Soon there was an unending stream of visitors. People, bleeding and broken, screaming and moaning, were arriving on the backs of more able-bodied men. It was a scene of chaos, a frenzied public in desperate need of assistance. Wessam took charge and rallied a group of young men and issued instructions. “Help there, take him there, make them form a queue,” and soon people started referring to him as a doctor. For a moment, he was not a Syrian citizen fleeing his country, but a man who had seen so much death and destruction that he knew what to do.

It was mid-2011, when the Arab Spring had come knocking at the doors of Syria, asking for the resignation of the Bashar al-Assad government. Rather than agitating on the streets, Wessam quit his job as a woodcarver who made Syrian movie sets. He led his family out of Damascus to Deir Ez-Zor, a city in the north where the rebel Free Syria Army (FSA) was attempting to form a base.

Wessam was under no illusions about the impending state brutality: two of his brothers had been picked up in the dead of night because they were seen as affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood, a party banned by the government. Soon after, the FSA gained more territory. A rain of bombs dropped by government MiG fighters nudged the family out of the house of a relative and into the car of an FSA rebel who ferried them to Al-Hasakah at the Turkish border for a hefty fee.

“I had to make them run again,” Wessam says. His wife, four girls and mother were back on the treacherous road leading to the Turkish border. The official border crossing had been cordoned off to stop the influx of more refugees so the family trekked over the mountains, at times walking six hours a day. Several travellers on the same escape route helped carry his daughters while his mother proceeded at the “pace of a snail”, and his wife did what wives do best, “complain”.

At the small Turkish town of Izmir, a man showed up, promising dreams. “You can have a good life in Europe,” the human trafficker told them. The “agent”, as he liked to be called, held several meetings with Wessam, each at different locations around the town, and made promises of political asylum, safe passages, and a visa that guaranteed place in German society where his brother and sister had already made their homes.

The family went to Istanbul from where they boarded a plane to Malaysia, a country Syrians don’t need visas to enter. “Malaysians are lazy, they won’t check your passports,” the “agent” had assured them. But the Malaysians scrutinised each piece of paper and passed the passports of the family from one official to another. Finally they were not allowed to travel to Germany.

“The Syrian passport itself had become a testament of wrongdoing,” says his wife.

Days later, advised by the “agent”, they travelled to Nepal where like most tourists, they were allowed a 12-day stay. Again, the Syrian passport aroused suspicions as they tried to board a plane to Germany with a visa that Nepali authorities deemed a fake. Hours later they were thrown into prison, and Wessam was separated from the women of his family. It was only after the UNHCR heard of their case, after German embassy staff heard the testimonies of retribution that awaited them at Syria, that their case was looked upon in a new light.

Only when his wife went into labour, Wessam was allowed out of the prison to visit the emergency room at the Teaching Hospital.

On October 27 last year, Ibrahim was born, even as the complex process of earning the right to enter Germany as asylum seekers picked up pace. There were months of interrogations and countless letters of support from relatives in Germany before their request was approved. The only glitch was the $4,000 fine: the money Wessam was going to pay when the earthquake struck.

On Monday night, they slept in a tent pitched in the Teaching Hospital, too terrified to enter the hotel except for a quick shower. They wait for May 10 when they will be allowed to go to Germany. The family of eight sleeps on a wooden bed covered with a donated foam mattress and a blanket from the hotel that is now empty.

Even the hotel manager was too scared to stay. “If anyone comes, check them in,” he had said, and fled. Wessam says, “Even if the hotel owner wants to go inside, he has to come and get the keys from this tent.”

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY ALIA ALLANA

Jasvinder Singh, inspector and team commander of India’s National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) stationed at Gangapu in Kathmandu never thought of himself as a sentimental man. Right was right and wrong was wrong, and there was never anything good or bad about work. Work was just work, and that was that.

It was with that ethic he boarded the flight from Kolkata to Kathmandu three days after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck Nepal.

He was soon appointed by the Nepali army to search in the busy Gangapu area in Kathmandu. A tourist area with low-budget hotels, it was all but reduced to rubble as floors were added upon weak structures without taking into account the exact dimensions of pillars. “Most of the buildings weren’t earthquake resistant,” he says.

By the third day after his arrival, as the small window of hope for survivors slowly shut, Singh stood above the bed in the Gauri Shankar guesthouse. He was reduced to tears. Three brothers lay on the bed, their faces twisted by the sheer force of the ceiling which fell on them. “It looked as though two brothers were holding each other’s hands as the world shook,” he says. It was later discovered that the brothers had intended to head to Saudi Arabia for work the next morning.

Singh’s team would often be sent to the same spot as the Chinese team and were requested to search the area again. “Perhaps their job wasn’t quite as thorough as ours,” he says. Glancing sideways, he would look at the equipment of other foreign teams and was particularly desirous of the South Korean lightweight power tools. Often the South Koreans would ask the Indian team for their hydraulic cutter and separator. The South Korean team had been certified as “heavy” by the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group. India is yet to be assessed by the group and Singh believes that the future assessment, slotted for 2016, will place India amongst the “heavy” weighters as well.

The team frequently worked late into the night with the Omani team and since they were labelled as “medium”, the Omani team often leaned on India for guidance.

It would be foolish to say that a single one of the 11 days was ill-spent. Singh scrutinised the manner in which the buildings crumbled, the lower floors crushed under the sheer force of pressure. “Run to the top if you are stuck in a earthquake,” he told Nepalis as they watched them clear the area.

As the search and rescue operation makes way for the country’s process of reconstruction, Singh and his team have boarded the flight from Kathmandu to Calcutta. They carry with them photos of horrors and tales of sorrow.

TEXT BY ALIA ALLANA
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIA ALLANA, MARK HARRIS & REBECA OCACIZ

Halfway up the hill to Ichok in Nepal’s battered Sindhupalchok  district, a group of drunken Nepali men jumped aboard the truck. Some had covered their faces with chequered napkins while others wore clothes caked in dust. Bandits was my immediate assessment and they had chosen a particularly well-endowed truck to commandeer.

We were sitting on sacks of rice—700 kilograms in total—that had served as a seat on a challenging journey up what looked like an unpaved mountain. In Nepal, however, Everest is the only real mountain.

The men banged upon the bags of rice, lust in their eyes. They threw some words at us: one Nepali, two Mexicans, one Australian, and one Indian. “Who is this rice for?” asked one of them. The question was a threat, an accusation of wrongdoing. They had trekked almost two days in search of rice and salt as stocks dwindled in Ichok where despite sightings of helicopters, no aid had been delivered. Reassuring messages on the radio from the government and the United Nations sounded as empty as their stomachs.

The Nepali girl, a psychology student, intervened. “Speak to our leader, Mark Harris, he’s the bearer of this cargo dispatched for the good people of Ichok. More aid will soon follow,” she said calmly. The men were at once curious and sceptical about this “leader”. Their experiences with leaders had now put them at a place where the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund was inadequate to feed a population beleaguered by the “Great Earthquake”, as the Nepali media calls it.

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They carried on with us for the rest of the journey, for only the senseless would walk up the hill, telling stories of  dead family members, of a state that had been absent for a long time and had not come to their rescue even in a time like this; of depleted food stocks, and of the stench of decaying flesh.

In between listening to them, one of the Mexican architects pushed himself into the centre of group and took a selfie.

***

The earliest and most visible relief presence in Nepal came from India. Indian planes were the first to land in Kathmandu with food, water, earthmoving equipment, tents, blankets, mobile hospitals, and specialised rescue teams.

I landed in Kathmandu a week after the earthquake. The window of time in which trapped people could survive was closing, and as rescue workers started leaving, they took away the hope that had united the people of Nepal. Rescue over, a vast international aid apparatus was beginning to establish itself in Kathmandu.

Humanitarian assistance and relief teams appeared daily from all over the world—the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, as well as the United Arab Emirates. The World Food Program (WFP) was erecting tents abutting the airport and cargo flights loaded with supplies circled the skies above Kathmandu.The airport struggled to land planes on its single runway.

While search and rescue operations had been characterised by the presence of armed personnel and the police, aid distribution followed a more disorderly approach. Queues were seldom maintained, and those in charge of distribution struggled to reach an overwhelming number of people in need. In this period of chaos, Nepal’s Prime Minister Sushil Koirala remained silent, appearing on TV only twice, and didn’t have an answer for the years of neglect by successive governments.

***

“Where is your leader?” the drunken man again asked. The group, whom I had identified as volunteer tourists, looked at each other. The truck had stopped in front of a house guillotined by nature, revealing lives that were once lived: a purple mattress on a wooden bed, wicker baskets turned upside down; lives turned inside out.

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Mark Harris jumped off the back of the truck, his blue eyes twinkling with fire as he promised to rejoin the group after coordinating with a medical team of volunteers from Europe and America who were due to arrive. Harris was the “leader” who had managed to mobilise a small contingent through his Facebook account and late-night smoking sessions at a backpackers den called Fireflies. He had raised a small fortune of $10,000 through a crowd-sourcing campaign.

Since the first day I saw him, he’d been in the same blue shirt and grey pants, covered in dust with a line of dirt running across his face. It seemed as though he never stopped. “When you reach Ichok, you will meet David Tashi Lama, he’s your leader,” Harris said. The volunteers in the truck were taken aback. They thought Harris was their leader.

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When the road ended at Ichok, David Tashi Lama emerged from a crowd that had gathered. He had ornate tattoos that ran down his arm and the manner of a speed junkie. He hurried us and the Nepali men off the truck and began, singlehandedly, to offload the bags of rice as others watched. The men who had climbed on the truck to grab the rice just walked away. A group of people from the neighbouring village loaded wicker baskets with sacks of rice that they carried down a narrow path westwards of Ichok.

Nobody complained that they had been waiting for almost 16 hours. When distribution was over, the smoothest I had seen in my time in Nepal, the volunteer tourists took shelter under a large orange tent and David Tashi Lama sang Nepali rap songs about the inadequacies of the state.

***

They call Ichok “the town that built India”. Its Buddhist people from the Tamang tribe, feeding the insatiable Indian appetite for cheap labour, have through remittances built homes, lives, and the pagoda. From the smashed side door of the pagoda, the sound of funeral horns and the banging of drums rises and then scatters in the valley below.

An old woman who has lost her son thumps the earth to the sound of the funereal beat, wailing. She shakes back and forth as a few onlookers rush to her while a row of women and children eat daal bhat and drink Tang, unfazed. With 26 dead, most have seen the scene on repeat for days now, too numb to feel pain.

Kanchi Maya watched from the sidelines sipping Tang from a plastic cup. “When we lose people here, the entire community comes together but with a loss in every house, we are divided. We can’t be there for everyone and ourselves as well,” she says. Kanchi Maya had just finished building her house after being a labourer in India for 10 years and was saving money for her children who were in the care of her mother. Seconds into the quake, her mother’s old house rattled and came crumbling down. A “violent swinging of the earth,” killed the old woman.

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Kanchi Maya was working in Ladakh as a labourer for Rs 450 rupees a day and saw the scenes unfold on Indian television. The Indian media made it seem “as though the earth had gobbled everyone up. This is not Bollywood, this is our life,” she said. When she finally got through to her brother in Ichok, she enquired after her two daughters. They are both fine but with the death of her mother, nothing will ever be same.

“Who will look after them now, how will I ever work?” she asks.

The immediate problem was returning home and resettling into a life she had long forgotten. With no real possibility of returning to India and a crop yield so meagre that it can barely feed the stomach let alone be sold, Kanchi Maya fears she has no real chance at a livelihood. Without the wage she earns in India she will live below the poverty line.

Even before the earthquake, Nepal ranked as one of the poorest places on earth, with 25.2 per cent of its population living in acute poverty. Nepal was just beginning to emerge from a decade of internal conflict between the state and the Maoists. Despite political changes, the new government was characterised by rot and crony capitalism, with large parts of the country only notionally governed.

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According to the World Bank, as of 2013 the 27.8 million Nepalese had a $19.2 billion economy that was projected to grow this year by 4.8 per cent largely based on tourism but that has taken a severe blow as UNESCO world heritage sites such as the Dharahara tower, a 60-metre white minaret from 1832, have come crumbling down.

Over the years, Ichok morphed from being just another hamlet into a hub of sorts with a bus service that ran downhill into Melamchi, a larger town. Neighbouring villages that remained entirely inaccessible by road looked upon Ichok as a model for growth and development. These advances came undone on April 25 in the 64 seconds of the earthquake.

But Kanchi Maya is one of the lucky few. At least her house is still standing. From the outside it looks like it weathered the assault but above the stove is a gaping hole about the size of a football. The crack in the wall, rumours of more aftershocks, and the local interpretation of the earthquake, “God’s anger”, have pushed Kanchi Maya outdoors. She sleeps under a sheet of plastic next to the orange tent where the volunteer tourists drop iodine tablets to purify water.

On her first night back she even entertained the thought of an escape to India with her children. Despite the promising words of the UN, that every household will be accounted for, she’s fearful. “There is no hope here. Nobody knows we are up here except for them,” she says, motioning at the clueless volunteer tourists who await their leader who has become a minor celebrity on Facebook.

***

When Mark Harris’s house came crumbling down, the flattest in Melamchi, it claimed almost everything but a guitar that escaped with a few scratches, a fat handwritten book, and a suitcase full of suits. It was the most sincere form of poetic injustice: Harris had inaugurated his project, an artists’ residency from where he planned to finish writing his book, just the night before.

Melamchi is a quiet village, where any real noise means something has happened. So when the quake first made itself heard, Harris thought it was the sound of a drill. Then the walls of his stone and mud house shook so violently that he bolted out of the house.

As he was running towards the bridge he heard the cries of his neighbour’s children, the same ones who had been singing and dancing at the inauguration of his residency.

“I said, ‘come here, come here’ and held each child in one arm and watched the house collapse,” he said. House after house came crashing down, raising a cloud of dust. Further along the lone street that ran through Melamchi, a fire erupted at the electrical store that burnt well into the next day while the football ground served as temporary morgue as family members scavenged through pieces of wood in the remains of their homes.

At the government hospital people were rushing with handmade bamboo and plastic stretchers carrying injured and the dead from far off places. It is there Harris heard horror stories of a scene so desperate, of a people so far removed from state assistance that he felt lucky to be in devastated Melamchi.

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The horror played out in different parts of Nepal, as the 7.8 magnitude earthquake with epicentre in Lamjung district (north-west of Kathmandu) affected 30 of 75 districts in the western and central regions including Kathmandu Valley. The worst affected districts are Sindulpalchok, Kavre, Nuwakot, Rasuwa, Dolakha in the central region, and Kaski, Gorkha, Lamjung in the western region.

The government of Sushil Koirala immediately requested international assistance, particularly for search and rescue teams, medical teams, heavy equipment for the removal of rubble, and helicopters.

When the tremors subsided, Harris and a couple of friends journeyed back to Kathmandu expecting to find a “post-apocalyptic hell hole” but Kathmandu was far from that. People had moved into camps out of fear that their homes would collapse, yet they ate momos and watched DVDs on their laptops. Later that evening as he responded to emails and messages on Facebook he started an Indiegogo online campaign to provide direct aid to people in remote areas.

Several years earlier, he and a friend, David Tashi Lama, had conducted a survey of the schools in the Sindulpalchok region for an NGO. Then and now, Ichok was a place where they had forged contacts and could use it as a base to reach villages that were deeper inland. The initial aim of the campaign was to raise $3,000 to provide direct aid but the figure has since been surpassed handsomely. Harris now walks the street with a battered leather bag with wads of cash in it.

***

The boy beating the funeral drums was getting tired and missing beat after beat. An elderly man flicked him on the head but the sun, high up in the sky, was already playing havoc with almost everyone including the truck driver, who had grown frustrated by the indecision of the group. “I’m leaving,” he had threatened several times.

I had been on a twisted tour of destruction, seeing broken house after house and heard the same sentence everywhere: “We can never rebuild.”

If indeed there is a demand for disaster tourism as advertised on the Internet, of voyages across ravaged Syria, disrupted Iraq and chaotic Afghanistan, the voyeur might find a tour of earthquake-ravaged Nepal appealing. Down winding hilly paths, past stone and mud houses that lent character to this idyllic valley, blocks of bricks, piles of stones and mementos of lives lived formed obstacle courses.

“The people of this area believe in the darkness of man, a deep-seated history in black magic and evil spirits,” said Harris as we journeyed down. We passed a house where a dead rabbit hangs on a beam; the lady of the house claimed its part of a shamanic ritual. Premonitions had warned her than an earthquake was imminent.

Nobody in Nepal was truly taken aback by the quake. So persistent was its reminder that every year in mid-January, Nepal marked National Earthquake Safety Day in remembrance of the earthquake that flattened Kathmandu in 1934, and the one prior to it in 1833. According to the US Geological Survey, Nepal is “one of the most seismically hazardous regions on earth” and the government in Nepal did try its hand at a disaster risk reduction approach.

In 2008 it developed a National Strategy for Disaster Risk Management and was actively working towards implementing it though the pace with which this happened is up for debate. Efforts had been underway to upgrade building standards with a specific focus on strengthening mud buildings, especially schools. But there were simply too many old buildings and little political will.

“They should have invested in resilience,” yelled the man from the back of the jeep that belonged to the Embassy of the Philippines, as he drove up to the rabbit hanging on the beam. I could barely make out his words: his head and mouth were hidden behind a Palestinian keffiyeh, the scarf that Yasser Arafat wore, and he shielded his eyes behind bright blue reflective skiing goggles.

The journey uphill was treacherous and I was grateful to hitch a ride on his jeep. He was a disaster management specialist on tour in Nepal to survey the damage caused by the earthquake. He was collecting data, studying the manner in which the structures fell, second-guessing what could fall in an aftershock in order to be prepared for the quake in the Philippines, which lies in a seismically sensitive zone. He pointed at precariously placed rocks that weighed tonnes but were held in place by the meagre branch of a thin tree. “When a landslide comes, which it will, anybody in that path will be dead,” he said confidently, to which the others just tutted.

There was a volunteer doctor, a volunteer nurse, and a photographer on board the vehicle.

We stopped next to a battered house in a small village. The nurse went in and called the team over. The nurse carried with her the “magic medicine” of the earthquake, Betadine (an iodine tincture for wounds), and some gauze bandages. The photographer went wild inside, snapping photo after photo of the old woman’s agony as they superficially cleaned a wound. A piece of stone had lodged in her arm, the skin around it had festered, and it was now oozing pus. No medical team had been up the hill so her arm had swollen to the size of a tennis ball. The doctor and nurse stared at each other and muttered “amputation” before carrying on.

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We drove past greener than green rice fields, skirting along mountain tops, at times on roads that were smooth enough to gawk at the beauty of all that was spared. At many places on the road, in villages and hamlets, children came running towards the jeep. One of the Filipinos buried his hand into a carton and took out packets of biscuits. He was like a sadist Santa, throwing biscuits, teasing children, as they shrieked and ran after the jeep that cut across hairpin turns on cliffs, some so dangerous that had a child fallen, he would never be found.

***

“Giving out aid is way more technical than people think,” Robert Trigwell said and for this reason he worked with REACH in order to develop information tools and products to enhance the capacity of aid actors to make evidence-based decisions in emergencies.

On the day of the quake, Trigwell had been in South Sudan working on an assessments report for REACH and had seen the images from Kathmandu broadcast on CNN. A few hours and phone calls later, Trigwell had been ordered to pack a bag and board a flight to Nepal. I met him in the back of a taxi on the busy streets of Kathmandu where despite the loss of life and destruction, a semblance of order had been restored, where the only real menace on the streets were motorcyclists.

“You can’t air drop aid, that’s the worst thing you can do. Giving a bag here and a bag there, it’s not the way to do it,” Trigwell said. A man with an economy for words, Trigwell was interested in the three Ws: who, what and where.

During emergencies, whether the earthquake in Nepal or Haiti or the floods in Pakistan, the UN functions through the cluster system which ensures fewer gaps and overlaps in assistance by humanitarian organisations. Though the foundations for international humanitarian coordination were laid down by the General Assembly in 1991, a major reform in 2005, known as the Humanitarian Reform Agenda brought it up to date.

Crucial in this reform were elements that enhance predictability, accountability and partnership between UN and non-UN bodies such as REACH. The aim of the cluster system is to deploy all essential items to satisfy the most basic of needs: food, health, camp coordination and it was first tested out in Pakistan after the 2005 flood.

By the time I arrived, the clusters had been mobilised and were doing their assessments across 14 affected areas. Trigwell was studying the needs for food security and coordinating a response with other agencies. That is why we were in the back of this taxi on the way to the World Food Program.

“All everyone is thinking about is the medium-term,” he said. How to ensure that people are back on their feet, to make sure that they transition smoothly from tarpaulin to bamboo before the rainy season arrives. Like Trigwell, hundreds of aid workers have descended upon Kathmandu. Unlike Harris who runs up and down mountains, aid workers affiliated to bigger NGOs dart across the country in choppers, sometimes missing the smaller nuances of the larger project. But with so many resources to call upon, their reach is far wider. To put it into perspective, the WFP has provided food assistance to 3.67 lakh people in the worse affected areas.

However, in the social media, where individuals trump organizations, the faceless UN seems less accountable, less trustworthy than the Instragram-savvy volunteer. Do haphazard individual attempt at relief operation cause more harm than good? Nobody was interested in answering that question in the time of an emergency. Angeli Mendoza from the WFP said the WFP tweeted every hour, while Leszek Barczak, the public information officer at the UN House, was content with the public information team in Bangkok relaying all the information to the wider world.

“We want to get our message to the people who have been affected by this crisis, to the people in the small villages on radio. They don’t have mobiles with Twitter,” he said.

***

Despite the vastness of the valley, the long distances between hamlets, news still travelled with ease. For one, there was the radio. “A chopper is coming to your village,” the announcer on the radio would say and people would gather in anticipation on the flattest piece of ground. Then there was Kanchi Maya’s sister, married across the valley from Ichok, who many simply referred to as “Radio Melamchi.” She would talk on the phone for hours, to just about anybody who would listen, “What chopper. No chopper. They said one will come but what came? Nothing came. It’s all for radio, it’s all for show.”

So the people of Ichok who had heard stories of people waiting on plateaus for hours in the mean sun disbelieved the words of people they could not see, disbelieved in aid that they could not carry.

The people who mattered were the ones on the ground, the ones who had the trust of the community. There have been no elections at the village, municipal or district level for almost two decades and so the burden of coordinating an emergency response has fallen upon community groups, like the one inside Harris’s orange tent.

The tent itself had come to symbolise something that was in short currency in Ichok: hope. The group had achieved a fair bit: 2,000 kilograms of rice had been distributed, one toilet had been built, toothbrushes and tarpaulin had been handed over to children, while 500 people had been provided with medical care. Many songs had been sung where even the most despondent like Kanchi Maya had smiled.

When I finally sat face to face with David Tashi Lama, whom Mark Harris had called a leader as he had jumped off the truck, I asked him, “What will you do next as the leader?” He looked uncomfortable and shuffled from side to side. “Leader. I hate that word leader because we have been suffering only because of leaders,” he said in a raspy voice.

Days later the orange tent was pulled down. Harris had decided his work in Ichok was done, a decision the UN’s cluster head would not have arrived at so soon. Harris was nowhere to be seen. People said he was riding up another mountain, reaching people no one else had yet found. A leader in the land of phantom leaders.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIA ALLANA

On the night of June 11, 2014, Harjit Masih (24), of Kala Afghana village in Punjab was abducted along with 39 other Indian workers from Mosul amid the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) stunning assault on the Iraqi city. Four days later, according to Masih, all 40 Indians were asked to kneel shoulder to shoulder by militants dressed in black near a railway track encircled by a hill.

Moments later the assault rifles went off. One by one the men dropped dead.

Masih claims to be the sole survivor, someone whom a bullet just grazed. He lay with the dead until the shooters left, and then got up. Splattered with blood, and dazed, he managed to get back on to the road—assisted by a tribal leader with a generous heart and a getaway car along the way—that finally led him to an Iraqi army  checkpoint in Erbil from where an asset of the Indian embassy picked him up.

Masih was sent back to India a couple of weeks later and kept in Gurgaon, Noida and Bengaluru by the security agencies for three months. He doesn’t know which agencies—and Fountain Ink couldn’t independently verify this—though external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told Parliament on November 27, 2014 that Masih was in the “protective care of the government”. The men assigned to him, he says, told him that he should not speak about the killing of others, that he should say he didn’t know anything.

He stuck to his story: Yes, 40 Indian workers at University Lake Towers, Mosul, were abducted and 39 killed. This part has been reported by the media, and denied and dismissed by foreign minister Sushma Swaraj in Parliament. She has said the government has six sources—it is extraordinary for the government to specify the number of sources, a fact of operational detail that has little public importance—that claim otherwise in writing, and that Masih’s account can’t be believed.

The government, on the advice of one its third-party sources, at least once provided medicines to ISIS as a goodwill gesture to ascertain more information on the workers and obtain proof of life, Fountain Ink has confirmed from sources at the highest levels of government. It is learnt that talks on this specific matter came to a stop when no proof of life was provided by the third party in contact with ISIS, though there were more demands for medicine.

The ministry, through its spokespersons, has been more measured, and has said that it refuses to deny hope to the families of 39 Indians till it has more evidence. In all its statements, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has omitted to tell the public that the workers repeatedly called the Indian embassy in Baghdad for help over four days, and asked their families in India to do the same. The embassy is said to have told them to sit tight and wait for the fighting to stop.

Vikas Swarup, spokesperson, MEA, told Fountain Ink that the government has only third-party sources and that it has no direct knowledge of the situation. He also said that the government does not have “any concrete proof of life.”

Fountain Ink interviewed Masih over three days and investigated his account, and was able to verify large parts of his story. The site where he worked exists, the places where he was kept by the militants can be traced—including the place at which Masih claims the workers were executed—and most details he provides are vouched for by Indian and Iraqi sources associated with the workers. The locations have been traced on the basis of information provided by sources in Mosul, and Masih’s account.

All the Iraqi sources confirmed the abduction of 40 Indian workers from Mosul, and those remaining in Mosul were unanimous that they met Masih after his escape. They have neither seen nor heard from any of the others.

Whether the massacre took place could not be independently verified—there are no known witnesses. The battle of Mosul left hundreds dead and disappeared, and which group or unit of the ISIS was responsible for what incident can’t be ascertained.

This is Harjit Masih’s story.

***

Days after his 19th birthday, Harjit Masih was at the passport office in Amritsar. His dreams had already taken him to Dubai, a place where he thought a partially educated Indian like him could make it. A few years later, in July 2013, he was seated on the second last row of a flight to Dubai International Airport. Though Dubai was merely a transit stop to Basra in Iraq, it was also a realisation of his dreams. He took a selfie under a giant golden palm tree, he loitered about the gold souk. It was only when he tried on designer aviators and stared at his reflection that he felt like an impostor in this fairytale land far from home.

Home, the village of Kala Afghana in Gurdaspur district, its only market road as long as one of the travelators at Dubai International Airport, is a no-frills place. His house, an old mud construction, had more space for the two cows—their prized possessions—than the five family members crammed into a bedroom. Masih and the men he was travelling with knew each other from other villages in Gurdaspur. These were settlements tucked behind fields of wheat and rice, where the threat of drugs loomed high and opportunity remained low, a circumstance that provided the impetus to go to a place as uncertain and volatile as Iraq.

Not all Gulf countries are equal. Desperation decides the destination. Dubai is the most sought after, as is Doha, but for the downtrodden like Masih, Iraq was a better option. Wages in Dubai range from ₹15,000 a month, but those in Iraq start at ₹25,000 because of the dangers involved.

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Masih took a loan against his house and paid his uncle, the agent, ₹1.5 lakh to work in Iraq. When the men landed in Basra, nobody waited for them at the airport, nor was there a job. They made nervous phone calls from a SIM card they had bought at the airport, led by Kamaljit Singh. Kamal, as he was called, was an old hand at the Gulf game, having spent 12 years in the Middle East. He negotiated with the agent in Gurdaspur who mentioned a factory in Baghdad and later, Kamal spoke in fluent Arabic to the taxi driver who dropped them at the factory where Indian labourers had previously worked.

Two weeks went by at the factory but there was no work. On the walls of the labour quarters, names and numbers of previous workers were scrawled in Hindi. The men started calling the numbers. A few misses later, they got lucky: work was available; people needed to build towers in Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. A couple of days of negotiations between the agent in Gurdaspur and the Iraqi owner led to a deal: the men from Punjab would build the University Lake Towers in the Jamia district of Mosul, within the University of Mosul area, at the end of July 2013.

The agent is now in Dubai but he did not reply to Fountain Ink’s calls.

Their place of work and residence abutted the College of Agriculture and Forestry within the University of Mosul. In the pictures they uploaded on Facebook, the green façade of the Agriculture Department is clearly visible. Working in Jamia was also considered safe in a city of sectarian tensions between Shia and Sunni because it was the base of the 2nd Division, an elite unit of the Iraqi army.

Despite the 2nd Division, car bombs and suicide bombers, coordinated explosions and a mounting death toll came to characterise life in Mosul during Masih’s first year in the city. He was ordered to never leave the construction site, and he says he never did.

Masih hadn’t been told life would be so precarious. All he wanted was to transform his small village home into a concrete bungalow like his neighbour who had built his through remittances sent from Muscat.

***

Life was good in Mosul. Payments were regular and Masih wired  ₹65,000 to his mother in his first four months. He struck up a friendship with Hassan, one of the 52 Bangladeshi workers working at University Lake Towers, and together they picked up bits of Arabikc. (Efforts to trace the Bangladeshi workers have been unsuccessful).

During the day, he spent hours working with steel and had learnt a great deal about construction despite being an electrician by trade. He was allotted the bottom bed of a bunker in an air-conditioned tent that housed about 20 workers. A dry ration of rice and rajma was delivered by Abu Kareem (name changed), a local employee of Tariq Noor al-Huda, the Baghdad-based construction firm that employed the workers. Over the months, Abu Kareem would become a father figure to the men—many of them in their early 20s—on site as well as provide recharge coupons for their mobiles.

Other mothers recall their sons as being content with their job. Simranjit Singh ran off without telling his mother and called her from Delhi airport in fits of hysteria.

“I am doing this for us,” he had told her.

She had lost a nephew to smack and had seen her brother spiral into a depression that culminated in suicide. “At least there he would have been safe,” she said on a hot sweltering day in her village of Babowal.

In the last few phone calls, he had promised to buy her an inverter because the power always ran out. He had WhatsApped images to his sisters of himself with an Acer laptop that he promised to pass on to his nieces and nephews.

Kamal, the Arabic speaker in the group who had transformed his village by putting up its first big concrete house through remittances from Dubai, regularly updated his Facebook profile. There were pictures of him and the other men monkeying around with wooly hats outside their tents where lines of laundry hung. Others posted selfies with local workers and Abu Kareem. Manjinder Singh posted pictures of himself with Hamad and Mohammed (names changed), the chief engineer and surveyor, and of the top bunk of the bed he occupied.

But Facebook isn’t real life and what the men withheld was this: the agent who had organised their travel and negotiated their employment had only managed to get them tourist visas. He had left the task of securing work visas to the workers themselves, something they found impossible to accomplish. Their boss, the arbab, seldom if ever showed up and when they approached the manager, he would make excuses: “too busy this week, next week.”

By June 2014, the men had overstayed by eight months and would incur a stiff penalty upon departure. As is customary, the arbab had taken their passports upon arrival and locked them in a safe at the company’s offices.

Seven months after they started working, in February 2014, the salaries stopped. “Tomorrow. Next Week. Cash flow problems,” were some of the excuses. By the end of May last year, the men just had hope. “We believed we would be paid so we just worked and waited,” Masih said.

Stories about the upheaval in the region took centrestage as local workers talked about how the war in Syria had spilled over into Iraq. They wagered money on whether an al-Qaeda assault was imminent and once Fallujah—the city where US marines fought the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war in 2004—fell to an al-Qaeda affiliate, Masih recalls the local sentiment: “The questions wasn’t if the war would spread all over Iraq, but when.” However, work continued at University Lake Towers.

***

Hamad, the chief engineer on the project, usually a composed man, was a ball of nerves. On the morning of the June 6, 2014, he was scampering about, lifting papers, dumping files into a big black plastic bag. In a conversation from the UAE, he told me that he had told the workers, “Nothing to worry about. Keep working,” even as he reversed out of the compound. Soon the other locals employed at University Lake Towers packed their belongings.

“Not to worry. This is al-Qaeda style. They will make some noise and in two or three days it will be over,” said Mohammed, the surveyor. In a recent conversation from Mosul, he told me that in those days, the labourers were desperate to leave and had even offered to pay the Iraqis money to take them away, but nobody had thought it would get this bad. “You are from another country, they won’t touch you,” Masih had been told.

When the locals departed, they left an inactive construction site with cranes and trucks and three tents of Indian and Bangladeshi workers who had no money and no passports in the middle of the most daring assault ISIS had launched upon an adversary.

***

On the night of June 9, when ISIS made its final push for Mosul, Masih stood under a sky lit by the reds of rocket launchers and oranges of explosions, even as a curfew and a gradual shutdown of street lamps engulfed parts of the city in darkness. University Lake Towers were a road away from the Iraqi army’s 2nd Division and so the labourers had the finest seat in this theatre of war.

“When al-Qaeda was arriving near us, the night would be lit with red lights. Where there were tall buildings, there were bombs. The camps were in the centre of action because they were next to the army base, and when a rocket was launched we could see them take off. We didn’t know anything even though we were neighbours. We just heard the noises, doof, doof, all night. When we heard the noise, we couldn’t go to sleep,” Masih told me.

When the shelling became a near constant, the men broke into the prefabricated rooms that comprised the office. The English speaker of the group Harish Kumar—who had worked as secretary to Hamad, the chief engineer—had the keys to the safe. He took out all the passports, according to Masih. (By the accounts presented to me by Mohammed, the passports were delivered the following morning by a middle man.)

By then it was too late to leave. The city was under lockdown as ISIS chased out the 2nd Division, took Turkish personnel hostage, and massacred civilians and armymen in what is their greatest military victory so far.

The workers asked for help wherever they could. There were a series of pleas that got increasingly desperate, from phone calls to families, to the agent who sent them to Iraq, to the Indian embassy in Baghdad.

Calls to the embassy began in earnest from June 9, 2014. According to a few family members calls began even earlier on June 6.

On the morning of June 9, Harish and Kamal called the embassy and the initial response was that the problem would sort itself out in a few days as it had done in the past. “We were 700 kilometres away, how could we help them?” says a source in the MEA who has knowledge of the events in Iraq.

There was no help. It is this lack of response during an active phase of war that pushed the workers to seek the assistance of the militant group which had conquered the city.

On the question of phone calls to the embassy, Vikas Swarup, spokesperson, told Fountain Ink that the information was “misplaced” and that there is no “log sheet” of the calls. He said: “The embassy did get in touch with the company each time a call came. They spoke to people at Tariq Noor al-Huda and the embassy was informed that they (workers) were taken care of until June 16, 2014. It is the company’s duty to deliver them to us.”

He said that the company “did misinform” the government or that they “misread the gravity of the situation”.

On the morning of June 10, when the ISIS victory was all but guaranteed and the world woke up to the news, the workers hadn’t slept a wink. The need for chai led one out of the compound to the milkman across the street who shared tales about the Sunni militants bravado and laughed at the sight of elite army officers who threw away their uniforms and ran into the hills around Mosul. With no calls from their boss and a complete shutdown, Masih recalls the group feeling abandoned.

Then Abu Kareem came to the company.

***

Abu Kareem, the local employee, looked upon the workers as his own children. An elderly man with a large heart and a big stomach, he had been a father figure to the men. It was he who brought chicken soup his wife cooked when one of the men felt unwell, it was he who lent money when they didn’t have enough to buy phone credit, and it was he who showed up the morning after the battle with a bag of rice and rajma.

“Stay indoors my boys,” he said with a look of desperation. “God will protect us all.”

“Help us leave,” the workers pleaded as they gathered around him. “Give us our money and take us out,” said others. Abu Kareem was almost reduced to tears. “Wallahi, I wish I could. Wallahi, I wish I could,” he kept repeating aloud. Abu Kareem confirmed to me that this conversation did take place.

Just as the discussion was about to get heated, two Bangladeshis slipped out to seek the counsel of the militants who had set up base at the headquarters of the 2nd Division, less than a couple of minutes’ walk away. (It is unclear whether this was a group decision or the Bangladeshis acted upon their own will. Masih says he was uninformed. Abu Kareem confirmed this to me.)

Moments later, two pick-up trucks with militants pulled into the compound of University Lake Towers. Armed with assault rifles, they pushed Abu Kareem. “Give them their salaries, give them what you owe them,” said a militant in his 50s. He wore a white kandoora with an agal and gatara, the head dress that indicates seniority. This wasn’t an ISIS fighter in the black uniform with the black ski mask but a tribal leader.

Soon the conversation between the workers and the militants turned to a rescue mission. The militants, to everyone’s surprise, said they would transport the men to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan where shopping malls were open and construction sites were erecting tall towers.

Day turned into night and the men readied for dinner. Masih was in the kitchen when two sedans pulled into the compound. About 10 men emerged. They wore black T-shirts and black pants and their faces were covered with ski masks. Only the white of their eyes showed.

“These were gunda-types (thugs),” Masih recalls.

They carried two plastic bags and ordered the group to send two men who would speak on their behalf. Kamal, the Arabic speaker, and Harish, the English speaker, were chosen. The militants gave them two plastic bags that contained lentils and salt. Then they ordered the group to sit on the floor.

After half an hour of discussions, the men were told to pack their bags. They would be moved to a safer spot in Erbil, they were told. The fighters asked for their passports. “They said ‘we will stamp an iqamah (visa) and you will be able to leave’,” Masih said.

But these men weren’t government, I asked Masih.

“There was no government. There was just al-Qaeda. They said they were in control now and would soon issue their own currency. Gold coins. We believed them. We trusted them because we had no one else we could rely on,” he said.

So the Indian and Bangladeshi labourers handed over their passports.

A truck pulled in and the men climbed on. They drove for about five kilometres in the dark to Al-Dawassa Road crossing the river Tigris. Al-Dawassa Road is in the heart of Mosul in the Jamhuriya Area, close to the municipality. The group was made to stand at the Al-Qudus Building where about 35 militants had gathered. It was around 10 p.m.

According to an Iraqi source intimately involved with this operation, the aim was to escort the men to a secure location and hold them at the Al-Qudus Building. The plan was foiled when a rocket hit the base of the building. People ran in different directions and minutes passed before the militants regained control.

“Hindia, (Indian) saf. Saf. Saf. Line. Line. Line,” said one militant in plainclothes.

Led by five men in black uniforms, the workers were escorted through dark streets. When someone put on a torch on their mobile to see the road ahead, the militants went berserk.

“No light! No light!” they yelled.

They walked for about 15 minutes until they arrived at a basement in a market place with shops on either side of the street. They were ordered to sit on the floor next to a mobile and apparel store. When one of the men called home, the militants ordered all mobiles switched off. Then they gave workers Coke and Sprite and Fanta with biscuits.

As morning dawned, someone in the group finally said what all of them knew: “I think we have been kidnapped.”

***

The morning of June 12 came with the sound of a garbage van, the only sign that civic bodies were still functioning. There was no traffic light, there were hardly any cars, and the workers were surprised when two men came to open the mobile and clothes store.

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“What are you doing here? Get away,” said the mobile store man. The man had taken them for trespassers until he saw two men with black T-shirts and pants and automatic weapons. The shop-keepers said no more.

The captors were vigilant, allowing people to go to the washroom in twos and watching them from the street as they went. Not far from where they were held were two hotels and nearby was a mosque, though the minaret could not be seen. Just before the call to afternoon prayers, one of the shopkeepers gave the men some biscuits and another gave them some water. They also had cold drinks. Soon after, the shopkeepers closed their stores and didn’t return.

At about 4 p.m. a fighter in plainclothes returned with a plastic bag that he held up. “I have your passports, let’s go,” he ordered.

The Indians and Bangladeshis followed. They boarded a truck, crammed together, and travelled for about five kilometres to Al-Mansoor Industrial area. There were many warehouses and the truck stopped in front of a blue and white one. The militants ordered the workers inside and instructed them to “not venture out, not to make too much noise, not to come by the main door”.

Then the militants gave them samoun (unleavened bread) and honey with khubuz, small packets of juice, as well as detergent and soap. Despite being hostages, for a brief moment Masih recalled feeling like a guest.

Soon after the doors to the warehouse were bolted from the outside, the men called home with news of their kidnapping.

Simranjit, from Babowal, told his sister, “They are taking care of us, do not worry, we have not been harmed.”

Kamal, from Hoshiarpur, called his wife and first enquired about his 10-month old daughter and then calmly explained the situation. “Terrorists have picked us up. They are good people, they say they will take us to Erbil. I have been in touch with the embassy,” she recalls him saying.

Manjinder from Bhoewal, called his sister. “We have called the embassy. They say they cannot help us. See whom you can call,” he told her.

Gucharan Singh, from Jalal Usman, told his mother to call the agent “and to buy a ticket and get me out of here”. But she had no way of going into town and his father had been admitted into hospital, she told him.

The workers continued to make phone calls to their families during the course of the day. They told their families they were being kept in a factory that manufactured cottonwool and gauze. They said they were being kept with the Bangladeshis in a massive warehouse about 25 feet high. Confirming Masih’s account, they all stated that they weren’t allowed to go out.

Masih recalls shafts at the top of the warehouse that lit it up by letting light filter through. He had even seen the assembly line and shared the information with his cousin Robin Masih. Life in captivity was normal: they showered and washed their clothes, and at 2.30 p.m. and 8 p.m. they were served hot lunch and dinner. Someone even commented that they were better looked after here than they had been at their arbab’s company. The meals came in white trays and were always the same: rice and samoun and rajma for lunch and dinner. Though they were confined to one space, Masih doesn’t recall feeling threatened.

“We didn’t think they would kill us, we thought they were here to save us. Why would people who have been feeding us for three days kill us?” asked Masih.

On the second day in captivity, Kamal and Harish enquired about how long they would stay. “Until necessary,” replied a militant. On the morning of June 13, when the men ran out of phone credit, the militants brought them recharge cards. Finally, three phones remained operational and the men would “missed call” their families back home from one of the three numbers.

On June 13 and 14, Kamal and Harish called the Indian embassy in Baghdad several times on behalf of the workers, as did their families. They claim to have spoken to D. V. Singh at the Chancery while in captivity but there was no help. Phone calls from Manjinder’s sister, Gurpinder Kaur, to the Iraqi embassy in Delhi yielded no results either. The men were told to have “faith in God” by officials at the Indian embassy in Baghdad. They were also informed about the “700 kilometre” distance between Mosul and Baghdad and how Mosul was under lockdown.

“It was a highly fluid period. Nobody thought Mosul would fall the way it did. The embassy could not have reacted in any other way. But yes, the embassy did miss the distress calls,” says an MEA official intimately involved in the operations in Iraq. Information that 40 Indian workers were being held hostage was known to officials from June 13, but the government went public on June 18.

Then MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin in a June 18 press briefing, cited the International Red Crescent and other sources, and said 40 Indian workers in Mosul had been “kidnapped”. He said the government hadn’t received any ransom demands, and that its main sources of information at that moment were humanitarian agencies.

***

The morning of June 15 was different. The men who brought breakfast had changed. There were more of them outside, about 30-35 militants, and they spoke sternly. At lunch time they brought two plates of food instead of one. They hadn’t done this over the past couple of days. This was at about 12.30 p.m. in Mosul.

Twenty-nine out of the 40 families that I spoke to maintain that the last phone call they received from the workers was between 2-5 p.m. on June 15. Most said they were fine and were being looked after and fed.

The only account that was jolting was Kamal’s, the group’s only Arabic speaker.

“He sounded extremely panicky, which is unusual for him. He said, ‘If anyone comes looking for me, if any one wants my identity, don’t give it to them. Don’t give anybody any proof about who I am,’ and then hung up. I knew something was wrong immediately,” says his mother.

At about 4 p.m., the militants ordered the Indians and Bangladeshis to get into separate groups. “We have the Indian passports, the Bangladeshi passports will arrive later. The Indians must come with us,” they said.

Outside, a truck with a large container waited. When Masih boarded he saw a small blindfolded man with hands tied behind his back. Then the door to the container was closed. Seconds later, it was suffocating. They fanned their T-shirts. Someone passed around a water bottle. There was no air and the truck was swerving from left to right, going over uneven terrain, up and down small slopes.

“We aren’t going to Erbil,” someone said.

***

When the truck was opened half an hour later, Masih was momentarily blinded by the light. “Get out,” shouted one of the militants. The men scrambled out, one after the other, into a barren landscape. They were in the desert that surrounded Mosul, with hills in the backdrop. There were about 10 trucks with 30-40 militants outside. The sun was lower in the sky; it must have been about 4.30 p.m. A slight breeze had set in. At a distance stood a communications tower. On the far eastern side was a rail track, Masih recalls.

According to a source in Mosul who was aware of the movement of the workers, the Indians were taken to the deserts of Badosh on the outskirts of Mosul.

“What have you come to do here in Iraq?” barked a man in an ISIS uniform. Nobody responded.

“Get in line,” he thundered.

It was this order that made Masih realise what was going on. “Abto hamara kam hone wala hai (This is the end for us),” he recalls thinking.

The men began to cry.

They joined their hands together and begged for freedom.

Nobody listened. They were ordered to kneel on the ground. They pleaded some more.

“Please let us go, please. We will become Muslims,” someone said.

They were again ordered to kneel.

Masih was in the middle of the line; to his left was Samal from West Bengal and to his right was the heaviest man in the group and one of the oldest, Balwant Rai Singh from Punjab. The fighters talked among themselves standing behind the kneeling Indians.

Two men stood in front: one was the man from the container whose blindfold had been removed, the other was an ISIS militant who was holding a camera.

Allah-o-Akbar. Dak. Dak. Dak.

As soon as the first shot was fired, Samal dropped to the ground, in spite of the firing starting from the right. Masih followed him. He buried his face in the gravelly sand and just lay there. Seconds later, Balwant Rai Singh fell on him, pressing him deeper into the ground. Balwant’s leg landed on his back pinning him down. With the weight of a dead man on him, he was unable to move.

“One bullet grazed me. I didn’t breathe, didn’t move, didn’t look up. I just lay there,” Masih says.

He says the firing lasted for about a minute and a half and that he couldn’t hear a thing once it stopped. He lay on the ground for about 20 minutes, playing dead and unable to move because of the weight of Balwant Rai Singh’s body. He turned his head left, he turned his head right, and could see the others lying flat on the ground. There were no militants to be seen. When he stood up, he saw bodies strewn all over the place, facing different directions.

“I couldn’t recognise people’s faces,” he says. “I couldn’t make sense of a thing.” Not far from where he stood one man lay flat on the ground his eyes open looking up into the cloudless sky. He was alive but had bullet holes all over him. He was covered in blood.

“Can you walk?” asked Masih. He waved his hands, gesturing no.

“I joined my hands together and said, ‘Sorry, but I have to go’,” and just like that Masih turned his back on the massacre.

***

“I didn’t know where I was going, all I knew was that I wanted to go,” he recalls. He walked towards the sun because his factory faced east. But it was nearing sunset. Time had lost all meaning; when he thought he was walking east, he was going west. Nothing made sense. The desert seemed to stretch forever, the hills shadowed him. There was no man in sight.

He came across two bodies that lay on a rail track. He skirted the hills, careful not to expose himself. Half a kilometre or so later, he came across another heap of bodies.

“I thought I’d come back to the same place but there was a stench here, the stench of decaying flesh,” Masih says. So he knew these weren’t his men.

He kept walking till he reached a highway. Dazed and thirsty, he waved frantically at passing cars. These were few and far between, and no one was stopping for him. A while later, a yellow taxi slowed down only to chuck out a bottle of water. Masih took small sips of the warm water and kept walking.

Forty-five minutes later, a white car slowed and the driver rolled his windows down. “Please take me with you, I am in danger. Khaif. Khaif. Scared. Scared,” he said in the only Arabic he could muster.

The driver opened the front door and Masih got in. He tugged at the red thread around his neck; only disbelievers would wear this, he thought to himself as he yanked it out. After a kilometre, the driver made a call and another car pulled up in front.

“Go with him,” the driver said.

“Please no,” Masih begged. A burly man dragged him out and shoved him in the backseat of the car. A weapon lay on the floor. They will kill me now, he thought.

Masih heard the driver speak on the phone. “Hindia, Hindia, Indian, Indian,” was the one word he could understand.

The car finally stopped at a checkpoint with the hills in the backdrop. It was manned by armed men in black who immediately handcuffed Masih.

“What is your name? Where is your passport? Who are you?” they asked. “My name is Ali, I’m a Bangladeshi and I don’t have my passport,” he said.

“What is your father’s name? What do you do here? Why have you come here?” they asked.

“Khaif. Khaif. Scared. Scared,” he said and pretended to not understand a word of what they were saying. He wanted to go back to his company he told them. An elderly man, about 60, in a white kandoora called Masih him over. He was the only one without a gun and he ordered the men to uncuff Masih. The fighters called him Abu, “father”, a term of respect for an elder or person in a position of seniority.

“He said, ‘don’t worry, I will make sure you are okay.’ He was the kindest man I met that night,” recalls Masih.

As night fell Abu gave Masih a plate of rice and rajma. Masih tried to eat but had no appetite left. About 10 p.m., Abu ordered Masih into the backseat of the car and drove him to a big house in the centre of Mosul.

It was a grand house with marble floors. Many unmasked militants sat in the front of the house and more sat on the floor inside having dinner. Abu ordered Masih upstairs, where the rooms served as small detention centres. One of them held 10-15 men in army uniform. In another, where Masih was held, two handcuffed and blindfolded men were sitting on the floor. There was a small window through which Masih could squeeze through and he was flirting with the idea of jumping out when a militant ordered him downstairs and into a car. He saw a gun on the backseat.

Masih bolted back into the house. “Abu, Abu, where are you sending me?” he asked.

“Wallahi (you have my word), son, nothing will happen to you,” Abu said. Masih was escorted back to the car. The ISIS fighter gave him 5,000 dinars—a present from Abu. He was told to pay the taxi fare with the money. The journey to the factory took about 20 minutes and when Masih put his hands in his pocket, the driver waved him off.

Abu had taken care of it.

***

University Lake Towers, that barbed wire confinement, had never seemed so free, so promising before. He snuck underneath a gap in the barbed wire and moments later a group of dogs came barking. Already jumpy, he dashed back out and ran to the milkman in his first fit of tears. The milkman lit a torch that shone on his wet face.

“Put that out, it’s me, Harjit,” he said.

“Harjit, what has happened? Why are you crying? Where are the others?” he asked.

Masih was bawling, unable to construct a sentence. He took a sip of water. He cried some more and then he told him his entire story.

“They are all dead?” asked the milkman.

“Yes,” replied Masih.

Masih pleaded with the milkman to let him sleep there until morning but the milkman called Mansoor (name changed), one of the contractors at University Lake Towers. He recounted bits of the tale.

“Send him over at once,” Mansoor ordered and so Masih walked to Mansoor who stood in the dim light of a mobile phone, motioning him over in silence. Then Masih cried some more.

“We need to get you out of here,” Mansoor said. He was transporting the Bangladeshis to Erbil the following morning and Masih could hitch a ride on one condition: he wasn’t to speak a word, nor could he reveal his identity. Mansoor ordered him back in the tent with the Bangladeshis who rushed to Masih as he recounted the tale for the third time.

They had been given their passports back and were allowed to return with their belongings. An hour later he showered, crusted bits of blood running into the water. He changed into a pair of clothes a Bangladeshi gave him and tried to sleep but couldn’t.

***

Soon after daybreak, a car pulled into the compound of University Lake Towers. Mansoor organised the men into two groups and took Masih in his car. They came to a checkpoint manned by ISIS. They were in complete control of the city by now. Mansoor got off and spoke to the gunmen. About 10 minutes later they were allowed to journey onward to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Further along was an Iraqi army checkpoint, the first sign that they had left the zone of terror. They questioned Mansoor for about 15 minutes and let them go further. At the border of Erbil, where people were arriving in droves, Mansoor and his group were made to stop at the edge of a checkpoint.

The army was trying to scrutinise the massive outflow of people but the scene was too chaotic. Mansoor dropped the boys off and turned back to Mosul while it seemed as though everybody else was trying to get out.

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The checkpoint was a few metres before a bridge and the officers asked the Bangladeshis and Masih for their passports. Masih’s passport had never been returned by the militants. They told the men they couldn’t cross through until their senior gave clearance and ordered them to stay under the bridge. That night they gave them khubuz, onion, cucumber, tomato and water. Masih used a Bangladeshi labourer’s phone to call home. He spoke to Robin who had heard about the incident on TV.

Manjinder Singh’s sister, Gurpinder Kaur, exasperated with the lack of response from the embassy which she had been calling from June 6 onwards, panicked when her brother didn’t call on the evening of June 15. Terrified and fed up with the lack of official assistance of response, she called ANI news agency on June 16, breaking the news about the abduction.

As the mainstream media picked up the news, helpline numbers were being flashed on TV. Masih’s cousin Robin gave him the number and told him to call the helpline and say that one was alive. While Masih waited under the bridge for a second night, Robin called the embassy and informed them that his cousin was alive. The embassy passed on a number for Masih through Robin. It belonged to an Indian restaurant owner in Erbil used as a local asset. Given that the Indian mission has no presence in Erbil, he had assumed the duties of the mission.

***

“I said ‘I have come this far, at least help me now,’” Masih recalled of his first phone call to the man, on his third night under the bridge, June 18, when the government first acknowledged the kidnapping. Many people who had been held were running from the checkpoint by now. A few Bangladeshis were planning an escape. Masih asked if he could run with them but they looked upon him as a liability. So Masih ran alone until an army van rounded them all up. Afraid he would be thrown into jail for not having valid documents, he made an excuse that he was getting water and slipped out and went to a taxi. From there he called the number again. The asset arrived about 20 minutes later.

He pulled up in a red car, a smart looking man with a receding hairline. He walked straight to the guards. After a brief conversation, he walked to Masih and escorted him to his car, and Masih recounted the entire story.

“Are you lying?” he asked. He asked that question several times.

“No,” replied Masih. “Why would I lie?”

That night, the asset took Masih for a meal at a restaurant and assured him that he was safe. Over the next couple of days, he took Masih to meet various officials in Erbil. He got constant phone calls from Baghdad and New Delhi enquiring about Masih.

Images were sent to the man’s phone for verification, to identify if Masih knew the people in the photos. The asset refused to be interviewed for this story.

Four days later, two Indian officials came to meet Masih. They kept asking if he was lying. To verify his story, they called the Bangladeshis who recounted the same tale. The asset bought him clothes and put him up at his house. After the fifth or sixth night, he went for dinner at about 10 p.m. He returned at around 11 p.m. and told Masih to wake up early and be ready.

He was going to India.

Less than a fortnight later, Masih travelled from Erbil to Doha and then New Delhi. In Doha’s shiny airport, with stores of perfumes and showcases of watches, he felt his Gulf dream slipping away. But he knew one thing for certain: if the opportunity to return to the Gulf came up, he would take it in less than a heartbeat.

“That’s where dreams are made,” he said.

***

Postscript

Harjit Masih was taken from the airport to a safe house. The house was “surrounded by a jungle and enclosed by a wall”. He was under constant surveillance. For a couple of days he was interrogated by a man who identified himself as Ved Sharma. Masih’s guards told him it was dangerous outside. Sometimes they said ISIS was looking for him and other times that he was in danger from the 39 families. He was promised a job and even sent to Bengaluru for two months where he trained to become an electrician.

Then he was brought back to a detention centre in Greater Noida and kept for months because his “certificate from Bengaluru wasn’t ready”. Finally, he was allowed to go home for 10 days and told a job awaited him at Dharamsala.

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He was told to tell the media: “I don’t know what happened, I ran, I don’t know if they are alive, according to me they are dead.” He agreed.

After 10 days he called back, asking for a job. There was no answer. It was then that he decided to go to the media. Suddenly, Ved Sharma called back. He told him to go to Dharamsala. So he went with Robin and a man came to collect them. He dropped them off at a hotel and promised to return but never did.

A few days later, Masih returned home. On the advice of a panchayat member, he decided to hold a press conference. The following day, he publicly said 39 Indians had been massacred in Mosul on June 15, 2014.

Harjit Masih is a reviled figure among Gurdaspur families who have made nine trips to New Delhi to meet Sushma Swaraj. Each time they are told the workers are alive and that a search is underway. But an MEA source said there was no proof of life though the government had requested it.

Further, the source said that short of digging around Mosul, there was no way to ascertain whether they were dead or alive. The claim that they were working as unpaid labourers to build a mosque or a stadium remains unverified.

(Names of people spoken to in Iraq have been changed to protect their identities. Mosul continues to be under the control of ISIS, and the sources interviewed for this story have reason to fear reprisals.)

(Update Aug. 3, 12:30am: The paragraph beginning ‘On the night of June 9, …’, part of the story first published on July 31, went missing due to a technical glitch on the website. It has been restored. Fountain Ink regrets the error.)

Read the other stories in the August issue of Fountain Ink here.

BY GOVIND KRISHNAN V

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARSHA VADLAMANI

In September 2010, Kalvakuntala Chandrashekar Rao was almost finished. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), the party he founded for a separate Telangana, was coming undone. His coalition with the Congress was long over, and the state government led by the charismatic Y. S. Rajashekar Reddy had persuaded 10 of his 26 MLAs to defect to the Congress by 2008. To stem the tide, Chandrashekar Rao, universally known by his initials KCR, had forced his remaining MLAs to resign and went in for by-elections in April 2008.

The move back-fired—the result reduced his party to just seven in the 294-member Andhra Pradesh Assembly. In the next state elections in 2009, the party got just 10 seats and a vote share of around 4 per cent. It was a sign that the momentum for Telangana that TRS had built since 2001 was ebbing. The election was so disastrous that KCR resigned as party president for a while. Rumours were rife his nephew Harish Rao, the second-in-command in the party, would defect to the Congress. KCR was staring at the barrel, his three decades in politics close to amounting to naught.

That was then.

Today KCR is the tallest leader in Telangana, and carving the new state in his own image. A leader from nowhere, who is now everywhere; a man who found a cause as much as a cause found him; a careful, career politician who embraced audacity; a man who faced with all-or-nothing odds staked his political capital and won it all; a man of the masses promoting his family over others.

***

Even before becoming the first chief minister of Telangana on June 2, 2014, KCR grabbed the headlines for actions that were seen as both whimsical and authoritarian. He announced that all Andhra government servants living in Hyderabad should leave, as jobs in the city were only for Telangana people. After being sworn in, he created panic by ordering a household survey in Hyderabad to determine whether the residents belonged to Andhra or Telangana. While some media commentators described the survey as “Hitlerian”, the high court stopped the survey from asking the question about nativity.

At the beginning of his term, the government unofficially banned two news channels—TV9 and ABN Andhra Jyothi—when TV9 ran a satire on the manner in which TRS MLAs took their oaths. In a speech KCR threatened to finish off the channels, saying, “We will bury them some 10 km. We won’t hesitate to break their neck and then throw them out … If they want to operate here, they should salute and respect the people of Telangana.”

While TV9 apologised to the government, to date ABN Andhra Jyothi remains unavailable despite a court order to the contrary.

He ordered all Andhra number plates changed to Telangana ones, only to be stopped by the courts again. He started a demolition drive against illegal houses in Madhapur but it was stopped once allegations surfaced that the notifications targeted only Andhra-dominated areas.

A believer in vaastu, he announced that the secretariat be moved to the Government TB and Chest Hospital, which in turn would be shifted to a location outside the city. With widespread protests, the plan is in cold storage now, but KCR is known to have visited the vaastu-unfriendly secretariat only three times in as many months, preferring to clear files from his residence.

For astrological reasons, he changed the colour of the vehicles in his convoy from black to white. He incensed student supporters at the Osmania University by a plan to take away university land for housing for the poor, as well as stubbornly sticking to a plan to move the Osmania General Hospital and demolish the historical structure build by the Nizam.

He made eccentric promises that are legally impossible to implement. He has promised a Christian Bhavan and Muslim Bhavan; as well as 12 per cent reservation for Muslims. Then there are his frequent spats over resource-sharing with Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

KCR is often seen by the national media as someone out of his depth—a bumbling agitator yet to transition to an administrator. But behind the picture created by headlines, is a man firmly in the saddle as a politician, whose word is the law, and whose popularity has soared sky-high in the one year since he assumed power.

Whimsical and eccentric he may be, but there is method behind some of his madness.

Almost every politician and journalist I spoke to for this story, including bitter foes, described KCR as a brilliant, even gifted politician.

“He is clever, extremely well-read, and able to sway people with his opinion. His grasp of subjects is deep and he can build propaganda around issues,” says Raghunandan, a distant relative of KCR. Raghunandan, who was a TRS leader during most of the agitation, is now with the BJP.

KCR’s partymen would not speak of his management of party affairs even on condition of anonymity. Such is the fear he inspires that even some political antagonists and journalists who gave their opinions for this story refused to be named. Attempts to get an interview with KCR failed. Messages and several calls to his private secretary went unanswered.

***

In April 2001, KCR took the biggest gamble of his life: he quit as deputy speaker of Andhra Pradesh, alleging continued discrimination against people of Telangana. He floated his own  party, with the stated goal of statehood for the Telangana region.

The demand for Telangana has spawned political agitations since 1951, after Andhra—carved  out of Madras Presidency—was united with Telangana, an area that was part of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s domain.

In 50 years of united Andhra Pradesh, people from coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema came to dominate every aspect of the state’s life. Telangana had become a distant dream rather than an achievable goal. No political heavyweight from Telangana, from any party, was willing to follow KCR into the TRS. However, KCR’s dynamism and ability to mobilise people around the idea of a new state brought Telangana back into public consciousness.

Within a month, KCR organised a massive show of strength, taking a rally from Hyderabad to Karimnagar. There he attracted the kind of crowd that BJP and Congress politicians who took up the cause of Telangana had never managed. He also got Shibu Soren—leader of the Jharkhand movement—to take part. And in oratory that has come to define his style, he told the crowd, “If the people on this dais desert the Telangana movement, the people should stone them to death.”

The words struck a chord, as would similarly impassioned speeches over the next 14 years. In the 2004 Assembly elections, TRS took 26 seats in the region. While TRS shared power with the Congress, KCR joined the UPA cabinet as labour minister.

This was the high point for KCR and his dream of Telangana. The next six years saw a gradual slide to near political irrelevance. Though the cause of Telangana had electoral representation for the first time since 1971, KCR’s hope that his ally would bring a bill in Parliament to create the state of Telangana was belied. In 2006, he quit the UPA saying it was not committed to Telangana.

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In the next three years, TRS began to fall apart. Chief minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy, whose political empire was financed by Andhra business interests, understood the importance of keeping the TRS in check. Though in public he expressed support for Telangana, he moved systematically to lure TRS MLAs and weaken ground support for the movement.

He was helped by more than money power. In his first term, YSR undertook a massive scheme of public subsidies, including free engineering and medical education. It gave him unrivalled popularity among the rural sections.

“At that time it looked like the TRS was finished. None of us had any hope that Telangana could ever be achieved as long as YSR was in power. KCR used to say ‘YSR  is the only obstacle to Telangana,’” says a former member of the TRS.

The party crisis and loss of confidence in KCR’s leadership became so deep that the central committee actually considered making Harish Rao party president. Several sources privy to the internal affairs of TRS in 2010, confirmed that Harish Rao had realised that TRS was at a dead-end. By September, Harish Rao, now minister for irrigation and legislative affairs in the Telangana government, had even finalised his plans to move to the Congress.

***

Telangana Bhavan, the sprawling TRS office, is located in Hyderabad’s upmarket Banjara Hills. A marble staircase spirals up three open floors, ending in a huge dome painted pink. Three enormous pictures at the top of the stairs catch the eye. Pictures are arranged in a line like a holy trinity: that of Telangana martyr’s memorial, of Batukkamma, the goddess of Telangana, and a portrait of KCR. A life-size portrait of the late Jayashankar—former economics professor, Maoist sympathiser, and the chief ideologue of the Telangana movement—is below on a pedestal.

I meet Srinivas Reddy, office secretary of the TRS, almost a month after the first anniversary of the formation of Telangana on June 2.  The grand celebrations sponsored by the government lasted a week, with parades, tableaus, and cultural and food festivals. KCR started the events by paying respects at the martyrs’ memorial in Hyderabad, a 25-foot granite statue in the state secretariat built to commemorate those who died in police firing during the 1969 agitation for a separate state. The memorial had been the starting point or destination for hundreds of rallies and protest marches that rocked Hyderabad during the 42 months of the Telangana movement. He also issued a government order declaring June 2 as “Martyr’s Day”, with commemorations to be carried out in all district headquarters.

Reddy, a frail-looking man in his seventies, is furiously scribbling on a sheet of paper as I talk to him in his Telangana Bhavan office.

He tells me the history of the movement and says 369 people, including students, were killed in the police firing in 1969. I ask him about the role of student protestors from Osmania and Kakatiya universities in the phase leading to statehood. The students led many protests, clashing with police and para-military, facing rubber bullets instead of the real ones used to kill their predecessors in 1969.

Reddy is dismissive.

Hundreds of students (the exact number is disputed) across the state committed suicide by hanging or self-immolation, saying they were doing it for the cause of a separate state.

“They did not play a big part. From the beginning, he (KCR) decided not to involve students too closely as there were suicides, and he didn’t want students to lose their academic year and lives. He also had to keep the movement non-violent as the earlier movements failed because they became violent,” he says.

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Earlier Reddy had been speaking to me about KCR’s contribution in forming the new state. On the mantle of a cupboard behind him, is a trophy awarded to KCR. It spells out the title “Telangana Super-Fast Express”.

KCR always had trouble convincing people he was serious about Telangana. Too many politicians over the years had betrayed the movement. “There has been a long history of Congress politicians using the Telangana movement to further their careers and then abandoning it. In 1969, the agitation was led by Marri Channa Reddy, G. Venkataswamy, M. J. Manik Rao, and other Congress politicians. They broke away from the Congress and formed the Telangana Praja Samithi. It won 10 Lok Sabha seats. At the peak of the agitation, Indira Gandhi came to Hyderabad and met the rebel leaders. A deal was struck and the Praja Samithi merged with the Congress. The movement was abandoned and Channa Reddy was rewarded with a governorship,” says Jinga Nagaraj, a veteran political reporter, now researching the Telangana movement at Gulbarga University.

With statehood now achieved, KCR is shy in admitting that the movement was not his alone. Senior party members too, it seems, are obliged to play up the cult of KCR, shadowing their own achievements and those of others in the movement.

“The Telangana movement was a mass movement. There were bandhs, processions, rasta rokos, rail rokos, non-cooperation movements, and strikes by schools, colleges, government employees and lawyers. People from all parts of life including students, lawyers, and government employees, housewives, farmers, all took part in it,” says Krishank, a member of the Telangana Students Joint Action Committee, a multi-party collaboration working for the cause of the new state.

A senior journalist told me, “I thought Telangana was a mass movement. Now all we hear about is this one man called KCR and his family.”

***

Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao was born in 1954 in Chintamadaka village of Medak district in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, the tenth child of Kalvakuntla Raghava Rao and Kalvakuntla Venkatamma. Raghava Rao was a contractor belonging to the Velamma caste. When KCR appeared in Osmania University at the beginning of the Seventies to study Telugu literature, the heyday of the Telangana agitation had passed. Indira Gandhi had become a national hero after the 1971 war and with the Congress winning an overwhelming majority in the Lok Sabha, the Telangana Praja Samithi had few options.

Passing with an M.A. in Telugu literature, KCR retained both a love for Telugu and a reading habit that would hold him in good stead in public life.

Like any young man interested in politics those days, he gravitated towards the Congress. He joined the Youth Congress in 1970, when Sanjay Gandhi was leading it.

“After Andhra was merged in Telangana, state politics was dominated by two major castes. The Congress leadership was dominated by Brahmins. But in terms of numbers, they were a minority. In the three decades after state formation, Brahmin leaders entered into a coalition with the dominant Reddy caste, who were financially and numerically strong, against the Kammas. Most of the highest political offices were cornered by these two castes. Other forward castes like Rajus, Velamas, Kammas and Kapus were underrepresented, as were the backward castes and Dalits,” says Nagaraj.

In his early life as a politician, his caste or Telangana origins did not hold Chandrashekar Rao back even if it did not privilege him. He rose through the Congress party steadily, becoming the Youth Congress vice-president in 1982. Around the same time as KCR, another young man had joined the Youth Congress: Nara Chandrababu Naidu, a Kamma from rural Chittoor in Andhra Pradesh, hailing from an agricultural family.

Four years older than Chandrashekar Rao, Naidu’s rise in the Congress was meteoric. He studied in Venkateswara University in Tirupati, then a hotbed of Kamma-Reddy rivalry. The Kammas were starting to resent and fight the dominance of their Reddy rivals in politics and as a student leader representing Kammas, Naidu shot up through the Youth Congress hierarchy. Considered particularly close to Sanjay Gandhi, he stood staunchly behind him after the Emergency. He was given an MLA ticket in 1978 and won the election. Naidu was inducted into the state Cabinet at 28 as the technical education and cinematography minister. He held a variety of low-key portfolios under various chief ministers.

By 1983, the younger Chandrashekar Rao was yet to get an MLA ticket, and his bitter rivalry with Naidu was decades away.

***

In 1980, Chandrababu Naidu did something that would profoundly affect the destinies of both men. He married Bhuvaneswari, second daughter of Telugu mega star Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, popularly known as NTR. In 1983, NTR sent seismic waves through the Congress-dominated politics of Andhra Pradesh by floating his own party—the Telugu Desam Party (TDP). Like Naidu, NTR too was a Kamma.

Nagaraj says, “The Kammas were financially powerful, but politically weak. They had investments in industries, movies and hotel businesses, but it wasn’t reflected by their representation in politics. When NTR almost retired from movies, he approached Vijay Bhaskar Reddy, the Congress chief minister for a Rajya Sabha nomination. The story is that Reddy laughed at him. A humiliated NTR consulted Kamma leaders and they decided to challenge the Reddy-Brahmin dominance by launching a political party.”

In many ways NTR did in Andhra Pradesh what MGR had done in Tamil Nadu only six years earlier. Like MGR, NTR’s on-screen charisma helped him achieve a pan-Andhra iconic status. His portrayal of mythological characters and stints in family dramas endeared him to Telugu audiences. In 1983, building a party structure almost overnight, NTR’s TDP swept the polls, making him the chief minister.

“The Congress was a party of extremes, drawing its vote bank from Brahmins (and Reddys) and Dalits. In north India, intermediary classes were starting to mobilise. NTR observed this phenomenon and projected TDP as a pro-backward caste party. The numerically strong OBCs, with castes like weavers, dhobis and goldsmiths (they are part of SCs in the north), came up to almost 60 per cent of the state’s population. He introduced reservations for backward castes in corporations, municipalities and panchayats, giving them a space in state politics. The TDP voter base was composed of rich Kammas and OBCs,” Nagaraj says.

KCR was quicker to see which way the wind was blowing, while Chandrababu Naidu, in spite of family ties with NTR, didn’t realise that the state’s politics had forever been altered. KCR left the Congress and joined TDP. “With senior Congressmen dominating most regions, NTR was looking to poach young Congress leaders who could represent their region. He was impressed by KCR’s grip over language and his persuasive abilities,” says Nagaraj.

In 1983, NTR gave KCR a ticket from Siddipet, in the young leader’s home district of Medak. KCR lost to the Congress heavy-weight Madan Mohan by less than 1,000 votes. It is the only election he has lost since.

In 1985, he contested from Siddipet again and became a TDP MLA at the age of 31.  The personality cult of NTR dominated both the TDP cadre and common voters for more than a decade. And Chandrashekar Rao, now increasingly known as KCR, was an enthusiastic hero-worshipper of the man who had given him his first political break. He named his first-born K Taraka Rama Rao in homage.

***

KCR came to power with 63 MLAs in the 119-member Telangana Assembly. Now he has 76, with 13 legislators defecting from TDP, Congress, the YSR Congress (YSRC), and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in one year. Opposition leaders allege that TRS bought their MLAs for huge sums of money and the promise of plum government or ministerial posts. With the unofficial support of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), KCR has the support of 85 MLAs, reducing the Opposition to just 34.

“From the moment KCR assumed power, he has had a single point agenda: eliminate TDP as an effective opposition. And having been in TDP, he knows how the party works. Almost every opposition MLA has been approached to switch sides,” says K. P. Vivekananda, TDP MLA who represents Quthbullapur constituency.

Vivekananda’s two-room office is next to a vacant lot and a school. His three aides in the outer office are watching the news on television. There is not a single visitor in the office, a tell-tale sign for an elected MLA. Bespectacled and dressed in a yellow shirt and casual pants, 38-year old Vivekananda is one of the youngest MLAs in the state. He claims that he was approached by TRS to switch loyalties.

“I was approached through a close relative, who is also a politician. The man who spoke to me talked about Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh Yadav, people who have changed the politics of a state. He compared KCR to them. He said that I should join TRS for the cause of the state. I was offered the chairmanship of a government cooperative right away if I joined. And in the next term, I would be made a minister,” says Vivekananda, who chose to remain with TDP. Vivekananda said the man who spoke to him gave him to understand that he was talking on behalf of Harish Rao.

Vivekananda says opposition MLAs are being choked at the constituency level, with government officials under instruction not to work with non-TRS MLAs. Gesturing to his office, he says; “I am hardly here. If I call officials to get some work done, nothing happens. I have to run around myself.”

An MLA who cannot implement projects in his constituency faces a grim future in the next election. Several opposition politicians contacted for this story said TDP and Congress MLAs were being coerced to switch sides through obstacles to effective work in their constituencies. They also alleged that in some cases, MLAs were intimidated by threats of  investigations into their personal finances and properties.

Raghunandan, who repeated the same charge, says, “The Parakala (Warangal district) MLA, Dharma Reddy is a government contractor. He apparently had some government bills pending, which it refused to sanction. Thus pressure was brought upon him to switch parties. Madhavaram Krishna Rao (the Kukatpally MLA) is in the construction business. There were allegations of illegal constructions and they used these allegations to target him. He switched to TRS.”

Sridhar Reddy, Telangana BJP spokesperson, says, “The entire thing is undemocratic. And they are crossing a line. You cannot go after a person’s personal life, business or property.”

Vivekananda believes KCR is determined to finish TDP as an opposition party in the state. With the Congress in terminal decline, he sees TDP as the only opposition.

KCR’s strategy has been to paint TDP as an Andhra party and blame Chandrababu Naidu, and sometimes his alliance partner at the Centre, for the problems Telangana is facing. He extends tacit support to YSRC, which has no presence or ambitions in Telangana, as an alternative to the TDP in Andhra. Before the elections, his oft-repeated line was “Akkada Jagan, ikkada KCR. (Jagan there, here KCR).” Jagan refers to Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy, the head of the YSRC and son of former chief minister Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy.

Raghav Reddy, a political observer based in Hyderabad, says KCR’s strength lies in his understanding of the Telangana voter.

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“He can speak in the local idiom, Telangana Telugu, and he uses proverbs that hit the mark. His speaking style is very effective,” says Kodandaram, the chairman of the Telangana Political Joint Action Committee, a multi-party organisation that led the Telangana agitation.

Narasimha Reddy (name changed on request) runs a political PR firm in Hyderabad that designs election campaigns for individual politicians. His firm ran customised campaigns for TDP and TRS MLAs in Andhra and Telangana, as well as for a national Congress leader in Chhattisgarh.

Before turning to PR, Reddy worked as a journalist for 15 years, picking up political contacts that came in handy when he launched his own enterprise. The years he worked in Andhra-dominated media organisations and the discrimination he says he faced there has shaped how he views KCR and his government.

“I believe he (KCR) is the first brave politician Telangana has produced. If he had been born in the 1930s he would have produced better results for Telangana. People from Andhra have always had better education, are culturally advanced, and have been financially forward. To compete with them you need both finance and the knowledge and ability to use it. In 2000, when KCR started TRS to get Telangana, people did not believe it would happen. The entire state media was in Andhra hands. It carried out a defamation campaign against KCR so that no one would believe him or what he said.

“They did stories saying he was lazy, that he did not get up in the morning, that he drank late into the night. This was in a state where everyone drinks. He was not only fighting the police and Naidu, but powerful media groups with enormous financial capability. His message was clear: he only talked about separate Telangana. He said that to achieve Telangana, he was willing to do anything, even kiss a gongali purugu (a species of worm considered particularly hideous-looking). ”

Reddy feels KCR’s greatness lies in the fact that he won against insurmountable odds, without resorting to politics of hatred. He has been following the Revanth Reddy episode keenly, and sees it as a spectacular move in a political chess game with Naidu.

***

On May 31, the Telangana government scored its most stunning political upset against KCR’s old friend-turned-foe Chandrababu Naidu. The Telangana Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) arrested Revanth Reddy, a firebrand TDP MLA and star campaigner in Telangana, charged with attempting to bribe nominated MLA Elvis Stephenson to vote for the TDP candidate in the MLC elections.

In a sting operation managed by the ACB, Reddy was caught on tape offering money to Stephenson. Even as he was arrested, ACB officials leaked the video clip of the sting to T News, official news channel of the TRS. Soon the entire Telugu electronic media got hold of the clip and it played prominently across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for several days.

Further unattributed leaks revealed that Naidu had rung Stephenson and assured him of support on the deal. This was followed by news channels playing an audio recording of Naidu allegedly talking to Stephenson and assuring him of cooperation. For the next two weeks, Hyderabad was abuzz with speculation that Naidu would be summoned for questioning by the Telangana ACB. With law and order in Hyderabad under Telangana’s control, this was a possibility. The resulting Andhra-Telangana rivalry led to hundreds of cases being filed in Andhra Pradesh against KCR for illegally tapping the Andhra CM’s phone. Though Naidu was never summoned, his name was mentioned several times when the ACB filed the chargesheet.

In casual conversations in offices, cafes and restaurants in the city, Andhraites had their task cut out to defend their CM, while those from Telangana could hardly suppress their glee. To twist in the knife into Naidu, TRS leaders are going to town heaping shame upon the “corrupt TDP” for buying off legislators over a single botched attempt.

A Vijayawada magistrate court is hearing the Andhra Pradesh government’s case that KCR has been illegally tapping the phones of Chandrababu Naidu, his son and several TDP MLAs. On the orders of the Supreme Court, mobile phone operators Bharti Airtet, BSNL  Reliance and Idea handed over a list of numbers the Telangana government had asked to be put under surveillance.

A special investigation team of Andhra police has served notices to the Telangana home secretary on the orders of the Vijayawada court, asking the Telangana home department to produce records of the phones it has intercepted. The Telangana government has approached the high court seeking a stay on the order and disputing the jurisdiction of the Vijayawada court.  The Andhra government has also submitted evidence to the Union home ministry as well as a list of IAS and IPS officers allegedly involved in tapping
the phones.

Naidu is hoping that the threat of a constitutional crisis would be a political bargaining chip against any attempt by the Telangana government to prosecute him in the Revanth Reddy bribery case.

***

After the Congress defeat in 1983, Chandrababu Naidu quit the party and joined TDP, in the footsteps of KCR. At first, even as NTR’s son-in-law he found it difficult to rise in the party; the fact that he was a Congressman for many years came in the way. Naidu soon got his chance when he helped NTR avoid a coup by a section of TDP leaders. A grateful NTR made Naidu the TDP general secretary, entrusting him with internal party affairs. He had a number of major portfolios in the NTR cabinet, while KCR had only a short stint as drought and relief minister in 1987-88.  Towards the mid-Nineties, KCR was part of a small group close to Naidu.

“TDP leader Bojjala Gopal Krishna Reddy, now Andhra Pradesh forest minister; the current MD of news channel ABN Andhra Jyothi, Radhakrishna; KCR and Chandrababu Naidu were part of this gang. They were on intimate terms, frequently drinking and hanging out together,” says Raghunandan. His friendship with Naidu would help KCR break the ceiling and eventually emerge as an important figure within the TDP.

In 1995, Naidu launched his own palace coup against NTR, whose health was worsening. KCR played a significant role in the takeover. Naidu negotiated with KCR a few days before he made his move, trying to persuade KCR to abandon NTR. “When Thummala Nageshwar Rao and Venugopala Chary were present, Naidu promised KCR that he would reward him for his switch. Naidu called his son Lokesh and placing his hand on his head swore that KCR would get an important Cabinet post if he became CM,” Raghunandan says.

Nageshwar Rao is now Telangana roads and buildings minister, while Venugopala Chary is part of the TRS. KCR took the offer and switched loyalties.

The majority of TDP MLAs sided with Naidu and NTR watched as Naidu took over the party he had created. Naidu became chief minister and KCR the transport minister. Though NTR’s heyday as a film star was over, he was still a very popular figure. Naidu could not afford to be seen as a usurper in the public eye, and he assiduously set about replacing NTR’s legacy with his own.

“KCR helped design many of the policies the government implemented at that time. He is a great organiser and used to take lectures for party members. He helped conceive popular policies like Janmabhoomi and Prajala Vaddaku Palana (governance at citizen’s doorstep),” says Raghunandan.

As KCR came to play an increasingly important role in the government and party, Naidu started becoming insecure about the talented politician from Telangana. “KCR was well-read and had a deep knowledge of various subjects. He could debate and dominate people in a way Naidu could not. KCR would sometimes talk to a roomful of people including MLAs and they would not have a word to say against his argument. Naidu could never do that and he was careful about KCR.”

When TDP came to power for a second term in 1999, Naidu sidelined KCR. According to Raghundandan, KCR wanted to be made home minister. Naidu however made him deputy speaker, effectively leaving him out of important government business.

For months KCR negotiated with Naidu for a ministerial berth but was not successful.

KCR resigned from the party and as MLA on 27 April, 2001, and stepped into the political wilderness.

Letting KCR go is a decision that Naidu has much cause to regret. He would lose the next polls. When he became chief minister again after a decade, he would be the leader of a truncated state, placed in the impotent position of ruling from Hyderabad, a place under the administration of his rival KCR.

***

One of the most unusual traits of KCR as a politician is his history of working with various non-political left groups, cultural organisations, and activist groups for more than 14 years in a united effort to form a separate state. In a country where most politicians follow a feudal style of functioning, KCR linked his electoral politics with a diverse group of intellectuals, social activists, writers and artists. This forced him to follow a democratic style of functioning, at least outside his party.

Many people who knew him from that period say he was easy to access, had a deep interest in most issues, and was ever ready to discuss and debate. Vivekananda, who started his career with the TRS, recounts, “I could go to his house at any time and talk to him. He would discuss things with you for over an hour or two.”

From all accounts, almost immediately after he took oath as chief minister, his style changed drastically. Both as head of government and of TRS, KCR is described as an autocrat, inaccessible except to the most powerful, and exercising control over colleagues and  subordinates alike.

A top office-bearer of the Telangana Employees Joint Action Committee (TEJAC), an organisation of government employees which played a part in the statehood agitation and worked closely with TRS, spoke about KCR’s transition from agitator to administrator.

“We met him several times during 2013-14 to discuss our issues. As someone who led the agitation for 13 years, he was able to understand people’s aspirations and problems. His basic advantage when he came to power was that government employees, teachers and all pressure groups had a direct link to him.”

The Telangana government implemented a 43 per cent hike in government salaries and also issued free health cards. However, the TEJAC official said government employees have been unable to meet KCR to discuss the non-implementation of the health card or problems with division of employees between the two states. He says KCR refused to meet contract employees on dharna demanding regularisation.

“He was accessible till June. After that he became inaccessible to everyone. We have never had a CM like that. YSR, Rosaiah, Kiran Kumar Reddy, they all received hundreds of visitors a day. He used to say ‘Bara darwaze khule!’ (All my 12 doors are open) but now all the doors are closed all 24 hours.

“KCR has surrounded himself with a coterie of IAS officers who run the show—Raymond Peter (principal secretary), Rajiv Sharma (chief secretary), the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation Commissioner Somesh Kumar, Ramakrishna Rao (special secretary, finance department), and Smita Sabharwal (additional secretary). All policy decisions are taken in consultation with this group. Ministers have absolutely no independence. Finance Minister Etela Rajender and Home Minister Nayini Narasimha Reddy have no power. Other than KCR, the only ministers who take decisions are his son K. T.  Rama Rao (called KTR, panchayati raj and IT minister) and nephew Harish Rao (irrigation and legislative affairs minister),” he said.

In the 13 months of the TRS government, most major decisions have been announced by KCR, his son KTR, nephew Harish Rao, and his daughter and MP K. Kavitha.

“KCR has total grip over the party. No one dares spread information against him. He is a supremo like Jayalalithaa. Most MLAs also do not have access to him. The phones of all TRS MLAs are reportedly tapped and they are under constant surveillance. Party leaders have no liberty and they are not happy with that,” the TEJAC official said. Other sources report that the TRS government is tapping the phones of its own MLAs as well as members of the Telangana Political Joint Action Committee.

***

Cheruku Sudhakar is one of the heroes of the agitation. A former polit bureau member of the TRS, he was arrested by the Andhra Pradesh government under the National Security Act (NSA), meant to prevent espionage and anti-national activity. It allows preventive detention for up to one year. His arrest created unprecedented outrage, with protests for his release erupting all over Telangana. It was one of the high points of the Telangana movement. He is one of the many second-rung TRS leaders who quit before the elections, for being denied a ticket in favour of TDP and Congress leaders entering the party.

I meet Sudhakar in a small apartment in Hyderabad. He lays out a couple of chairs from a stack of plastic chairs stacked on top of each other. This sparsely furnished apartment is going to be the future office for the Telangana Udyama Vedika, an organisation Sudhakar has helped create to fight for Dalit uplift.

In the last 18 years, his political life has come full circle. A doctor by profession, his tryst with the Telangana movement started in a similar office in 1997, when he became convener of the Telangana Mahasabha in his home district of Medak. The Mahasabha was one of the first organisations created around the idea of a separate Telangana. Sudhakar says it attracted almost 20,000 people to its membership.

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An economics professor called Kothapalli Jayashankar—who would become the movement’s chief ideologue—became interested in the Mahasabha. Gathering a group of intellectuals and social activists including Professor M. Kodandaram, he started an umbrella group of Telangana organisations in 1999 called the Telangana Development Forum, which anticipated the Telangana Political Joint Action Committee (TPJAC) of 2010.

During his years in the TDP, KCR did not show any interest in the cause of Telangana and that did not change in his last three years in the party, when the newest phase of the movement was developing. Naidu had a standing rule in Cabinet meetings that the region would only be referred to as “backward region”, never as Telangana. A few months before KCR’s dramatic resignation, a friend suggested that Sudhakar try to rope in KCR, as a prominent political face from Telangana, to lend support.

“I called KCR on his landline. I couldn’t talk to him directly, but relayed the message. We did not get any response. These were the months that he was negotiating with Naidu,”
Sudhakar says.

***

Aman without a party, KCR was now in search of a cause. And the Telangana movement, hamstrung without a platform for mass mobilisation, was a cause in search of a party. KCR spent several weeks in discussion with Telangana leftist intellectuals, trying to understand the economic and social problems the districts faced and the political formulation that was feasible.

Among KCR’s first contacts was Inaiah, once associated with the CPI (Maoist) but at that time a Telangana activist. He was soon in touch with Jayashankar who would become KCR’s mentor and guide for the next 11 years. Jayashankar, who died in 2011, was convinced that for the nascent Telangana movement to become broad-based, it needed an electoral stage. And in KCR he found the man who could energise people to believe in the possibility of Telangana.

“KCR engraved the name of Telangana in the hearts of people,” says Raghunandan, who, inspired by KCR’s rhetoric, put aside his practice as an advocate to join TRS.

Jayashankar’s support was however, essential for KCR. The ideologue convinced the various activists, artists, writers and social workers, with their left and anti-caste politics, that the upper caste professional politician was the man to lead a party dedicated to achieving statehood.

Sudhakar, who is from a lower-caste community, says: “I initially had reservations about trusting KCR. Upper-caste politicians had always used the cause of Telangana for their benefit and betrayed it. But it was Jayashankar Sir who persuaded me to merge the Telangana Mahasabha in TRS. He used to say ‘Achieve geographical Telangana first. Then you can support whoever you want’.”

From 2000 to 2010, when the movement entered the phase of agitation, the base was expanded across Telangana. “With the TRS and the platform of general elections, more funds and resources came into the movement,” says Sudhakar. Outside TRS, social and cultural organisations involving people like Kodandaram, spread the message of Telangana in its villages and towns. Untiringly, small public meetings, the singing of revolutionary Telangana songs, Batukkamma festivals, and poetry readings were held by dedicated Telangana
workers. The roots of Telangana regionalism which were planted then nourished not only the mass movement that created the state, but determine the dynamics of state politics today.

TRS attracted people from all sections. The depth of sentiment was such that in 10 years it brought every section irrespective of background together.

Raghunandan, who was closely involved in the finances of the TRS, says the party financed itself by a soft form of extortion of Andhra businessmen. During the period when he was in charge of operations, Raghunandan recounts how the TRS used agitation as a tool to get funds.

“All the infrastructure businesses gave large amounts. We would disrupt business by giving a bandh call, set fire, throw stones or create fights with the employees. We would use this as a threat. Sometimes when there was a bandh we would act it out so that one guy in front would shout we should break things up because the businessmen are anti-Telangana. A second guy would try to pacify him and when this was happening, someone from the back would throw a few stones. We used such pressure tactics. When KCR called the businessman later, he would say that the TRS was planning a programme or meeting and he would be glad of his help. Of course, the businessman would contribute to the party fund.”

He adds bitterly “KCR never got his hands dirty, people like me did all the work.”

Before coming to power, KCR in his speeches attacked Ramoji Rao—head of the Ramoji Group which owns Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad—as a businessman looting the people of Telangana. He alleged that Ramoji Film city had encroached on land and that if TRS came to power he would take back the land and give it to farmers.

“Ramoji Rao was not funding us. This was a way of trying to get him to come around to our way of thinking. With others, when such threats succeeded, we left them alone,” says Raghunandan. Sudhakar says he was aware that “many party members collected money by threats”. The idealistic politics of the Left groups and the cynical politicking of KCR made for strange bedfellows. In spite of outward unity, there was always an inner tension and mutual distrust. “He (KCR) was afraid of the Left groups from day one. He wanted power but was apprehensive that the Left groups would not allow it. They never wanted him to grab power. But they needed him as someone to take the movement to completion.”

The formation of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand gave the movement’s leaders hope that this time Telangana was an achievable goal. In 2004, when KCR joined the UPA Cabinet as labour minister, the left groups expected him to use the five TRS MPs in Parliament to push the cause of Telangana with the Manmohan Singh government.

“Sonia Gandhi had always been sympathetic to the cause. On KCR’s birthday, a few months after he became minister, she called him up to wish him. She told him ‘Mr. KCR, your dream of Telangana will now come true’,” Raghunandan says.

Two years later, with no real progress on the statehood demand, the left groups became impatient. They suspected that like previous politicians who had used the movement to gain office, KCR would sell out. “KCR did not want to resign as minister. But the left groups pressured him and he had to quit,” he says.

***

On September 2, 2009 a Bell-430 helicopter took off from Begumpet airport, Hyderabad. It carried then chief minister Y. Rajasekhar Reddy and several crew members. Encountering bad weather, the helicopter crashed near Rudrakonda hills, in the Nallamala forests, killing all five people  on board.

On October 29, KCR launched a fast unto death for Telangana, sparking off the biggest political mass movement India had seen in a decade.

“YSR’s death was a miracle. It changed the course of the movement,” says Raghunandan. As always, KCR was the quickest to see the opportunity and he seized it without hesitation.

“KCR is a chain smoker and heavy drinker. He suffers from a liver ailment and is being frequently treated at Yashoda hospital,” says Raghunandan The exact nature of the ailment was, of course, a closely guarded secret. But there was concern among TRS members when KCR announced his fast unto death.

“He told us ‘I know how to take care of my health. You go ahead and just make the arrangements. I will take care of the rest’.” Raghunandan, who had assisted in KCR’s previous fasts, says the fast was managed at every stage so that his health would not deteriorate. “He used to take fluids, multi-vitamin tablets and medicines regularly. But being a brilliant organiser he arranged for it to look like an indefinite fast to the death. Even what photographs were to be taken (by the press) were arranged.”

On the second day of his indefinite fast, a video circulated online showing an emaciated-looking KCR sipping juice. As rumours that he had compromised gained ground, a seething volcano of fury erupted amid students protesting since the first day of the fast. KCR was denounced as a traitor and effigies burnt. KCR announced immediately that the news was false and that he was still fasting. He broke his fast only after P. Chidambaram, then home minister, announced that the process of forming Telangana had been initiated. But the UPA backtracked and the pro-state agitation took on the character of a mass movement.

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KCR’s daughter K. Kavitha, now MP for Nizamabad told The Caravan in 2014 that her father being under police custody was manipulated into drinking the juice. Raghunandan has a different version. “He did break the fast. He was getting worried that the agitation by the students would go out of control and become violent,” he says.

In a short while, the students of Osmania University formed a Telangana Students Joint Action Committee (TJAC).  It had representatives from the student outfits of all major political parties except TDP, as well as non-allied students. The idea of an umbrella organisation of all political parties was later taken up by KCR, and members of the Congress, BJP, communist parties and TRS all joined under the leadership of Professor M. Kodandaram. Following the student TJAC, the group was named the Telangana Political Joint Action Committee. These groups determined the flow of events in the agitation. The fast was the turning point in the history of the movement, sparking a level of support that even TRS had not anticipated.

After the momentum of the agitation shifted from TRS to the Political TJAC and the Student TJAC, KCR had his apprehensions about the growing clout of these bodies. “He was afraid the students could form a body like the Assam Gana Parishad, which could be a counter to TRS,” says Raghunandan.

Cheruku Sudhakar says that in spite of public statements of support, KCR “preventively diluted the agitation” at various stages to ensure TRS’s leadership position. “He tried to dilute support to the Million March and the Sakala Janula Samme. He was never part of these movements himself.”

The Sakala Janula Samme was a month-long agitation starting from September 2011, in which various sections including lawyers, students and government employees struck work.

The Million March was a plan by the Political TJAC to create a mass protest on the streets of Hyderabad by mobilising people from all parts of Telangana to converge on the city. Tens of thousands of people were on the streets and violence erupted in the Tank Bund area, where the protestors demolished public statues.

Sudhakar shot into the limelight during the Sakala Janula Samme. As part of the programme, the Political TJAC declared that no buses plying from Andhra would be allowed into Telangana. The government started running buses—through what was then an imaginary border—late at night.

Sudhakar was tipped off that buses from Andhra were passing through his home town, Nakrekal. Telangana protestors under Sudhakar decided that they would block the highway. “I am a well-known doctor in the area, so the police allowed me. About 50 buses from Andhra were passing through. All TV channels, including the national media had descended on the spot. It was a live show. TV9 asked us ‘Are you trying to stop the buses?’ We said we will stop the buses in Nakrekal. At that time people started throwing stones. Once somebody starts, the whole crowd starts pelting. The police managed to let the buses go on to Hyderabad. But we broke every window on every bus.”

Sudhakar says he soon got a call from Jagadish Reddy, a colleague in TRS, now education minister for Telangana. “He said ‘Boss is asking, only digital sound is there, no light effect’.”

Sudhakar says this was an instruction to set buses ablaze if possible. “He (KCR) knows well how to instigate,” he adds.

Sudhakar was arrested for the attack. He got bail, but was re-arrested under the National Security Act. A review board constituted by the state government under the provisions of the National Security Act recommended preventive detention for a year. But the Andhra Pradesh High Court dismissed the case. Sudhakar says he spent 37 days in Warangal jail, with hardly any TRS leaders visiting him.

“Except for Etela Rajender (now finance minister), no one came. There was great public pressure on TRS for not agitating to release me. The perception was that they were not responding because of pressure from the government. Gaddar (a famous Telangana poet) criticised TRS people. Manda Krishna Madiga, the social activist, went on a fast to secure my release. Then TRS gave a bandh call. Lakhs of people came out on the streets all over the state. For 30 days I had no communication from KCR, till he finally visited me.”

When the high court released him, Sudhakar emerged from jail as one of the greatest heroes of the cause. He says KCR explained that he was reluctant to instigate protests for his release because he feared that more TRS leaders might be arrested. After getting out of jail, Sudhakar wanted to go to Nakrekal, where he was expecting a rousing welcome. But KCR had other plans. He asked that Sudhakar be admitted to a hospital for a few days.

“He said that we have claimed everywhere that I was suffering from ill-health. It will not look good otherwise. And that health reasons was part of the reason the court had released me. But the court order did not mention any medical grounds. I was admitted to a hospital. After two days I called KCR and requested that I be discharged and that I cannot stay in the hospital anymore. I went to the district (Medak) after that.”

Sudhakar quit the TRS a month before the elections, when he was not given a seat to contest.

“One thing was very clear. KCR didn’t want anyone else to assume a position of importance. Not even his family members.”

Raghunandan had told me something similar about KCR. “KCR doesn’t trust his own shadow. He is just like Chandrababu Naidu in that. Both the Chandrus are in the same boat.”

***

By 2013, in spite of the mass demonstrations, non-cooperation and civil disobedience, the ball was in the central government’s court. It had to bring in a Bill to create a separate state and also create a political consensus with  opposition parties. During the agitation, KCR announced that he would merge TRS in the Congress if the Centre granted Telangana. A few months before the decision was made public, the Congress high command had informed KCR that an announcement on Telangana was imminent. Before the  Bill was introduced in Parliament, KCR left for Delhi announcing that he would come back only with a separate Telangana.

He came back to Hyderabad to a hero’s welcome; the Congress had miscalculated badly by letting KCR take the credit for state formation. KCR had no intention of merging his party with the Congress. He was looking for a coalition.

Once the Bill was passed in February, he arrived in Delhi with his son KTR, daughter Kavitha, and his wife. There he held consultations with Sonia Gandhi and Digvijay Singh, then in charge of Andhra Pradesh.

Palvai Govardhan Reddy, Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Telangana, who acted as mediator between KCR and Sonia Gandhi, recalls: “KCR was keen on an alliance with the Congress. He wanted a seat-sharing alliance between the TRS and Congress at 40:60. His other condition was that he should be made chief minister. Sonia Gandhi was willing to accept these terms. Other leaders like Ahmed Patel, Gulam Nabi Azad, Chidambaram, A. K. Antony and Sharad Pawar were in favour of the plan. But the Andhra-in-charge (Digvijay Singh) misguided Sonia Gandhi. Once the bifurcation announcement had been made, half-a-dozen Telangana Congress leaders were hoping to become CM. They convinced him (Digvijay Singh) that it was better for the Congress to go it alone. He ruined all the results of my negotiations. Otherwise the Congress would be sharing power with TRS right now.”

On his long road to chief ministership of the new state he wanted to create, fortune intervened several times on KCR’s behalf. This was another one of those times when chance triumphed. Unwilling to give up on being CM, KCR was forced to face the polls alone. His strategy was to poach MLAs from other parties, especially TDP. The process had started a year back, in 2013. This is what turned away people like Raghunandan and Sudhakar, who have been members of the TRS since the beginning.

Raghunandan was expelled  in 2013, when he rebelled against KCR’s decision not to give him  an MLA ticket.

The number of people who joined TRS from other parties between 2013 and 2014 makes up a significant population within the 119 MLAs who contested elections. Twelve defected to TRS after the government was formed. Seven of the 18-member Cabinet consists of people who joined TRS in the last three years from the TDP or Congress. Konda Surekha, a former Congress MLA and a supporter of Y. S. Jaganmohan Reddy joined TRS before the elections and is now MLA from Warangal East. Jaganmohan Reddy was a bitter opponent of the Telangana movement and Surekha had called KCR a lanjakoduka (son of a whore) in public in 2010.

Sudhakar says: “KCR’s contribution to the movement is great. But he has taken the sole credit. He forgets that when TRS car got stuck (the party symbol is a car), it needed people like us to push it.”

***

After the TRS had been formed, KCR declared in public that none of his children would follow him into politics. Raghunandan recounts: “He had said ‘Nenu, naa musalamma, iddarame unnam’ (‘There is only me and my old lady’).  In 2006, his son KTR returned from the US and joined the TRS.  Kavitha, who, like KTR, had completed her post-graduate degree in the US, also became part of the TRS and was the force behind promoting the Bhatukkama festival.  During the agitation, both KTR and Kavitha were prominent faces of the TRS. While KTR won from the Sircilla constituency as MLA and joined as IT and Panchayati Raj Minister in his father’s Cabinet, Kavitha won the Nizamabad Lok Sabha seat.

Almost all the people spoken to for this story, were unanimous in their assessment that power in the government and party was exclusively concentrated in the hands of KCR’s family. The big four—KCR, Kavitha, KTR and Harish Rao—make all the major decisions, announce most major government decisions and implement all big government projects.  Harish Rao is in charge of Mission Kakatiya, an ambitious government irrigation project to restore 45,000 tanks and lakes constructed in Telangana by the Kakatiya dynasty. The total budget allocation of the scheme is ₹20,000 crore of which ₹ 9,500 crore has been allocated in this year’s budget. Opposition politicians like Sridhar Reddy and Raghunandan allege widespread nepotism in the scheme, with most non-tender projects being handed out to TRS cadre.

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The other big project the TRS government has undertaken is under KTR: a Water Grid Scheme to ensure drinking water supply to gram panchayats and urban municipalities by linking up water resources in the Godavari and Krishna Basin using a 1.25 lakh-kilometre pipeline network.

“No other minister in the government has any decision-making power. The home minister is like a puppet. The government and the party is split into four groups, each owing allegiance to one of the four members of KCR’s family. No person in the party has the right to speak against KCR.  He is sowing the seeds of dynasty politics in Telangana. The benefits of an agitation of four crore people are going to four people,” says Sridhar Reddy.

Whether Telangana is headed for dynastic politics or not, it seems definite that the TRS’s political future is tied to its first family. There have been media reports of tension between KTR and Harish Rao, which the party has been quick to counter. “KTR is media savvy, well-educated and has appeal among the urban voters. Harish Rao, however, has been with the party from the beginning and controls the booth level politics. He is very popular with the cadre. The succession in the TRS will come down to these two.”

But there are many who believe that like in 2010 when he was about to deflect to the Congress after failing to take over the party presidency from KCR, Harish Rao would make the first move. Two different people, one a veteran journalist and the other a politician, told me the exact same thing: “Harish Rao may become to KCR what Naidu was to NTR.”

Raghunandan, who had worked with KCR and Harish Rao for most of TRS’s existence before it came to power, says KCR was always on his guard against Harish Rao. “KCR fears him. KCR came to power first by betraying NTR. History repeats itself. There is a saying in Telugu. ‘Neevu nerpina vidya, nee painey vaadtaaru.’ The knowledge you teach will be used against you.”

(Rajesh Asopa contributed reporting from Hyderabad.)

Edit September 2, 2015: The first paragraph of the story has been updated for clarity.

BY ALIA ALLANA

Late on the evening of August 31, 2014, in Kolkata, four young men from Telangana made their way down from the second floor to the lobby of Hotel Krishna in New Market, where they had checked in earlier. They were filled with trepidation, hope and fear.

A journey awaited, a holy vow was close to fulfilment. They didn’t make it far.

Away from Syria, away from the promise of 72 virgins that the Islamic State (IS or ISIS) had assured them, right there on the battered brown sofa of the lobby sat an inspector of the Telangana police who had tracked their “radicalisation” for months. Now when they were a whisker away from Bangladesh—their route to Syria via Turkey started from Dhaka with fake passports—and far from Hyderabad, the officer stood up and looked them in the eye.

“Game over,” he said.

Amir, Armaan, Arbaaz, and Imran  (names changed) were four Indian Muslims stopped by police and other intelligence agencies from joining the IS. They were radicalised—as the term goes—online, mainly on Facebook, had virtual handlers and one of them had as mentor, a man who claimed to be an IS sniper, according to the police investigation. The sniper cut a dashing figure for Amir, someone who could nail the eye of a fish at a furlong, and still discuss the Quran like a preacher.

The lure of IS among young Muslims is strong, as is the pull of the ummah, the Islamic community that unites Muslims across the world. According to reports more than 30,000 foreign fighters have made their way to the deserts of Syria and Iraq to fight and build the Islamic society that the IS espouses.

At least 50 Indians, including some working in the Gulf countries, are said to have gone to Syria and Iraq to join IS, and some—such as Abdul Qudus Turki from Bijapur, and Mohammad Umar Subahan from Bengaluru—have been killed there, according to a document prepared by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and reviewed by Fountain Ink. At least four Indians have been killed in the Islamic State in 2013 and 2014, according to the MHA document.

Areeb Majeed, one of the four young men from Kalyan—the first known IS recruits from the country—returned after six months in IS-controlled Syria. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) is investigating his case. A senior official of the MHA, who did not want to be named commenting on an active investigation, told Fountain Ink that Majeed, in confessions to the NIA, has said life under IS is not the pious activity it is projected to be. Majeed said that there was hardly any community life, he was paid $75 a month as wages, and that he shared a small barrack with three other fighters, the official told Fountain Ink.

According to Majeed’s statement there was an absence of religious activity, and no form of entertainment was permitted save the Internet, the official said.

The list of Indian nationals who joined IS includes an engineer, an MBA graduate, a journalist, and a religious scholar. Indians joining IS, according to the MHA document, have gone from places like Singapore, Bengaluru, Bijapur, Queensland (Australia), Doha, and Collins County (Texas), among others.

At a meeting held in Delhi in August this year, attended by heads of intelligence agencies, state home secretaries, and chaired by the Union home secretary, it was proposed that the ISIS threat be “consciously underplayed”, as undue publicity would be counterproductive. Fountain Ink has reviewed the minutes of this meeting.

The minutes reveal that the “ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) phenomena” is at an “incipient stage” in India, and that the organisation does not have the capacity yet to carry out attacks in the country. However, intelligence agencies say “lone wolf attacks” can’t be ruled out.

According to the minutes, the government should promote “counter-narratives” to radical propaganda, there should be “minimum publicity” of cases of radicalisation, and police forces should not take “reckless enforcement action” against innocents.

Social media surveillance is crucial to any anti-IS campaign but, according to the minutes, state police forces don’t have the capacity. Multiple sources in the Telangana police, which includes senior officers, and at least one senior MHA official dealing with the matter confirmed to Fountain Ink that Facebook has on more than one occasion refused the government’s request to grant access to profiles of people under investigation.

Facebook did not confirm nor deny this. A Facebook spokesperson told Fountain Ink that the company keeps a close watch on pages that promote terrorism and they are frequently taken down if they violate its community standards. The spokesperson said Facebook cooperates with governments when requests for sharing information are made through proper channels. The spokesperson said they “removed” comments that praised or supported terrorist groups and that they had specially trained employees who “remove any accounts associated with ISIS”. Facebook also added that they have in the past worked with law enforcement officials.

The story of the four young men from Telangana lifts the veil on IS’s methods of online recruitment and radicalisation, its appeal in India, the way online conversations morph into action offline, and IS’ global collaborative effort to radicalise and provide logistical support to those who want to join. For example, 19-year-old Amir’s online circle which included a Syrian sniper, a Dubai-based businessman, a Turkish-Syrian IS sympathiser, a Gujarati recruiter, and a former Students Islamic Movement (SIMI) of India member was formed on Facebook.

A seemingly disparate but united effort by these players resulted in the 19-year-old being a flight and a bus ride away from joining IS, barely weeks after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared the Caliph.

Fountain Ink interviewed two of the four young men separately in Telangana over days, getting exhaustive details of their online activities and motivations. All of them, though not charged with any crime, are under police surveillance. They spoke on the condition that they not are identified with their real names. Another young man, Karim (name changed), who didn’t make the journey to Kolkata after his passport was impounded, was also interviewed.

“When we caught them, they were in a state of panic. Not because they had been stopped but because they didn’t want to keep their Caliph waiting,” says the inspector who found them in Kolkata.

The Telangana police team that investigated the case spoke to Fountain Ink on condition that they not be named.

This is the story of the journey to the Islamic State that almost happened.

***

Constable Akbar (name changed) was wrapping up for the day when his phone rang. The anonymous caller spoke in a hushed, hurried tone. “Certain people of interest have gathered outside Al Azhari Mosque, you don’t want to miss this,” he said and hung up.

By the time Constable Akbar reached the tall gates of the mosque, the Hyderabad sky was blushing with the hues of sunset. A small crowd congregated around a man that police claim to be a well-known “extremist” who was agitating about Israel’s war on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Minutes before the azaan signalled an end to a long day’s Ramzan fast, at a time when hunger dictated most thoughts, the “extremist” called upon those gathered to show their support for Gaza by attending the Battle of Badr commemoration two days later.

In the congregation was Amir, a close relative of the “extremist” and a person on the watch list. Amir was visibly excited, remarked Constable Akbar to his superior, Inspector Veer (name changed). It was then decided that Amir be watched for the next few days.

“There are certain groups that are always watched and within those groups are certain individuals. It is my job to watch those individuals online and offline,” said Inspector Veer.

On July 14, 2014, the evening of the commemoration of the Prophet’s most storied battle and one of the few battles mentioned in the Quran, Amir visited the local beauty parlour and had his cheeks waxed. A well defined, fuller beard would compensate for his dainty features and elegant frame, providing masculinity. Emboldened by the quick-fix, he swaggered down the street enveloped in the sweet scent of rose and oud itar, aware that people were watching.

He stopped and shook hands with a friend, and upon turning the corner, spoke briefly with another. The friend, Imran, looked nervous.

“I hear it’s going to be big,” he said. Imran had made a poster of the Palestinian flag but was uncertain about its debut.

“The bigger the better,” Amir replied convinced that a bigger crowd was safer than a smaller one, harder to monitor. He did not know that he was already being tailed by Constable Akbar.

The inspector recalls Amir chanting in support of Palestine, roaring when the demolition of Babri Masjid was mentioned and pledging support to the ummah. Some conversations, however, the officer wasn’t privy to.

“Are you ready to work for Allah?” asked a member of Ahle Hadees, a puritanical Islamic organisation.

Amir nodded.

“Gaza is the key through which you can unlock another world on Facebook but trust only those who bear the Prophet’s seal,” the Ahle Hadees man said. When Amir searched Facebook that night for information on Gaza, he came across a black and white logo and learnt of the Islamic State.

“The reason for meeting was Gaza, but it quickly spilled into ISIS from there,” said a senior Telangana police official.

“In a way ISIS used Gaza, just as radical groups have used Babri Masjid or Godhra to further their cause,” says a source in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

***

ISIS is at home on social media. It uses YouTube as a disseminator of news uploading videos of beheadings and massacres. It uses the 140 characters of Twitter as a ticker for news on military operations, and as a tool for recruitment. On Facebook, ISIS cadre pose as “friends” who sell carefully crafted propaganda to lost youths in the darker corners of the Internet.

ISIS is online, all the time. It wants Muslims from all over the world to join its fold.

Foreign fighter migration isn’t a novelty. Extremists have travelled from the West to the mountains of Afghanistan and onwards to the lawless plains of Somalia to be trained by Islamist terror groups. But the Syrian case is unique: war volunteers from all across the globe, spanning different races and ethnicities, men and women have traversed the Jihadi Superhighway to a single destination.

Syria is not just the first war to unfold on social media, it is also the first war where fighters document their experiences in real-time. These virtual diaries have caught the imagination of jihadists worldwide.

But jihadist use of media isn’t novel. Even before the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda utilised new media companies such as As-Sahab (the clouds) or Al-Malahem (the battles) to disseminate propaganda videos. Password protected Internet forums such as Ansar al-Mujahideen, al-Ekhlaas, Faloja, and Shamukh existed as early as the 1990s. Al-Qaeda’s first beheading, that of Nick Berg, a radio entrepreneur from Pennsylvania in 2004, had also been uploaded on to a jihadist web forum.

ISIS arrived at a time when technology has exponentially multiplied the power of propaganda. The beheading of James Foley, an American journalist, by ISIS was uploaded on YouTube, announced on Twitter and became the subject of Facebook groups within a matter of minutes. Soon it trended across the Internet and on the smartphones of four men in Hyderabad connecting them to a world far away.

***

For Amir, this online connection with ISIS came when he was feeling disconnected from his real world. He had failed 11 subjects in his last exam at the engineering college. Fights with his father had become more frequent and violent. His father had once hit him with a chair for performing poorly. A second time, he had been hit with a belt.

“College didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to be a part of some other unit,” he says.

As a teenager looking to rebel he started chain-smoking. Two days after he turned 19, he rented a cheap room in a hotel where he lost his virginity. In the month that followed he slept with two other women.

“I was on the wrong path,” Amir said.  “I had all the vices in the world but no satisfaction.”

Amir had grown up in Medina, one of the holiest cities in Islam where his father ran a company that provided services to hotels. Medina, with its stringent rules, and his father, with his harsh temper, meant Amir always had a desire to run away. After he shifted to India at the age of 14, the openness of the society appeased him somewhat. When his father relocated to India, Amir again felt claustrophobic.

“There was no freedom at all. Not then and not now,” he said on a rainy day in Hyderabad.

While the real world and his father’s rules had him trapped, he felt free online. His father, in his late 40s, had only heard about Facebook but for Amir, Facebook became life. He started spending more than eight hours a day online, consuming real-time information about the war in Syria via ISIS mouthpieces. He would lie in his darkened bedroom surfing page after page, updated every couple of minutes. The more pages he liked the more he commented, the more information he craved. Soon there was video after video of mutilated bodies, of mothers crying, of mass graves, and of a child’s coffin.

One video posted on a public page stuck with him. In the video, “infidels” drag a young woman into a mosque and rape her. Her screams made him feel like his brain would explode. At the end, the narrator asks, “If this was your sister what would you have done?”

“The sheer amount of information had me hooked and after a certain point, I felt as though I was a part of it,” says Amir.

Amir thought he was consuming news and not propaganda.

Did you ever think about verifying the information? I asked.

“No. I didn’t read newspapers nor did I watch TV news. I believed what I saw. It all seemed very real,” he said.

As his online activity increased, so did his conversations with like-minded people. At a point when he felt distant from his world in Hyderabad, he found kinship among IS supporters.

Amir only informed his cousin Arbaaz and best friend Imran about what he had discovered. Then he showed them. The three men were sitting in Amir’s bedroom when he typed “Al Malhama al Kubra” into YouTube. Narrated by Imam Alwaki, the video mimics a Hollywood blockbuster with end-of-the-world scenarios as buildings collapse and deserts become scenes for epic battles between Arabs on horses and Roman gladiators in chariots. An impressive soundtrack is interrupted by Imam Alwaki, who draws upon religious text to place the current conflict in Syria. “Do not miss this golden opportunity to be remembered,” the imam urges.

Soon, the three men were spending hours on Facebook, spellbound by an imam, wired into a war far, far away.

***

Amir was addicted to Facebook and the jihadi Web. “After a certain point, I wanted more,” recalls Amir. He had identified a group of individuals deeply involved with ISIS and Syria and tried to make contact. He had been noticed by a few people, many of his comments were liked and so he sent a friend request to someone he had begun to look up to. His name was Abu Aziz al-Andalusi and his comments yielded hundreds of likes.

“I didn’t expect it to go any further,” he says but on the fourth day after he sent the friend request, his mobile beeped with an alert while he was in class. Andalusi had accepted his request.

Soon they began exchanging messages. Andalusi claimed he was a sniper with the Islamic State in Idlib, a particularly restless Syrian governate. Years of fighting has brought the north-western city to its knees. He had images to prove he was there: there were pictures from the destroyed city of Aleppo, of him with an assault rifle, and of the beautiful rolling hills in Turkey where jihadis took a break from the theatre of war.

“They looked like they were brothers in arms, it looked fun,” says Amir.

Over a month he followed Andalusi’s posts in a state of rapture. Andalusi shared stories from the battlefields, about victories, and often heartbreaking posts about “brothers” lost on the way. Soon Amir was aware of the operational details: the location of the last round of fighting, the weapons used, the kind of assault the Syrian army had launched. Over time, Amir says, he began to feel like he was there, at the side of the sniper who had brought the war to him. Andalusi was his news anchor at a time when war correspondents had been kept at bay.

“He often asked me to pray for them. He kept saying the losses were great and how the ummah needed all the help they could get,” recalls Amir. Though most of the conversations were in English, Amir spoke a fair bit of Arabic and this impressed Andalusi.

From the night of July 27, 2014 Amir and Andalusi exchanged messages all the time, first on Skype and later, Andalusi told Amir about Telegram, a more secure free messaging service.

Each had questions for the other.

One night Amir wrote: “I am lean and of a small build,” implying that he would not be able to fight.

“A Muslim need not be tall but have big taqwa/imaan,” came the reply.

“Do you go the dargah?” Adalusi asked in one message.

“No,” replied Amir.

Not once did Andalusi mention jihad but instead presented him with verses from the Quran, quoted hadith (collection of traditions that contain sayings of the Prophet) which gave credibility to ISIS’s claim that the Caliph had arrived and that the Caliphate was legitimate.

“He encouraged me to join the fight in whatever capacity I could. We spoke non-stop for two days but on the third he disappeared,” says Amir. He felt a strange sense of loss and wondered if Andalusi had been killed.

He searched several days for him, trawling the ends of the jihadi Web, liking whatever came his way on Bilad al-Sham (the Quranic name for the area IS occupies), adding person after person bearing the flag of the Islamic State.

***

Constable Akbar had shadowed Amir for two days and found nothing. “The boy just goes to college and back. He often goes to the mosque,” he reported to his boss. The inspector was at a loss. Informers kept mentioning a group called ISIS and he kept repeating, “There is no ISIS in Hyderabad.”

Then one night, something clicked.

“This is a young boy from the digital age. I was looking in the wrong place,” he says.

ISIS was not in Hyderabad, it was inside Amir’s smartphone. By the time the police realised this, the 19-year-old had a mentor in an ISIS sniper, and knew details of battles being fought in Syria.

During this period, a high-level meeting with various branches of the Telangana police discussed the issue of radicalisation on Facebook. It was decided that officials would contact Facebook for intelligence on the activities of certain “extremists” who had raised red flags.

Fountain Ink has learnt from senior Telangana police officers and the MHA that Facebook was contacted both by the Central and Telangana governments for information but were denied access.

***

By August, Amir was restless at home. Online he was part of IS, coached by its sniper. Offline he was just a boy failing 11 subjects and getting thrashed by his father. He wanted to be the person he was on Facebook: confident, smart, and with a purpose.

He changed his profile picture from his own to the flag of ISIS though he did not change his name. He started sharing videos sympathetic to ISIS, and downloaded popular songs and anthems of the Khilafa such as Dawlat al-Islam Qamat (translated as “Ummah, dawn has appeared”). He even set set one as the ringtone on his Samsung smartphone.

Amir’s friends list continued to grow and his knowledge of Islamic State had begun to impress online handlers, says a senior officer of Telangana police.  Amir was invited to several closed groups where information was openly exchanged. It was there he learnt about the presence of recruiters and met one though he wouldn’t know this until much later. The man was called Abu Zakaria and he referred to himself as the Emir of Hatay, a Turkish province that borders Syria. Abu Zakaria, unlike Andalusi, was less open and a lot more paranoid.

“He kept asking me, ‘how can I trust you, how can I believe you are Momin, a true believer’,” recalls Amir. And when he finally stopped that, he wanted to get as much information about Amir as possible. “He wanted to know everything. How old I was, what I had studied, what I could do for the Islamic State.”

Late one night in the first week of August, Abu Zakaria said he was “tired of the child’s play”, and presented Amir with a verse from the Quran, from a surah titled “At-Taubah, The Repentance”. It reads:

“Say, [O Muhammad], ‘If your fathers, your sons, your brothers, your wives, your relatives, wealth which you have obtained, commerce wherein you fear decline, and dwellings with which you are pleased are more beloved to you than Allah and His Messenger and jihad in His cause, then wait until Allah executes His command. And Allah does not guide the defiantly disobedient people.’”

“Then he asked me, ‘what do you think about that?’” Amir told him the first truth that came to his mind: “That’s the first time the word jihad has been mentioned to me,” he wrote in a message.

Though Amir had been online for well over a fortnight, much of his correspondence with sympathisers and IS fanboys had been about the fighting in Syria and the dire humanitarian situation and religion. Trained as an engineer, Amir claims, he had never imagined himself as a fighter—though intelligence officials disagree with his claim. Suddenly the prospect of fighting, to kill or be killed, of being one of the men he saw in videos seemed very real.

What do you think is the most attractive reward of jihad? I asked him.

“Seventy-two virgin whores,” he replied with an impassive face. That, and the belief that he could take 70 members of his family straight to jannat, according to a Bukhari hadith.

After that conversation, Abu Zakaria became more persistent about Amir joining the Islamic State. He would repeat again and again, “India is one of the safest places for a Muslim, your family is safe there, it is your duty to come here and help us and help your ummah.”

Amir had concerns and hesitations: “Why do they call ISIS terrorists?”

“We aren’t terrorists, we are just imposing the rules of sharia’a,” messaged Abu Zakaria.

“How was Baghdadi chosen as the Caliph?” he asked.

“We chose the most capable man among us,” Abu Zakaria said.

Abu Zakaria started teaching Amir about Surah Qaf, about helping the ummah. “He kept telling me that it was my duty to help at this auspicious moment,” Amir says.

So Amir did. It was mid-afternoon on August 18 and a small altercation took place between a boy and a girl. Determined to defend the girl’s honour, Amir walked over to the boy and pulled out a knife. Terrified, the boy ran to the principal who suspended Amir.

Without college, Amir got sucked deeper into Facebook. When the college tried to reach his parents, the phone didn’t connect. Amir had given an incorrect number and he was too afraid to tell his parents and more desperate than ever to leave.

“Can I come?” he messaged Abu Zakaria the following day.

“You never need to ask,” he replied. “This is your home.”

For the next couple of days, they spoke about the journey. Abu Zakaria calmed Amir, often speaking to him as an older brother. The handler assured Amir that he would have emotional support the entire way and sent a list of instructions to be followed strictly:

“Wear haram clothes,” he messaged. Amir understood this to mean “yo-yo type” clothes. He had already picked an outfit: black jeans and a black T-shirt like the fighters in the video he had seen.

“Anything but that,” Abu Zakaria said. “Do not carry a mobile, it can be traced,” he added.

Abu Zakaria presented him with the most direct route: Delhi to Istanbul and onward on what has been dubbed the Jihadi Superhighway. In Istanbul he was to purchase a TurkCell SIM with lira that he would change at the airport. From the airport, Amir was to take a  taxi to the Buyuk Istanbul Otogar, and message Abu Zakaria from there. Abu Zakaria would have a handler who would take him into Syria, waiting for Amir in Gaziantep.

Later that evening, Amir, who had appointed himself as the Emir (a title bestowed on rulers) of Hyderabad, called an urgent meeting after the prayers after sunset. His two followers met in an empty lot used as a cricket ground behind his modest house.

Amir was visibly sparked as he recounted the incident. “It’s finally happening, praise be to Allah,” Amir said. The young men smiled and embraced. “Praise be to Facebook,” he added, “without which none of this would have happened.”

***

Travel along the Jihadi Superhighway was a pipe dream and for days Amir lamented on Facebook about not having a passport. “He told just about anyone who would listen,” says an intelligence officer monitoring public Facebook groups related to Islamist extremism.

Amir also told new friends in closed groups and on popular pages. He moped about the house, acutely aware that at the end of the day, he was just a 19-year-old with little money. He even turned to Abu Zakaria.

“I don’t have a passport. Nor do I have any money to get a visa or to travel,” said Amir hoping Abu Zakaria wouldn’t lose his temper and might help him.

“We are in the middle of a war, I can’t fly people out here, this is not a holiday at my farm house,” he said at first. Later that night, he messaged about getting in touch with those who are “in the business of bringing people here,” Amir recalls.

So Amir started searching earnestly. He already had a group of friends online who were guiding him from page to page like a student graduating from one class to the next. They introduced him on a page called “Dawlat al-Islamiabil Iraq-ul-Sham” (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS) as a “brother”. On that page, IS sympathisers told him to remain steadfast in his search for finances, assuring him that for the pious God would create a way.

By mid-August, Amir received a message from a man named Anand Gowda.

“You have what it takes,” read the first message.

Amir didn’t bother to reply. He didn’t know Anand Gowda.

“Let me help you,” read the second message.

Anand Gowda’s profile picture, of a burly South Asian man with a heavy moustache didn’t match the ISIS profiles he had become accustomed to seeing. “The profile and its content were unlike anything I had seen. He was a normal businessman,” Amir says. It would take Gowda a couple of days to convince Amir that he was genuine, and he even produced a certificate that attested he had converted to Islam.

While Gowda and Amir were in conversation, Telangana Intelligence were studying the activity of a well-known ex-SIMI operative in Dubai. Senior sources in Telangana intelligence believe Gowda is the fake profile of the outlaw they are investigating. They even shared intelligence with the UAE authorities and were awaiting his deportation when Gowda got in touch with Amir.

To Amir, Gowda was a knight, a man with money, and a heart that belonged to the ummah. “Without him my plans would have remained just plans,” says Amir. Gowda promised to send Amir a total of ₹1.5 lakh in a couple of weeks and kept his word.

“This is a gift for your service to the ummah,” he said.

But police couldn’t act. They couldn’t prevent the men from engaging further. “No crime had been committed,” said Inspector Veer.

“Again, we tried to get in touch with Facebook to get information but they flat out refused. It would have been crucial to figure out who else was transferring the money because more than one person was involved in the money trail,” says a senior source in Telangana intelligence. Facebook refused to comment on this request of the police.

***

Half an hour from Amir’s house, down an unpaved alley, Karim sat under a broken chandelier playing online poker with opponents from all over the world. Dissatisfied with life in a small mohalla, bored with his job in foreign exchange, apprehensive about becoming a father, angry about the war in Gaza, the 24-year-old started playing online poker in June 2014 and escaped for a couple of hours every day, alone with his Sony Experia smartphone. Though gambling is haram in Islam, after a particularly exciting match he received a message from one of his opponents.

“Are you Muslim?” asked Ibn Muhammed.

“Yes,” replied Karim.

“Sunni or Shia’a?” he asked.

“Sunni,” he said.

“So we are brothers,” he responded and sent a friend request. Before going to bed, Karim accepted his request. A week after their first conversation in June 2014, Ibn Muhammed invited Karim to a page on comparative religion. He accepted the invitation.

The page was a sort of debating club where people showed off their knowledge of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Karim thought himself knowledgeable about Islam and was commenting frequently which meant that his Facebook wall showed him more and more news from the page.

People in the group would often talk about the Khilafa and a place called “al-sham”. Karim had only ever heard of these in history textbooks. In Islam, it is predicted that at a time when the world is in chaos, a new Caliphate will be declared, a new Caliph will emerge from the ranks of the Muslim fighters.

“I knew the history but these people were talking as though it was actually happening,” Karim told me under the broken chandelier.

One night, after a nasty duel with a commentator who alleged that Karim didn’t know anything about “political Islam,” he began to research and came across ISIS for the first time. He began searching for information on Facebook by typing “al-sham” into the search bar. He tried to seek out information on Google news, but Facebook was more compelling, he says. Soon, his two-hour nightly poker became an alternative education about politics and religion that took more than five hours every night.

Many videos appealed to the adventurer in him. There were videos in which men just like himself were training to be fighters, learning to aim a machine gun, riding black horses in the desert to ISIS anthems. When his pregnant wife finally nagged him into bed, he would lie next to her imagining himself in the back of a truck with the men in black riding towards the next battle.

It wasn’t until he came across a man named Mohammad Ibn al-Barra, an Australian of Syrian origin, that he truly wanted to be a part of that world. Through Barra’s page, Karim saw an intimate portrayal of life in a country ravaged by years of war. Barra became a real-time anchor, a war correspondent embedded in the theatre of war that most journalists were too wary to cover. But this anchor wasn’t like the ones on CNN. Barra was engaging and informal, he was real and approachable and soon Barra and Karim became “friends.”

There were similarities between the two: both liked the gym and had strong bodies, both had warm hazel eyes and dimples. However they led different lives. While Karim traded foreign exchange in Hyderabad, Barra had quit his job in Australia to help the thousands of Syrian refugees who had gathered on the Syrian-Turkish border.

Soon Karim began to spend most of his time checking Barra’s page. Barra shuttled between Syria and Turkey with bags of medicine that he dropped off at schools that were now makeshift refugee camps, he delivered band-aids and milk powder at places even the UN couldn’t reach, and he captured almost every step of the way on a camera. There were images of mothers greeting Barra with embraces, of rebels greeting him as a long-lost brother, and of children running to him. Barra became a hero to Karim.

When Barra’s Facebook account reached 5,000—the maximum number of friends allowed on Facebook—he started a Facebook page that had thousands of followers as well. In a way he offered an alternative to the darkness that has come to embody the Syrian war. In one photo, Barra is smoking shisha with fighters, in another he is posing with anti-tank missiles, and in another he is running, cigarette in hand, away from an explosion.

“It seemed exciting and he was doing something good,” recalls Karim.

Would you say this was like reality TV of war? I asked.

“I felt I was there, like I knew this man, like these were my people. It was all very real,” Karim said.

Along the way, as people lauded his efforts, Barra began asking for donations to fund his work and the money came rushing in to an Australian bank account, says Karim. Since he had been an early follower, Barra would often update Karim personally on events and at times even confided in him.

”Money is pouring in from all corners of the world and there is so much of it that I didn’t know what to do. I can buy out all the pharmacies on the Turkish border with the money I’ve raised,” he once said.

Over the course of six months, the conversation moved from war to life. Barra had met a beautiful green-eyed Syrian girl and they had married. The men shared another similarity: both would be fathers in the coming year. Late one night after a particularly tense day at work, he acted upon an urge that had been building up for weeks and sent a message to Barra.

“I want to come join you,” he wrote. “I want to help the ummah like you do, he wrote. Karim added, “I don’t want to fight, though.”

In our conversations in Hyderabad he told me that he wanted to create an account like Barra’s and provide an avenue for sympathetic Indians to provide monetary assistance as well as “old clothes” to the war-weary people of Syria.

“Why can’t I live an exciting life, while serving Allah, our ummah and earn good money?” he asked.

***

Days after he had expressed his desire to journey to Syria, Barra issued a set of instructions, similar to what Abu Zakaria had told Amir. He told Karim to get a visa from Turkey and purchase a TurkCell mobile. Karim was to make sure he had US dollars with him, and was not to speak to anyone or tell anyone where he was going. When he arrived, he was to check into a hotel with WiFi in Istanbul and inform Barra. Then he was to make his way to Reyhanli in Hatay where he would find a guide. The guides would ask for a fee and take him across the border.

Once in Syria, Karim was to make contact with Barra and join him, join them.

Karim, unlike Amir, had a passport and had been informed that authorities were wary of giving single men visas to Turkey so he applied for a visa for his pregnant wife, mother and himself. He succeeded in getting it. Despite getting the visa in July 2014, Karim didn’t want to journey alone.

“I wasn’t going there to die, but I was afraid,” he says.

In the beginning of August, Karim went to the al Azhari mosque, one that he usually didn’t frequent. It was afternoon prayers and the mosque was relatively empty. On that very day, another boy had been running late for his prayers and had left his mobile on ring as he prayed. Mid-way during prayer, an ISIS anthem cut the quiet of the domed mosque. Excited by the tune yet devoted in his prayers, Karim didn’t look up but finished his devotions. Then he scanned the room to see if anyone was on the phone. There was a small skinny boy talking on the mobile. That boy was Amir.

“I want to talk to you about an issue,” Karim said.

“Is that issue Syria,” Amir asked.

Karim looked down. “Kya, dar gaya? (Why, are you scared?)” he asked. And they agreed to talk later.

They met that  evening and began to talk in code.

“Are you planning on performing hijrah?” Karim asked Amir. Hijrah is a Quranic phrase that deals with the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina, and here refers to the journey to ISIS.

Amir nodded and explained his predicament. Everything was in place, he said, the route had been planned, a group had been organised but Amir was awaiting a “parcel” from Dubai. Karim, who was afraid to travel alone, offered Amir money from his foreign exchange business which Amir promised to pay back.

Several days later, after the passport application had been made, Amir informed Karim about a “parcel” that needed to be transferred to a bank account in India. Karim lent his back account details. But when Anand Gowda got nervous that the money trail could be followed, he asked for a pickup in Dubai. It was Karim’s cousin who went and picked up ₹1.5 lakh in Dubai, according to a source in intelligence.

More people sent money in the form of gifts: Umar-al–Kalai, another sympathiser, Western-Unioned him ₹1.5 lakh to cover travel expenses. Amir not only had enough money to buy a passport but more money than he had ever had. Four days after Amir applied, he got his passport.

In the third week of August, while Amir got busy finding an agent who would get him a  Turkish visa without asking too many questions, Karim travelled to Delhi to meet his in-laws and then returned to Hyderabad. Amir and Karim were in conversation about leaving together through this period.

On August 26, the day Amir was due to get his visa, there was a knock on Amir’s parents’ door. The police had come to inform Amir’s parents about their son’s impending travel.

Karim’s passport was also impounded on the same day. That was the end of his plan to join IS.

***

How did you know whom to watch? Are you watching private individuals’ Facebook accounts? I asked a senior member of Telangana intelligence.

“Most Facebook pages are open to the public. There are a few in particular such as the Indian Muslim Media Facebook Page where there is a lot of information on Babri Masjid and the Godhra incident. Pages like these are monitored. There are other pages, some related to Kashmir, there are a few with a Gulf connections such as the Emrati Islami Hind. We watch these pages and these men weren’t smart enough to cover their trail,” he says.

Amir, who was browsing public pages of jihadi propaganda, was easy for the police to track.

Did you not think of adopting a nom de guerre, I asked Amir.

“Honestly, I didn’t think I was doing anything illegal,” he said.

After his plan to travel on August 28 had been busted and his ally Karim had dropped out, Amir didnt’t return home. His parents were furious and devastated. The police informed them that Amir’s passport was being impounded immediately. Amir was outside his college when he received a phone call from his hysterical mother. She had already been on the phone yelling at the travel agent, who was ordered to stop processing the visa application.

“What have you become a part of,” she shouted. Amir stayed at a friend’s house. He still wanted to run away, to be a part of IS more than ever. He messaged Abu Zakaria and updated him.

“I had a passport. I had money. I almost had a visa. Now I have nothing again,” he wrote.

Abu Zakaria suggested he speak to Abu Hamza al-Muzahir, an IS sympathiser in Surat on August 29. Muzahir wasn’t the friendliest of people he had met online. His instructions were short and trite: “Get in touch with the Emir, a boy name Armaan. He will lead you to where you need to be,” he messaged.

Nineteen-year-old Armaan, the true Emir of Hyderabad lived in Karimnagar, a three-hour bus ride away.

***

Armaan was the youngest of the group and according to the police, the most radical of the four stopped in Kolkata. A short boy with spiky hair and rimmed glasses, he was also the least imposing. Armaan’s radicalisation was the quickest: a day after he turned 19, his father bought him a Samsung S4, in part a birthday present and in part a gift for excellent grades.

Armaan immediately downloaded the Facebook app. Though there was a computer at home, it was shared with his brother, and it never afforded him privacy. A couple of days after downloading Facebook, unaware of how to use the social media platform he began to search for inspirational quotes on Islam which he later updated on his public Facebook profile. Like the others, his online activity coincided with the attack on Gaza when posters such as “when one finger bleeds, the whole body hurts, the ummah is the body” were immensely popular. Soon his uploads began to get attention from Facebook users in Australia and the UK who were second generation migrants. Many were from Bangladesh, says an intelligence source.

They told him the only way to address the suffering of the ummah was to strengthen Islamic State, and invited him to a page called “Biladul Sham 2”. There was a great deal of activity on this page and the content was deemed too radical in nature to be tolerated on Facebook. The page was shut down and in its place another with the same title but different number popped up. In his five weeks online, Armaan frequented “Biladul Sham 2” to “Biladul Sham 17”.

Through this he attained knowledge which even mainstream media lacked: he knew where the ISIS army was advancing, he saw them travel from northern Syria and create mayhem in Iraq and when it conquered more territory he was surprised. Soon, Armaan was posting updates on battlefield successes as IS and its allies took more and more territory.

But there was more to their interchange than war.

“There was always someone to speak to. At any one time there were 15-30 people online to speak to and they welcomed me like no one else had done before,” he says.

He often asked what a slight boy like he could offer the Islamic State, and time and again he was informed that the state was not just a military unit but a body where all sorts of people were needed.

“We will assign you work based on your abilities,” read one message. There were many options for an educated boy like him.

“We will give you jobs in first aid, medical aid, or in ISIS accounts in the treasury,” they said.

“I felt as though I was there, that I belonged with the Khilafa. Those men were my brothers, like in a fraternity,” he says.

At the end of the second month, he was commenting on every third video and had earned a reputation as being a serious ISIS fanboy. Once when there was a particularly striking victory he wrote, “May Allah bring the infidels to their knees”, and when there were videos of atrocities committed by the government of Bashar al-Assad, he once wrote, “I’m going to cry”. The comment got over 500 likes.

Fountain Ink has reviewed the dossier with screenshots of these Facebook pages with comments by Armaan, prepared by the Telangana police. The pages have since been pulled down by Facebook.

***

“Amir was agitated to begin with, he had fashioned himself as the Emir and suddenly there was another boy who had genuine authority,” says Karim.

When Amir, Imran and Arbaaz reached Karimnagar, Armaan was firm. “There is no need to ask questions, just do as I say,” he said and asked them to form a row in front of the webcam. Then he called Muzahir, who had the support of several well-known IS sympathisers online. It was he who appointed
Armaan as the Emir of Hyderabad.

“Show me their faces,” Muzahir said on Skype, and Armaan walked from person to person asking them to introduce themselves. They later pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, their Caliph.

“Are you ready to perform hijrah?” Muzahir asked.

They all said yes.

“Very well then, let Armaan be your guide,” he said.

***

Given Armaan’s active engagement, he soon got in touch with an Indian jihadi group known as Ansar ul Tawhid ul Hind, which the police claim was providing help to Indians seeking to join the IS. It is through contact with this organisation that Armaan got in touch with Muzahir, who put him in touch with Abu Barak, the recruiter.

Several other Skype sessions were held with Muzahir and the young men. “He kept asking us if we were certain we could live there, that life wasn’t easy,” recalls Amir. He didn’t just paint a rosy picture, says Armaan. We knew life in the Islamic State was dangerous but we were ready, he says. When Muzahir was convinced, he put Armaan in touch with Abu Barak.

Since Amir, Imran and Arbaaz’s passports had been impounded, Abu Barak suggested an alternative which the men took. On the evening of August 29, 2014, Amir, Imran, Arbaaz and Armaan packed a small backpack each and boarded a train to Kolkata. On arrival, they were told to stay at a lodge Abu Barak recommended. The following day they went to a café where they used the free Wi-Fi and got in touch with Muzahir.

“Everything is in place, you know what to do,” he said.

The men would make their way to Bongaon, a small village on the border of India and Bangladesh. Late in the evening they would cross over and a handler would be waiting for them. He would carry fake passports and papers that the boys would use to travel to Afghanistan. The password he would have to give the handler was “Khilafa”. On their way home, the four men whispered the plan once again. Everything was in place.

When Amir sent the message to Muzahir, Inspector Veer was watching his activity. He soon traced his IP address and got in touch with intelligence in Kolkata who found the men had checked into a hotel on Armaan’s ID. Inspector Veer boarded a flight to Kolkata and made his way to the hotel. He waited in the lobby while the men were in the room.

All he had to say to the four men when they came down was, “Game over.”

Postscript: The police claim the four men and Karim have been “deradicalised” and some of them are back to attending college.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory in the elections paves the way for the country’s first democratic government which has to work under the eye of the all-powerful military.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIA ALLANA

Everything possesses an air of novelty in Yangon, even the opening of a new bar. In the heart of the colonial downtown, journalists drink with anthropologists, architects share popcorn chicken with development specialists, and waiters serve drinks whose names they can’t pronounce. The bar, named Father’s Office, is a tribute to General Aung San, father of modern Burma (now Myanmar) and father to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. It is also a tribute to a new chapter in Myanmar, where the proprietor, the daughter of a political prisoner, smiles for the camera instead of looking over her shoulder. This comes just days after the face of defiance against oppression, Suu Kyi, squashed the generals in an electoral victory heard around the world.

Myanmar is shining, and dazzling at the centre of the wooden bar, sipping a daiquiri is a young woman with very long legs and a very short dress. This is no ordinary dress. The Balmain × H&M “limited edition” black and white embellished dress has sold out in stores from London to Paris to New York within hours (and in some cases, minutes) and has even featured in an episode of Keeping up with the Kardashians. By the time night coils up in the bar, a gaggle of women have surrounded the young woman in the dress, desperate for details. Hesitant to volunteer information at first, she eventually succumbs.

The dress came from Hlaing Tharyar, a satellite town on the outskirts of Yangon, where garment manufacturers reopened shuttered factories as western sanctions waned. In 2012, the US and EU moved to lift an assortment of sanctions—economical and political—but limited sanctions remain to ensure the military’s commitment to reform.

Among the new foreign arrivals in the industrial zone is H&M. The woman’s driver had squeezed past alleys, past bamboo huts thatched with palm leaves, past workers who squat around factories and pulled over opposite a water pump where children bathe on the street. In a small store on the other side is the dress that had Father’s Office abuzz.

Hlaing Tharyar, the place that makes dresses that set bars aflutter, thrives on the labour of low-skilled workers, often underage and mostly women, who don’t have a fixed minimum wage.

“It was cheap,” the woman says of her dress.

“It’s obviously a fake,” someone whispers.

That dress in a bar, shimmering and short, made by the poor for the rich, a product of Myanmar’s hesitant transition to democracy, is full of promise and unreal—much like the country Suu Kyi inherits from the generals.

***

Myanmar lies in the centre of South Asia and Southeast Asia, sandwiched between India and China while sharing borders with Thailand, Laos and Bangladesh. According to the 2014 census, its population is more than 51 million with 135 distinct ethnic groups that are recognised by the government.

In a historic election on November 8 last year, the people of Myanmar voted in the Lady (as Suu Kyi is often called) and her National League for Democracy (NLD), both once considered a pariah and persecuted for decades by iron-fisted military rulers.

The journey to the election, when thousands in red took to the streets across the country, was years in the making. Its roadmap was laid in August 2003 when the junta announced the “Roadmap to the Discipline-flourishing Democracy” with the explicit aim of writing a constitution, electing representatives to the Hluttaw (legislative body) and, finally, holding parliamentary sessions.

Twelve years after the proclamation, 25 years after the last election—an election that the generals didn’t honour—and four years after they swapped their uniforms for civilian suits, Myanmar took to the polls as dictated by the constitution written in 2008. Though some 90 parties registered only two mattered: the NLD led by Suu Kyi, and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), a party of the military.

The election was largely peaceful and unlike 1990, the junta didn’t renege on its promise. Instead they conceded defeat in a Facebook post as President Thein Sein, a former general, congratulated Suu Kyi for “winning the people’s approval”, while the powerful army chief Min Aung Hlaing vowed “cooperation with the new government”.

NLD won 77 per cent or four-fifths of the contested seats in the lower house of parliament. But a quarter of parliament’s 664 seats are set aside for the army to ensure the survival of the military in politics. However, the 2008 constitution gives NLD the power to appoint the president. Clause 58 states that the president “takes precedence over all other persons in Myanmar.”

But the constitution also ensures that despite being loved by the public—who call her Amay Suu, Mother Suu—Suu Kyi will never become president. The law prevents those with foreign children from taking office. The three most powerful bureaucracies—military affairs, border affairs, and home affairs—will remain under the control of the military and their budgets are not open to civilian scrutiny.

Suu Kyi has on several occasions spoken out against the constitution, enacted after a referendum. “As you all already know, I believe the 2008 referendum didn’t really reflect the true desires of the public,” she said at a public rally in the Kachin State during the campaign.

***

A group of people have gathered outside the Royal Rose Restaurant in Yangon awaiting her arrival, but there is no certainty that Suu Kyi will turn up. Inside diners slurp bowls of khow suey until a black Toyota with tinted windows pulls in. Suu Kyi emerges, erect in posture at the age of 70.

Chopsticks drop. Waitresses stop taking orders. Out come the mobiles with their cameras and people rush. A ring forms and, within it, another ring. Men in crisp white shirts and green and blue longyis manage the excited crowd. Myanmar is still a country where minders and informers operate. Suu Kyi walks up the stairs and assumes her position at the head of a table, seated next to U. Tin Oo, a trusted confidant and chairman of the NLD, as he speaks to victorious MPs in their first meeting since the election.

Suu Kyi is not without her critics. She has been labelled “autocratic” by some members of the 1988 generation who led the first protests against military rule. Her ratings as a human rights champion have fallen given her silence over the Rohingya crisis while U Yan Naing, a former Muslim member of the NLD who joined in 1988, has been left “deeply disappointed” by her failure to appoint a single Muslim candidate for the elections.

Suu Kyi, however, remains untouchable: daughter of a martyred national hero who negotiated Burmese independence from the British, wife to a man who was denied access to her during his last days because she was under house arrest, and a mother to two sons who have grown up without much mothering. She has “paid a high price for being a participant in political life,” she told me in a 2010 interview.

For this she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 in absentia, made the cover of Time magazine several times, and at one time the world’s most famous political prisoner. Suu Kyi has attained the status of an icon and possesses as much star power as Angelina Jolie. In an August 2015 visit to garment factories in Hlaing Tharyar, Suu Kyi and Jolie created media frenzy while international tabloids heralded it as a union of two of the most powerful women in the world.

In this period of openness, Suu Kyi is everywhere. In bookstores, shelf after shelf is dedicated to her writings and biographies. Street vendors sell Suu Kyi calendars, children sell Suu Kyi postcards, and outside on the pavement of the NLD office, volunteers sell Suu Kyi T-shirts, satchels, magnets and stickers.

With the perks of being a revered figure come the drawbacks: Suu Kyi, who has spent 15 years over a 21-year period in house arrest, is much like a doll in a glass box, aware of the realities, but restrained. “Don’t for a moment think that the best minds and resources aren’t guiding her,” says a senior Western diplomat in Yangon.

Indeed, a political attaché at the British Embassy, has quit his job and is now a full-time member of her team. In a historic visit in 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state visited Suu Kyi at her lakeside villa to talk politics. Clinton was the first secretary of state to do so in 57 years and carried two books on Eisenhower and George Marshall as a present for Suu Kyi. Both men were former soldiers who got into politics. “There’s a lot of guiding behind the scenes,” a diplomat at a Western Embassy says.

She has on several occasions said she will be “above the president”, which is at once a lofty goal and vague ambition. Despite this, there is no denying that the power she wields is questionable: does she have the political capital to act or is she just a puppet in the hands of the generals who own the stage on which she performs?

The generals were in disarray anyway. Bitter struggles between the reformists who hadn’t gained enough and the henchmen who were loaded, had shaken the army. Two generals—both former protegés of the dictator Than Shwe—Shwe Mann and Thein Sein had already faced off. In what much of Yangon calls a “putsch”, Thein Sein had Shwe Mann booted out and assumed the presidency when the army remodelled themselves into a civilian governance body.

Shwe Mann got the position of speaker of the assembly, a body which many had called ineffectual. He made it a place for serious debate, no matter how doubtful its relevance in a country that is “devoid of the Rule Law”, according to Suu Kyi.  My enemy’s enemy is my friend, as the saying goes, and Suu Kyi struck close ties with Shwe Mann. It was he who appointed Suu Kyi to chair the Committee for Rule of Law and Stability and Peace in 2012.

Suu Kyi showed herself to be a cunning politician when she began talks with Thein Sein after he assumed presidency, and talked of serious reform. Thein Sein engineered reforms that transformed the country, reforms which were approved by the military. He released political prisoners, allowed NLD into politics, and as a result western sanctions on the country, businesses and individuals with close ties to the junta eased.

A couple of years into it, reforms stalled and soon the army threatened to return to its old ways, where journalists were chucked into prison, constitutional amendment remained a distant dream and hardline Buddhist monks threatened to hijack politics. “In a way the two military men have used Suu Kyi in this power struggle,” says a senior general. He later adds, “Maybe she’s used them both. But the real question is who is controlling them all?”

Towering over the country is Than Shwe, the patron saint of injustice, a sharp dresser with red betel-stained teeth, a man who still wields enormous power despite being out of office.

After the election, Suu Kyi met president Thein Sein, and commander-in-chief of the Army Min Aung Hlaing in separate meetings.

Then she held a third meeting with Than Shwe on November 19 last year. Multiple sources who had information about what went on behind the scenes spoke to me about the importance of this meeting.

The good-looking poster boy, Than Shwe’s grandson Nay Shwe Thway Aung, managed to sit the “Beast” (Than Shwe) down with the “Beauty” (Suu Kyi), an incredible feat given that Than Shwe’s superstitious aversion to Suu Kyi is a matter of jest in Yangon. The meeting ran well over an hour and a half, and with predictable measured statements emerging from it.

The real prize was a Facebook post from Nay Shwe Thway Aung.

He posted a 5,000 kyat bank note on his wall signed by three of the most important figures in Myanmar’s recent history: Than Shwe signed it in 2009, Thein Sein in 2012, and Suu Kyi on November 19, 2015. He claimed the signatures were collected when the person was to assume leadership. Both army and NLD have kept quiet on the nature of the succession, and Suu Kyi hasn’t forgotten 1990 when the election was just ignored, and is hesitant to speak. So while people desperately seek answers, they rely on symbolism and read between the signatures on a crimson bank note.

***

When the history of Ngwe Saung was being written, Achogyi was one of its first victims.

Achogyi was a fishing village with about 30 houses in Ngwe Saung—a coastal area with a stretch of beach—on the western coast of Myanmar. Local superstition claimed the black rocks in the sea that gave birth to large waves would one day wash away the village. But it wasn’t the waves, it was the junta that erased the name. Over the course of three years, even the birds forgot Achogyi but one man’s memory did not allow him to forget. This man was U-Hla Tham.

When the first trucks arrived at Achogyi, no road sign existed so the locals just pointed with their fingers. When the bulldozer flattened the houses to make way for new buildings, U-Hla Tham wept under his coconut trees. The trees and banana plantations were uprooted soon after. It was then he started recounting the story of Achogyi to his grandchildren, desperate to preserve the place even when it didn’t exist.

“Your great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather and grandfather were born in a house where the swimming pool stands today,” he told them. Materials the people had never seen—brick, cement, glass and tiles—created “new villages” across Ngwe Saung. Achogyi became the Bay of Bengal Resort, while other villages morphed into fancy hotels too. Despite the Ngwe Saung Tourism Development Authority’s attempt to bring together Ngwe Saung as an organic beachside community, the truth would remain: nobody belongs to Ngwe Saung and nobody is buried in Ngwe Saung.

The people who called the coast home have been inadequately compensated and pushed inward into a new village called Zee Hmaw from where they see shiny cars drive in and out of Bay of Bengal Resort. Five metres of dusty road, lined with stores selling wind chimes made of shells and “I love Ngwe Saung” T-shirts, separate U-Hla Tham’s old life from his new.

Anger and desperation led him to volunteer as a monitor during the elections. One month before the elections, he hung the NLD sign on the second floor despite complaints from his neighbour, a “crony” who owns one of the three concrete houses in Zee Hmaw.

“That’s why I voted for the Lady,” he says.“She will ensure I walk those five metres to what is rightfully mine.”

***

A Porsche Cayenne cuts past the Strand Hotel, a colonial relic restored to its former glory as a five-star hotel. A young man in beige chinos steps out and strides into the lobby.

“Crony,” mumbles the local journalist as we trail behind. A fleet of cars—BMWs, Range Rovers, Jaguars, and Rolls Royces—roar through the streets day and night. The revving engines awaken people to an awkward truth: there is no middle class in Myanmar. Years of running the country into the ground have not only ensured centralisation of power but also of wealth.

The cronies are everywhere, in all industries, leaving no profit-making enterprise untouched. Most notorious is Tay Za, 51, who owns the Aureum Palace Hotel, the most lavish and pricey resort in Ngwe Saung. He is chairman of the Htoo group of companies that owns Air Bagan, Myanmar’s first private airline. He flies in his private chopper to his luxury mountain retreat  and rips through the streets of Yangon in his Ferrari. The US Treasury has called him “an arms dealer and financial henchman of Myanmar’s repressive junta” and has imposed sanctions upon his companies, him and, until recently, his wife. His wealth is astronomical in a country where the majority subsist on an annual income less than $200 per capita, where 70 per cent of the average household expenditure is on food.

The list of cronies is long.

Aung Myat who is close to senior general Than Shwe, and a former minister of industry has heavily invested in the cement industry and construction projects. The EU has imposed visa restrictions upon him. The son of the USDP secretary, Nay Aung, has been awarded positions at the United Amaya Bank. Other cronies have cashed in too: Asia Green Development Bank was assigned to Tay Za, the Irrawaddy Bank to Zaw Zaw and Myanmar Shae Saung Bank to Chit Khaing, all military men. The son of General Than Shwe runs six gas stations in Yangon and Mandalay.

***

In a country that had become accustomed to speaking in whispers in tearooms, the diplomat seated in front of me at the newly-opened modern Rangoon Tea House dared to circulate what is a rumour. He leaned in, over a plate of tea leaf salad, and waited for the waiter to be out of earshot. The catalyst, he claimed, to the “Burmese Spring” had its origins in an incident involving a high-ranking member of the army and his aspiration to have his son educated abroad. However, the sanctions imposed by the west prevented this privileged child from reaping the benefits of decades of misrule by the army. It is more palatable for the world to deal with a lady with flowers in her hair than a general with stars on his chest.

Thus the “spring”.

It is an economic rebirth of sorts that has allowed hundred of billboards to bloom. Yangon’s street are gridlocked by cars because in 2012 the army lifted the ban on imports of foreign cars. Since then second-hand cars, mainly Japanese, have brought traffic to a standstill.

New shops line the streets where every third store sells mobile phones. Towering above the city are hoardings advertising the arrival of another game-changer: privatised telecommunication. Norwegian Telenor and Qatari Ooredoo sell SIM cards for less than $2 whereas two years ago a SIM card could cost about $2,000. Urban populations have connected to “The Facebook”, a term used interchangeably for the Internet.

Economic liberalisation has also regurgitated the same tired clichés: it is the “last frontier” in Asia, where a “new gold rush” has turned Myanmar into “the Wild West”. Special economic zones with preferential rates for foreign direct investment attempt to nudge the economy of a country which was considered the rice bowl of Asia, forward. Myanmar is among the least developed countries nestled in the fastest growing economic region in the world.

As it attempts to catch up, expats from around the globe have come to cash in. There is money to be made in construction, development, fisheries, agriculture, mining, a list limited only by imagination. Investment. Investment. Investment. The word is heard in the bar at the Strand where Orwell and Kipling once drank, and at the poolside lounge at the Savoy where lobster-red, sunburnt white men drink Myanmar beer and high-five each other.

“Welcome to Burma,” they say.

***

Myanmar is on the cusp of change. Between 1900 and 1990, average GDP growth of the world economy was three per cent, but Myanmar’s growth was only 1.6 per cent. While the global per capita GDP quadrupled during this period, Myanmar’s remained stagnant. With the country opening up for business, it remains a virgin land of opportunity, ripe for exploitation.

A McKinsey report states, “If current demographic trends continue and labour productivity growth remains the same as it has been over the past 20 years, annual GDP growth could be as low as 3.7 percent. However, Myanmar has the potential to achieve rapid economic growth equivalent to eight percent per annum if it taps the full potential of all seven key sectors of its economy. Expanding these sectors (manufacturing, agriculture, infrastructure, energy/mining, tourism, financial services, and telecom) could more than quadruple its size from $45 billion in 2010 to over $200 billion in 2030.”

Those in power and their cronies have most to gain.

When the juice had been squeezed from the economy, when Chinese hegemony started grating as they sucked the money from mineral-rich Myanmar, reform began. So cronies became businessmen, much like the generals who became politicians. Tay Za invested some of his income from the lucrative gem and timber trade and entered the white economy with hotels, planes and acres and acres of rice fields. Other cronies followed as they could be vulnerable to political reversals.

In this new Myanmar, Tay Za is sponsoring training for newly elected members of the NLD, many of whom are first time legislators at the Shwe San Eain Hotel in Naypyidaw, a hotel he owns.

“When did you hear of the oligarchs?” asks a senior member of the USDP and answers the question himself: “when the disintegration of the Soviet Union happened. That is what you will witness here soon, the rich are about to get much richer.”

“She’ll be held more accountable,” the USDP bureaucrat laughs and say, “Holding your first conference at a luxury hotel owned by a blacklisted tycoon, the Lady is not so different from us.”

***

An icon is a mascot, a rallying figure. A government is bureaucratic, a somnolent combination of the routine and the mundane held together in the spirit of compromise, of wheels within wheels, levers within levers, that are the nuts and bolts that can transform a country. A government does not have the luxury of an ideal situation. Great principled rhetoric can’t move a single file in the secretariat. Suu Kyi, the icon, now needs to become a leader who governs through a system best known for its cruel misrule.

A dedicated political movement like the NLD needs to transform itself into a body fit for governance. Many leaders of the NLD had been living in exile for years together and others went in fear of retribution for their political activities.

“This election, this moment is a dream. We don’t want to wake up,” says U Aung Thein, one of the oldest members of the NLD and its auditor.

At the NLD office in Yangon, senior party members try best to explain what “de-mo-kra-see” is, an idea for a revolution that they now have a chance to live. There is no word for democracy in their language nor is there one for the “rule of law”.

Enlarge

Elders explain foreign concepts and new ideas in the old office where cracks in the false ceiling expose the tin roof. Others file returns on campaign expenditure to ensure that the election process has been transparent. Papers, some as old as the patrons, brown with age, are piled on top of steel cabinets. There is only one computer under a large poster of Suu Kyi which has been made by small newspaper cut-outs of her face. At the entrance is a picture of Suu Kyi smiling with Obama, a signal of one of the major shifts in Myanmar’s international posture: a move away from China, that was an ardent supporter of the military regime, towards the West.

In the only prefabricated air-conditioned room big enough to accommodate a table, two chairs and a picture of General Aung San sits U Tin Oo, chairman of the NLD who is widely tipped to be the next president of Myanmar. In one of the few interviews he has given since the election, he speaks to Fountain Ink.

Why is the army willing to let go of some of its powers? I ask.

Tin Oo’s face breaks into a cautious smile. “Amnesty,” he says, his skin firm, his tone unwavering despite his age.

He had been a young man when General Aung negotiated the freedom of the country, and had gathered with the masses mourning the loss of the great hero a year later. For about a decade Myanmar enjoyed relative calm but the state slid economically backwards, wars disrupted large parts of the country, and Ne Win led a coup in 1962 to restore “order”. His was a brutal and misguided rule. Neither knowledgeable nor passionate about Buddhism or socialism, he put Myanmar on the Burmese Path to Socialism and thus began the country’s isolation. Brash and paranoid about the students who led protests, when Ne Win travelled to Austria and England for medical check-ups, universities remained closed.

After Ne Win, Than Shwe took on the task of running Myanmar further into the ground. His outlandish decisions are unnumbered: paramount among them was to move the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw in order to create an imperial city for the junta, miles away from anything. Elusive and paranoid, he distanced himself from public view and had he been produced as a war criminal, the average citizen might not even recognise him.

For years the government has ruled this resource-rich country with such disregard that large parts of the population live at levels of desperation associated with Africa. For years the rulers have been so brutal that charging them with “crimes against humanity” is a distinct possibility. A UN inquiry into their deeds isn’t off the cards either.

“Just look at Cambodia,” he says, where members of the Khmer Rouge are under trial; many have died at the dock. “The army cannot stand the elements from inside and from outside. The country is degrading economically and Burma is becoming a failed state.”

Discussions between Suu Kyi and the generals started in 2011, a year after she was released from house arrest. Before that they had decided to move away from China and get closer to the West.

“There was a reconciliatory attitude even prior to Suu Kyi’s release,” he says, but the West was keen on talks between Suu Kyi and the president and she kept reiterating “‘I want to help you if you need help from me,’” he says.

Progress was slow. At least 10 rounds of discussions, mostly on the economic backwardness of the country, took place of which Tin Oo was privy to more than half but they yielded no progress. The icebreaker was a communiqué in the form of a letter passed over in 2011 with a clear message: democracy would be possible. The nature of this democracy remains vague as Suu Kyi and the generals continue to hold conversations behind closed doors.

New alliances have been struck but a tussle between moderates and hardliners isn’t too unlikely a prospect, says a high-placed source in the NLD. “Many are aware of the need for change but others live in paranoia. It may seem as though there is an opening but this is still a closed society,” the source says.

“We need to create a middle class,” Tin Oo repeats several times and attempts to explain the difference between “good cronies” and “bad cronies”.

All cronies stifle entrepreneurship, there is no good or bad, I say.

“Don’t be foolish,” says Tin Oo and for a moment the 88-year-old morphs back into his position of commander-in-chief of the armed force. Stern and sharp. “There are cronies everywhere, we welcome every good enterprise as we stand at the gates of democracy,” he says.

Just then his assistant storms in. Some Australians have arrived to talk business.

***

In another NLD office in a town called Myaungmya, deep in the heart of the Irrawaddy Delta, a couple lie on a mattress in the back room. They met a few months ago on the campaign trail. Strangers from different parts of this town, they travelled to far-off villages, 504 in total, in a region famed for its sweet fluffy rice, telling people how to cast their vote. The people they encountered, devastated by cyclone Nargis, were bitter with years of neglect. “This is what the NLD logo looks like,” she, Khin Sandar Aung, had said. While he, Ko Ko Aung, had shown people how to stamp the ballot just once.

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Keen to tell the tales and encounters  from the campaign trail, she drags me into a small tea house where people sit on wobbly wooden chairs and sip tea from white cups.

Myaungmya  is the sort of town where a foreigner stands out like a general at a NLD rally and my presence catches the attention of a group of men, one of whom wears a tight fitting T-shirt with Suu Kyi’s face on his back. He walks over.

Zani Tint used to work on a merchant ship and had spent days at sea carrying cargo with logs of famed Burma teak. When they docked at ports around Southeast Asia, he would often wander, captivated by the shiny buildings of Singapore and appalled at Papua’s poverty. Over the course of 15 years, he had seen just about every country in Southeast Asia and returned to a life stuck in time, going nowhere. He took charge of his father-in-law’s jewellery store, a shop that had neither grown nor shrunk in 45 years.

The other men at the table, all small-time businessmen—a convenience store owner, a stationery store owner and another jeweller—too had inherited businesses that filled their stomachs but not their appetite. “We want opportunities, we want to grow,” one man says.

Another who had spoken at the NLD rally on a stage assures people that the NLD would ensure all men had equal opportunity. A senior officer of the army, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, had said: “Suu Kyi will have to be more careful who she does business with. People are watching her.”

While sipping sweet tea, the elected MP passes by, wearing a green Hawaiian T-shirt with an unlit cigarette between his lips. “We want better teachers, we want better schools, we need to create opportunities for small businesses. Everything needs to change,” he says and keeps walking in a city where politics was all people spoke about.

Economic changes have already gripped Myaungmya  with the arrival of the Myaungmya  Industrial Zone, where chimneys rise as high as the palm trees. Rice mill after rice mill is running in the lush forests and a steady stream of cargo vessels pulls away from the banks. The merchants at the tea shop didn’t get a penny out of this, and angry farmers hadn’t been compensated for the land grab. We sip our tea in silence until someone interrupted: “Capitalism,” he says.

The white colonials who came to rule Myanmar, followed by the generals who controlled it now made way for a group of people who would pretend a free market economy existed. It was the colonial club making way for the capitalist club.

The table has changed, the players are the same.

***

The reporter at Bi Mon Te Nay news journal knew he  should have not written the story on July 7, 2014. Unlike the decades gone by, there was no restriction for free men to congregate and a large crowd had gathered outside the court in Yangon for the trial. He had gone only to observe after being invited through a Facebook group, but the Movement for Democracy Current Force (MDCF), the group that the accused had started, distributed a leaflet with a message from the man at the dock. This was too big a moment to ignore.

The people have appointed Suu Kyi and ethnic leaders to form an interim government, it read. When the story landed on the editor-in-chief’s desk, he knew there was no turning back. He authorised the publication of the leaflet on the front page of the bi-monthly publication.

This was the sort of story that would anger the doorkeepers at the Ministry of Information but unlike previous years, stories no longer went to the censors. Journalists were free to write and publish what they desired but the published paper had to be sent to the ministry.

Writing the truth wasn’t without consequences, though. That hadn’t changed at all over the decades.

The night after publication, the editor  sat on the wooden chair opposite the front door of his apartment, awaiting arrest. The reporter and the managing editor had already been picked up. Any minute now, he thought. No one came. He waited, growing impatient until around 3 a.m. after which he made his way to the Special Branch of police in downtown Yangon. The office, an unnamed but well-known building, was quiet. He walked to the officer on duty: “I’m guilty of publishing the truth,” he said.

An hour later, he was back at his apartment, where three police officers went through his drawers. His wife and child had been woken from their sleep while an officer looked under the mattress. After they’d searched his laptop and were satisfied, he was locked behind bars. The arrests rattled the press corps because the government submitted a complaint directly to the police, bypassing the Myanmar Press Council which was set up to handle complaints. He was sentenced to two years in Insein Prison, and ultimately spent one year and 22 days inside the notorious jail.

He was booked under the 1950 Emergency Provisions Act that bans content that can “affect the morality or conduct of the public or a group of people in a way that would undermine the security of the Union or the restoration of law and order.” There is not one law but several that ensure a chained press. A 2013 Telecommunications Law allows the government to intercept information that threatens national security or the rule of law while the 2004 Electronics Transactions Law prohibits the electronic transfer of information liable to undermine national security and has been used to clamp down on Internet activism.

“What about all this talk of the freedom of the press?” I asked.

“We are freer, we just have to think twice before we publish,” he said.

***

At the offices of the Associated Alliance of Political Prisoners (AAPP), there hangs a board with pictures of people, young and old, who have been detained on dubious charges. There are people who have been arrested without warrants, there are student protestors who have been arrested as they demonstrate against the Education Bill which would prevent them from joining unions. A blogger, a poet, a rebel, and a student—all languish in prisons across Myanmar for acts such as posting a meme on Facebook which pokes fun at the generals, for writing poetry of sedition, and for demanding that ethnic languages be taught in school.

“Compared to 2010, arrests have increased,” Moe Zaw of the AAPP, said.

***

I didn’t vote,” said the Kachin leader and hung up abruptly. These were tense times and he was afraid to talk.

We hadn’t spoken for many years but had met eight years ago in Mae La Refugee Camp on the Thai-Burmese border, in a cramped room where he showed me all sorts of weapons and explained the “truth” about Myanmar.

“There are three Burmas,” he had said. “The white, the grey and the black.” The government controls the white, the grey may or may not be under a ceasefire, and the black belongs to whoever controls it. He didn’t view the government as legitimate nor did he recognise its authority.

In the months leading up to the election, the government in Naypyidaw made a lot of noise about signing ceasefire agreements with armed groups but the deal wasn’t all-encompassing. Though ethnic groups on the border with Thailand had come to the table, long stretches of territory bordering China remained out of government control. Two of the largest militias, belonging to the Kachin and Wa, each with tens of thousands of soldiers, didn’t sign the agreement. There was an uptick in violence immediately after the vote.

Myanmar is home to many civil wars, and so deep are the fissures that Myanmar’s Union Election Commission which oversees the polls announced that elections wouldn’t be held in parts of war-torn Shan State.

The vote didn’t stand a chance in at least 42 villages in the Wa Self-Administered Division, an area that pledges allegiance to China. In spite of a  ceasefire agreement, the vote had been cancelled in over 400 villages in Kachin, Karen, Shan and Mon states. Unlike the Rohingyas who had been denied the vote on the grounds that the people were “foreign”, the ethnic issue in Myanmar is one that has troubled the country since its inception.

The areas where the rebels fight are rich in minerals, and hubs of drugs, the trade that fuels the fight. Kachin state in northern Myanmar produces the finest quality of milky-green jade.

Cronies of the junta battle local rebel armies for control over the best quarries in an industry whose value, according to a Global Witness report, is placed at $31 billion in 2013, which is nearly half of the national GDP and 46 times the allocation on healthcare. But according to the Natural Resource Governance Institute, the value of the jade trade is a mere $374 million.

“Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” says Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba in the report. Conditions are so dire in the quarries that miners have turned to heroin.

Myanmar is the world’s second-largest poppy grower after Afghanistan. The Shan and Kachin state are producers. Despite the drive to reduce poppy cultivation, there was a 13 per cent increase in cultivation, placed at 870 tonnes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime notes,“Food insecurity and poverty in the rural areas fuel illicit opium poppy cultivation, which is reinforced by the armed conflicts and ethnic tensions in Shan and Kachin states.”

***

When much of the world was busy slapping the country’s dictators on the wrist by imposing sanctions and restricting their travel, India remained dedicated to maintaining cordial relations with the generals. Officially formal ties began with the 1951 Treaty of Friendship but a meaningful economic relation began following Rajiv Gandhi’s visit in 1987. Trade between the two countries is currently $2 billion and the majority of the tur dal in stores in India is from Myanmar.

The current value of Myanmar’s exports to India in pulses and beans is  $800 million. Myanmar meanwhile imports pharmaceutical products from India. With the preferential rates and the presence of oil and gas in Myanmar, ONGC will soon enter the market and Tata Motors has set up a heavy turbo-track assembly plant with financial assistance from the Indian government. Sources at the Ministry of External Affairs say that the two countries will be moving towards defense cooperation in the near future.

A new government of the NLD, a product of the long and brutal revolution, and a resounding electoral victory, is about to take charge. It believes in the rule of the law, and inherits a system where the rule of the few prevails. It believes in creating a middle class, where a cabal of the cronies play capitalists. It believes in freedom, when the laws of the land emasculate it.  It wants factories, and is willing to do business with “good cronies”. It has among its voters a man whose house is now the swimming pool of a resort, and who wants it back. Its mascot is an icon, long-persecuted and long-revered, who can’t be president, but who has to run a country and keep her oppressors in good humour. It has the hopes and prayers of millions, but the powerful men in uniform control its fate.

This is Myanmar, the world’s newest democracy.

BY G K RAO
INFOGRAPHIC BY KARTHIKEYAN R
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY DINAMALAR

The deluge has washed over Chennai and the waters have receded, leaving behind a weary waste of household wreckage wherever the eye lights. Still, the city is beginning to sort itself out as the sun is shining again. For some people, however, the worst is now as they contemplate ruined homes and the destruction of all the value they had so painfully built over the years. The state government is beginning to move into gear but it is bound to be slow work. Rehabilitation is mainly its responsibility and this time there is a great deal at stake with an assembly election just months away.

As the initial numbness wears off, more and more people are asking what happened and why. Why were they never given an idea of how unprepared the city was for the monsoon? Why, 10 days after the event, were entire localities still inundated? The top echelon of the administration, which is supposed to lead from the front, appeared clueless both before and after the deluge.

The rain is, of course, a large part of the explanation. This was an unprecedented monsoon with the precipitation breaking all-time records, three separate events of all-day rain that overran by many times the capacity of the city’s drainage system. Meanwhile, the Adyar River, swollen far beyond its usual limit by rain in its catchment area and, possibly, massive inflows from the various lakes and tanks along its course swept through the city, breaking its banks and for a brief while taking back its old flood plain, with disastrous results for the people occupying it.

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This line of narrative is perfectly true but does not explain how and why people came to be living on the flood plain. Surely the city’s engineers are aware of the risks attending such a scenario. Take the case of the Kotturpuram housing for economically weaker sections. Anyone crossing the Adyar at Kotturpuram is bound to see the rows of flats huddled across one of the banks of the river. The peeling institutional once yellow walls and the boxy shape are like a government stamp. These flats were built by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board for poor people. They’re almost in the riverbed.

Presumably there was a study before the project came up, but there they are, flirting with, inviting disaster. The occupants have suffered not one but several encounters with flood water. In 1985 it reached the second floor. This time, too, when the Adyar broke its banks the EWS flats were under water up to the first floor. It remained that way for days on end, with many residents marooned because Kotturpuram was one of the most difficult areas to reach.

What makes this case particularly noteworthy is that the builder is not a fly-by-night operator but the state. The occupants are not illegal squatters but have titles awarded by the state. Yet they are living in an area where the threat of flooding is ever-present. They are so close to the Adyar that even a small increase in river flows becomes problematic.

The rest of Kotturpuram is similarly situated. The high value residences are less vulnerable but this time the entire area, with a few exceptions, was under four to five feet of water, from the Adyar and the nearly 40 centimetres that poured down on December 1-2. Again, this layout is officially sanctioned. Whether all of it is in the river’s flood plain is not entirely clear but there is no provision for draining the excess. If the river breaches its banks, Kotturpuram residents have two options; flee their homes or stay and suffer the consequences.

Indeed, there is more than one report by expert committees highlighting this danger. Here is an excerpt from a 2008 study.

“Problems due to flooding may be attributed to:

(i) The change in land use leading to increase in runoff volume with reduction in time of concentration;

(ii) Encroachment along the banks of the river;

(iii) Inadequate storm water drains and their poor maintenance; and

(iv) In urban watershed, inundation occurs even for a low intensity short duration storm.”

The first point is the key one. It means that the flood plain has been encroached upon for several decades as the city grew. Large parts of the plain were converted into patta lands (ownership approved by the state government). It had two consequences. The first was that construction on these patta lands reduced their capacity to retain water. The runoff has increased steadily over the years. Secondly, the river had no place to go as its “right of way” was progressively taken away. In some places up to 30 per cent of the plain was lost to officially approved encroachment. The result of this approach is that projects and layouts in these areas are always vulnerable in times of heavy rain. In the deluge of December 1-2 when the river was discharging up to ten times its usual load areas such as Kotturpuram, Ekkattuthangal and Saidapet were the first to be affected. The situation was compounded by the lack of alternative drainage, and the three factors created a positive feedback loop to wreak havoc.

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In other words, successive state governments since the 1970s are primarily responsible for the mess. They ignored the warnings of their own experts and sanctioned development plans without thinking of the consequences. When these same experts pleaded for mitigation in the form of a drainage network it was delayed for various reasons. Permissions for building, however, continued to be given regardless of the capacity to handle sewage and storm water discharge. After a point any city planner would have known that the structure was unsustainable. December 1-2 was the knockout punch that followed the body blows dealt by the wettest November in decades. The real culprit, however, is the government’s mindless destruction of built-in safety valves such as flood plains and the city’s lakes and tanks, which held the runoff and recharged aquifers and wells in the vicinity.

***

Hindsight is a great thing and can prevent every tragedy before it begins. Unfortunately, it is always after the event. Nevertheless, it is a temptation to see what might have been saved if existing safeguards had been exploited. The Adyar, for instance, is just about 42 kilometres from source to mouth. About half of that flows through Chennai city. It rises from three sources, the Chembarambakkam lake basin, Guduvancheri in Chengalpattu district and Malaipattu tank in Manimangalam village of the same district. The three streams join at Thiruneermalai to form the Adyar. Its watershed has 109 lakes and tanks, large and small, natural and man-made that act as feeders.

These water bodies are part of the magnificent water management network handed down to us as a more than 1,000-year-old legacy. Southern India, especially the old Tamil country, has few substantial rivers. Water was a problem even in the best of times as there are no perennial rivers of the kind that flow across the north. The only solution was to store rain water and reduce the runoff to the sea. That is the origin of water harvesting. It continues to prove its worth even today as about one-third of the area under paddy in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu is irrigated by tanks, or ery as they are called. The Kaveripakkam tank, one of the largest and oldest in Tamil Nadu, is said to have been built by Nandhivarma III (846-869). It covers an area of 16.06 sq km.

The ery is a small body of water formed by damming a natural depression with bunds or embankments on three sides and leaving the fourth side open to the water that flows in from the catchment area. Water is stored for irrigation, drinking and recharging aquifers. Overflows are released through a weir and water for irrigation by a sluice which directs it into channels built to cover the entire designated area or ayacut. It is a small but precise feat of engineering designed for purely local conditions. There are thousands of these tanks or ery across Tamil Nadu.

In the 1850s a British engineer, R. Baird Smith observed in a report on irrigation in Madras Presidency:

“The extent to which it (irrigation works) has been carried throughout all the irrigated region of the Madras Presidency is truly extraordinary. An imperfect record of the number of tanks in 14 districts (of the Madras Presidency) shows them to amount to no less than 43,000 in repair and 10,000 out of repair or 53,000 in all. It would be a moderate estimate of the length of embankment for each to fix it at half a mile; and the number of masonry works, in sluices of irrigation waste weirs, etc, would probably be not over-rated at an average of six.

“These data, only assumed to give some definite idea of the extent of the system, would give close upon 30,000 miles of embankment (sufficient to put a girdle around the globe not less than six feet thick) and 3,00,000 separate masonry works. The whole of this gigantic machinery of irrigation is of purely native origin, as it is a fact that not one new tank has even been made by us, and the concurrent testimony of those best informed on the subject shows that a great many fine works of the kind have been allowed to fall into utter disrepair and uselessness.”

A Tamil Nadu government report of 2005-06 states that there were 40,319 tanks irrigating 5,75,352 hectares in various districts. More than half the irrigated area in Kancheepuram district was under tanks. A system that at Independence was deemed primitive and having outlived its usefulness continues to be central to the lives of lakhs of people even today. This is a regime, moreover, that lends itself naturally to flood control as the ery are generally linked to each other in clusters by channels.

The overflow from an ery at a higher contour line was directed to one at a lower line by channels dug for the purpose. The system at its best was like a giant man-made sponge soaking up large quantities of water in times of excess, retaining it to recharge water tables and reduce the pressure on small rivers like the Adyar that are prone to flash floods in the monsoon. The system would also check soil erosion, a big problem for small rivers which silt up quickly, reducing their ability to hold water during a flood.

So far, not a single report on the deluge of November-December has even mentioned the condition of the 109 lakes and tanks in the Adyar’s catchment, much less whether the links and channels between them were in sound condition or the extent to which they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of precipitation. The worst affected districts of Chennai, Tiruvallur, Chengalpattu and Kancheepuram have over 3,000 tanks and lakes. Were they made ready for the monsoon and did they play a role in the flooding?  Information on this would at the very least clarify whether the PWD did its job.

***

For a city that is so desperately short of water Chennai is prone to flooding, especially in so-called low-lying areas. Usually it is worst in the suburbs, though central areas such as T. Nagar and Mambalam are also susceptible. Parts of north Chennai outside the original town are also vulnerable. This time even the ultra-posh Boat Club area was inundated but there are many parts of the city that go under even in the southwest monsoon. The one reason everyone mentions is that there are over 5,000 kilometres of road length but only a third of that has a sewer system to drain water. The rest are condemned to stagnant water when it rains heavily, for hours if they are lucky, days if not. There is little mention of the other factor, which is probably far more decisive.

Most of us living in the city feel we’re really unlucky if our localities get flooded after an hour-long downpour. But luck has nothing to do with it. This is institutional stupidity at work. Take an old map of the city and lay it on the latest one. Many of today’s localities don’t exist but if your area is particularly prone to inundation, there’s a good chance that it was either on the edge of a lake or was part of a lakebed.

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The old city of Madras was full of erys across its length and breadth. The precise number is a matter of debate but there seems to be general agreement that it was over 120. A great many of them have been filled up and built upon, for instance, the so-called Lake Area that spans Nungambakkam and parts of T. Nagar. This is one of the perennially problematic localities. Even a short sharp shower sometimes causes flooding and major traffic problems. Parts of this area had four to five feet of water on the streets, and were unreachable for days after the deluge. Residents were marooned without power or water. The only food was what they had before the rain started. Dry ground was just minutes away in some cases but there was no way of getting to it.

In fact, the entire area from Nungambakkam through T. Nagar, Mambalam and up to Saidapet (among the worst affected areas) was part of a massive continuous system called Nungambakkam Lake-Long Tank until the 1920s. Is it any surprise that they should be vulnerable to flooding, especially as the drainage system is still so basic? The system drained the areas around it but once it was filled up there was no place for the overflow. The alternative drainage is simply not good enough to cope, given that the runoff is so much more in this highly urbanised, totally built up space. In the old days open spaces would have absorbed some of the water. Now there is hardly any left.

So there is lots of real estate, lots of wealth but hardly any thought to water management, which should have been central to the world of the urban planner.  No one seemed to realise what might happen if a city was built over its lakes rather than around them. Look at the contrast with the men who built the ery system. In his paper on “The Ery Systems of South India”, T. M. Mukundan notes: “Only recently, modern irrigation experts have begun to consider an entire irrigation basin as an appropriate unit for designing irrigation systems. This was an established practice in ancient times.” This was the vision that created the intricate network of ery and their connecting canals. The outcome was a system that maximised control and minimised mishap.

For instance Malaipattu tank, one of the Adyar’s sources, had extremely heavy rain and was running full two weeks ago when my colleague Saurav visited it. But in the nearby village of Manimangalam residents barely wet their toes. The same was true of Chembarambakkam as well. Even after this deluge the residents around seemed safe if shaken by its intensity. A district-wide survey would be interesting; perhaps even provide a clue about where to site dwelling places.

***

There is perhaps some excuse for inner Chennai where development took many decades and there was enough provision on paper for a complete drainage system. But it was never laid in full. Though it was informed by a general ignorance of hydrology, many senior PWD engineers of the time did sound warnings more than once. The same reasoning cannot be used for the IT corridor running parallel with the East Coast Road on Old Mahabalipuram Road.

Most of the area was a freshwater swamp until independence. Pallikaranai was once a complete aquatic ecosystem spread across approximately 80 sq km, the city’s only surviving wetland and one of the last remaining natural wetlands of south India. It is also a vast drain for the excess of monsoon precipitation in a catchment area of about 235 sq km. The volume of water it can hold is thus impressive.

Beginning in 1806 for the Buckingham Canal, it has been encroached upon by successive generations for various purposes. Today about 90 per cent of the marsh has been lost to development but the shrinkage was gradual until the IT corridor was designated.  After that it was a virtual gold rush and free-for-all as the area was swamped by real estate developers, all frantically clearing, filling and building in a desperate rush to grab the jackpot. Pallikaranai  was a place under siege.

It became a part of the Chennai Corporation in 2011 and is one of the country’s top investment destinations in residential real estate. A report by global property consultancy Knight Frank estimated that housing prices would increase 93 per cent in the period 2012-17. It’s a home for tens of thousands of rising young things housed in a myriad high-rises and working from other high rises in the area and outside. The villages surrounding the marsh turned almost overnight into prime real estate. In the process virtually every warning about drainage, low-lying areas, danger of inundation was ignored. Build or perish was the slogan and perish they nearly did in the last couple of months. Dream locations became waking nightmares of steadily rising water as the rain bucketed down.

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OMR, as it is known, was one of the worst affected districts of Chennai in the deluge. Roads were washed away or became like canals, thousands of people were stuck in their tall buildings without power or water or food, and when the water receded the place was initially unrecognisable. The OMR disaster is the result of administrative neglect and dereliction of duty by virtually everyone in power, from ministers downwards. The principal culprit is indiscriminate planning permission without providing for drainage and the second is the inability by both builders and the authorities to recognise that this is where the water pools when there is too much of it. There is no other place for it to go. Given the conditions, what happened was inevitable. What was on display was not the power of nature but the power of institutional stupidity. Few things are deadlier.

The last question to ask is, will the government learn from the disaster, start remedial work and be more strict about enforcing the rules? The answer is still blowing in the wind, but past experience offers little encouragement. There’s more money in breaking rules than in enforcing them.

BY SAURAV KUMAR
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY DINAMALAR

The MTC bus driver, one hand clutching his jaw and the other sitting dead on the steering wheel, was blinking hard and fast like bursts from a machine gun as the vehicle barrelled down MTH Road in north Chennai. The road was empty and intact, the sky blue, and the rain faint. There were a dozen or so passengers, mostly old men and women, and a young woman carrying two large cans of idlis and pongal to distribute to those whose houses had been flooded. Her house had survived, and she had heard that a great many people were without food and water.

The bus, too, was a survivor. The night before, water had crept up to its scratched windshield from the top of which dangled a broken wiper, but had stopped before it could break the glass, the driver said. It had whooshed its way inside, from the cracks and holes in the aluminium floorboard, from the cut-outs for brake and clutch pedals.

No one knew where the water came from. It came from everywhere after the rainfall on December 1 and 2. It was from the Adyar and Cooum rivers. It came from an overflowing Buckingham Canal. It came from the system of tanks and lakes that breached in the Tambaram-Mudichur area, 40 kilometres south of Chennai. It came from the discharge by the rain-fed Chembarambakkam Lake near Tambaram, the single reason for the devastation, Chennaiites have been told. It is an unbelievable reason, when in one day Chennai and Tambaram received 30 and 50 centimetres of rainfall respectively, and every important water body and canal brimmed over.

It brought the deluge inside the bus, depositing into it the remains of a city. A red shirt that once belonged to a child, pages from a comic, a beige Bata Sandak plastic slipper, the shell of a cell phone, and a thick layer of dirt. On the morning of December 5, the shards of a broken city were inside this metal box hurtling towards Avadi, driven by a man so bone tired he couldn’t even lift his arm to stifle a yawn.

The driver had not gone home for three days, taking shelter at the bus depot instead, waiting to run the only vehicle that had the drop of a chance to brave the water. Officially mandated 12-hour workdays (with overtime) had stretched to 72 hours on the job, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting to cover the 30 kilometres of the city’s 27H bus route, a journey of hope through sheets of water under which once lay roads. The route starts from Marina Beach and winds its way through Choolaimedu, Anna Nagar, Ambattur, Padi, and ends at Avadi, all parts of north-east Chennai and its suburbs, all prone to waterlogging.

So clear were the roads, and so exhausted the driver that on a day when there was a smidgeon of sun and empty roads, he barely kept his eyes open. Every few minutes his right hand would grope the floor for a battered bottle of Amma water from which Jayalalithaa’s face had faded away. A few splashes on his face were his remedy against exhaustion.

Amma water is the Tamil Nadu government’s subsidised bottled water, half the price of Aquafina. It bears the image of chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, and is named after what her followers call her: Amma.

Amma and her eponymous products follow the bus everywhere. It passes a closed Amma canteen, a low-cost meal facility of the government; a closed Amma pharmacy in Ambattur; a government van selling “fresh farm cooperative vegetables” bears her picture near the Lucas bus stop, and bus stands from Padi to Avadi have her images next to hollow words of achievements and announcements. The bus carries on its back a flex poster proclaiming the great job done by the state government in the time of the flood and the image of the chief minister.

Flex printing is Tamil Nadu’s greatest small industry, fuelled by perennial sycophancy in the state’s politics and the insatiable demand for poster and larger-than-life cut-outs for occasions like birthdays, marriages, deaths, and even floods.

When Chennai was submerged—when most of the city didn’t have power, phone lines were down, the airport was closed and trains cancelled, and the sun didn’t come out for days—flex posters were printed and put out across the city. It said, in effect, that even when the government didn’t do much to save you, it could print posters and bring them near you. In the government of Amma, no one takes a call, no one speaks, no one decides. She is the messiah, she is the message. The flex is the medium.

Inside the bus, there isn’t much conversation. There is a temporary truce from the everyday battles of life and seat. People crane their necks to peer inside lanes that link to the main roads. Most are still inundated, a stagnant stream of garbage carpets them, and the stink seems to run with the bus. When people speak, they often start with the question, “Evlo thanni (How much water)?” The answer is usually a hand signal: knee-deep, waist-deep, neck-deep.

In its last stretch to Avadi the bus gathers speed, the driver sleepy as ever. Every turn on the steering wheel is an effort, every tug on the horn lever a task. When it reaches Avadi bus stand, across the road from the railway station, there is a small crowd and a few buses are waiting. As the last of the passengers are stepping down, the driver sprinkles his face one last time with Amma water and says, “Have to go back again in half an hour.”

By December 5, as the waters receded from some areas and the talk of “resilience” and “normalcy” started rearing its head, the city was just about beginning to take stock of its loss. What is the new normal for those who lost their homes and possessions?

As for resilience, what is the choice? There’s a stoic inevitability about life, about survival. There’s the compulsion of living, of going about jobs, of being a small cog in a big wheel, a sleepless bus driver carrying a handful of passengers going about their business after their city of seven million people sank.

***

Tamil Nadu had been receiving  intense bursts of rain from early November beginning right after Deepavali. On November 12-13, the city and its surroundings received 10-15 cm of rain, most of it in an one-hour cloudburst. The rain, in what was a precursor to the floods of December 1-3, drowned parts of the city. Especially affected were parts of the northern suburbs—most of bus 27H’s route—and the area around Puzhal Lake, a major water body. The southern suburbs along the Old Mahabalipuram Road (OMR), the city’s IT corridor built on low-lying marshland, were also badly waterlogged.

The worst hit was Mudichur, part of Tambaram municipality, about 30 kilometres from Chennai within the Greater Chennai Metropolitan Area. Boats were out for up to three days, as people who had bought state-approved plots and flats on what had been a paddy basin for hundreds of years, needed rescue.

Six districts—Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kanchipuram, Sriperumbudur, Chengalpattu and Cuddalore—were affected and at least 70 people killed in this bout of rain. This received barely a mention by the media outside Tamil Nadu. It could have been a warning; it went unheeded. It showed that the state was ill-equipped to handle large amounts of rainfall, that parts of Chennai city could not be saved, and that unchecked construction on the peripheries of the city, on erstwhile fields and lake beds would be the first to be submerged.

Enlarge

There was darkness at morning, noon and night for three days in Chennai, starting December 1. It was the climax of the devastating rains of November, and the water went everywhere. It emptied out houses and their people, it broke open shops, it crashed cars against walls and filled their seats, it floated bikes away, and it dragged out living room sofas, and sat atop beds. It was all-consuming and relentless. It had a memory. It recreated the past: lakes and marshes, long-levelled by grit and greed to make way for projects that grace the front pages of newspapers as advertisements, reappeared, drowning partly-constructed buildings, and evicting people from inhabited ones.

The water left in its wake a gasping administration, a force of volunteers formed on social media trying their best to reach people, teams from the Army, Navy, Air Force and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) operating across the districts, and a knocked down city in need of rescue and relief.

***

The light-brown house with a blue “To Let” board stood in a sea of water, alone. Water had gone down from the day before, when it had covered the ground floor. It now stood at the gates, surrounding its pink walls from all sides. The family that lived here fled on the night of December 1. One hundred metres separated it from the road in Manimangalam, a pool of water turning dark in the failing light. The road connecting to the house had been under waist-deep water for five days. Locals speculated that it had been washed away. People remained marooned in their houses, inaccessible to everyone but those who were willing to walk into waist-deep water. There was no electricity. The entire layout is made up of plots approved by the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, the nodal urban planning agency. People bought land, built houses on what was farmland till five years ago, and got every piece of paper establishing their title over it. It had all come to naught.

A police crew was supervising the operations of an earth digger on the other side of the road. This side too, was submerged till the bases of house and apartments. The road, however, recently built and on much higher ground, had survived, though water had clipped its sides wherever it could. The earth digger was cutting a channel under the gate of an apartment complex.

It was guesswork.

A stream of the Adyar River had flowed through the fields in Manimanagalam, not far from its origin. The stream had disappeared when the houses came up; it had been filled over by people who didn’t want a water body crossing the front of their homes. Now at dusk, without a map, and under headlights, police had the task of finding and dredging the submerged channel. A couple of attempts made earlier, slush piles of earth upturned by the metal jaws of the digger, had failed. The stream was a lost memory, one difficult to recall at the time of the flood when nothing of the landscape remained the same.

The gaggle of locals were full of suggestions and according to them, the elusive stream was everywhere, left, and right, north and south, and further up and down. The police had adopted the brute force hack: to keep dredging till the channel was found.

Getting the water out from areas without functional drains and canals was a task with no easy solutions. Across the city, in areas old and new, wherever drainage channels were ill-maintained or built over, there was no way out for the water. In Besant Nagar, an up-market south Chennai locality, when the flood threatened to breach homes in one of its streets, residents gathered and dug a canal to take the water to the sea. But Thyagaraya Nagar, or T. Nagar—Chennai’s retail shopping district that does an annual  business worth Rs 15,000—50,000 crore no channel could save. A densely populated, low-lying area, it was built in 1921 by draining the Long Tank, a magnificent lake eight kilometres long and five kilometres wide that occupied an area that is the heart of present day Chennai. With no way out, water remained in some areas long after  it stopped raining.

***

Next to a cluster of closed, underwater shops in north Chennai’s Padi, one shop is open. It’s about noon and there are a group of at least 10 men crowding the iron grill that separates the shop and its patrons. Some hands slip past the grill with money, and a quick transaction takes place: the money goes into the cash register, and a “quarter” of brandy goes to the customer. The man unscrews the cap, sniffs, and heads straight for the shed next to the shop. He walks through knee-deep water without bothering to fold up his trousers and stops at a cement table. The bar is abuzz, its eight tables and benches at capacity, even if they are partly underwater. The barkeeper comes, carrying a couple of pouches of water and a plastic glass. The man pours the caramel-coloured liquid filling three-fourths of the glass, picks it up and holds it close to his lips, as if seizing the moment. Then in one swift motion, he knocks back the glass. Seconds later, he tears off the pouch and squeezes the water down his throat. The bottle empty in two shots, the man in the white-blue checked shirt screws the cap back on and tosses it in a corner.

Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation, more commonly called Tasmac, is the government-owned monopoly that sells alcohol and runs bars in the state. It’s a cultural icon, known as much for the poor quality of locally brewed but heavily taxed, and therefore expensive, booze it stocks, as it is for the on-the-go-pissed-drunk culture it has spawned. Long lines of inebriated, staggering men crowd Tasmac shops at all hours, a function of the way the government runs the liquor business. Tamil Nadu does not give liquor licences to standalone bars; a hotel with 20 bedrooms and 40 beds is a must. This gives Tasmac the monopoly on the bar business, too, which at least in cities are small, dim, temporary sheds serving the purpose of forcing people to consume huge amounts of liquor in short periods of time and stagger away.

The corporation sold liquor worth Rs 26,188 crore in the last fiscal, by far the single biggest earner of revenue. Hundreds of thousands of men drinking and passing out at Tasmac parlours across the state are the fuel for the state’s extensive, Amma-branded welfare schemes. When milk and vegetables were hard to come by, liquor was easily available. Tasmac stores remained open throughout. The few that were shut down were in badly-submerged places, and even then the employees made every effort to keep the shops running, standing for days in water, by candlelight, not denying a drink to anyone ready for the adventure.

The sale of liquor in the time of the flood outraged the middle- and upper-classes, the people with luxuries of private stocks and home bars. It enraged volunteers, many of whom had ventured for the first time to the slums and working-class neighbourhoods, when they found that some of the people they were so eager to help had had a drink or two. Women volunteers felt unsafe, and there was a growing demand on social media for the government to close liquor shops till relief and rescue were complete. A petition in the Madras high court demanding that the sale of alcohol be stopped for 60 days in the aftermath of the rains was dismissed on the ground that it was for the government to decide.

Tasmac runs a business that fills the government’s coffers. It decided to keep its shops open during the flood, and made money. After days of relief operations, the volunteers are back home. People who congregated around liquor shops, who had a drink when their houses filled with water, when their possessions floated away, are still left to pick up the pieces. A man who wouldn’t reveal much about himself at a Tasmac shop said, “If after working for hours, I go and drink, what has the flood got to do with it?”

***

North Chennai is the part of city that people don’t remember. It’s where the city first expanded, outside the colonial moat of the White Town, outside the first Black Town that served it. This chipped hammerhead on the map, bulldozing through the old villages of Tondiarpet, Thiruvottiyur and Royapuram, creating industries and facilitating commerce, was where Chennai first made its wealth. North’s the hardware to the software of the south’s genteel, gentrified neighbourhoods of retirees and professionals. Crowded and narrow, home to India’s oldest railway station, a 1,500-year-old temple,  and Chennai’s criminal gangs, north Chennai is for now deemed unworthy by the builders.

Vyasarpadi, a locality in the north, is lined with shanties, churches and low-cost housing projects, as also numerous small manufacturing and trading units. At its northern border lies Mahakavi Bharathi Nagar or MKB Nagar, a planned agglomeration of low-income housing board flats in neatly laid out short, parallel streets. The flats were built on marsh and pond lands, and every season the area gets flooded.

On a Monday afternoon in MKB Nagar, when the main roads have traffic and buses are running, there is a lull in the air. Life is lived inside and outside, as two rows of housing board flats often stand a car-length away from each other in enclosed streets. In one such street, tarpaulin covers from facing balconies run its entire length providing a shelter from the sun. Below it is the public-private space, a self-contained universe: bedding is laid out to dry, soaked furniture is assessed for damage, motorcycles are parked on the sides, and from cooking to carom, the street hosts it all.

The street is the all-purpose living room and backyard, a way of carving space, a refuge from the small, dark rooms of the government construction. Right now people are running, walking, and limping their way to a more upscale apartment complex, a couple of blocks away, next to the bus station. Two trucks have arrived from Vellore carrying relief supplies, charity from a group that runs educational institutions. The police selected the apartment complex as the distribution hub, its two gates serve as entry and exit points, and there’s room inside for the trucks to be parked.

There are at least 300 people squashed together in a scrum struggling to become a line. More are merging on the streets. Children and young men race, women shout at those breaking the queue, and old ones wait for the generosity of those already filed up to get a place. It looks like a train about to derail, lurching from side to side, even as it pushes forward at the black and golden gate of the apartment. There are five policemen between the two gates to manage the impatient, garrulous crowd. Inspector S. Balamurli, a tall, well-built man in a sharply pressed uniform and rubber sandals—a practical concession to the flood—holds a flaccid red-and-white plastic baton, and struggles to impose order. The other policemen just have their uniforms as armour.

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The gate is opened a little, and people are let in one by one, though every time a few others violently try to push their way in. Inside, a volunteer from the truck flings over a yellow plastic bag. It contains rice, dal, mosquito coils, sanitary napkins, candles, a bedsheet, and a couple of bottles of water. The process is too slow for the crowd and it gets jittery, heaving at the gate at every chance. Fights break out among the women in the line, and a cop tries to resolve it, only to be shouted away by women who stop fighting and gang up.

He comes back to the gate and says, “Women are the worst. They don’t follow any order.” In between a man comes in a wheelchair and stands by the gate. The inspector gets him the packet out of turn. By now some men attempt to climb the walls of the apartment, and cops have to rush to stop the invasion.

A boy with just a hint of a moustache darts for the gate. Inspector Balamurli goes after him, and the boy now runs away. The officer gets on a chase but is no match for the fleet-footed boy. He throws the plastic baton, which just hangs in the air and falls near his feet. In the meantime, the crowd has sensed an opportunity. With the inspector away, it makes a determined push for the gates, and the lone cop there can’t stop it. The line scatters, a tidal wave of people swarms inside and goes for the truck. The situation is getting out of hand. The inspector runs for the gate, shouting at the crowd to step back, hurling abuse out of the sheer helplessness of his situtaion. With great difficulty, and by positioning himself in front of the gate, he stops the surge. He orders the stopping of aid distribution.

“I have been ensuring proper relief here for days now. This is the fourth round of distribution, and not needed here. I have gone to the streets and helped people when they were under water, distributed food and essentials. The truth is that people don’t need any relief here. They have enough stuff. They are just hoarding now. Look at this crowd. Look at those women with thick gold chains. Do they need anything? They are hoarding,” he says.

It was something of a carnival in MKB Nagar. In between the jostling and fighting, there was banter and laughter. Jokes about how someone managed to get more relief than was being given, about how long the freebies will keep coming now that the water has ebbed. People walked back triumphant and smiling with their yellow packets.

In a world where so much was not a given—whether the government would keep its promises, whether a job would materialise, whether the money for a daughter’s marriage could be arranged—the unrelenting trials of the everyday made way for the certainty of flood relief. A disaster had struck, and two trucks of help were there.

Aid relief by volunteers, while helpful, came with its own set of problems, and MKB Nagar witnessed some of those.

Volunteers groups had supplies and good intentions but little idea of how to go about it. They didn’t know where to set up base, how to engage locals, and how to negotiate around silos of caste, class and religion, which stayed firm even when entire localities were flooded. They brought with them a distrust of institutions: not involving local authorities in aid work, not keeping police in the loop in situations that were tense to begin with. They also brought with them an attitude that said, “We came here for you, and the government didn’t,” and expected people to be
grateful.

***

When the rain stopped and the water started retreating, Chennai was left with more than one lakh tonnes of garbage on the streets. It was a task that no army of volunteers could do. In any case, no army of volunteers turned up for the task.

It fell to the Chennai Corporation, the work of its conservancy staff. The city was a dump yard, rotting and stinking. More than 2,000 workers from other city corporations and municipalities of the state were sent to do the clean up.

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The city can’t go about its business as long as roads are covered with trash, as long as there’s a threat of disease, and as long as people can’t walk without holding their noses. This job, the most important of all, falls on the conservancy workers, the majority of them Dalit daily wagers on contract. Across the city, day and night, they went about the cleaning, going through stuff the water had deposited on the streets: soggy, mouldy mattresses, wrinkled wooden cupboards, a library of books, an ocean of plastic, carcasses of dogs and cats, rats and mice. Armed with their hands, standing on their bare feet, they cleaned the city of its rubbish. When concern forced the authorities to provide protective gloves and boots to the workers—and nowhere near as many as required—they looked ill-at-ease working in black-and-yellow oversized gear. They drew thick lines of white bleaching powder across the city even as they burnt their hands, a mark of a thankless job selflessly done.

***

There is a pleasant calm at Chembarambakkam Lake. The water in the reservoir is down to harmless levels, and there is barely any evidence of a deluge. It is a newly-minted picnic spot, bringing the curious in cars to see the dreaded lake for itself. It is easily accessible, and in spite of a few cops posted there, people can walk all along its spillway save a small control area. Children dive in the pool below the sluice gates, from where media reports said the torrent that submerged Chennai was let loose. In the small pools and streams around it, there are groups of men squatting with fishing lines, staring down like egrets looking for food. An old woman has set up shop next to the walkway, spreading packs of cigarette and peanuts on a cloth. She says this stream of visitors have started drifting here after the flood. There is a small channel that leads away from the gates, the route that the 30,000 cusecs of water took when released on the night of December 1.

The water had nowhere to go. The stream begins to peter out after 300 metres or so, a road cuts it a little further away, and beyond it lie housing plots, apartments and an engineering college. A stream of the Adyar river is a couple of kilometres further away, according to more than one local person. There’s a network of interconnected water bodies, lakes, streams, and channels, big and small that feed the river. The water from the lake had to go through entire swathes of settlements to meet the river, flooding everything in its path. Natural streams that flow from the lake to the river are hard to find, CMDA approved plots and housing have swallowed them. There are whole settlements coming up around the lake, and along the path of its stream, ensuring that a similar amount of rainfall in the future would wreak more havoc.

For now it is the hot site for disaster tourism—the lake that sank Chennai.

***

Postscript:

On the evening of December 1, when the city was fast shutting down, people made last-ditch attempts to stock supplies. At a grocery store in Nungambakkam, the kind that stocks imported versions of domestically available products, and one of few open anywhere, a crowd was gathering. People bought packaged and frozen food in bulk. It was panic shopping. They paid Rs 50 for half a litre of organic milk as they bought cans of it, or double that amount for a packet of oyster mushrooms, the sole vegetable in the shop.

A smartly-dressed woman with a leather clutch walked in. She shouted from the door, “Do you have two packets of goat cheese?” The shopkeeper said, “We are out of stock, madam.”

He tapped a few keys on the computer, and said he would procure it from another outlet 15 kilometres away and deliver to her house. There was silence and stunned people looked at each other.

Goat cheese, an essential in the time of the flood.

_

Read our essay here, on how the flood that drowned Chennai was made by successive governments.

BY ALIA ALLANA
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY UNRWA.ORG

“I’ll call you,” he said, as he turned his back to leave for Yarmouk refugee camp, almost certain that they won’t speak. That they can’t speak. Years of war have turned Syria inside out, left the cell phone towers upside down. It’s a country of rubble connected through weak, broken strands of mobile phone network that seldom work.

She’ll wait by the telephone in the neighbouring town of Yalda, where armed fighters have agreed upon a shaky reconciliation with the government of Bashar al-Assad.

An anxious lover, a new mother, she knows the only place the phone will ring is on the rooftop that has been transformed into a vegetable garden, a desperate attempt to forage food in a time of great hunger and death. The rooftop is the sort of warm colourful place that stands out like a painting in the cold eyes of a sniper, of whom there are many. She won’t go there. She can’t go there. She won’t tell him that. The unspoken will go with him, as he lumbers past an armed rebel checkpoint –where snipers frequently kill–into what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called “the deepest circle of hell.”

***

This is Yarmouk today: a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus that has been under siege for almost three years, deprived of food, water and electricity; its starving people terrorised by the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), forced to witness public beheadings outside a butchery known as The Millions.

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Yarmouk, once a bustling Damascene suburb of 200,000 is now home to about 17,000 Palestinians, the poorest of the poor, who live in such desperation that they make soup out of blades of grass. The people that remain in Yarmouk are entirely dependent on food aid distributed by United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the near East (UNWRA) but the last time aid convoys were allowed inside the camp was March 28, 2015. The majority of people get on average about 400 calories a day according to Christopher Gunness of UNRWA and 15 have starved to death. The arrival of ISIS has complicated matters further: on April 1, 2015 ISIS aided by Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, came tearing into the camp following a dispute with a local Palestinian militia, Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, allied to Hamas who staked claim over the camp.

Today Yarmouk is the “Arab Spring” in a suburb, a smelter of wars old and new, a place of fresh kills for past grudges.

***

He will keep calling her. When he hears her voice, broken into pieces because of static, he will rejoice. The siege, he says, brought them together. A notorious jaggal, a smooth-talker, with black gelled hair and a packet of cigarettes tucked into the back pocket of his tight jeans, he was the type a man wanted his young daughter away from.

A player who would never change, is what friends told her just before the uprising in Syria began in 2011.

“For you I would,” he had told her, and she had believed him. Eight months into the siege, while hardships mounted and people including his family fled, he stayed for her. A year into the siege as food stocks from relief agencies fell and humanitarian workers were not allowed to enter Yarmouk, the besieged came together, a community forged in the heat of war and trying to escape it.

“I want her to have a good man,” her father had said.

They married on their street, on the carpet of shell-blasted rubble. Someone brought a few flowers. A couple of friends travelled to the neighbouring town of Babila where a ceasefire was in force, and bought overpriced vanilla ice cream. They married at asr, the time of the afternoon prayer, and prayed for cessation of gunfire. She wore a borrowed white dress and veil. He wore an old suit that belonged to his father. At sunset the women moved the party indoors to dance to the sultry tunes of Raghab Alami on the stereo powered by a car battery. When gunfire cut through the song, they chose to ignore the war.

***

He rushed to the Palestine Hospital when his wife went into labour. The hospital had no doctors, no nurses, no medicines, and no electricity. The night of delivery was bitingly cold, so the only midwife in Yarmouk, a celebrity, instructed him to burn wood that filled the room with smoke. When the contractions got violent, the midwife ordered him to rush to Yalda to buy a painkiller injection at three times its price. At least then in February 2015  there was no IS, he could have dodged the siege but soon they lived under house arrest too afraid to walk out.

On the second night of ISIS’s conquest, almost five weeks after the birth of their son, when mosques in Yarmouk broadcast messages of IS’ successes and issued threats, the two lovers and their 39-day-old baby sneaked out of their house and into Yalda where locals viewed them through distrustful eyes.

“They think we are terrorists, that all Palestinian are terrorists,” she says.

Prices have skyrocketed in Yalda because of scarcity, rents are exorbitant, and many sleep on the street. His wife and child were the lucky ones who quickly moved from a school into the house of a generous host but there wasn’t any space for a man so he continues to live in Yarmouk.

“The siege has also cemented our love,” he says as he teases death walking back and forth between Yarmouk and Yalda to see his wife and their young child. On the walk back he steals glances at places that once were. The shop from where he bought her a red dress when he had started courting her, past the Chicken Corner where they had their first meal as man and wife, and at the park where he had first confessed his love to her. None of those places remain but buried under them are emotions that will continue to linger despite the ravages of war.

***

Postscript:

There is no certainty of peace in Yalda, and despite the possibility of a ceasefire in Yarmouk the people of Reef Damascus (Damascus countryside) aren’t too hopeful. They see the ceasefires as uneasy reconciliations that are always close to breaking down. Last week armed factions fired rounds as IS threatened to usurp more territory. The government has reached agreements with several areas in Reef Damascus where armed groups have agreed to lay down their weapons but these pacts have not been followed by genuine reconciliation.

Instead, areas like Yalda, which were besieged, have had their doors opened. On good days trucks full of bread enter Yalda, but the supply is nowhere close to demand. Similar scenes unfold in Babila, Tadamoun and other parts of Reef Damascus where the unspoken government and rebel policy has been to “starve until surrender”.

Yarmouk may be the “deepest circle of hell” but there are other circles, other towns and villages living out similar nightmares. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about 400,000 people in Syria lived under siege in December 2015. A town called Madaya, under siege by government and allied Hezbollah forces, is the darkest corner of this war. Doctors without Borders estimates that 23 patients in the health centre in Madaya have died of starvation since December 1. On January 7, the UN facilitated a deal with the Syrian government to allow aid into Madaya but the siege continues while the Minister of Reconciliation Ali Haider travels the country attempting to broker peace.

On August 17, 2015, the United Nations put out an estimate of 250,000 that had died in the war. According to the UNHCR the number of Syrians fleeing to neighbouring countries in July 2015 crossed the four million mark distinguishing the Syrian crisis as the world’s single largest refugee crisis in almost a quarter of a century.

(Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moualem arrives in Delhi on Monday. The Syrian war has claimed at least 240,000 lives and made four million people refugees. At least 400,000 people live under siege in the country. This is the first part of a Fountain Ink series on the humanitarian crisis.)

BY ALIA ALLANA

V. P. Haran served as India’s Ambassador to Syria from 2009 until 2012. He speaks to Fountain Ink on how sections of the media exaggerated the uprising as well as signs that al-Qaeda was a game player since the early days of the conflict.

What was Syria like when you arrived in January 2009?

Syria was a peaceful country and there was no undercurrent of tension. The Syrian economy was doing well, there was over five per cent growth rate on average. Unemployment was at about eight per cent but Syrians who were unemployed could find work in the Gulf. There was, however, a high percentage of educated unemployed. Syria also had a comfortable foreign debt position at 12.5 per cent of the GDP. Much of the debt owed was to Russia which wrote off much of the debt. The real problem was the drought in the north-east that had led to massive relocation to the south and south–west.

What was life like in Damascus?

As a diplomat you tend to live a secluded life but I’d go to the downtown area, sometimes in a cab, and have tea in a cafe and chat to the people. Those were wonderful moments and wonderful days. Law and order was never a problem. My female colleagues used to tell me they could wear jewellery and walk home alone at 2 in the morning and they would feel safe. In certain areas restaurants would stay open until 5 a.m. One never felt there would be trouble on the streets.

Some say it was because of the mukhabarat (military intelligence directorate) but I sensed that people felt as though they were responsible for their collective security.

When I reached Damascus, I was told every other person is the mukhabarat. This is a gross over-estimation. There is an intelligence unit and they function very efficiently internally but I never had a direct encounter. In my four years I was followed once in Media in Idlib Province. A jeep tailed us but they weren’t intimidating.

Did you anticipate an “Arab Spring” in Syria? 

When the situation got tense in Tunisia and Egypt, President Bashar al-Assad appeared on TV and stated that the political and economic conditions were different in Syria. He said he was confident Syria would not go down the same path. This was also the general assessment of the diplomatic community.

Bashar al-Assad was a popular leader and this is partly why he is still in power. There is no adequate internal opposition and a lot of the problems in Syria have been created by foreign sources that are trying to get rid of an inconvenient regime. Sixty-seven percent of the entire Arab world had voted him the most popular Arab person in a poll in 2009. Even the diplomatic community was in agreement that he had the support of about 80 per cent of Syria. Western diplomats said so as well. He had begun reforms in 2000 but didn’t carry through because of opposition from the Baath party.

Also this is not just a Sunni-Shia fight. Look at the numbers. There are over 50 per cent Sunni Muslims in Syria and there are Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Assyrians, Alawites and others who make the remainder. Bashar al-Assad has the full support of the minorities and even a large percentage of the Sunni Muslims support him. But by the time I left, in 2012, Syria had changed a lot. While the first couple of years were like heaven, things started deteriorating by early 2011.

Do you recall the first protests in 2011?  

By February, when Bahrain experienced protests, there were attempts by some NGOs to organise protests in Damascus. Two had been organised over two weekends but hardly 20-30 people turned up. The number of journalists and members from the diplomatic community was far greater than the demonstrators. Then March 18, 2011 happened when the children wrote on the walls of the school and then there was a big protest. The following week there was a protest in Latakia and then with each passing Friday something happened.

Soon parts of Latakia, Homs and Hama were chaotic but Aleppo remained calm and this troubled the opposition greatly. The opposition couldn’t get the people in Aleppo to rise up against the regime so they sent bus loads of people to Aleppo. These people would burn something on the streets and leave. Journalists would then broadcast this saying Aleppo had risen.

A few things need to be said about this: some parts of the media went overboard in projecting Syria negatively. At times things that didn’t happen were reported. For instance I was talking to a prominent sheikh when my colleagues started calling me frantically saying that the sheikh would play a role in protests planned for that afternoon. But no such thing was happening. In fact I was sitting with him then having lunch.

There was a lot of exaggeration by the media.

There is one instance that stands out. In Idlib, hardcore Sunnis had gone to Aleppo and told the people to join the opposition. People in Aleppo started beating them and ordered them to leave. The crowd had been unruly and the police had to come in and control it. The hardcore Sunnis from Idlib had to be taken to a house and the police had to give them their uniforms so that they could leave without being lynched.

Did Damascus change much during this period?

I recall one incident on the April 14, 2011 when I went for my daily walk to the stadium which was about two kilometres away. On the way I passed the bakery I used to pass every day but there was a long queue at this usually quiet bakery. On the way back the queue remained and I enquired. People were stocking up on bread because they had heard that something would happen. The next day nothing happened despite it being a Friday.

As the situation worsened my walk to the stadium was replaced by a walk around the park in the Mezze area by the second half of 2012. One day a motor bike came at very high speed and turned a corner from where it revved its engine. Soon after, a security jeep followed but missed the turn taken by the bike. When they couldn’t find the bike they came to the park to see if people had seen what was going on. Then we were told that the people on the bike were planning attacks.

In Mezze, not far from the district where diplomats live, is a cactus field and rebels had gotten into it by a tunnel arrangement. They had established a camp there from where they threw fire rockets aimed at the PM’s office. After that the security forces went in and blasted the camp. This was a targeted operation and I spoke to a person who lived in a flat with clear view and he said they had targeted one building and destroyed it completely.  A huge cache of arms and ammunition was recovered from the building.

But parts of the country remained calm.

The external backers of the opposition could not digest this. They sent a group of people to the Syrian-Jordanian border and they overran two security posts. They killed all the people there. Some were killed in the most brutal manner in al-Qaeda style. The government didn’t report this immediately but a member of the diplomatic community confirmed it was al-Qaeda in Iraq who had done it. It was evident that al-Qaeda in Iraq were in Syria since April 2011.

Al-Qaeda was there from the very first week, and if not the first week then from late 2011 when al-Qaeda banners appeared. It was these groups that provided the opposition with support from across the border. In Raqqa the fighters came from the north and it was clear that it was al-Qaeda.

Assad has been saying that it was terrorists from the beginning. Why did no one believe him?

People’s minds were not open. Why would al-Qaeda in Iraq take interest in creating chaos in Syria? A lot of it was being directed by outsiders, namely the Gulf countries. Al Jazeera played a role, too. In April I had taken a guest to the amphitheatre in Bosra and then to Sweida for which I had to take the highway to the Jordanian border. We were in the car at about 9:30-10:30 am. That day an Al Jazeera correspondent was asked to leave Syria and was travelling along the same road. The correspondent reported check points every few seconds. My embassy called me in a panic because of what they saw on TV. I told them I had encountered just one check point.

Why did the Syrian government not present a better case about the present of terrorists?

We asked them about the lack of engagement with the media and they said that nobody believed them. They had very bad PR and handling of the media. Having said that, there were also excesses by the government. Syria has a very inadequate police force so when the problems started the government was forced to deploy security forces to handle problems that are managed by the police. Some of the army committed excesses and the government put a few under house arrest or into prison but they didn’t go public with this.

Bashar al-Assad was not just slow on enacting reforms but also slow on announcing changes that had been undertaken. For instance when they enacted a reform reducing the primacy of the Baath Party, the reform wasn’t reported until three months later. Their PR wasn’t wise. They didn’t handle the crisis well.

(Title image :“Al-Hamidiyah Souq” by Bernard Gagnon)

(This is Part II of the Fountain Ink series on the crisis in Syria. Read Part I here.)

BY ALIA ALLANA

The Russians started 2006 in Syria with a bang, really big ones. Hours into the new year they launched a series of airstrikes over the country. Proud proclamations were sounded from all quarters with a bold announcement: “A total of 311 sorties have been made over the first days of 2016 during which strikes were delivered at 1,097 facilities,” said Lt. General Sergey Rudskoy, the Russian defence chief. They targeted oil facilities and infrastructure used by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants in Raqqa, Dasmascus, Homs, Hama and a territory they hadn’t ventured into before: Dera’a.

Dera’a had for long been romanticised as home of the Syrian rebellion, the southern state that dared to rise against the rule of Bashar al-Assad. For much of the war, Dera’a remained firmly under the control of the Free Syria Army (FSA), the mainstream opposition that liberated many of the villages in this southern state bordered by Israel, Jordan and ISIS-controlled land to its east. Dera’a with its Free Syria Fighters remained a low priority for a government preoccupied with ISIS advances in the North of the country.

That changed in May 2015 when ISIS marched on south Syria raised its black flag in Dera’a. ISIS fighters went from house to house seeking FSA fighters. They confiscated their weapons and publically shamed them as disbelievers. Mohammed, a fighter with the Free Syria Army, witnessed their ruthlessness. “They said they were the real Muslims not us,” recalls Mohammed. Soon ISIS went on a killing spree beheading people and by the end of 2015 was in control of three fronts.

Defections from FSA soon followed. Just last month one battalion of about 40 FSA fighters joined ISIS even though its presence in the area is limited. “They join ISIS for money,” says Mohammed. ISIS pays fighters about $300-400 a month from its deep coffers. It runs a highly lucrative business not just of extortion at checkpoints but also controls Deir Ezzor, the area with Syria’s most productive oilfields. Oil sales account for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and soon FSA fighters whose payment was in food for themselves and their families spoke about mass defections, according to a senior commander in the Free Syria Brigade in the southern front.

That’s when the Syrian army and Russian jets turned their attention to Dera’a.

***

The beginning of the year was marked by a new push in southern Syria with the help of Russian air cover. This could be a potential game changer. The FSA fighters in Dera’a are staffed by Arab and Western forces. Large numbers of its fighters have been trained by Americans across the border in Jordan. “If this area falls to Assad then the international community loses a major bargaining card. This is the only area where the West has a healthy relationship with fighters against the regime,” says a commander of the Ben Sunni brigade.

The battle is currently focused in a town called Shaikh Maskin. It has been “hot” since the first week of 2016. Days of assault by the Syrian army supported by the heaviest aerial bombing campaign Russia has unleashed in southern Syria have reduced the city to rubble. Buildings have collapsed on top of each other, ceilings chopped off and wires and iron roof beams bent out of shape. Sheikh Maskin is a trophy town, the “crossroad of the south,” as a Syrian General called it, lying on a major supply route from Damascus south to Jordan.

The fighting in Sheikh Maskin has led to a mass exodus. Thousands have fled from the villages. Israel has a policy of not accepting Syrian refugees, the neighbouring state in Syria is firmly under ISIS control so people fled towards Jordan. About 12,000 refugees were stranded on the border as of December 8, 2015, according to estimates by the UNHCR. Jordan claims that 16,000 refugees are stranded in the remote desert area. In December, Human Rights Watch claimed that at least 20,000 refugees were on the border and the UN refugee agency has urged Jordan to allow them to enter. But the border remains closed. So the fleeing Syrians are now trapped in this no-man’s land at a particularly bad point, when years of strain have pushed the UN’s humanitarian agencies to the verge of bankruptcy. They cannot meet even the basic needs of the millions of stranded people. This refugee crisis is beyond them.

Sources in the Ministry of External Affairs state that a key reason for the visit of Syrian foreign minister Walid Muallem’s visit to New Delhi is to urge the Indian leadership to launch humanitarian efforts in Syria from a base in neighbouring Jordan.

This is Part III of the Fountain Ink series on the Syria crisis. Read Part I here, and Part II here.

(Title image by MrPenguin20 via Wikimedia Commons)

BY ALIA ALLANA

In an exclusive interview to Fountain Ink, Syria’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister Walid al-Moualem (left, above photograph) speaks about the upcoming Geneva Conference, the success of the Russian military campaign, and the role of the United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in fuelling the war. Moualem is the highest-ranking Syrian official to travel to India since the civil war began in 2011.

A UN-brokered conference will take place on January 25. The aim is to bring together representatives of the Syrian government and opposition leaders. What is the Syrian government’s aim?

Our aim is a dialogue between the Syrian government and the opposition without interference. We hope to reach an understanding to compose a national unity government where the opposition will take part. By the opposition I mean one that envisages a better Syria, not one that fulfils other countries interests. We want them to be a part of the political process. This national unity government can compose a constitutional committee to discuss a new constitution and this modern constitution will allow for parliamentary elections.

How will the rift between Iran and Saudi Arabia affect Syria?

I assure you that Iran is helping Syria to combat terrorism. Saudi Arabia is training and arming the terrorist groups. They have spent millions of dollars to strengthen the terrorist group. It will affect us because we expect the Saudis to increase the aid to the terrorist groups to intensify their activity and they will instruct their delegation at the Geneva Conference, which belongs to them and is financed by them, to make preconditions before starting the negotiations. Parts of the opposition which have allegiance to foreign countries are not a genuine opposition and we will not fulfill their demands. The UN is calling for Geneva Conference to be held without preconditions. What is the alternative then? To fight them militarily.

How do you read the Syrian refugee and humanitarian crisis?

We have a humanitarian crisis but I must admit that it is not as it appears in the foreign media. Why do we have a humanitarian crisis, we need to go to the roots. We are facing a coalition of countries, the US, EU, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey against us. From the beginning of the crisis they financed, armed and trained terrorists who came to Syria from 100 countries. This is where it all started. They massacred many Syrians, they destroyed the economic infrastructure, they stole factories and sent equipment to Turkey. They stole our oil, cotton and wheat and sent that to Turkey too. Syria became a poor country and Syrians lost the opportunity to work and their standard of living started to fall. In addition, the US and EU place sanctions against the Syrian people which prevents us from importing food and medicine. What will the results of this be?

What is the reality of the Russian campaign?

First, by terrorist I mean any citizen or foreign fighter fighting the Syrian army. There is no distinction for us because the bullet that goes through the gun doesn’t say whether the fighter is a moderate or a terrorist. These descriptions of fighters, moderate, extremist are American descriptions and terrorists are just following instructions. The Russians came on our request to help us combat the terrorists and this is because terrorism is not just a Syrian concern but an international concern. Russians came in their fighters on September 30, 2015 and have achieved in three months 10 times more than the 10,000 American raids against ISIS. The Syrian army has started to regain many villages controlled by ISIS and other terrorist groups.

Do you feel betrayed by Turkey?

We feel more than betrayed but not just by Turkey. We feel betrayed by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. The Turkish angle was that they wanted the Muslim Brotherhood to be a part of the Syrian political process but we refused because we ban the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdogan (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey) considers himself the godfather of the Muslim Brotherhood so from March to May 2011, Davutoğlu (then foreign minister and present prime minister of Turkey, Ahmet Davutoğlu) made three trips asking the Syrian government to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in political life. The third trip was more of a warning message and when we refused Turkey began to take anti-Syria measures. It closed the Syrian embassy in Ankara and began to build camps even before the refugee started arriving. Since May 2011 Turkey opened training camps and let terrorists enter from its border with Syria. But the Qatar matter is different. Qatar is a small country that wants to play a big country and it also supports the Muslim Brotherhood.

Images of emaciated children, testimonies of starving citizens of Madaya are in the news. What is this happening and what is being done by the government?

Before the crisis, Madaya was a very prosperous village and Damascenes used to go there to buy their produce. Then about 500 terrorists came to Madaya and controlled it as well as Zabadani. The government troops had to liberate them but because there were many civilians in these two villages we preferred reaching an agreement. The agreement has three stages. In the first stage that began three months ago, a ceasefire was agreed upon for a period of six months. One week ago, the second stage started under which all the injured and sick in Zabadani and Madaya will be vacated from their village to go to the north. The second stage has been fulfilled. This brings us to the third stage which is due now under which food and medical supplies need to reach Madaya and Zabadani. The armed group in Madaya has in the past used civilians as shields and this has been a major challenge for the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. Fighters have previously taken control of convoys of food and medicine and have sold it on the black market to the people the food is intended for. Madaya has become a political campaign to fulfil the terrorists’ wish and break the agreement that led to the ceasefire. We are hoping that this doesn’t happen and that in the final stage the terrorists hand over their arms. Naturally the terrorists don’t want to do this.

How much dialogue is there between Syria and other countries?

There is no consultation between the US and Syria nor are there any talks between Syria and Turkey, Qatar and Saudi. Some countries in the Gulf want to talk without the media being informed but we don’t like under-the-table diplomacy. We are making new bilateral relations and this is why I came to India. I came to offer India security cooperation because these terrorists know no border. I went to China as well. Know that there are more than 700 families from China who have come to live in Syria. They are all Muslims. The men fight with ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra and the wives and children remain at home. In the security arrangement between the Indian government and Syria there will be measures to prevent cases like the disappearance of the 39 Indians from Iraq. There will be intelligence sharing.

Do you feel as though there is a reshaping of the Middle East along sectarian lines?

Any sectarian war is bad war. We believe in a modern society where all Syrians can live together as citizens irrespective of their religion. We are unlike Saudi Arabia, we fight Wahhabism, and ISIS (Daesh) is based on Wahhabi education and practice. We are against sectarian divisions totally. In Syria we were always proud of our coexistence and we recognise that our society is rich with different religions. This Sunni-Shia divide in Syria is new. This divide wasn’t there before the crisis. We are Syrians whether we are Muslims, Christians or any other religion. Only those who take sides with the terrorists are seeing these divides. This is a conspiracy led by the USA with Saudi money.

When will this war end?

Two things need to be mentioned. First, what you are seeing in Syria is a conspiracy and the origins need to be stated. It was all planned in 2006 after the Hezbollah victory against Israel in July 2006, in which Syria helped Hezbollah in the war. We were fighting the same enemy. First we need to know the American strategy. We don’t know their official policy but we know that American policies are planned in Israel and fulfilled by the US in the Middle East. Second, the Security Council of the UN recently adopted an important resolution under Chapter 7 of the Charter which obliged all countries of the world including the US, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, Lebanon, UAE to fulfill that resolution to combat terrorism. The last resolution, 2253, was adopted two months ago and calls upon all countries to refrain from financing and arming the terrorist group. If our neighbouring countries and the US who is a permanent member in the Security Council adhere to the resolution then 70 per cent of the Syrian crisis will be finished. The remaining 30 per cent can be finished by the Syrian army along with the help of Russia and the war will finish at the end of 2016.

(Title image: Courtsey MEA, India) .

This is Part IV of Fountain Ink series on the Syria crisis. Read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

TEXT BY ARPIT PARASHAR
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY NAGRIK

IIt is an unusually sunny winter morning in Birgunj, a border town in Nepal, minutes away from Bihar. The people are out in greater numbers on the streets than in recent weeks. The Ghantaghar (clock tower) in the middle of  the town is seeing more traffic than usual, with rickshaws jostling for space and bikers yelling out or honking; all except the clock are in a hurry. The urgency is palpable.

Mahavir Dharamshala on the main road running through the old town is eerily quiet. Built by an enterprising Marwari for traders and businessmen who frequently visit town, it was a bustling point for social and political discussions till a few months back. There is not even a receptionist here now. As one walks through the empty corridors to the terrace, Mahendra Yadav, local head of the Sadbhavna Party led by Rajendra Mahato, is having an intense yet studiedly calm discussion with six other people. Some are party members, the rest are men leading local units of  other Madeshi parties. Two of them—Sanghiya Samajwadi Forum (Nepal), and the Tarai Madhesh Loktantrik Party—are led by Upendra Yadav and Mahanta Thakur, respectively.

For the last three months, the Madhesi parties—representing the demands of Nepal’s terai or plains—have been on dharna, a blockade at the border with India barely 4-5 kilometres from the town. The leaders are anxious. Protesters who sit on the small bridge, in the no-man’s-land between Nepal and India were beaten up on December 23. Two days before that, 20-year-old Tabrez Ahmad was killed in police firing on protestors in Ghor town. On January 21, three more people died in police firing by police on unarmed workers of the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF), under whose banner the Madhesi parties are agitating, in the Morang town 400 kilometres east of Kathmandu. After every such attack, the protestors have been harassed continuously by locals, mostly in the night.

“There are leaders and workers from all the parties on the spot, as well as villagers and volunteers who are apolitical but support the cause because it affects them directly too,” Mahendra Yadav says.

“The day the police attacked protesters, thousands of people gathered within hours,” he says. The people of the district only need a call from the loudspeakers installed in every village to come together. “It is the sowing season so the villagers are busy. Otherwise they gather in large groups whenever they find the time. Support is coming from every corner.”

Some of the party workers live barely 350-400 metres from the bridge. They or their family members are quick to pass on news of any mishap and any “oppression” can be swiftly dealt with.

Nepal’s population was 2.65 crore according to the 2011 census. The Madhesi-majority districts constituted 51 per cent of it—1.35 crore. Of this, close to 50 per  cent population is of ethnic Madhesi castes such as Kishan, Gangai, Jhangar, Tajpuria, Tharu, Danuwar, Dhanuk, Dhimal, Meche/Bodo, Rajbansi/Koche, Satar/Santhal, etc. Ethnic hill tribes and migrants with Nepali ancestry constitute another 12-15 per cent of the population. Rest of it consists of castes that are found in both India and Nepal like Yadavs, Telis, Kushwaha, Kurmi, Musahar, Paswan, Brahmins, Baniyas, Dhobi, Rajput, Thakurs, Kayastha, etc.

Use of force against protestors has been frequent. Mahendra Yadav says there have been at least 200 incidents of assault by police. The attacks also come mostly from adjoining villages and the culprits work for black marketing mafias. Since the curfew came into place they have lost business; bribing officials does not suffice now. Given traditionally friendly relations between India and Nepal, the border exists only on paper and has never meant much on the ground. After protestors started sitting on the bridge that is part of the so-called no-man’s-land, the insistence on border controls became strict in a way it has never been.

Mounds and mounds of coal and other raw material from India lies dumped along the bridge, which connects Birgunj and Raxual in Bihar. The hundreds of trucks coming from Bihar and West Bengal carrying supplies are stopped by the protestors occupying the small, narrow bridge. Governments on both the sides do not consider the bridge their responsibility and consequently, it is filthy, and dogs and pigs roam around freely scouting for food.  “We are sitting 100 steps from the board which says ‘Welcome to India’. Nobody is troubling India,” a party worker says apologetically.

On the ground, people like Shakoor Miyan hold the fort. Almost 70, he has not left the spot for six months now, living in tarpaulin tents that threaten to fall apart. Dogs run around inside the tents too, sniffing for leftovers. Stoning is common now and people sleep with lathis by their side every night. For protection, political parties have made sure that at least a handful of young cadres who are experts in wielding lathis, sleep on the bridge every night. People who yell abuses at the protestors and harass them are mainly black marketers who have lost business because of the blockade. But in the night, gunfire comes from invisible figures hiding in the dark; from police and the people working for them. The holes in the tents protecting the protestors, grow by the day. Most people get scared and leave after a few days at the bridge.

But Shakoor won’t. “I was sitting alone here in protest even before the politicians woke up to realise that something was wrong. I will keep sitting till I see everyone here smiling.”

Karima Begum, ex-MP and member of the Constituent Assembly, has also been on the spot for almost five months now. Nepali police have beaten her up so often that her backbone has been fractured in several places. She now wears a permanent hard belt without which she cannot move. Yet she sleeps on the bridge every night to keep the women protestors inspired. She does not shy away from taking her clothes off to show the signs of police’s attack on her. Men look away but she yells with agony, anger and teary-eyed pride while standing half-naked,  that the rights of the Madhesis need to be given to them.

“Everyone is supporting us. Indian people come across here in great numbers quite often. Yet we suffer. Why can Kathmandu politicians not feel our pain? Had we been anti-national we would have called for a separate Madhesh country,  and not just a state within Nepal.”

Some leaders like C. K. Raut, however, have called on the people to fight for a separate Madhesh Desh (country), which has politicians from Kathmandu in jitters. While Raut’s is an extremist opinion, the hill politicians have termed statements by such people as the ‘real intent’ of the Madhesi people. Prime Minister K. P.  Sharma Oli called the Madhesi movement anti-national and a threat to Nepali unity. This led to a surge in nationalistic sentiment among youngsters. Mohan Thapa, a student in Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan University, says, “India is implementing this blockade to help Madhesi people so that it can take over their land and then attack Nepal. We will not let it happen.”

***

Birgunj never saw curfews as harsh as the ones imposed in November 2015. Even during the protests against the monarchy, the police didn’t stop milk deliveries or vans carrying newspapers. Even though the strictest curfew lasted only four days, the action was symbolic of the authorities’ hard-nosed approach, newly elected and basking in the glory of the international community’s accolades for passing the Constitution.

Official figures say that on one day alone the police fired 1,460 rounds at protestors armed only with lathis. People on the streets of Birgunj say there was at least four hours of non-stop aerial firing, using 5,000 rounds. “The view of the area seen from nearby localities was as if Ayodhya was celebrating the return of Ram after exile, bursting crackers and lighting up the night skies.” It terrified people and the town came to a standstill. Six political activists have been killed while 47 civilians, including a visiting Indian teenager, have lost their lives in police firing.

Enlarge

The funeral of the first victim saw more than a lakh of people on the roads. The 40-feet wide road leading to the cremation ground outside Birgunj was choked. Hungry television cameras could reach the spot only after the ceremonies. “We were begging and requesting the crowds to stay calm and respect the occasion. Had we instead instigated them, not even a barrack full of soldiers could have stopped the people,” Mahendra Yadav says.

People were distributing water, food, and even providing medical aid to tired protesters and marchers on the roadside those days. They took it upon themselves to provide amenities and would request protestors to have at least a sip of water on the way. “It was their way of showing support for the cause.” Birgunj is a predominantly Madhesi town, much like other districts in the terai region.

Local leaders claim they only call upon people when the situation goes out of hand or their political unity in the name of the people of the Madhesh region, which borders India along its length, is challenged. This unity has only come about in the past few months, although people, especially youngsters on the streets still talk about the glorious period seven to ten years ago.

Yet it is the disconnect with the young generation of Nepal that has resulted in a crisis that has seen economic losses worse than those inflicted by the twin earthquakes that rocked the country last year. By the first month of 2016 one estimate held that it was twice the loss caused by the quakes.

While the rising cost of living is angering people in the upper reaches of the country, particularly the Kathmandu valley, the suppression of aspirations and the historic discrimination against people of Madhesh, known in earlier times as Madhyadesh (middle country), is giving birth to a rift that borders on civil strife ,waiting only for a spark to ignite it.

“There have been days when my office received as many as 400 calls from agitated youngsters asking for guns to fight the police; they say you just give us guns and step back, we will handle everything the (security) forces have to offer,” Mahendra Yadav says, almost helplessly. “We are holding tight.”

***

The numbers of relief camps for people displaced by the earthquakes last year, have gone down drastically. Most are now inhabited by people who are not only homeless, but also unemployed.  Yet the numbers of the displaced are roughly the same—almost two lakh. The only change international aid  has brought is that there is food to eat, even if it is just rice and lentils.

The employed do not necessarily have a home; they only managed money to build a dwelling wherever they found vacant spaces, sometimes along gaps in the walls of buildings,  but mostly just in the open, like the one right across Tribhuvan International Airport in  Kathmandu. The traffic police outpost across is now surrounded by around 20 makeshift dwellings, which the locals have started referring to as slums. The park around it sees kids and daily wage workers sleeping or wandering about in the hundreds every day.he numbers of relief camps for people displaced by the earthquakes last year, have gone down drastically. Most are now inhabited by people who are not only homeless, but also unemployed.  Yet the numbers of the displaced are roughly the same—almost two lakh. The only change international aid  has brought is that there is food to eat, even if it is just rice and lentils.

Mongolian Mona is a 19-year-old college student who lives in one such slum. Her real name is not known to people except in college, the name of which she never reveals. The present name has stuck because her looks are Mongolian and she offers sexual services; she is known mostly as a part-time prostitute in hotels around the airport. It helps her fund her education and send some money back home in the upper Himalayas close to the Tibet border. Mona, who worked in a local hotel, took up the sex trade after the earthquake when she found herself on the streets. Returning after a week at the makeshift camp following the first quake, she found her rented house in ruins. There was no food. She found shelter in a nearby refugee camp for 10 days. Then, along with other employed people, she was turned out. The hotel was almost out of business and the owner told her that he could not afford to employ her.

While she manages to earn her meals many are not so privileged. Since the border blockade the prices of fuel and essential commodities have sky-rocketed. Petrol sells at Nepali Rs 320 per litre (Indian Rs 200)—it cost Rs 800 (Rs 500) till a few months back—while kerosene is even costlier. People mostly depend on firewood now. Even hotel kitchens use firewood as an LPG cylinder costs Nepali Rs 10,000 in the black market. Mukesh Bhandari, owner of the Civil Hotel in the Manpower Bazaar across the airport, says, “My kitchen has been blackened by smoke and the exhaust fans have to be cleaned every day but this is the only way I can keep my business running.”

The street is called Manpower bazaar because it has the highest number of placement agencies in Nepal. The men go across the world, including the Gulf countries, Russia and even Europe, mostly as cooks, guards or factory labourers. The men who come to Bhandari’s hotel earlier booked rooms for 15-20 days while they waited for visas. They would buy drink and food, spending good money. All that is in the past. Now hotels compete to offer cheap meals and a comfortable bed, reducing prices as much as possible.

“I myself sleep in the corridor at times to accommodate customers. Prices are so high that customers cannot afford to spend basic money on a room and we cannot afford to let any bed stay vacant.”

A vegetarian meal known as thakali (thali) at a cheap restaurant costs around 800 rupees. The only welcome change is that the numerous sekuwa (barbeque) places in the city now actually barbeque their meat over coal/firewood rather than gas-powered stoves. But firewood prices too have been going up consistently. One kilogram costs Rs 60 , and street fights over cutting trees are becoming increasingly common.

Bus rides that earlier cost 3-4 rupees now cost around 18-20 rupees. Taxi fares have tripled. Queues outside fuel stations extend for up to five kilometres. Truckers, bus owners and taxi drivers sometimes spend three nights in the queues, sleeping in their vehicles or on the pavements, for refuelling.

Other businesses are on the brink too. Madhusudhan Mahto, who works with a textile manufacturer in Jalandhar in Punjab, says, “Usually our supplies to Nepal have been 4-5 quintals of cloth and ready-made garments per month. But this time it was hardly 50 kg, which I brought on the flight as my luggage. There is no way to transport it to Nepal without either doubling the price or selling at a heavy loss. My owner loses his market in both the cases.”

He sold the supplies in Kathmandu and headed to his ancestral village in Jhapa district on the border with Darjeeling in West Bengal. He plans to spend a few months hoping that the current crisis blows over and business resumes. Till then, he will make do with his savings over the past few years in India and with the produce from his family’s farm. “It will be local vegetables and country meat now. It is almost like returning to my childhood; life seems to have come full circle.”

***

As per the 2011 census there are more than 1.2 crore Nepali Indians in India at present, although the figure fluctuates frequently due to seasonal migrations for work. It is estimated that around 4 crore Nepalis live in India.  According to the Nepal Rastra Bank, the Nepalis living abroad sent in remittances of $426.2 billion by mid-2015, a 7.1 per cent increase compared to the previous year. At the same time, Nepal’s growth rate was barely four percent. Some estimates say that of this 30 percent could be from India alone. Bilateral trade between India and Nepal in 2010-11 was close to $4.21 billion, out of which Nepal’s imports amounted to $3.62 billion and exports to India were $599.7 million.

The political elite in Kathmandu have turned against the Madhesi movement and India. Nepal’s annual trade with India is 90 per cent of its overall trade  and they see the blockade as an Indian conspiracy. According to the Nepal Rastra Bank, the country’s exports have fallen 25.4 per cent while imports have tumbled 31.9 per cent since the blockade began. The people, who welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited Nepal and addressed Parliament, are now against him, since he “promised the world but instead has brought only misery”. This sentiment is echoed by the leadership of all mainstream parties, including the Left led by ex-Maoist (UCPN) chief Prachanda and current Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist). The parties refuse to be quoted citing the “political situation”, but blame India for interfering in the democratic process and supporting the Madhesi movement.

Nabindra Raj Joshi, a member of the Constituent Assembly  of Nepal and on the central committee of the Nepali Congress, says, “The friendship between India and Nepal is so deep that differences only lead to some taunts and then we get on with life. Nepalis could not imagine such a harsh response from India. While a federal system is being implemented here, how can a friend take sides and pressure an elected government to look into issues of people (Madhesi leaders) who have not even got their own people’s mandate?”

Joshi is not off the mark. Only two of the present coalitions of four leaders who claim to represent Madhesh have been elected through direct voting—Upendra Yadav and Mahendra Yadav. They were part of the team that met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi when the constitution issue had heated up in the wake of protests.

There is, however, a history of marginalisation of Madhesis that has led to the current crisis. It starts with the formation of Nepal as a single state with a common identity.

While there are various theories on how the word “Nepal” came into usage, it was first used when Gorkha dynasty ruler Prithvi Narayan Shah annexed the adjoining kingdoms one after another till he had unified almost all areas of present-day Nepal by 1769. When he attacked the triple-city state of Kathmandu valley, Lalitpur, and Bhaktapur, then ruler Jay Prakash Malla led a much smaller army  against the superior forces of the Gorkha king. He then called upon the armies of the terai region for support. A 12,000 strong Madhesi army, known then as the Tirhutia army, came to his aid and inflicted heavy losses on the attacking forces but could not win*.

After taking over the region, Shah who was a Rajput, disbanded the Madhesi army and discontinued representation from the region. He went on to attack Madhesh and captured large areas of then Awadh region and at one point is said to have reached as far south as Patna. The advance was stopped after his armies lost to the Chinese in Tibet and suffered heavy losses against the British in the Anglo-Nepalese war. This brought Shah to the negotiating table and led to the consolidation of the boundaries of Awadh under British rule, as well as of Nepal as a separate kingdom. Nepal got political recognition and autonomy similar to that awarded to Kashmir and Hyderabad.

As the monarch consolidated his hold over the captured lands under British protection and patronage, the people of Madhesh remained subjugated and exploited. The tradition of excluding Madhesis from all government departments or benefits has continued since. The figure quoted by the Nepali weekly Jana Astha on the caste and ethnic representation of various populations of Nepal in 2004 shows not a single officer in the Royal Nepalese Army(RNA) of Madhesi ethnicity, while marginalised ethnic tribes also found nominal representation. The hill Brahmins and Chhetris (Kshatriyas), form the bulk of the RNA,

Prithvi Narayan Shah insisted that the British recruit soldiers among the Gorkhas, a practice followed religiously by the Indian armed forces, too. This was an extension of the imperial view that only the royal martial clans be recruited into the army. Democratic Nepal continued this policy and India too has benefited from Gorkha recruits, and cheap labour from ethnic hill tribes and Madhesh.

The Ranas, who held prime ministerial posts after grabbing power from the Shah dynasty in the middle of the 19th century, reduced the Shahs to royal symbols. The Ranas introduced an aristocratic system based on absolute monarchy, Nepali language, Hindu ethos and centralised politico-administrative structure under a unitary political system. Nepali, spoken by the ruling elite, is a mixture of Nepal Bhasha, spoken in and around the Kathmandu valley and Newari, spoken in the region west of Kathmandu. It is only one of the almost 100 languages or dialects spoken throughout Nepal but was adopted as the national language.

Subsequent monarchs, even while dallying with controlled democracy, insisted that every Nepali leader wear only the traditional warm dress worn in the hills, speak Nepali and pledge loyalty to the monarch. Madhesis were short-changed since their language is closer to Hindi/Urdu than Nepali, and a majority of them were illiterate, as is the case even today.

***

Madhesi people have not been able to overcome these barriers in the decades after independence. Their ethnic identities were diluted and lands usurped systematically since the early 1950s by the ruling elite under various schemes, most infamous being the “birta” grant (bravery grant) of land in the inner terai (lower hills and adjoining plains) and the outer (plains bordering India), which meant only groups serving in the armed forces—Chhetris, Gorkhas and hill Brahmins, benefited.

The Rapti valley development plan (1954), Nepal Resettlement Company (1964), Jhapa Resettlement Company, Kanchanpur resettlement project, Nawalparasi resettlement project, etc. were implemented by clearing forest land in Madhesh over decades. Migrants from Burma, Assam, Sikkim, West Bengal and Bhutan were encouraged to settle to keep a check on the demographic structure.

While half the region was under forest cover in 1927 as per British records, by 1992 forests stood only in national parks and protected regions. Landless labourers from Madhesh were hardly ever granted land, which has resulted in large-scale migration year after year. While Madhesh happens to be the main industrial and agricultural belt, contributing around 65 per cent of the total GDP and with 70 per cent of the total cultivated area, it received only 15-20 per cent of the development budget till 2011-2012. Migrants and resettled communities own most of the businesses in the region, while Madhesis remain a predominantly agrarian community.

Upendra Yadav says an apartheid-like situation exists. “Racism is rampant in the higher echelons. Any person with a dark skin is looked down upon and not considered worthy of any top position in the government departments, leave alone political circles. Even though we form 51 per cent of the population, our representation in government jobs, civil services, police and the army is negligible if not non-existent,” he says.

Yadav was a professor of political science at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu till 2006, when the first Madhesh movement demanding equal rights and representation was launched. He formed his own party, then called Madhesi Jan Vikar Forum Nepal and joined the movement, which was also demanding a democratic and federal system in the country. Even though the Madhesi parties were not ideologically close to the Maoists led by Prachanda, they found common cause in agitating for a system where every citizen could have equal rights and socio-political representation.

“The terai people are part of an ancient civilisation that dates back at least 5,000 years. We are Mithila people who have inhabited this land since much before the present ruling elite–hill Brahmins and Kshatriyas. The denial of rights to indigenous people (the region includes the greater Mithila Pradesh) is nothing short of internal colonisation.”

It is known that the Gorkhalis, the larger Gorkha clan, are a mixture of hill races and migrants from Rajasthan, Gujarat, Kumaon and Garhwal valleys. They fled their homelands during the expansion of Mughal rule in India and intermingled with the hill populations, consolidating the tribal Gorkha identity into that of a warrior race. They also diversified into other Rajput clans in Nepal today, like the Chhetris and some offshoots of indigenous Gurung tribe.

***

The first major push for democracy came in 1990, when the Left parties and the Nepali Congress united against the regressive panchayat system of King Mahendra. While the system was supposed to show the world, specifically India, that a democratic system was in place, it was stage-managed by confidants of the king. He had absolute control over the leaders and could remove anyone at his whim. It degenerated into a feudal enterprise run by the king’s loyalists and hardened into a regressive machinery against which, the political parties and youth eventually rose.

Yugnath Sharma Pundel, editor-in-chief of bilingual newspaper Commander Post based in Kathmandu, was a student leader when Ganesh Man Singh, considered the greatest pro-democracy and human rights leader of Nepal, gave the call for uniting against the monarch.

“The call was simple: hold elections and elect people’s leaders directly to a parliamentary system. The king could no longer decide who represented the people.” Most leading politicians in Nepal today were part of the movement as student leaders but split into different groups thereafter. The strongest came up in 1996 under the Maoists who, armed by China, launched an insurgency. Pundel says Indian policy was to side with the monarch since the time of Nehru, under whom then king Tribhuvan was given asylum in India while the Ranas took over control. India also quietly backed the Ranas to buy their allegiance and keep China at bay. The government followed the same policy when the Maoists were gaining strength in Nepal.

Back channel talks and diplomacy led to a truce in 2003-04 after intense deliberations but Pundel claims the Nepali Maoists were always closer to India. India also kept arming the forces to fight the insurgents. After the assassination of King Birendra in 2001 in the royal palace massacre, the Maoists assumed greater power and a deal was brokered in New Delhi with Prachanda, facilitated by Indian intelligence agencies. The communists have had a strong influence on Nepal politics since then, because India’s acceptance has always been looked at as the final approval for leadership, from all quarters.

In 2006, however, when the first Madhesi movement broke out, the balance of power started shifting. The majority Terai people asserted their identity and pressed for their rights, and were eventually promised a democratic system with equal and equitable representation in all fields, including in government jobs. When the movement picked up pace again in 2008, the elected government, led by Girija Prasad Koirala held detailed talks with Madhesi leaders.

The leaders at the meetings were Sadbhavna Party leader Rajendra Mahto, Madhesi Jan Vikar Forum Nepal leader Upendra Yadav and the leader of the then newly formed Terai Madhesh Loktantrik Party, Mahanta Thakur. Prachanda of the UCPN, Madhav Kumar of the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and then prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala were the others. More significantly, though, the Indian ambassador to Nepal, Rakesh Sood, was also a part of the meeting, which meant India had taken a direct step to intervene and broker a formal deal.

The meeting agreed on eight main points to be included in the interim constitution before elections to be held the same year. Among them were:

 Federal system under which Nepal and Madhesis will be given their right to self-rule in state or region (name was not decided upon).

 Group-wise inclusion in Army, Civil services, etc. E.g. 10,000 Madhesis were to be inducted with special vacancies created for them immediately.

Swayatt Madhesh (Madhesh ruled by its own people within Nepal) to be created separately, which would give the people their social and cultural identity within the federal system.

Equal rights through citizenship. A commission was to be constituted. Equal representation in every field and departments in the country

Seats to be decided based on population and not just geographical area of a constituency. This was done keeping in mind the huge gap in the population densities of the plains and the hills in comparison to the areas they were spread in.

This deal—and its non-implementation—is the root cause of the troubles that have descended upon Nepal today.

***

The deal was seen as a great victory for Madhesis as well as for the country. They had forced an interim constitution to be brought in and kick-started the transition to a democratic federal structure. Madhesi leaders became heroes overnight and were garlanded as demi-gods when they returned home, while public opinion in other regions was also in their favour.

In the elections held in 2008, Madhesi leaders won overwhelming victories in the 20 constituencies in Madhesh while writing in other regions as well.  Other parties cashed in on the pro-Madhesi sentiment and fielded many Madhesi candidates who won by large margins. While the Madhesi parties won close to 100 seats, the total number of candidates of Madhesi ethnicity in both houses of parliament touched nearly 400 out of the 601 mark—a two-thirds majority which could help them pass any bill, including a newly-framed Constitution.

Their supporters flooded the streets and slogans expressing pride in their identity were heard all around. ‘Garv se kaho ham Madhesi hain’(Say with pride that we are Madhesi) and ‘Bhagoda nahi Nepali hain ham’ (Not deserters, we are Nepalis) were among the calls reverberating in Nepal. The Singh Durbar, or Secretariat, was full of Madhesi faces. Birendra K.M, who works for a leading Hindi news channel from India, says, “As a Madhesi I could not believe my eyes. The personal assistants of non-Madhesi leaders too were predominantly Madhesi. It was as if Madhesis had stamped their authority on the country and reversed the past in which we were only subjugated, exploited and discriminated against.”

Upendra Yadav emerged as the biggest Madhesi leader. One of the main reasons was that he had defeated Sujata Koirala, daughter of Girija Prasad, by a huge margin. But he also eventually became the symbol of arrogance and disconnect from popular issues. Madhesi parties formed an alliance with the Nepali Congress and Girija Prasad Koirala became prime minister again while they got plum posts. Upendra Yadav became foreign minister—he stayed in Nepal only for 13 days in the three years the coalition lasted, spending only three days in his constituency.

With the top leadership missing, frustration and anger among the junior leaders, especially those elected for the first time, grew, as did their  high-handedness. The communists say that their leaders were even stopped from moving freely at times since the writ of Madhesi leaders and their cadres ran everywhere. Shree Prakash Das, a Tribhuvan University student leader who supported the Madhesi cause but has since joined the CPN (UML), says, “No leader was available on call, leave alone on email. People’s issues are solved by being among them. I felt suffocated since I too am a Madhesi but the leaders were betraying us.”

The promised constitution was nowhere in sight as the deadline of 2010 expired. A new deadline was set for 2011, which too lapsed . During discussions on the final framework of the constitution, Madhesi MPs from non-Madhesi parties stuck to their official party line, while MPs from the Madhesi parties were in disarray in the absence of their top leadership. After the second deadline lapsed, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered a fresh election.

***

By election time, the three Madhesi parties had split into 36 groups, each forming their own party. The turnout was historic, with both Madhesi and non-Madhesi citizens voting in record numbers. However, Madhesi leaders lost in as dramatic a fashion as they had won in the previous election. Leaders like Upendra Yadav and Vijay Kumar Gajhdar, who had already aligned with the Congress, fought two seats each. They won only one, that too with low margins. The results of the elections were delayed by a day, which some observers claim was to ensure sightings of at least a few Madhesi faces in the Constituent Assembly.

Of the 36 Mahdeshi parties, only nine registered wins, mostly one seat each. The total number of directly elected Madhesi leaders fell to 11 while the total number, including the ones elected on the basis of population ratios, came down to 37.

The Nepali Congress had lost one of its greatest leaders in Girija Prasad Koirala two years before the elections, and Sushil Koirala had taken over the reins. The communist parties allied with the Congress and formed the government. For most of them it  was time for payback to the Madhesi leaders.
Political gimmickry could not be observed in a starker atmosphere. Madhesi faces disappeared from the Singh Durbar as fast as they had appeared. The new government then set about the task of framing the new constitution. Many drafts were discussed among various stakeholders but the Madhesi leaders were hardly ever invited.

Seizing an opportunity to become the strongest Madhesi leader, Upendra Yadav approached two fringe parties that represented tribal communities. The Magarat Party represents the indigenous Magar tribe and the Sanghiya Samajwadi Party merged with his party to form the Sanghiya Samajwadi Forum (Nepal). Upendra Yadav became the leader of the largest Madhesi party with 18 seats, one more than that of Vijay Kumar Gajhdar.

In March last year, an all-party meeting was convened to discuss the new constitution. Madhesi parties protested the exclusion of the eight points agreed upon and included in the interim Constitution in 2008. Most vociferous was Rajendra Mahato, who had lost the election but represented his party. K.P Sharma Oli, the present PM, is said to have told him to demand his rights in UP or Bihar where Madhesis were in some power; Nepal was theirs to rule and Madhesis had no role to play whatsoever.

This remark angered the leaders, who felt their identities, loyalty and nationality had been questioned. The parties boycotted the meeting and leaders went to their respective constituencies to organise the voters again for a mass protest. But it was an uphill taskas the leaders had lost their credibility. Kanaka Singh, who claims to have been a student leader in Kathmandu in 2006-07 but now runs a cycle shop in Birgunj, says, “These leaders exploited power and earned money through various sources. People united under them since they had no options. The exploitation of Madhesi people is a recorded chapter in history and the people understand that, whether they are educated or uneducated. Supporting them is the only option since they are the so-called credible faces in Kathmandu.”

The new constitution gave them the chance to bounce back in strength. “Where in history have rights already awarded to the citizens been taken back? It is nothing but the arrogance of the present government. They are following the same agenda as previous governments. Ruling elites including the Shahs and the Ranas consider Madhesis as outsiders. It is but an extension of that racial and social discrimination,” Mahato says sitting in Birgunj. He has decided not to go to Kathmandu or be part of any meeting until the points agreed upon in the interim Constitution of 2008 are included in the new one.

While the protests were slowly picking up in Madhesh, orders from the ruling coalition were to deal with the protestors sternly. Barely two days before the constitution was finally passed on September 19 a protestor was killed in police firing. It  gave a new lease of life to the Madhesi movement. The brutality of the police crackdown fuelled the anger of the movement.

India intervened at this moment and foreign secretary S. Jaishankar rushed to Kathmandu. Most political parties and observers say this was a spoiler. Jaishankar insisted that adoption of the constitution be delayed till the Madhesi leaders were also taken on board. At this point India was seen as siding with the Madhesis and interfering in the politics of Nepal. Sudhir Sharma, editor of the largest selling Nepali daily Kantipur, says, “Politicians felt offended at the way Indians were pressuring them.” Jaishankar was told they would only wait two days for the Madhesi leaders to come to the negotiating table, which did not happen.

Sharma says this was an unprecedentedly bold step. He is the author of a book called Prayogshala, which translates to “laboratory”, in which he has written on the role of the Indian Embassy and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in shaping politics in Nepal. He claims Nepal has been used by RAW as a place to experiment with various forms of democracy and even monarchy to keep a tight control over political leaders. He claims India insisted that the word “secular” be removed and instead the concept of “religious freedom” be inserted to protect Nepal’s identity as a Hindu nation; the pressure has been immense since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. Since the word was introduced into the Constitution in 2007, the Nepali government tried to address India’s demand by inserting lines explaining the definition of “secularism”. The explanation roughly means that there will be religious freedom but that Nepal is culturally a Hindu country.

But there is another reason why this explanation was inserted. Kamal Thapa, leader of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), has always demanded that Nepal become a Hindu Rashtra and his party has been loyal to the royal family—ex-King Gyanendra and his son Paras. This explanatory paragraph lends credibility to Nepal’s identity as a Hindu Rashtra. While monarchy could not be reverted to at any cost, Thapa was allowed to present a note of dissent when the constitution was passed. He was offered the post of deputy PM and the foreign portfolio in exchange for his support which he promptly gave. The new constitution thus came into being.

Similar deals were made with other leaders too. Madhesi leader Vijay Kumar Gajhdar was offered deputy premiership in return for his support. The demands of coalition politics and the desire to become prime minister induced K.P Sharma Oli to appoint six deputy PMs—none would settle for a lower portfolio than their competitors. Apart from Thapa and Gajhdar, C. P. Mainali, Chitra Bahadur, Bhim Rawal and Top Bahadur Rai Manjhi–all from different parties–are deputy PMs.

On the day of the final voting for prime minister, Madhesi leaders–66 in all–chose not to boycott the voting on the insistence of Sushil Koirala. Asked whether the vote meant that Madhesis  accepted the new constitution, Upendra Yadav declared, “We would have voted against (K.P.S) Oli even if it was a dog contesting against him.”

The clampdown on protestors across Madhesh was severe after that. Many people died in police firing in various districts.

Sensing that the situation was getting out of control, India tried to save face by opening up trade posts at other places along the border. Sushma Swaraj welcomed the few points the Oli government agreed to address. The Indian government has not made any comments since. Madhesi leaders, however, rejected the step outright. “What has she welcomed? We have rejected the carrot. Either all demands have to be met or the agitation will go on,” Upendra Yadav says, adding, “And why is it being called a blockade in the first place? A blockade is when there is absolutely no movement across borders. It is not so here. These are disturbances caused by people agitating for their rights and they have every right to do so.”

***

In the midst of all this, China maintained a studied silence on Nepal, even as it is the biggest beneficiary from the near-freeze in Nepal-India relations. Since the blockades, various delegations have visited China and foreign minister Kamal Thapa has personally requested fuel supplies, the response to which has been prompt.

Siddharth Gautam, president of the Lumbini Foundation based in Kathmandu, has been an avid activist for the cause of Tibetan freedom from China.

He has stopped using cell phones. “Sadhu-type logon ko koi zyada dekhta nahi hai na” (People don’t notice saint-like people much). He is a lonely person in Kathmandu nowadays. While politicians would earlier respond to his requests to travel to Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, or to Dharamsala in India where the Dalai Lama lives in exile, no one comes any more.

He used to organise Nepali MPs under the banner Parliamentarian Friends of Tibet and Nepal and arranged trips to Lumbini and to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama. In 2013, he took a delegation of six, including three MPs, to Canada for an International Parliamentarians’ Conference on Tibet. The Chinese Embassy in Kathmandu wrote to the government protesting the trip.  No politician has responded to his calls or letters since.

“China wants to make sure that Tibetans stay a marginalised group in Nepal. India needs to step up its game in tackling the pressure and tactics Chinese use here. We try to bring Indian and American lobbies together since they are both democracies but the Indian lobby’s popularity has been severely dented by the economic blockade. I’m amazed that India is letting this happen here; it is a big failure of the embassy and the staff present here. It is India’s own foolishness.

“Nepali communists too were cultivated by Indians but as a policy they have stayed pro-China. Ideological will power against China is not present in Nepal. The present generation has become anti-Indian and will not forget this economic crisis for years to come.”

He says relations between India and Nepal have been irreparably hurt. “A change of guard is needed at the embassy here for a new beginning and repair work. The problem is also that ambassadors from India come on three-year postings whereas Chinese defence attaches are posted for 8-10 years and get a better understanding of situations on the ground.

“As soon as the present (Madhesi) issue flared up the defence attache was called back to Beijing for a detailed report. They quietly keep making inroads and get praise too while Indians get only brickbats.”

Fountain Ink sent a detailed questionnaire to Indian Ambassador Ranjit Rae through his press secretary Abhay Kumar but received no response.

***

In Birgunj, meanwhile, as in other regions of Nepal, the industrial area has seen factories shut down in the past few months. Fuel supplies and raw materials procured from India lie across the border in Bihar’s Ruxaul district. The trucks that supply the material from ports in West Bengal or from Delhi have to pay excise on the raw material if they hold it more than a week. As a result the suppliers do not take the risk anymore. Some industrialists, like Giriraj Singh who runs a rubber tyre manufacturing unit, have extended support to the movement.

“I too am a Madhesi so I back the cause and support the protestors in the hope that the government will relent and our businesses will resume.” Upendra Yadav has a different view on the economic situation. “When a revolution begins it obviously brings pain from many quarters. But like a mother forgets all the pain when she looks at her newborn child, the result of this revolution will eventually bring happiness in the form of rights to the people of Madhesh.”

The black market, especially in diesel, has become a lucrative business. But it is not new to the border areas of Nepal. There are families whose only profession, apart from some local farming, has been black marketing goods from across the border; and business is booming.

Enlarge

“People are keen to marry their daughters into such families as it is a highly paying business with hardly any punishment. They demand the highest dowry in this region,” says a local shopkeeper. The ingenuity of the tricks employed by the small-time black marketers knows no limits. Diesel is smuggled in on motor bikes whose tanks are filled with diesel while a makeshift arrangement through a plastic bottle and pipe is used to supply petrol directly to the engine. An average sized tank of 10 litres fetches almost six times what it costs in India, which means that two trips mean a profit of around 8000 Nepali rupees, whereas before the blockade the margin used to be 1000 Nepali rupees on a good day’s trade. Pathways through fields and kutcha roads are comfortable routes for cycle and bike riders and they are making full use of it. Except industrial materials, every commodity is being smuggled into Nepal, albeit with much more difficulty than before the blockade. “When thieves were hanged in the open in earlier times, some men picked pockets even among the crowd that gathered to watch the executions. This is human nature, it cannot be helped,” Upendra Yadav says.

Support from the Indian side has been consistent and is steadily growing. While leaders like Yadav and Rajendra Mahato say there is only moral support, party cadres claim trucks are being stopped much before they reach the checkposts. “All parties are helping us on their side of the border. The support has been immense,” says Mahato. He himself joined many local leaders on the Indian side and travelled to trade points like Biratnagar from where supplies were previously coming in even as Birgunj, from where 70 per cent of the India-Nepal trading happens, remained blocked. Leaders from various parties, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh of the JD(U), Pappu Yadav of the RJD and Mangilal Singh of the BJP have all held rallies along the border districts and pledged full support to Madhesi leaders.

As Kathmandu and other interior regions suffer heavily due to the economic crisis and shortage of fuel and essential supplies, Madhesi leaders are not ready to relent. “For two months till November only Madhesh suffered since we closed our businesses and shops. But the government left us to die since it hardly cares about our rights. Now that they too are suffering, I hope they understand what we want and the government concedes our demands. Till then we will keep provoking. That is how revolutions are won,” declares Rajendra Mahato.

Leaders like Yadav and Mahato now find themselves at the point of no return. The promises they made mean they have to achieve a victory or perish trying.  “Do you think the present generation will live without obtaining the rights they already had? Hundreds are ready to pick up guns and kill for the movement. There is only so much leaders can do to hold them. Patience is running out,” Mahato says.

If the agitation takes a violent turn, the porous border will no longer be confined to “roti-beti ka rishta”.  As Siddharth Gautam points out, “If this border turns violent and gun-wielding men start moving in and out of either country at will, it will be a bigger problem for India than even Pakistan. It will cost billions of dollars and years of strife along the peaceful UP-Bihar region. It is time India acted sternly with this government.”

(Arpit Parashar is a freelance journalist based is Delhi)

Published from the February 2016 issue of Fountain Ink

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANKUSH SAIKIA

Some 22 kilometres upstream of the Siang from the town of Pasighat in eastern Arunachal is the site of the proposed 2,700 megawatt(MW) Lower Siang hydroelectric project. It was transferred from the Brahmaputra Board to the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), which then handed it over to Jaypee Associates. The Dihang or Siang flows down from Tibet through Arunachal to Assam, where it combines with the Dibang and Lohit rivers to form the Brahmaputra. The upper end of Assam where these great rivers meet is prone to flooding in the monsoons. The Adi are the dominant tribe of the Siang belt. They are said to have come from across the Himalayas at some distant period. The proposed 86-metre high storage dam (with nine 300MW turbines at its base) would be located just below the confluence of the Siang and Yamne, near the villages of Pongging and Bodak.

My contact in Pasighat took me to meet a middle-aged man whom he described as a “social activist”, someone who filed RTIs and PILs on behalf of people. Karunath Pazing lived in a long dormitory-like building where other families stayed as well. It was dusk and there was a power cut, and the activist was sitting outside with his wife near the embers of a fire. He studied law at a college in Lakhimpur when he wasn’t doing odd jobs. His wife supported him, too.

Pazing was from the village of Rasing some way up the Siang. He said agreements for 40 projects with a capacity of 12,000MW had been signed in the Siang basin alone, nearly all with private companies like Reliance Power and Adishankar Power, besides the 3,750MW Upper Siang II project given to NEEPCO (North Eastern Electric Power Corporation). He likened the money required to be deposited up front by developers to the betel nut and pan leaf offered in Assam by a girl’s parents to a prospective groom’s: it carried no guarantees. Everyone knew there were official and unofficial amounts (several lakh rupees per megawatt) to be paid, but no one knew where that money went. Pazing had filed a PIL in the Guwahati high court against dams in the Siang Basin, and my contact chipped in saying they would start another agitation if work resumed on the Lower Siang project. They said if the dam was built it would submerge villages a long way behind it, and Pasighat would be at risk of being washed away.

The Arunachal government says it has collected Rs 1,500 crore so far as upfront money, but most people I spoke to said there were unofficial amounts involved too. Projects have been allotted to developers with no prior dam-building experience, and without bidding. The main criteria seem to have been the amount of payment upfront and the percentage of free electricity for the state (which it would then resell). The agreements reportedly contain a clause which absolve both the state government and the developer in the event of damage caused by earthquakes or outside aggression. Experts have also pointed out flaws in some of the environmental impact assessments based on which the projects have been cleared.

The next morning I walked down from the circuit house to the riverside, where the Siang widens out on its way from the mountains into the Assam plains. White kohuwa reeds flowered in the distance on sandbanks, and an old woman was netting fish at the ghat. A person from a nearby basti gave me a lift back to the circuit house on his motorcycle. He said most people in Pasighat weren’t concerned about hydel projects, and he thought dams were needed for development.

Later I went to have a look at the site of the proposed Lower Siang project. Driving out of town we crossed the bridges over the Sibo Korong and the Siang, the mountains looming up with clouds at their tops. We crossed a swaying hanging bridge with the Yamne rushing by below, old and new bamboo slats laid on it (the old ones rot and fall away), and walked for about 30 minutes through trees and on hillsides. At one point, to our left, driftwood was piled up beside the river. The final stretch was uphill, behind us the river and the gorge at the confluence and paddy fields down below. The village was on a gentle slope with about 50 Adi long houses (made of bamboo, and palm or toko leaves for the roof) with pigs and mithun (a domesticated type of gaur) around them. In the veranda of one of the houses was an old man sat in a pair of tattered shorts. He was lean and weather beaten, shaped by the elements around him. His wife was a fair, pug-nosed woman. Their son lived in the same house with his wife and two children. They said they had chased the people from Jaypee away, and that they had no desire to part with their paddy fields. They felt they would get limited or no compensation, and be reduced to doing menial labour at the dam site.

Then we walked up to the village secretary’s house. He had studied at the Pongging primary school under Assamese teachers. He said the school, which started in 1967, hadn’t produced any officers or doctors or engineers yet. There was no health centre. Even though it was a short distance from Pasighat, the oldest town in Arunachal, Pongging was stuck in time. A small turbine by the river provided low-voltage electricity and farming was tough.

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The traditional houses had to be rebuilt every 10 years or so at considerable expense (food and drink for the volunteers). The secretary said his life would be better if he could build a permanent house in town and send his children to a proper school. He said Jaypee would build roads and a hospital and give them jobs. He said, “The hearing for the Lower Siang project was disrupted by people from much higher up the valley, people who weren’t even being affected, but had spread rumours about villages like Geku, at the zero point, being submerged.” According to him, a majority of the people in the village were in favour of the project.

I had the feeling that some Adis might not like the idea of someone from another tribe signing away their rivers. “Times are changing,” the secretary said, “this is the computer age, we can’t go on living like in the old days.” The family who didn’t want to part with their land, and the secretary who talked about the “computer age”—in an ideal world there would have been space for both. But Arunachal had remained too remote for too long: the outside world was at the gates, and soon many of the old ways would disappear for good. A journalist in Itanagar, the state capital, told me that people were starting to leave their far-off villages to come and live in towns where there were schools and hospitals.

Arunachal is ripe for damming, and has had governments determined to do it. There is the lure of the 50 gigawatts (GW) of hydroelectric power capacity, a target that the government, and the companies that want to build the dams can only achieve by churning the country upside down, displacing people, and submerging villages. Development, the vaunted catchword, was a reservoir away.

***

Hanging like a cupped palm over the other north-eastern states, Arunachal has five major rivers—and their many tributaries, and other smaller rivers—all of which flow down from snow-covered mountains to the densely-populated Assam plains. From west to east, the five big ones are: the Kameng, Subansiri, Siang, Dibang and Lohit. It is in the basins of these large and small rivers that rights for hydel projects have been signed away over the years by the state government—with little or no say for the scattered local communities (the state of some 84,000 square kilometres has a population of about 15 lakh). A map of Arunachal with the planned power projects on it shows numerous small red bars across fine lines of blue.

According to the figures with the journalist from Itanagar, Arunachal has 156 proposed projects with a capacity of 46,500MW. Tawang, the western-most district, has 13, from the 2.4MW Paikangrong project (SMJ Consultants, New Delhi) to the 93MW Rho project (Sew Green Energy, Hyderabad), and the 780MW Nyamjangchu (Bhilwara Energy, Noida) to the 600MW/800MW Tawang I & II projects (NHPC, Faridabad). West Kameng district has 24 projects with a total capacity of 24,00MW, including the 600MW Kameng II (Mountain Fall India, New Delhi), and East Kameng, 22 projects with 1,600MW. At the other end of the state, the Upper Siang district has 12 projects with a total capacity of 4,505MW, and the Lower Dibang Valley district has 6 projects with 3,284MW.

Heading east across Arunachal, the big dams come up: the 2,000MW Subansiri Upper project (KSK Energy Ventures, Hyderabad), the 1,800MW Kamala project in Lower Subansiri district (Jindal Power, Gurgaon), the 1,000MW Siyom project in West Siang district (Reliance Power, Mumbai), the 1,750MW Demwe Lower project in Lohit district (Athena Energy Ventures, New Delhi) and the 1,200MW Hutong II project in Anjaw district (Mountain Fall, New Delhi). In all, some 16 projects of 1,000 to 3,750MW capacity, for a total of 30GW (this is not counting the 6,000MW Upper Siang II project, supposedly with NHPC).

It is these mega-dams, and the numerous smaller dams, that activists, especially in Assam, are worried about. The entire Northeast comes under India’s highest seismic risk Zone V, and the collapse of a mega-dam or several smaller ones would have catastrophic effects downriver. The runoff water from the operational dams could affect downstream aquatic life.

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The Northeast itself, with a limited industrial base and just four per cent of India’s population, has a peak hour requirement of only 2,400MW. Per capita electricity consumption here is about one-fourth of the national average of 1,000kWh, itself among the lowest in the world (China’s is about 4 times higher, and developed countries about 12 to 15 times higher). However, India at present requires around 156GW, which is projected to rise to 250/300GW by 2030. Seventy per cent of present generation comes from thermal, primarily coal, and there are still around 30 crore people off the grid. This is where, in the view of analysts, the Northeast with its potential of cheap, renewable hydro power comes in. And anti-dam activists rarely mention that dams will have the effect of reducing the widespread annual flooding in Assam.

***

Not everyone in Arunachal is against dams. My contact in Pasighat took me to someone he described as “pro-dam” , saying “tabhi toh aapka argument banega (That’s how you can make an argument)”. He also told me the village secretary of Pongging had been against the project before switching sides. The “pro-dam” person was a retired state civil servant on the outskirts of town in a large, informal tribal household. Obang Dai was from the nearby village of Balek, and had made his way up the bureaucracy. He now ran a residential school. Dai put forward his case for dams: power for development projects from horticulture to construction, and revenue for the state to allow for larger grants from the Centre (at present the Northeast states contribute 10 per cent for Central schemes to which the Centre adds 90 per cent). “Two hundred years ago we were stuck inside the jungles with no knowledge of the outside world; that has to change. Our people say, ‘till that mountain there is my father’s or grandfather’s land’. But what have they done with that land? Not even planted a single tree!” It reminded me of the Supreme Court’s order in 1996 banning indiscriminate felling of trees in the Northeast.

“There are school dropouts masquerading as leaders in order to extort money from companies,” Dai said. I saw a group on Facebook with just over 100 members that said firms coming from outside would require their permission to operate in Arunachal. It seemed a throwback to the old days when sub-tribes and even villages levied taxes on people wishing to pass through their territory.

That night my contact took me to visit a friend of his from the village of Komsing up the Siang. It was a traditional Adi house, with an open fireplace, smoke-darkened interiors, and children sleeping under a mosquito net (there are dengue cases in Pasighat). The man’s wife served us rice beer by the fireplace, and we talked of Komsing and dams and hunting. My contact was also originally from Komsing. They didn’t go back there much, though. The night ended with a drive out to the bridge over the Siang, the moonlight sparkling on the wide river. In 1911, a British expeditionary force went up the river and into the hills beyond to subdue the Adis (then known as the Abors) after Noel Williamson, Assistant Political Officer at Sadiya, had been hacked to death in Komsing after a misunderstanding. I thought of how the Gurkha and Naga troops would have landed on the ghat down below on their way up to avenge Williamson’s killing. An epitaph still stands near Komsing.

The next morning I met the divisional forest officer (wildlife), one of the two DFOs in Pasighat. Tashi Mize was categorical that dams were needed for revenue generation. “Unfortunately,” he said with a sideways glance at my contact, “there are those who would like our people in remote areas to forever live in the midst of the jungles, away from the world.”

China was constructing dams on the Tsangpo, so why couldn’t India do the same, he asked, when technology had developed to construct safe dams? Mize had a meeting to attend and so couldn’t give us more time, but he said the politics of the dams was another matter, and even though forest land would be submerged in some cases, he was for them.

Across the road from the DFOs office was the Jaypee office complex: the barracks-like office and deserted quarters behind had a whiff of army discipline. Some of the senior managers are ex-defence personnel. The land itself was with NHPC, which gave it to Jaypee when it took over the Lower Siang project (the group apparently started out supplying cement to NHPC). I spoke to one of the staff, a local. The MoA for Lower Siang was signed in 2006, but the project was halted due to public opposition. Now they had won a case in the Supreme Court, and had to submit a fresh DPR (detailed project report), and the forest department was, very slowly, doing a survey for clearance from the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.

He said the dam would create a backflow of 77 kilometres along the Siang (reaching zero point or normal level near Geku), and a backflow of 6 kilometres along the Yamne, and would help control floods downstream in Arunachal and Assam. Most of the staff were now in Bhutan, where Jaypee was working on two hydel projects (and NHPC as well). Bhutan was much easier to operate in. He said Jaypee managers had thought that because they had the MLA on their side the project was wrapped up. “But Arunachal is a place where even a person on the street can point a finger at the CM and talk.”

Some local people had been offended with the managers’ assertion that they would construct the dam by force if necessary. As for the state hydropower body, he said it had been set up solely to handle the money coming in from the hastily-signed MoUs and MoAs, some for remote places along the upper reaches of rivers where projects were almost impossible. He was exasperated with the state government for not helping with their project.

Next to the Jaypee office was NHPC’s office for the 2,880MW Lower Dibang multipurpose project (earlier the office of the Lower Siang project, when NHPC was handling it). I spoke to one of the engineers, an Adi. He said the Lower Siang would submerge some cropland and habitations, whereas the Lower Dibang project on the Dibang or Talo river wouldn’t submerge any houses, only some cropland: it was mainly steep gorges where nothing could ever grow so it was better that the villagers took the compensation and allowed the project to come up. The project would also help combat floods downstream.

A scientist at the Naharlagun office of the Arunachal Pradesh State Pollution Control Board (APSPCB), which conducts public hearings on hydel projects, had shown me and the journalist from Itanagar footage of a protest against the Lower Dibang project.

A group of belligerent Idu Mishmi blocked the road between the Upper and Lower Dibang Valley districts at a bridge, holding up banners saying “No Dam / No Displacement” and stopping a group of NHPC engineers from proceeding further.

Later, the scientist said, the government appointed an Idu Mishmi DC in the area who managed to persuade people. He alleged that some NGOs involved with the anti-dam lobby were taking money from groups that wanted to block hydel projects. He told us about how the hearing for the Lower Siang project around four years ago, disrupted by people from the upper Siang valley. The podium was vandalised and villagers were prevented from attending (something the Pongging village secretary had mentioned). The culprits had been provided with a truck and cases of beer and liquor to stoke them up. He said, “Certain political families which had been prominent earlier are trying to show that they still retain a hold; they are the ones causing these disruptions”.

But he agreed that the process of signing MoAs was wrong: villagers should first be made aware by the state government, and then one or two dams built to show they would work, instead of a large-scale signing away of the state’s river rights.

However, it would be premature to expect all of these projects to come up. The scientist said the majority would never get the requisite forest and environmental clearances. Of the 20 projects cleared so far, some have run into renewed problems, like the Lower Siang project, or Bhilwara Energy’s 780MW Nyamjang Chu project in Tawang district. Neepco’s 110MW Pare project near Doimukh and 600MW Kameng project and the 144MW Gongri project in West Kameng district are the only ones on track.

The journalist from Itanagar said a skewed “me first” model of development had taken root in Arunachal. Progress had come to mean lining one’s pocket with central funds.

***

In newly-independent India, provision had to be made for the administration of Arunachal Pradesh, then known as NEFA (North East Frontier Agency). There were no roads, as the British had preferred to keep the hill tribes isolated behind an invisible “inner line”, to prevent people from entering the hills and stirring up trouble. The area was seen mainly as a buffer with Tibet and China.

In the 1950s, Assam Rifles posts were established and supplied by air at great expense (the army took over only in 1959). What Assam went through in 200 to 300 years, including war and conquest, the hill tribes of Arunachal went through in about 50, and the squeezing of the period of adjustment with the outside world led to difficulties.

From the late 1980s onwards, after statehood, more money began to pour in from the Centre. Bureaucrats and engineers from mainland India taught local politicians how to get their hands on central funds. Elections turned into a matter of buying up voters.

A person from Yingkiong far up the Siang I later met in Tezpur said the dam agreements were a big ghapla (fraud). He gave me the examples of a tour operator who started a project, and a south Indian developer who had said, “The minister told me the river is his, he said you just go and give liquor to the locals and start work”. The developer’s car was attacked en route to the project site and he had turned back and fled.

***

One project that encapsulates the problems with hydel projects in the Northeast is Lower Subansiri. Head east on Assam’s NH52 at the beginning of October and passing through Dhemaji district you see lush paddy fields, blue skies and the mountains of Arunachal in the distance. But there is a darker side to this rural idyll. Dhemaji and neighbouring Lakhimpur district) on the north bank of the Brahmaputra are among the districts worst affected by flood in Assam. The floods come every monsoon caused by heavy rain and the level of rivers such as the Subansiri, Jiadhal, Kumotia, Gainadi, Ranganadi, Dihing, among others, rise as they flow down from Arunachal. Vast areas are inundated, and bridges, roads, and embankments damaged, turning this upper corner of Assam into a water world. Just last year, out of a total of 1.44 lakh hectares of cropped land affected in Assam, 93,000 ha were in Dhemaji alone (and another 11,000 ha in Lahkimpur). Around 3.36 lakh people in Dhemaji and 74,000 people in Lakhimpur were affected by the floods, out of a total 8.75 lakh people affected the entire state. The Mising tribals in these districts, who came down to the plains from the hills long ago, have adapted with their stilt houses and boats. However, an increase in sand casting—sand brought down from the hills by rivers —is raising river beds and burying fertile land, challenging even the capacity of the Mising to adapt.

The small town of Gogamukh astride NH 52 in Dhemaji is the headquarters of the Mising Autonomous Council. It is better known today from its association with the Lower Subansiri project. The site at Gerukamukh is just 16 kilometres north of Gogamukh. I first went there in February 2014, catching a Guwahati–Jonai night bus that dropped me off at Gogamukh at 3 a.m. A broken, rutted road leads through fields with huts and a stretch of forest. Past an iron bridge is the NHPC complex: discoloured walls topped with barbed wire, gates manned by armed sentries. The road climbs a hill, with Subansiri to the left, and then goes up to the dam site past high concrete silos. The construction site, past a tunnel, is not easy to get into. But you can turn left, down to the bridge from where the half-built dam can be seen, three construction cranes standing over it.

Up ahead, between the cliffs, a cement barrier rises from the water, with the river flowing out of the diversion tunnels on the cliff side, dark hollows in the rock just after the dam. On the other side of the river is the incomplete powerhouse to accommodate eight 250MW turbines. An armed CISF guard in a monkey cap peers out from the guardhouse to check if I am taking photos. Work stopped in December 2011 after an agitation by the KMSS, the Takam Mising Porin Kebang (TMPK) and the All Assam Students Union (AASU). Ahead of the bridge are rollers and excavators, all rusting in peace. Every idle day costs NHPC Rs 3 crore.

The road turns back in a loop to Gogamukh, through a one-time IAF bombing practice ground covered with hummocks, and the silent, dripping Dullung reserve forest. An elderly north Indian shopkeeper pedalled by slowly on a bicycle loaded with supplies. Where the road meets the highway there is a small army encampment ringed with barbed wire. It came up after the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) tried to prevent the transport of turbine parts to the site.

It was in the 1970s that the now defunct Brahmaputra Flood Control Corporation surveyed the Subansiri with a view to controlling downstream flooding. The work was carried on by the Brahmaputra Board formed in 1980. They came up with a plan for a multi-purpose project on the Subansiri’s lower reaches to help with flood control and irrigation. Power generation was an incidental part of the whole. It had the support of organisations such as AASU. After the project was transferred by the Ministry of Water Resources to NHPC in March 2000, it was revised to a run-of-the-river project, with power generation the main objective.

The Board’s original design called for a rock-filled dam more than 200 metres high. NHPC came up with an alternate concrete-gravity dam, whose dimensions have since been revised to a height of 116 metres and a width of 271 metres (along the river). So it built a road and a colony and started work, paying compensation to villages in Arunachal whose community-held lands were submerged. Initially all was well, but as construction proceeded disputes arose between NHPC and people from the nearby area, who demanded a greater share of jobs and contracts. By then groups were pointing out flaws in the dam’s design. Slowly, opposition to the project grew, leading to the involvement of AASU, KMSS and environmental activists from outside.

There was also a clash of attitudes between NHPC engineers and managers from the mainland and the laidback but proud local people. “Amar iyat tamul pan-ote kam hoi jai (You can get things done here even over betel nut and pan leaf)”, a former small-time contractor with the project from near Gogamukh told me on my second visit, in December 2015. It was echoed by an engineer at the headquarters of Neepco in Shillong, who said that if they had been given the project, it would have been completed by now. “Most of our staff are from the North East, they understand the sentiments of the locals.” [Author’s note: Between the filing of this story and its publication online, there have been reports of materials and parts being transported to the Lower Subansiri project site without being stopped by the agitating groups.]

Neepco is currently operating the 405MW Ranganadi project in Arunachal and the 275MW Kopili project in Assam, besides working on the Pare and the Kameng projects (in Arunachal). Neepco has paid Rs 100 crore as the first instalment of money up front to Arunachal for the 3,750MW Upper Siang II project (part of a 9,750MW project; the 6,000MW Upper Siang I project is supposed to go to NHPC), which is to be designed by the Russian firm RusHydro.

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Chandan Mahanta, professor of civil engineering at IIT Guwahati, says NHPC initially failed to communicate effectively with people in the downstream area. “Now they are doing good work with schools, scholarships and medical assistance, but that should have been done at the beginning.” Mahanta is part of an eight-member committee formed by the power ministry to sort out the issue, one of four members from Assam (the other four are from the central government). Mahanta says he has questioned NHPC’s seismic studies on the project.

“They say the dam can withstand a G force up to .38, based on a Richter scale reading as high as 8. But what if there’s an earthquake with an intensity of 8.5 or 8.75? The G force could go up to .44 then.” In 1950, there was an earthquake measuring 8.6. The epicentre was just beyond Arunachal’s eastern boundary with China. The 1897 Assam earthquake might have been even more powerful.

In 1950 the Subansiri was blocked near its mouth for three days by landslides and debris, before the water burst out and flooded the entire downstream area. The botanist and explorer Frank Kingdom-Ward described how “millions of tons of rock and sand” poured into the main rivers and their tributaries. Since then the Brahmaputra, whose bed was raised by the deposits, has overflowed its banks more regularly and with much more severity.

NHPC says the National Committee on Seismic Design Parameters has approved the structure and that the site cannot face forces greater than those caused by a temblor measuring 8 on the Richter scale. But factoring in a larger event would call for a change in design, which would increase project costs (already up to Rs 16,000 crore from the initial Rs 6,000 crore) as well as the unit cost of power. Mahanta also points out that NHPC has dug nine metres deep into the sandstone for the foundation, whereas the Board’s design called for a 16-metre foundation—the depth at which more stable rock is found. He concedes that the NHPC in its other projects in Tawang and the Dibang Valley has factored in earthquakes higher than 8 on the Richter scale.

Just a few hours before I met Mahanta at his office on January 4, a lengthy pre-dawn tremor measuring 6.8 with its epicentre in Manipur sent people all over the North-East running out of their houses in panic.

Another objection from activists regards the quantum of water flow from the turbines. NHPC has agreed to operate one turbine continuously, so a minimum flow of 300 cumec (cubic metres per second)—comparable to the lean season flow—is maintained. With all eight turbines running, the discharge would be 3,500 cumec, comparable to peak monsoon flow. The apprehension is that if turbines are stopped during low power demand, the fall and rise of the river along its 130 kilometre course to the Brahmaputra would affect aquatic life and cause erosion. NHPC is setting up embankments at places with porcupine structures to cope with the latter, but local fishermen and woodcutters say fish and driftwood have both decreased after the river was diverted.

There’s a feeling among those watching the project that if the BJP comes to power in Assam in this year’s assembly elections—it won half the state’s 14 Lok Sabha seats in 2014—the Centre will get the project done. Also, in 2015, the Power Grid Corporation of India completed at a cost of Rs 12,000 crore a high-capacity 800kV 6,000MW transmission line from Bishwanath Chariali on the north bank of the Brahmaputra in Assam to Agra in Uttar Pradesh. In future the lines will transfer power from the northeastern region and Bhutan to the national grid (Bhutan is working on developing, with financial and technical assistance from India, projects with a capacity of 10GW by 2020).

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“We feel the Centre will get the project done one way or the other as the country needs power,” Monoj Gogoi, an anti-dam activist, had told me during my first visit to the project site. If an understanding is reached with the groups agitating against the project, as some say is already happening, NHPC will need to get the turbine parts to the site and construction will resume.

However, there seems to be little hope of any long-term measures for flood control, both at the state and central level, across Brahmaputra’s impoverished north bank. People from Dhemaji and Lakhimpur will keep leaving, looking for jobs elsewhere, as far as Maharashtra and Goa. The trafficking of minors from among the poor tea tribes and tribal communities will continue. And in an area with a high percentage of educated unemployed, attempts by the Maoists to widen their base will only increase.

***

In the west of Arunachal, among the mountains of West Kameng district, the powerhouse of Neepco’s 600MW Kameng project at Kimi is nearing completion. The state’s project will have a 14.5 kilometre head-race tunnel under the mountains and a two-kilometre surface high-pressure tunnel delivering water from the 69-metre Bichom dam and the 24.5-metre Tenga dam to the powerhouse on the right bank of the Kameng at Kimi. The Bichom and the Tenga are tributaries of the Kameng, and the smaller Tenga dam, which is meant to supplement the flow during the lean winter season. The water will reach the powerhouse at a velocity of 4 metres per sec through two penstock pipes and turn the four 150MW turbines to produce 350 crore units of electricity annually.

Neepco hopes to have one turbine running by mid-2016 and the other three within a year or two of that. The project has overstretched its deadline of 2009, and the cost has doubled to Rs 5,000 crore. Inaccurate initial geological reports led to changes and delays in tunnelling, and the difficulties of logistics and communications in this remote area were underestimated. A kutcha road branching off the highway in a loop for some 90 kilometre has been cut out to access the powerhouse and dam sites.

Along the Assam foothills in early November, the paddy was being harvested. The picture postcard view on the Tezpur–Tawang highway was marred by soldiers patrolling from Nameri to Tippi past the border town of Bhalukpung. An NHPC manager returning from Tawang had been kidnapped by militants near Nameri in 2013. About 75 kilometre from Tezpur, the kutcha road branches off the highway at Pinjoli and crawls along the side of the mountains, in places the jade green waters of the Kameng visible down below. There are solitary transmission towers awaiting power lines, and one or two patches of paddy on the hillsides. The area is sparsely populated by the Aka tribe (Buragaon is the main village near the dams and powerhouse) with some Monpas and Nyishis.

At Kimi a new but empty and dusty residential and office complex on a hillside awaits the project’s commissioning. The few households of Kimi village have been moved to nearby Khupi, with their consent, Neepco officials say. The staff operate from a smaller office complex cleared out of the jungle in 2004. There is a large switchyard and a flat grassy area with numerous pipe segments lying out in the open. A bumpy track leads to a construction site by the river, with the powerhouse to the left, and two or three shabby huts to the right, the offices of Patel Engineering, the contractors for Neepco.

Behind them the jagged rocks at the river’s edge and the hills on the other side form the upper boundary of the Pakke tiger reserve. Workers pump cement mix from a machine up to the power house. In the office (a low roof with a fan whirring just under the ceiling) and speak to the supervisor, an Assamese youth from Nagaon. He stays at the nearby Patel Engineering colony, and goes home once every two to three months.

“The road is terrible during the monsoons and it is difficult to bring equipments and supplies to the site,” he said. I went in through the high entrance to have a look: a fixed crane on top for assembling the turbines. Walking past the turbine parts on the floor I saw the actual scale of the building, an immense chamber with people at work down below on the turbine cavities. A young engineer from Odisha mentioned how there were four entry pipes, one for each turbine, through which water would come in from the two penstock pipes. The turbines being assembled would weigh 85 tonnes each. It was strange to see something so huge and technical coming up in the middle of a jungle.

The project site, from construction areas to storage yards to the shabby but well-stocked shops had, along with the bumpy and muddy roads, the feel of a frontier settlement. I felt some of the engineers working here might come to enjoy this isolation and freedom. They were open to technical questions about the project, but weren’t too comfortable with questions about the politics of dams. They would rather talk about the surge shaft and penstock pipes, concrete and steel linings for tunnels, water flows and water levels in the dams.

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Wildlife activists have voiced concerns about the effect of the dam on fish in the Kameng, especially mahseer, and also on the downstream areas, particularly the Nameri national park in Sonitpur district. But there have been no widespread protests. After Sonitpur lost almost all of its 1,000 square kilometres reserve forests to politically-sanctioned encroachment and deforestation over the past three decades, the condition of a river doesn’t appear to bother people.

The project chief spent a decade at the Ranganadi project powerhouse, and was then at Neepco’s headquarters in Shillong. He said there was no problem with the locals (though the man from Patel said they initially protested and called bandhs). He had asked the people at the resettled village of Kuphi to clear some jungle and grow vegetables which they could sell to Neepco (supplies come from Tezpur), but they didn’t want to do that. He said, “I’ve seen an Arunachali who used to come to Ranganadi wearing slippers, he became a contractor, and now has a house and cars in Yazali and a flat in Delhi, all with Neepco money”.

Two more engineers came into his office while I was there, to discuss communication issues (the BSNL tower was down, a frequent occurrence) and logistics. They work late into the night, most men away from their families, while at the project site work continues 24 hours a day. All of them had stories to share: the last call to their families from Balipara after Tezpur in the days when mobile connectivity was even worse, the engineer who got a message in the middle of the night that his daughter had passed away and then drove through the night to Tezpur only to find out that the news had been about his brother’s daughter, landslides on both ends of the kutcha road cutting Kimi off, the engineer who died while load testing on a bridge just after Pinjoli. The elder brother of the dead engineer, himself an engineer at Kimi, said to me, “We are like soldiers serving the country, but unsung ones.”

The project chief said local politicians in Assam blamed the Ranganadi project for floods, whereas it had mostly helped control them. “We have a single person in a one-room office at Yingkiong for the DPR for our 3,750MW Upper Siang II project, but he has been asked to vacate the place by anti-dam groups.” A similar fate seems to await the NHPC’s 6,000MW Upper Siang I project.

The next day an engineer took me to Kuphi, or pachis (25 kilometre) as they called it, with pineapples on the upper hillside, an orange orchard below, and bamboo and toko pat Aka houses with the usual runny-nosed kids. The Aka tribe are supposed to be the only one in Arunachal to have migrated upward from the plains. There were two pucca houses, the larger one the village headman’s (he did contract work with Neepco) with a small truck outside it. Water and electricity had been provided and there was a school, a long, single-storey building. The engineer said most of the people preferred their old-style houses.

On our way up to have a look at the penstock pipes, the road was all dust and stones. The pipe segments were being welded together by workers with only a hard hat as protection (most are from Bengal and Odisha). The two pipes came down from the hill above, and where they were covered with cement they looked like bunkers. Further down the hill they were joining segments beyond which were the two vertical entry shafts from where the water would separate into four streams and enter the powerhouse. There were mobile generators and cement mixers, and rusting iron and steel everywhere. High above, from where the cement casings for the pipes came down, an excavator was clearing the hillside. Beside the pipes, on the slope, was a stone crushing unit. There was something oddly impressive about the whole enterprise.

The engineer himself was from Assam, and had been with Neepco since 1980. He said the Lower Subansiri imbroglio should be solved by negotiation.

“At Kopili and then at Ranganadi the local people first said they wouldn’t let the projects come up. But that was just a way to bargain with us while negotiating. The same is the case with this project. Now we have no problems with the locals.”

He told me about a geologist who had been crushed under tons of earth at the Ranganadi project, and an engineer who lost his life there when going up to check a blasting site. When they were about to close the head-race tunnel before operation at Ranganadi, he nearly had tears in his eyes.

The engineer went home for about a week each month, but after a few days he would start missing life back at the site. “It might sound bad to say so, but that’s how it is.” Then he added, “When I retire, I’m going to miss this life.”

(Ankush Saikia is the author of Dead Meat [Penguin India, 2015] a crime novel set in Delhi)

Published from the February 2016 issue of Fountain Ink

BY GOVIND KRISHNAN V

On September 14, 2015, Marco Drago, a 33-year-old Italian post-doctoral researcher and writer of fantasy novels, was in his office at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover, Germany, talking to a colleague over Skype. Drago was one of more than a thousand scientists working in an international collaboration called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to detect the unimaginably tiny ripples in the spacetime fabric predicted by Albert Einstein 99 years ago. At the heart of the collaboration’s efforts are two enormous detectors in the states of Washington and Louisiana in the United States, sensitive enough to detect vibrations a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a proton. As Drago checked his email, he noticed that among the several dozen mails he receives from LIGO every day, was an alert that the detectors had picked up something significant. It would be some time before Drago realised the true significance of the small squiggle he saw on his computer screen.

He was the first human to see what a real gravitational wave looks like.

A few minutes earlier, just before 11 a.m. Central European Time, laser beams travelling more than a hundred kilometres in a huge vacuum tunnel inside the LIGO detectors picked up a signal originating from two large black holes that crashed into each other with explosive force more than a billion years ago, sending convulsions through spacetime at the speed of light. This rare cosmological event, known as a binary black hole-coalescence, had been theoretically predicted by physicists, but no one had proof they happened. The black holes, which had been circling each other peacefully for millions of years, drew closer and closer to each other by their combined gravitational force, moving faster and faster and radiating more and more energy as they spiralled around each other at speeds close to that of light, till in a fraction of a second, they merged to form a single entity. The dying flash of gravitational energy that escaped the event in the last one-fifth of a second travelled a distance more than 10,000 times the diameter of the Milky Way to pass through the twin detectors in USA. The detection would later be officially named GW15094.

At the time Drago noticed the detection, Arunava Mukherjee, a post-doctoral researcher from the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru was working just across the corridor, in his temporary office at the Einstein Institute. Arunava is part of the eight-member LIGO team in ICTS, and was visiting Hanover to work on a project at the institute. He was in the company of Professor Parameswaran Ajith, who led the ICTS team.

“No one believed Drago when he said there was a signal,” Arunava says. “We thought it was a prank. Or that it was an instrumental artifact. When he joined us for lunch all of us thought the same.” There was a particular reason that Arunava, and later, when they got to know of the detection, his colleagues in Bengaluru, had doubts about whether the signal was genuine. LIGO does blind injections of fake data, to keep scientists on their toes. Only a handful of LIGO leaders know when such injections are made.

The next morning, members of the LIGO group received a mail from the director of the institute, asking them to report for an emergency meeting. Arunava realised immediately that something was up.

“When I entered the director’s office, he asked me if I was a member of the group. He checked everyone, and then locked the door. He asked people to close all the windows in the room. He then announced that the signal was genuine, there had been no blind injection.”

After an hour-long discussion, where the director fielded questions and swore the LIGO members to secrecy, most people still could not believe it. “It was 50:50. You could never be sure.”

Ajith was not in Hanover when Drago saw the detection. He had left for India two days earlier, and planned a short vacation in the backwaters of Kerala before getting back to the grind in Bengaluru. An alumnus of the Albert Einstein Institute, he got his doctorate in gravitational waves in 2007, and then a post-doctorate. While there he collaborated on a paper that came up with a new method, called the phenomenological method,  which describes the gravity waves emerging from black-hole mergers like GW150914.

Just before he graduated in 2007, Ajith made a bet with three of his fellow students in the institute. The advanced LIGO detectors would lock on to a gravitational wave signal by 2015. But that was assuming that they would be up by schedule, and with the schedule changing, Ajith did not expect LIGO to see gravitational waves till 2018.

He won his bet with just three months to spare.

***

The first person to learn of the “trigger” back home at ICTS was Archisman Ghosh, a postdoctoral researcher working with Ajith. The event happened at 3:21 p.m. Indian time. In three minutes, an automated computer program had scoured the data to find signatures of expected gravitational wave sources, taking apart the mixture of noise and the astrophysical signal.

Unlike Drago, who was part of the data analysis sub-group in LIGO, Archisman had not subscribed to automatic alerts for triggers from the detectors. He was the only one in the office at that time and after a while he went home and then for a workout before returning to ICTS. Around 7 p.m. he checked his email. There was a message that said a trigger of unusual signal strength had been caught by LIGO detectors.

“The signal was too good to be true. Besides, the detectors were going through an engineering run and had begun data collection only a short time back. It looked just like if it had been a blind injection to get everyone going,” he says. But like other groups in the US, Germany, UK and other countries, the ICTS team too started work on the data assuming it to be real. Archisman called up Abhirup Ghosh, a doctoral student in the LIGO team and told him about the trigger.

Ever since the start of the LIGO project in 1995, several astronomical sources were considered candidates for gravitational waves. The stronger the energy of the waves the greater the chances that they would come within the frequency range of LIGO detectors. They were searching specifically for the intense gravitational waves from end-of-life binary systems where two objects merge into one. The general expectation was that the first gravitational wave detection would come from a pair of neutron stars spiralling into each other.

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Neutrons stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons and are the densest and smallest stars in the universe. They are small enough in size to be compared to cities, but so dense that a teaspoon of material can weigh more than five billion tonnes. Coalescing binary black holes like GW15094 were considered less likely as physicists had little idea how often such events  happen.

The pattern of gravitational waves varies according to the source that emits it. Archisman didn’t need to run any computations to see the signal had the signature of a binary black hole collision. This was a stroke of luck for the ICTS team. For several months, Abhirup and Archsiman had been working on binary black hole mergers as a possible source of gravitational waves. Ajith had worked extensively on black hole mergers over the years. Under his guidance, they had just finished developing a way to test how consistently Einstein’s theory describes the process of black holes colliding and merging. This was too good an opportunity to miss.

“At 11.41 p.m. I received a mail from Walter del Pozzo, who was collaborating with us from the University of Birmingham, asking me whether we could run our consistency tests on the data. Even if it was a blind injection we would get a chance to see if our tests worked. Just before midnight I called Ajith to tell him. He asked us to start at once. We decided to start working on the data from Tuesday morning (September 15). That was the most hectic week in my life,” Archisman says.

Ajith gets up and walks to the green chalk board and draws a series of wiggles—the wave form of GW15094. As he draws, he explains that the pattern is that of a “golden binary”. “This is the ideal signal we could expect. Later, the LIGO spokesperson sent a mail to everyone saying that this was a genuine detection not a blind injection. But I did not believe it till two weeks after the event. You see, I thought it could be a double blind.”

The waves start with smooth troughs and crests, very evenly spaced. This part corresponds to the inspiral phase, where the black holes are orbiting each other in ever smaller orbits. In the middle, the frequency suddenly spikes, with a number of sharp crests and deep troughs. This is the phase where they collide and merge. The last, where the waves start getting flatter, is the ring-down phase, where a new black hole 62 times the mass of the sun settles into a stable state.

Till relatively recently, physicists did not have the ability even to theoretically model such waves in a precise and complete way. The development of complete theoretical models of gravitational waves from high mass, high energy cosmic events allowed LIGO scientists to theoretically compute the rough data that emerged from the signal. There are two ways to do this.

“One is called the effective one-body method which does this in a theoretically rigorous way. The second, phenomenological method, does it in a simpler way,” says Ajith.

He has made crucial contributions in developing the phenomenological method along with several collaborators. Professor Bala Iyer, his one-time mentor, now his colleague at ICTS, had worked with a group of French scientists in developing analytical solutions to Einstein’s equations that made both the methods possible.

Growing up in Malappuram in north Kerala, Ajith dreamt of studying at FTII in Pune and becoming a film maker. He says he was an indifferent BSc student, getting just enough marks to  make it to an MSc in Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. There he met two wonderful teachers who changed his future. A husband-wife pair, their classes in quantum mechanics, relativity theory and astrophysics captivated him. They advised him to do a project under Sanjeev Dhurandhar, one of the pioneers of gravitational wave physics in India, then at IUUCA in Pune.

***

Sanjeev Dhurandhar was one of a small group of physicists along with Bala Iyer fighting a lonely battle to establish the field of gravitational wave physics in India. Many of the Indian scientists leading the research in LIGO are students trained by Dhurandhar and Iyer. Ajith next did a project under Iyer at the Raman Research Institute, a period that resulted in his first published paper. His work led to the offer of a doctorate position at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, also called the Albert Einstein Institute.

When Ajith arrived in Germany in 2004, it was an exciting time for gravitational wave physics. The LIGO detectors had started working and a similar detector called Virgo was also operational in Italy. Physicists who chose the field as their speciality, worked with the assumption that gravitational waves would be found in the near future, opening up exciting new vistas and giving birth to gravitational wave astronomy.

This was not the case even ten years ago, and when Iyer and Dhurandhar started their work in the Eighties, gravitational wave detection was a remote possibility in the future, perhaps never to be realised in their lifetimes. Doubt about whether these exotic waves could be found, or whether they even exist, had been there since Einstein predicted them in 1916.  Einstein himself was to change his mind on whether they existed, and change it back again. In his 1916 paper he wrote that they were too weak to be ever detected.

The doubts about their existence subsided in 1974 when Taylor and Hulse obtained indirect evidence of gravitational radiation by observing a pulsar rotating around a companion star. They received the 1993 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the binary pulsar. Still, very few physicists believed it was a worthwhile hunt. For one, the cost of building a facility like LIGO was astronomical. There were great engineering and technological challenges which many feared would turn the whole thing into a wild goose chase.

Two men who played a leading role in conceiving LIGO and convincing the US government that it was worthwhile to build the detector are Reiner Weiss and Kip Thorne. Thorne is known in popular media for two things—for coming up with the theory of time travel through wormholes and for his work on the film Interstellar as scientific adviser and script writer.

After leaving the Einstein Institute, Ajith would work on gravitational waves at the California Institute of Technology, as a member of both the LIGO lab and Thorne’s relativity research group. When he returned to India in 2013, he joined the newly established ICTS as a faculty member.

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The Max Planck Society, which runs the Max Planck Institutes, is the historical successor of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Einstein worked when he discovered his General Theory of Relativity in 1915. In 1913 the great physicist Max Planck travelled to Switzerland, where Einstein was working, to win him over for German science. Einstein accepted the offer of a professorship at the yet to be founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which had the great attraction that it carried no teaching responsibilities and left Einstein free to do as he wished. Einstein’s first results on relativity in 1905 came to be known as the Special Theory of Relativity. It revolutionised the concept of time and space and changed everything we knew about the universe.

Suppose, when Planck was travelling to Zurich to meet Einstein, he had carried a torch along with him in the train. And further suppose that Einstein was waiting at the station to receive him. Just as the train draws into the station, Planck switches on the torch and a light beam travels from his end of the coach towards a mirror on the wall of the side opposite. Just as the light hits the mirror, he starts his stopwatch. The light beam is reflected back and hits another mirror on the wall on Planck’s side of the coach. Planck stops his stopwatch at the precise moment that the light beam reaches the second mirror. By measuring the distance between the two mirrors and performing a simple division, Planck is able to get the speed of the light beam.

If Einstein also carried a stop watch, he would be able to measure the time that it takes the light beam to travel from the first mirror to the second. But for Einstein who is on the stationary platform, the distance travelled by the light beam is greater than for Planck, who is inside the moving train. So, by Newton’s laws of motion (and common sense), the speed of the light beam is different for Einstein and Planck. But strangely this is not the case. The speed of light is the same for all observers, whatever their own respective speeds.

This was the biggest scandal in physics at the end of the 19th century and no physicist could provide a satisfactory answer. The solution Einstein came up with in 1905 was that time depended on the speed at which an observer is moving. Einstein’s calculations also showed why no one had noticed such a peculiar thing before. The closer a body moves to the velocity of light, the greater this effect. The fastest hypersonic jets only achieve speeds of 11,000 km per hour, while light moves at almost 300,000 km per second.

The effect is negligible at these low speeds. But if one were to travel eight years in a future space ship that could move at the speed at which the black holes collided with each other (around 60 per cent of light speed), one would find on returning that 10 years had passed on earth in the meantime.

Relativity overturned all our intuitive concepts of space and time. Not only does the duration of events vary according to how fast an observer is moving, but the absolute space and time of Newton’s physics had to be abandoned. Instead, the three dimensions of space and one of time  are now understood to be four dimensions of a single entity, the spacetime continuum. This was the picture in 1905. Einstein’s theory was controversial at first, and Max Planck, the first major physicist to recognise its value, promoted it in the scientific community.

Even as his ideas were being debated and discussed, Einstein occupied himself with what would come to be regarded as his greatest scientific achievement. As physicists discarded Newton’s laws of motion, his gravitational theory also lost its applicability. Einstein spent the next 10 years developing the theory that would explain gravity and cause a revolution even greater than the one he caused with his Special Theory of Relativity. His General Theory of Relativity explains gravity not as a force that operates between bodies, but as movement caused by the curvature of spacetime.

We can think of objects being curved, but it is impossible for us to visualise space itself as curved. One way to do this is to imagine spacetime as an extraordinarily large sphere. We experience the surface of the earth as flat, though it is in reality curved. The shortest distance between the places that we travel to is not really a straight line but a curve. In similar fashion, as three-dimensional creatures we do not experience spacetime as curved, but as flat.

The General Theory of Relativity says that the mass of objects curves the space around it. The greater the mass, the more the curvature. A common example used to illustrate the phenomenon is of a ball on a trampoline. If the ball is massive, it creates a dent in the trampoline, by stretching its fabric. Massive objects similarly create dents in spacetime. Mass tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells mass how to move, as it were.

Instead of fabric, if we imagine spacetime as a pond and objects as bodies that float in it, we are able to get a visualisation for gravitational waves. The floating objects cause dents in the surface of the water as they float, but if they move faster, they send out ripples along the pond. Bodies that accelerate in space-time radiate gravitational waves. When they pass through a region of spacetime, time dilates or speeds up for the objects in it. Their relative positions also change.

***

Einstein’s equations describe the way all the objects we see move, from a small pebble to cars to massive planets, stars and black holes. But the equations turned out to be so complex mathematically that physicists found it impossible to get perfect solutions for them. So they work around it, by using methods of approximation that allows them to calculate the solutions to a defined degree of accuracy. From the Eighties, when the first phase of serious research into gravity waves started around the globe, Bala Iyer was working at developing such theoretical descriptions of gravitational waveforms, together with a group of French gravitational physicists. The wave forms they developed using the pen and paper method, made it possible to calculate gravitational waves associated with any mass or velocity. That is, up to a point. As the mass and velocities got very large and gravitational fields very strong these models broke down. But the increasing processing power of supercomputers and the development of certain mathematical tools changed the picture. In 1990, two physicists developed a simulation of gravitational waves radiating from the formation of a black hole. In 1995, a partial simulation of binary back holes colliding was achieved. By 2005, precise simulations of the inspiral and merger phases of binary black hole became available.

But simulations are extremely costly and only a relatively limited number of them can be computed. Physicists can simulate black hole mergers at various intervals of mass and velocity, however large or fast. But no picture can be formed of gravity waves from black holes, which fall between these sample intervals. This was a serious problem for detecting wave forms to detect real gravitational waves, whose values and exact form are unknown beforehand.

Pen and paper analytical methods could, on the other hand, predict gravity waves from objects of any mass and velocity, but only if the values did not cross a threshold. The solution was developing ways of combining the two methods into a hybrid method, which is used to model wave forms for the entire possible spectrum of binary black hole, and binary neutron star mergers.

The phenomenological method, developed first by Ajith and his colleagues in 2007, achieved this using a simple, easy-to-compute method. More advanced versions of the phenomenological method were evolved by physicists who built on Ajith’s work. It was one of the two key techniques that allowed LIGO scientists to model theoretical wave templates, using which the data of GW150914 were analysed.

Once the initial rough data came in through the detection pipelines, various research sub-groups within LIGO started to work on different aspects of the data. Multiple sub-groups worked on the same set of data, sharing their results with each other and refining them. The results are eventually shared with the entire collaboration, so other groups can utilise it.

Given that the claim of observing gravitational waves was an extraordinary one, LIGO had to make sure that the evidence to back that claim was extraordinary. The confidence in observation had to pass 5 sigma, the gold standard in physics to announce something as having been observed. At 5 sigma, the possiblity that the results of an observation is because of chance, is statistically equivalent to around one in 3.5 million. LIGO’s results were at 5.1 sigma, which means there is only one chance in 5 million that the results are a fluke.

To ensure that a premature announcement was not made the LIGO team was sworn to complete secrecy, so that none of their colleagues outside the collaboration knew about it. All the detector equipment was checked to eliminate any mechanical errors, and the code of the algorithms in the detection pipeline was rechecked line by line. From September 14 to February 11, when the announcement was made to the world, LIGO scientists rechecked the data multiple times, while also extracting astrophysical information about the different stages of the black hole merger and features of the gravitational waves.

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The test of general relativity that the ICTS group was working on evolved from Abhirup Ghosh’s summer project with Ajith. The ICTS was set up in 2012 by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. In a short period, ICTS has gathered a small team of highly qualified faculty members who would work in core areas of theoretical physics and pursue interdisciplinary research.

Abhirup, who did his MSc in physics from  IIT Roorkee joined ICTS because he thought the institute offered greater flexibility in research, which turned out to be true. When he approached Ajith to mentor his summer project, Ajith asked him to take forward an idea he had developed theoretically while at Caltech, but whose implementation had not been fully worked out. This was to test the consistency of Einstein’s equations of general relativity in black hole binary mergers. As Abhirup worked on the project, it evolved, and when he joined LIGO, it became his thesis project.

Eintein’s equations have been tested in all kinds of astronomical events and held consistent. But the gravitational fields of ordinary astrophysical bodies, including huge stars are weak. The theory has not been tested enough in strong gravitational fields, which occur only in supernovae or when stars implode to form neutron stars and black holes. The gravitational field of black holes are so strong that not even light can escape it.

While no one believes that relativistic gravity is wrong, it is possible Einstein’s equations might require modifications in very strong gravitational fields. Some physicists believe that general relativity will eventually have to be modified, to unite it with quantum mechanics, the theory governing the sub-atomic realm. Archisman and two other ICTS colleagues, Nathan Johnson-McDaniel and Chandra Kant Mishra, helped Abhirup in developing the theoretical architecture of the IMR (Inspiral Merger Ring-down) consistency test. The test calculated the final mass of the black hole from two parts of the observed signals—the part produced by the inspiral before they merged, and the part produced by the merger and subsequent ring-down of the final black hole.

If these two estimates are inconsistent with each other, it would mean that the dynamics given by Einstein’s equations are not consistent with the way binary black holes in the universe spiral into each other to form a new entity.

***

On September 15, a Tuesday, Abhirup and Archisman are in their office by 11 a.m., geared up for work. Before the detection event Monday, they had been putting the finishing touches to the code in the IMR test. To apply it, they needed the initial masses and spins of the black holes. For this, they run a parameter estimation pipeline on the data, a set of algorithms developed by LIGO which computes fundamental parameters of the black holes from the gravitational wave data.

By afternoon, they have the results. Abhirup now works on implementing the IMR consistency test. Archisman is part of the parameter estimation sub-group of LIGO, whose members work on deriving further parameters from the primary ones and sharing it as fast as possible with the LIGO group, so that different projects can use the information for their calculations. Abhirup uses part of the IMR code they have developed, to obtain the final mass and spin of the single black hole formed from the merger. By 2:25 p.m., Abhirup obtains the first crude results. It shows the team that their test can be applied to the data. That it works. It also indicates that there is no deviation between Einstein’s predictions and the black hole merger that caused GW150914. But they need to further refine the tests.

In the evening, Ajith, who has returned to Bengaluru, joins them. He is excited that the team has picked up on the data so fast. For further refining  the IMR test, they use a supercomputer they have named “dogmatix”, after the famous pooch in Asterix comics. By 8 p.m., Abhirup has estimates of the final mass and spin. He puts it up on a website that other LIGO members can access. The next day, the more reliable results of the general relativity confirmation tests are obtained and Abhirup puts it up on the website. At 9:35 p.m. Saturday, Ajith puts up the final results of the consistency tests and advertises the results to the entire collaboration. No deviation has been found with general relativity. By this time, the team has started working nights. At four in the morning on Sunday, Archisman, is able to put up final results for various other parameters like the mass spin and volume of the black hole. Soon, other groups start contacting the ICTS team with questions about the results. They take questions in teleconferences of various, sub-groups, defending, explaining and refining their results.

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On Monday, a week after the detection event, the results are uploaded on the official LIGO wiki. On Wednesday, the IMR results get some serious attention and it seems that it will be published along with the detection papers. At the end of September, the team is reasonably sure that the consistency results are solid.

Frenetic weeks of reviews by LIGO members not involved in calculating these results follow. There is a review conference every week till January, as the results get more and more firmed up. Every line of code is taken apart by the reviewers to be checked. As the announcement date in February approaches, there are on average two review teleconferences every week. Both Archisman and Nathan had not completed a year in the LIGO collaboration. By LIGO rules, only those who have been members for a year, get authorship when the results are published. But given the momentous nature of the breakthrough, LIGO announced a process by which members who do not qualify under the one-year rule were allowed to petition for inclusion, if their contributions were significant. Nathan and Abhirup petitioned for authorship in the detection paper based on their contributions to the IMR consistency test and a few other contributions  Their petition was  accepted. The test found a place in the detection paper. It was also part of the complimentary paper on tests of general relativity, along with four other tests from around the world, all of which declared the rigorous conformity of Eintein’s equations of general relativity with the evolution of in-spiraling binary back hole mergers. After the announcement of LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves to the world, the ICTS team members have more time on their hands. The excitement and exhilaration of the first two weeks, had slowly dissipated over the gruelling months that followed. Now it comes back at times, in waves that suddenly rise up and recede.

“This is too early in my career. I am still getting used to that,” says a bemused Abhirup. Archisman and Abhirup talk exuberantly of gravitational wave astronomy, a field birthed the moment the waves passed through the detectors at Louisiana and Washington. A moment that depends on what spacetime region you are in. “We have radio wave, X-ray, gamma ray astronomy. But if you think about it, they are all electromagnetic radiations of different frequencies. Now we have another way of detecting objects in space and measuring cosmological parameters.”

Ajith has dug out the paper he and his three friends in the Albert Einstein Institute had signed to seal their bet. With the distance of time, it looks both interesting and amusing to him. It reads:

“The SNR > 8 Conjecture

Conjecture: The instruments of the LSC will detect at least one gravitational wave with signal-to-nose ratio greater than 8 before the last hour of 2015.

We Daniel Friedrich, Ajith Parameswaran, Kentaro Somiya, and Kazuhiro Yamamoto, place a positive bet on the conjecture.

I Jan Harms, place a negative bet on the conjecture.

Whoever will lose the bet, will have to invite the other betting party for dinner and pay for travel expenses.

Hannover, 22nd of November 2007”

The friends had all scrawled their signatures below. A few months before the document was signed, Ajith had completed work on the research paper on the phenomenological method for finding the waveforms of binary coalescing black holes.  A gravitational wave from a coalescing binary black hole would be detected by the instruments of LSC 108 days before the last day of 2015. An algorithm would comb through the noise for the signal and send the information to Marco Drago in Hanover, winning the bet for Ajith’s betting party at the very place where the bet was made. The signal-to-noise ratio was 24.

(The cover story of the March 2016 issue of Founatin Ink)

BY ALIA ALLANA

Raj Das’s Casio digital watch beeped twice. It was 9 p.m. and he got up from a garden bench and walked inside the farmhouse that is the office of ScoopWhoop Media Pvt. Ltd, a digital media start-up with mass following. It was as though a school bell had rung. Others followed him inside. They gathered in front of the television set that hung on a red wall in the newsroom. The camera zoomed in onto the man of the hour, Arnab Goswami.

#JNUCrisis was underway, and Goswami had been on fire for the past couple of days, debating sedition, shouting down students, and raising the crescendo of the crisis to a climax.

“Bastard,” someone shouted at the TV, as they continued to watch.

A long day of writing was coming to a close at ScoopWhoop and a bank of content was lined up on Facebook to be published late into the night. ScoopWhoop never stopped and nor did the traffic on its website. Soon tens of thousands of people would come to the site, peaking its consumption around 11p.m. The content would have millennials in stitches with listicles such as “48 Signs that you are true blue 90s Child”, and in fits of frustration through stories like “This Israeli Café In Kasol Refuses to Serve Indian Customers. Not Cool At All.”

Raj Das, a programming drop-out, an ex-American Express employee who used to ghost-write for sites like wired.com is considered a king at the content factory whose assembly line produces upwards of 1,000 stories per month. He is a viral spin doctor capable of turning bland ideas into lists that you will share, share, and share. But he wants more.

“Ek kisum ki khoojli hoti hai (It’s a kind of itch),” he said after debating Edgar Allen Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald at length. It was the itch that drove him to convince his chief content officer, Sriparna Tikekar, 28, a founding member of ScoopWhoop, to let him cover the JNU crisis that was unfolding just 10 minutes away. “Let’s give the students a mic and a chance to talk without shouting at them,” he said and she  agreed.

That night Das walked out covered in a hoody into the smoggy Delhi night followed by the excitable videographer and creative director, Prithwish Barman.Hours later a ScoopWhoop investigation was uploaded onto Facebook, a series of candid interviews with students that marked the digital content factory’s boldest entry into the world of journalism. It is one of ScoopWhoop’s most popular uploads of the week, with well over 50,000 likes and shares. The video hasn’t been free of criticism, with other websites alleging that ScoopWhoop is leftist, that it has openly backed the students.

“We are not this and we are not that. We just want to be India’s biggest media company,” says Sriparna, a petite woman with perfectly winged eyeliner, a butterfly print skirt and a purposeful demeanour. She has the unusual burden of managing a team that has grown so rapidly that she struggles to remember the names of all her staff. She’s quick, spewing out headlines on demand to her wing woman who types them down on her laptop while struggling to keep pace with the woman in stilettos who controls the show.

The numbers look impressive: ScoopWhoop sees 20 million unique users per month, with an average of 2.5 minutes spent on the site, making it India’s most popular digital media house amongst the millennials. It will earn Rs 11 crore in revenue by March 2016 and currently charges Rs 1.5 lakh for a native advertisement on its site. ScoopWhoop will be profitable in two years, its founders say.

“We are here to disrupt the game,” grins Debarshi Banerjee, 30, chief product officer, his eyes ablaze with excitement as he codes late into the night fuelled on double shots of black coffee that he sips all day while smoking inside and out. “Coding is logic. It’s the easiest thing to understand,” he says. Debarshi, a student of history, is an unlikely candidate who manages to make sense of troves of data that equip ScoopWhoop to suss out not just consumer behaviour but also find new areas to explore.

Chief operating officer Rishi Pratim Mukherjee, 32, has just returned from the office of BuzzFeed in New York, which is changing the nature of the media game in the West. He sits behind a desk, his t-shirt reads,“No 1 Cannabis Amsterdam”.

“We are a threat to traditional media,” he says and reclines back into his chair.

***

Nobody is quite certain who came up with the name but they do know the idea was the outcome of several drinking sessions in 2013. Rishi PratimMukherjee, Satvik Mishra and Sriparna Tikekar, three friends who met at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, were up late talking: why do some ideas travel across the globe and others not? All three were working in advertisement agencies and exposed to the rapidly growing world of digital advertising. Question was, how could they make the most out of  digital advertising when it accounted for just Rs 4,350 crore in a Rs 1,00,000-crore media and entertainment industry.

As they pondered these questions, BuzzFeed, a New York-based media company, claimed to have found a solution to the woes that plagued the media industry and espoused a new revenue model for both journalism and advertising. Its founder, Jonah Peretti who started BuzzFeed in 2006, travelled from one tech talk to another putting out a theory called “Big Seed Marketing” that draws upon an epidemiological equation for viral reproduction expressed as R=Bz (z represents the number of people who come in contact with a contagious individual, while B represents the possibility of transmission.)

Through variations of the equation BuzzFeed was changing the media landscape by engineering viral phenomena. BuzzFeed popularised a distinctive branch of kitten journalism where GIFs of kittens, listicles and memes garnered more clicks and quantifiable success than the traditional journalism of daily beat reportage and investigations.

That began to change with the hiring of storied reporter Ben Smith in 2011. BuzzFeed has taken strides in publishing seriously good journalism such as Rayhan Harmanci’s profile of a Google contractor who had to look at violence and porn all day. BuzzFeed hired Mark Schoofs from ProPublica in January 2014 and has ambitiously expanded its investigative unit.

“News is the heart and soul of any great media company,” Peretti told USA Today. His company has gone from strength to strength. In August 2014, the year it launched its India edition, BuzzFeed was valued at more than three times The Washington Post. In 2015 the company was valued at $1.5 billion.

Its tech team’s stated goal is to “develop the most innovative publishing platform on the planet” and the company is obsessed with data. According to  a blog post by BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen, the media company has about 80 million unique visitors in the United States and almost 200 million worldwide. It has recently announced that it is shifting to measuring engagement rather than views.

Advances in technology mean data hitherto unknown, such as number of visitors per site, their age, sex and time of activity is available in real time. Understanding how these work together could possibly result in viral optimisation, the end goal of striking the gold mine in the prospector-heavy field of digital content production. Clicks matter and some media organisations has started paying writers on the basis of clicks their stories fetched. Would this model push somebody to dig through public records or invest hours in building a narrative? Monetising writing so crudely chipped away at the integrity of a story.

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Nobody was playing this game in the Indian market and BuzzFeed’s content remained alien. Thanksgiving didn’t strike a chord with the Indian public. They wanted Holi and Pujo and Eid. A biryani could start a conversation that chicken roast couldn’t.

“Tell me, who doesn’t like to talk about golgappas?” asks Sriparna while sipping Red Bull from a large glass, a habit she picked up from days spent in McCann during advertising pitches. Nobody was having these conversations with the youth in India. ScoopWhoop appeals directly to millennials, the digital natives for whom their Facebook news feed is the front page of news. While traditional media houses in India continue to enjoy revenue from print, their digital media strategy has lagged behind, failing to appeal to the millions of 18-35 users who are constantly wired to the web.

ScoopWhoop has tapped that market.

***

On August 15, 2013 the friends started a blog called ScoopWhoop while working their day jobs and soon enough their content began to go viral. “People were on our site at work, there was such a buzz about it but we stayed silent,” recalls Sriparna who was working at McCann as a copy writer. She remembers a viral post that poked fun at Bengalis “because they are such happy people” that they laugh at themselves.

It wasn’t until BuzzFeed got in touch that their calculations changed. Rishi was in hospital when he got a call from Ben Smith, the high-profile news editor from BuzzFeed. “That was a big moment for us,” says Rishi. Smith was keen to discover the potential of the Indian media landscape and the possibilities ahead. Soon after the call the group left their jobs to find out the answers themselves.

The team had already grown bigger. The trio had roped in Saransh Singh, a designer, and Suparn Pandey, a brand executive into their fold. They worked long nights, guzzling down can after can of Red Bull, smoking ceaselessly, unsure of what lay ahead.

By November 2013 they left their suits and offices behind. Rishi and Sattvik had found a small run-down bungalow in a farmhouse in south Delhi’s Vasant Kunj. A4 as it was known became their world. There were two bedrooms but the group crammed themselves into one. There was a period where Sriparna worked 20-hours shifts, constantly updating the blog. Sattvik and Suparn shared the load of writing while Rishi handled the business side of things. “Work had become life,” she says. They hired a cook named Sunil, who is still with them and cooks the “most fabulous chicken curry” and rice for the people of  ScoopWhoop. There are currently 125 employees.

Viral fever was a constant and the blog buckled under the pressure and crashed often. Debarshi, a student of history with a passion for programming, was brought into the fold and a new domain was created. Debarshi, mad for coding, was madder still for algorithms that attempted to made sense of the infinite world of possibilities in consumer behaviour.

When are the boys most active? When are the girls online? What time will a happy story work? When will a sad one sell? What emotions yield the greatest engagement? A computer could mimic a poem, he said but “isn’t it all about originality,” he asked. So he began developing his own formulas.

How do you create viral success? I asked Debarshi, who is now the chief product officer, in control of the website and ensures ScoopWhoop doesn’t come crashing down on its own weight. “You want me to give you my secret sauce?” he asks after taking a puff at his cigarette.

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This secret sauce has meant venture capitalists who are traditionally hesitant to invest in media start-ups have pumped money in ScoopWhoop. Its first round of funding raised $1.5 million from Ignite World (formerly Bharti Softbank) in September 2014. The second round has raised $4 million (nearly Rs 26 crore) from Kalaari Capital.

Kalaari is an early-stage, tech-focused venture capital firm with $650 million in assets under management. Partner Bala Srinivasa told The Economic Times: says, “ScoopWhoop is well on its way to becoming a highly influential new media company for India’s 200 million-plus internet and social media-savvy youth population. By combining strong editorial capabilities with technology and smart analytics, ScoopWhoop is in a position to leverage the massive shift from traditional media to digital advertising.”

***

Hot pink bougainvilleas cascade down the white compound of the farmhouse. A heavy black gate with a flimsy sheet of paper bears the address. There is no sign on the door, the turquoise and yellow ScoopWhoop logo is nowhere to be seen. A slight watchman stands guard and the six dogs that ScoopWhoop has adopted patrol the ground, pausing only to eat from giant bowls that are periodically loaded with food. Passing through this sedate residential area, one wouldn’t know that a group of twenty somethings, high on energy, are bouncing off the walls, writing up a storm. The only indicator of activity is the constant sound of banging and drilling as an extension to the farmhouse is being constructed.

The offices of ScoopWhoop occupy a chaotic space in the house. What would be the master bedroom houses the creative team, the living room is where the news team sits, and the smaller bedrooms make up the offices of sister publications such as VagaBomb, a feminist webzine, and Gazab Post, the Hindi webzine.

The spacious house is cluttered with chairs, space so scarce that someone works in the cranny under the staircase. The stairs themselves are makeshift workstations and the rooftop can also serve as a meeting room. There is never a quiet moment at the office. Music often booms from the video room from where ScoopWhoop Talkies are produced. The only silent room is the tech room where nerds study behaviour that ensures ScoopWhoop keeps growing.

There are people everywhere. They lean against the mural smoking cigarettes. The mural pays homage to people relevant today, the gods of likes, shares and retweets. In the centre is Kim Kardashian, the queen of social media, with a smart phone that has an Instagram app. Also present is Arnab Goswami, the man that rakes in the highest TRPs in English news television today.

In small print on the corner of the mural is a text that says it all:

“I JUST DID IT FOR THE LIKES.”

***

Nobody knows what will bring in the likes as well Sriparna. “Headline badal (Change the headline),” pleads Sonali Mushahary, senior editor and Sriparna’s “right hand woman.” She chases after Sriparna, tugging at her grey sweater-dress and scruffy ankle boots. They sit on the wooden bench at the entrance of the office brainstorming. The story is about a village in Rajasthan where it is the norm for couples to live together before marriage.

The headline needs to provoke gently. It reads “In This Indian Village, Men and Women Can Live in Even If They Aren’t Married & Nobody Judges Them.” Sriparna says, “I want to start conversations, I want to challenge the way we think.” The story has 8,600 shares, and contains at the  bottom a link to the original article published on Al Jazeera.

During my three days at the ScoopWhoop office, writing stories seemed like a popularity contest. The top five popular articles from Thursday to Saturday of a week  in order of highest visits are:

1)Here’s How This Student Bought An iPhone 5S From Snapdeal Only For ₹68!

2) This Is Why We Love Ravish Kumar. See How He Blasts Arnab Goswami & Others On JNU Crackdown

3) The World Seems To Be Taking A Cue From India & Replacing Toilet Paper With Water. Here’s Why

4) Ever Wondered What The SBI Logo Means? Here’s The Answer

5) These Illustrations Beautifully Depict The Beauty & Struggles Of A Long Distance Relationship

David Skok, managing editor of the digital arm of the Boston Globe,writing in the Nieman Lab states: “The aggregators of today will be the original reporters of tomorrow. Those of us who care about good journalism shouldn’t dismiss the BuzzFeeds of the world because they aren’t creating high-quality reporting. Their search for new audiences will push them into original content production.”

With the pressure to be popular comes the pressure to be novel. While ScoopWhoop is essentially an aggregation website, curating news from across the Internet, it occasionally publishes a ScoopWhoop Special. One such is “If India Were a Circus Here’s What These Famous Indians Would Be Doing.”

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It reads: “Firstly it would be the biggest circus in the world. 90% of the people would be unaware of how the circus actually works, but they’d be happily distracted by performers.” In the circus under caricatures are captions in a sans serif font. “Modi would be the lion, Kejriwal would be the Trapeze Artist, Sonia would be the Leader of the Clowns and Arnab Goswami would be the Ringmaster…”

ScoopWhoop stories are simple to read and designed with a mobile-first approach. Chief creative officer Saransh Singh, 29, holds his mobile out and gestures as though he is flicking. The aim is to catch the attention of a reader who is spoilt for choice, so visual is valued over verbose language. This is why he looks back to the work of Andy Warhol whose pop art with its vibrant colours arrested the hectic pace of the 1960s.

“Each story needs its own approach,” Saransh says and resists the temptation to have a fixed design. The key here is to ensure the style remains nimble and that the logos for Facebook and Twitter are placed in the most prominent position for the ultimate goal: sharing. The story passes through Joshua Moares, the associate editor, and when it is ready it gets a nod from Sriparna before it is uploaded on to Facebook. Immediately after it is uploaded the team watches the data chart. A spike within 10 minutes indicates a viral success and after a couple of years of doing this day in and out, they know whether the story will go viral or not.

ScoopWhoop would produce more content if it could, but for that it needs more people. What was once a six-member team is now a 125-member company and the explosion in size has meant the vibe at ScoopWhoop is that of a frat house and a railway station.

Editorial holds meetings on park benches next to the trampoline, advertising frequently relocates its offices to the sofas at the entrance, and the six founding members share one small cabin big enough to fit a table, a small cabinet and three chairs. On the wall is a picture of the chief executive officer, Sattvik Mishra, 28, who has spoken at Harvard and is on the cover of Fortune magazine’s February issue. “Meet the best of India’s new economy,” reads Fortune’s Facebook post.

***

They work silently like elves, hashing out content for the mill. Someone is working on a story about rich Arabs. I’ve been in their world for too long and have started thinking in listicles. They’ve already done my suggestion of Rich Kids of Instagram. They’ve even written about “The Most Hated Teenager on Instagram,” to “15 Celebrity Kids You Can’t Wait to Watch in Movies,” The latter has 80,900 likes on Facebook.

ScoopWhoop writers face no limits, they curse and opine as they wish. The only check is Facebook which once refused to carry a post because the image violated norms. ScoopWhoop isn’t afraid of offending people as it brings to the public sphere conversations the youth have in private.

VagaBomb, which takes stands on feminist issues such as abortion while calling out Vogue India. “Vogue’s Ageless Cover with Rani Mukherjee is Anything but Age Sensitive,” reads the headline. Scroll past photoshopped images and the text reads, “Stop trying to be a supporter of real women and real beauty when you’re in fact, not. And seriously, stop with these fake, photoshopped covers. If you were trying to appreciate and acknowledge Rani Mukherjee and her two-decade long career—you shouldn’t have made her look like just another babe from the block with perfect collarbones, jawline, cleavage, and an overly retouched face. Just Stop. And get real.”

Too many people have an eye on Google Analytics to see the activity online. When the traffic dips, they go into their reserve pool of stories and publish ensuring that a few thousand readers are on the website at all times, not just consuming content but also engaging with the material.

On February 12, both Indian Express and ScoopWhoop carried the same picture of Hollywood star Chris Hemsworth on holiday in Goa on their Facebook pages. Of all the uploads on Facebook, the picture of Hemsworth garnered the largest number of likes on Indian Express. The total likes were 583 and it had four comments. That same picture on ScoopWhoop, posted four hours earlier, had 11,000 likes and 502 comments.

It seems as though legacy media in India with its age-old traditions, its heavy reliance on a fixed format, and strict adherence to style isn’t too concerned about ScoopWhoop. And ScoopWhoop, a farmhouse full of hipsters—big beards, mini-dresses, ankle boots and extreme partings—that smoke and drink tea and coffee on tap aren’t too obvious a threat.

But when Facebook launched a new product called “Instant Articles” Scoop Whoop was one of the first organisations be on board with other publications such as The Hindu, The Indian Express, old media houses which have decades of brand value attached to them.

“We were able to get into that. That’s a pretty big deal,” says Kriti Gupta, vice-president strategy and audience development. She tracks all the data at the backend to ensure that stories conform to Facebook’s rules and regulations while deepening the relationship with the social media behemoth.

***

This is the second list a writer on the creative team has made (she spoke on  the condittion that she not be named) today and wants to stop. Sometimes the lists get absurd and often she has to write material that is editorially unsound. But it sounds good and will sell. “Just get me the likes on Facebook and clicks,” she says.

“We don’t differentiate in content,” says Suparn Pandey, managing editor, 26. “Everything we produce is equally important to us, be it an ad or an investigation or a listicle.”

ScoopWhoop founders are advertisers at heart and are unworried about departing from the once sacrosanct division of advertising and editorial. Advertisers meanwhile pump money into more and more complex audience metrics that focus on engagement and writers sometimes produce clickbait. A lot of noise has been made about clickbait which is a term used for something that lacks value and merit but is published principally for the purpose of tricking people into reading it. AdarshVinay, a senior editor who is part of the creative editorial content, says there is only so many times a reader will click on something titled “You won’t believe how amazing this is…” So writers in the brand team produce ads which are engaging as the stories produced by the creative team and in a sense revive the excitement of working in advertising that is seen in TV series like Mad Men.

ScoopWhoop publishes native advertising. The native component is through the promotion of branded content to the readers in a style that looks and feels like other editorial content on the website but is in fact paid for. Such content has a small disclaimer that says “sponsored” at the bottom. Native advertising—pushing ads in the garb of editorial content or news—is not unique to ScoopWhoop though. It is now accepted practice at world’s top media organisations, including Indian publications.

Companies ranging from Pepsi, Flipkart, MakeMyTrip, Maybelline to the hugely popular Goa Sunburn Festival have approached ScoopWhoop to create content and advertise on their site. One slot costs Rs 1.5 Lakh and ScoopWhoop carries up to four ads in a day.

Abutting the founders’ office is the  conference room from where the brand team operates. Days of back and forth between the beauty product giant Maybelline and ScoopWhoop has resulted in a listicle: “18 Thing Every Girl Can Do to Beat The Summer”. Craftily placed in the GIF-listicle is the “suggestion” that Maybelline lip gloss could beat the summer. Similarly, “Path Breaking EDM Song that Defined The Genre” a cool collection of popular dance tunes is another listicle written by Suparn. The listicle is a digital advertisement for the Sunburn festival.

Andrew Sullivan writing in The Dish states, “Maybe I’m old-fashioned but one core ethical rule I thought we had to follow in journalism was the church-state divide between editorial and advertising. But as journalism has gotten much more desperate for any kind of revenue and since banner ads have faded, this divide has narrowed and narrowed. The ‘sponsored content’ model is designed to obscure the old line as much as possible (while staying thisclose to the right side of the ethical boundary). It’s more like product placement in a movie—except movies are not journalism.”

***

Arun George, senior editor of ScoopWhoop News knows exactly whom he would hire if he had a free rein. Ritu Sarin, The Indian Express reporter who has a mobile loaded with contacts that can crack the trickiest of investigations. Instead Arun, with 15 years in journalism has to shepherd interns straight out of journalism school teaching them the basics of desk work.

Arun followed Ashish Magotra from Firstpost. As the editor-in-chief of news operations, Ashish attempted to build a team. As a member of the team that launched DNA in Mumbai, he knows the grind and has an idea of the stories he wants to do. Ashish wants to look at the Indian porn industry for starters, and that’s a cracker of a story. He wants new emphasis on sports but he needs to keep the demographic in mind. He’s always second-guessing what his readers want to buy, always thinking like a 20-something year old even if he is 35. He is a grandfather in ScoopWhoop where the average age of employees is 24.

In this desperate search to connect with the readers, matter is dumbed down, photos are privileged over text, and ideas are killed because the “readers aren’t ready”.

For now, however, ScoopWhoop will publish a news report from a reporter they have sent to cover JNU; they will discover and present Saudi billionaire Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal to their readers; carry a listicle of things you thought are bad for you but aren’t; and publish a summary of the feud between newsite TheWire’s founder Siddharth Varadarajan and Times Now editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami.

After three days at the ScoopWhoop office, I fear that I’ve permanently started thinking in listicles. When I see the chief content offcier in a pair of stilettos I think: 10 places where you can wear stilettos in Delhi without twisting an ankle. That will get the likes. That will get the clicks. That will get the shares. More often than not it is the mundane that gets public approval. Stories that would have tanked, set standards, and despite monitoring the data there is no real guarantee about success.

Sriparna strides across the farmhouse debating whether to put Modi on the banner of a story or Shashi Tharoor. Tharoor wins this battle. “The BJP can get touchy and Tharoor has a following,” she says. With background in advertising the team knows how to sell. People will identify with certain emotions: love, anxiety, curiosity. Complex stories are less rewarding.

Writing in the Scientific American Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, professors at the Wharton Business School seek to answer “The Secret to Online Success: What Makes Content Go Viral?”

Their study concludes: “While content may be shared for many reasons, overall, content that elicits an emotional reaction tends to be more widely shared. In addition, stories stimulating positive emotions are more widely shared than those eliciting negative feelings, and content that produces greater emotional arousal (making your heart race) is more likely to go viral. Also, anger-inducing content is more likely to be shared than sadness-inducing content because it produces greater emotional arousal or activation.”

Aside from tugging at emotional strings, technological advances have meant that algorithms exist that track the amount of time people spent on an article after opening the link.

“Serious articles don’t do as well, the readers leave the page” says Sriparna. In September last year ScoopWhoop published a video documentary investigating the myth surrounding guns and the northern states of India. Though it has views in six-digits, the story underperformed according to ScoopWhoop’s standards.

“Do you create content just so its shared” I ask. Nobody chooses to answer the question.

(From the March 2016 issue of Fountain Ink)

BY MARCEL KOLACEK

Three days of photographing the Old City in Jerusalem leave you amazed at the mixture of religions and cultures. But increasingly, I wanted to see between the walls, the “real Jerusalem”, without the tourists and the myriad peddlers. When I talk about “the real Jerusalem” I mean the tradition, so strong that it defies time.

Welcome to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish quarter of Me’a Še’arim, the Charedi neighbourhood, near the Old City, where the most conservative members of the Haredim of Orthodox Judaism live.
The word is derived from the word charada, fear, tremor, awe. It is also occasionally used for “godly”. The fifth and largest neighborhood outside the walls of the Old City inspires immediate respect. The dusty streets, the shops, the buildings make it seem as if you had stepped back a hundred years.

Haredi families have an average of six or more children. Ten in a family is not unusual. What impresses you immediately at first glance is the most recognisable character of the Haredim. The men are dressed mostly in black, a classic black suit and white shirt without a tie or bekiš (black cloak of the holiday). On Shabbat, which runs Saturday but begins on Friday afternoon, men are in a different colour, white or gold. And, of course, we cannot forget the hats.

Rules of dress for women are not strict, but clothing must cover at least the knees. The sleeves must extend over the elbows. But do not expect variety, colour or perhaps some extravagance, most women wear dark colors which do not attract attention. Married women must cover their hair with a scarf. In some groups they cut their hair or shave the head and wear a wig in public. It is not strange to see veiled women and girls.

During my time in Me’a Še’arim I saw no one who took photographs or indeed any foreigner. At this point, it takes courage just to pull out the camera. Point and pull the trigger? The basic rule is no photographs without permission.

I initially took a few photos of the empty street, but there was no direct contact. People avoided my company. I spotted a few places whose vibrant atmosphere I wanted to capture. But where a little while ago were many locals, the place emptied out as I made my way. One day in the neighbourhood children welcomed me by spitting when they saw that I took pictures. They were obviously having fun shouting at me. But they were too far away and I wanted close-ups, not the zoom lens. I was starting to feel discouraged.

During my entire time in Me’a Še’arim I didn’t meet with a single sympathetic reaction among the women. Compared to Europeans, these women have a very difficult life. They are completely subordinate to men, have many rules with which they must comply and which are invented specifically for them.

But in a few days the situation started to turn and I managed to photograph places and people without major problems. I still got mistrustful glances, but I had become a familiar sight. Negative feelings gradually turned positive. On my last night I met a group of college students. I was at the door of their dormitory, they invited me in, offered snacks, cigarettes and we talked. It was a very pleasant experience.

(Marcel Kolacek is a Czech freelance photographer devoted to photojournalism, documentary, street, portrait photography. He has been published in the National Geographic, and various Czech periodicals. His next photo tour will be to India, Morocco and Bangladesh.)

(This photo story was published in the March 2016 edition of Fountain Ink)

BY PRERNA SINGH BINDRA

Raha, Raha, Raha!” urges Panchanan Nayak. The hoarse, urgent whisper from the short, wiry man makes the eight-foot tall elephant, the matriarch of the herd stop in her tracks. She grinds to a halt, then extends her trunk to encircle her young son, in her attempt to contain him. She is a wild elephant, even if Panchanan calls her by the name “Lakshmi”. Her herd of 25-odd-elephants have paused— impatient—just short of the busy Bhubaneswar-Athgarh highway (Odisha) and the paddy fields beyond.

It’s surreal: 25 wild elephants contained in their path by Panchanan or Panchu as he is known, and his three colleagues—Sanatan Nayak, Dileep Sahu, Santa Sahu—who form the “Athgarh Elephant-conflict Mitigation Squad”.

Squad is a grandiose title for Panchu and his gang, a rag-tag group of four daily wagers employed by the forest department and armed with nothing more than mobile phones to coordinate between themselves, call in forest staff for reinforcements, or police to control crowds.

Here man and beast communicated.

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Not by force. Not by firing blanks, bursting crackers, or burning mashals (flame torches)—the methods usually deployed across India to ward off wild elephants as they enter towns, bazaars, and fields that were once forests.

It was late afternoon when the elephants approached the road. Traffic was at its peak, and people milled around: working in the fields, doing brisk business in the dhabas and shops that line the highway. Children were racing back from school, and cowherds herding their cattle back home.

On the edge of the road, barely hidden by a forest fragment, the elephants were restless. On the other side, was water (this is a dry landscape with scant water sources), and the paddy was ready for harvest—an easy, power-packed snack for the pachyderms. The small, patchy forests of Athgarh that the elephants are confined to do not have the forage to sustain them.

They are former Chandaka elephants, a sanctuary on the outskirts of Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar, whose rapid, ill-planned expansion fragmented it.

***

Chandaka forests were once contiguous to the Kapilas forest further north. Westwards along the left bank of the Mahanadi, they extended towards Narsinghpur, and into what is today the Satkosia Tiger Reserve and Mahanadi Elephant Reserve. Once upon a time the elephants traversed the entire landscape. Ancient instincts and knowledge dictates their movements, decides the paths they take. They know they must move to strengthen their bloodlines, and not to  overburden a forest. One elephant consumes about two quintals of plants a day. They are not just copious consumers, but  equally distributors of seeds which they disperse, smartly packaged in fodder—dung—as they travel, contributing, in a major way, to a forest’s plant diversity.  Confining elephants in small islands, and pushing themto feed in fields, will slowly, but surely, wither a forest, as in the case of Chandaka.

A mixed sal forest, Chandaka represents the northern tip of the Eastern Ghats, not as celebrated as the Western Ghats, but equally rich in biodiversity. Chandaka had tigers once, with the last resident recorded in 1967.  Even as the big cat vanished, it continued to harbour other rare species—elephants, leopards, sloth bears, ratels, etc. It was declared the Chandaka-Dampara Wildlife Sanctuary in 1982, to protect elephants—it had over 80 till 2002 in its 190 sq. km—and serve as Bhubaneswar’s green lungs.

Over time the dynamics of the city and the forest changed. From a quaint capital built post-independence in 1948, Bhubaneswar has grown rapidly with a vision to transform the Chaudwar-Cuttack-Bhubaneswar urban conglomerate into a metropolis that will replace Kolkata as the “hub of the east”.  Gated colonies, large institutes (Bhubaneswar has over 100 engineering colleges, plus a number of management and other institutes), tech parks, hospitals and malls have come up, decimating and  engulfing the sanctuary and its surrounding forests.

Even within the sanctuary there were problems. Chandaka was neglected and  mismanaged—overgrazed by cattle, exploited for firewood, encroached by villages, it no longer offered refuge for its denizens. Pushed out, elephants raided fields, blundered into residential colonies and institutes that were once forests. Crackers, shotguns, crowds, mobs and mayhem invariably followed wherever they went. The desperate, bewildered elephants were on the run, hounded by mobs, harassed by hostile villagers. A few fell on the wayside: some from sheer exhaustion, some were poisoned, others electrocuted. Six including two calves were crushed by a speeding train as they travelled southwards toward Chilika. Lakshmi’s herd waded through the river Mahanadi, across towns,villages, industrial areas and highways to reach Athgarh.

Elephants chased away from their home, chased everywhere, trapped in forest scraps. Untamed, cornered, desperate. Pushed into conflict with man, they have retaliated, killing people. Yet, they “listen”, and respond to the squad, who are, literally, their shadow.

Why? I ask the Athgarh squad.

The answer is as simple as it’s complicated: “The elephants know we help them,” said Sanatan.

They have warned electricity department authorities of sagging power cables—an easy, frequently used weapon to kill elephants. Elephants are felled by sagging power lines—which may be accidental but avoidable. But many times it is deliberate poaching or retaliatory killing by live wire traps and electrified fences.

In Odisha alone over 60 elephants have been electrocuted in the last five years, according to data compiled by the Wildlife Society of Orissa based on forest department records and newspaper reports.

Panchu and his group have even rescued Lakshmi’s five-year-old calf, called Nungura ( “the one who teases’’),  because he is a bit of a brat, naughty, curious, whimsical. “Actually not unlike my own son, Pintu,” mutters Panchu as his mates holler in glee. Nungura had fallen into an open well. The calf shrieked, flailed in the depths, as the herd desperately tried and failed to lift him out with their trunks. The inevitable crowd gathered. Curious—and suicidal—onlookers who tried to get close to watch the tamasha were charged at by an enraged, distressed Lakshmi. A few came particularly close, unmindful, even mocking the elephants,  mobiles held aloft to click selfies. Lakshmi charged, stopping just short of them. She bellowed in warning, once, twice, thrice; maybe more, but heedless, the men jostled ahead, peering into the well. Tormented by the crowd, and terrified for her calf, Lakshmi struck, killing one man.

The situation was rapidly getting out of hand, if not becoming explosive, when the squad arrived.

They admit to a brief moment of fear—after all Lakshmi had just killed a human—before it flickered out. “The elephants were not killers. They will not harm intentionally. We knew it was only because she was provoked, cornered, and like all mothers, fiercely protective.”

“So we talked to a distraught Lakshmi, calmed her, reassured her that we would get back her child…only she has to let us do our job,” says Panchu. The matriarch moved away, a silent sentinel, as with the help of an earth mover, the calf was rescued and united with the herd.

In the alien, hostile world that the elephants have been tossed into, they know that they have these men on their side.

Such bonds and elephant behaviour, while extraordinary, is not unheard of.

Elephants are one of the most intelligent of animal species and are adept tool users. They fashion twigs to shoo pesky flies, use logs to break electric fences designed to keep them out, and  have strong social and familial bonds. They are sensitive and empathetic, and comfort one another in times of distress. When threatened, adults in a group close ranks, get into a huddle, encircling and shielding babies with their bulk. In north Bengal, five elephants were mowed down by a speeding train in 2010 when trying to save two of their young trapped on the Siliguri-Alipurduar track. In Corbett National Park, a mother carried the wasting body of her still-born calf for days, constantly touched and caressed by others in her herd in an effort to comfort her.

They co-operate and coordinate to solve problems, understand and respond to people. Researchers in  Amboseli, Kenya, speak of individual elephants recognising them after a gap of 12 years.  In Assam’s Manas Tiger Reserve, guards recall that elephant herds would gravitate toward their quarters during the period of insurgency, which saw brutal violence and poaching. Did they feel safer? We don’t know—but in times of peace, such behaviour diminished. A severely dehydrated tusker in Uttarakhand allowed forest officials and vets to help him—even pour gallons of glucose down his throat. When better, he calmly walked away, as his rescuers stood by.

While these seem anecdotal oddities, science supports the idea that elephants are intelligent, social, empathetic beings with a problem solving ability.

***

At Athgarh, this man-animal relationship is taking a toll on the trackers. Their affinity to the elephants has alienated them from the other village folk, at times even their families, who bear them a grudge for the loss of crop  “their animals” have caused, and the havoc they create. A few locals also find this the perfect pretext to strike back for being caught by the watchers/trackers for poaching deer and boar for the pot.

Sanatan says his father is fed up and fears for his son who faces the community’s wrath. He offered to pay Sanatan the `200 a day he gets as wages, if he left the job, and the elephants alone.

But Sanatan won’t leave his job. Like the rest of the squad, for better or for worse, he feels bonded to the elephants.

It wasn’t always so. Their employment in 2011 was triggered by the escalating human-elephant conflict. Panchu and gang were unacquainted with elephants, their impression of the animal largely based on the stories of conflict and confrontation. They were apprehensive and clueless. In the beginning they  followed the elephants at a “very safe distance”, joining the crowd in bursting crackers, lung power and loud bangs, in an effort to scare them away.

It didn’t work. In fact, it had quite the opposite effect. The uproar spooked the animals, leading to greater chaos and damage.

The turning point was when they realised that the elephants were as terrified as they were. “We also sensed that they didn’t misuse their immense strength, their power—they could have actually caused us grievous harm, as we bumbled behind, trying to chase them away,” said Panchu. “This gave us courage.” And sparked in them a feeling of empathy for the beleaguered pachyderms.

In the mornings they try and trace the elephants to keep tabs on their location. By afternoon, they have a fair idea of where the elephants are and also an idea of where they will move—which villages will fall in their path that evening. Most wild animals usually take set routes—they work out the best ones and stick to those. Most of the time, the squad watches over their herd until the elephants are safe in the next fragment of forest.

And as they monitored their charges round the clock, they learnt about elephant behaviour, and individual characteristics. They identified which one was unpredictable, which one calm. They knew that Lakshmi was gentle, yet aggressive. As the matriarch responsible for her herd, she would put her life at risk, and kill others if she felt threatened. They learnt it was hunger and thirst which drove the elephants. And they saw them grieve. When one of the elephants was  electrocuted, the herd tried to rescue the dying elephant , trampling the live wire and getting hurt in the process. They surrounded the carcass, circling it, touching it, shaking their heads back and forth, calling out in distress.

And so, the fear factor fell—on the part of both man and beast. The elephants started recognising them, even seeking them out among the crowd when surrounded by mobs. It motivates them to go on against all odds, say the trackers. It’s certainly not the money, the wages are low. All of them have other means of livelihood. Panchu, for instance, runs a small farm supply shop, the rest supplement their income with their small landholdings. Tackling conflict situations is stressful, at times risky, and knows no hours or Sundays. While their kith and kin celebrate Diwali and other festivals, the squad steps up its vigilance during festivities, with the accompanying noise and crowds. Nights are when the elephants are most vulnerable: to open transmission wires or around train tracks.

However, even such monitoring and dedication cannot be a solution to the issue of human-elephant conflict, unless the root of the problem—vanishing, fragmented habitat—is addressed. Loss of forest cover directly causes, and increases conflict, as the experience in north Bengal shows. At least 50 people have been killed in the two districts of Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling. The elephants  have lost nearly 70 per cent of their original habitat in the region, which has been occupied over the years by tea estates, labour lines, fields, defence infrastructure, hydel projects, highways, rail tracks, resorts, etc .

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Elephants have been killed as well; many bear scars, burns from lighted mashals, their bodies limp and pockmarked with bullets. It wounds the spirit as well. Calves born in, and living with conflict are not unlike children raised in war zones. Anxious, traumatised; and having never known peace , they are more prone to get into conflict situations. The conflict mitigation team here is the “Mal Squad”(based in Mal Bazar) and was set up in 1979, the oldest such in the country. It receives no less than 50 distress calls a day.  At best, squads such as these can defuse the crisis—but it’s not unlike applying a band aid to a festering, bleeding wound.

***

IIn Athgarh, the sliver of forests in which these 25-odd-elephants are confined, cannot sustain them. As instincts dictate, the animals have tried to get back to their original home range, Chandaka, but were obstructed by barriers—moats and walls built as part of management plans by the forest department. The elephants were turned away, from a sanctuary created to protect them.

Even the fragments they inhabit now in Athgarh are threatened. Grassy meadows which the pachyderms prefer, are being plotted, concretised and built upon.One of the critical water sources, a natural pond is slated to be filled up for a ‘Picnickers Paradise Park’.

No one bothers to consult the squad when an elephant habitat or a crucial waterhole is signed away for a power plant or a shopping complex. The trackers form the lowest rung. In fact as contract labour, they do not even exist in the official hierarchy of the forest department.

In a state which has forsaken its elephants, this  “squad”, and others like it in similar conflict hotspots across the elephant range, are the animals’ only saviours.

The state government has overseen the destruction of critical elephant habitat and corridors; in fact, it even refused to notify two proposed elephant reserves—South Odisha  and Baitarani Elephant Reserve, in deference to mining interests.

This landscape is rich with elephant lore. Historically, the elephants of these jungles were the most coveted for wars. About 50 kilometres from Chandaka is the ancient elephant sculpture at Dhauli, where the emperor  Ashoka embraced Buddhism, and ahimsa.

In India, the Elephas  maximus is strictly protected by law and is listed under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. It is also accorded the status of our Natural Heritage Animal.

The turmoil and the conflict at Athgarh is a microcosm of what is happening across its range as forests and ancient pathways of elephants are decimated, drowned and destroyed by urbanisation and development. Human-elephant conflict has escalated across its range, with fatal consequences to both sides—all over India about 300 people lose their lives to elephants annually­ and many elephants are felled in conflict.

The central government also failed to act on the recommendations of the Elephant Task Force it appointed in 2010. One key recommendation was to create an empowered National Elephant Conservation Authority along the lines for the tiger, but it was dismissed. While some cosmetic recommendations  like the Haathi Mera Saathi (the title of a popular yesteryear Bollywood film) campaign was started, substantial recommendations of bringing crucial elephant habitats and corridors under some kind of graded legal protection was not taken on board.

Currently, only a third of elephant habitat is covered under the Protected Area network. This is not accidental. The elephant habitat is also prime coal and iron-ore land.

***

In Betakholi, Athgarh, dusk has fallen and elephants have broken cover. The squad readies to watch over their herd, now a little too close for comfort to the village.  I wonder, worry about their future, grapple for a solution to this complex and arguably hopeless issue.  I look to our ‘elephant men’ who say that it is not the elephants who are the problem. “Elephants are wise, intelligent, peaceable beings with a heart, a conscience.  We have wreaked havoc in their lives­­­—taken their home, their food, blocked access to water. We have killed their families, destroyed their society. So they are pushed into being something they are not­—aggressive, erratic, belligerent. Whatever “solution” we think of,  has to keep the elephant in mind. Only then there is hope,” they say.

With Inputs by Aditya Chandra Panda

Update: Since the publication of this story, two elephants of the Athgarh herd were electrocuted.

(Prerna Singh Bindra is a writer and a conservationist with a focus on conserving wildlife habitats. She has served on India’s National Board for Wildlife, and is the editor of the journal, TigerLink.)

(Aditya Chandra Panda is a writer, photographer and conservationist working in Odisha.)

(From the April 2016 issue of Fountain Ink)