Costs and benefits: 1927

Certain govt authorities were making too big a deal over the 1927 lease and the Sturmabteilung, as usual being ignorant of the details. Any ground-level support for the 1927 lease within Germany, if arranged by the SA, was likely to have been services that were paid for. 

If there was vagueness in the wording of the 1927 lease, it could imply several versions of the lease document, depending on the behaviour of the colleagues of Adolf Hitler, what kind of intimacy and personal relationship they enjoyed with FDR and William Donovan in Washington DC.

For example, Antara had done fairly extensive research on the St Francis dam disaster of April 26, 1928, where an overnight and dramatic level in the rise of water ended up causing destructive flooding in parts of Los Angeles County, killing 431 people and causing widespread devastation. 

The St Francis dam disaster, therefore, took place a year after the signing of the legit lease. A major royal household of central India was apparently suspected, in case there was sabotage near the 'foundations'.

Antara had come across the following phrase in a Bengali work of fiction, "Los Angeles...what an enchanting name, did the fairies/angels get lost there?"

Maybe it was a good idea to let go of the obsession with the 1927 lease and SA till one could determine how many versions of the lease document existed?

ii. Nor should the problem around the real name/surname cause such disturbance within the ranks of the RSS that they'd forget who was a traditional ally and who should have been regarded with suspicion. For the latter, we were referring to the student movements that arose out of the Islamic seminaries of Pakistan and Afghanistan, those that had become rulers and administrators now.

The fate of Ishmael had befallen the royal dynasties of Europe, their members wandered about from place to place, they often didn't know where their adversaries were hiding, where they were strong. Would it have been the correct decision to advertise millennia-old history when one had a nomad's existence? 

Ishmael/Ismail was a neighbourhood in Antara's hometown, Asansol, and that was all she had for her identity. Look to your real hometown, New York, it has the King's County (Brooklyn) and Queens. Your problems with INC and its friends were not going to be easy to solve.

iii. More than arranging for bilateral trade deals through private operators, the Indian Govt could have thoroughly perused the legit lease document. Wide-ranging were the powers of the legit lease to enforce trade deals, argue for India, get high prices for products no other country produced, conclude the deal on India's terms. 

Did the Indian Govt contact the legit lease heir? No, it denied her an Aadhaar card, took away her banking facilities in India, the one individual who could have turned India into a prosperous superpower.

From 2014 onwards, she raged and ranted, 'use the lease, use it to make India strong', but in hotel lobbies and exclusive clubs of Delhi, all that they talked about was "how to starve her", "how to bludgeon her in her sleep", how to make sure "there were no sandwiches on the table". (A private operator from Kolkata who was quite a force in the govt, wildly popular among the Indian elite and the middle-class.)

iv. The RSS might say that its hostility towards Antara was guided by The Statesman newspaper, both its Kolkata office and the Barakhamba Road office in New Delhi. 

The Statesman was a strange publication, it was descended from a gazette called 'A Friend of India'. Did the RSS care to find out who were these 'friends of India', how they connected to the English East India Company, if The Statesman had always been a 'front' for other kinds of anti-India commercial interests?

Oh right, the RSS didn't have the time, it was either thinking about the 1927 lease and the SA or Larry Elisson. 

Not even when The Statesman launched 'Voices', a team of high school students from Kolkata meant to run the White House in DC? What happened to regular Americans? Why was a newspaper from a Third World city, known only for poverty and misery, supplying White House officials?

Such were the seeds you had sown. No wonder ordinary Indian citizens were not allowed to interact with Antara.

May 10, 2025.