Whats with rhyme?

Corporal Joshua Belile of the U.S. Marine Corps is facing flak from the left for his song Hadji Girl in which he renders a light mood to the human collateral damage in an encounter with insurgents (btw, haji or hadji is the slang U.S. soldiers use for Iraq natives, like the Somalian skinnies a la Black Hawk Down). Not suprising. The conclusion that rhyme doesnt go down well with martial affairs was brought home to me last year when my feeble reactionary "poem" (for lack of a lesser word) was shut down on a popular military forum that I had long participated in.

Many discussions on this forum center around current conflicts theatres like Iraq and Afghanistan. One frequent theme of back-slapping among supporters of the war is the killing of Iraqis who are shot at when they approach too close to an armed checkpoint or an APCs (armored personal carriers). APCs carry large signs in English and Arabic warning that anyone approaching near will be shot, and frequently these warnings are realized. The trespassers are all supposed to be insurgents, but after the death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari we know better. Not-so-pretty pictures of the victims are sometimes posted and celebrated. The arrogance in one such discussion motivated me into scribbling an angry poem in reply. Well, it seems the the response obviously pinched some folks, because in a few minutes of the posting moderators had branded me a troll, banned me and locked the thread. The poem went like this:

We are here to help you!
We are here to free you!
We are riding on streets,
Thats YOUR taxes paid for, how sweet!
But if you come close to my armored car,
I will blow you brains FAR!

You were just a regular hadji guy
On your way to work; you werent out to die.
But you didnt see my sign,
So I blew you out of line!
We are here to help you!
We are here to free you!

We put you in a body bag
And posted the pic on an online mag
With the caption "Insurgent taken down with 50 cal"
Now, isnt that swell, pal?
We told your wife and kids some
That you are the cost of their freedom.
We are here to help you!
We are here to free you!
***

The funny thing is that I and others had aired more heretical ideas in regular posts on the forum without raising any eyebrows. Does rhyming your thoughts make them hit harder?

Book Recap: Kashmir - Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace

In the 1987 Assembly elections in the Amirakadal constituency in Kashmir valley, the incumbent centre-backed National Conference (NC) candidate was challenged by Mohammad Yusuf Shah of the Muslim United Front (MUF) party. A 21-year old man named Yasin Malik was Shah's campaign manager. On counting day, when it became clear that Shah was winning, the NC candidate quietly left for home. But a few hours later, he was recalled to the counting office and declared a winner. The NC being favored by the Centre, presiding election officers had 'intervened' and changed the course of the result. The same evening, Yusuf Shah and Yasin Malik were arrested and imprisoned without trial for nearly 9 months.

Bose uses this incident to highlight the plight of the political process in Kashmir. In the 60 years since Independence, this story has been played out repeatedly across Jammu and the Kashmir Valley, and Bose contends that as much of the Kashmir problem is due to mishandling of Kashmiri democratic institutions by India, as is to the extraordinary conditions of its birth. But this particular incidence has special significance. After being released from prison, the frustrated MUF candidate and his campaign manager crossed over into the so-called Azad Kashmir (POK), returning after a couple of years - with Mohammed Shah (later taking on the name Syed Salahuddin) founding the Hizb-ul Mujahideen and Yasin Malik founding the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, both organisations having violence as their key strategy.

The first half of the book is thus given over to making the point that contrary to projections by Indian leaders and perception of the Indian public, the Kashmir problem is an internal political problem rather than a boundary dispute. In fact, cross-border terrorism is barely mentioned till late in the book. Interviews of the author with native Kashmiris who talk fondly of vague but lofty notions such as kashmiriyat and khudmukhtari while berating the acts of both India and the violent militant culture, would give fresh insight to Indians brought up to think "Kashmir problem = Pakistan". Another stark reminder is that of the shallowness and corruption within the National Conference (NC), once thought to be the equivalent of the Indian National Congress in Kashmir's freedom struggle, that is better known by its leaders Farooq Abdullah and recently by his son Omar Abdullah. Remember how in 2002 the Indian media, with its enchantment for everything young and beautiful, had presented the freshly-elected MP Omar to the unsuspecting Indian public as a messiah-in-the-making?

While the earlier sections of the book are written in a quasi-journalistic subaltern style, Bose resorts to a more traditional academic approach in the last. He tests some of the frequently-aired solutions to the Kashmir problem and proposes an original resolution framework. Plebiscide and partition are both dismissed out of hand because of the complex nature of the problem. A parallel is drawn between Kashmir and Northern Ireland (the latter faces a similar problem of conflicting nationalities and religious cultures, with the Catholic minority leaning towards the Republic of Ireland and the Protestant majority leaning towards England). The peace of the last 6 years in Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 is taken as proof of the success of the complex solution followed there, and Bose models his own framework on that basis. In essence, his approach calls for the establishment of an all-inclusive independent governance structure in Kashmir with direct but benign intervention of both Dilli and Islamabad.

Overall, the book is excellent reading for someone with only a casual understanding of the Kashmir problem. Others might find Bose's ideas, especially those centered on the solution, less inspiring. While he maintains a fairly interesting narrative throughout, one feels restricted in perspective by the fact that the book is essentially written from the standpoint of an Indian (though the book contains plenty of objective criticism of India's approach). For example, many Indian readers would like to know what Kashmir looks like from Islamabad, or from Muzaffarabad (the capital of POK) to get a better grasp of the problem, but Bose doesnt offer that luxury. The upside being that his point-focus keeps the book short and precise, thus making it a good primer.

The ghost of Janawad

This report in The Hindu today caught my eye: No chargesheet filed yet in Janawad scam case. In case you are stranger to this name, Janawad is a village in Rajasthan, immortalised by a jan sunvai organised there by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in April 2001.

I was working with Seva Mandir in Udaipur district then, and had hopped on a mini-bus along with a bunch of other Seva Mandir workers for the two-hour ride to Janawad in neighboring Rajsamand district. Most had little idea what to expect, though all had heard of MKSS and its aggressive campaign. MKSS, which owes its success to its rather well-known leader Aruna Roy, had been organising jan sunvais in various places in Rajasthan to expose corruption in panchayat-organised works. The 2005 Right to Information (RTI) Act passed by Parliament last year has been generating a lot of interest in development circles lately; the Rajasthan government passed its own RTI act in 2000 which generated a similar amount of excitement and MKSS was trying to make the best of it.

The venue of the jan sunvai was a giant shamiana erected on a vacant field near the panchayat office in Janawad, and when we arrived there by late morning there were already a couple hundred people from Janawad and neighboring panchayats seated there. MKSS had invited a few officials from the district administration and a retired judge to form a panel; they had also requested all panchayat officials to attend and as far as I remember none did. Over the past few months, MKSS volunteers had used RTI to painstakingly collect panchayat documents related to construction contracts, muster rolls etc.

The sunvai itself was a stark affair. Shankar Singh, a MKSS volunteer (the one mentioned in the Hindu report) with a quick wit and a big smile, would read out details of panchayat works that were reported as completed and invite people to come to the dias and verify those claims. The results were shocking - invoices for dam construction where none existed, muster roll entries for people who didnt exist and so on. At the end of the day, it seems almost everyone associated with these development projects from elected representatives to PWD civil engineers were guilty of corruption and the few district officials there promised action. I remember reading in Dainik Bhaskar a couple of months later that FIRs had been filed against a few officials....I didnt keep track thereafter, till I read this report today morning.

Enthusiasm about the new nationwide RTI is understandable, as evident by the flood of RTI success stories in the media lately, but this study of Rajasthan's six-year old RTI law is instructive. The Rajasthan law was flawless. The prosecutor had impeccable credentials. Then why didnt Janawad work?