The Line of Control

Title: The Line of Control – Travelling with the Indian and Pakistani Armies

Author: Happymon Jacob

Publisher: Viking Penguin, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670091270

Pages: 201

The international border between India and Pakistan is one of the most militarized regions in the world. When the demarcation line runs through Kashmir it is called the Line of Control (LoC) since Pakistan has still not technically recognized Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947. This boundary is not clearly delineated by any prominent geographical marker such as a river or a mountain chain and sometimes pass bang through the middle of a village. Whatever may the moral justifications be for Pakistan's claims on Kashmir, it is an open secret that they recruit, train, arm and dispatch jihadi terrorists across the frontier into India to carry out acts of sedition through open terrorism such as suicide bombings on streets and crowded markets. Pakistan seems to have fallen into an ever repeating groove of tactics to bleed India through a thousand cuts, ignorant of its rapidly accumulating financial and military muscle. As a result, India maintains highly alert border posts along the LoC where heavily armed soldiers watch out for intruders. They are matched on the far side of the border by equally watchful Pakistani troops. Needless to say, such an atmosphere of heightened tension ends up in incidents of firing light personal and/or heavy artillery weapons between the two sides. These ceasefire violations make lives in the local villages hellish as many of them are straddling the LoC. In the first three months of 2018 alone, Pakistan reported 900 ceasefire violations by India and India reported 633. There is no relevance to the exact number of incidents, but it serves to indicate how volatile and dangerous a zone it is. Happymon Jacob is an associate professor of the Centre for International Politics of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This book is an account of his unique and enviable experience of travelling along the LoC on both sides as a guest of the Indian and Pakistani armies as part of research for a book about ceasefire violations on the LoC.

Jacob is a prominent contributor to the Track II dialogue process between the two countries. These meetings are not organised by the government and are usually arranged in neutral countries, away from the glare of media. They bring together interlocutors from nations in an adversarial relationship to discuss contentious issues, especially when tensions run high and governments don't talk. JNU is markedly anti-establishment and allegations frequently surface in the media on the anti-India activities on its campus organised by scholars who freely avail of the university’s facilities which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers’ money. Probably this portrait of a rebel and Jacob’s outspoken anti-Narendra Modi feelings might have opened many doors for him in Pakistan.

The author’s trip to Pakistan was authorised from its highest echelons, no less a person than the army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa. It was partly prompted by his desire to let the Pakistan army be seen as open and transparent. Jacob is a regular traveller to Pakistan attending conferences and meeting friends, but in his earlier private visits, he was inevitably tailed by security agents who come out in the open to monitor his movements and take notes on the people he meets. He also used to receive blank telephone calls in the middle of the night to test whether he was indeed in the hotel room. Once they even barged into the room unannounced and intercepted an interview he was taking. Surveillance of Indians is so commonplace that the minders don't even take the trouble of being less conspicuous. As if to atone for past experience, the author was granted a personal interview with the Chief of General Staff at the army GHQ at Rawalpindi. This is a unique experience for an Indian citizen.

What makes this book especially noteworthy is the moving depiction of the miserable life on the LoC in front of two firing squads. The innocent villagers close to the boundary on both sides are often caught between the crossfire of the two armies. For these hapless people, peace is all about not getting killed. The author's visit on the Pakistan side was carefully choreographed to locations where the Pakistani civilians were most vulnerable to Indian firing. A brief history of the development of the strife is also given. Radcliffe did not divide Jammu and Kashmir. The line came about after the war of 1947-48. The 1965 war did not engage these parts. Unlike after the 1965 war, India and Pakistan did not exchange territories that were captured during the 1971 war. The low intensity warfare began with the surge in Kashmiri militancy in the 1990s and after 2003, ceasefire violations became the norm. This made life increasingly tough for the rural folk. Pakistani military took great care to let the author speak only to senior army officials and a carefully handpicked group of villagers. Even with this handicap, Jacob has been successful in faithfully conveying the sad plight of the non-combatants on the field. The position of the combatants is also nothing to envy about.

An invariable question posed to a person who made a visit of both countries is to make a comparison between the two. The author answers this with reluctance. For many Pakistanis, India is an internally divided country with no clear purpose. Jacob somewhat sides with this postulate, ostensibly in the backdrop of the Hindutva ideology that is finding more and more support by the day. On the other side, he personally comes across army officers doling out constant references to Koranic invocations on victory, success and war. Religious fanaticism is seeping through all layers of Pakistani society. Sometimes, the soldiers make religious references right in the middle of factual and logical discussions on statecraft and warfare (p.106). Alcohol is fading out from higher reaches of Pakistan’s military officialdom. However, he clarifies soon that the consumption of alcoholic drinks is not necessarily an indication of a liberal outlook, but then abstinence would potentially indicate a higher degree of religiosity. Another fundamental difference is regarding the public display of religiosity in the two countries. In India, religion is far less excruciatingly invasive of our private space and spiritual choice on account of the country’s plurality. However, faulty assumptions on the supposed lack of martial quality in Hindus are still prevalent in Pakistan in spite of its crushing military defeat in 1971. Ayub Khan, a former military ruler, once remarked that a Muslim is worth ten Hindu soldiers in the battlefield. This is just wishful thinking arising out of a false sense of superiority typically observable in jihadis. Figures indicate that of the 40 Victoria Crosses awarded for the highest level of military gallantry given to Indians of the British Indian Army, 28 were for Hindus while the Muslims received it only seven times even though they constituted nearly a third of the British Indian Army (statistics mine).

This book gives some tips for researchers of sensitive political issues. The author advises them to shed shame and ego and approach anyone who can give them an insight on the topic of research and to doggedly do the follow up. Not only that, academics who worked on national security are disadvantaged by the Official Secrets Act. Jacob has devised two ways to circumvent it. One is the use of extensive interaction with retired officials from multiple organisations on both sides of the border and the other is going on extensive field trips. True to the ethos of being a professor, the author keeps his students always in mind.

The narration cannot be designated as objective as the operational freedom granted to him in Pakistan was understandably limited. He was like a blinkered horse on the other side of the border, seeing and doing only the things his minders wanted him to see and do. On the Indian side, he was given absolute liberty to interact with villagers and rank and file soldiers and so, all his observations against the establishment are only based on local issues. He has also reproduced a rumour on Nawaz Sharif, probably at the behest of the Pakistan army. The book says that Sharif was not only aware of the Kargil incursion, but even enquired Musharraf when their troops would reach Srinagar from Kargil. This embarrassing episode is not discussed further. A string of photos would have added a definite punch to the narrative. A plus point is that the author does not venture to suggest ways in which the Kashmir issue could be resolved as is usually the case with this genre.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Gene: An Intimate History

Title: The Gene: An Intimate History

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Publisher: Penguin, 2017 (First published 2016)

ISBN: 9780143422167

Pages: 593

Progress of human culture was episodic in various fields of knowledge. The eighteenth century was all about music. The masters of Western music such as Beethoven, Bach and Mozart and the three jewels of Carnatic music such as Thyagarajar, Shyama Shastri and Muthuswami Dikshitar made their profoundest contributions at around the same time. The nineteenth was the century of chemistry and the twentieth, that of physics. Mind you, these are broad classifications and you are not to labour too fine a point on this. The present century, the twenty-first, belongs to biology, especially genetics and genomic engineering. Gene is an entity which encodes a message to build a protein that is further used by the body of the animal or a plant. They are in fact recipes to make the protein, rather than blueprints. A flaw in the blueprint would be quite obvious in the manifestation of the end product. However a defect in the recipe is much more difficult to discern, evident only if you carefully examine the result. Moreover, the genomic effects are influenced by environmental factors and pure chance too. The discreteness and digital nature of genes has made biology much more amenable to methods used by the exact sciences. So far, it was the most lawless of all the sciences. There were few rules to begin with, and even fewer rules that are universal. This era of classification is long past and Siddhartha Mukherjee presents an intimate and voluminous account of the genes to general readers. A highly specialised oncologist of international repute, Mukherjee is the author of the best seller ‘The Emperor of all Maladies’, reviewed here earlier.

It is interesting to examine the weird theories on heredity that was in circulation till hardly a century ago. Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that sperm circulated in the human body, collecting messages from each organ and preserving them. Lamarck thought that hereditary traits were passed from parent to offspring in the same manner that a message is passed. This theory held the ground during Darwin's time. By ‘use and disuse’, organs will be strengthened or weakened. This adapted feature would then be transmitted to the offspring by instruction. Even Darwin was erroneous in proposing a scheme for the transfer of traits between parents and their offspring. He imagined that the cells of all organisms produced minute particles containing hereditary information and called them gemmules. These gemmules circulated in the parent’s body. When it reaches the reproductive age the information in the gemmules is transmitted to germ cells such as sperm and egg. The study of genetics fell in the right grove with the analysis of hereditary traits in pea plants by Gregor Mendel. However, his observations were published in an obscure journal in 1865 and remained hidden from scholarly evaluation for 35 years. He found that hereditary characteristics were transferred as discrete bits rather than blended entities.

Mukherjee provides an encyclopedic review of the budding of the science of genetics. Wilhelm Johanssen coined the term ‘gene’ in 1909 as an instrument to store and transfer heredity. Neither he nor the scientific community of that time had any idea of what it was, where it resided or how it operated. The term denoted only a function. By the 1920s, it was known that the gene resided in chromosomes. Research on fruit flies evinced the first hints on the appearance of genetic traits in animals. However, the nascent science suddenly took an unexpected turn for the worse. Eugenics rose as a program to enhance the fitness of a population by sterilizing or even exterminating chronically ill and mentally retarded members of that society. The program originated in the US, but impartial reviews brought out the danger lurking in the details. Anyhow, Nazi Germany embraced it with gusto. The Nuremberg Laws for the protection of the ‘hereditary health’ of the German people was enunciated in 1935. It barred Jews from marrying people of German blood or having sexual relations with anyone of Aryan descent. To plug all loopholes, they were further restrained from employing German maids in their homes. The transition from sterilization to outright murder came unannounced and unnoticed. Genetic courts were set up in the country to order sterilizations. Conservative estimates show that about 250,000 were killed and another 400,000 sterilized.

The book gives a ring-side view of the action in identifying DNA and its structure which led to massive innovation and progress in the field. DNA was discovered way back in 1869 and was called nuclein, because it was found in the nucleus and was acidic in nature. Its cellular function had remained mysterious till 1943, when it was observed that DNA is the carrier of heredity. After Crick and Watson found the double helix structure of it, the pace quickened. Tinkering biologists devised novel ways to manipulate the DNA base pairs and thereby altering the proteins they encoded for production. Recombinant DNA technology was successful in the synthesis of two major proteins very early – Insulin and Factor VIII – for the treatment of diabetes and hemophilia respectively. Earlier, insulin was extracted from the pancreases of dead cows and pigs. Factor VIII, which helped the blood clot, was collected from blood donated by volunteers. A single dose of the chemical required much quantity of blood which was taken from numerous people. In the 1980s, this caused a spurt of AIDS cases in unknowing hemophilia patients who received contaminated injections of Factor VIII. Genetics solved this vexed problem by inserting the required genes into a bacterial genome which made the bacterial cells produce the chemical in its body. It was so clean and so revolutionary at the same time.

After vetting their appetite on fruit flies and mice, geneticists turned their attention to the human genome and controversies erupted. The researchers sought to pre-empt pesky and ignorant lawmakers by self-imposing restrictions in the Asilomar Conference. The Human Genome Project (HGP) reached completion in the year 2000 which was a symbolic reminder of the relevance this new technology signified for the twenty-first century. Any discussion on genes raises the dichotomy between nature and nurture, that is, whether a physical trait is originated only by the chemical pathways of the genome or whether it was also moulded by the environment. The author is the right person to address this query and he gives a mixed verdict. Citing case studies, he points out that genetic factors play a very crucial role in making a person what he is. But, it is not genetics alone. The environment, chemical triggers and pure chance also work on the genotype represented by the DNA in producing the physical manifestations defined by the phenotype. This is held out in a few convincing examples. Schizophrenia and various kinds of cancer are highly hereditary in nature and its genes are carried in the DNA. Identical twins share the same genome. So, if any of the above diseases rear its terrifying head in one of the twins, the other is also ought to succumb to the ailment. However, this is not observed in practice. The incidence rate falls from 80 per cent for some diseases to as low as 10 per cent for others. This argument vindicates the environmental factor.

Mukherjee identifies a new current of novel thought in biology. It is split through the middle. On one side sits its old guard, the natural historians, taxonomists, anatomists and ecologists who were pre-occupied by the classification of animals and qualitative description of organisms’ anatomy and physiology. The other now studies molecules and genes, common mechanisms and the secret of life. The author rubbishes the notion of stigma among individuals having a history of highly heritable diseases by openly discussing the many instances of mental disease running in his own family. This increases the confidence level of such persons and initiates a wave of empathy towards the author. The book also shares some anecdotes on how genes played with the history of nations. A case in point is that of the czarist prince Alexei, whose genetic illness of hemophilia and general emaciation was also a factor in the violent overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917.

The book is exhaustive, but without being exhausting to the readers.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion

Title: Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion - A Life

Author: Gareth Stedman Jones

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780713999044

Pages: 750

If you are asked to name a single person who had influenced the political economy the most in the twentieth century, it would undoubtedly be Karl Marx. Marxian theory, or what his followers thought he taught, directed the economic and political destinies of nations. The twentieth century began with the rise of Marxism through a revolutionary upheaval in the Soviet Union and it ended with the Marxist sun setting with the disintegration of the same country into as many as fifteen daughter republics. The man, who moved millions to a utopian goal he cherished so much, must have been an out and out intellectual. He was the foremost theoretician who directed the workers movement, but without being imprisoned a single time in the turbulent times of the nineteenth century. Marx was a man made up of energy, willpower and invincible conviction. For most of his working life, he and his family were reeling under grinding poverty which was alleviated to some extent by the generous contribution of his close friend Friedrich Engels, who was immensely rich. Earlier, scholars were patronized by kings who looked after their financial needs. In modern times, this role was taken up by academic Institutions, but a scholar like Marx who nourished ideas detrimental to the established political order could not have come under such a protective umbrella. This book describes Marx’s life in a peripheral way, with much of the volume dedicated to a narrative of how his ideas meshed with contemporary philosophical thought. Early biographers tended to offer descriptive accounts of Marx’s theoretical writings and preferred to concentrate on his life. This work pays attention to Marxian thought as much as or perhaps more than his life. Gareth Stedman Jones is a historian and Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary University of London.

Marx was an intellectual of the first calibre, but with all attendant human weaknesses such as professional jealousy, contempt of political opponents, ignoring the family in favour of his ideals and a possible adulterous affair with his housekeeper too. Apotheosis of Marx took place in the three decades after his death by clever propaganda of the German social democrats. Many of its workers were sustained by the idea that the approaching demise of capitalism was proved definitively in a book written by the great philosopher. Marx’s miserable poverty was assuaged to some extent in the late 1850s by working as the European correspondent of an American journal called New York Daily Tribune. This fact is also resented by some hard core leftists who find it shameful to conceive that their master was once in the payroll of a Yankee publisher. This argument does not take into account the intellectual worth of Marx’s articles and what the publishers were willing to pay for them. Jones describes another deviation in which twentieth century communism which pins on the indelible association between Marxism and revolution with a violent overthrow of capitalism and a leading role for the revolutionary party with more gentle theoretical concepts. The author attributes this to a selective reading of a small number of prescribed Marxian texts. In the making of Capital, he believed that workers in England might, by peaceful means, conquer political supremacy.

The book gives a general description of the social changes brought in by the French Revolution and a primer on the divided German political scene. The concepts of nationalism and religious tolerance developed with a grudging acceptance of the Jews for the first time in history. However, with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Marx’s hometown of Trier came under the rule of Prussia which re-introduced harsh discriminatory laws. This forced Marx’s father Heinrich to convert to Prussian Evangelical Christianity, in order to continue his legal career. Moreover, the Prussian King Frederik Wilhelm IV viewed the new Hegelian ideas popular among young intellectuals with growing suspicion. This denied an academic position to Marx even though he possessed a doctorate degree and diverted his career to journalism in the Rheinische Zeitung. Perhaps if he had had a comfortable teaching position, the history of the world would have been different! Marx always fell afoul of authority and had to move to France, then to Belgium and finally to England. The new Kingdom of Belgium resisted Prussian pressure to deport Marx, but he had to give an undertaking in writing of good conduct. He renounced his nationality at that time and remained stateless thereafter. The book gives a summary of the works of Marx when they are encountered in the narrative. This would have been harmless if the author had not assumed the readers to be fully familiar with abstruse concepts of philosophy and political economy. A large part of the book is hence rendered an uphill task for the ordinary readers.

The author presents some interesting information on Marxian concepts. The term ‘communism’ was coined by the French radical republican Etienne Cabet as an inoffensive substitute for the forbidden idea of an egalitarian republic. Radical republican societies mushroomed in the aftermath of the July Revolution of 1830 that introduced Louis Philippe as the citizen-king. However, the republicans considered the parliamentary monarchy, propertied franchise and laissez-faire economics of the king as a betrayal. Republican societies were outlawed in 1835 as a result. They hit back with a botched uprising in 1839. This explains the background of Cabet’s advocacy of the peaceful establishment of ‘communist’ society as something distinct from the republican. Jones is very liberal in including obscure theories in the narrative, but the tiresome exposition of the concepts of philosophy which were studied by Marx and other scholars is a nightmare to the readers. This hair-splitting description turns them away from the book.

The partnership between Marx and Engels was a very productive one for the workers’ movement and extremely beneficial for Marx’s family. Engels became very rich after he inherited the wealth of his industrialist father in 1860. Marx’s daughters requested money straight from him as he was almost like a father to them. Engels was the first to identify the revolutionary possibilities of modern industry and the place of the factory worker. There were occasions when the two had some issues between themselves. However, Engels’ tendency to defer to Marx’s intellectual authority smoothed out some areas of possible contention. Jones portrays the poverty of the Marx household in some detail. Anyway, there were also periods of plenty. When they had money, the family was extremely profligate. Marx never wanted to live the life of a member of the working class whose interests he was protecting through his writings. They rented expensive buildings and bought tasteful dresses for the women in the family and employed two servants. When the money was exhausted, they returned to poverty with stoic Indifference.

The two great events that exercised Marx’s political creativity were the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the Communist Manifesto published in 1848, he combined a brilliant thumbnail sketch of the development of modern capitalism with a depiction of the contemporary conflicts between classes and its necessary outcome. The Paris Commune lasted for just ten weeks and was nothing more than a rebellion of the working class in which they withstood a siege of Paris city by royalist troops and conducted the internal administration on their own. Marx was immensely excited by both and expected the triumph of the revolution around the corner. Anyhow, within weeks the revolutions lost steam, driving Marx to dejection. He also founded the International Working Men's Association (IWMA), also known as the First International. Organisational work ate into his literary time and he could publish the first volume of Capital only in 1867. It was Engels who brought out the second and third volumes after his demise. Marx's diligence in publishing was exemplary. He rewrote many parts of the French edition of Capital when he felt that the translation was not up to the mark in these areas.

The discussion amply demonstrates that Marx's philosophy followed the gist of the time. This was a crucial transition period in which monarchy was beating a slow but inevitable retreat. When his revolutionary ideas were taking shape, the working class was very poorly remunerated and didn't have any right to vote. In fact, the concept of an elected legislature was still inchoate. Evidently, even a great visionary like Marx could not have foreseen the great changes the revolution of 1848 and the uprising of 1871 would bring about. With a stream of reform measures that continually relaxed the norms of franchise, a new alternative was opening up for labour other than armed rebellion. Jones hints that Marx was getting around to a concept of peaceful change, at least in Britain. However, the revolutionaries who came after his death was in a hurry to bring change at the flick of a switch, instead of waiting for a lengthy democratic process. In that sense, the entire blame for the precipitous collapse of communism should not be attributed to Marx alone. The greatness of Marx was his feat of thinking up a scheme to explain how the present political economy came into being. The illusion was his inability to see much beyond the present state of things and a lack of general optimism.

The book is awfully huge and the diction is not reader-friendly. You need to have tons of determination and patience to sail through to the end. There are 123 pages full of notes to clarify the main text. You need to have a very thorough prior knowledge of nineteenth century Europe and its political, social and philosophical terms to fully appreciate the narrative. The author’s hands-free approach in this regard is highly reprehensible. It was almost a sacrifice of one’s leisure for nearly ten days to complete this book.

The book is not recommended. Very serious readers may give it a try at their own risk.

Rating: 2 Star