I follow Aatish Taseer’s footsteps to profile him.
Author of many books, Aatish is a fascinating man and a writer par excellence. He’s come a long way from being an ardent and certainly one of the most articulate supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to now his most celebrated critique. He wrote the cover for TIME’s International Edition, with an image of Modi, in his words “to examine his record in India and the atmosphere of Hindu nationalism, with the headline India’s Divider in Chief.
I venture to examine Aatish's record as a writer and a person.
This change of heart happened during the first term of Modi. What caused it is a million-dollar question. One would argue, of course, Modi. There are a growing number of people who can’t prevent his rise and, therefore, love to hate him. In Aatish's case, perhaps the Indian prime minister didn’t meet his set of expectations, also, I reckon, the change of his own personal situation had a role to play in his change of heart.
This has to be said: Big writers have a big influence and, therefore, a big responsibility. Their words carry weight. It’s unfortunate that some employ their talent and influence to settle personal scores. Sometimes are driven by whims and fancies, and even changes in their personal circumstances have a bearing on their worldview, say for instance new love life or a new partner; or for that matter to curry favours to have a stream of income running, make a public spectacle of personal association with old friends in order to garner acceptability of the new set of friends. And play the victim though are actually the instigators.
I, the responsible reader of the responsible writer, wonder: who to believe, the new or the old Aatish, perhaps none, because he may change again.
Aatish wrote a series of articles–A Bend In The Ganges–from Varanasi in 2014, welcoming the change Modi epitomised. He explained eloquently why Rahul is bad news and sad news. And I wondered—that’s the quality of great writers, they make readers wonder far too often-–whether his hate for the Nehru-Gandhi clan is greater than support for Modi, or does support for Modi stem from the perennial hate for the Gandhis?
His mother, Tavleen Singh, who he rightly describes as a ‘renowned journalist’, wrote the book Durbar in which she blames dynastic politics for much of India’s woes. And I quote “Dynasty, a political tool in the hands of the ruling class, has become the catalyst for a new colonization of a country whose soul has already been deeply scarred by centuries of it. This is the main reason why an expanding and increasingly educated middle class is becoming disenchanted with democracy and democratic institutions.” There was a time when Tavleen was close not only with Rajiv Gandhi but also with Sonia Gandhi.
‘Then suddenly, this closeness came to an end,’ one of the reviewers of her book had observed. For this reason, perhaps, Tehelka magazine (where I worked for good four years) rubbished the book by describing it as a gossipy tattle against the Gandhi family 'to settle old scores.' So Aatish’s need to settle score by way of good prose has a lineage.
A Bend In The Ganges series of articles by Aatish was published by Open Magazine in 2014 ( I worked with Open too, for a good three years). The team I joined was given marching orders to accommodate a new set of journalists under the leadership of S Prasannarajan, formerly one of editors with India Today (here too I worked for good four years). Soon after taking charge in early 2014, Prasannarajan, within a week or two wrote a few stories on the lines describing the then prime minister Manmohan Singh as a “Hollow Man” and eloquently (sorry for using this word far too often) answered, “How Manmohan Singh wrecked his party— and defeated Rahul Gandhi even before Narendra Modi could.” And then “Guess who’s in search of the Führer—Rahul’s Hitler invocation is in tune with the lazy intellectual tradition of our undergraduate radicals and peanut socialists” And then The Amateur’s Day Out– "India today is not the ideal place for a revolution, no matter what hallucinations propel Arvind Kejriwal.”
I have worked with Prasannarajan long enough to know he has a way with words, though many find his writing cryptic and convoluted like his curly hair. He’s fairly amenable to political pressures. But his fascination for Aatish, perhaps his writing too, is real. Though with a sizable age difference, he and Aatish are, or should I say--were--ideological brothers.
A Bend In The Ganges series made similar noises as Prasannarajan in the months that followed. Perhaps, Aatish was trying to establish himself as an intellectual counterpart of Arundhati Roy. In his piece ‘There’s No Silence Louder than Rahul in Benares’ dated 11 April 2014, he explains, “He (Rahul)—like Arundhati Roy, that other prophetess of the picturesque poor—is ever in search of that man who, with dead worshipful eyes, will look to him as his benefactor.…But this man is no longer representative. He might at a pinch win him the chief ministership of Jharkhand—and this is a job our sepoy prince, after this election, would do well not to disdain—but he cannot make him Prime Minister of India.” That’s almost prophetic!
Aatish writes, “I will say further that the extinction of this man—and his mentality—who the Gandhi family has nurtured so lovingly as the most captive of all voters, will, when it comes, be a welcome change. Because the anger of the new electorate this election, so nakedly visible among young people, is an electrifying and wonderful thing.” He reads so much like his mother. And the contempt is palpable.
Another example of contempt directed at Arvind Kejriwal, is “the most dangerous of all political animals: the messiah. The man for whom any existing reality is too impure to be corrected….And he has crafted a political style to go with his politics; he has made a great show of his simplicity. It is a mistake, I fear. I think he will discover that if style is to be the test of ideology, then the people of India prefer Modi’s chopper to Kejriwal’s Scorpio.” he wrote on May 1, 2014 in his piece titled The runaway messiah. Kejriwal has postured himself as the most formidable opponent of Modi, with some electoral success to the credit of his party. For instance, Punjab elected an AAP government.
There was no confusion in Aatish's mind--his views seem black and white–which is often a sign of delusion. He intuitively seems to know people he meets. A great ability that I admire. While he was categorically disdainful of Modi's opponents, his views on Modi were fairly encouraging. “...if he wins this election, stands not just to be the Prime Minister of India, but the MP from Benares.….All around him, if he looks well, he will see the remains of tremendous intellectual achievement in need of new vitality. Modi must not look away from the spirit of enquiry and freedom that was at the heart of that achievement. He must take as his maxim what one very wise Brahmin here told me it had been his life’s ambition to be: ‘A Hindu without vengeance, and without apology.’” Poetic!
Brotherly love, perhaps, six months later, in December 2014, Prasanna (as Prasannarajan is popularly addressed) wrote an essay on Aatish’s book and called him An Indian Original. “An overwhelming sense of being Indian runs through the pages of The Way Things Were, “ Prasanna wrote and placed Aatish on the cover and tried to answer an existential question: Why Aatish Taseer is the most distinctive voice of his generation? So touching!
So I (Prasanna) ask Taseer: “Delhi of a certain vintage, its class mannerisms and attitudes, comes alive so naturally in your book. Memories of growing up?”
This was Aatish’s response, “It is hard for me to conceal my contempt for the people I grew up amongst. There was an outward veneer of sophistication about them, but it was very thin: they were in fact shallow and stupid people. ….. Many of them went into politics. Some became chief ministers, one a prime minister, others senior ministers. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely nothing.…. They were disgusted by the people who had brought them to power. And they either left them roughly as they had found them or they looted them, squirrelling away money, diamonds, and flats in Knightsbridge. Nothing makes me happier now than to see that the age of this class of person is over. The drawing rooms of Delhi have been emptied of influence. And it’s a wonderful thing.”
The wonderful thing that Aatish is referring to is Modi coming to power and changing the status quo. But, Tavleen has a bit of pedigree too. One of her grandfathers was amongst the five Sikh contractors who were given the responsibility of building the city of Delhi by Edwin Lutyens. A khandani dilliwali.
Contempt is fodder for writing. And there’s discernible bitterness in his writings. I don’t blame it on him. Born out of wedlock, Aatish’s biological father, Salman Taseer, in Aatish’s own words, “was a Pakistani businessman and politician who abandoned my mother when I was two, leaving her to support us through a career in journalism—and as a reaction, no doubt, I developed a taste for café society in New York.” He was not in contact with his father until he was 21. Salman was assassinated in 2011, when was the governor of Punjab–Pakistan. Very sad!
Aatish met Gabriella Windsor, a daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin when they were studying in Boston. A relationship that made news–Hello Magazine put them on the cover. It lasted for three years, and what followed was a nightmare for the British Royal family. He wrote to make private moments with Gabriella public, he painted sordid pictures of the Royal family. Race and the Royals: An Outsider’s View Inside Kensington Palace for Vanity Fair--stands out.
Hardly an outsider, Aatish gained access to the royal household, and minces no words to describe he and Gabrie-Ella “hung about Kensington Palace; we swam naked in the Queen’s pool in Buckingham Palace; we did MDMA in Windsor Castle.” Further, later in the article he simplifies things for the readers, “...royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar. It was that everyone above a certain age in Britain is at least a tiny bit racist. The colonial past made it almost second nature for Britons born at the tail end of the Raj to treat roughly a quarter of the planet as subject people.” But, given all these maladies present as listed by Aatish, how come they tolerated him for three long years?
The tendency to badmouth old friends employing good prose is something he has inherited from, perhaps, his mother. And it was done in bad taste and is not a polite thing. His step brother, Shehryar Taseer, told The Mail on Sunday, that this piece is “quite sickening” written just a few weeks before the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is “purely an attention seeking piece from somebody who has been cut out of high society.” Another friend was quoted by The Telegraph: "How pathetic and needy to capitalize on a romance that ended 12 years ago with a treacherous cocktail of innuendo, invention, indiscretion and something akin to sour revenge. What on earth for? He enjoyed the privileges of Palace life and now chooses to spit it back in his ex-girlfriend's face." This is my question too.
It’s unsolicited advice to his current lovers and friends: be wary of him, for when they lose favour with him, the details of their intimate liaison will find a graphic description. The only consolation is that it will make them popular as some leading journal that thrives on demonising people will give it a nice play.
There’s a crisis of trust and it is reflected in the writings. I empathize with him. What do you expect from a man forsaken by his own father?
.2.
In 2014, Aatish had a forum to employ his talent to explain how good Modi is for India: Open magazine, which celebrated him as the most distinctive voice of his generation. After five years in power, Modi was one of the most followed world leaders on social media. Aatish needed a much bigger platform for discrediting Modi–the leading American weekly, TIME, readily obliged him– after all it was here he started working as a reporter.
But what changed in these five years?
There are no simple answers. I’m neither categorical in judging the affairs of men, unlike Aatish or his mother Tavleen. Though I admire the audacity of choices they have made in life. The mother-son, all said and done, make a formidable duo.
Both, Modi’s detractors and supporters, agree that he has always been clear and consistent about what he believes in. Why did it take Aatish five years to see Modi clearly? Perhaps, the reasons were different. Aatish and his mother had certain expectations for their intellectual loyalty to the cause of Modi and weren’t adequately rewarded. Tavleen, too, did a course correction, in her book Messiah Modi? A Tale of Great Expectations. She details how her support for Modi metamorphosed into disenchantment with him as the prime minister and the cabinet he choose. She finished the book in less than a year after her son's infamous TIME cover.
The likes of her, the intellectual women who ideologically supported Modi, taking on the Left Liberals in their own lexicon, were ignored by Modi after winning the election. To their consternation, the likes of Smriti Irani came to the political forefront, she was made a minister, though lost to Rahul Gandhi in her first bid in 2014, that changed in 2019. This was too much. Smriti became an eyesore for women politicians across the ideological spectrum. They demeaned her and said things that were plain sexist.
Just for example, Tavleen, in her Indian Express column recently, was not very appreciative of Smirti’s efforts. In July last year, Tavleen described the scenes in the Parliament, “As I watched the histrionics in the Lok Sabha last week, I pinched myself to make sure this was real life and not some second-rate reality show. Easy to be fooled since the leading lady of the parliamentary drama rose to celebrity and fame in a TV soap opera. She is now a Cabinet minister, but Smriti Irani seemed for a moment to have confused her careers as she shrieked “Apologise, apologise, Sonia Gandhi, apologise to the nation for sanctioning the disrespect of a woman in the highest constitutional post.” I’m sure Tavleen would have done it differently but here she sounds like the people she criticised in Durbar–the erstwhile ruling class.
One thing is clear, Tavleen, by implication her son, was not happy with some of the choices Modi made. Or perhaps their choice of aligning with Modi. To her credit, she has always been forthright. But those words are more like a reaction, echoes of frustration, categorical, and sometimes shallow.
During Modi’s first term as the prime minister, Aatish also underwent a phenomenal transformation in his personal life, or at least made it public. Aatish came out (correct me if I’m wrong.), then 36, and married a much younger white man, 30-year-old lawyer Ryan Davis. Aatish made it known to the world by way of writing, about his travels across the American south with Davis, "the tall white man from Tennessee I had married a few weeks earlier in New York,” in Travel + Leisure on October 9, 2016. The height and the colour of the skin were the only details he shared. I sincerely hope he still goes swimming naked at an exotic location with his new partner, though they must avoid drugs–America has a long tradition of losing talented people due to drug overdose.
I’m happy that he’s “happily married,” which means that the chances of the graphic details of their married life going public are remote, at least in the near future.
People got hyper about him being gay or bisexual. That’s a non-issue for me. In fact, I admire sexual fluidity. My own tryst with art has demonstrated to me that we are sexually attracted to a certain energy, and that can be embodied by the male or female body. I wanted Aatish to inspire my drawings, that was a long time ago. He agreed in principle but it never happened. Like I often say, it’s never too late to do a good thing.
But trust remains an issue here. If we aren’t trustworthy to ourselves, we can’t trust others. And when we are not trustworthy, we try hard to prove to others that we are, especially to the one we are emotionally vulnerable to. Perhaps, Aatish had to demonstrate his change of heart, as a part of personal evolution, and that his past is well and truly a thing of the past. There isn't a grander way to do it than write a polemic essay against Modi in TIME magazine.
He declared Modi India's Divider In Chief and raised an existential question just a few weeks before the 2019 general elections: Can the World's Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government? “Of the great democracies to fall to populism, India was the first,” he starts the piece. Categorical as always, he goes on to write, “Nehru’s political heirs, who ruled India for the great majority of those post-independence years, established a feudal dynasty, while outwardly proclaiming democratic norms and principles.” Again, he sounds so much like his mother.
Though his problem with Modi seems intellectual, “Modi, without offering an alternative moral compass, rubbished the standards India had, and made all moral judgement seem subject to conditions of class and culture warfare.”
Aatish is a novice political commentator, he makes tall claims in the TIME piece, “Modi will never again represent the myriad dreams and aspirations of 2014. Then he was a messiah, ushering in a future too bright to behold, one part Hindu renaissance, one part South Korea’s economic program. Now he is merely a politician who has failed to deliver, seeking re-election. Whatever else might be said about the election, hope is off the menu.” Indian voters proved Aatish gloriously wrong, perhaps, because this time he was not in Varanasi. Modi improved his tally in 2019.
Modi didn’t write an essay, just Tweeted, “TIME magazine is foreign, the writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility." But isn’t that what Aatish and his mother have thrived on, almost perfected it as an art form, to judge people for their lineage?
The Indian government made him a global celebrity by stripping him of his overseas citizenship or the OIC status. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. His pending American citizenship was processed at an express pace and he’s now a bonafide citizen of the US. He wrote another piece, Why Modi is targeting me? TIME, again obliged.
Aatish plays the victim and goes gaga about it. This strategy has served him well: if you're out of favour, or not benefited from an arrangement, quit, rebuke, and join the detractors. Thanks to his talent, he always finds people who’d pay him to badmouth old friends. “The (original TIME) piece…sent his supporters into a fury. In the days and weeks that followed, people put false content on my Wikipedia page, accusing me of working as a “PR Manager” for the opposition Congress Party; they began on-line petitions denouncing me; they ran amok on social media, making multiple death threats and circulating multiple memes of me with a Pakistani eyepatch. Suddenly, I was portrayed as an agent of shadowy Western interests determined to exert undue influence over the Indian election,” he wrote. He was credited for far too many things, I agree.
Aatish clarified, a victim is being victimised. “I am Westernized (so learning Sanskrit didn’t change much); I am English-speaking; I am part of the despised elite whose entrenched power had helped fuel the rise of Modi. But there was another aspect of my identity that made me especially vulnerable to attack: my father was born in British India to a British mother and a father who became Pakistani when that country was created (but that was true in 2014, perhaps Modi didn’t know about it). And, within twenty-four hours of my piece being published, the BJP spokesman, Sambit Patra, seized on it to delegitimize me…and “that nothing better could be expected from Pakistan.”
“It is easy to see my situation as individual or unique,” he further writes, but that’s not the case, according to him, “It is symptomatic of a much larger movement. The government that stripped me of my overseas citizenship had just stripped the state of Jammu and Kashmir of statehood, autonomy and basic human freedoms. In the northeastern state of Assam, it was acting to strip 1.9 million people – the great majority Muslim, – of citizenship, rendering them stateless.” Aatish you can’t club yourself with Kashmiris and Muslims from the North East. Nothing can be further from the truth.
Aatish learned the lesson of his life. Modi is not some inconsequential English royalty that you sleep with and then bitch about when it’s over to get eyeballs and get away with it.
He was wrong about Modi, on many counts. Modi doesn’t need Aatish. He never did. Aatish needed him. He still needs him to get back to India. And Aatish cashed in on Modi, both praising and denouncing him. He, indeed, did very well for himself–and owe it in some measure to Modi.
Aatish won't be allowed to make noises from Indian soil. But in digitalised world, that's not much of an issue. Tavleen will be proud of Aatish--the son, the writer. I understand her woes, she has to travel all the way to New York to be with her son.