Posted by: John Elliott | March 5, 2012

Ramkinkar Baij – sculpting a path for modern Indian art

The long and rich traditions of India’s modern Bengal art have been eclipsed in recent years by members of the famous Mumbai-based Progressives Group such as Syed Haidar Raza, M.F.Husain, F.N.Souza and Tyeb Mehta who have dominated the headlines and international auctions at a time when Indian modern art has become more popular.

That is now being corrected with a revival of interest in Bengal artists who were influenced in the 1800s by British and other foreign painters visiting India’s old colonial capital of Calcutta (now Kolkata) and then emerged with their own distinctive developing styles.

Ramkinkar Baij, who died in 1980 aged 70, was one of the most important of India’s early Bengali moderns, both as an experimental sculptor who broke away from the formal celebratory styles of British India and as a painter. He is now being recognised with a splendid retrospective exhibition of over 350 works at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi (till March 31, then Mumbai and Bengaluru).

Meanwhile the privately owned Delhi Art Gallery (DAG) has had an exhibition of 102 Bengal artists beginning with early works derived from traditional miniature painting in the 19th century to the latest well-known names such as Jogen Chowdhury and Ganesh Pyne with strong figurative works. This show – The Art of Bengal – will be at Kolkata’s Harrington Street Centre from April 4-17.

The extrovert and widely travelled Progressives, who came together in the 1940s and 1950s, always had more visibility and international exposure than the more secluded Bengalis. “Ramkinkar and the others in West Bengal were not outgoing artists and he didn’t bother with how he was looked at and appreciated,” says K.S.Radhakrishnan, a leading sculptor who was a student of Ramkinkar (as the artist is usually known) and has been curating the NGMA show over the past four years.

Bengal works are usually smaller than the Progressives, and many are classified as national treasures so cannot be exported out of India. The Progressives also benefited, says Kishore Singh of the DAG, from the commercial capital of Mumbai (then Bombay) becoming an active art market with rich buyers and critics that Calcutta lost when the British capital moved to Delhi in the 1930s.

These factors partly explain why the Bengalis have not captured headline-hitting record prices such as those achieved, for example, by Raza who established an Indian art record with an acrylic on canvas abstract work that sold for £2.4m ($3.5m) at a Christies’ London auction in 2010.

Works by artists like Jamini Roy appear in most international auctions and there was one notable recent Bengali sale, also in 2010 at Sotheby’s in London, of twelve smallish paper works by Rabindranath Tagore, a revered Nobel Prize-winning writer, poet and artist who dies in 1941. This yielded prices up to £313,250 and set records for both Tagore and Indian paper works. It illustrated the potential if more were available without export restrictions, but the Sotheby’s sale was a rare event, made possible by the Dartington Hall Trust of the UK selling a collection gifted to it by Tagore in 1939.

Ramkinkar revelled in the remoteness of Santiniketan, the ashram, art centre and university town north of Kolkata that is the cultural home of Bengal art.

Much of his work drew on tribals of the area and other rural scenes. “He reflected the vibrancy of local life,” says Radhakrishnan. “Anything that moved around him moved him – women threshing paddy, big storms, tribal celebrations, marriages.”

He understood how western artists used watercolours. “His experience was totally Indian but he understood foreign art – Santiniketan was looking at Japanese art in the same way as the Impressionists did,” says Raman Siva Kumar, a professor at Santiniketan who has written a large book on Ramkinkar for the NGMA and DAG.

The NGMA exhibition is dominated by Ramkinkar’s evocative and colourful watercolours (below), but he is most famous as a sculptor who moved away from the staid formal statues of British rulers to portray local life.

“He was probably the first sculptor on the Indian art scene whom you could call a creative sculptor,” says veteran artist K.G.Subramanyan in another of the Ramkinkar books. “He made sculpture for his own pleasure, not in answer to a patron’s wishes”. Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Subramanyan said that Ramkinkar would sometimes paint on bed sheets when he couldn’t afford canvases and did little to protect his works.

He usually worked with cement and pebbles for his outdoor sculptures because he did could not afford other materials, quickly moulding the mix before it set and then chipping at the cast. Some of his sculptures were later cast in bronze using moulds made from the original works.

One of these, a striking abstract head of Rabindranath Tagore called The Poet, is on show in both forms – the original cement work, tinted black to relieve the monotonous grey cement (above), is with the DAG, and a bronze cast is at the NGMA. Also on show is a famous sculpture of Mahtama Gandhi on the Dandi civil disobedience salt march against British rule (above).

Most of his largest sculptures are at Santiniketan and are shown in large ceiling-height photographs at the NGMA. Notable among them is Santhal Family (originally done in 1938 and cast in bronze by the government after his death – seen right at Santiniketan). This depicts members of the large Santhal tribe, who are spread across eastern India, moving home with their possessions.

Siva Kumar says this work marks “a dramatic shift” in Indian sculpture because it brought tribals, who had been virtually invisible, into the centre of the Santiniketan campus and because it merged classical and modern sculpture.  Another work is a woman threshing, again shown as a ceiling-high photograph, but accompanied by a small statue and watercolours that Ramkinkar did first as sketches.

With all that rural West Bengal history and context, it is something of a surprise to find two smoothly finished carved sandstone statues by Ramkinkar guarding the doors of the Reserve Bank of India’s offices in Delhi. They are of Yaksha and Yakshi, guardian spirits of Kuber, the god of wealth, and were done in the early 1960s, but they are far from typical of his work.

I asked Radhakrishnan about Ramkinkar’s special legacy for young artists today. “He was one of a kind, cut off from the material world,” came the reply. “Here is someone who was passionate about his work which he did without caring about the market”. That is quite a contrast with so many market-driven modern artists who, helped by galleries, work to boost their prices!

A shorter version of this article is on The Economist‘s books art and culture blog, Prospero – http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/03/art-ramkinkar-baij

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Posted by: John Elliott | March 2, 2012

Jairam Ramesh calls for political parties to get active in Naxalite areas

India’s Maoist rebels need mainstream party politics

Naxalite rebels need to be tackled with mainstream political activity, not just development projects and repression by security forces. This new approach for handling India’s most serious internal security problem is being pushed by Jairam Ramesh, the minister for rural development. It is also being tacitly accepted by the state government of Orissa where Naxalite candidates won elections in 30 panchayats (village-level councils) last month.

Ramesh (below) is the first central government minister to pick on party political activity as an essential means of providing a peaceful alternative to the violent occupation of tribal and other remote areas by Naxalite Maoist rebels, who are active in nearly a third of India’s 600 administrative districts and whose leaders ultimately want to overthrow democracy. He first did so in a letter to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, at the end of December, but that was shuffled off to the Planning Commission which has been loosely in charge of the government’s non-security Naxalite policies for several years.

The Ministry of Home Affairs is in charge of security operations, along with individual states, and that has been stepped up since Palaniappan Chidambaram became Home Minister at the end of 2008. There was a decrease in violence last year, though the number of those killed by Naxalites was still high – nearly 450 civilians and over 140 members of security forces according the ministry statistics.

There are reports of Naxalite attacks almost daily. Last weekend about 150 rebels raided a stone-mine in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh in eastern India looking for explosives and, failing to find any, set fire to eight stone crushing machines. Others torched seven construction vehicles nearby, and a defaulter was reported to have been buried alive for not repaying a loan provided by a Naxalite organisation.

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The Planning Commission was given charge of development policies a few years ago. In 2008, it produced a massive 90-page report, “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas”, which helped to influence government policy on the need for development, supported by funding .

But the Planning Commission does not have the political or administrative muscle needed to implement change. Ramesh, whose high profile initiatives transformed the Environment Ministry (at least temporarily) when he was in charge there for two years till last July, is now using his current job to fill the vacuum.

The government has not taken up his call for political activity since his letter to the prime minister, but he proposed it again at the launching of a book on Naxalites – “More Than Maoism” – in Delhi last week and he then chatted to me about his ideas. “Lack of political mobilisation is the biggest weakness in these areas – you need mainstream political party activity,” he says. Last October he presented a comprehensive paper on “The Maoist issue” in Delhi (which was re-printed in Outlook magazine).

He proposed a “two track approach – one that deals with the leadership of the Naxals, who wish to overthrow the Indian state, and the other which focuses on the concerns of the people they pretend/claim to serve”. He did not mention political activity because, he says, he had not then realised how important it is for party cadres to attract young people who would otherwise turn to Naxalites leaders. He has now visited 24 of the 78 administrative districts that are most seriously affected by Naxalite occupations and violence, and says he was struck by the lack of mainstream politics in areas that had become “security fortresses” without any presence of government machinery or authority.

Politics, people, police

A “three pronged approach through politics, people and police” was now needed. “Democracy by itself won’t solve the problem,” he says. “People need to have confidence in political parties and instruments of state such as the judiciary”. That may seem an odd remark at a time when public opinion about politicians and the judiciary is desperately low because of widespread corruption and the government’s failure to govern effectively.

But Ramesh points to success in West Bengal where the Trinamool Congress chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, has been taking party politics and development into Naxalite areas. He picks out for special mention a popular young Trinamool MP, Subhendu Adhikary, who was elected last year for a constituency that includes Lalgarh, a town occupied by Naxalites in 2009. Adhikary has been holding well-attended public rallies, despite the risk of bomb attacks.

There was concern in the state of Orissa (now officially renamed Odisha) when Naxalites won the panchayat elections, several without any opposition because rivals had been warned not to stand. The Home Ministry is believed to have favoured cancelling the elections, and there was also concern that development funds allocated to the panchayats would be diverted to buy arms and explosives, or into organisations run by the Naxalites’ alternative form of government (such as the one involved in the loan defaulter’s death) .

However, Ramesh sees the panchayat elections as “a good first step” into the system. ”This is an opportunity for political dialogue,” he says. He acknowledges the risk of funds being diverted to the Naxalites and says that special safeguards will be needed – he avoids saying that panchayat funds probably leak to them already, or to other illicit recipients.

Sceptics will say that Ramesh is playing to the gallery and that talks have been tried before with little success, but governments usually come round eventually to talking to rebel groups and Ramesh’s proposal is broader based than just talks.

No-one is suggesting that political rallies and panchayat elections will end a rebellion that has raged to varying degrees for 60 years in different parts of central and eastern India. These ideas could however give politicians and official organisations a chance to offer an alternative to people who have only come under Naxalite influence because of neglect and maltreatment by mainstream society.

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Posted by: John Elliott | February 14, 2012

Thinkers ponder what’s amiss in India – is it jugaad?

This article provided groundwork for my book IMPLOSION: India’s Tryst with Reality that expands on the role of Jugaad in India – the book is available in leading bookshops and on Amazon and other websites as a hardback, paperback and e-book http://amzn.to/2gwrfjb  

For decades India has survived, and sometimes thrived, by turning muddle and adversity into success. In the days of the licence Raj, this enabled the country to work, creakily, until systems and machinery broke down and were patched up again. Hindustan Motors’ Ambassador car (below) is perhaps the longest surviving example of patchwork success, with its 60-year old body tarted up with chrome and its innards replenished over the years with parts from Japan and elsewhere.

That reliance on what is known as jugaad – making do and innovating with what’s available rather than looking for new levels of performance and excellence – is no longer working effectively.

Consequently, India is failing to flourish despite its many riches that range from ambitious youth, brilliant brains and abundant natural resources, to a mostly stable multi-religious democracy and an increasingly successful private sector.

The most internationally-visible recent example of jugaad  failing the country was in the preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, but it also applies to the failure to tackle corruption, poor governance, poor health and education, dreadful infrastructure, inadequate defence and security equipment and training, and much else besides. As a result, much of the country is in a constant state of unstable under-performance that often benefits those in authority because they can bypass the failures and gain corruptly from the chaos, but leaves hundreds of millions of people in various forms of poverty.

Ramachandra Guha, a prolific author, suggests in the current issue of Britain’s Prospect magazine that “instability is India’s destiny”. He says he makes this point as a historian, but he fails to argue it through and indeed devalues his long article with statements like the Indian “bureaucracy is incompetent”, which is wrong, or at least only partially true.

Pavan Varma – along with most commentators – looks on jugaad as a totally positive attribute. At a power industry (IPPAI) conference in Goa last summer, he said that it involves “thinking out of the box….seizing the opportunity….refusing to accept defeat”. He saw it as a “reflection of resilience” that led to entrepreneurship.

Mark Tully, the BBC veteran, hits the point in his latest book Non-Stop India (right) by asking whether India “is still muddling through”. He quotes a car mechanic who years ago sprinkled turmeric into his damaged Ambassador car radiator to “stop the leaks temporarily”.

Commenting on traffic chaos at a nearby railway level crossing, the mechanic says: “Who does anything about anything in this country? Why are we Indians religious people? Because we know that this country only runs because God runs it. It’s all jugaar”. (Jugaar is a more phonetically correct spelling than the usual jugaad).The positive aspects are of course also being lauded internationally because of what some auto industry executives and others call India’s “frugal engineering”, where the best is made of minimal low-cost facilities.

I suggested at the conference that Varma was taking a rather romantic view, which failed to see that the “quick fix” mentality (like the motorbike water pump above, and the Pringle crisps-car repair below) stops India moving ahead because it is assumed that, even if deadlines and quality standards are missed, they can be quickly rectified – exactly the mindset that dogged the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

One does of course see the same sort of make-shift solutions in other developing countries, but in India it has become a way of life. Harking back to Tully’s mechanic, God’s jugaad makes the railway crossing work (albeit chaotically) day after day, so if God and destiny are in charge, why should anyone bother to build a stable bridge for the road traffic?

Indeed, while often solving problems and leading to some good engineering solutions, jugaad leads to complacency and acceptance of things as they are. It can undermine established systems and procedures because it deters the search for permanent solutions.

Last March, after Japan’s nuclear disaster, I suggested that such attitudes meant that India could not be relied on to ensure sustained safety if it built its planned series of nuclear power plants.

I cited various disasters in the previous year that stemmed from a jugaad mentality – extensive flooding every monsoon in Mumbai and elsewhere, radioactive steel scrap found in a Delhi recycling yard, failure to manage crowds and road congestion caused by Delhi’s annual auto and other trade fairs, gross inadequacies in police readiness and functioning, a disastrously inefficient reaction to a massive fire in Kolkata a year ago (and now more recent hospital disasters), plus countless railway crashes.

Jugaad also feeds into corruption, which thrives when quick fixes can be bought – why build a good road that would last years if you can bribe officials to accept quick-fix substandard work and then bribe them again to let you repair it!

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Posted in India, India corruption, India economic reforms, India entrepreneurs, India industry, India infrastructure, India manufacturing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | February 6, 2012

Government “in blundering retreat ” on corruption crisis

Rahul Gandhi emerges as Manmohan Singh declines

India’s endemic corruption is demolishing the credibility of its Congress-led coalition government and threatening prime minister Manmohan Singh with an inglorious end to a long career as an economist, bureaucrat and politician. This not because new corruption cases are emerging (though some are and there are plenty in the locker), nor of course that the prime minister is himself corrupt. The problem is that wide-ranging current cases are exposing how he has failed to exert his authority.

Meanwhile in Uttar Pradesh (UP), a battle is being fought not only for which party runs the massive state after current assembly elections, but for the credibility of the Gandhi dynasty whose leader-in-waiting, Rahul Gandhi, is staking his embryonic political reputation on changing the crime and corruption-wracked state.

These then are the contrasting faces of Congress and India’s political leadership – a tired crisis-ridden national government led by a prime minister who is 80 this year, and an heir-apparent to the ruling dynasty who is little more than half his age at 41. The prime minister does not seem to want to resign for having failed, and would like to hang on till he gives way to the crown prince , but the prince shows no sign of wanting to move in to the prime minister’s office.

“I have no aspirations to become prime minister,” Gandhi said (left) at a nationally-televised press conference on the UP election trail this morning – an obvious line for him to take, but it could well be true.

Gandhi did however emerge this morning as a viable political future leader, full of much more strength and self confidence than he has shown in the past – though he did not produce any detailed policies for UP. Nor did he say how he would fulfil what he described as his “mission” to the state and try to solve its problems – would he for example risk his political reputation by taking on the extremely tough job of chief minister if he were in a position to do so?

The prime minister (below) must have been tempted to respond to the country’s anti-corruption mood and resign last Thursday when the Supreme Court cancelled 122 telecom licences  that have become the subject of a far-reaching corruption scandal since they were issued in January 2008.

That must have been the worst day of his long career. He knew that he could have stopped the rot  some four years ago but had not done so because the Congress Party, led by Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, did not want to upset its coalition partner, the DMK party, whose nominee, A.Raja, was telecom minister.

Then, on Saturday, a lower court dismissed a criminal conspiracy case brought against Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, for failing when he was finance minister in 2008 to stop Raja’s business friends from making massive profits by selling shares in the licences to Telenor of Norway and other foreign telecom companies.

That judgement is likely to be appealed. If Chidambaram were eventually found legally culpable for failing to stop Raja, the prime minister would be next in line for blame, along maybe with other cabinet ministers. There was speculation last week that Chidambaram would have resigned if the court had not dismissed the case, and that would inevitably have made the prime minister vulnerable.

Meanwhile Raja has been in jail for a year – the anniversary was on February 2. That itself (along with jailing of officials involved in 2010 Commonwealth Games contracts) is a mark of progress because no politician has been jailed for corruption for so long.

“Raja in jail UPA in handcuffs” ran a front page headline in yesterday’s Indian Express on a column written by Shekhar Gupta, the paper’s editor. On the handling of the 2G scam, he wrote that the government is “in blundering retreat from one indefensible position to another, much in the fashion of our army against the Chinese in 1962″ – a cruelly damning line given that the 1962 defeat is probably India’s biggest post-independence humiliation.

The government is blundering on other fronts, often with a corruption angle. It is having an almost unbelievable confrontation with the chief of army staff over the year he was born (often not clearly recorded in India). That could have been resolved a long time ago but has been running through the headlines for weeks, culminating in General V.K.Singh, who has upset some fellow generals by tackling army corruption, getting Supreme Court support last week.

The government has also mis-managed a controversy over alleged corruption on a foreign contract in India’s space agency (ISRO). The extent of corruption was further illustrated by a report that, improbable as it might seem in the current climate, an official charged with corruption is a candidate to become chairman of government-owned Coal India.

There was also a corruption allegation last week from Canada involving Praful Patel, India’s former aviation minister (now heavy industries minister) who has been widely criticised for his handling of ailing Air India. It was alleged that he was to receive a $250,000 bribe for a proposed $100m Air India contract. This was quickly denied by Patel and disowned by a Canadian journalist involved in reporting the allegations.

British aid row over jet order

The only good news last week was that India virtually decided remarkably quickly on a $10bn-$18bn contract for 126 Indian Air Force fighter jets – with it seems no major corruption. The government is to start final negotiations for Dassault of France’s Rafale fighter, which I hear has been priced 6% below its rival, a German and British-led European consortium’s Typhoon. That has triggered annoyance in the UK and sparked an argument over the value of the country’s £266m ($425m) annual aid to India if it does not help to win such orders.

There have also been suggestions that India’s pay-off will be French help on nuclear energy projects – an inducement that does not fall under the tag “corruption”.

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Posted in dynasty, India, India corruption, India defence, India politicians, India telecoms, India UK, Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 31, 2012

India’s successful art fair – where less is more

A shorter version of this article is on The Economist’s Prospero blog

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India revels in creating pockets of excellence out of urban noise and muddle and at turning logic on its head, and it also loves creating tamashas. That is what has happened at the four-day India Art Fair that closed on Sunday night in New Delhi.

Families and young children mixed with serious art collectors and buyers, and the organisers were pleased that their estimated 80,000 total number of visitors was considerably less than the 128,000 that they claimed last year.

“The mood of excitement to see things and to learn is palpable – there is tremendous spirit,” said Hugo Weihe, Christie’s Asian art director, standing in the middle of Sunday’s crowds that totalled some 20,000. “You can feel the future of the Indian art market here”.

Lavaris Vastu by Asim Waqif

The event, previously called the Art Summit, is unusual on the international art circuit because it aims to introduce and educate the Indian public, as well as providing sales and high-value contacts for some 90 exhibitors. Inevitably, that leads to tensions, especially between some foreign galleries that are eager for quick sales and want the public access reduced, and those who welcome the mix. Some top Indian collectors agree with that line and, along with foreign exhibitors, also want the organisers to tighten the overall standard of works next year.

Others however know that India is a country that needs to be tackled differently from other potential markets. “It’s a great place to be, but not if you want to make money quickly – if you stick around you do well,” said Conor Macklin of London’s Grosvenor Gallery that has a link with Delhi’s Vadehra Gallery.

In past years, the fair has been staged at exhibition grounds in central Delhi, which families frequently visit for a weekend’s entertainment, whereas this time it has been at a south-Delhi location that was difficult to find, adjacent to a chaotically noisy traffic interchange and overhead metro station. In usual Indian style, once one escaped from broken pavements and swirling traffic, the fair was serene and enthusiastic, spread across 12,000 sq metres in three internationally designed tents.

Bharti Kher + Subodh’s Gupta works on Hauser & Wirth – Meera Menezes photo

“We are happy with the total of about 80,000 because almost everyone who came was genuinely interested in art, whereas last year there were people who just came to walk around,” said Neha Kirpal, the founder and director of the fair.

Earlier this year Kirpal sold a 49% stake in the fair to two founders of Art Hong Kong, Sandy Angus, chairman of Montgomery Worldwide, and Will Ramsay, founder of the Affordable Art Fair. Together, they are now planning an affordable fair for India in the autumn that might draw away some of the crowds.

Half the 90 or so galleries (selected from over 250 applicants) came from India and the rest were from 20 other countries with names such as Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, White Cube, and Other Criteria, with artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Marina Abramovic, a New York-based Serbian performance artist, and UK artists Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst and Martin Creed.

There was not enough buying activity to provide a significant boost for India’s sluggish modern and contemporary art market, but most galleries made sales or began negotiating for later deals that ranged up to Rs60m ($1.2m) for a video installation. Others consoled themselves by making new contacts.

Top Indian collectors made substantial purchases, notably Kiran Nadar who has set up a modern art museum in Delhi. Two of the most popular video installations believed to be targeted by buyers were Lisson’s “Levitation of Saint Teresa” done by Abramovic in 2010 and a 1995 work where the artist cries and moans as she chews an onion (left). Hauser & Wirth are believed to have a sold a small neon sign by Creed saying, “Love” that was priced at $85,000 and a painting by Subodh Gupta, a leading Indian contemporary artist, for Euro 200,000 ($263,000, Rs13m).

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The Other Criteria gallery reported several sales of Damien Hirst’s Psalm prints on silkscreen with diamond dust (below right), which come in runs of 50 and are priced at £3,500 (Rs273,000).

Serigraph silkscreen prints of works by well-known modern Indian masters such as M.F.Husain and S.H.Raza, and more recent successes like T.Vaikuntum, were selling well on Ahmedabad’s Archer Gallery stand at about 5% of the price of originals.

A lot of the contemporary Indian exhibits tackled social issues that have had less attention from India’s leading modern painters, with the new artists using installations, photographs and video works.

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On the Gallery Espace stand, G.R.Irani had an installation (left) of wooden slippers and a red car roof light like those used by Indian politicians and officials) priced at Rs600,000 ($12,000). He told me it signified “a protest against violence and how we are losing our morals and values, with the flashing light creating tension”.

On a lighter note, Indigo Blue Art from Singapore sold several gaily painted fibreglass cat sculptures (bottom) adapted by Tapas Sarkar from West Bengal’s 19th century Kalighat style and priced at Rs275,000 to Rs375,000 ($5,500-$7,500).

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Special exhibitions staged on the fringe (and still open) include works by Yoko Ono (who visited Delhi recently) at the Vadehra Gallery, West Bengal works at the Delhi Art Gallery,  and Iranian art at the Devi Art Foundation where the fair’s boisterous closing party continued until the early hours yesterday morning.

The bank has been building a collection of mostly low-priced works since the 1970s, not usually as an investment though the current value is around £200m. Other figures are also impressive – a total of 60,000 works spread around 928 buildings in 45 countries, all organised to decorate offices and involve the staff. Exceptions on price are sometimes made for art to be located in reception areas, which house a Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.

Explaining why he was in India, Hicks said: “If you are interested in art, you come to the place where change is happening quickest”.

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Posted in India, India festivals, Indian contempoary art, Indian modern art | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 26, 2012

Salman Rushdie was blocked out but MF Husain is back on show

Just a few days after Salman Rushdie was excluded from the Jaipur Literature Festival because of an extremist Muslim campaign against his writings, paintings by M.F.Husain are hanging at the India Art Fair without any objections from Hindu fundamentalists who have had them taken down in the past.

The fair opens today and Husains (left and below) are on show at six galleries, four from India and two from London. In 2009, his works were not included and last year they were temporarily withdrawn , and then hung again with a police guard standing alongside them. This time there is no special security.

Like the Jaipur festival, the fair (previously called the Art Summit) has grown enormously since it were started in 2008 and it now has 91 exhibitors from 20 countries. Both events are visited by tens of thousands of people, opening up the worlds of art and literature to those who would not normally have access to see or listen to – and mix with – famous painters and authors.

The aims of the fair says Neha Kirpal, its founder and director, is to increase India’s currently very small number of art collectors, to encourage Indian companies to do more to promote art, and to open up India internationally. That is very similar to the aims of the Jaipur festival, but both are vulnerable to religious extremists who use the arts stifle debate and development.

Two Husain works with a Ravinder Reddy head

Last year Jawhar Sircar, the government’s secretary for culture, told me that the reappearance of the Husain works demonstrated India’s freedom of expression being supported by its “strength of pluralism and elasticity”.

Regrettably, that does not always happen, as was shown at the Jaipur festival last weekend, when alleged assassination and other threats led Rushdie to decide not to come to India. Risks of violent demonstrations then led to a video-link being cancelled. Legal cases have been started by Muslim and other groups against the festival organisers, alleging incitement to violence. These cases, which are likely to drag on for months and maybe years, could be used to stifle the festival and its voice in the future.

This shows how little “pluralism and elasticity” there is in Indian society when religious extremists decide to stir up trouble – especially when that coincides with a group that is politically significant, as Muslims are currently in Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly elections. Attempts are now being made to cover up the blot on India’s open and democratic image by implausibly suggesting that the problems were started and encouraged by Rushdie and, or, the festival organisers to attract publicity, and that the legal problems were exaggerated.

India’s Congress Party is deeply involved. Though it did not initiate the crisis, it seems to have decided  to let it develop, once it started, because it is wooing the Muslim vote in UP. It is in power in Rajasthan, where Jaipur is the capital, so it controls the police and could have pressured interest groups such as the Muslim demonstrators to de-escalate the protests. It seems not to have done so and now, unsurprisingly, is denying there was any link with the UP elections.

The Art Fair has this year moved from easily-accessible central Delhi exhibition grounds to a less well-known location in the south of the city. That has enabled it to be laid out by international experts along the lines of leading events in the US and Europe, but the difficult location might deter some visitors.

Half the 91 exhibitors come from India, and works on show range in price from Rs15,000 to Rs2 crore – roughly $3o0 to $400,000. The galleries have been chosen from over 250 applicants by a selection committee based on their performance and artists, but more pruning might be needed in future years to strengthen the focus and quality of what is on show.

The exhibitors include prominent overseas galleries such as Hauser & Wirth, Lisson, and Fabian-Claude-Walter from Europe. Along with their foreign artists, most of them are showing Indian works – those three galleries for example have works by Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anish Kapoor and (less well-known) Viveek Sharma.

The next few days will be an important test of the Indian art market, which has been sluggish for a couple of years. Good sales would provide it with a much-needed boost, and a good number of visitors at the new location would also help to spread awareness of the riches of Indian and foreign art.

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Posted in India, India elections, India politicians, Indian contemporary art, Indian festivals, Indian modern art, Indian states, Uttar Pradesh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 23, 2012

This book is not for reading………

 Politics, religion – and police – invade the Jaipur Literature Festival

JAN 24: In a potent example of religious intolerance hitting India’s traditional freedom of expression, plans for Salman Rushdie to speak to the festival by video link were abandoned this afternoon. Muslim demonstrators managed to gain access to the premises and positioned themselves in groups around the various venues, while several thousand prepared to march to the location.

Some of the demonstrators began to push schoolchildren off chairs so they could sit down, and it was clear that there was a serious risk of violence if Rushdie appeared on the video. The owner of DiggiPalace (where the festival has been held since it started in 2006) decided, after hearing firm state government and police advice, that he could not risk the escalation in the tensely packed location and, with the organisers, cancelled the link.

Instead Rushdie gave a long interview on a tv channel. He said the events had shown that India was a place where “religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival, in which the politicians are too, let’s say, in bed with those groups to wish to oppose them for narrow electoral reasons”, adding: “This decline in public standards, and in the liberty of ordinary Indian citizens to engage in discourse, to hear differing points of view, that’s the thing that makes me saddest”.
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JAIPUR Jan 23: Last week I wrote about elephants that “are not for riding”, explaining how huge stone statues had been shrouded by India’s Election Commission to avoid influencing voters in the state of Uttar Pradesh’s coming assembly polls. This week it is Salman Rushdie’s book, Satanic Verses, that is not for reading at the internationally famous Jaipur Literature Festival, which Rushdie has not attended because, indirectly, of the UP elections.

The Jaipur festival is one of the wonders of today’s India, growing haphazardly from a few hundred people in 2006 to one of the world’s biggest such events with 15,000-17,000 new registrations each day, and a total of 120,00 footfalls expected by the time it ends tomorrow evening. Here 260 writers, including many famous Indian and foreign literary names such as (from abroad) Richard Dawkins, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, and Ben Okri – mix with masses of book lovers and schoolchildren, combining often-brainy entertainment with conversations, vibrant music, and minor controversies – and this year with Oprah Winfrey, the American tv personality as a star attraction (above).

But the UP elections have this year invaded the crowded gardens and tents of Diggi Palace, the elegantly faded hotel that hosts the festival, because Rushdie was due to attend. In the past, there have been only minor protests about visits to India by this UK-based Indian author, who had a fatwa issued against him for insulting the prophet Mohammad with his 1988 novel, Satanic Verses that Muslims consider blasphemous. But when Rushdie’s visit this time was announced, it was condemned by an Islamic seminary based in UP, the Darul Uloom Deoband, which called for the visit to be cancelled.

That instantly became big news because Muslims are an important vote bank in UP and therefore need to be wooed by political parties. They could swing the result, which is especially important for the Congress Party whose potential future leader, Rahul Gandhi, is cutting his political teeth on the hustings.

Threats of mass demonstrations against Rushdie were issued by various Islamic organisations, and a reward of one lakh of rupees (Rs100,000 – $2,000) was offered for anyone who managed to throw an insulting slipper at him – Rs125,000 if they spat.

As the festival opened last Friday, police and other security forces – some in uniform and others in easily identifiable plasticky-looking leathery jackets – spread through the festival along with less obvious intelligence officials, and the entrances were closely guarded

Later in the day, after intelligence agencies allegedly reported an assassination threat against him, Rushdie announced that he would not be coming . That calmed nerves, which had been on edge with the organisers fearing mass demonstrations that could ruin the mood of the festival and even lead to injury if they became violent, and plans were prepared for him possibly to appear on a video link tomorrow.

But, within hours, the festival itself was plunged into controversy when four authors read passages, initially mild and then highly contentious, from Satanic Verses. This book is banned in India, which means that it cannot (lawyers tell me) be imported, bought or read in public, so the four authors and the festival organisers could have been instantly arrested and jailed, and the festival could have been closed, even though organisers had stopped the first of the two readings.

Legal action started

The police quickly issued threats of arrest, which remain, and legal complaints were lodged by Muslim groups in Rajasthan courts today against the four authors and the conference organisers.

Two foreign-based authors who read passages – including Hari Kunzru, who is British – have fled to avoid arrest, leaving a furious debate about what has happened.

The conventional view (with which I agree) is that the law is the law. So, if a book is banned, it is not the job of a broad-based literature festival – even though it stands for freedom of speech and expression and may disagree with the ban – to allow speakers to flout the law and thus face the risk of both jail for themselves and others, and the closure the event.

The alternative view is that, having invited Rushdie, the festival should have stood by him, encouraging him to come, and should not have stopped the first of the two Satanic Verses readings (the organisers did not know about the second till it was too late).

David Remnick, an author who was at the festival, has emerged as a focal critic with comments in the Indian media and an article headed A Writer Under Threat in the The New Yorker, which he edits. “Reading Rushdie’s own words seemed like a very necessary act of defiance to me and almost everyone else at the festival,” he wrote – “almost everyone” being I believe an untested, emotional and inaccurate assertion.

Such a view shows little understanding of the complexities of Indian life and the way that religious sensitivities and political ambitions inter-weave, with one cashing in on the other, often violently.

It is easy to defy the law from offices and homes in the US, UK and elsewhere – or during a brief stay in India – but it is neither practical nor sensible for a literature festival like Jaipur to put its future and the safety of thousands of people at risk.

Oprah Winfrey (above) remarked during her star performance yesterday that she had been struck by how, in India, “people don’t talk religion, they just practice it”.

She was of course correct, but the opposite of any statement is often also true in this country, and that is the case here. While a huge majority of the 1.2bn population do indeed practice their religions quietly, there is a  minority that use people’s beliefs to whip up unrest for their own often far-from-religious reasons – as has happened with Rushdie in Jaipur.

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Posted in India, India books, India elections, India politics, India religion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 17, 2012

These elephants are not for riding………..

Symbols of empowerment, too powerful for the Election Commissioner

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These giant stone elephants sitting on their pedestals in a huge park outside Delhi were never for riding, and now they are not even to be seen. Built here and in Uttar Pradesh’s capital city of Lucknow, along with other massive stone and bronze monuments, stupas, and domes (below) at a reported cost of Rs4,500 crore ($1bn), they are designed to glorify Kumari Mayawati, the state’s controversial chief minister and be a symbol of empowerment for her Dalit low caste.

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India’s Election Commission ordered last week that all the elephants, and statues of Mayawati, should be covered for the duration of the state’s current assembly elections – polling takes place next month. The chief election commissioner, S.Y.Qureshi, said this was done to stop Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) gaining “political mileage” from the displays – just, he said, as pictures of political leaders are removed from government offices during polls. Similarly, in 2004, banners carrying pictures of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then the Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister, were removed during the general election campaign from highways he had commissioned.

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One can see Qureshi’s logic because Mayawati (left, with statues in 2009)  is the chief minister candidate in the elections and the elephant is her party’s symbol. (The fact that this maverick and autocratic politician, who brooks no opposition, obeyed him is a testament to the uniquely independent authority that the Election Commission wields in this unruly country).

But was Qureshi’s instruction sensible, and was it counter-productive? A retired top bureaucrat has told me that it was excessive and unnecessary because the statues were permanent fixtures, not photographs or banners hung on walls or highways. The expensive drama involved in covering them also drew attention to Mayawati, and may have led to sympathy from her supporters – she told them the authorities were discriminating against Dalits.

This is a key election contest. With a population approaching 200m, UP has traditionally been seen as a major factor in which party wins general elections, though that has lessened in recent years with the growth of coalition governments that depend on support from southern regional parties.

This time its state assembly election is in focus because Rahul Gandhi, the as-yet unproven heir-presumptive to the leadership of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and thus to the prime minister’s job, is leading his Congress Party’s election campaign. If he does well and raises the number of Congress seats in the 403-seat assembly from the present 22 to 70-100, he will have succeeded and could be on his way to being the next prime minister quite quickly – if he wants the job, which is not known. If he only manages 40 seats or less, he will have failed. He will still be heir apparent, but will progress more slowly.

There is even speculation that if Congress achieves the higher figure, and maybe wins Punjab, the other most significant state now going to the polls, it might call a snap general election to try to shed debilitating partners in its current national coalition.

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So the elephants are important, covered or uncovered, and they are also significant as a symbol of Mayawati’s success. She is a Dalit – the “untouchables” in the Indian caste system – and relies on this caste for mass support in elections. But she has done little during her four terms as chief minister to develop the state, especially in rural areas, though she has recently tidied up the city of Lucknow and improved some aspects of law and order.

Her main aim has been to impress her fellow Dalits by building up her own extravagant exclusive image and life-style, and by building the monuments that bring back memories of powerful Mogul rulers’ palaces and forts. With widespread and plausible allegations of massive corruption, she has licensed impressive bribe-clad highway and other projects, including a race track for a very successful grand prix motor race last October.

The statues near Delhi occupy an 80-acre park in Noida, a flourishing satellite city that lies within UP and is also the location for the grand prix track and its associated lucrative real estate developments. In addition to Mayawati, the statues are of Bhim Rao Ambedkar, a revered Dalit leader at the time of India’s independence, and Kanshi Ram who founded the BSP. Ram spotted and coached Mayawati to be not what she has become since his death in 2006, but a constructive leader of the lowest rated in India’s divisive social system.

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She was 56 on Sunday and had a relatively low-profile birthday. That contrasted with earlier extravagant parties, when Lucknow has been decorated with thousands of lights and Mayawati has worn expensive diamond and gold jewellery, with garlands of big-valuation currency notes, reported to be worth Rs18 lakhs -$40,000 (right – in 2010), and multi-tiered cakes weighing over 50kg.

The question is whether such excesses impress the desperately poor – do they feel empowered by such success of one of their own and say “look what one of us can achieve”, or does it appal them?

Many people throng to the parks on holidays and admire the elephants, enjoying the well maintained open spaces. But will they vote for her, or swing back to her main rival, the Samajwadi Party that ran earlier assembly governments (badly and corruptly)? And will they also give enough votes to the energetic Rahul Gandhi, whose political future will be much easier if he does well in UP? Pundits and opinion pollsters disagree on which way the result will go – we will know in early March.

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Posted in India, India corruption, India politicians, India politics, India states, Rahul Gandhi, Uttar Pradesh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 4, 2012

Ambani and Bajaj show what Indian industry can do, despite the government

Mukesh Ambani moves into media – Rajiv Bajaj plans a 4-wheel tuk-tuk

Last year may have been disastrous for politics, as I suggested in my blog last week, but India’s top businessmen weren’t wasting time while the politicians failed to govern effectively. This was shown yesterday when two of the country’s top industrialists, Mukesh Ambani and Rajiv Bajaj made announcements that could be game-changers. Both demonstrate the entrepreneurial drive that makes India a success, despite government failings.

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Both initiatives show lateral – or out-of-the-box – thinking. Bajaj (right) unveiled a smart little four-wheeler that side-steps Tata Motors’ over-hyped and small-sales Nano car by providing a new vehicle for auto-rickshaw (tuk-tuk) drivers.

His launch came just before the opening tomorrow of India’s biennial Auto Show which will demonstrate the international success of the country’s auto industry. Perhaps less desirably, it will also show how international manufacturers such as Lamborghini and Aston Martin, as well as older favourites Mercedes and BMW, are rushing into the country to sell unnecessarily large flashy cars to India’s status-conscious emerging middle class.

Ambani, who runs one of India’s two biggest groups, showed that he can still launch deals that catch people by surprise and extend his involvement over vast swathes of India’s economy – despite being hit by various setbacks that led me recently to suggest that his group had lost its sheen.

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He announced an audacious move into the media business with a complex network of investments reported to be around $350m in the Network 18 television news and entertainment group, one of India’s largest (though currently debt-laden) media empires. The deal links up with another TV company Eenadu (ETV), in which Ambani earlier invested secretly.

This, according to reports, will provide him with preferential content for a new countrywide 4G data broadband network that he is launching later this year. It could also give him a professionally questionable hold over key parts of television news broadcasting. “Is Ambani the next media czar in our highly integrated future of information overdrive?”, the Business Standard asked this morning.

Indeed, the idea of Ambani as a media mogul has become a distinct possibility, adding to his clout within government and his large hold on industries ranging from oil and gas exploration to textiles and polyester. And it is not just one Ambani because Mukesh’s younger brother, Anil, also has media interests that include UTV (Bloomberg TV) and, according to rumours, parts of the India Today magazine-to-tv group. Mukesh Ambani is already believed to have a financial stake in another tv channel, NewsX, and there have been internet reports of  more indirect investments , including ETV.

Not a Nano

 
Bajaj has been working on his very small passenger vehicle for several years. He first told me in October 2007 that his aim was “not to produce a mainstream four wheeler” but something “that takes forward our skills and cost structure as a two and three wheeler manufacturer”. He was then diverted by an on-off liaison with Renault-Nissan into developing a rival to Tata’s Nano, but sensibly gave that up for the sector his company dominates – it is the world’s largest manufacturer of auto-rickshaws, producing 520,000 a year, more than half for export.

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“Our marketing position is anti-car, we make 2/3/4 wheelers that consume less resources, cause less pollution,” he told me today. He plans to launch the 200cc RE60 within a few months.

That is a smaller market of course than the world’s cheapest car, which was the Nano target. The Nano failed however to take off and only made approaching 100,000 sales in its first two years compared with a 500,000 a year target.

 It was never the “one-lakh (Rs100,000) car” that Ratan Tata, who heads the group, envisaged, and it has few fuel-efficiency or design advantages over its nearest competitors. The branding was also wrong – Tata failed to remember that India’s image-conscious consumers do not buy-cheap but go for cost effective products. He also forgot that most of the families he was trying to rescue from motorbikes and scooters probably do not have parking space for a car, however small.

[[Jan 5: In Delhi for the auto show today, Ratan Tata told journalists that the company had “wasted an early opportunity” on the Nano, and added: “Whatever stigma is attached to the Nano, we will undo it….The basic concept is robust. This is not a ‘poor man’s car’. We have upgraded on the basis of market feedback. I believe we will see a resurrection of this product as we move forward.”]]

Tata is now repositioning the Nano (above, a CNG Concept version at the current auto show) as a smart almost iconic tiny car, both in India and abroad, and this is beginning to yield sales. Meanwhile Bajaj is providing something more socially useful – a four-wheeler mini-taxi to replace the tuk-tuk. The social significance of the Ambani move into tv and media has yet to emerge.

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Posted in Ambanis, India, India industry, India media, India telecoms, Ratan Tata, Tata, Tata Motors | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | December 30, 2011

A fitting end to a disastrous year in Indian politics

It was a fitting end to a disastrous year for corruption-ridden India’s floundering government, destructive parliamentary opposition, and self-serving politicians. At midnight last night, amid almost unbelievable scenes of chaos and uproar, legislation to introduce an anti-corruption Lok Pal (ombudsman) stalled in parliament with MPs on all sides shouting and screaming at each other about whether and when to vote on over 180 amendments.

This was just the latest of a series of examples this year of how coalition leader Sonia Gandhi and prime minister Manmohan Singh are unable to run an effective government. The examples range from their slow handling of corruption scandals, to their clumsy attempts to deal with a mass anti-corruption movement, and their failure to reinvigorate the country’s flagging economy, declining international image, and faltering business confidence.

The parliamentary opposition has made matters worse. Scenting blood with a stream of corruption allegations against leading members of the government, it has been in destruction mode – maybe thinking it can force an early general election (though it is itself in no fit shape to fight one). 

Consequently, India now has a coalition government that cannot govern, partly because of its own internal failings and contradictions, and partly because of a vicious opposition that has no new coherent policies of its own but wants power.

Making matters worse, are regional parties in the Congress-led coalition that have little interest in the nation as a whole – the worst offenders being Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal that is focussed primarily on demonstrating her own personal power, and Tamil Nadu’s discredited DMK party that has focussed on accumulating illicit wealth for its ruling regional dynasty. (Banerjee joined the opposition in disrupting the Lok Pal Bill last night, and the DMK has been the prime mover in this year’s devastating telecommunications corruption scandals.)

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MPs are no doubt content today with their behaviour last night (right). Firstly, as has happened repeatedly since the 1960s, they have successfully avoided introducing a Lok Pal which could have impeded the extortion and fraud that run from their own offices and homes right through the economy and society. (Parliament is now in recess till the Budget session starts late in February or early March, when the government says it will re-present the Bill).

Secondly, they have plenty of ammunition to use in campaigns for five state assembly elections that take place in the next two months – both sides can claim that the other has shown is not interested in stemming corruption because it prevented an effective Lok Pal being introduced, and also stalled two other anti-corruption bills on judicial accountability and protection for whistleblowers.

The idea of a Lok Pal is far from simple. Action is certainly needed to stem corruption, and that needs effective independent investigation that does not currently exist, but it is arguable whether a Lok Pal ombudsman is the right answer. If the ombudsman and supporting bureaucracy is as strong and independent as Anna Hazare, the anti-corruption campaigner, would like, it could seriously undermine the authority of the prime minister and the entire government machine with devastating corruption investigations and accusations. But if it is as soft as the version that was being debated in parliament this week, it could have little effect. Either way it is highly likely that it would itself become corrupted – as Amitabha Pande, a retired senior bureaucrat, argues (click here).

But India likes debating symbols and creating icons rather than facing reality, and the Lok Pal has become an iconic symbol of a fight against corruption that few have wanted to wage.

The good news this year however is that the “few” are becoming more numerous, especially among the young and the middle classes, who have demonstrated during mass protests this year that change is needed. This pushed the government into preparing and tabling the Lok Pal Bill against deadlines dictated by Hazare.

Politicians of course hope that this groundswell of protest will die away, as such movements usually do in the tumult  and contradictions of Indian society. The government was wrong on that however when Hazare-led fasts and demonstrations in April (picture below) were replicated across the country in August. It has been gambling again this week that Hazare’s civil society movement is losing support, as seemed to be happening when he moved his latest fast and mass meeting from the winter cold of Delhi to warmer Mumbai and then faced health problems. But last night’s fiasco gives him the platform he needs for fresh protests during the state election campaigns, and then in Delhi when the weather becomes warmer.

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What is clear is that something needs to change in 2012. India cannot repeat 2011 without doing serious damage to its economy and fabric of society. The exposure of corruption ranging from the telecommunications scandal, which reaches to top government ministers and the prime ministers office, to the 2010 Commonwealth Games graft that is rumoured to reach even further, plus mining scandals in many states, shows how deeply ingrained extortion and greed is in politics, government and business.

These exposures are of course good and necessary, but they have had a negative impact on government decision-making at a time when new right-to-information laws are revealing details of confidential government decision-making years after decisions have been taken. That has made bureaucrats and politicians scared to sign off on projects and policies, and has almost halted decision making from top-level to minor decisions in many areas.

That in turn has had a negative impact on the economy and has led many industrialists to complain about ineffective government.  Businessmen were also upset earlier this year when Jairam Ramesh, then the reforming environment minister, blocked projects that often corruptly flouted environmental rules. That led industry to exacerbate a declining investment climate by claiming Ramesh’s actions were driving them to invest abroad. Ramesh has now been moved and businessmen are instead complaining, quite rightly, that the government needs to do more to boost the economy.

The government has focussed on iconic policies such as foreign investment in supermarkets, which ministers unwisely and falsely built up as a major economic boost last month and then failed to implement (partly because of Mamata Banerjee tantrums.) Significantly, while pursuing such diversions, and dealing with the growing Lok Pal crisis, ministers have been paying insufficient top-level attention to issues that could cripple the economy such as, for example, drastic power shortages that are being exacerbated by insufficient coal supplies.

General election logic

In all this, Manmohan Singh has seemed to be able to exert little prime ministerial authority, except possibly in foreign affairs. Sonia Gandhi has suffered from ill health and was in the US during August for a rumoured cancer operation. It is still not known how well or ill she is, though she is now back at work at the head of the coalition. Much now depends on how successful her son and heir, Rahul Gandhi, is in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly election which takes place in February. He is staking his political reputation on boosting the Congress Party’s currently small role in the state and, if he does well, is expected to play a bigger role nationally.

If Congress were to build a sizeable position in UP, it should then logically call a quick general election to try to boost its numbers in the Lok Sabha (lower house) and thus have to rely less on unpredictable coalition partners. But MPs hate having to risk losing their lucrative seats before the due date (2014), so that is a political gamble that it is unlikely to happen.

If an election were called however, it could pave the way for a more coherent and stronger government than the one that is now failing to govern India.

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Posted in India corruption, India economic reforms, India elections, India FDI, India general election, India retail | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

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