Books: Paper Chase

PRESS, POLITICS AND SOCIETY
BY KIRTI NARAIN
MANOHAR
PAGES:302
PRICE: Rs 230

Kirti Narain's book is an academic's attempt to concede that the history of the colonial period can be better assessed by looking into vernacular newspapers, which operated as the source of information at the grassroots levels. They also exposed internal conflicts. Many of the problems that bedevil us today -- communal suspicions, Ayodhya, cow protection (slaughter), caste loyalties, misogyny in various guises -- were all commented upon in 19th century vernacular newspapers of the United Provinces.

The years in reckoning (1885-1914) were crucial in the formation of nationalist consciousness. The period witnessed several crucial developments in India -- consolidation of British rule, spread of English education, birth of the Congress and the Muslim League, partition of Bengal and agitation for Hindi. The United Provinces remained the seat of conflict and compromise. The historic Lucknow Pact of 1916 was an outcome of Hindu-Muslim unity.

The book is based on analyses of contemporary Hindi and Urdu newspapers. They were not always impartial but they represented the indigenous view -- and courageously exposed social ills. These were the years of emergence of national consciousness, of the rise of Hindi as an alternative to Urdu and of competing aspirations. So this book can also help in researching the genesis of Partition.

AUTHORSPEAK
TARA KARTHA

Lethal Woman
What it takes to write a biography of guns

In the era of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear bombs, chemical warheads and germ weapons -- the ordinary rifle may seem passe. But India has learnt a bitter lesson in Kashmir and Punjab -- where light weapons such as ak-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and bombs have taken the lives of thousands of people. It is for this reason that Tara Kartha's study looking at the global phenomenon of light-weapons proliferation is important. As chief researcher of project on light arms carried out by the Delhi-based, semi-government Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), Kartha has written extensively on the mayhem that has been caused by such weapons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Caucasus.

Kartha's study Tools of Terror (Knowledge World) actually goes beyond the deadly arithmetic of small arms proliferation. In analysing the subject, she appears inevitably drawn to the changed nature of modern conflict. Of the 232 parties that engaged in conflict between 1989-1994, she says, 164 were "non-governmental" actors, referring to terrorists, freedom fighters, crime syndicates, narco-terrorists and so on. But she says that while these may be seen as internal conflict, in many cases they have been sustained from outside.

The origin of this pool lies in the 1980s when the CIA-backed guerrillas received hundreds of thousands of weapons to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. A second factor was the draw-down of stocks in the hands of the former Warsaw Pact countries because of the treaty to reduce Conventional Forces in Europe. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, millions of additional weapons flooded the market. "Weapons don't disappear after a conflict," says Kartha, "they move on to other conflicts." The seeming impossibility of mapping this movement: "This is one market that no one owns up to."

As she speaks animatedly, Kartha makes obvious a lifelong fascination for her subject. The daughter of an army officer from Calicut, she got a masters degree in defence studies from Madras University before moving to IDSA in 1991. Kartha says she is not surprised at her own interest in a subject as dreary as light weapons: "I come from a military background and my childhood hero was (Erwin) Rommel." What are her plans for the future? Nothing specific, but she is completing a PhD on "theatre missile defence" from Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University. This is the lady for tough subjects.

--Manoj Joshi