"Indian Contribution to the Chinese Propaganda"
Pallavi Aiyer, China Correspondent of The Hindu, married to a Spanish diplomat is the Indian contribution to the Xinhua-Hindu propaganda network. In the last six months Pallavi Aiyer filed a number Tibet 'stories' for The Hindu. Let us examine her new 'story' on Qinhai-Lhasa railway project:

Image 10: "To the roof of the world, by Train" (The Hindu, July 01, 2006)

On July 1, 2006 The Hindu publishes a story by Pallavi Aiyer titled: "To the roof of the world, by Train" - a story about the newly opened Qinhai-Lhasa railway project. The story was written days before she boarded the inaugural train from Beijing West Railway Station on July 1, 2006. She begins by saying: "This is a railway that both supporters and critics agree will bring about a historic transformation of what was hitherto one of the world's most remote and inaccessible areas - Tibet. The roof of the world will from now on be connected by rail to several of China's larger cities; connections that bring in wake myriad economic opportunities for a region that has so far been left behind by China's economic boom." The reporter also speaks on the behalf of the Government of China: "The Chinese authorities have made suitable arrangements to protect the environment - some $192million for environmental protection projects - while dismissing the Dalai Lama's critiques as propaganda."

Pallavi Aiyer's story on the much-criticised railroad to Lhasa ends with a warning: "The ultimate effect of the railway line will be a matter of history to judge."

Not everyone seems to be celebrating an engineering marvel and reproducing data provided to them by the Chinese officials. On June 30, 2006, Taipei Times reports: "many fear the completion of the rail link will lead to a new influx of Chinese migrants into Tibet, diluting the native population and speeding up the erosion of its unique culture, which has been under constant attack in the 56 years since the communists first occupied the region. The arrival of the railway will only help the Chinese authorities further tighten their grip on Tibet. Travel outside of Lhasa and one cannot help but feel one is in a police state - army bases and police stations dot the countryside and even the smallest country town comes complete with a military outpost or two. The railway will make it much easier for the communist government to move troops and police into the region in the event of any future unrest."

"Big Brother Fascination"
By Ramachandra Guha (Historian and Columnist)

In 1980, the respected left-wing editor, Nikhil Chakravartty, made a trip to Afghanistan. He was invited by the Soviets, who, the previous year, had invaded that unhappy country. On his return, Chakravartty wrote a multi-part essay in the journal he founded and edited, Mainstream. The burden of that essay was that the progressive communists were bringing the fruits of modernity and science to a backward and feudal land.

Twenty years later, another senior left-wing editor has provided a willing whitewash of a totalitarian regime. The cover story in the latest issue of the Chennai fortnightly, Frontline, written by N Ram, provides an extended and lavishly illustrated brief for the Chinese occupation of that country. The Chinese, claims Ram, have brought hospitals, roads and schools to a previously deprived land. He minimizes the attacks on Tibetan cultural institutions and religious beliefs that the Chinese have so demonstrably carried out.

He also dismisses the reports by others of a demographic shift in Tibet. Relying on official Chinese census data, he rejects independent evidence of the largescale settlement of the region by the Han people. In any case, Ram has little sympathy for pre-colonial Tibet. He thinks that before the Chinese came the land was a reactionary backwater. The dalai lama, revered by the Tibetans and regarded also by millions of non-Tibetans as a leader of dignity and courage, is characterized by Ram as a man with a "separatist, revanchist and backward-looking agenda". The editor ends his essay with a message from the Chinese government to the Indian government, asking it to "put an end to the Dalai Lama's virulently anti-Chinese, separatist, and revanchist political activities in India".

Ram's case is made with complete confidence, on the basis of a stay of five days. It is safe to say that the editor's movements in those five days were closely monitored by his host, the Communist Party of China. For, as is always the case in authorized travels to totalitarian countries, the visitor is only allowed to see or talk to what the rulers want him to see or talk to. It is in keeping with what we know of how and why Ram's article was written that it carries the Orwellian title: "Tibet: a reality check".

The curious thing about Nikhil Chakravartty and N. Ram is that at home they have been vigorous defenders of political and intellectual freedom. In 1975, five years before he visited Soviet-ruled Afghanistan, Chakravartty closed down Mainstream rather than subject it to the censorship imposed during the Emergency by Indira Gandhi. And Ram's Frontline has sometimes championed unfashionable causes. For instance, it refused to join the super-patriotic acclaim for the nuclear blasts in the summer of 1998. What then explains these double standards? Why would these champions of freedom at home so energetically support brutal dictatorships abroad?

An answer of a kind is provided in a classic work by the British writer and historian David Caute. Called The Fellow Travellers, it was first published in 1975, and reappeared in an expanded edition 12 years later. The book is a superb history of Western apologists for communist regimes. It starts with the authors and scholars who supported Joseph Stalin, such as the American writer, Lincoln Steffens - who famously said, after a week in Russia, that "I have seen the future and it works" - and The New York Timescorrespondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, who consciously suppressed, in his reports, the evidence of millions of deaths caused by collectivization.

But, as Caute shows, American leftists have had a monopoly on deceit and credulity. All the great British Fabians, including George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, lined up to support Stalin and his ilk. Sidney and Beatrice Webb even wrote an 800-page book with the wonderful title, Soviet Russia: A New Civilization? That apologetic question mark was, however, removed in the second printing. The one and sterling exception to this shameful trend was Bertrand Russell, who very early saw Soviet communism for the monstrosity it was. Russell has never been given proper credit for his 1918 book, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, the first serious exposé of Leninist politics.

After the Fifties, it was no longer possible to defend Soviet Russia. So the Western writers went in search of a substitute Utopia. One group settled on China, a second on Vietnam, a third on Cuba. But, as Caute remarks, these intellectuals would not, of course, trade their own life in a free country for life under the boot. His explanation of this paradox was two-fold. On the one hand, these men practised an unconscious racism: they believed the British needed democracy, but not the backward Georgians or Chinese. On the other hand, they displayed the intellectual's endemic love of power. The commisars, aware of their propaganda value, would shamelessly flatter them. Thus the Webbs or Wells would get an audience with Stalin, and Edgar Snow an audience with Mao, while being denied an interview with Roosevelt or Churchill. Naturally, they would be disposed to writing well about their foreign hosts.

Caute's book can also help explain why Indian Marxists have so zealously supported foreign communist regimes. Fortunately, they do not have the field all to themselves. Thus N. Ram's account of Chinese rule in Tibet must be contrasted with the account provided by another Indian writer, Vikram Seth. Unlike Ram, Seth speaks fluent Chinese; and unlike him again, he hiked and hitchhiked through Tibet rather than whizzing through the country by official car and aeroplane. In his book, From Heaven Lake, Seth provides chilling details of the destruction and degradation of Tibet at the hands of the Chinese. With his linguistic gifts and a novelist's empathy, he was able to obtain from ordinary Tibetans a direct, unmediated account of what they thought of their rulers. If Ram at all spoke to Tibetans it would have been through interpreters, and with Chinese colonial officials standing by.

The Indian Marxists's admiration of foreign dictators is a curious thing indeed. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is the only party in the world which still worships Stalin, putting up his portrait alongside those of Marx, Engels and Lenin in their annual congresses. Yet the party has long ago abandoned armed struggle, and is happy enough to participate in the routine processes of Indian democracy.

Admittedly, hypocrisy of another kind is practised by parties of the Indian right. The founders of what is now the Bharatiya Janata Party were fervent admirers of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. And Bal Thackeray admires those fellows still.

This writer is just about old enough to recall a time when Indian politics and intellectual life were both dominated by men who were consistently unwavering in their support to freedom and democracy. I was interested to read in the obituaries of the recently deceased Congressman, S Nijalingappa, that he and Indira Gandhi parted ways over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As president of the Congress, Nijalingappa wanted our government to condemn the invasion, but as prime minister, Indira Gandhi refused to do so. Nijalingappa was reared in the tradition of MK Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, who loathed Hitler as much as they loathed Stalin, whose life's work was the winning of democratic freedoms for their people, and who would not be so arrogant as to deny other people those same freedoms.