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By:

Shoumojit Banerjee

27 August 2024 at 9:57:52 am

The Road to Europe’s Apocalypse

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since...

The Road to Europe’s Apocalypse

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, was engulfed in the ‘war to end all wars.’ The First World War would claim more than 20 million lives, bring about the downfall of four empires, redraw maps from the Baltic to the Levant, and sow the seeds of Bolshevism, fascism and, lead ultimately to an even deadlier World War within the next two decades. The catastrophe that led to the First World War began with seven young conspirators waiting to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne - on the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Few episodes in modern history have generated so vast a literature from so small a stage. By 1939 itself, as Europe stood on the brink of World War Two, nearly 3,000 books and pamphlets had already appeared on Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Among this formidable library stands one unjustly neglected masterpiece. Yugoslav author-politician Vladimir Dedijer’s Road to Sarajevo, published in 1966. It deserves to stand beside other great ‘origin’ classics of WW1, namely Luigi Albertini’s monumental The Origins of the War of 1914 (1942-43); Barbara Tuchman’s riveting narrative history The Guns of August (1962) and Christopher Clark’s celebrated The Sleepwalkers (2012). If Albertini reconstructed the tangled diplomacy that led to the Great War, Tuchman recreated the drama and Clark the intricacies of the European system, Dedijer illuminated something that few authors could ever possess on the subject -the historical and political psychology of Bosnia and its peculiar political turbulence. Tangled Geopolitics As a Bosnian Serb by birth and a Partisan fighter under Tito during the Second World War, Dedijer, later to become one of the former Yugoslavia’s foremost historians, brought to the origins of the First World War not merely archival diligence but an intimate understanding of the land, its people and the tangled skein of its many ethnic nationalisms. What distinguishes Road to Sarajevo from the shelves groaning with WW1 books is the balance of its historical imagination. Dedijer understood that Sarajevo was simultaneously a provincial Bosnian town and the fault line of European geopolitics. He neither elevates the 19-year-old Gavrilio Princip – the student activist and Franz Ferdinand’s assassin - into a nationalist martyr nor reduces him to a terrorist in search of notoriety. Princip emerges as a product of a peculiar political ecology born from the cauldron of Habsburg rule, South Slav nationalism, youthful idealism and the febrile atmosphere created by the Balkan Wars. Few historians have so convincingly captured the tension between individual agency and the larger historical forces that converged on June 28, 1914. Conspiracy Theories One of the book’s great pleasures lies in its treatment of the extraordinary historiography surrounding the assassination. Dedijer is less interested in peddling yet another grand theory than in forensically dissecting the countless theories that others invented. The result being that The Road to Sarajevo reads like a controlled Umberto Eco novel – a febrile, yet historically grounded thriller populated by diplomats, spies, policemen, Freemasons, revolutionaries and ambitious politicians - each cast in successive generations as the hidden puppeteer pulling the strings on that fateful day in Sarajevo. Almost immediately after the Archduke’s assassination, the hunt for invisible hands began. The American historian Sidney B. Fay, whose landmark The Origins of the World War (1928) overturned the simplistic Versailles thesis that Germany alone bore responsibility for the conflict, accused Serbia of failing to warn Vienna despite prior knowledge of the conspiracy. Bernadotte E. Schmitt’s meticulous two-volume The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930) reconstructed the July Crisis with exemplary scholarship while Pierre Renouvin, himself a decorated veteran of the Great War, subjected the diplomatic record to equally rigorous scrutiny in Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (1925). Dedijer catalogues these competing claims with enviable detachment. Few crimes in modern history have attracted so many imaginary accomplices. Alfred von Wegerer, the German authority on the Sarajevo assassination, writing in 1937, suspected a Bolshevik hand behind the deed. His argument rested largely on testimony extracted from Karl Radek - the brilliant, caustic Polish-born Bolshevik intellectual - during Stalin’s infamous Moscow show trials. Leon Trotsky, who had visited Serbia several times before 1914 and knew some members of the revolutionary circles surrounding Princip, inevitably found himself drawn into the speculation, though he had consistently opposed individual acts of terrorism as a revolutionary method. Others found darker conspirators. Father Anton Puntigam, the Jesuit priest who administered the last rites to Franz Ferdinand, believed that international Freemasonry had engineered the assassination. Count Ottokar Czernin, later Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister and one of the Archduke’s closest associates, claimed Franz Ferdinand himself had confided that Freemasons intended to murder him. Under Nazi rule, such allegations acquired an unmistakably antisemitic colouring. Hitler’s party paper - Völkischer Beobachter - described Princip as both a Jew and a Freemason - a grotesque fabrication entirely in keeping with the conspiratorial obsessions of the Third Reich. Wickham Steed, the influential British journalist and historian, suggested remarkable negligence on the part of Sarajevo’s security arrangements while others hinted that the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count István Tisza, had maintained secret contacts with Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević - better known by his nom de guerre ‘Apis’ - the formidable chief of Serbian military intelligence and guiding spirit behind the clandestine Black Hand organisation. Franz Ferdinand’s own family entered the debate. His eldest son, Max Hohenberg, accused the German secret service of complicity. The charge proved inconvenient after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938; Max and his younger brother soon found themselves imprisoned at Dachau. In one of history’s stranger ironies, Hitler himself later blamed British intelligence for the 1914 assassination while justifying his invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. A.J.P. Taylor, in his delightful review of Dedijer’s book for The New Yorker in 1966, observed that almost everybody eventually found themselves accused. Serbia, Russia, Germany, Britain, Hungary, the Bolsheviks and even American anarchists - all appeared, at one time or another, in the dock for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Taylor’s own description of Dedijer remains one of the finest appreciations of the man: “He is a Yugoslav, not a Serb nationalist, and is not committed either to Pasic, the Serbian prime minister, or to Apis, the head of the Black Hand (though he was once dandled on Apis’s knee as a little boy).” Few historians have enjoyed quite such a colourful connection to their subject. Perhaps that explains the book’s extraordinary confidence. Dedijer neither sensationalises nor dismisses these theories. He simply lays them before the reader, examines their evidentiary foundations and wryly allows most of them to collapse under their own improbability. Every generation invents the conspiracy it deserves. Just as the assassination of Julius Caesar generated tales of omens and prophecies, and the murder of John F. Kennedy continues to nourish an endless conspiracy industry, Sarajevo has repeatedly become a screen onto which successive political eras have projected their own anxieties. But the book is perhaps even more vital - and rewarding - beyond the assassination itself. Behind Princip’s pistol stood decades of imperial rivalry, the slow retreat of Ottoman power, the ambitions unleashed by Italian and German unification, and the unresolved ‘Eastern Question’ that had vexed European statesmen since the Congress of Vienna. More signally, Dedijer anticipated a truth that later events would painfully confirm. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the brutality it unleashed demonstrated that the region’s history was a bottled djinn of unresolved grievances. Once uncorked, the questions of identity, sovereignty and historical grievance that animated Princip’s generation resurfaced, in a far more violent form, during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are books that answer historical questions. There are rarer books that teach readers how history itself is constructed. The Road to Sarajevo belongs firmly in the latter category. More than sixty years after its publication, this rich, humane and intellectually honest work deserves to find a new generation of readers.

India waits to lasso diamantaire Mehul Choksi

Mumbai: India rubbed its hands gleefully as the Belgium Police honoured its request to arrest the absconder diamantaire Mehul Chinubhai Choksi – more than seven years after he, along with his nephew Nirav Deepak Modi - allegedly duped the Punjab National Bank of nearly Rs. 13,800-crores.

 

The scam involving the ‘Mehul Mama-Nirav Bhanja’ erupted in Jan 2018, after the PNB lodged a complaint with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

 

By then the kin, along with many of their family members, winked and slipped out of the country, leaving a rattled India rubbing its palms in disappointment.

 

A political-cum-financial storm raged, embarrassing the Bharatiya Janata Party government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a year before the Lok Sabha elections.

 

Multiple agencies launched a multi-pronged probe into what became the biggest banking scam in the past quarter century – and almost four times bigger than the stock market-cum-banking fraud the late Big Bull Harshad Mehta had inflicted on the Indian economy 33 years ago (in April 1992) – when it was just opening up.

 

In Belgium

According to official reports, Choksi was living with his Belgium citizen-wife Preeti in Antwerp, a global diamond hub, presumably for the past 18 months on a ‘residency permit’ acquired through questionable means, for medical reasons.

 

Earlier, he shot to the headers (June 2021) while being taken in a wheelchair to a court by the Dominican Republic's Police on charges of sneaking into the small country in the Caribbean Sea, North America.

 

Interestingly, as the Antigua & Barbuda government initiated the process to cancel his citizenship acquired through an investor visa, Choksi had suddenly gone ‘missing’ till he surfaced in the Dominican Republic.

 

The April 2025 action by Belgium followed a request by India’s CBI and the financial frauds specialist Enforcement Directorate (ED) to nab Choksi as the InterPol had revoked his Red Corner Notice in 2023.

 

Mama and Bhanja

‘Mama’ Choksi is the founder-owner of Gitanjali Group while ‘bhanja’ Nirav’s Firestar plus other companies – and the duo, with some PNB officials hand-in-glove – conspired to make a ‘mamu’ of not only PNB, but other banks, as it subsequently tumbled out.

 

After making a quiet exit, Choksi was detected living in the verdant Antigua & Barbuda Isles (West Indies), then attempted entry to the Dominican Republic, was sent back to Antigua & Barbuda and then went to Belgium where he was nabbed on Sunday.

 

Similarly, Modi was found sauntering on the streets of London and nabbed in March 2019. He remains in jail there since India's extradition is still pending.

 

However, India is keeping its fingers crossed that it may finally lay hands on Choksi, bring him to India and face trial in the PNB scam, though it may take time.

 

Born in Mumbai (1959) and educated in Gujarat, Choksi, 66, and wife Preeti have three children.

 

The Rs. 13,800-crore PNB scam

In the modus operandi revealed after India’s second-largest PSU bank PNB admitted it was scammed, Choksi and Modi used fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoU) to get overseas credits or loans from Indian banks.

 

The PNB first informed the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) of the fraud and then lodged a criminal complaint with the CBI in Jan. 2018, plus another CBI complaint in Feb, that led to a FIR against Modi and Choksi and their companies.

 

The ED entered the scene to probe the allegations of money-laundering through the LoUs – which they allegedly misused to avail short-term business finances from foreign branches of Indian banks.

 

The probe said that the duo were availing the LoUs from the PNB’s Brady House Branch from March 2011, and over the next six-seven years, managed to get a whopping 1,200-plus LoUs like a breeze with the help of some friendly bankers within.

 

Post-scam, the gold-diamond companies Gitanjali Group and Firestone Group with multiple operations in India and abroad have largely wound up, while some personal assets of the mama-bhanja have been auctioned to recover a part of the dues.

 

ED's plea to declare Choksi fugitive stuck for seven years

Even as absconding diamantaire Mehul Choksi, a key accused in the Punjab National Bank loan fraud case, has been arrested in Belgium, the ED's plea to declare him a fugitive economic offender has been pending before a court in Mumbai for nearly seven years.


Choksi, 65, and his nephew diamantaire Nirav Modi are the prime accused in the Rs 13,000 crore PNB bank loan fraud case. Choksi was arrested in Belgium following an extradition request by Indian probe agencies, official sources said on Monday.


The Enforcement Directorate had filed the application in July 2018, seeking to declare Choksi an FEO and confiscate his assets under provisions of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act.


However, the matter has witnessed repeated delays owing to a barrage of applications filed by the accused in the PMLA court and the Bombay High Court alleging procedural lapses in the Enforcement Directorate's plea.


"The court is kept busy with frivolous applications, and hearing on our application to declare him (Choksi) an FEO has been adjourned for the past seven years,” an ED officer had said after the hearing was once again deferred this February.


"The court should have continued the hearing and taken a decision on the future course of action once the application was moved," the officer had said.

He had urged the court to take note of the repeated filing of similar applications and to not entertain them.


Choksi's lawyer had informed the court that the accused was undergoing treatment for suspected cancer in Belgium and intended to file an application in connection with his health.


Under the FEO Act, an individual can be declared a Fugitive Economic Offender if a warrant has been issued against him for an offence involving Rs 100 crore or more and he has left India while refusing to return. Once declared an FEO, the person's property can be confiscated by the investigating agency.


Choksi had challenged the ED's application in the Bombay High Court, alleging that the agency "had not followed proper procedure before filing the application and, hence, it stands vitiated".


However, in September 2023, the High Court dismissed his plea, ruling that the ED had adhered to the prescribed format under the FEO Act. It also vacated a stay on the special court's proceedings.


Despite this, the hearing on declaring Choksi FEO could not commence, with Choksi continuing to file applications before the special court through his lawyers.


While most of these pleas have been dismissed, a few remain pending. His latest attempt to stall proceedings through a plea to recall the notice issued on the ED's FEO application was rejected in December 2023.


According to ED officials, Choksi left India under suspicious circumstances in early January 2018.


Shifting stance

Choksi's counsel has argued that the ED kept shifting its stance on the material grounds for declaring him an FEO and that the suspension of his Indian passport made it impossible for him to return for investigation.

The court, however, rejected this argument, stating that the notice was issued based on accurate information and not based on "wrong facts or mistaken assumptions".


ED claimed the accused left the country under suspicious circumstances in the first week of January 2018.


Nirav Modi has already been declared as an FEO by the special court. He has been lodged in jail in London since 2019.

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