Check the Impossible to find the Possible

CHECK THE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND THE POSSIBLE
By M J Akbar
COVERT (16-31st JULY 2008)

In times of meltdown, the great eagerness is of course to get a glimpse of the future. The tendency, but naturally, is to track the future along the seam lines of what politicians can do. There is a much surer way of negotiating such minefields. Check out what politicians cannot do, and you will get a far better idea of what they will do.

Eliminate the impossible, and the possible begins to define itself. This is not to suggest that the contours of the possible will always be precise. Fuzz comes much more naturally to politics than clarity. But at least the route map will be broadly correct.

Second tip: Sentiment has little to do with power play. Likes and dislikes mean very little at crunch time. Politics is about the protection and pursuit of interests. Of course self-serving politicians will always clothe their self-interests in the garb of national interest, but that subterfuge is so old that it has worn thin.

It was never possible for the Left to accept a strategic alliance with the United States, which is the meat and bones of the new relationship that Dr Manmohan Singh and George Bush want. It is a concept in which India becomes the eastern fortress of the “New Middle East”, an expanded arc that stretches from the Nile to the Ganges and includes all the volatile regions of the Muslim world in which America has a deep vested interest because of energy. America does not hide this interest. George Bush is blatant in his assertion that American troops will remain in Iraq for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future, occupying 58 bases. The pro-American Iraqi government in Baghdad wants all American troops out within a specified timeframe, but that does not faze American policymakers. India, including its waters, will become a region from which American forces can operate if they feel the need to do so. Obviously, this need will arise only rarely, but when it does India will be an undeclared base supporting forward operations. War is not only about fighting; it is also about logistics. The sop that is being thrown out by Dr Singh is that an American presence will be protection for India against Chinese aggression. He, along with the Congress, has abandoned the notion that India can defend itself without becoming an American ally.

The Left has not. Who is right is less relevant, in the present context, than the fact that these views are incompatible. The alliance, acceptable till the line was breached, is now untenable. Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi want to leave an indelible American mark on the Congress Party, with consequences that will change the organisation’s fundamental ethos completely. That is their privilege. A substantial section of the Congress does not agree, but is voiceless in a party where debate has been extinguished. However, it is absurd for the Prime Minister and Mrs Gandhi to expect the Left to rubberstamp their somersault. Congress spin-veterinarians (they are not quite doctors) tried till the last minute to suggest that the Left would beg for some patchwork formula rather than face “isolation”, but they were only fooling themselves.

Mulayam Singh’s decision to ditch the Third Front and support the Congress government has absolutely nothing to do with America or the nuclear deal. His compulsions are regional and personal. Mayawati has driven him out of power in the only state where he can be in power. Defeat in the last Assembly elections to Mayawati has unnerved him. He is no longer confident that he can take on Mayawati alone. The Congress makes a perfect ally, because it is too frail to make an independent bid for power: it is bed-ridden but not quite dead. If the Congress had been able to even walk, it would have sought to triangulate the non-BJP vote and expand its space in order to build its future. But it has abandoned its future in the heartland in order to seal a deal with America.

When it comes to a division of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats before the next general election, Mulayam Singh will bargain with bare knuckles. Those Congressmen who think the party can contest 25 seats are living in a very big fool’s paradise. They will be lucky if Mulayam offers ten and relents to 12. Local luminaries like Salman Khursheed could discover that they have been sliced out since Mulayam will not concede a constituency like Farrukhabad. Once the Congress moves out of 80% of the seats, it will never be able to return, for its remaining cadre will abandon the party. This suits Mulayam Singh even better, just as it suits Lalu Yadav in Bihar to restrict Congress to four or five seats. The Congress cannot revive if it sells long to buy short.
The short-term benefits for the Congress are dubious; the long term suggests disaster. If there is an electoral deal with Mulayam, the Congress will have effectively eliminated itself from the spine of the nation, the Indo-Gangetic belt from the point where the Ganga enters the plains to Ganga Sagar in Bengal, where it pours into the Bay of Bengal. If, five years or more later, the electorate tires of regional parties and seeks a national alternative, the Congress will have evaporated from the space where it could have reaped maximum benefits. The only national party in Uttar Pradesh left standing will be the BJP.

On paper, the nuclear-dealers should survive in the floor test in the Lok Sabha. Mulayam Singh has already made it clear that support will come at a price determined by how much benefit he and his friends can get. Those opposing the deal have nothing to offer by way of cash or policy-switch; and there are no trips to America to encourage them. The process cannot but further erode the credibility of the ruling coalition. The price will be high; the size of the parliamentary victory as low as single digits. Dr Manmohan Singh began with a majority of over a hundred. In four years, by becoming a one-point Bush-entranced Prime Minister, he has reduced that majority to a variable that could easily slip into a minority. Hard numbers may be less important than the more malleable commodity known as credibility. A shrinking government, tossed around by a last -minute Mulayam Rescue Squad, discovers that its authority has dissipated as well.

India is in a mess, its flesh weakened by inflation, its bones wracked by Naxalite violence. But the Prime Minister had a glow on his face when he met George Bush at the G8 Summit in Japan. Bush has been an uncertain asset over the last three years; he will be a liability in elections. But of course the two can still smile at each other when both their parties have lost national elections because of their leadership.

Amoral Code

Byline By M J Akbar : Amoral Code

In India, secularism means respect for the other’s right to practice faith in whatsoever manner the other chooses. Hindus and Muslims have lived with each other almost as long as Muslims and Christians.

When a coalition begins to melt, its partners subtly, if not silently, begin to shift their public agenda from common concern to individual need. The debate over the bridge built by Lord Ram between the Tamil Nadu coast and Sri Lanka is hardly new. A year ago, the supreme leader of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Mr M.K. Karunanidhi, would not have fractured sensibilities nationwide with intemperate, unacceptable remarks about Lord Ram, revered and worshipped by Hindus as the paradigm of virtue. Today, the political calendar has a premature general election marked within the first half of 2008. His party’s fortunes are now more important to him than his coalition’s fate. After all, what use is any coalition to him if he cannot get the seats that can make him a power broker?

Under pressure, Mr Karunanidhi is dipping into the source of Dravida nectar for sustenance. The origins are lost to public memory, so it may be useful to recall them.

The movement began in 1914 when Dr C. Nadesan Mudaliar started the Dravida Association. But it got its first impetus when the son of a rich landlord, privileged enough to be educated in England, walked away from his background to fight for the lower castes against the domination of the Brahmins. The name of this remarkable man was E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, popularly known as ‘EVR’ and then ‘Periyar’. His philosophy was practical: he likened caste to malaria and said that his search was not for medicine but for the mosquitoes that spread malaria. He declared himself an atheist and went to war against Brahmins, the chief perpetrators of caste iniquity. He launched an agitation against his personal friend, the Maharaja of Travancore for reform: an Untouchable could not walk on the streets of the princely state, let alone raise his eyes in front of someone from an upper caste. You can get a flavour of EVR’s views from this quotation: "(Aryans) concocted absurd stories in keeping with their barbarian status… The blabberings of the intoxicated Brahmins in those old days are still faithfully observed in this modern world as the religious rituals, morals, stories, festivals, fasts, vows and beliefs". Inherent in the doctrine was the Aryan as an outsider, who had driven true Indians, Dravidians, south and then maintained his power through an iniquitous system. Brahmins were agents of that domination. The Dravida movement would move away from the eccentricities of EVR into the sager leadership of C.N. Annadurai, but the basic philosophy did not alter. When the DMK was formed after the split in the Dravida Kazhagam on 17 September 1949, it did not name a chairman. That chair was kept vacant for the "soul of Periyar".

Mr Karunanidhi has made two basic miscalculations in trying to revive his party by resurrecting the spirit of Periyar. No faith has undergone more dramatic reform than Hinduism has in the last seventy-five years. This is a tribute to both Hinduism’s leaders, the most notable of them being Mahatma Gandhi, and to ordinary Hindus, who realised that the excesses of caste were self-defeating. The India of 2007, with a supremely confident Mayawati as chief minister of India’s most important state, would be unrecognisable to the Hindus of 1932, a dramatic year in the history of caste relations. A nation cannot be modern until it destroys the shibboleths that have kept it chained to regression. There is much talk of a Hindu renaissance in the 19th century. That is a myth compared to the true renaissance that came in the 20th century, and became the engine of social change, a vital necessity for the kind of economic growth that India is witnessing. When the Brahmin votes for Mayawati, he makes Periyar, once a crucial catalyst of change, irrelevant. Periyar’s genius created the change that has made Periyar unnecessary. Tamil Nadu has changed as much as the rest of India. The "low caste" Hindus of Tamil Nadu are no longer subservient to the Brahmin. Mr Karunanidhi’s electoral success is evidence of this.
Mr Karunanidhi is talking to the Tamil Nadu of 1967, not the Tamil Nadu of 2007.

Nor does the venerable Dravida leader quite understand the meaning of secularism, at least as we practise it in India. The European benchmark of secularism is the separation of faith and state. In India, secularism means respect for the other’s right to practice faith in whatsoever manner the other chooses. Hindus and Muslims have lived with each other almost as long as Muslims and Christians. But there is no instance of the kind of ferocious diatribe that Dante, author of Divine Comedy, indulged in against the person of Islam’s Prophet, in any epic written by a Hindu. Similarly, there is not a single writer of any standing among Muslims who has ever been insulting towards a Hindu god. We do not have to believe in each other’s creeds to have respect for each other’s religions. That is the essence of co-existence. Mr Karunanidhi, who is probably an atheist, forgot that simple rule.

The debate about proof is inane, to opt for the most polite word. I cannot ‘prove’ that Allah exists; a Jew cannot ‘prove’ that Jehovah exists; a Christian cannot prove that ‘God’ exists. This may be, for all I know, less a reflection on divinity, and more an indication of human limitations. It is arrogance to believe that truth is merely the little that the human brain comprehends.
Gravity existed before Isaac Newton’s brain "discovered" it; indeed, it would be presumptuous to claim that the Pyramids were built without a thorough knowledge of gravity. The human brain is a work in progress.

Belief that has sustained itself for centuries is rarely constructed on a chimera, no matter what deviations (like caste) men may impose on the original faith. The past is littered with forgotten claims. Mr Karunanidhi would have been wiser to respect the faith of the millions who have prayed in the temple at Rameshwaram, the offshore island also called the Kashi of the South: no prizes for guessing that Rameshwaram is named after Lord Ram. It is interesting that a Sri Lankan, King Parakrama Bahu, built the sanctum sanctorum of the Ramanathswamy temple. Incidentally, "mythology" has an answer to Mr Karunanidhi’s question about whether Lord Ram was an engineer: the bridge between the mainland and Sri Lanka was constructed by Nala, the son of Vishwakarma. But such political wisecracks only trivialise a sensitive issue.

A voter decides on the fate of a ruling party because of a bouquet of reasons. There is rarely just one reason that becomes the decisive driver, submerging others. What parties need to worry about is the tipping point, the final straw that persuades a voter to move from the past to a different future. Many voters, across the country, will be hurt by the insult to Lord Ram and establishment’s inability to do anything about it.

Mr Karunanidhi has one advantage over his critics. He knows that no one cares how you win an election, or what you do to stay in power; the only thing that matters is numbers in an age of coalitions. His allies may fudge and squirm but no one will dare ask him to leave the alliance. If he retains his MPs after the next election, he will be welcome in the next permutation and combination, whatever it might be.

Power has its own moral, or amoral, code.