Of Triumphs and Tribulations

(Left: The Democratic Convention where Barack Obama accepted his nomination. The opening ceremony of Beijing Olympics. Photos courtesy New York Times/Sports Illustrated)

By Sudhakar Jagdish

Bingo! The decade is coming to close and we are already in the last lap of completing the first decade of 21st century. Depending on from which number one begins counting.**
So we had three Olympics in this decade -- Sydney, Athens and Beijing -- and three US presidential elections -- Bush, Bush and Barack. And the parallels between the twos are indeed overwhelming.
Bush Jr revived conservatism in 2000 polls, Sydney rejuvenated the grand Olympics syndrome. The 2004 US polls chose continuity with Bush Jr getting elected for the second term (in spite of Fahrenheit 9/11), Olympics returned to Greece. But the spectacle was reserved for 2008 with both the Beijing Olympics and election of Barack Obama as the 44th US President on November 4. Grand and bewildering frenzy could be used as adjectives in both the events, global, of course. And ironically, there were many controversial and nail-biting preludes to both. If smog, Tibet and Human Rights plagued the Chinese, it was race, faith and faltering US economy that made Americans edgy. But at the end, hopes, dreams and “Yes We Can” spirit of millions won in both the places -- US and China.

This decade is a watershed. We began with the fear of Y2K (Remember that the world, oops the computers and the tentacles of its network, would come crashing down on 01-01-2000, but nothing of this happened), to wake up one morning to see the New York’s twin towers crashing down. Al-Qaeda became real and Osama an anathema of terror in the East and West but not in the Middle. Daisycutters ravaged Afghanistan, Taliban flew and took shelter in the mountains of Tora Bora bordering Pakistan. The war still continues, as Osama makes intermittent appearances with audio and video tapes and hundreds who get inspiration from him bomb London, Madrid and Istanbul.
(The picture of Woolworth Building in New York, pre and post 9/11 as the twin towers are missing in the colour picture. Photos courtesy: New York Times)




(The cover page of New York Times)










Meanwhile, Bush Jr digresses to Iraq, brings down statues of tyrant Saddam Hussein in Baghdad but his army has to fortify themselves in the Green Zone overlooking Tigris. The tyrant is caught from a “manhole”, fights his own case determinedly and is then hanged, the MMS clip of which is circulated on the Internet.

Talking about Internet, hey it has truly become WWW --- World Wide Web. We now do everything on NET, make friends, have date, some even have sex, speak to our near and dear ones, the terror bosses also uses www to hatch, execute and talk to their suicidal foot soldiers -- as highlighted in the November 26 Mumbai attack. In 2000 New Delhi, at an average the nearest cyber café would be 2 kms away, today one has laptop or at least a desktop connected with 128kbps Internet connection. Most of them have Facebook, Orkut accounts, tie knots through shaadi.com, gossip on messenger or g-talk or read and write, better key, blogs.


(The attack in Mumbai -- India's financial capital -- on November 26, 2008 when 10 terrorists from Pakistan killed nearly 200 people, including the top cops. Special elite commandoes had to be deployed to end the siege. Photo courtesy New York Times)


Like the world, India too has changed. Politically, coalitions have become stable complete with renunciation act. Democratically, voting is a beep away. Presidential-ly, a woman has become occupant of the bungalow that oversees Mughal Garden and is Commander-in-Chief of India. Diplomatically, New Delhi is de-facto nuclear power and a strategic ally of US after having shed the Nato burden. Economically, rise and fall of the 30-bench index at the Dalal Street mimics the Wall Street in New York. Financially, money can be withdrawn from the nearest ATM. Technologically, everyone in towns, cities and villages flaunt mobile. Scientifically, the tricolour has reached Moon. Militarily, Israel is India’s biggest defence supplier. Ghastly, terror has bruised the country and word communal still makes headlines. Invisibly, farmers kill self in Vidarbha and Sunderbans mangroves are sinking. Entertainingly, people watch movies at multiplexes, reality shows at homes on digital format. Sportingly, cricket remains the religion. Finally, India is shining for a few, is whining for another few, is stumbling for another lot and grasping for the rest.

Overall, dominance of Blair at 10, Downing Street and Mian Musharraf’s in Islamabad ended -- the latter’s after protests, emergency, bomb attacks and ultimately assassination of “Daughter of the East”.
In the meantime, record of Mark Spitz was drowned by compatriot Michael Phelps. Gentleman Sachin Tendulkar is still playing the gentlemen’s game and setting seemingly insurmountable records, tennis has a new legend in Roger Federer and so does golf in Wood.
Unimaginable though, a gay romance wins top Oscar honour, preceded by African Americans dominating the 2002 Academy Awards and followed by Martin Scorcesse’s breaking the golden statuette jinx. Uff! Really a lot has happened but sorry for not incorporating million others, including the shoe attack on Bush Jr and the onset of global recession.


** It depends on how one counts the beginning of the decade. While some count the decade from 2001. Others count from 2000 and it is imminent that this statement follows Rule 2.

Tribute to the spirit of journalism

Johnston reporting for BBC in Gaza and just after his release from the captivity

(Pic 1 courtesy : Associated Press, Pic 2 courtesy: Reuters)

BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was freed by Palestinian militants on July 4 ending his 16 weeks of ‘terrifying’ ordeal. Johnston was abducted on March 12, and was taken at gunpoint by a group called the Army of Islam while he was on his way back home in Gaza city.

We at the GNBI pay tribute to the spirit of courage and fearlessness that accompanies those journalists, who risk their lives to bring to us those stories without which the world would have been darker and opaque.

We are reproducing an article of Alan Johnston which he had written for the BBC’s “From Our Own Correspondent”, and narrates his 1997 rendezvous with Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Johnston was then posted at Kabul and reported the initial phase of the War on Terror, post 9/11 that saw the end of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

General Dostum’s Cavalry

Alan Johnston
(November 3, 2001)

Early one morning in the spring of 1997, I was standing on the Soviet-made airstrip outside Mazar-i-Sharif. Beyond the tarmac the flat steppe land of central Asia gave way to aline of mountains, a spur of the Hindu Kush range. Off to the left sat a dilapidated old military helicopter that looked badly in need of repair. I asked a militia officer where the helicopter was that was supposed to take me to the front line. Disturbingly, he just pointed at the machine that looked badly in need of repair.

Eventually, the pilot coaxed the clattering, shuddering, contraption into the air and we were off, low over the steppe on our way to the battleground and an appointment with General Abdul Rashid Dostum. The general started his career on the Communist side of the war, as a security officer in a factory during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But he quickly expanded his horizons. He transformed his security unit into a fighting force drawn from his own Uzbek ethnic group, which dominates this part of northern Afghanistan. Soon his men were being used by the Communists government as shock troops against the Mujhaheddin guerillas. They were sent to do their brutal business in areas where the hold of the regime was most tenuous. And when General Dostum eventually switched sides and allied himself with the guerillas, it spelt the end for the Kabul government.

By the time I’d climbed aboard the helicopter in 1997, the war had brought the army of the Taliban movement to the borders of General Dostum’s northern stronghold. But that spring morning, the word was that his militia had made some advances on the long front line in the rolling hills of Badghis province.

The helicopter put us down close to the front. The place bustled with General Dostum’s fighters, many in traditional Uzbek dress: tightly bound turbans and long padded coats for keeping out the icy winds of the steppe. Far away, across a plain, a column of armed horsemen was making its way down a hillside. They hit the flat ground and broke into a canter. This was Uzbek cavalry, perhaps a hundred strong, surging towards us, dust rising from the pounding hooves. And there at the centre of the line, on a white charger, rode General Dostum himself.

As the riders reached us they reined in hard. There was a great neighing of horses and stamping of hooves. We were engulfed in dust, and the gathered soldiers roared in salute of their commander-in-chief. The general dismounted and strode towards me, a huge man in a turban, his Uzbek jacket reaching down his riding boots, and in his hand he carried a whip. He was orchestrating what amounted to a grandiose photo opportunity. His fighters had some success, and he wanted to make sure that the BBC and the outside world knew about it. In his deep, booming voice he joked with his troops and gave a running commentary as he strode down a line of captured Taliban vehicles. The general glowered briefly at a forlorn group of six Taliban prisoners of war.

He line up his senior officers and introduced them to me one by one. He’d been angered by some report in the media that his generals had been absent from the front. He wanted to make the point that they were, in fact, all there putting in a good day’s work. Next a string of jeeps took us rocketing up a hillside. At the summit, arrangements had been made for a picnic like no other. There were carpets and cushions spread on the grass, and there was chicken and rice and fruits and nuts. The guns on the front line were silent, and as we ate and drank we gazed at the hills that turned blue in the distance as they rose and fell towards Iran. The general talked of politics and war, and at one stage he pointed with a chicken bone at a peak off to the left and said: “See that mountain, the one with the snow on it? Well. I captured it three days ago.’

General Abdul Rashid Dostum

As it turned out, one of the commanders lounging on the cushions at that picnic betrayed General Dostum a few months later. It was the kind of act of grand treachery that is very much part of Afghan warfare. General Dostum lost his front line in the hills of Badghis and soon the whole of his northern stronghold was gone. The general endured a brief exile in Turkey but stormed back within months to retake his lands. In another stunning reversal he lost them once more to the Taliban the next year. And Mazar-i-Sharif could be about to fall yet again. General Dostum is back in the north, and he is determined to drive the Taliban from Mazar one last time. He has complained that he lacks heavy weaponry. He is reported to be using riders armed with Kalashnikovs, just like the cavalry I saw four years ago before that picnic on the Badghis front.

So here we are, at the start of the twenty-first century and Mazar-i- Sharif is still locked in a scene that could be drawn from the darkest passages in central Asia’s history. Armed horsemen laying siege to a city on the steppe; it is a drama in which Genghis Khan would have felt at home.

(Excerpts from book titled: From Our Own Correspondent)

My papa’s Thatcherism, my own Blairism

Sudhakar Jagdish
(Managing Editor)

It was a cold November morning of 1990 when Margaret Hilda Thatcher finally bid adieu to one of the most revered address in the World –the 10, Downing Street- after making an emotional speech from its doorsteps.

Thatcher before 10, Downing Street giving her farewell speech on November 28, 1990

(pic courtesy: BBC)

The iron railings standing behind her stood motionless as the Iron Lady, who ruled the United Kingdom for last 11 and a half year , almost in tears said: “We're happy to leave the UK in a very much better state than when we came here."

My papa has still the cuttings of the next day newspaper where it questioned ---“End of Thatcherism?”

Moving to sunlit June 27 forenoon this year, Tony Blair in almost similar fashion left the white arched doors after residing in the house for a decade. However, Blair was not alone like Thatcher. He had company of his fashionable wife Cherie and sons and a daughter, as the “happy family” posed for the shutterbugs.

Blair family

But there was a marked difference-Blair was no more iconic.

Thatcher’s last trip to Buckingham Palace to tender her resignation was termed as “unfolding of history before your eyes” by the BBC.

Media had no such ablution for Blair. The US magazine Newsweek wrote: “After a shamelessly long and high-profile six-week farewell tour, Tony Blair finally leaves office on Wednesday”.

(The last global summit that Blair attended as British premier- The G8 Summit at Baltic resort of Heiligendamm)

The BBC did not look back at Blair-era and refused to even say so. It focused on the new Premier Gordon Brown and on his Cabinet formation discussion. So was the Guardian.

Blairism was hardly heard, spoken and written, for it has been scarred with events that are not taking place either in the UK or its neighbourhood, but miles away in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Blair for the last time answered questions at Westminster, where he admitted to the dangers faced by British soldiers in Iraq, two of them got killed in a Taliban attack in Helmand province in the yet to be normalized Afghanistan.

My father was in love with Thatcherism as I was growing, and had also predicted its end with her ‘retirement’, but I had witnessed neo-Thatcherism launched by rival New Labour under a ‘bright charming Blair’ as I gained adulthood.

The Iraq fiasco drained out sheen from the charming Premier in such a huge proportion that Michel Sheen as Blair in the 2007 Oscar winner ‘The Queen’ looked a much better Prime Minister than the real one---Confident, sharp, who would not like himself be referred as US Prez George Bush’s ‘poodle’.

Blair and Thatcher have much thing in common apart from their profession as a barrister, their reformist agenda, support to gay rights and their close to a decade rule that shaped the UK, the Europe and the World.

Both began their political life with challenges thrown at them. While Thatcher made her way to the Parliament from Labour stronghold Finchley on a Conservative ticket, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair gained victory from orthodox Labour seat Sedgefield on a reformist New Labour agenda that later paved his way to unprecedented three consecutive victories of him and his party in the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005.

The New Labour crafted by Blair took Britons to 21st century with growth, glitter and grin. Dipped unemployment rate, growing service industry, tactical improvement of healthcare and education helped the UK citizens overcome the identity crisis post British imperialism’s death and the demise of the Cold War.

If Blair ‘loved’ Bush, Reagan was Thatcher’s philosophical soul mate.

(Bush-Blair pic courtesy: CNN)

But Thatcher never allowed the media to look her cordial bonding with Reagan look akin to Blair’s subordinate behavior vis-à-vis Bush.

Thatcher played a crucial role in mollifying US’ hardline ‘deterrence’ policy to détente (relaxing of tension, especially between nations, as by negotiations or agreements) during Cold War.

Blair failed to do so in Post 9/11 world, when Bush got infatuated with ‘pre-emptive’ strike policy that has led to mortar prone seismic Kabul, oozing blood and flesh in Baghdad, ‘nuclear’ Iran, hungry Libya and Sudan, and tumultuous Middle East.

(Blair speaking to British troops in Iraq)

Thatcher also had her own share of ‘outsourced’ wars akin to Blair’s troop struggling in Hindukush and Euphrates. She had to fight Falkland Wars in Latin America in 1982 after ruling Argentinean military invaded the Falkland Islands. But the island was at least a disputed territory and remnants of British imperialism, and Thatcher wrapped up the campaign with a success.

Thatcher fortunately did not have to cope with suicide bombings, jihadi British Muslims who have taken the war on terrorism at the doorstep of Downing Street.

Blair had too.

The nearest brush Thatcher had with terrorism was on the early October morning in 1984 when Provisional Irish Republican Army bombed Brighton Hotel injuring her cabinet colleagues. Thatcher escaped unhurt but returned a day after at the same venue without venomous speech against the perpetrators.

A year later Britain signed the Hillsborough Anglo-Irish Agreement with Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald that for the first time gave the Republic of Ireland at least an advisory say in the governance of Northern Ireland.

The Bush-Blair’s War on Terror is yet to conclude and it would be premature to pass judgment on its outcome and the change it has brought to the World -good or bad either.

Blairism for me will not end up with remembering Iraqi blood stain on his shirt but as the end of a turbulent decade that was enveloped with Taliban’s cloak, collapsing WTC, dropping of stealth bombs, execution of Daniel Pearl, Osama’s famous tapes , handcuffed prisoners at Guantanamo Bay , Saddam’s smile fading with his capture and execution that we all watched on World Wide Web etc etc.

As Blair put it on his last day: “I wish everyone -- friend or foe -- well. And that is that. The end," we look forward to see the end of this quagmire.

(Blair seen with his successor Gordon Brown)

But the truth is that Mr. Blair, it would take a long long time till climate change threatens the entire mankind altogether.

Wait a minute! Here is the final dissimilarity between Thatcher and Blair as I wrap up.

Thatcher continued as Member of Parliament determined to remain a thorn for her successor John Major. But Blair has become more global by accepting to become representative of the Quartet- the UN, US, Russia and the EU—in the Middle East peace process.

Hope the peace prevails just like my papa sighed after Thatcher’s exit. Then there was peace, now we require peace.