How Public is Public Opinion?

Byline By M.J. Akbar: How public is Public Opinion?

As Parliament gears up for a vote of confidence on the Congress-driven nuclear deal, evidence of base realities is beginning to seep upwards. The virtual split in the Indian Union Muslim League over the deal tells its own story.

All opinion is not public. This is one reason why public opinion polls so often get it wrong. Some sections of the Indian public — generally, the less confident — prefer to keep their views to themselves, partly out of a nagging fear that the establishment might react adversely to a hostile opinion. And partly out of a sense of property rights in a democracy: why should anyone else know what I think? Let them find out when they check the ballot box. Instead of leading the opinion pollster towards the broad truth, the voter might even deliberately mislead.

Many Indian Muslims, a minority that has learnt to maximise its democratic opportunities, have become sophisticated in the art of misleading the establishment. In the absence of any direct communication with the grassroots, or the tea-stall, the establishment prefers to get its information through an intermediary class, the most prominent of which is the clergy.
Whenever political parties want to advertise "Muslim" support, they parade a queue of grey beards. Maulanas do have their place in Muslim society, a prominent one, but they are not the only determinants or mirrors of opinion. Their influence can be overestimated. It is hardly a secret that some of the Indian clergy are sustained by the establishment and can be counted upon to echo whatever any government wants to hear. Very few of the Maulanas- for-hire actually believe in the statements they make for Delhi's consumption. The rhetoric of the same Maulanas at the next Friday khutba [the sermon at Friday prayers] could easily be at great variance from their public posture a few days before.

Muslim voters, in any case, are not mechanical one-source consumers. They hear, they watch, they read but, most important, they remember. They are affected by their individual woes, but equally bear a strong sense of community. Television has made the world a village, and Iraq is as close to Kerala as Gujarat.

As Parliament gears up for a vote of confidence on the Congress-driven nuclear deal, evidence of base realities is beginning to seep upwards. The virtual split in the Indian Union Muslim League over the deal tells its own story. On 25 June, just a day before he died in Mumbai, G.M. Banatwala, then the party's national president, issued a press statement saying that the deal was not acceptable and that the party should oppose George Bush's "imperialism". He advised the Congress to "reconsider its decision". This of course was unpalatable to the establishment lobby within the IUML, led by E. Ahamed, who has done well as Minister of State for External Affairs in the UPA. He has the distinction of being the first Muslim League minister in Delhi since 1947. The pro-government section of the party therefore has a vested interest in supporting what the Congress orders it to do, and will ratchet up the usual list of advantages and alibis in defence of its alliance with the Congress. But there was strong resistance when the deal was discussed at a three-hour meeting of the party in Mallapuram on 10 July. The compromise that emerged was a typical fudge: the party would vote for the government, not the deal, and would convey Muslim anxiety to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. "The Muslim community is worried about the deal," said Panakkad Syed Muhammadali Shihab Thangal, president of the Kerala unit.

The Muslim League has rivals for the space it has acquired in the Malayali Muslim's affections. The most notable competitor is the People's Democratic Party, led by Abdul Nazar Madani. Madani publicly castigated the League and added, "The Muslim community across the world has been facing atrocities sponsored by the United States. The deal with an anti-Muslim country should have been opposed by the IUML." The CPI(M), which would like nothing better than to crack open the hold that the League traditionally has over the Muslim vote in Kerala, has accused the IUML of being loyal to American imperialism, adding for good measure that the Congress was in collusion with America, which had killed Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Like all other voters Indian Muslims too are influenced by both regional and national issues: the Muslim League's views in Kerala does not impact on the way Muslims vote in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. But on national and international issues there is a clear majority view across the states. The nuclear deal is both a national and an international issue, and it is only logical that national and international realities will enter the argument.

The only point being consistently hammered by Congress, Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and the IUML in order to change Muslim sentiment is the spectre of BJP in all its manifestations. Let us look at the list.

At the top is the statement that if you oppose the deal it will help communal forces, in that it will enable the BJP to come to power. Does this mean that the Congress and UPA have already conceded defeat in a future election? I thought the Congress believed that the nuclear deal would be an election-winner, sweeping up votes with every clause. In fact, instead of searching for a harrowing and narrow victory in Parliament, the Congress should have had the confidence to go the people and been vindicated by their support. The Congress did not have the courage to do so because it does not believe the deal to be a vote-winner. If the BJP-led NDA wins, it will not be because of the deal, but because of the mismanagement of the nation over four years.

Second: the Congress tried desperately to get BJP support for the deal, and is still propping up former national security adviser Brajesh Mishra in order to try and break BJP unity. Would the deal or the Congress have become communal if the BJP had supported it?

The most lurid accusation is charging the CPI[M] with supporting "communal" forces because it opposes the deal. The Congress has a very convenient memory. The last time that a government was defeated on the floor of the House, the Congress and the BJP voted together — to bring down the V.P. Singh government. Did that make Congress, and Rajiv Gandhi, who was leader of the party then, communal? During the term of the V.P. Singh government the Marxists and the BJP were allies, supporting Singh. They had weekly dinners, from which Harkishan Surjeet and L.K. Advani would emerge, smiling and laughing for the cameras. Did that make Surjeet communal? Why should Prakash Karat become communal because he is against the nuclear deal, for reasons, incidentally, different from the BJP? You have to be very arid, mentally, and believe as well that Indian politicians and voters have nothing called a memory chip in their brains in order to market such logic.

It would take a very inept government to lose a test on the floor of the House that it had sought. Dr Manmohan Singh has brought down his majority from over a hundred to perhaps five or less, but surely he could not have dragged it into negative territory. The real test, however, is not a contest for 272 MPs in this Parliament, but for 272 MPs in the next one. Politicians will decide the fate of the Congress in the coming days. Voters will decide its fate in the coming months.

Have you ever heart a cake crumble? (Covert)

Have you ever heard a cake crumble?
-by M J Akbar
COVERT (1st-15th JULY 2008)

In the second last week of June, after nearly fifty months of office, Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered Congress President Sonia Gandhi one of two options. She could either support the Singh-George Bush nuclear partnership and shoot herself in the Left foot, or she could abandon the Marxists who had carried the government on their uneven shoulders and shoot herself in the Right foot. If the bullet went Left, the partnership would fracture, hobbling the Congress severely in its effort to remain the core of a future non-BJP alliance. If the bullet went Right, the credibility of theManmohan Singh government, already in hospital, would be put permanently to sleep.

The root of the dilemma is a paradox. Dr Manmohan Singh has run a Right-wing government with Left-wing support. The Prime Minister is Right, if not right, by instinct and conviction. The Marxists knew this, but calculated that if this was the price to be paid to keep the BJP out, then so be it. Every price is a trade-off between cost and value. The Left offered Dr Manmohan Singh a credit card, but every credit card has an upper limit, unless you are a fool ready to be parted with all your money. The upper limit was reached with the strategic, technological and economic partnership that the Prime Minister arranged with the United States, a pact that would keep India in the American camp for the foreseeable future.

Dr Manmohan Singh came to power on the strength of the common man, the aam aadmi. He has spent four years courting just one khaas aadmi, George Bush. It was his bad luck, I presume, that the alliance should have been with a man who is now the most unpopular President in the history of the United States since polling began in 1928. But one must laud the power of true love: nothing could deter Dr Manmohan Singh from investing all his assets in one man, Bush.
In actual fact, Mrs Sonia Gandhi had little real choice. Allies like the DMK, desperate for a few extra months in power, largely so that they could make yet more money, urged her to save the government. You can only save what exists, and Dr Manmohan Singh’s government no longer exists. The joy has gone out of this administration, as is evident from every photograph of any Cabinet Minister; they look punctured and limp.

If that statement surprises you, it is because we associate a break with a sharp sound, and there has been no such crackle from Delhi. But only something hard breaks with a snap. Think instead of a cake. Have you ever heard a cake crumble? Disintegration can also be soundless.

The image of a cake is doubly appropriate because this government has lived on the principle of a cake won in a lottery. Everyone has been digging into the national cake with a diligence and greed that will find their place in the annals of our time, while the Prime Minister has watched helplessly, unable and unwilling to control the corruption that is rife.

Dr Manmohan Singh has worn a brilliant camouflage. He has smiled his way through four years. He positioned himself above politics, which won him much empathy among the urban middle class, which has grown tired of the cynicism that imbues contemporary politics. But politics was always lurking below him, in its many different manifestations. Perhaps he began to believe that CPI[M] general secretary Prakash Karat too was purchaseable, and all it needed was successful negotiation to complete the deal. He forgot the upper limit of the Marxist credit card, beyond which an individual or an institution becomes a pauper. The distance between wealth and the poorhouse is often no more than a single mistake.

The final decision on the direction of the bullet was not in Dr Manmohan Singh’s hands, because he has always been in office, rather than in power. But his assessment was correct when he told Mrs Sonia Gandhi on the morning of 18 June that he could not continue as Prime Minister if the nuclear deal was aborted. He is identified with a single cause, central to his Prime Ministership, both domestically and internationally. In India, he cannot go to the electorate with nothing to say except that he had survived by pawning his convictions. In the more immediate term, he surely wondered how he was going to face Parliament during the Monsoon Session. Between a deflated deal and inflated prices, the enlarged Opposition (now including the Left) will expose the government’s impotence each day on national television. A majority in Parliament is more than a technical necessity; it must be a vocal fact, or a government can get drowned. One of the advantages of an early election would be that the Singh government would not have to face a Parliament session during which it could get repeatedly humiliated.

Out of India, the Prime Minister would be a faceless nonentity at the G-8 Summit in Japan between 7 and 9 July, the last opportunity to push through a deal with the personal intervention of the Singh-Bush partnership. The official deadline for the compact is 20 January 2009, the day Bush demits office and hands over power, hopefully, to Barack Obama. The practical deadline is 9 July 2008. To have any hope of success, Dr Manmohan Singh must reach Japan with a formal decision in his files. Anything else would fetch him a few wan smiles, and an occasional hullo while the rest continue with discussions of substance between themselves.

I am an avid reader of bridge columns, largely because the mathematics of games of chance can be engrossing. But there is a second reason to check out some of the popular American bridge columns. They tend to begin with a wisecrack, which may or may not be wise, but is certainly a crack. On the day after the non-meeting between the government and the Left, Frank Stewart of the New York Times had a good opening bon mot: “If you let a smile be your umbrella, your rear end will get soaking wet.”

For four years Dr Manmohan Singh has let his smile be his umbrella, and the monsoons have arrived.

War and Consequences

Byline by M.J. Akbar :War and Consequences

In a delicious irony, American policy towards Iran has shifted 180 degrees. In the last few days America has announced that it will open a diplomatic presence in Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad's Tehran. This has to be seen in the context of both the original break with Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and the dramatic seizure of the American embassy three decades ago, and Bush denunciation of Iran as the villain in chief of the Axis of Evil.

George Bush went to war in Iraq in order to create a new Middle East. Six years later, much to the shock of his allies and the horror of perceptive Americans, he has. The shock and horror arise from the fact that the Middle East has been changed by the Bush intervention in a direction sharply divergent from America’s fundamental interests as perceived by the Bush doctrine.

The Middle East was a term coined in 1903 by an American naval historian and strategic thinker, at the very height of British power across the world, when the Boers had been defeated in South Africa, the Ottomans had been virtually displaced from their most important colony Egypt, the Arabian Sea confirmed as a British lake and India itself was preparing to celebrate the glory of the Raj with a glittering durbar summoned by the Viceroy of Viceroys, Lord Curzon. India was a bulwark of this concept called the Middle East, a fortress of trade and imperial might that had neo-colonised China, and supplied the bulk of the troops for British expansion. The rupee was king from Singapore to Jeddah.

When George Bush’s team visualised their new map of the world they included India in what they termed the ‘Greater Middle East’. India was not an intrinsic part of the new power flows, but it was integrated once again as the fortress of the East. Since India was run by Indians rather than British allies, Indians had to be co-opted into the engineering of the new design. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the man for the job.

Six years later Project Greater Middle East is tottering all across this strategic map. In Delhi the Singh government has been unable to bear the burden of an alliance with Bush. The Congress encouraged the illusion, with the help of a cabal of analysts, publicists and lobbyists, that the Left was a lapdog rather than a watchdog, and could be either appeased by a bone or silenced with a stick. When the moment came to choose, the Congress stood with Bush instead of Prakash Karat. The official excuse for this decision is energy. But this is deception. Dr Manmohan Singh deliberately sabotaged a much cheaper and more immediate source of energy for the country when he deliberately undermined the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, raising one false spectre after another to mislead the country, so that it would seem that there was no option but to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal. We have forgotten now that the first objection he raised, three years ago, was that financing would be a problem. This is not raised anymore since it is obvious that finance would be easily available at a time of rising energy prices. Countries like Russia are ready to invest in overseas projects of this nature even with equity participation as the present Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (chairman of Gazprom from 2000 to 2008) has confirmed. A second scare was puffed up: the unrest in Balochistan. This did not travel when Iran and Pakistan laughed it off. The real problem was always the fact that American legislators had made India’s relations with Iran a condition of their support for the deal. The best oil minister we have had in memory, Mani Shankar Aiyar, was suddenly removed from his job because he was more sceptical of America than the Prime Minister’s latitude permitted.

In a delicious irony, American policy towards Iran has shifted 180 degrees. In the last few days America has announced that it will open a diplomatic presence in Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad's Tehran. This has to be seen in the context of both the original break with Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and the dramatic seizure of the American embassy three decades ago, and Bush denunciation of Iran as the villain in chief of the Axis of Evil. This should be sufficient to resurrect the ghost of Senator Henry Hyde, who ensured that there were 18 references to Iran in the Act that gave legislative approval for the Indo-US nuclear deal. Add to this the fact that Bush has repeatedly threatened war to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and we begin to get an idea of the degree of capitulation — or return to realism — in American policy.

America is learning to live with the consequences of Bush's war. The single biggest beneficiary of the Iraq misadventure has been Iran. Before 9/11 Iran was chained by international diplomatic sanctions and hostile neighbours: a virulently anti-Islamic Revolution Saddam Hussein and a virulently anti-Shia Taliban. America cleared the Taliban out of Kabul and Saddam out of Baghdad for its own reasons, but no one thanked America more than the Ayatollahs in Tehran, although they may not have advertised their applause. Even as America got swamped by two wars that refused to end, Tehran used the new opportunity to strengthen its allies till they rose from the margins to the frontlines: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

At the heart of the Arab conflict with Israel, Iran's allies are in control: Hezbollah dominates Lebanon while Hamas continues to increase its influence in Palestine. In another dramatic turnaround, Israel has been forced into substantive peace talks with Syria, and has agreed to place the Golan Heights, advertised since 1967 as sacrosanct to its safety, on the negotiating table.

These shifts pale before the impact that American intervention has had on Iraq. For better or worse is not the real issue; there are new facts and we have to deal with them. Under Saddam, Iraq was a secular, anti-Ayatollah dictatorship. Under America, Iraq has become a Shia dominated democracy with a religious ethos and excellent relations with Iran, another fact that the Bush administration finds it convenient to ignore. The Baghdad government is also beginning to assert itself against America. Washington wants a security pact with Baghdad which is a carbon copy of the pact that the British imposed on Iraq in 1930 as a condition of granting “independence”. The one significant difference is that while Britain was content with two permanent military bases in Iraq, America wants 58. It was in this blithe spirit that Bush dismissed a question about when all American troops would leave the country. America still had troops in Korea, Japan and Germany, so why not forever in Iraq? Permanent is a very American term in Bush’s lexicon. Even the pro-American administration in Baghdad is beginning to baulk at this language of hegemony. Nor will the Arab world remain a mute spectator.

The change that Bush wanted in the Middle East has merely begun but the arc will not move in the direction of Bush’s dreams.

The one success that Bush can flaunt is in North Korea, the only region where Bush opted for diplomacy — hard and meaningful — instead of the rush of war. Given the enormity of damage he has done elsewhere, this is minor relief. There is a Hindi proverb that might sum up the Bush achievement: khoda pahaar, nikli chuhiya (he dug a mountain, and there emerged a rat).

Are economic reforms the solution to communal riots?

Croissants & Crescents:
Are economic reforms the solution to communal riots?
By M J Akbar (22 June, 2008)

Are economic reforms the solution to the Great Indian Curse, Hindu-Muslim riots? Economic reforms began in 1991. Between 1991 and 2008 there have been only two major outbursts of Hindu-Muslim conflagration, both connected to old wounds, in 1992-93 after the Babri episode and then six years ago in Gujarat. Those who take this comparative peace for granted might want to recall that riots had become endemic in cities like Ahmedabad and Hyderabad by the Eighties, and there was carnage in Bhagalpur, Bihar in 1989.

Are these disparate facts by any chance related?

Reforms have altered the culture of business, easing, unintentionally, a few genuine reasons for Muslim anger, like discrimination in private sector jobs. With products protected from competition and capital available through cozy deals, the closed economy businessman could afford the luxury of bias in hiring. The reforms economy is both more ruthless and more ruthful. Profit is its central compulsion. The stock market has no religion and only one faith: higher share values. Companies must hire on the basis of merit and maximum worth for every salary given.
Moreover, urban violence is anathema to commerce. In a city like Mumbai you can either have riots or a rising market. A bear might waddle into this market for any number of reasons, but a bull will never show its face if the city is in acrid flames.

Competition among small businesses used to be another reason for violence in medium-sized towns like Varanasi and Moradabad. The post-reform environment has suddenly expanded space for opportunity. You no longer need to wrestle for crumbs in a tight circle. The market has exploded. If you can create the product it will find its niche. Muslim businessmen in Calcutta can sell leather products on mobile phone to customers in Europe.

Have we reached then what might be called an Obama moment for Indian Muslims? I refer only tangentially to his startling ascent in democratic politics, and more particularly to his revolutionary speech to fellow African-Americans (as son of a goat-herder in Kenya he is more immediately African than the descendants of slaves). Obama told Black America that it was time to get out of the irresponsible sloth that was destroying families and turning the community into parasites — he did not use this phrase, but that is what he meant.

Indian Muslims cannot be accused of sloth. They have, indeed, to work harder to remain in the same place. Their big problem is a culture of self-pity fused with the politics of patronage, in which a demand for handouts becomes the principal motivator of their sentiment. This culture has been nurtured by successive governments who have given Indian Muslims the illusion of benefit, through a dribble of grants and denied Muslims a flourishing role in the economy. When the dole is inadequate, as it always is, self-pity sets in.

With the economy slowly seeping out of the control of governments and private sector bias unprofitable, a remarkable opportunity has opened up for Muslims as much as it has for other disadvantaged groups.

But this opportunity will not drop into their lap like manna from heaven. They have to make themselves equal to the opportunity. A revolution may be sweeping through the world around them, but in order to join it they must know how to open the doors of their mind.
The greatest enemies of Muslims are poverty, lack of education and gender bias. Common sense suggests that the three are linked. Muslims now fully understand the vital role of education, and thirst for English and its attendant benefits. But conservative elements retain their tight clamp on gender bias.

One reason why India has begun to lift out of economic stagnation is because of the social reforms that Jawaharlal Nehru initiated through the Hindu Code Bill. If Muslim families deny the girl child her rightful place in a modern world, they will only abort the community's productivity and potential by half.

Unless Muslims eliminate gender bias, they will not reap the extraordinary benefits of the twentieth century, never mind the 21st.

Appeared in Times of India, June 22, 2008

The Fine Art of Doing Nothing (Covert)

Covert: The Fine Art of Doing Nothing
By M J Akbar

COVERT (15TH-30th JUNE 2008)

Sensible politicians are wary of big words: they never know when one will rebound and bite them, with painful consequences. The philosophy of power is one word too many in a phrase about politics. Politicians keep their nose to the ground, philosophy out of their thoughts, and their conscience in a safe deposit vault, so that, while it remains out of sight, it can always be taken out, brushed up and put on display when expedient.

And yet, everyone who exercises power does so on the basis of some logic, even if we cannot in justice extend its meaning to the expanse of a philosophy. You have to be not merely very brave, but also intellectually robust to be a disciple of Kautilya, or even of Machiavelli. Their treatises on governance are more comprehensive and demanding than their one-liner reputations might lead you to believe. The only Indian Prime Minister who saw himself as a potential Kautilya, as early as in the 1930s, and had the intellectual bravado to pull it off in the 1950s, was Jawaharlal Nehru. Mrs Indira Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee had read enough to appreciate the nuances of a Kautilya, but they chose to stress different elements of the Arthashastra prescription, creating vastly different medicines for the national health.

No Government of India has been as minimalist as the UPA regime. For over four years now it has survived on a simple basis: Do nothing, and nothing unfortunate will happen.

There are some good reasons for this.

The central motivation of the UPA coalition has been fear of failure. It wanted to survive in office above all else. It knew that the alliance was brittle, and so compromised on two basic elements of power. No action was ever taken on the corruption or misrule of ministers, for fear that it would break the alliance. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could not possibly have had two standards on corruption, a wink for allies like the DMK, and a taskmaster’s discipline for Congress ministers. So when DMK ministers began raking in the loot like there was no tomorrow (and maybe for some of them there isn’t) Congress ministers welcomed the signal. They got a free ride on a highway without tolls, and, being seasoned Congressmen, devised artful and even brilliant forms of bribery. I believe the fashionable thing to do now is to ignore silly old cash, and settle for benaami equity in private sector companies. Ministers with less imagination used power to get benefits for companies owned by relatives. Ritu Sarin of the Indian Express has done some superb investigation of how rules were bent and laws broken to favour a distillery owned by Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s son Shailesh. You only associated the Home Minister with starched clothes, white shoes, pomade and cluelessness, did you? Well, he had a distillery up his armpit.

What will happen?

Nothing.

Any action might cost Dr Singh his job and his boss, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, her reputation.

The Hindustan Times story on uranium might not have the drama of the Express investigation but it is, in a sense, even more damaging. It undermines the very basis of Dr Singh’s arguments in defence of the Indo-US nuclear deal, that India needs foreign uranium for its civil nuclear programme. As Neelesh Misra reports, “India has been sitting on massive, untapped reserves of uranium, hundreds of tonnes of which have been discovered over the past couple of years – adding to the over 1 lakh tonnes already identified in Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.” That is enough for our requirements for at least 40 years. Why did the Prime Minister keep this a closely guarded secret for four years?

What will happen? Why, nothing of course. To do anything would mean that the Prime Minister would have to appear on national television and cough discreetly before declaring himself guilty of misleading the country.

Dr Singh learnt what little he knows of politics from P.V. Narasimha Rao, a Prime Minister who perfected the art of doing nothing, and flaunted indecision as a decision. The epitome of this model was reached on 6 December 1992 when, in an unparalleled display of comatose indifference Rao did nothing while the Babri mosque was being destroyed through the day. Singh was Finance Minister then, and arguably the most important minister after Rao. What did Dr Singh do? So much of nothing that you could write a book on silence out of it. But here is the surprise. The government got away with it. Rao manipulated the still dominant government audiovisual media from the evening of 6 December, sold a lie, and the Congress won a handsome victory in the Assembly elections held a year later.

Moral of the story? If you do nothing successfully enough, you can always drift back to power. The danger of doing nothing is that it can become a habit. Witness how government has tackled rising prices. Measures against inflation should have been put in place in December last year. The government did nothing. By March this horse, inflation, had bolted. However hard the government slams the door now, the damage is done.

Narasimha Rao could legitimately claim some redemption in his record. He did do something in one area, the economy. He might not have done what he did were it not for the financial emergency he inherited; and he certainly could have done more, as Dr Singh would attest. But economic reforms will stand against his name. The record of the last four years, in contrast, is marked by only one significant departure from the norm: the Indo-US nuclear deal. That deal seems to have been sacrificed to survival. The Dr Singh years add up to a fragile zero. Perhaps the Prime Minister is beginning to understand this. Those who saw him on television asking ministers to stop going abroad in order to save Indians from the whiplash of rising prices were not overly impressed.

His mien was never very colourful, although he could be brisk. If he began as a grey man, he has deepened towards an ashy pallor. The price of power was visible in his eyes. You might imagine that if you do nothing, nothing will happen to you. Your eyes betray you.

How Pakistan insulates India from terror

Croissants & Crescents:
How Pakistan insulates India from terror
- M J Akbar June 15, 2008

A few days ago, the government of Pakistan abandoned a ceasefire pact with insurgents operating across the tribal Pakistan-Afghanistan border, reached by Pervez Musharraf but reasserted by his successors in power. On June 11, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, said in Washington that any future terrorist attack on his country would probably originate in this region, known by its acronym, FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). This had become the most secure base of al-Qaida, he added, after the fall of the Taliban in Kabul.

Why has al-Qaida become a cancerous bone in Pakistan's throat, with the country neither able to digest it or spit it out? There is general agreement across different elements of the Pakistan establishment that swallowing this bone will infect the body politic beyond cure. But instead of surgery, there is a paralytic helplessness as al-Qaida and Taliban beliefs and prescriptions seep into street, village and towards the foot soldiers that form the core of any armed force.

Both the army and newly elected democrats fumble when faced with a basic, if provocative, query: Why is Islamabad fighting America's war against fellow Muslims? The overlap between Pakistan's 'national' interest and the interests of the 'Muslim ummah' has been further blurred in the northwest frontier by a shared ethnicity that has never recognized the Durand Line as a barrier between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Islamabad's dilemma revives a question that raged on the sidelines of the Partition debate between 1940 and 1947: Could united India ever have a secure border on its northwest frontier? The Khyber Pass was the traditional "gate" to Delhi. Would the Muslims of the region, and their brethren in the united Indian Army, secure the gate or open it for any Muslim invaders? The British, it is commonly known, regretted the division of the British Indian Army much more than they regretted the partition of British India. Others were not so sure. Among them was Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, the great Dalit hero who considered himself neither Hindu nor Muslim and was thus above the growing bitterness between the two.

The Secretary of State for India revealed, a trifle reluctantly, the ethnic composition of the British Indian Army in the House of Commons on July 8, 1943: Muslims were 34%, Hindus 50%, Sikhs 10% and the rest 6%. But these were wartime statistics, when emergency recruitment had altered the traditional balance, or imbalance. It was believed that the Muslim proportion of the peacetime British Indian Army, driven by the "martial races" theory and the belief that Frontier Muslims were superior soldiers, might be as high as 50%. There was no question that the army of a united India would retain a high percentage of Muslims, largely recruited from the frontier; political pressure from Muslims would ensure as much.

Would Muslim soldiers be immune to the lure of pan-Islamism? The Muslim League had resolved that the Indian Army should not be used against Muslim powers, conflating Indian and pan-Islamic interests. It was also recalled that during the Khilafat movement (1919-1922), Muslims displayed potentially explosive angularities. Maulana Mohammad Ali had invited the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India and conquer Delhi with the help of an Indian uprising.

Dr Ambedkar argued that India was better off divided, because it could not remain a secure state with such confused loyalties at its porous crown. A new 'Hindustan' army, created out of the resources of divided India, would be untroubled by dual loyalties. Given that Pakistan has few answers to the incessant diet of bombs and suicide missions, we need only to pause and consider the havoc that a strong Qaida-Taliban movement would have caused across the cities of the Indian subcontinent if it had not been substantially, though not completely, insulated by the Indo-Pak border. Imagine the nightmare of an undivided India.

Indian Muslims, who consciously opted for their motherland, paid a heavy price: they were not to be fully trusted with the defence of India. No one doubted their patriotism in the 1962 conflict with China, but during the 1965 Indo-Pak war, they were picked up arbitrarily and detained without trial by the Congress government of Lal Bahadur Shastri. The heroism of Havildar Abdul Hamid was treated as an exception. This prejudice was a major reason for minimal Muslim presence in the Indian Army and police services.

The Indian Muslim mind shifted from a pseudo-glorification of the idea of Pakistan in the 1940s to fear, resentment and uncertainty over the next two decades. Bangladesh was the turning point; it was clinching evidence that Pakistan was not a paradise for Muslims, but the preserve of a regional culture and mentality that was not ready to treat every Muslim as an equal. Indian Muslims abandoned, completely, any residual temptation for Pakistan. This is not just my effort to be politically correct. There is evidence: the complete lack of interest that Indian Muslims have displayed towards the Kashmiri insurrection has puzzled and frustrated the self-styled "pan-Islamic jihadi" organizations who expected Indian Muslim support in the effort to terrorize the Indian state and people.

When Indian Muslims get angry, they do so for their own reasons, not for Pakistan's. Muslims born in free India are not ready to be victimized for the mistakes of their fathers. This is an assertion of equality, part of the confidence gifted to them by the unique democratic values of the Indian Constitution.

The violent Sikh upsurge of the 1980s reminded India that there was more than one potentially hazardous minority, and that the politics of indifference could not be sustained.

The most heartening image of contemporary India, to me, are the slightly funny pictures of young Muslims puffing their chests to meet physical criterion during periodic recruitment drives for the Indian Army or paramilitary forces.

I wish Indian politicians would appreciate that the politics of patronage is no substitute for the politics of indifference. Patronage is essentially demeaning, and serves only small Muslim cliques who enrich themselves at the cost of the community. The Indian Muslim wants to be treated as an equal. He is waiting for the establishment to appreciate the true nuances of the term.

Appeared in Times of India, June 15, 2008

Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims

CROISSANTS & CRESCENTS:
Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims
- M J Akbar 08 June, 2008

A potent threat to Indian secularism comes not from its perceived enemies but from a section of the vanguard, the secular fundamentalists: those ideologues who forget that an Indian's identity — as distinct from India's identity — is shaped substantially by his faith.

The Congress that gave us freedom and reshaped India never made this mistake. The three venerable icons of secularism are a Mahatma, a Pandit and a Maulana. Their faith was gentle, culturally harmonious and hence quintessentially Indian. They protected the power of religion from the dangers of religiosity.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was anointed Mahatma during the Khilafat-non-cooperation movement of 1919- 1922, an inspiring instance of Hindu-Muslim unity in the common cause of nationalism. Gandhi aborted this awesome upsurge suddenly, after Chauri Chaura, to the bitter disappointment of particularly the Muslims, who had staked their all on his leadership. A chastised Gandhi often said that the term 'Mahatma' stank in his nostrils, but he never abandoned it. He did not need the title. But he knew that Indians needed a Mahatma as father figure of a nation awaiting rebirth. He understood that Hindus wanted this promise to be a Ram Rajya.

Abul Kalam Azad was a genuine Maulana, whose tafseer (analysis and translation) of the Holy Quran commands respect, and whose oratory soared above the high levels of his contemporaries. Among Azad's early enthusiasms, quickly abandoned, was an organisation called Hizbollah, or Party of Allah: you might be familiar with the name from the present politics of the Middle East.

But when did Jawaharlal Nehru become a Pandit? Nehru's liberal-democratic worldview was shaped by an European education and Indo-European sensibility. His personal lifestyle preferences were hardlly 'native'. Details of his breakfast need not detain us; suffice to note that they would not appear on the table of an orthodox Brahmin club. 'Pandit' was a political gesture, shaped by Gandhi, towards a conscious identification with an Indian reality. Indira Gandhi took care to visit the temple of Lord Krishna on his birthday. Their political heirs have lost this subliminal connect with the Indian psyche.

Indian Marxists, still convinced that class is the predominant determinant, are still reeling from the uppercut they received from Bengali Muslims in the recently held panchayat elections. Their grief is mixed with resentment: they gave Muslims protection from riots, and is this the reward? Peace was their sole exchange rate for the Muslim vote. It was a patronising view of secularism.
The CPM has not changed in three decades of power in Bengal, but the Bengali Muslim has. The young Bengali Muslim does not want to be a protected species. He believes he is an equal under the Indian Constitution. Safety of life is his right, not a favour. He wants jobs, education and healthcare, like the Bengali Hindu. And he wants the protection of his faith-identity. Biman Bose, the state party chief, attributed his party's sudden implosion to the corruption of its cadre. If that was the principal reason, the CPM ebb tide would have begun three elections ago. The tectonic shift has been led by the change in the Muslim vote.

Here is a paradoxical thought. The most successful Muslim leader of the 20th century, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a secular-fundamentalist in his personal life, and a man with a single-point mission in his politics: security for Muslims. Jinnah had open contempt for Gandhi ("That Hindu revivalist!"). Jinnah was privately contemptuous of the Muslim mullahs. He understood only the law, and convinced himself that equality for Muslims could never be achieved in any Constitution acceptable to an united India.

Six decades later, Bengali Muslims are upending that logic. Their politics is born out of the self-confidence of equality. They have the right, as much as a Bengali Hindu, to tell the state that law and order is a duty and not a gift. They insist on stretching security to faith, food, incomes and jobs. The fog of uncertainty in which the fear psychosis of the 1940s flourished has given way to the clarity of a citizen's rights, and the anger of citizens denied their due. Jinnah, incidentally, was perceptive to say, at one point, that the passions of Indian Muslims were like soda water. He maximised its power before the water went flat.

But the new power of Muslims is stable; it is the power of an equal. Jinnah, it is not widely known, enjoyed going to the races in Bombay. In 1946, just a year before Pakistan was born, he gave a tip to a friend, telling him to bet on a horse called Hindustan, which was giving odds of nearly seven to one. The friend protested: how could Jinnah recommend anything called 'Hindustan'? "Never mind," said Jinnah, "it is only a horse."

Two generations later, Hindustan is showing the pedigree of a champion, galloping ahead despite the scepticism of punters who gave it no better odds than seven to one. Indian Muslims want to gallop to victory on that horse, for it belongs to them as much as it does to any other Indian community.

(Appeared in Times of India, Mumbai)

The myth of forced Islamic conversions

CROISSANTS & CRESCENTS:
The myth of forced Islamic conversions
- M J Akbar 25 May 2008

An insidious debate has been initiated in the United States as conservatives watch, with obvious horror, the ascent of Barack Obama. Their campaign to label him a closet Muslim failed. Could he, however, be rebranded as the world's most powerful, and hence vulnerable, apostate — a few notches ahead of Salman Rushdie? Edward Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote recently: "In Islam...there is no such thing as a half-Muslim...As the son of a Muslim father, Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion...(Obama) chose to become a Christian...His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is 'irtidad' or 'ridda' (apostasy)...the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric."

The point is sharp; it can only be blunted by an answer.

Three weeks ago, in early May, the Shariah High Court of the northern Malaysian state of Penang ruled that Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah, a 39-year-old Chinese cake-seller, could return to her original faith, Buddhism. She had converted in order to marry an Iranian, but argued that she had never become a true believer. The Shariah court accepted her plea and blamed her husband and the religious authorities for failing to educate Siti. "I am very happy," said Siti, "I want to go to the temple to pray and give thanks."

The only surprise is that anyone should be surprised. Contrary to the fire-and-sword image that has been constructed, forcible conversion is prohibited in Islam. Even conversion based on an inadequate understanding of the faith is unacceptable, as in the case of Siti. You cannot be a believer if you do not believe, and belief cannot be forced down your throat.

Verse 256 of the second Surah is unambiguous: La iqraha fi al-deen (Let there be no compulsion in religion). Abdullah Yusuf Ali, whose translation of the Quran is recognized across the world, explains, "Compulsion is incompatible with religion because religion is based upon faith and will, and these would be meaningless if induced by force..." A second verse of the Quran reinforces the message: La qum din a qum wal ya-din (Your religion for you and my religion for me).

It is axiomatic that no new faith can grow without conversion; only Sikhism is younger than Islam. Equally, every faith discourages the faithful from abandoning their beliefs: this is why there is a persistent demand by some Hindu leaders for a ban on conversions in our country. Verse 106 of Surah 16 promises the "Wrath of Allah" and a "dreadful penalty" upon "anyone who, after accepting faith in Allah, utters unbelief". But it is vital to note that there is no earthly punishment for apostasy in the Quran. Judgment is left to Allah, the ultimate arbiter. Another verse (2:217) sends apostates to hell, but, as the Encyclopedia of Islam confirms, "In the Quran, the apostate is threatened with punishment in the next world." In a specific case, the Prophet consoled and welcomed back a Muslim called Ammar, who had, under severe torture, uttered a word that could be construed as recantation.

There is no Quranic case, therefore, for inflicting any harm upon Obama. His father lived among Muslims even after he had renounced his faith. As a product of Yale in Kenya, his father was hardly an unknown figure. But there is no record of any fatwa ordering the beheading of Obama's father at the hands of a cleric.

So where is the problem? The problem lies among some — not all — jurists who used one narrative (known as traditions) from accounts of the Prophet's life in which it is said whoever changes his religion shall be put to death. As Rafiq Zakaria points out (Muhammad and the Quran, Penguin, 1991) this "contradicts the tenor of a mass of other traditions and, therefore, cannot be relied. It also contradicts the verses in the Quran that speak of freedom of worship".
The faith often has to be rescued from the excesses of the faithful.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims will react to a President Obama on the basis of how he manages to take his nation out of the war that George Bush launched across wide swathes of the Muslim world, founded on false assumptions and fuelled by false rhetoric. If Barack Obama finds more comfort in Christianity than Islam, he is more than welcome to his convictions: Your religion for you, President, and my religion for me.

Appeared in Times of India, 25th May 2008

There's something about Indian secularism

There's something about Indian secularism
-M J AKBAR 18 May 2008

The Muslim bid for the conquest of Western Europe ended in the stifling summer of 1683, when Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa, son-in-law and commander of the forces of Sultan Mehmed IV, retreated from the gates of Vienna on September 12 after a two-month siege. He had been invested with the highest honours of the Ottoman Empire, the Imperial Seal and the Key to Kaaba; his standard was no less than the Sancaci Sheriff, the Holy Banner. On the last Saturday in December, Christmas Day, he paid the price of defeat: two executioners sent by his father-in-law waited for him to complete his mid-day prayers, then throttled him. The Turk, "the terror of the world" in Shakespeare's line, master of eastern Europe, and Islam, had been stopped before they could race through disunited Germany and France.

The war over the croissant is still without a victor. On page 365, the Compact Oxford English Dictionary refers you to "crescent" when you peer through a magnifying glass at "croissant". In slightly quaint English, "crescent" is thus described: "Adopted as a badge or emblem by the Turkish Sultan, and used within their dominions as a military and religious symbol...as this has been to Christendom in recent times the most formidable and aggressive Mohammedan power and rhetorically to symbolize the Mohammedan religion as a political force, and so opposed to the Cross as a 'symbol of Christianity'." Europe described a Turkish Jihad as a Crescentade; the British used this term to describe the Barelvi upsurge in India that lasted for half of the 19th century.

How did an image of Islam become a breakfast favourite of Catholic France? Popular legend has it that a Viennese baker, working at night, heard a subterranean rumble, alerted the authorities and thus uncovered Turks tunnelling their way below the city walls. He asked for no greater reward than the exclusive right to bake pastries named after the crescent. Voila, the croissant!

Turks have a less romantic view. They believe that the Viennese learnt the art of making the croissant, and drinking coffee, from them during that long siege.

Does it matter what the truth is? The croissant is perhaps the most pleasant byproduct of war in history; others are less savoury. The Western image of the Muslim in modern times was created largely by fear of the Turk, the terror of Shakespeare's age. Muslim armies twice threatened the heart of Europe, once when the Arabs crushed Visigoth opposition in Spain in 711 and soon reached within a hundred miles of Paris, leading Gibbon to famously wonder whether the azaan would have been heard from the minarets of Oxford.

The second time was when the Turks swept up to Serbia and Belgrade, swallowed Constantinople and reached the doors of Vienna via Budapest. The extraordinary success of Muslim arms created a reputation of invincibility, breeding fear. Fear is the father of prejudice; prejudice the mother of distortion. The Sultan's harem, for instance, was extended into the image of the "lustful Turk", staple of Victorian erotica, rather than treated as a privilege of the ruling class, familiar in other societies as well. Every Turk, and by extension every Muslim, became a fornicator and potential rapist. The scimitar became a symbol of inequity and forced conversion despite evidence to the contrary: Muslims ruled in Spain for nearly eight centuries, but never was the Muslim population more than 25%. A sword is surely more effective.

When the great age of colonization made European powers masters of the world, they took their prejudice against Muslims along, infected local attitudes and shaped divisive policies. Muslim armies came to India in the same year as the Arabs entered Spain; Muslim settlements were already present along the Indian coast. Hindus and Muslims have lived together for thirteen centuries. But there is no Dante in literature written by Hindus; that is, there is not a single instance of any Hindu writer having vilified the Prophet of Islam. Similarly, there is, to my knowledge, not a single Muslim writer who was abusive towards Lord Ram or Hanuman. Indian secularism is quintessentially different from that of the West. It is not the separation of state and religion, but space for the other: coexistence on the basis of mutual respect. I do not have to believe in Hanuman to respect my Hindu brother's right to believe in the Ramayana; the Hindu does not need to believe in Allah to respect my belief in the miracle of the Holy Koran.

The world is beginning to appreciate India's brains. It should take another look at India's heart.

Appeared in Times of India, 18th May 2008

Calculator vs Calendar

Calculator vs Calendar
M.J. Akbar

Mrs Sonia Gandhi would not be out in this heat, which also means that it is more difficult to obtain a crowd, without an agenda and almost certainly a calendar. Do they indicate a general election in November? India is a large country, and the sooner you begin the better. You could argue that she is on the road, using her credibility to explain her government's policies.

Has Mrs Sonia Gandhi begun the Congress campaign for the next general election? June has already witnessed a trip to Mizoram after a decade and a half; later in the month, she will be in Aurangabad on a schedule that has taken the Maharashtra Congress a bit by surprise. The Northeast and Maharashtra are regions where support for her party has softened, but, according to her strategists, not beyond recovery. If the Congress cannot retain these seats, it is going to be in boiling hot water.

The theme of her speech is also a marker for the party's election campaign. It will flog the Indo-US nuclear deal as the panacea for all ills, hoping to solve two problems with one promise. The logic runs thus: the deal will make us independent of that evil thing called oil, which has created this vile inflation. Not our fault, brothers and sisters: it's either OPEC or the Marxists, take your pick. By placing it on the election agenda, Mrs Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will also hope to blunt post-election objections by the Left, arguing that the deal has been purified by electoral holy water. It is not an argument that will change the Left, but the Congress believes that the Left will be a much-chastened force, depleted by as many as 20 MPs from its current strength, while the Congress will return with its numbers more or less intact. If its current crop of allies withers away, it will use the leeway of time offered by a generous President of India to woo replacements from the Third Front or even the NDA ensemble. To be more specific, Mulayam Singh Yadav and his MPs will be invited to join the government the next time, instead of doing duty for five years near the door, waiting for crumbs to descend from the Prime Minister's high table. If Lalu Yadav collapses, intermediaries will rush to Nitish Kumar and attempt to wean him away from the BJP; and Naveen Patnaik of Orissa will always be welcome in the name of secularism. In any case, the Congress will not be vulnerable to Marxist "blackmail".

The only thorn amidst the roses of such a scenario is that it might be one year too late. Such an election outcome would have been far more likely if the Congress had gone to the polls last August, when the Left took a final decision to stop the Indo-US nuclear deal. The immediate Congress response was aggressive. The Prime Minister dared the Left to do its worst, and Mrs Gandhi went on the offensive during a speech in Haryana.

But it was a very different world in August 2006. The BJP was still in utter disarray. The Gujarat elections had not taken place, so the Congress had not been routed there: the BJP's self-confidence only began to return with that result. The nuclear debate still evoked a frisson of excitement from the urban Indian middle-class, which has convinced itself that America adds a Midas' touch to their present and future [the Greenback Dollar may be undergoing palpitations currently, but no Midas was ever more attractive than the Almighty Green Card]. That frisson has flattened. The middle class, whose interest had peaked with the media campaign of last year, has a question now: if the deal was genuinely crucial to the national interest, why didn't the Congress defy the Marxists and go ahead? Was survival in power for a few months more important for the Congress than the national interest?

For more than one reason, an election last autumn would have seen a return of the Congress-led coalition to Delhi. But that moment was lost, apparently because Congress' allies were not ready to forsake the comforts of office for 18 months in pursuit of that roulette game called elections. Lalu Yadav and Sharad Pawar went public with their objections; and the DMK murmured its unhappiness in the typical half-bitten vowels that are its political trademark.

Nine months later, the environment is besieged by concerns that are far more potentially fatal to a ruling coalition. Inflation and economic mismanagement have eroded its support. No one yet knows who will win the next general elections, but there is growing belief about who will lose it. Last August, a Sheila Dikshit would have ensured a Congress victory in most of the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi. This year the Delhi voter, still enamoured of Mrs Dikshit, is wondering if there is any way by which it can retain her but demolish the Congress. [There isn't. You either get both or neither. ]

When the body weakens it attracts the most curious ailments. If Mrs Sonia Gandhi goes to Vidarbha in Maharashtra, another traditional Congress seat-catchment area, and picks up a few sounds from the ground, she will hear a question from the fertiliser-and-hope-starved farmer. He watches television. He knows about the 20-20 cricket tournament organised by Sharad Pawar. He now knows that the state government, doubtless under pressure from the patron, waived away the entertainment tax on stadium tickets, losing more than a hundred crores with just this one decision. The farmer is asking why this money could not have been collected and used to alleviate the difficult conditions he faces.

Mrs Sonia Gandhi would not be out in this heat, which also means that it is more difficult to obtain a crowd, without an agenda and almost certainly a calendar. Do they indicate a general election in November? India is a large country, and the sooner you begin the better. You could argue that she is on the road, using her credibility to explain her government's policies. But why waste credibility on a practice match, rather than the real tournament? The most reasonable assessment, in the absence of any confirmation, is that Mrs Gandhi's tours are a precaution against the sudden necessity of going to polls before winter, along with elections to five states that have to be held by then.

The cynical school of Congress thought, always a large and ever-increasing academy, believes that a November election would serve no purpose other than slicing three months of power, with its attendant lucrative benefits. But each month of delay will mean a few seats less for the Congress, not more. The Congress party is staring obsessively at a calendar just now. Someone should also bring out a calculator.

The Secret Diaries of Manmohan, Advani

The Secret Diaries of Manmohan, Advani

- By M.J. Akbar

COVERT (1-15TH JUNE 2008)

How could my fellow-traveller Buddhadeb Bhattacharya call me the worst Prime Minister India has had? That stung. I rather like Buddha. I know his type, a sheep dressed in wolf’s clothing. I’ve done my bit of lip-service to socialism. What option did one have if you wanted some trajectory up the old Congress bureaucracy greasy pole? Indira Gandhi would spread nonalignment at breakfast and turn pink with the salad over lunch: poor dear, no one told her that nationalization and nationalism are not quite the same thing.

Rajiv was different. His instinct told him that this socialist claptrap might be good for the ballot box but would not do for the economy, dear boy. But Bofors blew him away before he could merge his brains to his instinct. However, all this jargon did help when Chandra Shekhar – I wish he had stopped wiping tears out of the eyes of the poor in every speech – became Prime Minister. He kept me in play with probably the last decision of his brief and unlamented term, when he put me at the head of University Grants Commission. That may not sound a big deal when you are Prime Minister, but it is one huge blessing when you are a retired babu in Delhi.

Like a good bureaucrat, I have always believed in what the boss believes in. What a miracle, then, was 1991, the Year of the Great Counter Reformation: I finally got a boss who was persuaded to believe in what I believe in. Narasimha Rao had an intellect but no beliefs. That was helpful. When the call came he somersaulted right into the economic reform box.

I thought Buddha was one of us: spouting socialism as long as the feed came from there, and switching instantly to my old bank’s free-market-leave-the-poor-with-a-trickle thesis the moment we were sworn in. Ah, the pleasures of that great ebb and flow of intellectual dialogue in the World Bank canteen! I didn’t expect Buddha to have as much faith in America as I did, but then he wasn’t lucky enough to land a job at the World Bank. Studied Bengali at Presidency College, I gather. Pity he couldn’t get into Economics. We would have pulled him up to Delhi School of Economics, saved him from the Commies and made him leader of the Congress in Bengal by now. Buddha telephoned to apologise of course, but the explanation was thin: election rhetoric. Bah! I am an honest man. Everyone knows that. How can I help it if everyone in my Cabinet makes money? Why should I be called the worst Prime Minister?

I gave my country the Indo-US nuclear deal virtually single-handedly; even George was saying so. Well, not single-handedly; that is immodest. There were a few others, I must admit it. But who can deny that I brought my nation to the brink of an understanding with the United States that could make India America’s most important ally in Afro-Asia after Israel! We made history, and history will remember its maker! Those who oppose the deal are relics of a dead past! The Soviet Union is long dead, Comrades! I never criticized Buddha for being wrong on the nuclear deal; I could appreciate that he had to toe the party line. Why did he get personal with me just because the Congress has lost every election under my watch?

What I can’t understand is why the geeks of Bangalore never voted for the Congress after all I did for them. I don’t get it. The Indo-US deal is for their India! I’ve sacrificed my future for their future! And yet they’ve shifted to the awful BJP, which didn’t have the decency to support a deal that they would have happily done themselves. I only sold the right to test – which fool wants another bomb, in any case; the BJP would have sold the whole store! Politics is so unfair…

Young Prithviraj Chauhan was wrong when he said we lost Karnataka because Deve Gowda split the secular vote. Judging by the speed with which Gowda’s secular vote rushed towards the BJP rather than towards us, we are lucky Gowda held on to 16%. If he had sunk further, the margin between the BJP and us would have been greater.

I can’t understand why chaps keep talking of inflation as the reason for the Congress slump. My economic policies are beyond reproof. What have prices got to do with defeat? Millions of honest Kannadigas voted for Congress. Don’t you think their wives go to the market? If prices did not affect them, why should they affect anyone else? I can’t stop the price of oil from rising, can I – and when I offer peaceful nuclear energy in 2020 no one wants it! I could have been a Gulliver during these four years but little men from Lilliput have tied me up, made me immobile.
Let us face it, Dear Diary: this is a moment of introspection. I must be honest in my analysis, for I am an honest person. I was reading a Reuters report on the election results; it is a Western news agency, so it was unbiased. Reuters described the results as “another blow for the Centre-Left Congress party”.

That’s it. There lies the problem. The branding is wrong. Congress is now off-message. Bangalore doesn’t want a Congress that veers between Centre and Left. It wants one that veers between Centre and Right. We should rebrand the Congress as Right-Centre, because we are both Right and Centre. Must discuss it with the media boys in the office tomorrow, if I can find one who isn’t looking for another job.

Goodnight, Diary.

Extract from the Secret Diary of Lal Krishna Advani: It’s nightmare time again. I won’t be able to sleep. This is precisely what happened four years ago. We swept the Assembly polls, stepped out with confident stride, brought the general elections forward and fell into a big hole from which we still cannot quite get out. If I had to offer one explanation for that catastrophe, it was the smug look on the faces of all our chaps on television. That cost us the general election. I can see that same glimmer back on some BJP faces on television sets. My sweat is cold already: remember all those who predicted that the BJP would get 300 seats…

It doesn’t bother me a jot when television channels are critical of the BJP. That is probably advantageous. Who cares if their opinion polls give Congress twice the seats it eventually gets. It makes no difference to the voter. The BJP cannot be defeated by its foes. But God save the BJP from its friends!

Is there no one who will ban television news channels till the next general elections are over?

From Promise to Compromise

Byline By M.J.Akbar : From Promise to Compromise

A government slips from "midterm" to "end-term" condition not when it has lost its majority, but when it has lost its ability to govern. Only a confident government goes for a midterm poll because it believes it will be re-elected; an "end-term" election takes place under an anxious one.

Language facilitates communication; but becomes a trap when misused. The misuse may not be deliberate, merely complacent. But a complacent phrase can enter the discourse, shape decision or indecision and leave a sharp, self-inflicted wound.

"Midterm election" is a case in point. One is not being pedantic; a midterm election does not have to be precisely in the middle of a government's term. But there is a political definition of "midterm" that separates it clearly from the "end-term" phase of a government's life.
In the British-Indian system of a parliamentary democracy, a "midterm" election means any election called prematurely, either because the government feels it is advantageous to go back to the people, or because it no longer has the majority to survive, and Parliament cannot offer an alternative ruling formation.

A government slips from "midterm" to "end-term" condition not when it has lost its majority, but when it has lost its ability to govern. Only a confident government goes for a midterm poll because it believes it will be re-elected; an "end-term" election takes place under an anxious one. Tony Blair, the most successful Labour Prime Minister in history, won three elections by going to the polls early. He had not lost his majority; he chose an earlier date because he considered it politically propitious, and it was the point at which he could maximise the extent of his victory.

His successor, Gordon Brown, took office a year ago and entered his "end-term" phase within four months, when he somersaulted out of an implicit promise to call an early election. He may retain the confidence of Parliament, but he lost the confidence of the country. Since then he has been Dead Man Walking. If Labour does not change him he will take Labour to the grave: where else would you expect a Dead Man to go?

A calendar has something, but not a whole lot, to do with a government's credibility. Governments do not explode suddenly, in a blaze of fireworks. The more objective metaphor is colder. Governments melt like icebergs, piece by piece, before sinking into oblivion. The moment this process accelerates, the "end-term" begins.

The decisive moment for the Manmohan Singh government came last August, when it seemed, for about a week, ready to challenge his coalition in pursuit of a policy which the Prime Minister believed was in the national interest: the Indo-US nuclear deal. The force and conviction with which the Prime Minister hyped up the deal was sufficient to convince many in-between that there must be something in what he said. The Prime Minister was, not so subtly, transferring his personal credibility to the deal, and many were ready to buy this transfer. But when the same Prime Minister walked away from the nuclear deal in order to save his government, his personal credibility took a beating. He became just another politician who was ready to compromise the national interest in order to remain in power. If the deal was truly so vital to India's future, then it was more important than the few remaining months of his government. And if it was less important than his government, then it was not so vital after all.

After that, the Communists began to wag the dog, creating just enough distance from the alliance they had delivered, baby-sat and nurtured. Last August, the Congress could have signed the deal and increased its seats in a subsequent election. After Gujarat, its tide began to ebb. In August 2007 the Gujarat elections had not taken place. The BJP was still a defeated party. Narendra Modi not only saved his party; he also shifted the key debate to governance. His victory was on the single issue of good governance. And just at that point, the Manmohan Singh coalition's reputation for competent governance, never particularly high, began to wither. If it had tainted itself with compromise on the nuclear deal, it began to seem pathetic in tackling economic issues.

It is now evident that inflation ate away any goodwill for the government at a rapid pace: the fire of the belly rarely leaves authority untouched. The mismanagement of oil prices speaks for itself. Oil prices did not start rising last week; this has been a phenomenon spread over the whole of last year. Many serious economists were predicting the prices we are witnessing today. A government with time on its side has the ability to take tough decisions. By winter it was clear that the government had limited options: it could raise prices, which would mean risking the stability of the coalition and a further push on inflation. If that was unacceptable, it could have initiated measures to reduce consumption. Or, it could have foreseen the crisis ahead, argued that only a government with renewed strength could handle such a crisis, and gone to the people. It did nothing. Today, it is in a complete bind. There is no money to meet higher costs (particularly after the great squander of national wealth in order to bribe voters in the Budget), and no will to raise it from consumers. If prices do not go up, we will see an oil famine in the country as oil companies run out of funds.

A government that could have won an election last August is sitting, heavy-bottomed, on a panic button eight months later.

There is only pseudo-drama in the much-debated question on whether the government should call an election in October-November or wait for the scheduled end of Parliament in March-April. It doesn't matter much anymore. The Opposition, which was once eager for a midterm poll in the forlorn belief that anything was better than the status quo is now quite happy at the thought that elections might take place only next March. In its view, the longer this government sticks around in office, the more seats it will lose. Yes, of course, a delay would enable some ministers to make more money, but who can argue with the kismat of the corrupt?

The Manmohan Singh government has travelled from promise to compromise; it will need huge dollops of good kismat to travel any further.

Double Jeopardy

Byline by M J Akbar: Double Jeopardy

The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendour to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day.

There is a television game called "Double Jeopardy" built around the rather depressing thought that the answer to a problem might be a problem in itself. India's Marxists have just discovered that this game could spill over into reality.

Moralists have long condemned those politicians who enjoy power without responsibility. The CPI(M) is now discovering the pain of having responsibility without power. That is probably closer to a triple jeopardy.

If ever there was a double jeopardy in politics, then the hammering they have just received across West Bengal in the panchayat elections is a gloomy, or glowering, example. From control of 2,303 village panchayats in 2003, the CPI (M)-led Left Front has stumbled to 1,633; the Mamata Banerjee-led disunited Opposition ascended from 917 to 1,463. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress won more than three-fourths of the village councils.

Two facts stand out in the Bengal results: Mamata won villages that she had not even bothered to campaign in; and the most decisive shift away from the Left was the Muslim vote which it has wooed so consistently with its absolutist opposition to the BJP. The upsurge against the Left in Bengal is therefore greater than these results indicate. If this pattern holds then the Left could lose more than 15 seats in the next general elections.

And it is no longer sufficient to go red each time you see saffron in order to pocket Muslim votes. Muslims want more, including bread and education. As the Sachar Committee's report proved, during more than three decades in power the Left has given neither to Bengal's Muslims. It has certainly provided security to the community, but that is not enough. You cannot take land with impunity from the Bengali Muslim peasant and yet frighten him into voting for you. That era is over. The tectonic shift in the Muslim vote has cut the ground from under the CPI(M)'s Fortress Bengal.

There are many reasons why the Muslims did not revolt against the Left Front before. The leadership of Jyoti Basu was both charismatic and reassuring. Basu knew the language that would communicate with the people, even if in practical terms (that is, bread and education) he did not do very much. He shepherded the community through its most vulnerable phase, 1970s and 1980s, with the kind of concern that the sentimental might even confuse with affection. It was psychologically impossible for Muslims to leave the CPI(M) as long as Jyoti Basu was at the helm. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was another matter. Buddhadev had been insensitive to Muslim sentiment even when a minister in Basu's Cabinet. Muslims might have accepted his lectures on the aazan and madrasas if he had begun to address their bread-and-education concerns. Instead, the lectures came with the most appalling usurpation of land in Singur and Nandigram. Muslims were among the worst affected.

There is a phenomenon that is being shrouded by the shift of the Muslim vote towards Mamata Banerjee. In the 1960s, as Bengal's Muslims abandoned the Congress, many of them first went to marginal parties, including outfits led by the clergy. In the elections of the late 1960s, parties that were variations of the Muslim League set up candidates and got a reasonable chunk of the vote. The CPI(M), under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, weaned the Muslims towards the Left and eliminated such parties. They have returned to Bengal politics.

A little before the panchayat elections, Jyoti Basu made a casual remark that was not so casual: it was time for another Front, he suggested. The CPI(M)'s partners are displaying signs of fatigue. But an alliance with CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc may be a smaller problem than the Left's dalliance with the Congress in Delhi. The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendour to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day. Blaming the rest of world doesn't really help: oil prices shot up to unprecedented levels in 1973 as well, but it did not help Mrs Indira Gandhi when she blamed the international situation for domestic inflation. The government can take comfort from clever opinion polls. A recent one showed that the UPA government had 34% support, as against 26% for BJP and its partners. Then buried somewhere deep in the copy lay an interesting fact: the survey was done among 1,600 respondents in the big cities, and restricted to the very rich, the topmost socio-economic categories. The rich find inflation less demanding than the poor. And if Dr Manmohan Singh cannot get the vote of this segment, which constitutes less than 10% of the population, then he has no vote at all. I am sure if you take a poll within my family, you will find my support at 34%. If you check with the whole mohalla, it could be a different outcome. The difference between the Left and the UPA might seem distinct over dialectical debates in Delhi; it seems a blur from the villages of Bengal. Jyoti Basu always had a wonderful alibi when faced with difficult questions. He would blame lack of cooperation from Delhi and send subliminal signals that this was also discrimination against Bengalis. Buddhadev Bhattacharya tried to blame the Prime Minister during the panchayat elections. No one bought his story. The voter had seen him cozying up to Delhi too often.

The Marxists will lose very little if they lose Delhi. The Left can afford to lose Delhi; it cannot afford to slip in Bengal, or it will disappear for a decade.

The Dance of the Ghosts

Byline by M J Akbar: THE DANCE OF THE GHOSTS
COVERT (15-30TH MAY 2008)
Posted from Princeton University where he is giving a lecture on Talibanisation of Pakistan)

One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whi­zuncles will rush to sell Rahul Gandhi as India’s Obama. The similarity is superficial, if there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty. The real parallel to Obama in India is the spectacular trajec­tory of Mayawati.

Old rules get old because they have legs to walk through generations. Time, then, to re­call one of the oldest: When you are dead, lie down. So many politicians simply don’t get this, whether they are provincial wannabes like the erst­ while Congress satrap from Uttar Pradesh Akhilesh Das or the woman who wanted the White House, Hillary Clinton.

I am familiar with the face of defeat – not least my own in 1991, when I failed to get re-elected in the general elec­ tion, during my brief departure into politics. But never have I seen a visage as utterly depressed, seething with the last twitches of a withered dream, as that of Bill Clinton standing behind Hillary on the night of 7 May. For the re­cord, she was delivering a “victory” speech after the Indi­ana primaries, but her words turned instantly into ash the moment they left her mouth. Poor Bill got the blowback. He knew that this was the last dance of a dead campaign. Four more years of adulation and power had disappeared into a blank. I’ve seen long faces too, but that evening Bill’s jaw was nearer his nipple than his lip.

There are no exact parallels, least of all between de­mocracy in the United States and India, but common questions can open fresh lines of thought.

Does Barack Obama represent the arrival of a new role model? Will this drama of startling shifts energise hope elsewhere?

Barack is young, but he is not about youth. George Bush and Tony Blair were startlingly young when they won office; they have aged decades in less than ten years. Pow­er seems to be an aphrodisiac for the old (P.V. Narasimha Rao yesterday, John McCain today), and decomposes the young.

The Barack phenomenon is about identity, not youth, the vital first act as America attempts to exorcise the de­mons that have kept the enslaved and dispossessed on the margins, not totally excluded in these “liberal” times, but not fully included either. His personal history is the an­tidote of convention. He is a child of an absentee black, talented Muslim father and a white, bright, single mother who survived for a while on food stamps. His personality, his success and his dramatic invasion of the white political club, with -- to the shock of traditional America -- a coalition of white college kids and his black community, provokes reservations, suspicion and downright, barely-disguised hatred. The Clintons, who are brilliant at surreptitious pol­itics and viral-marketing, positioned him as the ultimate Manchurian candidate at a time of Bush’s war against “Is­lamofascism”: they converted him into a “closet Muslim” without of course letting the phrase escape through their noble, if clenched, teeth. Worse, he was an uppity snob who had the temerity to wear Gucci,drink latte, and, worst of all, dress and dance better than the Clintons. The Clin­tons have every right to a bank balance of $109 million between them, earned in the last eight years. An upstart should remain a degree below latte. Obama prevailed among the Democrats not because he had changed but because enough of America has changed.

One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whi­zuncles will rush to sell Rahul Gandhi as India’s Obama. The similarity is superficial, if there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty. The real parallel to Obama in India is the spectacular trajec­tory of Mayawati. She never studied in Harvard, and the only law she knows is that of the jungle through which her elephant has had to fight for survival. But she rose from the margins and is imploding upon the Centre by extraordinary political skills. Her coalition of Brahmin, Dalit and Muslim is if anything more impressive Obama’s. She does not wear Gucci (she thinks Rahul Gandhi does). But she does wear diamonds; the contempt/anger/hatred and pseudo-morality that her wealth induces is evident enough. She does not belong to the class that has a hered­itary right to be dishonest. But the most important simi­larity is that she has energised her own community to an unprecedented degree. The Dalits are the blacks of India; Babasaheb Ambedkar is their Martin Luther King; Kanshi Ram is their Jesse Jackson; and Mayawati is their Obama. Being less suave than Obama, she is both the acceptable and unacceptable face of Change; she can apply the rhet­oric of Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, the pastor who has made incendiary remarks against white racism and America, depending on the audience she is addressing, or dismissing.

Obama is leading a sophisticated upheaval. Maya is heaving against prejudice that has congealed over many thousands of years. In neither case has the Establishment surrendered, yet. The Republicans believe they can slice Obama up and feed him to middle America. The Con­gress is convinced it can undermine Maya after she has sabotaged herself. All options are possible, for the tur­bulence and direction of change can never be certain. Hillary Clinton refuses to lie down even when declared dead because she still hopes that the unpredictable will somehow emerge from the inconceivable. If the correct­ly-pigmented John Edwards had pounded her as Obama has done, she would have shaken his hand and accepted the Vice President’s nomination some time ago. But with chocolate-flavoured Obama, you never know when some circumcised skeleton will fall out from the cupboard.

The candidate may be dead. The ghosts dance on.

There is a second old rule in politics. Stick with friends, but stick closer to enemies. An Obama or a Mayawati has learnt that sentiment is a trap. Once you have fought a foe to death, you can always dance with the ghost on the way to power.

Will we, Won't we?

Byline by M J Akbar: Will we, Won't we?

Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word called domitable?

One of the minor attractions of a foreign hotel room is the chance to switch on a strange television channel. The field is open; any country with a reasonable budget and a desire to be seen as an international player now has a state channel airing its version of events.

Predictably, the British thought of this wheeze first: very few know that 50% of the BBC's expenses are still paid by the British Foreign Office. In the heyday of Empire this was considered a legitimate part of national duty; and during wartime, the investment provided extraordinary returns. The logic had to be twirled around in the post-imperial phase, and the BBC repositioned itself as the international guardian of truth, democracy, liberty, freedom and whatever the British Foreign Office considered worthy and useful. To its credit, the BBC was never as obedient as the government would have liked, which is why it discovered an international audience. There was a time when BBC radio was perhaps the most important source of news for much of the world. The BBC could even dare the government in wartime. It famously refused to describe British troops during Mrs Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War as "our" troops and called them "British" troops. At this distance this may seem a minor or perhaps even a trivial distinction, but for those in media who have to deal with nervous governments during wartime, there is nothing trivial about standing up for identity. Still the umbilical cord exists, and no one quite knows when mummy is tugging at the cord.

The American experiment in quasi-government media independence has been, shall we say, less successful. The Voice of America is only accurate in one respect: it is the Voice of America, with a modification – it is the Voice of the American Government. The VOA's spectacular spread is matched only by the spectacular failure of its inability to reach anyone. Credibility cannot be purchased by dollars. Or by Euros, for that matter. But what is good about European news channels broadcasting in English is that they offer you a different dimension of warzones like Iraq or Palestine. The American coverage, including that of non-government media, tends to follow some invisible consensus in which, for example, Israel can do little wrong and the Palestinians little right. The consensus does not extend to all aspects of coverage, but it certainly conditions reporting of war.

Even when you do not understand the language of television reporting, as for instance on Turkish channels, it is always instructive to see the images that are being broadcast. They are significantly different from the "consensus" images of Anglo-Saxon media. The great effort to take independent coverage to an international audience was made, of course, by Al Jazeera when it followed up its hugely successful Arab channels with an English version. The effort is brave; but the jury is still out on the quality of its impact. There is a sense of discomfort in English Al Jazeera, or perhaps the more accurate term would be uncertainty. It is never sure which note to hit. This grey confusion does not exist in Arabic, because it was always certain what it wanted to do. It was the first channel to report the Arab street, even when this caused great discomfiture to Arab governments. Although Al Jazeera is owned by Oman's rulers, they have wisely kept a distance between their channel and their foreign policy. Al Jazeera is hated by more Arab regimes that it would care to count. That is its strength. Perhaps its problem in English is that it wants to pander to its claimed audience, even when it claims the high ground of neutrality, instead of letting the news speak for itself. All audiences have biases, and it would be a foolish media person who ignored these biases completely; but media's true worth is tested only when it rises above the clamour of the audience on the few occasions when this is essential.

Perhaps the most interesting channel I have come across is the Chinese English channel. The last time I watched it, in a Singapore hotel, it was going on and on about the "indomitable" will of the Chinese people. It is a phrase that makes me nostalgic, almost taking me back to college and the good old days when anyone in Calcutta with any sense of adventure had Chairman Mao's Little Red Book in his pocket. (The Chinese were very kind; they sent it free.) They did go on a bit about the indomitable will of the Chinese people, and how it would inspire revolutions everywhere. India was reserved by Chairman Mao for a prairie fire that would light up in different spots and then slowly join up to set this uppity, half-baked nation ablaze with red flames. The prairie fire at my college, Presidency, was quite fierce for a while; but the one in Delhi's elitist St Stephen's College, I gather, went up in smoke. I shall not describe what kind of smoke it was.

Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word called domitable? There should be, logically, but anyone who knows English also knows that logic has nothing to do with its grammar and phraseology. Ever tried to find what the opposite of "unbend" is? It certainly isn't "bend".

I suppose only a very domitable people accept the conditions we do. The news is that our deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a protégé of the Prime Minister, finally discovered the state of Delhi airport and has called a meeting to find why this experiment in state-private sector partnership has become one unholy mess. It has taken Mr Ahluwalia time, not because he does not travel abroad, but because all high officials are taken through a gilded route when they traverse through airports. High Cabinet Ministers of course have their own airport. They just don't tell anyone about this. But we must give credit to Montek: he could have behaved like others, ignored the punishment that is inflicted on ordinary passengers and gone back to his desk. He could have scratched the back of the civil aviations ministry and lived happily ever after. He took some action. We shall see if anything comes out of it.

Carry on, Montek. Maybe one day you shall make us Indians indomitable as well.

The Alibi Game

Byline by M J Akbar : The Alibi Game

In public life — and both the market and politicians are in public life — you need not only a thick skin but also a strong chin. You have to take the blow on the chin and keep standing. A totter is not a pleasant sight in public life.

Logic and politics are not necessarily incompatible. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. If you live by market forces you die by market forces. Inflation is the most logical face of market forces. It is the market that sets the agenda. It is the market that raises prices based on its assessment of supply, demand and profitability. The market has no loyalty, least of all to government. The market has no social conscience: no food-trader ever died of hunger in the famine, or emerged out of the crisis with his bank balance depleted. The market is loyal to one concept, profit. The politician wants to win; the market wants to profit.

Their paths converge most of the time, but not all the time. When their interests converge they are the best of pals: see the width of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's smile when, in normal times, the Sensex booms across the skyscrapers of Mumbai. But that boom follows its own laws, and not those of the government. If profits can be sustained then the Sensex will boom even during a period of high inflation, at least temporarily, when there is still purchasing power in the market.

When the interests of politicians and the market diverge, they can be obstinate in the protection of their own needs. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi would dearly love to wake up one morning and discover that prices had levelled off or were even showing a downward trend. If they could order businessmen to do so, they would have done it, for a general election cannot now be too far away. But the businessmen who cozy up to politicians in the privacy of drawing rooms, doling out large bundles of cash, will not take such orders even at the cost of hurting their political friends.

It is, to use an apt phrase, a trade-off. The market should not cry when the politician lets it down. The politician must not weep when the market betrays it. In public life — and both the market and politicians are in public life — you need not only a thick skin but also a strong chin. You have to take the blow on the chin and keep standing. A totter is not a pleasant sight in public life.

Inevitably, if not wisely, politicians rush towards the false comfort of alibis when under threat. The Indian consumer does not want lectures on whether food prices are rising across the world; he wants to know what the government has done about it. In any case, this phenomenon was evident at the beginning of last winter, and that is already six months ago. What did Finance Minister Chidambaram, or his economics-professor boss, Prime Minister Singh, do about it last November and December? If they had taken the measures that suddenly seem wise to them now, things would have been under some control today. Instead, they were cooling their heals and heating the market. Now the market is cooling its heels and lighting fires under the government.

Alibis can be cruel. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has already blamed the changing consumption pattern of the Indian poor for rising prices. Sharad Pawar has never blamed the bloated stomachs of the rich for rising prices — ever wondered why? He believes food to be the natural right of the rich, and an unnatural right for the poor. He does not quite put it like that, because that would be too direct, but that is the foundation of his thought process.

Mr Pawar has now some help from the Lord Protector of the World, American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She too blames the rise of food prices on the Indian poor. Has she ever paused a minute to think about the consumption pattern of pets in American households? They consume food worth over fifteen billion dollars each year, enough to stave off hunger among Africa's poverty-stricken children. I know this is an unfair world, and I don't believe that pets should suddenly be cut off their feed. But at least we should be spared pomposity from the privileged.

Prime Minister Singh seems to have a strange, hands-off look these days, as if he is not really responsible for the mess that has collected beneath him. Indifference may be the last alibi left, but it is not an answer. When the mask of indifference is punctured by incidents like the exposure of help given by the Prime Minister's Office to a less-than-honest minister like the DMK's T.R. Baalu, the search for alibis reaches panic-station because the image of a clean Prime Minister must be preserved at all costs. The explanations trot out, one after another. The PMO letters were "routine". There is nothing routine about a Prime Minister's Office recommending that gas supplies be made available to the industries of a Cabinet Minister's son. There is nothing routine in the fact that a reminder was sent within five days, the first of seven. In government snail-mail the first letter would probably not have reached its destination in five days. A second in such a hurry is not routine. Oil and Gas Minister Murli Deora suggested that there was nothing in helping a colleague. Really? Even at the cost of rules and regulations? And if there is nothing wrong, why was nothing done? The answer is simple: the bureaucrats in the ministry did not want to break the rules. That is why eight letters were needed. Clever Mr Deora wants to have his cake and eat it too. Difficult.

The Indian in the bazaar has a right to ask how many letters the Prime Minister sent his Finance Minister on inflation.

The Prime Minister is a calm man who hides his stress under a self-imposed blanket of resignation. He was the surprise choice four years ago, and his personality aroused hopes at street and village level. All that remains of that once-promising reputation is the belief that he is personally incorruptible. But what use is his personal integrity when all around him there is rampant corruption and mismanagement. Is there a friend of his who can tell him that there are many kinds of dishonesty in public life? Permitting Cabinet Ministers to feed from the corruption trough so that you may preserve your job also amounts to disservice to the people.