Tuesday 22 April 2014

Hotelier Chatwal lied about being carrier pilot

Sant Singh Chatwal (left) with his batch mate  Yogi Saxena in Dehra Dun in May 1966.




Sandeep Unnithan  New Delhi, April 22, 2014 | UPDATED 08:02 IST
High-flying hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal pleaded guilty last Thursday to charges of illegal campaign contributions to three US candidates via straw donors. His former buddies in the Indian Navy say he is also guilty of another, admittedly far lesser, offence: consistently lying about being a former Indian naval carrier pilot.
In several press interviews over the past few decades, Chatwal, 70, claimed to have attended naval flying school and flying from the India's first aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. His former naval buddies, however, say Chatwal was a rookie pilot who failed to make the grade.
Vice Admiral (retired) Vinod Pasricha, a veteran carrier pilot first smelt a rat while researching his 2010 book "Downwind Four Green" on the navy's Sea Hawk fighter squadron. It was an aircraft type Chatwal would have flown off the decks of the Vikrant. Admiral Pasricha , however, did not find any mention of a carrier pilot named Chatwal. "There was no flying school in the navy (naval pilots then trained at the IAF's training school at Bidar). Chatwal joined the navy as a naval aviation cadet and was thrown out of flying after only about seven sorties."
Colleagues in Chatwal's 99th general duties pilot course at Bidar call him a high-flyer for his brazen self-promotion. During his Services Selection Board (SSB) interview in Dehra Dun in 1966, he told the GTO he had flying experience. When he failed to make the grade, he flew around 14 hours didn't make the solo grade, Chatwal joked he was talking about "flying kites."
Chatwal left the navy and moved to Ethiopia as a teacher where he also ran an Indian restaurant. He left Ethiopia after the collapse of the Haile Selassie dictatorship in 1974, moved to Canada and from there, to the US. The naval carrier pilot legend may have come handy to break into the US restaurant scene in the mid-1980s. Prominent US politicians including Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush Senior have been carrier pilots. Chatwal told Forbes magazine in 1987 that he was 'trained as a fighter pilot and assigned to India's only aircraft carrier, the Vikrant, in the mid 1960s.'
Lieutenant 'Yogi' Saxena, who retired as a naval pilot after eight years of service and is now settled in Duluth, Georgia, recalls how he ran into his former course mate Chatwal at his Bombay Palace restaurant in New York in 1984. Saxena had moved to the US in 1976. Chatwal, invited his friend to the opening of his a second Bombay Palace restaurant in Los Angeles evidently to burnish his reputation as a carrier pilot. "At the restaurant, Chatwal, boasted of being a naval aviator on the Vikrant with me. I immediately corrected him. A piqued Chatwal broke all contact."
Nearly three decades later, Saxena says he is still mystified why Chatwal insisted on parroting the carrier- pilot yarn. "I guess it gave him a social standing he thought he lacked," he says of the hotelier who is now facing a lengthy prison sentence.

Saturday 19 April 2014

Mughal Modi-- odyssey of an India Today cover.



When Narendra Modi was announced as the BJP's candidate for Prime Minister last October, i predicted he would become larger than the party. Hence, the sketch, far left on Nov 1. When the time came for a story on how he was reorganising the party, it was time to turn the sketch into a cover. The water-colour on April 7. It was based on a famous Mughal miniature of Emperor Jehangir with a rose. This was finally realised as a photo-visual by Rohit Chawla for the issue which hit the stands on April 18. 

Friday 11 April 2014

The resurrection of Ashok Chavan


Congress rehabilitates the scam-tainted former chief minister by fielding him from his family bastion, Nanded
Sandeep Unnithan  Nanded, April 11, 2014 | UPDATED 08:21 IST

Ashok Chavan interacts with voters in his constituency
Ashok Chavan interacts with voters in his constituency
Can you sense a hawa (wave)?" former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan wipes his brow and looks around as he asks the small public rally in Degloor, Nanded district. "Because we could do with some air. It's getting hot." His reference, in the dry Marathwada heat, is to a 100,000-people-strong rally addressed by BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on March 30, just five days earlier. Modi taunted Chavan for being an "Adarsh candidate", a reference to the housing society scandal which forced Chavan out of the chief minister's office in November 2010. Chavan, 55, was chargesheeted by CBI in 2012 and, in December last year, the Justice (retd) J.A. Patil inquiry committee squarely indicted him, and two other chief ministers, the late Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sushilkumar Shinde, for the housing scandal. It spoke of a "quid pro quo": Building clearances in return for flats for family members.
This scandal, now being probed by CBI, has strangely not affected Chavan's slow steady climb back to prominence within the Congress after a two-year exile. Even Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi's public censure of the Maharashtra state government's rejection of the Justice Patil report in December hasn't deterred him. CBI, which wants to prosecute Chavan under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988, has been held at bay only by Maharashtra Governor K. Sankaranarayanan's refusal on January 15 this year to sanction his prosecution. Despite this, Chavan's candidature was endorsed by party President Sonia Gandhi. "As far as we know, Chavan is not barred from contesting the election by any law," Sonia told the media at the release of the Congress manifesto in Delhi on March 26.

Graphical representation
Graphical representation
Chavan takes this endorsement to indicate that his rehabilitation within the party is complete. Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, no great fan of his, has been silent on the nomination. Ashok Chavan is unfazed. "When the party president has said something, where is the question of anybody else saying anything?" he says as his Innova rushes him to another election rally.
Chavan's mother in-law Bhagwati Sharma, sister-in-law Seema Sharma and father-in-law's relative Madanlal Sharma were found to own flats in the Adarsh Housing Society in 2010. CBI says this was in exchange for favours Chavan granted to the society while he was revenue minister in 2008. Adarsh, the former chief minister says somewhat incredulously, doesn't matter in these elections. "If Adarsh had been an issue, I would not take the risk of contesting," he says, as he blames a section of the media for keeping it alive. The scandal, involving the 31-storeyed residential building in South Mumbai's upmarket Colaba, has only faint resonance in Marathwada, a region comprising eight south-eastern districts over 500 km away. "Adarsh does not matter to us, we vote for Ashok Chavan," says Bandu Gaekwad, who runs a medical store in Nanded.
Chavan's rehabilitation has everything to do with the There Is No Alternative or TINA factor facing the Congress. The prospect of electoral defeat has forced even stalwarts to renounce home constituencies. In the Nanded Lok Sabha constituency, the Congress has a winner. The seat, which goes to the polls on April 17, is a Chavan family bastion. Nanded was held by Ashok Chavan's father, former Union home minister S.B. Chavan, in 1980 and 1984. Ashok Chavan, then a 27-year-old, held the seat for two years after a by-election in 1987 when his father went back to being Maharashtra chief minister. Since 1998 the seat has been held by Ashok Chavan's brotherin-law Bhaskarrao Patil Khatgaonkar.
Even the BJP candidate Digamber Patil, who won the seat once in 2004, admits he is counting only on the Modi wave to break in. "He (Chavan) has a lot of money," he says, "But there is a wave in favour of Modiji." The Modi wave, clearly, is the one thing Chavan fears. In meeting after meeting, he looks for chinks in Modi's armour. "My whole family is behind me, my wife and daughters are campaigning for me, where is Modi's wife?" he asks. That's Chavan at his nastiest.
Later in the evening, the Congress rolls out its heavy artillery. State Revenue Minister Narayan Rane jointly addresses a rally of nearly 10,000 people with Chavan in Digloor. Rane, who was briefly a Shiv Sena chief minister in 1999, trains his guns at Modi. He tells the crowd, many of whom are Muslims, of Modi's American event managers who advise him what to wear and speak, RSS which runs him by remote control and, of course, the Gujarat riots and the Ishrat Jahan encounter. "He's not a Vikas Purush," Rane thunders. "He's a Vinaash Purush." Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar and Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan are also expected to campaign for him soon. "Had Bhaskarrao Patil contested, we would have surely lost," says a Congress worker.
Caste equations have also been at play in Chavan's resurrection. The Congress, which has held power in the state with NCP for 15 years, faces state polls in October this year. The 2011 death of Vilasrao Deshmukh has left the Congress bereft of a strong grassroots leader from the dominant Maratha community. Rane, a Maratha from Konkan, is yet to earn the Congress's trust for the top job because of his origins in the Shiv Sena and for openly staking claim after Chavan's 2010 exit.
"The death of Desmukh literally orphaned the people of Marathwada," says journalist and political commentator Kumar Ketkar. "The Congress is looking at Chavan and his family's halfcentury legacy to retain their vote bank here." Ketkar, however, doesn't foresee a major role for Chavan either in the state or at the Centre because of Adarsh, especially with Modi promising to pursue the case in his Nanded speech. In candid conversation, Ashok Chavan says he belongs to Mumbai rather than to Marathwada. The ghost of Adarsh will ensure it stays that way.
Followthe writer on Twitter @SandeepUnnithan

Vikrant sale: How India and China view retired aircraft carriers


Dragon's pride, elephant's burden

Sandeep Unnithan  New Delhi, April 11, 2014 | UPDATED 12:52 IST


The Indian navy's first aircraft carrier the Vikrant was sold as scrap this month. The sale of the historic warship to a shipbreaker for Rs.63.2 crore comes after the failure of a 17-year-long struggle by the Maharashtra government to convert it into a floating museum for an estimated Rs.600 crore. Activists and defence correspondents in Mumbai have vowed to save it, yet again. The modest-sized light-fleet carrier epitomised the Indian navy for over 36 years. It performed a momentous, if symbolic role, of harrying the enemy in erstwhile East Pakistan during the 1971 war.
Yet, the Vikrant has always hovered around the scrapyard ever since its 1997 decommissioning. Plans to convert the 18,000-tonne carrier into a maritime museum have somehow never taken off.
In sharp contrast, China, a country that began operating an aircraft carrier in 2011, has not one but two aircraft carrier museums. The former Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev (sister ship of the Gorshkov acquired by the Indian navy last year) anchored in Tianjin, northern China and the Minsk, another Kiev class carrier, which forms the 'Minsk world', Asia's only military-themed park in Shenzen, north of Hong Kong. These 40,000-tonne carrier museums could well distinguish the different ways India and China perceive aircraft carriers. China, which began its naval modernization only two decades ago, sees its navy as an eventual global military rival to the powerful US navy. Aircraft carriers are powerful symbols of its naval aspirations. China purchased the hulk of the unfinished Soviet carrier 'Riga' over a decade ago and paintstakingly converted it into its first aircraft carrier the Liaoning, commissioned in 2012 as the Liaoning. China is believed to be secretly building two new carriers modeled on Soviet designs.
Chinese military thinkers scoured the globe for carrier knowhow. In the mid-1980s, they acquired the decommissioned aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne, a sister ship of the Vikrant to study. It is likely China's booming economy also noticed the vast tourist potential of the five aircraft carrier museums operating in the US. In the early 1990s, China snapped up the two Kiev class carriers retired by the crumbling Soviet Union. The carriers now serve as tourist magnets on the Chinese coast. 'Minsk World' serves up an ersatz Soviet experience for its visitors complete with propaganda posters and Russian songs and dances. Chinese media reports say the Minsk attracted 33,000 visitors during the Chinese Lunar New Year week in 2006. The Kiev underwent a 9.6 million pound (Rs.86 crore) conversion into a floating sea-themed luxury hotel in Tianjin in 2011.

the former Soviet carrier Minsk in Shenzen. (pix Wikipedia)

The Indian navy sees aircraft carriers as the centerpiece of its strategy to dominate a limited space, the Indian Ocean between the Malacca Straits and the Gulf of Aden. In addition to the Vikramaditya (ex-Gorshkov), it operates a 60-year old ex-British carrier the Viraat and is building an indigenous aircraft carrier 'Vikrant' in Kochi.
The navy rightly believes it has no job running decommissioned warships like the Vikrant (it has maintained the Vikrant since '97). However, crucial naval decisions taken by successive chiefs of the Mumbai-based Western Naval Command, have impeded the conversion of the carrier into a viable maritime museum. The navy has disallowed civilian helicopter flights from South Mumbai on the pretext that it impedes flights from its INS Shikra helicopter base in South Mumbai. This no-fly zone has swiftly killed plans to convert the Vikrant into a civilian heliport off the coast of South Mumbai. Surprisingly, the navy was open to the idea of helicopter operations in 2010 but inexplicably changed its stance. It will require intervention at the very highest levels to stop the warship from being towed to the short distance to the Darukhana scrapyard just north of the naval dockyard. It will require more than just intervention to realize the project.