Davai, Pustai, Rabota, Skoreye!

 

If there is one word you would catch from the numerous clips from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, it is "Dawai!" Even though it sounds like Hindi for medicine, it simply means "Move!" in Russian. In the videos the soldiers and civilians are urging people to try and get away from the gruesome, drone-dominated warfare that had hits soldiers and civilians in both countries.

This word turned up time and again in a book I just finished reading - "A Woman in Berlin". Written by a then anonymous young lady in Germany, it records the last days of the Third Reich. A time when the tide of war had turned. Hitlers armies that had spread out all over Europe and North Africa have all stalled. In Eastern Europe, a full retreat is in progress with the Russians rolling back the invaders, taking back their lands from the ruins of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), across the vast steppes, all the way to the nerve centre of Germany's war effort - Berlin.

It was a difficult time for the civilians in the city - especially for its women. For years they have been hearing the exploits of their own soldiers returning from the conquered lands. Stories of cities and towns bombed into submission, of women raped and children orphaned. Rumours of concentrations camps into which millions of jews, gypsies and PoWs disappeared. Now, in Berlin, the shoe is on the other foot. Russians are all over the city, and they are settling scores.

This book gives us a glimpse of the horrors faced by women in war-zones. The author  - now we know her as Marta Hillers - who was an educated, well travelled young lady whose boyfriend was away on some battlefront. She had been staying alone in a bombed out neighbourhood, scouring around for food and water.

The constant forecasts of death by starvation, of complete physical annihilation by the enemy were so pervasive that we're stunned by every piece of bread, every indication that we will still be provided for. In that respect Goebbels did a great advance job for the conquerers: any crust of bread from their hands seems like a present to us.

Homo homini lupus (Man is a wolf to man)...It's true everywhere and always, these days even among blood relatives...Hunger brings the wolf out in us. 

It's a blessing to be able to pray easily and unabatedly; amid the oppression and torture, in all our despair and fear...

In a city teeming with Soviet soldiers, single woman are easy prey, and they often spell trouble for the neighbours as well.

The most bitter thing in the life of a single woman is that every time she enters some kind of family life, after a while she ends up causing trouble: she's one too many; someone doesn't like her because someone else does, and in the end they kick her out to preserve the precious peace.

Marta gets raped time and again until she figures that be best way to deal with the situation is to get 'protection' from senior officers. These connections not only help her fend off other soldiers but also improve her access to food, books, and work opportunities, first as a translator, and then at a laundry.

The high-level connections also give her the confidence (Nicht haben Angst - Not to be afraid)  to deal with petty thievery, and the mindspace to dwell on larger issues ;) 

It turns out that Russian men, too, are 'only men' - i.e. presumably they're as susceptible as other men to feminine wiles, so it's possible to keep them in check, to distract them, to shake them off...

Recovering a stolen radio by pretending to be well connected as a translator - "However it appears that most of life's mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies.

It is at the laundry that we hear the now familiar words - 

'Davai, pustai, rabota, skoreye!' = 'Move, get on with it, work, faster!'...On the way back I was swinging my bucket gaily, in the spirit of 'what doesn't kill me makes me stronger'!.

 Over period 20 April and 22 June 1945, martial law comes into effect. Some semblance of order is restored bringing with it rations, water and electricity supply. 

The memoir ends rather abruptly. The book did not find any takers in Germany and was first published in USA in the mid 1950s. It is only in 2003 that a new generation emerged to look back at the war with a fresh perspective.

This makes you wonder about the condition of women and children in today's war-zones - Sudan, Gaza, Syria, Myanmar, DR Congo, Ukraine and Russia - and the decades it will take for the wounds to heal..

-------------------------------------------

Ukraine & Sy Hersh

 It is now one year since the Russia-Ukraine war began.

All through the murder and mayhem, the wanton destruction of cities and displacement of people that has been happening since 24 February, 2022, one thing has become increasingly clear - the whole thing is what we suspected it to be: a set-up. It is the people of Ukraine who are getting played by its 'friends and allies'. 

The current situation reminds us of the African proverb  - 'When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled'. The trampling is happening not only in Ukraine but also on the rest of continental Europe. And yet, the amazing thing is that not one newspaper or magazine from the so-called 'free-world' had the guts to speak truth to power, and provide a platform to the most celebrated investigative journalist of our times, Seymour Hersh. 

A few years ago the New Yorker had refused to carry Hersh's story on the truth behind the killing of Osama Bin Laden - it was picked up by the London Review of Books. This time even the LRB chickened out out, so he had to publish it as a blog-post titled, "How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline".

Thanks to this one journalist we now have a better understanding of how this whole tragedy played out. How the US ignored its own tacit agreement with Russia while expanding NATO; how it positioned nuclear missiles closer and closer to Russian cities until it created a situation for an 'unproved aggression'; how it resented Europe's closer economic ties with a rival to a point where it ganged up with Norway to blow up under-sea gas pipelines that belonged to its own close allies! 

Now USA is in a happy situation where it (along with Norway) can sell overpriced fuel to its hapless European allies while at the same time, ramping up its own arms export export industry. Sell energy, sell guns, and go laughing all the way to the bank. So what if a few million Ukrainians and Russians die in the bargain?

Ever since this story came out I have been poring over articles, YouTube videos - anything to understand more about the life and work of Seymour Hersh. What an amazing life!

The United States of America redeems itself - to some extent - by not harming this journalist, and by letting him carry on with his work.

-----------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

Substack blog - How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline (2023) - https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream

NY Public Library (2018) - https://youtu.be/JRvXx-H0b-Y

The Killing of OBL (2016) - https://youtu.be/yyISsqHShlM

LRB Interview (2016) - https://youtu.be/R_zk5b7v9M0

Thucydides in Ukraine

 

It seems nobody actually thought the cornered bear would attack, but last week, it did.

Perhaps it was assumed that all the snarling and swiping was nothing more than political and military posturing, that the 200,000 troops amassed by Russia along Ukraine's borders would just complete their 'exercises' and go home...but nothing of that sort happened. Instead, what we have now is a full blown war - an invasion that has already turned a million people into refugees, thousands have been killed, buildings blown to bits, and countries struggling to prevent a nuclear war.

These developments have also been a revelation, and an unravelling of myths, at many levels. 

First of all there is this myth about "rules based global order". When a big country invades a smaller, weaker country, the only rule that works is the Thucydides dictum - "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must". When USA invades other countries - Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan - it is packaged as a noble venture, to promote democracy, to usher in a free market economy,  as a saviour to the uncivilised, and so on. Turns out that this is a game other bullies can play as well.

Then there is this myth of "free speech". The Western media seems to have convinced itself that they alone know the difference between propaganda and news. BBC, CNN, and DW can barely hide their glee when news channels from other other side of the fence are banned or expelled. 

'Experts' from the western media hold forth on why blonde fair-skinned European deserve to be treated more humanely than the hapless people fleeing wars - initiated by their own governments -  in Africa and Asia. The levels of hypocrisy and racism has been just breathtaking!

It was also amazing to learn that over 20,000 students were trapped in the war-zone. While the government has managed to evacuate most of them, a few hundred still remain trapped in the war-zone. It seems a vast majority of them were studying medicine, revealing shortcomings in our own education system which seems to be better equipped at churning out engineers.

Then there is geography. Until last week I was aware of only a few cities - Kiev from Odgen Nash's famous poem - "The Muddlehead" from Petushkee, Odessa from Alister Maclain's files and novels, and, of course Chernobyl. The humanitarian crisis currently unfolding has made us aware of places far away, on the frozen steppes of Eurasia - Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Mariupol, Kheson...

As the father of political realism, Thycydides may have been right about the fact that relations between countries are dictated by just two factors - fear and self-interest. It seems not much has changed since 450 BCE.

----------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism

* https://www.wionews.com/world/ukraines-refugee-crisis-exposes-western-medias-hypocrisy-457831 

* Perhaps the clearest articulation of India's position - DBV Varma - "The Putin Pushback"

Boy Soldier

 

We ran for hours, deeper into the forest. The path had ended, but we kept running until the sky swallowed the sun and gave birth to the moon...

This must be one of the most harrowing real-life stories I have read so far.

It is about a twelve-year-old boy who loves reggae music, dancing, and hanging out with his friends. All of a sudden his world is turned up side down by an armed gang that attacks his village. The villagers scatter and run for their lives, leaving the boy gets separated from his family. While trying to escape a civil war, he ends up getting forced into becoming a combatant himself - part of a gang of teenage boys wielding machetes and AK-47s, marauding villages, killing innocent people as a form of revenge, or simply for fun - the oppressed becoming oppressors themselves.

I stood holding my gun and felt special because I was part of something that took me seriously and  I was not running from anyone, anymore...We were simply told to follow the path until we received instructions on what to do next. We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with fari, sniff cocaine, brown-brown, and take some white pills...

A few years later, while this war of attrition is still dragging on, a UNICEF vehicles roll into their camp. The younger boys are taken away to a rehab centre where most of the children are just not able to adjust to a life without drugs and guns. Most of them revert back to fighting, but one, somehow escapes because of one dedicated, thoughtful nurse. This is is the story of that one boy - Ishmael.

"None of these things are your fault", she would always say sternly at the end of every conversation. Even though I had heard that phrase from every staff member - and frankly I had always hated it - I began that day to believe it...

Ishmael Beah's memoir, "A Long Way Gone", is centred around Siera Leone of the 1990s. A country with a population of just over 8 million, and an area that covers double the size of Kerala. Here the mistrust between various tribes and political factions boils over into a full blown civil war. 

Mourning the dead wasn't part of the business of killing and trying to stay alive...Little did I know that surviving the war that I was in, or any other kind of war, was not a matter of feeling trained or brave...

This is the story of just one among the 300,000 children across 20 countries who end up as soldiers on the frontlines of war. According to the UN, up to 40 percent of these are girls. Come to think of it,  perhaps it is a miracle that even a few of them manage to get back their childhoods, and return some semblance of a normal life.

This book is a small but vital window opening into a world we do not know much about. A place where brutality is on a loop, and where peace is an aberration, an abnormal state of affairs. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

* UNICEF - Children recruited by armed forces or armed groups - https://www.unicef.org/protection/children-recruited-by-armed-forces

* Sierra Leone on the CIA World Factbook - https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/b0a107fb587d45dbfc17e74a6dd39c4f/SL-summary.pdf

* HRW - Child Soldiers -  https://www.hrw.org/topic/childrens-rights/child-soldiers

* UN -  https://www.un.org/youthenvoy/2015/02/4-10-child-soldiers-girls/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone

Across the Waters

 The Suez was in the news last month. A single, massive ship passing through the canal got blown by the winds and ended up getting wedged across the canal, blocking traffic for a week. During this period it effectively blocked the passage of about 400 ships and prevented an estimated USD 9.6 billion worth of trade!

How did we end up getting so completely dependent on the Suez and Panama canals? What is it that drives us to make bigger and bigger ships that need wider, deeper shipping docks and canals that cut across continents? The simple and obvious answer is global trade, and the economy of scales that drive it. If simple answers do not satisfy you, the book you need to read is David Abulafia's "The Boundless Sea".

This book is a serious piece of work - over 800 pages of which nearly half is references and citations! And yet, it is eminently readable, especially in the e-book format where the act of picking up a book of this size does not remind you of visits to the gym :)

The book covers a wide canvas. Starting from the oldest records of those who ventured out to explore the seas and oceans, all the way to the obsessive search for trading opportunities and power-play between countries that marks our relations with the not-so-boundless seas today.

I particularly enjoyed reading the sections on Polynesian navigators and explorers, trade during the Harappan period; the spread of Buddhism by sea; the Cholas, and the spread of Omanis deep into southern coasts of Africa. Towards the end, details of the arrival of the Europeans on the scene, and their depredations in Africa, the Americas and Asia makes for depressing reading. 

At the end one has to admit that if it were not for the bloody competition between the European powers that completely transformed the world through slave-trading and migrations, the world would have been a completely different place. 

-------------------------------------------------

LINKS & REFERENCES

* 2021 Suez Obstruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction

* 

A Disjointed War

 

A few years ago, an old Afghan friend turned up and Delhi and we decided to meet at Lajpat Nagar. "This is AK", he said introducing a compatriot, "He is a Tajik but we are still good friends." 

I knew that my friend was a Pathan but the introduction left me baffled. There I was, a South Indian, born and brought up in the north, sitting in a bustling market built from scratch by punjabis displaced by the partition...but I just could not imagine introducing a friend from UP, Mizoram or Gujarat, or anywhere else in India, in this way.

It is only later, after serving two UN assignments in Afghanistan that I began to understand that the caveat 'still good friends' was actually an achievement in itself. In Kabul I had found a city that was struggling to recover from years of war and strife, a city divided along ethnic lines, where communities sought the safety of numbers.

Once while driving from Jemal Mena and Kabul University towards Sevom Aqrab, we got stuck in a traffic jam. A colleague pointed to the traffic junction and reminisced, "When I was in school this was a dangerous crossing...on this side were the Tajiks, on the other, the Uzbeks and across the road, the Hazaras...all suspicious of each other, trying to keep the Taliban out of their neighbourhoods...there were dead bodies all over the place...you could get killed simply for responding to a casual greeting with the wrong accent of Dari or Pashto.."

It is a difficult world to explain or understand. Steve Coll's latest book, "Directorate S", tries to give you a bird-eye (or blimp) view of the other side of the story. One that enfolds after 9/11 and the arrival of USA into this tinderbox, seeking Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and revenge for the attack on USA. 

An ultimatum was given to Mulla Omar and the Taliban leadership - surrender your guests OBL, and his AQ minions, or else. Bound a code of honour, and, perhaps, by naiveté, they refused and opted for the 'or else'. That autumn US-led coalition dropped about 12,000 bombs on Afghanistan...about 40% were "dumb", unguided resulting in thousands of civilian deaths. 

The Soviet invasion of 1989 had claimed an estimated one to two million lives, or up to 10% of the population. This US invasion also caused about 140,000 deaths directly by the end of NATOs formal combat role in 2014. While the US-led allies spent about $60 billion a year in men, materials and 'humanitarian aid' in Afghanistan, the Taliban found refuge in Pakistan and managed with an estimated budget o $100 million annually. from Arab donations, drug dealing, protection rackets, local taxation, extortion and kidnapping.

Now what about the title of the book, 'Directorate S'? Well the author does not have much to offer other than patchy details about ISI and its machinations. The focus of the book is on allied generals, ambassadors, assorted dictators, dubiously 'elected' leaders and diplomats. 

Steve Coll's latest book reads like a thriller but it leaves you disappointed because the book is essentially about short-sighted Americans, not the Afghans, ISI or a way out of this mess. It describes two decades of disjointed war which has turned out to be as effective as most of the allied bombs - dumb.

-------------------------------------------------------

REFERENCES & LINKS

Coll, Steve (2018): DIRECTORATE S - The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Kabul's All Seeing Blimps - https://www.wired.com/2011/01/all-seeing-blimp/

Fighting on the Himalayan Ridges

Thousands of Indian soldiers are now perched on the freezing ridges of Ladakh. With China continuing with its expansionist "salami-slicing" of borderlands, lakes and islands, with no signs of letting up even in the midst of a pandemic, these soldiers are likely to stay put for the rest of the winter.

How do fighting units sustain themselves through some of the toughest physical terrains? How do they deal with the long stretches of silence and boredom? What keeps them going? I was looking for a book that would dwell on questions like these, and that is how I ended up with Sabastien Junger's "War".

It is a short, sharp book which reminds you that you should not judge a book by its cover. The book cover you see here is not the one favoured by the publishers which has a close-up shot of a single eye on an effeminate, clean-shaven face. I thought this one was more apt for the story of one platoon in one valley of southern Afghanistan.

This is the story of KOP - Korengal Outpost in Kunar Province. Its a place where the deep valleys and high mountains provide an ideal cover for Pakistan-trained Taliban to infiltrate into Afghanistan, and in 2007 Junger stays out there with a platoon that is trying to prevent this infiltration. 

This is a battlefield where codes of honour clash. When a US patrol gets ambushed one of the survivors, a soldier named Luttrel, staggers badly wounded into a mountain village with the Taliban at his heels. He survives because "The people of Sabray were obliged to protect Luttrell under an honor code called 'lokhay warkawal' (?), which holds that anyone who comes to your doorstep begging for help must be cared no matter that the cost to the community." 

The Taliban, on the other hand, know that battles can be won when the villagers are made to suffer at the hands of the "enemy", the "infidel". Their strategy is to lure NATO forces to accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain. The physical terrain would inevitably follow.

There is irony in the imbalance of military hardware. The Americans can call in their Apache helicopter gunships with 30mm chain guns, their drones, 155mm howitzers and AC-130 gunships, but thermal signatures can be blurred by Taliban fighters wrapped in blankets on a warm rock, and a flock of crows can give away the position of US soldiers. 

This brings you to a glimpse of the cost of war - "A javelin shoulder-fired rocket costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes war seem winnable."

Then there is the X-Factor that motivates smaller fighting units - "Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they are looking for. Not killing, necessarily, but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defence of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you've been exposed to it, there is almost nothing else that you'd rather do."

"In a crude sense the job of the young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kumar province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly 50 US soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I'm not saying that's a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged."

The situation in Ladakh now is of course vastly different - especially the human terrain. Unlike US troops in Afghanistan seeking legitimacy and acknowledgement from a wider world, this is a place where a conquered people - the Tibetans - are looking for ways to settle scores with the Communist Party of China. This will be a different kind of fight on the ridges.

Espiritrompa!

Q: What is this kid so angry about? At whom is he grimacing, hurling stones and abuses?
A: His favourite teacher, Don Gregorio.

In between this question and its unlikely answer lies a story that has been poignantly told in Spanish movie "La lengua de las mariposas". Directed by José Luis Cuerda this 1999 movie is about a shy, asthmatic child named Moncho, growing up in a Gallician town in the 1930s.

This is a little town like any other, closely knit and insular and yet full of people with divergent political opinions. Moncho's own family is represents these different views - his mother is deeply religious and conservative while the father, a tailor, has leftist leanings. In the normal course this would have been just fine but these are fraught times, Spain is in turmoil and the country is about to plunge into a bloody civil war.

Moncho hates going to school. He hates being taunted for his clunky breathing apparatus, he is unable to make friends and prefers being alone. On his first day at school he gets upset about being called a 'sparrow' by his teacher, Don Gergorio, and runs away to the woods.

Gradually he warms up to the elderly Don's gentle humorous ways, his love for nature and learning. Even as young Moncho is learning about far away places in Australia, and of butterflies extract nectar from flowers with their spring-like proboscis - the espiritrompa.  Political disagreements are turning into something nastier.

The Republicans are on the ascendant and they have decided to get rid of the Nationalists. People are being hauled out of homes in the middle of the night, and Moncho's mother have come to realise that the only way to survive and hold the family together is to put up a display of support for the Republicans, even if it means that they have to betray friends.

As things come to a head the whole town assembles to condemn the Nationalists as they are being arrested and taken away. Don Gregorio is among them. The mother joins the chorus of abusers and urges her husband and children too to join the mob. The last scene has Moncho running after the truck carrying the prisoners, hurling stones and expletives - "Traitors! Communists! Espiritrompa!"

This film makes you wonder how many times such dilemmas would have played out in history - in Catholic Europe, amongst Zoroastrians in Persia conquered by the Arabs, in Nazi Germany, behind the Iron Curtain, and in pre-partition India...

--------------------
LINKS

* Preview - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYNyrPVTbIk
* Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly%27s_Tongue

Raqqa

I just finished watching "City of Ghosts", a film about RBSS - a group titled "Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently" - that has been resisting the occupation of the Syrian city by the the Islamic State.

Unlike Hollywood war movies, this is not about something that happened in the distant past, coloured in shades of American bravado and machismo. It is the here and now of the situation in Syria. It is the story of how ordinary citizens of Raqqa, a city in Syria rose up in revolt in 2013 against Assad, a leader who they considered a tyrant for 40 years, until the radical Islamic State swiftly came in to fill the power vacuum.

The narrative follows a small group of nervous war refugees - teachers, journalists, students - fleeing from IS and the Syrian government. Seeing the rest of the world disconnected with the harsh reality back home they decide to set up a social network - a website, FaceBook page, Twitter -  to send updates from friends back home on the way in which ISIS was enforcing its vision of the Islamic Caliphate in Raqqa. Summary executions, beheadings, mutilation and rape, all in the name of Allah.

Once the counter-narrative begins to bite, ISIS responds to RBSS by hunting down nd executing its citizen correspondents in Syria, and by trying to assassinate it leaders in Turkey and Germany.

In 2017 the Assad Government finally managed to crush IS in Raqqa after a prolonged battle that reduced much of the city into rubble.

It has no been an entirely happy liberation. RBSS now has to contend with the "old" tyrant whom its founders perhaps opposed in the first place. So it now keep track of the shortcomings of the reconstruction effort, of insufficient funds coming in for rebuilding a city and of disease outbreaks in refugee camps. The devil may be gone but the deep blue sea remains.

This is the sort of film that makes your wonder about the Middle East and the so called "Arab Spring".

Was it really worthwhile to oppose the Assad regime that provided relative security and prosperity to a country for four decades? Has anything been achieved by the countries that encouraged "democratic movements"?  Or has it merely filled their own homes with unwanted refugees from countries they wanted to democratize?

Oil Wars

It takes humor to make truth palatable.

What is it that actually triggered the first World War? What lies behind USAs grand plans to "bring Democracy to the Middle East"?

Robert Newman uses the stand-up comedian's routine to teach us a thing or two about history and realpolitik.

Clearly worth 45 minutes of your time.

----------------------------------------------------------
Books Mentioned:

* Knight, Ian (1999): MARCHING TO THE DRUMS - https://www.amazon.com/Marching-Drums-Eyewitness-Accounts-Massacre/dp/1853673722

* Heinberg, Richard (): THE PARTY'S OVER - Oi, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies - https://www.amazon.com/Partys-Over-Fate-Industrial-Societies/dp/0865715297

* Brow, Lester (): WHO WILL FEED CHINA? -- https://www.amazon.com/Who-Will-Feed-China-Environmental/dp/039331409X

When History Repeats Itself

Each time I read a book by William Dalrymple, I wonder why our country does not produce such engaging scholar-storytellers. The book, "Return of a King" is no exception. It is meticulously researched and weaves a story that blends the contrasting versions of the victorious and the vanquished, into one 500-page, eminently readable tome.

In this book, the author also has is also a personal angle tucked away in the story. Dalrymple's great-great-grand uncle was an active participant in the Afghan wars, first as a bureaucrat in Punjab, and then as a soldier and prisoner-of-war in Afghanistan. So it also serves, to some extent, as the family history of a Scottish Highlander.

The book describes a period is spread across three centuries, from the time of Nadir Shah's invasion and plunder of Delhi in 1739 to the entry of British and US forces in the 1980s,  with the proclaimed intent of "fighting terror" and "restoring democracy" in what had become the stronghold of Osama bin Laden and his band of Arab fighters.

At the time of Nadir Shah, it was his Shiite Persian followers - the Qizilbash - along with his former soldiers, who formed the ruling elite of Afghanistan. The Sadozai clan was formed by a soldier named Ahmad Shah Abdali/Durrani who was to defeat the Maratha forces in the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, while the Barakzai clan arose from a gunner is Nadir's army named, Haji Jamal Khan.

While the central theme is politics, intrigue and power-struggles between these two clans, the book makes you wonder about the Afghanistan that would have existed long before it was taken over by Islamic soldiers of fortune, and of the times when fighting "Jihad" against "Infidels" was not the rousing war-cry that destroyed a rich cultural heritage.

It offers glimpses of economic linkages cultural traditions that persisted even until the last century -- of Shikarpuri merchants whom kings approached to fund their war-efforts; of Nepali pilgrims visiting the remains of Hindu holy sites in the mountains; of regular raids that took place across the Khyber Pass into the plains; slave traders who flourished in the markets of Kabul, Khulm and Balkh, all the way to Bukhara.

You wonder what a different world it would have been a few thousand years ago, when Princess Gandhari of Mahabharata moved out of Khandahar to marry a king in the Gangetic plains, and then went on to blindfold herself and listen to a courtier's commentary of the internecine war that destroyed her dynasty.

Later, did Alexander's army too wreak vengeance on villages just as the British army did in the early 1840s? Did they also plunder and rape, torch villages and cut down all fruiting trees, just as the British did in the Jalalabad valley and in villages like Istalif, the Shomali plains (which is today home to the USAF base at Baghram)?

What thoughts would have crossed the minds of the thousands of people who were taken away as slaves - so many that an entire mountain range is now called the Hindukush ("Hindu Killer") where most perished? In this context, some of the narratives make you cringe, such as the one by Josiah Harlan that describes how Uzbek slave-traders sewed their captives to their horse-saddles:

"To oblige the prisoner to keep up, a strand of coarse horse-hair is passed by means of a crooked needle, under around the collar-bone. a few inches from its junction with the sternum; with the hair a loop is formed which they attach a rope that may be fastened to the saddle. The captive is constrained to keep near the retreating horse-man, with his hands tied behind his person, is altogether helpless" 

This story revolves around the return of a king, and yet, it reads like a play that has been performed many times over on the same stage. The costumes change, religious leanings change from Hindu and Buddhist to Islam; languages switch from maybe Kharoshti/Prakrit, Pali, and Sanskrit to Persian, Pashto, Dari and English, but the same tragedy gets repeated over and over again.

--------------------------------------
LINKS & REFERENCES

* GoodReads - "Return of a King" - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13454654-return-of-a-king
* Istalif village - http://www.istalif.com/

India's War

Over the past few weeks two different authors launching two very similar sounding books: "India's War" by Srinath Raghavan and "India's Wars" by Arjun Subramaniam. Except for the pudgy looking elephant on the Srinath's book, both would have had similar covers too.

I picked the author was more familiar - Srinath. There are already a lot of glowing book reviews in the magazines and newspapers so let me just stick to the points that I found interesting or fascinating.

"India's War" makes a very interesting start with the author's curiosity getting piqued at the Indian Military Academy. At IMA, officer cadets were divided into groups named after distant, strange-sounding places in foreign lands. Battlefields where Indian units fought - and won - many significant victories.

Victories and defeats. The book does not attempt to whitewash battles where the British Indian Army suffered significant defeats. I liked that. I also liked the way in which the Germans and Japanese were given due credit for adopting significantly better strategies and tactics. Details of the logistics and costs involved in ramping up an army from 50,000 to 2.5 million, and the travails of moving the divisions from one corner of the world to another, makes fassinating reading.

It was also good to know that the supposedly "progressive" princely state of Travancore, under Divan Sir CP Ramaswamy Aiyer, fared no better than British Bengal when it came to providing foodgrains for its citizens. While the former starved for the want of imported rice from Burma, the latter just shipped off whatever it as reserve-stocks for British soldiers in Europe. During the Famine in Travancore (1941-43), a sack of rice cost Rs. 65. An Indian soldier fighting in North Africa or Southern Europe received a monthly salary of Rs. 17 while the British tommies in the adjascent trenches got Rs.67 - three times the salary for the same work.

Unknown names also came to the fore: Maruyama Daisaburo, the spy who lived in Gandhi's Wardha ashram in the 1930s went on to set up a superb school for espionage in Penang. And then there was Lt Gen Mutaguchi Renya, Commander of the 15th Army in Northern Burma. If it were not for the misclculation he made for for the main offensive "Operation U-Go (8 march 1944) and  Op Ha-Go (to stop and destroy the 5th and 7th Indian Division along the Mayu Ridge), the war could have turned out very differently indeed!

Mewar at War

Why would 16,000 women throw themselves into a giant bonfire?

This is a question that has troubled me. History is replete with instances where kingdoms have gone to war, where cities have been beseiged, of armies saughtered and people enslaved. Carthage, Rome, Cuzco, Babylon, Jerusalem, Vijayanagara, Delhi...the list goes on an on.

However in the Rajputana kingdoms of Mewar and Marwar, the endgame has always been marked by huge fires lit in palaces where the women are said to have killed themselves en masse, while their menfolk went down on a final, suicidal charge into the waiting enemy flanks.

Chittorgarh Fort (Western ramparts)

In the popular annals of Indian history, the defenders of one fort have used this as a standard procedure across centuries - Chittorgarh. This first time this happened was in 1303 CE when Sultan Allaudin Khilji beseiged the fort for six months before it capitulated. Over 16,000 woment went up in flames in the first recorded "Jauhar" in Mewar. The scene was repeated in 1535 CE, when Mohammad Shah of Gujarat took the fort, and then again in 1568 CE when the Mughals led by Akbar blew up Chittor's fortifications using gunpowder.

Chitrtorgarh Fort - Suraj Pol (Eastern Entrance)

The mass suicide is often portrayed as the outcome of a Rajput "Code of Honor", of "Death before Dishonor". Yet, whichever way you look at it, it seems rather bleak to be in a situation where you forego the option of living to fight another day. What is it that really made these mass suicides worthwhile?

One answer to this question comes from V.S. Naipaul's book, "Among the Believers". In a chilling description of a new type of warfare that arrived on Indian shores, he describes how in 710 CE the 14-year-old "General" Md. Bin Qasim ordered the execution of all fighting men, enslavement of all the women and children in Sindh.

Once this was set as a standard procedure in the medeiva; "all out war", it left the combatants with very limited choices. Either you die in your own home, among family and friends, or got raped and killed while being flogged on an ardruous trek across the Hindu Kush mountains, or to the streets of Arabia.

For the women and children in a city that had already under seige for many months, it may not have been a difficult choice. Was it the women of Chittor who set the precedent? Or is remembered because it happened on such a large scale, repeatedly, at the same site?

Somehow, this does not be a topic of interest to our historians. Its a pity that there is so little information on this either online, or at the actual site.

A layout map of Chittorgarh near the ASI ticket office

----------------------------------------------
Unanswered Questions:

Q1: How is it that the Jain temples and towers survived the military assaults that had flattened almost all buildings in Chittorgarh? One of the oldest structures in Chittor is the Kirti Sthambh built in the 11the century, and it still looks as though it were completed yesterday!

Q2: What did the place look like when it was a flourishing city, with elephants, horses and bullock-carts carting up goods up and down the hill? Who designed the lovely ponds and water bodies inside the fort complex with striped marble slabs cladding on the side walls? Is there a book that brings the life and times of Chittorgarh back to life?

Mitsubishi Zero's

"The WindMiyazaki Rises" (Kaze Tachinu) is perhaps the first Miyazaki movie I've seen which is actually based on real-life. It is a biopic - with lots of extra masala - on Jiro Horikoshi, the man behind the famous Mitsubishi Zero fighter planes.

By all accounts, the Zero was a formidable fighter plane in WW-2. It was one of the key elements of the Japanese military-industrial complex that the Allies struggled to control. The fact that the entire city of Nagoya - among other cities -  had to be burnt to cinders with incendiary bombs, indicates the level to which the allies went to destroy all the aircraft factories.

The movie portrays a mild-mannered kid dreaming about planes, his education at Tokyo University, of being sent to  Dessau and of the reluctance amongst the Germans to share technical knowhow with the Japanese. It shows the patriotic company-man toiling through repeated mistakes to create an aircraft that went on to become the A6M Zero - the best carrier-based fighter in the world.

A6M Zero (source - Wikipedia Commons)

The biopic also portrays a alternate view of the relationship between Japan and Germany -- partners who were taking on the established world order, and yet, competitors who were not willing to share technology on a platter. It also tries to show Horikoshi as an anti-war skeptic who played along knowing fully well that it would be disasterous for Japan.

Hindsight is always 20:20. No wonder this aircraft is the first showpiece that wlecomes visitors to the war-memorial museum attached to the Yasukuni Jinja shrine at Tokyo!

-------------------------------------------------
LINKS

* Review in the Guardian (2014) -- http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/11/the-wind-rises-breathtaking-japanese-love-war-story

* Jiro Horikoshi -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiro_Horikoshi

* Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero

War - What is it Good For?

Why did Yugoslavia break-up?  According to a Croat "...we had lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to ensure that we loved each other very much".

Ian Morris's latest book takes this line of thinking way beyond the alleys of the former Yugoslavia to an analysis of war and conflict across history, and comes to a startling conclusion. According to him, War is good for humanity.

Large-scale, organised violence apparently makes way for extended periods of peace and prosperity. It encourages trade and economies of scale. At their height, the greatest of empires - the Roman in the West, the Han in China and the Mauryan in modern India and Pakistan - each covered about 1.5 - 2 million square miles, governed 30-60 million people.

For some reason, the technology that drove organised violence seems to have grown much faster in Eurasia than in the Americas. Sticks and stones gave way to swords, spears, war-horses, chariots, the composite bow, and then the great jump to cannons, fire-arms and missiles. Morris seems to agree with Jared Diamond's argument about latitudes in Guns, Germs and Steel.

Somehow his arguments seem to fall apart when it comes to explaining how warfare will evolve in the present context. How long can the American globocop control the world through its grip on the internet, and drones raining hellfire through joysticks held in Arizona?

As always, hindsight is 20:20.

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINKS

* Amazon - Ian Morris - http://www.amazon.com/War-What-Good-For-Civilization/dp/0374286000 

* Review in the Telegraph -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10786021/War-What-Is-It-Good-For-by-Ian-Morris-review.html 

From Orwell to Al Qaida

George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" (1938) is an interesting read. For a book written before WW-2, it has a very contemporary feel, especially at a time when the Western press is full of indignant outrage about the wholehearted participation of their own citizens in Al Qaida and ISIS.

A few days ago ISIS brutally beheaded the second US journalist it had captured in Iraq / Syria. The executioner had given his two bits about Jihad in British accented English with a dagger flashing in one hand.

Osama bin Laden and his deputies may have lived in caves, dodged smart-bombs and married local women in Afghanistan. Orwell, on the other hand, went to fight his Jihad against fascist dictators in a more relaxed manner. He sailed across the Straits of Gibraltar with his wife to the Catalan coast, lodged her comfortably at the Continental Hotel in Barcelona, and then got himself enrolled in a local militia called the POUM.



After ten months in the trenches, he came away with a nasty wound. A sniper had shot him clean through the neck, damaging his vocal chords and missing his jugular by a millimeter. So he returns to Barcelona, recuperates, does a bit of street-fighting, picks his wife from the hotel, drives across the border to France, and to safety.

What was Mrs. Orwell doing for 10 months in the Barcelona while her husband was away on the front? Who paid the bills? The book is less than eloquent about all this and more.

If some the 'foreign fighters' in Al Qaida or ISIS got around to writing their own stories, I guess it would not be very different from 'Homage to Catalonia'.

-----------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES & LINKS

* Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) 
* Book -- PrintAsia 
* Wiki --  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia
* Fighting a war in the neighborhood - Turks in ISIS / Syria -- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/middleeast/turkey-is-a-steady-source-of-isis-recruits.html 

LoC Headcount

It is not the best of times to be a soldier at the Line of Control (LoC)...

Headhunters are back in action on both sides of the border. Until last week it was only the regiments posted along the LoC that kept a tally of the heads rolling to and fro. Now the Indian media is also in the fray.

Praveen Swami of the Hindu has published a couple of articles that goes to show that the Indian army, far from being the eternal 'victim' portrayed by the Indian press, has been actually quite a meticulous stickler to the Hammurabi Code - 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'.

According to this report, in the aftermath of a slaughter at Prankote village in Jammu & Kashmir (1998), the Pakistani's woke one morning to find a hand-written note lying next to a pile of 22 dead civilians, which asked a slightly rhetorical question - “How does your own blood feel?”

A few centuries ago, the same question was raised by Vlad-III, Prince of Wallachia, to the Ottoman Turks led by Mehmet-II. In 1462, Mehmed marched to the Wallachian capital of Târgovişte,  he discovered that all the roads to the city were lined with about 20,000 impaled Turks. Horrified, the Sultan and his troops retreated.

Over the ages, horror has always been a useful tool, both for invaders and defenders. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is the hapless civilian and the foot-soldier who dies of torture and mutilation.

As the saying goes, "When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled."

------------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES & LINKS

Swami, Praveen (2013): Locked in UN Files - 15 Years of Bloodletting, 30Jan13), url - http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/locked-in-un-files-15-years-of-bloodletting-at-loc/article4358199.ece?homepage=true

Let’s mount pressure to get back Hemraj’s head: Army Chief (The Hindu, 15Jan13) - http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/lets-mount-pressure-to-get-back-hemrajs-head-army-chief/article4307786.ece

ISI gave Rs 5 lakh to man who beheaded Indian soldier (ToI, 31Jan13) - http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-01-31/india/36657963_1_pakistani-intelligence-agency-isi-isi-officer-indian-army