Byline by M J Akbar: Who lost Paradise?
Lesson of the week: it is perfectly possible to simultaneously fool the United Nations, P. Chidambaram, much of the media and M. Karunanidhi with the same ploy, and within the same 24 hours. The outbreak of self-congratulation in Delhi when Colombo announced that it would cease using heavy artillery and air power against the trapped LTTE was not really self-delusion, because the mandarins of Delhi are not foolish. It was a desperate attempt by ruling coalition politicians to chalk up talking points for the elections in Tamil Nadu, where this government is being blamed for abandoning the LTTE. Typically, Karunanidhi over-egged the pudding by undertaking a fast. The fastest thing about the fast was how fast it ended.
The only Union ministers from Tamil Nadu not in electoral trouble are those who defected to Jayalalithaa. The others, whether from Congress, DMK or smaller parties, are anxiously shopping for any fig leaf to hide their impotence. Delhi’s spin doctors even tried to hype up the “heavy artillery” announcement as a ceasefire. This spin stopped turning when Colombo clarified that it would never agree to any ceasefire. Why would it cease fire when it has Prabhakaran in its crosshairs? The Sri Lanka government and army have not fought its most difficult war in order to make Chidambaram home minister or Karunanidhi chief minister.
Colombo has measured Delhi’s impotence carefully, and knows that Delhi will swallow any fudge it hands out, because there is nothing else it can do. The rest of the world can make the perfunctory noise, but that is about it. Some pompous types in the European Union hierarchy tried to flex verbal muscle. Mahinda Rajapaksa, Lanka’s President, could well have asked, qua Stalin, how many divisions does the Pope have?
For the record, LTTE is a terrorist organisation in the books of most western governments, including those who have long permitted LTTE operatives to collect a “war tax” from Lankan Tamils living abroad. This money, much of it repatriated, has financed the LTTE for two decades.
Colombo’s “concession” is meaningless because the war has entered a phase when heavy artillery is useless and aerial strikes counter-productive.
The combat zone, at the moment of writing, has been reduced to about five square kilometres of beachfront on the northeastern coast, in which perhaps 50,000 civilians have become double-hostages. Prabhakaran, leading the rump of the once-fabled LTTE forces, is using them as his last shield against the victorious Sri Lankan armed forces. The war has entered the close-combat stage, where each LTTE post and boat will be identified and eliminated through a process of attrition, even as efforts continue to offer civilians a route out of the trap.
Why would Colombo stop a war at the very moment when it has drained the growl out of the Tigers? Prabhakaran must be ruing the day when arrogance, or misjudgement, stopped him from accepting a deal through negotiations. Both Colombo and the world community gave him this chance, the former under compulsion, but nevertheless agreeable. Prabhakaran now faces the option that made his tigers, and tigresses, an object study in asymmetrical warfare, with their trademark use of the poison pill. We cannot say what he will do next, or indeed what realistic options exist for him. How long will the human shield of terrified civilians hold? Will the trapped Lanka Tamilians revolt against the person who was once a demigod? The armed forces surrounding the last battlefield have time, and morale, on their side.
It was perhaps bad luck for Delhi that this war came to a climax at just the moment when India’s long general elections are also heading towards theirs. I suppose the Election Commission did not factor in events across the Palk Straits when it decided that Tamil Nadu would be among the last states to vote. Delhi is busy formulating, and discarding, plans. In one of them, Prabhakaran would escape and then be forced to negotiate with Colombo. But such a scenario is riven with difficulties. Would escape be possible when the Lanka navy is keeping a 24-hour vigil on the waters? If he did escape, would the assassin of Rajiv Gandhi receive a warm welcome from a Congress-led Union government? Open arms? I think not.
I hope not.
Delhi lost the Lanka plot some time ago. Rip Van Winkle would not make a good foreign minister. You cannot wake up suddenly after a long sleep, and imagine that last-minute hysterics are an adequate substitute for two years of lazy drift. Foreign policy is a continuous pursuit. A crisis needs to be monitored on a regular basis. Foreign policy means shaping events towards the national interest long before denouement.
Chidambaram’s recent statement on China’s role in Sri Lanka was mystifying. Is this the first time that he has heard about this? Then he has not even been reading the daily newspapers properly. China has been arming Sri Lanka for many years, as messages from our envoy in Colombo will surely have confirmed. Delhi did a whole lot of nothing when the first shipload of arms arrived in Sri Lanka, because it had no alternative strategy to offer towards a solution. Colombo played it brilliantly: it got arms from China even as it persuaded the UPA government to give it a favourable trade status. India nourished Sri Lanka’s war-starved economy. Perhaps Delhi never expected the LTTE to collapse before the Lanka forces. Did Delhi become a victim of LTTE propaganda?
The price of miscalculation in a game-changing crisis is very high. You have to be extraordinarily lucky to escape payment. The Chidambaram-Karunanidhi partnership may have run out of its share of luck.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Kaun Banega PM? Watch on May 16
Kaun Banega PM? Watch on May 16
By M J Akbar
Sharad Pawar, it has been suggested, has thrown a cat among the pigeons by opening a can of prime ministers. He may have done something more worrisome than that. He may have thrown a pigeon among the cats.
Parties separated by geography, history, personality and ideology (or the lack of it) seem agreed on only one thing: that Manmohan Singh has had his moment. The NDA view is explicable; it has its own candidate in L K Advani. But why do politicians who have served in Singh’s cabinet for the last five years believe that they should get the job for the next five?
Marxists dislike Singh with exactly the same fervor that Singh dislikes Marx. The Left has a second reason for demanding a new order, which has not been widely recognized, far less appreciated. The Congress has accepted all conditions laid down by allies in order to forge anti-Left unity in Bengal and Kerala. But it refused to be equally accommodating to allies in key states where such unity could have hurt the BJP, whether in Jharkhand, Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. The Left sees a double game behind the Congress rhetoric.
The only nationally-known politician who has not cast an eye on Singh’s job is Karunanidhi, possibly because he can foresee the results of Tamil Nadu. Even the Congress is ambivalent. On the record, Singh remains the once-and-future PM. In its ads, the transition has taken place from Rajiv Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi.
In theory, the bidders in this auction house cannot be faulted. The prime minister is only the first among equals in a democracy, hence there is merit in the argument of meritocracy. But there has been a caste system in the UPA, with the Congress using its Brahmin status to seize all the major offices of state, and all the important instruments of state authority. Pawar, who made a serious bid to become Congress prime minister in 1991, was sent to the comparative wasteland of agriculture. The price of 58 months of silence is two months of questions.
Ambition is not restricted to one party. It is hardly a secret that the most vociferous defender of the government in this campaign, Pranab Mukherjee, would not mind becoming prime minister himself. If Congress numbers are fewer than its well-paid pollsters predict, Mukherjee’s name will be mentioned by allies, even if it is eventually rejected by his own party. This is why he plays word-games on whether he has an alliance with Mamata Banerjee or a seat-arrangement. The implication is that an alliance is a marriage while a seat-arrangement is flirtation. One of the many difficulties facing the next version of the UPA is that the Left will not support a government with Mamata in it, and vice versa. It was all so much easier when Mamata was such a good friend of the BJP. Her conversion to secularism is terribly inconvenient.
The path of ambition is paved with more than one theory. The simple one is the purchasing power of numbers. You have to bring MPs to the bargaining table if you want to sustain your claim. People underestimate Sharad Pawar when they think his numbers are only restricted to Maharashtra. He has received verbal assurances from other parties, some of which may even be sincere. But each assurance is subject to post-poll reality. Naveen Patnaik may want Pawar as PM, but that will be a secondary concern if he cannot get a majority in the Orissa Assembly. He will have to worry about who, between BJP and Congress, will want him as chief minister. A quid pro quo will be attached to the answer.
The second theory is more piquant. It believes in survival of the weakest. This least-resistance model has been tried and tested on Inder Gujral and H D Deve Gowda in the early days of the coalition era. It is a variation of the old hare-and-tortoise fable, in which the backrunner will be the only person in the race when the frontrunners have cancelled themselves out. In this scenario, a powerful personality will be perceived as too much of a threat to one or more of the partners, leaving Mr Humble Smiley the eventual winner.
But such tortoises are heroes of fables. Every contender has a right to dream till 8am on May 16. That is the hour at which the wake-up call will sound.
Appeared in Times of India - April 26, 2009
By M J Akbar
Sharad Pawar, it has been suggested, has thrown a cat among the pigeons by opening a can of prime ministers. He may have done something more worrisome than that. He may have thrown a pigeon among the cats.
Parties separated by geography, history, personality and ideology (or the lack of it) seem agreed on only one thing: that Manmohan Singh has had his moment. The NDA view is explicable; it has its own candidate in L K Advani. But why do politicians who have served in Singh’s cabinet for the last five years believe that they should get the job for the next five?
Marxists dislike Singh with exactly the same fervor that Singh dislikes Marx. The Left has a second reason for demanding a new order, which has not been widely recognized, far less appreciated. The Congress has accepted all conditions laid down by allies in order to forge anti-Left unity in Bengal and Kerala. But it refused to be equally accommodating to allies in key states where such unity could have hurt the BJP, whether in Jharkhand, Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. The Left sees a double game behind the Congress rhetoric.
The only nationally-known politician who has not cast an eye on Singh’s job is Karunanidhi, possibly because he can foresee the results of Tamil Nadu. Even the Congress is ambivalent. On the record, Singh remains the once-and-future PM. In its ads, the transition has taken place from Rajiv Gandhi to Rahul Gandhi.
In theory, the bidders in this auction house cannot be faulted. The prime minister is only the first among equals in a democracy, hence there is merit in the argument of meritocracy. But there has been a caste system in the UPA, with the Congress using its Brahmin status to seize all the major offices of state, and all the important instruments of state authority. Pawar, who made a serious bid to become Congress prime minister in 1991, was sent to the comparative wasteland of agriculture. The price of 58 months of silence is two months of questions.
Ambition is not restricted to one party. It is hardly a secret that the most vociferous defender of the government in this campaign, Pranab Mukherjee, would not mind becoming prime minister himself. If Congress numbers are fewer than its well-paid pollsters predict, Mukherjee’s name will be mentioned by allies, even if it is eventually rejected by his own party. This is why he plays word-games on whether he has an alliance with Mamata Banerjee or a seat-arrangement. The implication is that an alliance is a marriage while a seat-arrangement is flirtation. One of the many difficulties facing the next version of the UPA is that the Left will not support a government with Mamata in it, and vice versa. It was all so much easier when Mamata was such a good friend of the BJP. Her conversion to secularism is terribly inconvenient.
The path of ambition is paved with more than one theory. The simple one is the purchasing power of numbers. You have to bring MPs to the bargaining table if you want to sustain your claim. People underestimate Sharad Pawar when they think his numbers are only restricted to Maharashtra. He has received verbal assurances from other parties, some of which may even be sincere. But each assurance is subject to post-poll reality. Naveen Patnaik may want Pawar as PM, but that will be a secondary concern if he cannot get a majority in the Orissa Assembly. He will have to worry about who, between BJP and Congress, will want him as chief minister. A quid pro quo will be attached to the answer.
The second theory is more piquant. It believes in survival of the weakest. This least-resistance model has been tried and tested on Inder Gujral and H D Deve Gowda in the early days of the coalition era. It is a variation of the old hare-and-tortoise fable, in which the backrunner will be the only person in the race when the frontrunners have cancelled themselves out. In this scenario, a powerful personality will be perceived as too much of a threat to one or more of the partners, leaving Mr Humble Smiley the eventual winner.
But such tortoises are heroes of fables. Every contender has a right to dream till 8am on May 16. That is the hour at which the wake-up call will sound.
Appeared in Times of India - April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Array and disarray in the Left
Array and disarray in the Left
M.J. Akbar
Leaders come in two cultures. One sort of leader accepts the necessity of accountability in public life. This group is in a minority. The majority follows a law, which their followers know only too well: “If we win, I get the credit; if we lose, you get the blame”.
It is ironic that the best democrats in Indian democracy are the Marxists, whose ideology demands class war rather than the more genteel business of planting your finger on a symbol. They treat their party as an institution, not an individual’s or family’s private property.
Decisions are made through a collective system, not sent to a single individual for a royal assent or dissent. Responsibility is assigned to individuals, and individuals are stripped [as far as is humanly possible] of their ego. This is perhaps why ex-Marxists become so egotistic; all those decades of suppressed ego is suddenly let loose upon the world. There are rewards for success, even when this leads to stagnation. During 33 years of Marxist rule in Bengal there have been only two Chief Ministers, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadev Bhattacharya. Basu left because of age; he was not pushed out. No one is pushed out. More remarkably, there have been only two finance ministers, Dr Ashok Mitra and Ashim Dasgupta. Dr Mitra resigned on an issue of principle, otherwise he might have retired only along with his friend, Jyoti Basu, once again because of age. If you win elections you can do no wrong.
And that is what the problem might be in 2009. Buddhadev Bhattacharya could lead the Left in Bengal to its first major setback in three decades.
The buzz in Kolkata has already moved towards post-modern: Bhattacharya has decided to resign if he cannot ensure 25 seats out of 42 for his side. How do the Kolkata addawallahs know? Political information is always porous. The man at the top of the pyramid has merely to make an observation to a confidant or two; the latter discuss the possibility with their close comrades, and word rolls down along the sides of the pyramid to reach the dabblers and journalists on the lower ledges.
There are at least three distinctive aspects of this story.
First, a Chief Minister is planning to take responsibility for failure. Politicians across the country will do badly; after all, someone has to lose for another to win. Every other politician is thinking deep thoughts on how to cling on despite defeat. This of course does not apply to dynasts, who will look for generals to hang.
Second, 25 seats out of 42 is still a clear majority. But the Left has set the bar high and will not lower it.
Third, by levelling the bar at 25, the Left has already psychologically conceded 17 seats to the Trinamool-Congress combine. Even at the height of the Congress wave following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi, the Left had conceded fewer seats.
There are two reasons for this. The Muslim vote, estimated to be over 35%, has switched away in large numbers. And there is no split in the anti-Left vote after Congress accepted the slightly humiliating terms that Mamata Banerjee offered during seat-sharing talks. The Marxists tried, with Pranab Mukherjee’s help, to sabotage this, but final orders came from Mrs Sonia Gandhi in Delhi and it went ahead. The Congress, which had six MPs in the last Lok Sabha, accepted only 16 seats out of 42. Mamata, who had only one, catapulted to 28.
The Left read a clear message in this decision. The Congress was treating the Left, rather than the BJP, as its principal enemy in this general election. How? Because in the states where an alliance would have hurt the BJP, like Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Congress rejected an alliance with leaders who could have helped defeat the BJP, like Shibu Soren, Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan and Mulayam Singh Yadav. The distribution of seats in Jharkhand had even been announced, but the arrangement collapsed suddenly, and inexplicably, at the last minute. As a consequence, the BJP will pick up vital extra seats in a state where it was comprehensively defeated five years ago.
The Marxists do not consider this accidental. They believe this to be part of a careful Congress strategy to marginalise the Left. There is nothing personal or sentimental about their response. They will not permit Congress to lead another Government because they are convinced that the Congress will use every tactic, political and administrative, behind a screen of conciliatory words, to pursue the same objective if it returns to Government. They know it is a battle of survival and they intend to survive.
They can also sense an opportunity to do unto Congress precisely what Congress did unto them: use power, with Congress support in Parliament, to target policies which the Congress has made part of its core personality, economic reform and the Indo-US nuclear deal. That is the dilemma which the Congress faces. Can it support a Government with a Marxist Foreign Minister who announces an abrogation of the nuclear deal? Surely Dr Manmohan Singh would never find the flexibility to support a Government in Parliament that sabotaged his main achievement. What would the Congress do in such circumstances? It is not a question of swallowing one’s pride. It would be political suicide.
Nor should anyone believe that Marxists would compromise in order to save a non-Congress, non-BJP patchwork Government. They have an agenda, which is in the public domain. They will implement it. The CPI[M] is not going to enter the history books — this is the first time they will join a Government in Delhi, if the chance arises — as having betrayed its core commitment, anti-imperialism, in order to stick to office. This is high on its list of campaign themes, as anyone interested in Bengal and Kerala will know.
The Left will not do well. It will be mowed down in both Kerala and Bengal, but it will still have around 40 seats in the next Parliament. Both Sharad Pawar and Dr Manmohan Singh acknowledge, the first happily and the second reluctantly, that a non-BJP Government is impossible without the support of the Left. Curiously, the Left, with 60 MPs, may have been less relevant to a Government’s survival in 2004 than it could be with 35 or 40 in 2009.
It would be paradoxical, would it not, if Prakash Karat were being sworn in as Foreign Minister in Delhi and Buddhadev Bhattacharya were submitting his resignation in Kolkata? But stranger things have happened.
Let me suggest one of them. If the BJP becomes the single largest party, you would be surprised by the number of small parties which suddenly discover the virtues of stability at a moment of economic crisis. The Left will be actually relieved: it can be where it is happiest — in the Opposition.
M.J. Akbar
Leaders come in two cultures. One sort of leader accepts the necessity of accountability in public life. This group is in a minority. The majority follows a law, which their followers know only too well: “If we win, I get the credit; if we lose, you get the blame”.
It is ironic that the best democrats in Indian democracy are the Marxists, whose ideology demands class war rather than the more genteel business of planting your finger on a symbol. They treat their party as an institution, not an individual’s or family’s private property.
Decisions are made through a collective system, not sent to a single individual for a royal assent or dissent. Responsibility is assigned to individuals, and individuals are stripped [as far as is humanly possible] of their ego. This is perhaps why ex-Marxists become so egotistic; all those decades of suppressed ego is suddenly let loose upon the world. There are rewards for success, even when this leads to stagnation. During 33 years of Marxist rule in Bengal there have been only two Chief Ministers, Jyoti Basu and Buddhadev Bhattacharya. Basu left because of age; he was not pushed out. No one is pushed out. More remarkably, there have been only two finance ministers, Dr Ashok Mitra and Ashim Dasgupta. Dr Mitra resigned on an issue of principle, otherwise he might have retired only along with his friend, Jyoti Basu, once again because of age. If you win elections you can do no wrong.
And that is what the problem might be in 2009. Buddhadev Bhattacharya could lead the Left in Bengal to its first major setback in three decades.
The buzz in Kolkata has already moved towards post-modern: Bhattacharya has decided to resign if he cannot ensure 25 seats out of 42 for his side. How do the Kolkata addawallahs know? Political information is always porous. The man at the top of the pyramid has merely to make an observation to a confidant or two; the latter discuss the possibility with their close comrades, and word rolls down along the sides of the pyramid to reach the dabblers and journalists on the lower ledges.
There are at least three distinctive aspects of this story.
First, a Chief Minister is planning to take responsibility for failure. Politicians across the country will do badly; after all, someone has to lose for another to win. Every other politician is thinking deep thoughts on how to cling on despite defeat. This of course does not apply to dynasts, who will look for generals to hang.
Second, 25 seats out of 42 is still a clear majority. But the Left has set the bar high and will not lower it.
Third, by levelling the bar at 25, the Left has already psychologically conceded 17 seats to the Trinamool-Congress combine. Even at the height of the Congress wave following the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi, the Left had conceded fewer seats.
There are two reasons for this. The Muslim vote, estimated to be over 35%, has switched away in large numbers. And there is no split in the anti-Left vote after Congress accepted the slightly humiliating terms that Mamata Banerjee offered during seat-sharing talks. The Marxists tried, with Pranab Mukherjee’s help, to sabotage this, but final orders came from Mrs Sonia Gandhi in Delhi and it went ahead. The Congress, which had six MPs in the last Lok Sabha, accepted only 16 seats out of 42. Mamata, who had only one, catapulted to 28.
The Left read a clear message in this decision. The Congress was treating the Left, rather than the BJP, as its principal enemy in this general election. How? Because in the states where an alliance would have hurt the BJP, like Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Congress rejected an alliance with leaders who could have helped defeat the BJP, like Shibu Soren, Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan and Mulayam Singh Yadav. The distribution of seats in Jharkhand had even been announced, but the arrangement collapsed suddenly, and inexplicably, at the last minute. As a consequence, the BJP will pick up vital extra seats in a state where it was comprehensively defeated five years ago.
The Marxists do not consider this accidental. They believe this to be part of a careful Congress strategy to marginalise the Left. There is nothing personal or sentimental about their response. They will not permit Congress to lead another Government because they are convinced that the Congress will use every tactic, political and administrative, behind a screen of conciliatory words, to pursue the same objective if it returns to Government. They know it is a battle of survival and they intend to survive.
They can also sense an opportunity to do unto Congress precisely what Congress did unto them: use power, with Congress support in Parliament, to target policies which the Congress has made part of its core personality, economic reform and the Indo-US nuclear deal. That is the dilemma which the Congress faces. Can it support a Government with a Marxist Foreign Minister who announces an abrogation of the nuclear deal? Surely Dr Manmohan Singh would never find the flexibility to support a Government in Parliament that sabotaged his main achievement. What would the Congress do in such circumstances? It is not a question of swallowing one’s pride. It would be political suicide.
Nor should anyone believe that Marxists would compromise in order to save a non-Congress, non-BJP patchwork Government. They have an agenda, which is in the public domain. They will implement it. The CPI[M] is not going to enter the history books — this is the first time they will join a Government in Delhi, if the chance arises — as having betrayed its core commitment, anti-imperialism, in order to stick to office. This is high on its list of campaign themes, as anyone interested in Bengal and Kerala will know.
The Left will not do well. It will be mowed down in both Kerala and Bengal, but it will still have around 40 seats in the next Parliament. Both Sharad Pawar and Dr Manmohan Singh acknowledge, the first happily and the second reluctantly, that a non-BJP Government is impossible without the support of the Left. Curiously, the Left, with 60 MPs, may have been less relevant to a Government’s survival in 2004 than it could be with 35 or 40 in 2009.
It would be paradoxical, would it not, if Prakash Karat were being sworn in as Foreign Minister in Delhi and Buddhadev Bhattacharya were submitting his resignation in Kolkata? But stranger things have happened.
Let me suggest one of them. If the BJP becomes the single largest party, you would be surprised by the number of small parties which suddenly discover the virtues of stability at a moment of economic crisis. The Left will be actually relieved: it can be where it is happiest — in the Opposition.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Feel of the Election Pulse
Akbarnama
-M.J.Akbar
The really swish thing to do for visiting journalists is report Patna by night. No, the story isn’t Patna’s radical transformation into Beirut or Paris or even into the latest version of Baghdad, where the icons of modern civilization, nightclubs and bars, now jostle for attention with American soldiers and native bombs. Patna is a staid and quite conservative city, whose worst vice is the blitzkrieg of mosquitoes that descend upon the visitor at sundown with unerring inevitability. (The relationship between mosquitoes and the local administration is one of mutual respect: they leave each other alone.) The done thing is to sear notepads with observations and conversations on change, report the tinkle of rickshaws through city streets as night cools the city, and tape the guffaw of after-dinner chatter at the paanshop. Five years ago, when Lalu Yadav was famous merely for being a Chief Minister of Bihar rather than a management guru of Harvard, voices sank to a whisper at night as fear of kidnapping emptied Patna’s streets. Normalcy, that collection of minor amusements and sedate details of daily existence, is the big story of this Bihar election. The JD(U)-BJP alliance led by Nitish Kumar is ahead in the battle because the government has restored Patna to the comforting sphere of the ordinary after its extraordinary collapse of confidence during the Lalu regime.
Drop
A hot lively wind was blowing through the bright dust-flecked afternoon when I landed. This is the famous north Indian luh, which seems to boil the body beneath the skin. We drove out of the city, southwards, through the second Lok Sabha constituency of the capital, Patliputra. So far, only one of the city’s two seats, Patna Sahib, was worth a photographer’s attention. Making predictions is always a slippery business, but the consensus is that the contest between Shatrughan Sinha and Shekhar Suman is over bar the voting. Sinha is an authentic star, Suman has the look, feel and language of an also-ran. Sinha has the combined wind of a working alliance behind him. The confidence level of a campaign is always evident from the behaviour of its campaign. My trusted informant was my driver, who had done four days of duty for Suman Shekhar. Laws of libel prevent this item of an election diary from being more comprehensive. In comparison, the gentle manners and soft demeanor of Shatrughan’s wife, Poonam, who is in Patna Sahib while her husband tries to stoke his party’s fire across the country, evoke admiration. “This is Patna,” says my driver. “I may be in the front of this car and you at the back, but you have to treat me with dignity. I do a much more honest job than the politicians, don’t I?” Right, on all counts.
Drop
The second Patna seat was fated for an anonymous destiny until 16 April, when polling ended in Chapra-Saran, where Lalu Yadav was given a sharp reminder of the temperamental nature of democracy. As we have noted, predictions are perilous, but a candidate gets some hint of the news in his gut during the evening’s post mortem. If the gut begins to feel hollow, it’s bad news. The first clue comes from those manning the polling booths. Party volunteers read the telltale signs as voters arrive and depart. An effective indication of allegiance is which party’s workers a voter has sought assistance from. Unwilling to be messengers of disaster, the volunteers feed a gradual drip of alibis during the conversation. No one can gauge the precise numbers, but experienced politicians know instinctively when they need to take out an insurance policy. Lalu Yadav was lucky, since the spread of elections across three phases in Bihar gave him just enough time to bid for a second constituency. He chose Patliputra not because of its urban segment, but because its rural hinterland is a Yadav stronghold.
Warning: It would be a mistake to write off Lalu. News of his setback in Chapra could instigate a Yadav reaction in his favour. Lalu altered the momentum of his campaign as well after the first phase, shifting gear to attack the Congress as a co-accused in the demolition of the Babri mosque because he discovered that the Congress, while unable to find support from any other community, was attracting the Muslim vote that would have consolidated behind Lalu’s lantern. There is nothing sentimental about an Indian election.
Drop
Our politics does not function with the easy split-and-revive spirit of an amoeba. We talk glibly about UPA partners regrouping effortlessly after the polls. Politics is a human endeavor. Candidates fight elections with a ferocity that non-participants can barely envisage. This ferocity leaves scars. Scars can bleed. Lalu’s outburst against Congress may have been festering for a bit, but the explosion came when Congress put up a last-minute candidate in his second constituency that would do maximum damage to his chances. That was personal.
The “Third Front” and the “Fourth Front” may not agree on much, but they seem to be suggesting that even if they get together to patch a post-poll alliance, they will not accept a Congress Prime Minister. The Left is particularly bitter about Dr Manmohan Singh, who has recently begun to find virtues in those he scorned not too long ago. Precisely one year ago Dr Singh told the country, from the floor of the Lok Sabha, during the debate on the nuclear deal, how delighted he was to say to be rid of the Left, which had apparently treated him like bonded labour. I suppose it is a reasonable trade-off: no harm in returning to bonded labour if the Prime Ministership comes along with it. But Marxist politburos have longer memories than Congress Prime Ministers.
Drop
Much merriment among tense politicians desperate for some light relief over a district magistrate’s decision to arrest and jail an elephant in Uttar Pradesh. Reason? The elephant is Mayawati’s election symbol. Why the jollity in Bihar? Lalu’s symbol is a lantern, a more reliable source of light in many parts of Bihar than the tepid electricity that filters through the faltering grid. A wit wondered what the election commission proposed to do with everyone’s hands on the day of the vote: a hand, after all, is the Congress symbol.
- In Mail Today
-M.J.Akbar
The really swish thing to do for visiting journalists is report Patna by night. No, the story isn’t Patna’s radical transformation into Beirut or Paris or even into the latest version of Baghdad, where the icons of modern civilization, nightclubs and bars, now jostle for attention with American soldiers and native bombs. Patna is a staid and quite conservative city, whose worst vice is the blitzkrieg of mosquitoes that descend upon the visitor at sundown with unerring inevitability. (The relationship between mosquitoes and the local administration is one of mutual respect: they leave each other alone.) The done thing is to sear notepads with observations and conversations on change, report the tinkle of rickshaws through city streets as night cools the city, and tape the guffaw of after-dinner chatter at the paanshop. Five years ago, when Lalu Yadav was famous merely for being a Chief Minister of Bihar rather than a management guru of Harvard, voices sank to a whisper at night as fear of kidnapping emptied Patna’s streets. Normalcy, that collection of minor amusements and sedate details of daily existence, is the big story of this Bihar election. The JD(U)-BJP alliance led by Nitish Kumar is ahead in the battle because the government has restored Patna to the comforting sphere of the ordinary after its extraordinary collapse of confidence during the Lalu regime.
Drop
A hot lively wind was blowing through the bright dust-flecked afternoon when I landed. This is the famous north Indian luh, which seems to boil the body beneath the skin. We drove out of the city, southwards, through the second Lok Sabha constituency of the capital, Patliputra. So far, only one of the city’s two seats, Patna Sahib, was worth a photographer’s attention. Making predictions is always a slippery business, but the consensus is that the contest between Shatrughan Sinha and Shekhar Suman is over bar the voting. Sinha is an authentic star, Suman has the look, feel and language of an also-ran. Sinha has the combined wind of a working alliance behind him. The confidence level of a campaign is always evident from the behaviour of its campaign. My trusted informant was my driver, who had done four days of duty for Suman Shekhar. Laws of libel prevent this item of an election diary from being more comprehensive. In comparison, the gentle manners and soft demeanor of Shatrughan’s wife, Poonam, who is in Patna Sahib while her husband tries to stoke his party’s fire across the country, evoke admiration. “This is Patna,” says my driver. “I may be in the front of this car and you at the back, but you have to treat me with dignity. I do a much more honest job than the politicians, don’t I?” Right, on all counts.
Drop
The second Patna seat was fated for an anonymous destiny until 16 April, when polling ended in Chapra-Saran, where Lalu Yadav was given a sharp reminder of the temperamental nature of democracy. As we have noted, predictions are perilous, but a candidate gets some hint of the news in his gut during the evening’s post mortem. If the gut begins to feel hollow, it’s bad news. The first clue comes from those manning the polling booths. Party volunteers read the telltale signs as voters arrive and depart. An effective indication of allegiance is which party’s workers a voter has sought assistance from. Unwilling to be messengers of disaster, the volunteers feed a gradual drip of alibis during the conversation. No one can gauge the precise numbers, but experienced politicians know instinctively when they need to take out an insurance policy. Lalu Yadav was lucky, since the spread of elections across three phases in Bihar gave him just enough time to bid for a second constituency. He chose Patliputra not because of its urban segment, but because its rural hinterland is a Yadav stronghold.
Warning: It would be a mistake to write off Lalu. News of his setback in Chapra could instigate a Yadav reaction in his favour. Lalu altered the momentum of his campaign as well after the first phase, shifting gear to attack the Congress as a co-accused in the demolition of the Babri mosque because he discovered that the Congress, while unable to find support from any other community, was attracting the Muslim vote that would have consolidated behind Lalu’s lantern. There is nothing sentimental about an Indian election.
Drop
Our politics does not function with the easy split-and-revive spirit of an amoeba. We talk glibly about UPA partners regrouping effortlessly after the polls. Politics is a human endeavor. Candidates fight elections with a ferocity that non-participants can barely envisage. This ferocity leaves scars. Scars can bleed. Lalu’s outburst against Congress may have been festering for a bit, but the explosion came when Congress put up a last-minute candidate in his second constituency that would do maximum damage to his chances. That was personal.
The “Third Front” and the “Fourth Front” may not agree on much, but they seem to be suggesting that even if they get together to patch a post-poll alliance, they will not accept a Congress Prime Minister. The Left is particularly bitter about Dr Manmohan Singh, who has recently begun to find virtues in those he scorned not too long ago. Precisely one year ago Dr Singh told the country, from the floor of the Lok Sabha, during the debate on the nuclear deal, how delighted he was to say to be rid of the Left, which had apparently treated him like bonded labour. I suppose it is a reasonable trade-off: no harm in returning to bonded labour if the Prime Ministership comes along with it. But Marxist politburos have longer memories than Congress Prime Ministers.
Drop
Much merriment among tense politicians desperate for some light relief over a district magistrate’s decision to arrest and jail an elephant in Uttar Pradesh. Reason? The elephant is Mayawati’s election symbol. Why the jollity in Bihar? Lalu’s symbol is a lantern, a more reliable source of light in many parts of Bihar than the tepid electricity that filters through the faltering grid. A wit wondered what the election commission proposed to do with everyone’s hands on the day of the vote: a hand, after all, is the Congress symbol.
- In Mail Today
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Imagine a day of life in the Politician's life
Byline by M J Akbar: Imagine a day of life in the Politician's life
Isn’t it extraordinary that the country with the largest Hindu population is unaware of the most remarkable holiday in Hinduism? The largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, declares a national holiday each year — this year, on March 26 — to mark Hindu-majority Bali’s day of silence, Hari Raya Nyepi Tahun Baru. This beautiful concept has been absorbed into the syncretic Muslim-Hindu culture of that unique nation.
We Indians are not averse to holidays, so we must be averse to silence. Since Hinduism went from India to Indonesia, the concept of Nyepi travelled the same route. Silence has been mislaid in the land of its origin.
The father of modern India, who could never resist the temptation of turning a virtue into a discipline, gave his voice a day off every week. Mahatma Gandhi would keep maun every Monday. If he had a meeting he could not avoid, say with a toff like a Viceroy, on a Monday, he would write down his answers on chits of paper and pass them on. It must have been a satisfying experience for the Lords of the Raj, because the British upper classes value eccentricity as a high art form.
One suspects that Gandhi had more than one reason for his wordless Mondays. One of the most strenuous demands on anyone in Indian public life is the pressure on vocal chords. In the case of Gandhi, it was an instance of unremitting pressure on divine vocal chords. People expected words of pure wisdom to flow each time he opened his mouth. What a relief, then, to take a day off from wisdom and words.
Gandhi surely had a supplementary use for maun. His closest moral relationship was to his conscience, and he used to be in continuous dialogue with his ‘‘inner voice’’. Every Monday he enjoyed the luxury of this conversation without interruption from the stream of supplicants looking for solutions to problems that should never have arisen. Gandhi’s ‘‘inner voice’’, which he called a ‘‘dictator’’, played a significant part in our history. Whenever he ran out of persuasive arguments to rationalize a decision, he turned to his conscience as the ultimate arbiter. Having made him their Mahatma, the others were duly stumped. If you begin to question the conscience of a great soul, then what is left of its mystique?
Such questions, even when leavened with mild levels of cynicism, are irrelevant today. Conscience is no longer a participant in politics. The only modern politician who attempted a weekly holiday for his voice, albeit intermittently, was the charming, urbane Ramakrishna Hegde: what a prime minister he would have made!
Since no government of India would dare risk its tenuous hold on popularity by celebrating silence, perhaps the Election Commission could impose the spirit of Nyepi on our democratic process. It should order a day of silence every week during polling season. Could you imagine the bliss of 24 hours without the prattle of commentators, the flinging dung of accusation and response, the flabby and often tired arguments of spokesmen irritated by the pesky demands of television but fated by their karma to become familiar to millions who can vaguely recall what they look like but have no idea what they said?
There is one potential danger, though: the voter might get confused. So far silence has been the voter’s prerogative, and he has become a master at the art, honing its many nuances to brilliant effect. This is why no one really knows what the outcome of an election will be. A candidate might sense the feel on the ground, but no candidate can afford to believe that he does not have support, or the psychology of defeat will ruin him long before the voter does.
Voters enjoy their right to silence, and protect it with great care from the intrusive opinion-pollwallahs who arrive with question board and notepad to photograph his mind. His expertise in posing for a false photograph, creating an image three frames away from reality, is becoming legendary. The honour of the last word goes to that splendid Malayali warhorse, Karnunakaran, who has been in politics for six decades. When asked who would win, he answered, ‘‘In every constituency whoever gets the most votes will win.’’ Touche, maestro!
On Nyepi in Bali a priest (sengguhu) exorcises an evil force (bhuta) from the island. Come to think of it, that is what the electorate does as well.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
There is nothing called a dull election
Byline by M J Akbar: There is nothing called a dull election
The gem dropped in the middle of a convivial lunch when my friend, apropos of nothing, said: “There is some good news and there is some bad news. The good news is that there is no bad news.”
It has become so fashionable to be mournful about India that we frame current events in the opposite formulation: “There is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is that there is no good news.” My apologies to the professional pessimists, but every Indian election persuades me to remain an optimist. Around half a billion people, spread across a complex ethnic range, from every segment of wealth and poverty, vote to hold authority accountable, and their collective is distilled into the next government: as modern miracles go, this is top of the class.
For me the first day of the Great Indian Poll, henceforth to be known simply as GIP, was good news. From Kerala to Bihar, and through the Red Corridor (as the south-to-north Naxalite belt is now called) the voter challenged lacklustre politics and an overenthusiastic sun to send his and her message to the various shades of the ruling class. But there was a message as well to the insurgents. Voters refused to be intimidated by their guns and mines.
Eighteen died, including half a dozen policemen. Perhaps there would have been fewer dead policemen if the home ministry had not given instructions to them to carry only light arms. It is a bit distasteful to compare death counts, but not too long ago, in a state like Bihar alone, many dozens would die in inter-party, inter-caste and inter-ethnic violence during elections. There was a rather piquant situation at the end of polling on 16 April when Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bihar’s smiling slayer of political foes, demanded a re-poll because “Dalits” and the poor had been attacked with knives in three instances. Frankly, knives are a vast improvement on Bihar’s track record of guns as a means of coercion, but that was not the only catch in the story. It later transpired that in all three cases, Lalu’s supporters had done the attacking. Lalu’s body language was less deceptive than his language. He looked down, if not quite out.
“Extispicy” sounds like a sort of Asian nouvelle cuisine, but it is a form a divination. According to a friend who does a bit of foreseeing herself, it is “Derived from the word for entrails (exta) and the verb to look at (specto), extispicy…is the art of interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals.” Apparently no Greek or Roman general in his senses would venture into battle without a check of the lungs, liver or intestines of a sacrificial animal. As is with so many things, the practice began in Iraq, Babylon to be precise, and travelled to the Greeks and Romans. The word ‘inaugural’, it seems, originates in the extispicy of chicken: ‘ave’ is bird, and ‘auvger’ the reader of the signs.
The entrails of the 124 seats that went to the polls in the first round lie in three regions and one section of the electorate. The three critical areas are Telangana in Andhra Pradesh, Vidarbha in Maharashtra and those sections of Assam that voted. The Congress numbers hinge on how well it can replicate its success in Andhra five years ago. All the opinion polls that give Congress in the region of 150 seats assume that it will get around 25 seats in Andhra. To reach that figure Congress has to do well in Telangana, since Rayalseema is a Chandrababu Naidu stronghold and Chiranjeevi could produce a few surprises in the coastal belt.
In Vidarbha, which has a long horizontal border with Madhya Pradesh, the BJP and Shiv Sena alliance won 10 of 11 seats in 2004, so there was a good chance of anti-incumbency bringing rewards to Congress and its ally Sharad Pawar. A reversal will dip BJP numbers, which is as much a Congress objective as increasing its own. This is one area from where Congress can offset losses incurred in other regions. In Assam the Congress took most of the seats in the last elections, but the reason why the three seats in which voting is taking place in the Northeast is important because they will indicate the way the Muslim mood is shifting, if it is shifting at all. Congress will be decimated in Assam without Muslim support, and the first indications from Assam are that Badruddin Ajmal, the successful businessman who is maverick enough to risk his finances for politics, has done very well against a heavyweight like Santosh Mohan Dev. It is impossible to predict who is going to win, but very possible to see which community is voting in which direction. Assam’s Muslims have deserted Congress for Ajmal. This will have serious implications for the party in a state that it tends to take for granted.
The news from eastern Uttar Pradesh, which also voted, is similar. In 2004 Muslims voted with passion and unity for either Congress or its allies. In this election, their vote is splintering, with the candidate rather than the party being the principal draw. In Varanasi, they have voted for Mukhtar Ansari, a man who they have not seen, for the good reason that he is in prison. Ansari is considered a criminal, but he had the right name. Elsewhere, the vote has gone to Mulayam Singh Yadav or to new parties that are unafraid to say that they will represent only the Muslim interest.
There is nothing called a dull election in India, which is why no one knows the outcome. The vote of 2009 is, as the saying goes, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The opinion polls are nothing but expensive opinions. Just check the entrails.
The gem dropped in the middle of a convivial lunch when my friend, apropos of nothing, said: “There is some good news and there is some bad news. The good news is that there is no bad news.”
It has become so fashionable to be mournful about India that we frame current events in the opposite formulation: “There is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is that there is no good news.” My apologies to the professional pessimists, but every Indian election persuades me to remain an optimist. Around half a billion people, spread across a complex ethnic range, from every segment of wealth and poverty, vote to hold authority accountable, and their collective is distilled into the next government: as modern miracles go, this is top of the class.
For me the first day of the Great Indian Poll, henceforth to be known simply as GIP, was good news. From Kerala to Bihar, and through the Red Corridor (as the south-to-north Naxalite belt is now called) the voter challenged lacklustre politics and an overenthusiastic sun to send his and her message to the various shades of the ruling class. But there was a message as well to the insurgents. Voters refused to be intimidated by their guns and mines.
Eighteen died, including half a dozen policemen. Perhaps there would have been fewer dead policemen if the home ministry had not given instructions to them to carry only light arms. It is a bit distasteful to compare death counts, but not too long ago, in a state like Bihar alone, many dozens would die in inter-party, inter-caste and inter-ethnic violence during elections. There was a rather piquant situation at the end of polling on 16 April when Lalu Prasad Yadav, Bihar’s smiling slayer of political foes, demanded a re-poll because “Dalits” and the poor had been attacked with knives in three instances. Frankly, knives are a vast improvement on Bihar’s track record of guns as a means of coercion, but that was not the only catch in the story. It later transpired that in all three cases, Lalu’s supporters had done the attacking. Lalu’s body language was less deceptive than his language. He looked down, if not quite out.
“Extispicy” sounds like a sort of Asian nouvelle cuisine, but it is a form a divination. According to a friend who does a bit of foreseeing herself, it is “Derived from the word for entrails (exta) and the verb to look at (specto), extispicy…is the art of interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals.” Apparently no Greek or Roman general in his senses would venture into battle without a check of the lungs, liver or intestines of a sacrificial animal. As is with so many things, the practice began in Iraq, Babylon to be precise, and travelled to the Greeks and Romans. The word ‘inaugural’, it seems, originates in the extispicy of chicken: ‘ave’ is bird, and ‘auvger’ the reader of the signs.
The entrails of the 124 seats that went to the polls in the first round lie in three regions and one section of the electorate. The three critical areas are Telangana in Andhra Pradesh, Vidarbha in Maharashtra and those sections of Assam that voted. The Congress numbers hinge on how well it can replicate its success in Andhra five years ago. All the opinion polls that give Congress in the region of 150 seats assume that it will get around 25 seats in Andhra. To reach that figure Congress has to do well in Telangana, since Rayalseema is a Chandrababu Naidu stronghold and Chiranjeevi could produce a few surprises in the coastal belt.
In Vidarbha, which has a long horizontal border with Madhya Pradesh, the BJP and Shiv Sena alliance won 10 of 11 seats in 2004, so there was a good chance of anti-incumbency bringing rewards to Congress and its ally Sharad Pawar. A reversal will dip BJP numbers, which is as much a Congress objective as increasing its own. This is one area from where Congress can offset losses incurred in other regions. In Assam the Congress took most of the seats in the last elections, but the reason why the three seats in which voting is taking place in the Northeast is important because they will indicate the way the Muslim mood is shifting, if it is shifting at all. Congress will be decimated in Assam without Muslim support, and the first indications from Assam are that Badruddin Ajmal, the successful businessman who is maverick enough to risk his finances for politics, has done very well against a heavyweight like Santosh Mohan Dev. It is impossible to predict who is going to win, but very possible to see which community is voting in which direction. Assam’s Muslims have deserted Congress for Ajmal. This will have serious implications for the party in a state that it tends to take for granted.
The news from eastern Uttar Pradesh, which also voted, is similar. In 2004 Muslims voted with passion and unity for either Congress or its allies. In this election, their vote is splintering, with the candidate rather than the party being the principal draw. In Varanasi, they have voted for Mukhtar Ansari, a man who they have not seen, for the good reason that he is in prison. Ansari is considered a criminal, but he had the right name. Elsewhere, the vote has gone to Mulayam Singh Yadav or to new parties that are unafraid to say that they will represent only the Muslim interest.
There is nothing called a dull election in India, which is why no one knows the outcome. The vote of 2009 is, as the saying goes, a mystery wrapped in an enigma. The opinion polls are nothing but expensive opinions. Just check the entrails.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
There is nothing called the 'moderate Taliban'
There is nothing called the 'moderate Taliban'
By M J Akbar
If necessity is the mother of invention then politics is often the father. Barack Obama has invented a phrase that did not exist on January 20, the day he became president. Anxious to win a war through the treasury rather than the Pentagon, he has discovered something called the "moderate Taliban" in Afghanistan. Joe Biden, his vice president, has found the mathematical coordinates of this oxymoron: only 5% of the Taliban are "extremists".
Welcome to Obama's first big mistake.
The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not simply against some bearded men and beardless boys who have been turned into suicide missionaries. The critical conflict is against the ideology of a chauvinistic theocracy that seeks to remould the Muslim world into a regressive region from which it can assault every aspect of modernity, whether that be in political space or the social sphere.
Washington has a single dimension definition of "moderate": anyone who stops an active, immediate war against the US is a "moderate". Let me introduce him to a couple of "moderate Taliban". They are now world famous, having been on every national and international news channel these past few days, stars of a video clip from Swat. Two of them had pinned down a 17-year-old girl called Chand Bibi, while a third, his face shrouded, lashed her with a whip 37 times on suspicion of being seen with a man who was not her father or brother.
Obama should record the screams of Chand Bibi and play them to his daughters as the "moderate" music to which he wants to dance in his Afghan war.
These Taliban are "moderate" by the norms of the Obama Doctrine: they have come to a deal with America through Islamabad. Pakistani troops are not engaged in their medieval haven, nor are American Drones bombing their homes. All that remains, one presumes, is that they are placed on the Pentagon payroll as insurance of their ceasefire.
Perhaps, in their desperate search for moderation, Obama and Islamabad will promote the denial being manipulated into public discourse. The unbearable Swat-lashing video is now described as fake. It would be nice to know the names of the actors who played such a convincing part in the filming of this 'fake'. Chand Bibi has "denied" any such incident. Sure: but was any doctor sent to check the scars?
Such compromise with 'moderation' has also taken place next door, in Afghanistan, under the watchful eye of American ally Hamid Karzai. He has just signed a family law bill which compels Afghan women to take permission from their husbands before going to a doctor, seeking education, or getting a job. The husband has become complete master of the bedroom. Custody of children can only go to fathers or grandfathers; women have no rights. A member of Afghanistan's upper house, Senator Humaira Namati, has called this law "worse than during the Taliban (government). Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam". It makes no difference to the Taliban, of course, that the Quran expressly forbids Muslim men from forcing decisions on their wives "against their will". Karzai's justification is the usual one: politics. He wanted the support of theocrats in the election scheduled for August this year. Under pressure, there is talk of a review but no one is sure what that means.
If it's democracy, it must be "moderate", right?
One can understand a post-Iraq America's reluctance towards wars that seem straight out of Kipling. But we in the region have to live with the political consequences of superpower intervention, and the casual legitimacy that Obama is offering to a destructive ideology will create blowback that spreads far beyond the geography of "Afpak".
Benazir Bhutto and the ISI did not create the Taliban in the winter of 1994 for war against America. Its purpose was to defeat fractious Afghan warlords, and establish a totalitarian regime that would equate Afghanistan's strategic interests to Pakistan's. The ISI conceived an "Afpak" long before the idea reached the outer rim of Washington's thinking. Pakistan worked assiduously to widen the Taliban's legitimacy and would have drawn America into the fold through the oil-pipeline siren song if Osama bin Laden had not blown every plan apart. In some essentials, things have not changed. Pakistan's interests still lie in a pro-Islamabad Taliban regime in Kabul. The "moderation" theory is a ploy to provide war-weary America with an exit point. India's anxieties will be offered a smile in public and a shrug in private.
History is uncomfortable with neat closures. Neither the Taliban nor Pakistan are what they were in 1994: the former is much stronger, the latter substantially weaker. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban this time could be a curtain raiser to the siege of Islamabad.
There is nothing called a moderate lash, or backlash, President Obama.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty
Byline by M J Akbar: When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty
What would have been the reaction of Indians if the shoe thrown by Jarnail Singh at Home Minister P. Chidambaram had actually hit his face?
Sympathy is a sentiment best measured by mercury. A little shake of the thermometer and it can shoot off in either direction. Jarnail Singh did himself a great favour by missing. If the shoe had hit the Home Minister smack in the face, who knows, he may have shared some sympathy.
The errant shoe did far more damage than an accurate one might have done. It served Indian sentiment to a nicety, by delivering a sharp message without causing physical damage. Singh claims that he had never meant to hit the Home Minister in any case, but I am not too sure that he was in control of his actions when he suddenly spurted into the national limelight and Sikh lore. It was an involuntary gesture sparked by a deep, traumatic pain, a signal that the human spirit would not be defeated even when the hopelessness of an individual confronted a massive and even insolent cover-up by authority.
It would be a mistake to assume that this pain has only to do with the sight of two Congress candidates from Delhi who are believed to have been agent provocateurs during the three days of massacre in 1984. What is truly astonishing is the fact that not a single person has been convicted in twenty-five years. The 1984 mayhem took place in full public view. But the police could not find any witness. The obvious explanation is that beneficiaries of the anti-Sikh riots were in power between 1984 and 1999. V.P. Singh, who became Prime Minister in 1989, was a Cabinet Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s Government, and among his close confidants was Arun Nehru, who, according to his detractors, is alleged to have encouraged the rioting with a wink if not a nod. Chandra Shekhar, who toppled V.P. Singh, survived for a few months only with Rajiv Gandhi’s support. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who got his dream job in 1991, was Home Minister during the Sikh riots, and therefore directly responsible. The two Prime Ministers who succeeded him, H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral, were also in power with Congress support. Jagdish Tytler, incidentally, is right when he wonders why the man who was Home Minister while Sikhs were being killed on his doorstep [literally] was never considered unworthy of being Prime Minister.
That takes care of the first 15 years. The NDA Government went through the motions, but either could not, or did not want to, prod the police too hard. The police were safe in their stagnation once the Congress returned to power in 2004. The most important reason for their indifference was that the killings could not have taken place without the active collusion of the police, from constable to officer. Constables on duty literally directed mobs towards Sikh homes and localities in Delhi. Public pressure has ensured that there is some accountability for the Gujarat riots. There has been absolutely none for the Sikh riots, because the system collaborated with politicians to protect the guilty.
When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
Sikhs have had to live with this harsh fact. They had begun to come to terms with it. Many of them voted for the Congress in 2004 and 2008. Jagdish Tytler was elected in 2004. Has the shoe ignited an old wound that might be forgotten but will never heal? The answers, as usual, are more difficult than questions. But this much is certain: the Akalis, who looked dead in the water, have suddenly revived in Punjab. Momentum is a decisive asset in electoral politics.
One problem with sympathy is sustenance. Rajiv Gandhi came to power in the elections after the riots with the most decisive mandate in electoral history. His victory was routinely attributed to a “sympathy wave”. The voter simply eliminated the Sikh massacre from his consciousness, or even condoned it as the inevitable upsurge of anger after the assassination of a national icon, Mrs Indira Gandhi. But once Rajiv Gandhi won, the sympathy evaporated all too quickly. The electorate switched, as if it had paid its dues. The Congress began losing Assembly elections long before Bofors became a drumbeat and then a cacophony [one of the principal conductors of the cacophony was the Speaker of the last Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee].
The Indian voter is a tough bird. He knows his vote can turn an underdog into an overdog, but then waits to find out whether the overdog has become overbearing.
There is only one underdog in the 2009 election: Chiranjeevi in Andhra Pradesh. Conventional wisdom, of which we journalists are the unparalleled masters, places him a poor third in the results’ chart. But those who have seen the crowds swell with pride in his wake as he campaigns do not believe that they have witnessed a complete illusion. He doesn’t have to rent any crowd; people wait for hours in the blazing sun to see him pass. There is something happening which the beady, sceptical and perhaps even septic eye of the worldly wise cannot quite fathom.
Let us merely say that Chiranjeevi is one politician in the current mélange who need not be worried about a shoe hurtling in his direction at a press conference. It is noteworthy that some superstar politicians have already increased the distance between their dais and the first row of journalists. They used to dread the pen once. But so many pens have now been purchased that the only dread left is the shoe. The pen was generally considered mightier than the sword; the shoe is very definitely mightier than the pen. In Britain, no election is complete without a politician being hit by an egg or a pudding on the campaign trail. But that would be passé. Eggs are a bit jokey. The shoe is evocative of thousands of years of popular justice, since it has been used to beat the errant. It projects an intended element of humiliation. The shoe is essentially a non-violent weapon, and we Indians love to believe that we are non-violent. Is throwing a shoe libellous? This could turn out to be a lucrative debate.
I wonder if fresh instructions have already been issued to the elite VIP security squads, and there is now a posse trained to pick the slightest movement of a journalist’s arm towards a shoe at a press conference. No more bending, ladies and gentlemen of the press. You can kowtow of course, for that is what the high and mighty expect, but keep your hands in your laps, please.
What would have been the reaction of Indians if the shoe thrown by Jarnail Singh at Home Minister P. Chidambaram had actually hit his face?
Sympathy is a sentiment best measured by mercury. A little shake of the thermometer and it can shoot off in either direction. Jarnail Singh did himself a great favour by missing. If the shoe had hit the Home Minister smack in the face, who knows, he may have shared some sympathy.
The errant shoe did far more damage than an accurate one might have done. It served Indian sentiment to a nicety, by delivering a sharp message without causing physical damage. Singh claims that he had never meant to hit the Home Minister in any case, but I am not too sure that he was in control of his actions when he suddenly spurted into the national limelight and Sikh lore. It was an involuntary gesture sparked by a deep, traumatic pain, a signal that the human spirit would not be defeated even when the hopelessness of an individual confronted a massive and even insolent cover-up by authority.
It would be a mistake to assume that this pain has only to do with the sight of two Congress candidates from Delhi who are believed to have been agent provocateurs during the three days of massacre in 1984. What is truly astonishing is the fact that not a single person has been convicted in twenty-five years. The 1984 mayhem took place in full public view. But the police could not find any witness. The obvious explanation is that beneficiaries of the anti-Sikh riots were in power between 1984 and 1999. V.P. Singh, who became Prime Minister in 1989, was a Cabinet Minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s Government, and among his close confidants was Arun Nehru, who, according to his detractors, is alleged to have encouraged the rioting with a wink if not a nod. Chandra Shekhar, who toppled V.P. Singh, survived for a few months only with Rajiv Gandhi’s support. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who got his dream job in 1991, was Home Minister during the Sikh riots, and therefore directly responsible. The two Prime Ministers who succeeded him, H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral, were also in power with Congress support. Jagdish Tytler, incidentally, is right when he wonders why the man who was Home Minister while Sikhs were being killed on his doorstep [literally] was never considered unworthy of being Prime Minister.
That takes care of the first 15 years. The NDA Government went through the motions, but either could not, or did not want to, prod the police too hard. The police were safe in their stagnation once the Congress returned to power in 2004. The most important reason for their indifference was that the killings could not have taken place without the active collusion of the police, from constable to officer. Constables on duty literally directed mobs towards Sikh homes and localities in Delhi. Public pressure has ensured that there is some accountability for the Gujarat riots. There has been absolutely none for the Sikh riots, because the system collaborated with politicians to protect the guilty.
When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
Sikhs have had to live with this harsh fact. They had begun to come to terms with it. Many of them voted for the Congress in 2004 and 2008. Jagdish Tytler was elected in 2004. Has the shoe ignited an old wound that might be forgotten but will never heal? The answers, as usual, are more difficult than questions. But this much is certain: the Akalis, who looked dead in the water, have suddenly revived in Punjab. Momentum is a decisive asset in electoral politics.
One problem with sympathy is sustenance. Rajiv Gandhi came to power in the elections after the riots with the most decisive mandate in electoral history. His victory was routinely attributed to a “sympathy wave”. The voter simply eliminated the Sikh massacre from his consciousness, or even condoned it as the inevitable upsurge of anger after the assassination of a national icon, Mrs Indira Gandhi. But once Rajiv Gandhi won, the sympathy evaporated all too quickly. The electorate switched, as if it had paid its dues. The Congress began losing Assembly elections long before Bofors became a drumbeat and then a cacophony [one of the principal conductors of the cacophony was the Speaker of the last Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee].
The Indian voter is a tough bird. He knows his vote can turn an underdog into an overdog, but then waits to find out whether the overdog has become overbearing.
There is only one underdog in the 2009 election: Chiranjeevi in Andhra Pradesh. Conventional wisdom, of which we journalists are the unparalleled masters, places him a poor third in the results’ chart. But those who have seen the crowds swell with pride in his wake as he campaigns do not believe that they have witnessed a complete illusion. He doesn’t have to rent any crowd; people wait for hours in the blazing sun to see him pass. There is something happening which the beady, sceptical and perhaps even septic eye of the worldly wise cannot quite fathom.
Let us merely say that Chiranjeevi is one politician in the current mélange who need not be worried about a shoe hurtling in his direction at a press conference. It is noteworthy that some superstar politicians have already increased the distance between their dais and the first row of journalists. They used to dread the pen once. But so many pens have now been purchased that the only dread left is the shoe. The pen was generally considered mightier than the sword; the shoe is very definitely mightier than the pen. In Britain, no election is complete without a politician being hit by an egg or a pudding on the campaign trail. But that would be passé. Eggs are a bit jokey. The shoe is evocative of thousands of years of popular justice, since it has been used to beat the errant. It projects an intended element of humiliation. The shoe is essentially a non-violent weapon, and we Indians love to believe that we are non-violent. Is throwing a shoe libellous? This could turn out to be a lucrative debate.
I wonder if fresh instructions have already been issued to the elite VIP security squads, and there is now a posse trained to pick the slightest movement of a journalist’s arm towards a shoe at a press conference. No more bending, ladies and gentlemen of the press. You can kowtow of course, for that is what the high and mighty expect, but keep your hands in your laps, please.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
When political friends become opponents
When political friends become opponents
By M J Akbar
The first pattern of this general election has emerged: the really fierce contest is not between traditional foes, but between yesterday's friends, particularly where they shared power. The BJP's sense of betrayal in Orissa is palpable. The more decisive story is within the UPA, where shifting mindsets have ignited a splinter-explosion.
In 2004, the Congress had a single aim: to defeat the BJP. This time, its objectives have doubled. Its parallel purpose in 2009 is to expand its base. Where this expansion is sought at the cost of the BJP there is only minor confusion, created by large-scale intrusions by Mayawati or more modest forays by Mulayam Singh Yadav. The contradiction within the UPA lies in the fact that the Congress space in the Gangetic belt and Maharashtra has been usurped by its allies. The Congress clarified its intentions when it decided that it would not fight the 2009 elections as part of an UPA alliance, but seek partial adjustments as suited its purpose. It has prioritised its opponents from the list of allies.
At the top of the Congress hitlist is the Left, which opposed its heavy strategic tilt towards America. The Congress accepted a humiliating seat-sharing arrangement with Mamata Banerjee in order to maximise the damage to the principal Left citadel. In practical terms, this alliance will not help the Congress very much: it would have retained its six seats even without Trinamool. But the Congress vote could help Mamata Banerjee to poll vault from one seat to 10 or even more.
Curiously, the Congress walked away from similar electoral terms in Bihar, giving a lifeline to the BJP and the NDA. Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan offered the Congress what it had, three seats. The Congress could even lose all three seats, because it is contesting alone. It accepted a double jeopardy in Bihar in order to begin the process of revival.
Ditto in Uttar Pradesh. Mulayam was more generous than Lalu. The Congress had nine seats; it was being offered 17. A Mulayam-Congress deal would have pressurised Mayawati, squeezed the BJP and taken Congress from nine seats into double digits. Double jeopardy again: BSP and BJP will increase their tally now. The collapse of the Jharkhand pact with JMM will be even more beneficial to the BJP. Is there an explanation?
The Congress stuck with Sharad Pawar only because it did not want its chief minister to resign before the Assembly elections in autumn. But Sharad Pawar is also dispensable in the large scheme of things; he blocks Congress growth in the second largest state, just as Mulayam and Mayawati choke it in the largest. In Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi retained his alliance with the Congress only by increasing the latter's seat share to 14 out of 39.
Congress has calculated that when the tears dry and the numbers are counted, the cost will not amount to loss of power in Delhi. It believes it will still emerge as the largest single party, and then be able to cajole or bully the very allies it has damaged by whipping up a 'Stop BJP At Any Cost' campaign.
They would not be politicians if Pawar, the Yadavs and Ram Vilas did not instinctively recognise the dangers of this squeeze. They have responded by squeezing back. Pawar has pre-empted the post-election bullying with a question of his own: if the Congress is so anxious to stop the BJP, why doesn't the Congress support a Third Front government from outside, or even inside, instead of demanding primacy of power in any coalition? In 2004, he and the others were caught flat-footed. This time they have begun a dance to a tune of their composition. Pawar has made it clear that he considers himself a better future prime minister than Dr Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi.
Prakash Karat, who has no debts to pay the Congress and feels betrayed, is categorical that the Left will not support a Congress-led government in 2009. If UPA is the modern coalition in Indian politics, the Marxists are saying that they are all post-modernists now.
Conflicts of regional interest have added a Fourth Front to the Third, but these parties will rearrange themselves after the results. Where conflicts are incompatible, parties like BSP and SP will be in different camps, depending on who has reached where first. Do not imagine that all 'Front' parties have closed the backdoor to the NDA. Indian politicians love the freedom of a two-way street, and some of them are dexterous enough to negotiate any roundabout.
But both the walk and the talk will start only on the afternoon of May 16. Professional politicians pay for opinion polls, and then dismiss those they don't like. This may occasionally reflect an inability to face the unpleasant; but they also know that polls are not necessarily the truth. An opinion poll is what it says it is: an opinion. The fact of the matter is that only facts matter. Till then, ignore the spin, enjoy a rest, but do wake up to vote.
Appeared in Times of India - April 5, 2009
By M J Akbar
The first pattern of this general election has emerged: the really fierce contest is not between traditional foes, but between yesterday's friends, particularly where they shared power. The BJP's sense of betrayal in Orissa is palpable. The more decisive story is within the UPA, where shifting mindsets have ignited a splinter-explosion.
In 2004, the Congress had a single aim: to defeat the BJP. This time, its objectives have doubled. Its parallel purpose in 2009 is to expand its base. Where this expansion is sought at the cost of the BJP there is only minor confusion, created by large-scale intrusions by Mayawati or more modest forays by Mulayam Singh Yadav. The contradiction within the UPA lies in the fact that the Congress space in the Gangetic belt and Maharashtra has been usurped by its allies. The Congress clarified its intentions when it decided that it would not fight the 2009 elections as part of an UPA alliance, but seek partial adjustments as suited its purpose. It has prioritised its opponents from the list of allies.
At the top of the Congress hitlist is the Left, which opposed its heavy strategic tilt towards America. The Congress accepted a humiliating seat-sharing arrangement with Mamata Banerjee in order to maximise the damage to the principal Left citadel. In practical terms, this alliance will not help the Congress very much: it would have retained its six seats even without Trinamool. But the Congress vote could help Mamata Banerjee to poll vault from one seat to 10 or even more.
Curiously, the Congress walked away from similar electoral terms in Bihar, giving a lifeline to the BJP and the NDA. Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan offered the Congress what it had, three seats. The Congress could even lose all three seats, because it is contesting alone. It accepted a double jeopardy in Bihar in order to begin the process of revival.
Ditto in Uttar Pradesh. Mulayam was more generous than Lalu. The Congress had nine seats; it was being offered 17. A Mulayam-Congress deal would have pressurised Mayawati, squeezed the BJP and taken Congress from nine seats into double digits. Double jeopardy again: BSP and BJP will increase their tally now. The collapse of the Jharkhand pact with JMM will be even more beneficial to the BJP. Is there an explanation?
The Congress stuck with Sharad Pawar only because it did not want its chief minister to resign before the Assembly elections in autumn. But Sharad Pawar is also dispensable in the large scheme of things; he blocks Congress growth in the second largest state, just as Mulayam and Mayawati choke it in the largest. In Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi retained his alliance with the Congress only by increasing the latter's seat share to 14 out of 39.
Congress has calculated that when the tears dry and the numbers are counted, the cost will not amount to loss of power in Delhi. It believes it will still emerge as the largest single party, and then be able to cajole or bully the very allies it has damaged by whipping up a 'Stop BJP At Any Cost' campaign.
They would not be politicians if Pawar, the Yadavs and Ram Vilas did not instinctively recognise the dangers of this squeeze. They have responded by squeezing back. Pawar has pre-empted the post-election bullying with a question of his own: if the Congress is so anxious to stop the BJP, why doesn't the Congress support a Third Front government from outside, or even inside, instead of demanding primacy of power in any coalition? In 2004, he and the others were caught flat-footed. This time they have begun a dance to a tune of their composition. Pawar has made it clear that he considers himself a better future prime minister than Dr Manmohan Singh or Rahul Gandhi.
Prakash Karat, who has no debts to pay the Congress and feels betrayed, is categorical that the Left will not support a Congress-led government in 2009. If UPA is the modern coalition in Indian politics, the Marxists are saying that they are all post-modernists now.
Conflicts of regional interest have added a Fourth Front to the Third, but these parties will rearrange themselves after the results. Where conflicts are incompatible, parties like BSP and SP will be in different camps, depending on who has reached where first. Do not imagine that all 'Front' parties have closed the backdoor to the NDA. Indian politicians love the freedom of a two-way street, and some of them are dexterous enough to negotiate any roundabout.
But both the walk and the talk will start only on the afternoon of May 16. Professional politicians pay for opinion polls, and then dismiss those they don't like. This may occasionally reflect an inability to face the unpleasant; but they also know that polls are not necessarily the truth. An opinion poll is what it says it is: an opinion. The fact of the matter is that only facts matter. Till then, ignore the spin, enjoy a rest, but do wake up to vote.
Appeared in Times of India - April 5, 2009
Saturday, April 04, 2009
A right can sometimes become a wrong
Byline by M J Akbar : A right can sometimes become a wrong
I don’t suppose the Christian principal of Nirmala Convent Higher Secondary School has looked at a picture of Jesus Christ lately, although it should be on more than one wall of the institution. If he had, he would have noticed that Jesus had a beard. The iconic prophets of the Old Testament certainly wore beards, at least according to the version of Moses popularised for the world by Cecil B. De Mille and Hollywood: Charlton Heston was given one as he brought the laws of God carved on stone from Mount Sinai. Not all prophets had beards; Solomon had one, but David seems to have shaved regularly.
There is nothing specifically religious about a beard in Judaism, Christianity or Islam. A beard is not a Quranic injunction, or a fundamental commandment of the faith. But some Muslims wear it out of admiration for, and in imitation of, their prophet, whom they adore as the true exemplar of humanity. There are those who keep it as a mark of identity, or even an assertion. Other Muslims keep their chins hirsute out of personal preference; perhaps the jawline is worth hiding from public view. Out of the six great Mughal emperors, Babar had a nicely cut beard; Humayun’s was more wispy (if the vague image I have of him is right); Akbar staked his visual reputation on the luxury of his moustache, as did his son Jehangir; Shahjehan had an immaculate beard which was clearly dressed by a superb royal barber; and only Aurangzeb had a beard that seemed straight out of a need for piety.
When the principal of Nirmala Convent forbade a student, Mohammad Salim, from coming to school in a beard, he was clearly objecting to what he considered was Salim’s aggressive assertion of a Muslim identity in a Christian school. He was, as the Supreme Court judgment confirmed, within the law. Article 30 of the Constitution gives a minority institution the right to determine the culture of its institutions.
Would this decision have become news if Justice Markandeya Katju had said nothing while dismissing the special leave petition in the case of Mohammad Salim versus Principal, Nirmala Convent Higher Secondary School? Salim’s appeal was framed around Article 25, the right to practice his faith. Justice Katju justified the decision by saying, “We don’t want to have Talibans in the country. Tomorrow a girl student may come and say she wants to wear a burqa — can we allow it?”
It was not a jocular aside made in an unguarded moment. It indicated the thinking behind the judgment. It is a bit of a mystery why he equated a beard with the Taliban: every Taliban might have a beard, but every Muslim with a beard is not a Taliban. Indeed, every terrorist does not appear with a beard attached, as the incidents in Mumbai last year indicated.
The judgment opens up an interesting can of minority rights. A large number of medressas in Bengal have Hindu students. Would the maulvis in the medressas be within their rights to demand that every girl come in a veil and every boy wear a beard? Should they make it compulsory for non-Muslim students to fast during Ramadan?
I would hope not. Hindu children in Muslim-run institutions come for an education in the three R’s, reading, writing and arithmetic, not in the fourth R, religion. Does the Supreme Court verdict mean that a Sikh child can be forced to shave if he joins a Catholic school?
It is curious how the most intelligent, balanced and learned among us succumb to stereotypes when faced with another’s faith. Perhaps this story of a lecture I gave at the Warsaw University might be instructive. It was around the time when the French government had stirred a huge controversy by banning the headscarf in state schools on the grounds that France was a secular nation and no symbol of religious identity could be permitted in a state school. The ban, incidentally, did not extend to wearing “small” crosses on a chain on the rather specious excuse that they were symbols of tradition rather than faith.
There are no mosques in Warsaw for the good reason that there are hardly any indigenous Muslims in Poland. There was surprise, therefore, when I mentioned that I had seen a woman wearing a hijab on my way to the University. Who? I had seen a Catholic nun, I explained. No one had ever viewed the nun’s dress as a form of hijab and abaya. The amazement widened to disbelief when I pointed out that the Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mother, would never have got admission in France’s state schools. There is no image, statue or painting, in which she does not have her head covered.
India’s definition of secularism is very different from Europe’s. Between Voltaire and Karl Marx, a huge swathe of Eurasia from the shores of the Atlantic to the edge of the Pacific, has separated state from faith. Indians are not obliged to set aside their faith identities when they go to a government office or a state school. A Sikh can wear his turban, a Muslim may fast during Ramadan, a Brahmin wear his caste thread. Religion is private space. The only requirement is that no religion can impose its will on another. Indian secularism gives a Hindu the right to be pro-Hindu, but not the liberty to be anti-Muslim. And vice versa.
Denial can be counter-productive. Common sense suggests where limits can be drawn. Where an individual’s identity is not intrusive, or an assault on the social good, there is little harm in permitting leeway. One of the more welcome facts about South India is the rising number of quality educational institutions financed with charity donations by Muslims. They stress vocational skills and are therefore in demand. A sizeable percentage of the students are non-Muslim, which is an extremely positive development. But it would take just one incident of a principal of a Muslim institution objecting to a Brahmin’s sacred thread or sandal paste on the forehead for a positive to become a negative. He would be within his legal right to do so; but he would not be in his right mind.
Postscript: As I finished this column the story of a girl being lashed mercilessly by fundamentalists in Pakistan appeared on television. I could not bear to watch or hear the screams of the young woman, who was being held down by her elder relatives while the punishment was being administered: is this brutality, this atrocity, this barbarism the final fate of Pakistan?
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Battle for survival of the fittest unfolds
Battle for survival of the fittest unfolds
By M J Akbar
In a year when the rest of the country has forgotten him, Indian politicians are paying due homage to Darwin on the 200th anniversary of his birth.This general election has turned into a ferocious display of the survival of the fittest. As Darwin told us there is neither emotion nor kinship nor morality as the strong proceed to decimate the weaker of the species. The processes of the laws of political nature are a marvel to behold.
Loyalty is an imbecile’s begging bowl. Those who ask for it do not deserve it. The only measure of a relationship is strength. Where there is a conflict in assessment, the dispute is being put to test without reference to yesterday’s commitments. New alliances are impervious to anything but the calculation of a temporary bargain. Every duel is a cold battle, untouched by past dalliance, or the lure of future romance. Divorce terms are being negotiated without the door being shut on the option of remarriage.
Deals are being made, and abandoned at the first prospect of a higher bid. Trust has been abandoned with impunity in states as diverse in their politics as Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh or Tamil Nadu. Shall we just say that the last tea party of the season has not been held at Jayalalitha’s Poes Gardens. The kettle will keep boiling across the country till the final moment of nomination.
In an exalted tribute to Darwin, we should probably rename the Election Commission and call it the Selection Commission. The survival of the fittest is the law out there as well.
The conventional tools of democratic appeal have faded in the culture of self-preservation as the highest good. There is no point bemoaning the collapse of ideology. Convictions cannot survive in a junkyard auction. Ideology is too far a horizon. This election is shorn of even a new idea. Can you cite a single speech that has floated a new thought?
The irrelevance of every manifesto is obvious in the absurdity of its content. Parties are offering so many things free that we might as well do away with currency. There is insanity in the competition for handouts. How will any future government pay for what is on offer? Who cares? A ruling party’s promises beg the obvious question: why weren’t these offers implemented when the party was in power?
Politicians know that no one is gullible in their tribe. Every election is a Russian roulette: someone will end up with a brain injury if not worse. But their manifestos and speeches imply that they consider the voter to be a gull. But the glitter of the packaging cannot really hide the fact that there is nothing in the package. When the minorities hear that they will get reservations this time around they do not break out in joyous dance. The choice before them is not for the best on offer but the least worst. Their vote will scatter in the fog of uncertainty.
There is only one prominent politician who is not making any deal with any other party. Mayawati has clearly decided that the moment for deals is after the strength of every species has been revealed in the ballot. She is courteous to friends, offering them a decent dinner when they come calling. But she is utterly indifferent to any suggestion on seat adjustments. She wants no kindness and offers no generosity. She is contesting more seats than either the Congress or the BJP. There is a BSP candidate in nearly every constituency. Is this chutzpah? But there just might be a plan beneath the expensive bravado.
A set of statistics might give us a hint of her plan. In 1989 she got 9.41 % of the vote in UP and Congress 27.9. She had 13 seats and Congress 94. Follow the graph through the elections of 1991, 1993, 1996, 2002 and 2007: 9.44 and 17.32; 11.12 and 15.08; 19.64 and 8.35; 23.06 and 8.96; 30.4 and 8.84. She moved from 13 seats to 206; Congress slipped from 94 to 22. It took six elections for the chip effect to hit critical mass.
The obvious contenders are hoping to become prime minister in 2009. But there are three politicians who have time on their side: Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Mayawati. Each would like to do well in 2009 but this is not the year of their dreams. Their objective is to sow the seeds this time around and wait for the next elections which, in their estimate, are less than five years away. Age is with them now. They have to find a way of getting the country behind them.
Evolution, as Darwin pointed out, needs time of course, but human beings did not become the supreme species without intelligence.
Appeared in Times of India - March 29, 2009
By M J Akbar
In a year when the rest of the country has forgotten him, Indian politicians are paying due homage to Darwin on the 200th anniversary of his birth.This general election has turned into a ferocious display of the survival of the fittest. As Darwin told us there is neither emotion nor kinship nor morality as the strong proceed to decimate the weaker of the species. The processes of the laws of political nature are a marvel to behold.
Loyalty is an imbecile’s begging bowl. Those who ask for it do not deserve it. The only measure of a relationship is strength. Where there is a conflict in assessment, the dispute is being put to test without reference to yesterday’s commitments. New alliances are impervious to anything but the calculation of a temporary bargain. Every duel is a cold battle, untouched by past dalliance, or the lure of future romance. Divorce terms are being negotiated without the door being shut on the option of remarriage.
Deals are being made, and abandoned at the first prospect of a higher bid. Trust has been abandoned with impunity in states as diverse in their politics as Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh or Tamil Nadu. Shall we just say that the last tea party of the season has not been held at Jayalalitha’s Poes Gardens. The kettle will keep boiling across the country till the final moment of nomination.
In an exalted tribute to Darwin, we should probably rename the Election Commission and call it the Selection Commission. The survival of the fittest is the law out there as well.
The conventional tools of democratic appeal have faded in the culture of self-preservation as the highest good. There is no point bemoaning the collapse of ideology. Convictions cannot survive in a junkyard auction. Ideology is too far a horizon. This election is shorn of even a new idea. Can you cite a single speech that has floated a new thought?
The irrelevance of every manifesto is obvious in the absurdity of its content. Parties are offering so many things free that we might as well do away with currency. There is insanity in the competition for handouts. How will any future government pay for what is on offer? Who cares? A ruling party’s promises beg the obvious question: why weren’t these offers implemented when the party was in power?
Politicians know that no one is gullible in their tribe. Every election is a Russian roulette: someone will end up with a brain injury if not worse. But their manifestos and speeches imply that they consider the voter to be a gull. But the glitter of the packaging cannot really hide the fact that there is nothing in the package. When the minorities hear that they will get reservations this time around they do not break out in joyous dance. The choice before them is not for the best on offer but the least worst. Their vote will scatter in the fog of uncertainty.
There is only one prominent politician who is not making any deal with any other party. Mayawati has clearly decided that the moment for deals is after the strength of every species has been revealed in the ballot. She is courteous to friends, offering them a decent dinner when they come calling. But she is utterly indifferent to any suggestion on seat adjustments. She wants no kindness and offers no generosity. She is contesting more seats than either the Congress or the BJP. There is a BSP candidate in nearly every constituency. Is this chutzpah? But there just might be a plan beneath the expensive bravado.
A set of statistics might give us a hint of her plan. In 1989 she got 9.41 % of the vote in UP and Congress 27.9. She had 13 seats and Congress 94. Follow the graph through the elections of 1991, 1993, 1996, 2002 and 2007: 9.44 and 17.32; 11.12 and 15.08; 19.64 and 8.35; 23.06 and 8.96; 30.4 and 8.84. She moved from 13 seats to 206; Congress slipped from 94 to 22. It took six elections for the chip effect to hit critical mass.
The obvious contenders are hoping to become prime minister in 2009. But there are three politicians who have time on their side: Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Mayawati. Each would like to do well in 2009 but this is not the year of their dreams. Their objective is to sow the seeds this time around and wait for the next elections which, in their estimate, are less than five years away. Age is with them now. They have to find a way of getting the country behind them.
Evolution, as Darwin pointed out, needs time of course, but human beings did not become the supreme species without intelligence.
Appeared in Times of India - March 29, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Banking on Bankruptcy
Byline by M J Akbar: Banking on Bankruptcy
Washington: Why did the Washington Post downgrade its business section when a crime story is always a great read and the best crime stories of America are now on the business pages? Add this to the many things one cannot understand about American media.
Drop
Who would have thought that the first word might serve as the last word and the first word would be uttered by George Bush? Bush’s plaintive analysis of the Greatest Crisis in Human History was pithy: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” All right, not quite how Keynes or Galbraith might have put it, but elegance was not the issue when the Titanic hit the iceberg. One suspects Bush rather enjoyed the thought that the sucker might suck someone else down.
Drop
We tend to forget that “bank” is the first part of “bankruptcy”. Barack Obama’s problem however seems to be a bankruptcy of ideas. No one I spoke to — and among them were high officials of finance — is yet certain how the most powerful economy in the world turned into a cashless casino. Obama’s solution is to flood the casino with money so that the game does not suddenly stop. How much money? A trillion dollars, and more to come. What happens when the dollar starts to slip to the value of printing ink? China, which has invested heavily in dollars, is getting edgy. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is not impressed by Barackonomics. He writes that Obama is squandering his political capital by replicating a solution even Bush abandoned: cash for trash. The Titanic might leave the dollar on thin ice.
Drop
Ordinary eyes see clearly what expert vision misses. There is rage on the avenues of America. The working class, increasingly bereft of work, was moving in busloads for a few days in search of bankers who had compounded their irresponsibility with the sin of drawing bonuses from dole. The pitchfork, once a weapon aimed at witches, is the symbol of anger. Ed Rollins, a Republican pundit who is a TV regular, reported the public mood succinctly: “They think it’s all occurring because of the greedy bastards on Wall Street and inept officials.”
Inept? Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff was a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Does that say something?
Drop
Citigroup boss Vikram Pandit has a nickname: Pandit the Bandit. He has just begun renovating his offices, at a cost of $10 million. He will get a sub-zero refrigerator as opposed, one presumes, to the above-zero machines available in the country of his origin. He will also get “premium millwork”. No one knows what this means, but I can see Indian chief executives calling up their interior decorators.
Drop
Add a new word to your conversation. Hyperopia. Fear is making people look so far ahead that they cannot enjoy the present.
Drop
Why are American TV anchors so fond of redundancy? Why have they begun to say, particularly on CNN, “take a listen” when “listen” is perfectly serviceable? Is “take” more virile? The only explanation is that TV anchors are so in love with their voices that they will not give up a chance to squeeze an extra three seconds.
Drop
Bankers are not the only fatcats. John Clay of the World Wildlife Fund informs us that the American cat eats more fish each year than the African human being. On top of this the cat eats chicken and beef. Will fatcats be affected by the fact that the American economy has shrunk by 6.3%?
Drop
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich in Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes gallows humour to the gallows. A banker, with a grin and a bonus bag, is standing outside a cave in Afghanistan. An irate Osama berates him: “Find your own cave...”
Drop
Barack Obama has earned, so far, $8,605,429 from book royalties. That’s fair reward for the journey to the White House from a madrasa in Indonesia. Tom Friedman has sold 12 million copies of his flat earth thesis without ever wanting to become President. On purely partisan grounds, including professional kinship and personal friendship, I declare Tom the winner of the royalties contest.
Both are getting ideological competition from a surprising source: John O’Hara. The Grapes of Wrath, a huge indictment of materialism published in the 1930s is the sleeper success of publishing. In 1959 O’Hara wrote to his friend Adlai Stevenson, the great icon of liberals, “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
Drop
Obama got half a million dollars for the children’s rights of his memoirs. But what do children really read? The boy in the lift of my Washington hotel was not old enough to be in double digits. I was impressed: he had a book in his hands. I asked what he was reading. “A kind of funny book.” Title? “Five People Who Died During Sex”. Wasn’t he a bit young for such intellectual stimulation? “Oh,” he replied unfazed, “it’s about a lot of things... Paranoid rulers...” His floor came and he went off. If he understood the meaning of paranoia, sex should be no problem.
Washington: Why did the Washington Post downgrade its business section when a crime story is always a great read and the best crime stories of America are now on the business pages? Add this to the many things one cannot understand about American media.
Drop
Who would have thought that the first word might serve as the last word and the first word would be uttered by George Bush? Bush’s plaintive analysis of the Greatest Crisis in Human History was pithy: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” All right, not quite how Keynes or Galbraith might have put it, but elegance was not the issue when the Titanic hit the iceberg. One suspects Bush rather enjoyed the thought that the sucker might suck someone else down.
Drop
We tend to forget that “bank” is the first part of “bankruptcy”. Barack Obama’s problem however seems to be a bankruptcy of ideas. No one I spoke to — and among them were high officials of finance — is yet certain how the most powerful economy in the world turned into a cashless casino. Obama’s solution is to flood the casino with money so that the game does not suddenly stop. How much money? A trillion dollars, and more to come. What happens when the dollar starts to slip to the value of printing ink? China, which has invested heavily in dollars, is getting edgy. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is not impressed by Barackonomics. He writes that Obama is squandering his political capital by replicating a solution even Bush abandoned: cash for trash. The Titanic might leave the dollar on thin ice.
Drop
Ordinary eyes see clearly what expert vision misses. There is rage on the avenues of America. The working class, increasingly bereft of work, was moving in busloads for a few days in search of bankers who had compounded their irresponsibility with the sin of drawing bonuses from dole. The pitchfork, once a weapon aimed at witches, is the symbol of anger. Ed Rollins, a Republican pundit who is a TV regular, reported the public mood succinctly: “They think it’s all occurring because of the greedy bastards on Wall Street and inept officials.”
Inept? Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff was a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. Does that say something?
Drop
Citigroup boss Vikram Pandit has a nickname: Pandit the Bandit. He has just begun renovating his offices, at a cost of $10 million. He will get a sub-zero refrigerator as opposed, one presumes, to the above-zero machines available in the country of his origin. He will also get “premium millwork”. No one knows what this means, but I can see Indian chief executives calling up their interior decorators.
Drop
Add a new word to your conversation. Hyperopia. Fear is making people look so far ahead that they cannot enjoy the present.
Drop
Why are American TV anchors so fond of redundancy? Why have they begun to say, particularly on CNN, “take a listen” when “listen” is perfectly serviceable? Is “take” more virile? The only explanation is that TV anchors are so in love with their voices that they will not give up a chance to squeeze an extra three seconds.
Drop
Bankers are not the only fatcats. John Clay of the World Wildlife Fund informs us that the American cat eats more fish each year than the African human being. On top of this the cat eats chicken and beef. Will fatcats be affected by the fact that the American economy has shrunk by 6.3%?
Drop
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich in Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes gallows humour to the gallows. A banker, with a grin and a bonus bag, is standing outside a cave in Afghanistan. An irate Osama berates him: “Find your own cave...”
Drop
Barack Obama has earned, so far, $8,605,429 from book royalties. That’s fair reward for the journey to the White House from a madrasa in Indonesia. Tom Friedman has sold 12 million copies of his flat earth thesis without ever wanting to become President. On purely partisan grounds, including professional kinship and personal friendship, I declare Tom the winner of the royalties contest.
Both are getting ideological competition from a surprising source: John O’Hara. The Grapes of Wrath, a huge indictment of materialism published in the 1930s is the sleeper success of publishing. In 1959 O’Hara wrote to his friend Adlai Stevenson, the great icon of liberals, “If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick.”
Drop
Obama got half a million dollars for the children’s rights of his memoirs. But what do children really read? The boy in the lift of my Washington hotel was not old enough to be in double digits. I was impressed: he had a book in his hands. I asked what he was reading. “A kind of funny book.” Title? “Five People Who Died During Sex”. Wasn’t he a bit young for such intellectual stimulation? “Oh,” he replied unfazed, “it’s about a lot of things... Paranoid rulers...” His floor came and he went off. If he understood the meaning of paranoia, sex should be no problem.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Don’t take the Indian voters’ silence lightly
Don’t take the Indian voters’ silence lightly
By M J Akbar
We confuse elections with noise. In truth a great silence descends upon India the moment the Election Commission rings the starting bell. Media amplifies the jangling nerves of a candidate into a scream but how do you cover the silence of the voter?
The anonymity of the opinion poll is one method. But the Indian electorate has now become the most secretive in the world, and if he does not unlock his mind all the figures that emerge from surveys add up to no better than guesswork or, at best, a rough direction-suggester. John Kenneth Galbraith once suggested that the only purpose of economic forecasting was to make astrology look respectable. Some opinion polls make star-gazers seem prophetic. Perhaps, Jayalalithaa knows what she is doing when she asks aspirants for her party ticket to come armed with horoscopes. They are probably a more accurate guide than opinion polls.
The sphinx-like stolidity of the voter can be unnerving, particularly to a candidate who has lived largely in an urban drawing room. The immature can be so easily induced into hysteria. The likes of Varun Gandhi miss an important development of the last decade when they seek support by demonising Muslims. The Hindu voter has matured. He is now enthused by the prospect of a better life, a higher income and the promise of peace within which to enjoy that income. He has contempt for the politician who cannot understand what is so easily apparent to him: that you can either encourage the arsenic simmer of communal violence or you can enliven the throb of an expanding economy. You cannot have both.
This is not to say that we have eliminated aggression from our consciousness or our discourse. That would be self-delusional. Aggression comes particularly easily to the Indian elite, but it is equally wary of any blowback. It has, therefore, devised the strategy of passive aggression, exercising its sectarian or casteist prejudice in verbal assault, always taking care to ensure that the target is not within hearing distance. The elitist anger against Mayawati has nothing to do with alleged corruption. If corruption was a social sin, in Delhi very few ministers would get invited for dinner. Mayawati’s problem is that she is ‘‘not one of us’’.
The prejudice of 10,000 years is not going to disappear after only 60 years of an egalitarian polity.
Mature politicians participate in the clamour of claims and repartee, which is the essential menu of a democratic diet. But they do their real calculations in silence. If you want to understand what Lalu Yadav really thinks of the Congress, ignore the verbiage of the accolades he may occasionally deliver in praise of Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi. Check what he did in silence. He and Ram Vilas Paswan allotted just three seats out of 40 to Congress in Bihar. This was an assessment not by enemies but friends. Mulayam Singh Yadav does not really believe Congress deserves more than six seats out of 80 in UP. Mamata Banerjee had one seat out of Bengal’s 42 in the present Lok Sabha; the Congress had five. She sent the ultimatum in the new alliance and the Congress crumpled. Deve Gowda did not even bother to open negotiations in Karnataka.
Such dismissive treatment is not exclusive to the Congress. Naveen Patnaik did not think the BJP deserved an alliance in Orissa. Where regional parties see value they change their attitude: in Assam, Bihar, Haryana and Punjab for the BJP; in Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand for the Congress.
Never confuse the Indian voter’s temporary maun vrat with the silence of the lambs. This is the silence of tigers, as they pad noiselessly towards their quarry, shattering the air of the jungle only once, with a roar with the final leap towards the prey. When tigers feed only once in five years, the casualty rate can be terrifying.
Appeared in Times of India - March 22, 2009
By M J Akbar
We confuse elections with noise. In truth a great silence descends upon India the moment the Election Commission rings the starting bell. Media amplifies the jangling nerves of a candidate into a scream but how do you cover the silence of the voter?
The anonymity of the opinion poll is one method. But the Indian electorate has now become the most secretive in the world, and if he does not unlock his mind all the figures that emerge from surveys add up to no better than guesswork or, at best, a rough direction-suggester. John Kenneth Galbraith once suggested that the only purpose of economic forecasting was to make astrology look respectable. Some opinion polls make star-gazers seem prophetic. Perhaps, Jayalalithaa knows what she is doing when she asks aspirants for her party ticket to come armed with horoscopes. They are probably a more accurate guide than opinion polls.
The sphinx-like stolidity of the voter can be unnerving, particularly to a candidate who has lived largely in an urban drawing room. The immature can be so easily induced into hysteria. The likes of Varun Gandhi miss an important development of the last decade when they seek support by demonising Muslims. The Hindu voter has matured. He is now enthused by the prospect of a better life, a higher income and the promise of peace within which to enjoy that income. He has contempt for the politician who cannot understand what is so easily apparent to him: that you can either encourage the arsenic simmer of communal violence or you can enliven the throb of an expanding economy. You cannot have both.
This is not to say that we have eliminated aggression from our consciousness or our discourse. That would be self-delusional. Aggression comes particularly easily to the Indian elite, but it is equally wary of any blowback. It has, therefore, devised the strategy of passive aggression, exercising its sectarian or casteist prejudice in verbal assault, always taking care to ensure that the target is not within hearing distance. The elitist anger against Mayawati has nothing to do with alleged corruption. If corruption was a social sin, in Delhi very few ministers would get invited for dinner. Mayawati’s problem is that she is ‘‘not one of us’’.
The prejudice of 10,000 years is not going to disappear after only 60 years of an egalitarian polity.
Mature politicians participate in the clamour of claims and repartee, which is the essential menu of a democratic diet. But they do their real calculations in silence. If you want to understand what Lalu Yadav really thinks of the Congress, ignore the verbiage of the accolades he may occasionally deliver in praise of Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi. Check what he did in silence. He and Ram Vilas Paswan allotted just three seats out of 40 to Congress in Bihar. This was an assessment not by enemies but friends. Mulayam Singh Yadav does not really believe Congress deserves more than six seats out of 80 in UP. Mamata Banerjee had one seat out of Bengal’s 42 in the present Lok Sabha; the Congress had five. She sent the ultimatum in the new alliance and the Congress crumpled. Deve Gowda did not even bother to open negotiations in Karnataka.
Such dismissive treatment is not exclusive to the Congress. Naveen Patnaik did not think the BJP deserved an alliance in Orissa. Where regional parties see value they change their attitude: in Assam, Bihar, Haryana and Punjab for the BJP; in Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand for the Congress.
Never confuse the Indian voter’s temporary maun vrat with the silence of the lambs. This is the silence of tigers, as they pad noiselessly towards their quarry, shattering the air of the jungle only once, with a roar with the final leap towards the prey. When tigers feed only once in five years, the casualty rate can be terrifying.
Appeared in Times of India - March 22, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Out of Balance
Byline by M J Akbar: Out of Balance
The last SMS on my mobile as I left Delhi was from a friend who has been watching cricket — on the field, not in the drawing room — for more than four decades. His SMS was either a cry from the heart or a joke, or possibly a cry from the heart disguised as a joke. It will be safe, he wrote, to conduct the IPL tournament during the elections as almost all the criminals in India will be busy contesting the elections.
Without dissecting the pleasantry with the heavy scalpel of bombast, consider this: if there was a vote on whether the cricket should be postponed or the elections, which way would the electorate go? Why miss out on a contest of skill and transparency when all we get in return is a murky game where a tribe of varied characters spend dubious money in a process that may not even declare a clear victor? At least the 20-20 rules do not permit indecision.
To be fair, democratic politics always needed money as a part-time servant. Unfortunately, the dependency has been reversed. Money now needs politics at its beck and call.
The most powerful people in India used to be elected politicians and the institutionalised bureaucracy. They were not well paid. Salaries have improved of late but are nowhere near private sector scales. However, authority was a proud compensation. There was some vicarious pleasure in seeing the fattest of cats purr before a joint secretary and meow piteously before a minister. Ministers would not deign to give appointments too readily. But equations have changed. Money has become an independent power. Ministers now seek appointments from fatcats in the guise of socialising. The business-political nexus is now celebrated over pleasant evenings. Business expect and get decisions tweaked to suit their interests as a price of their contribution to the political kitty. If there is nothing called a free lunch there is nothing called a free general election either.
Uncertainty over results has fuelled inflationary pressures. The present government purchased an extra year of life by buying MPs during the nuclear debate. The current talk in Delhi is that the next government may need a hire purchase system from inception.
If neither the BJP nor the Congress has enough seats to provide a stable core to the next coalition, Delhi could well become, at least temporarily, the most exciting auction house in the world.
Dr Manmohan Singh is said to have despaired privately of the amount of leeway he had to give his ministers, both in his party and among his partners, to keep his government afloat. But he did nothing about it. I wish I was able to use, at this point, a hapless pun and note that there was no check on cheques. But politicians do not deal in cheques. All transactions are in cash.
A friend has suggested a solution. The only way to kill, or maul, this chequeless corruption is to demonetise all bank notes above 100 rupees. His point, and a valid one, is that if the American economy did not need a currency note above 100 dollars why should the Indian economy? All high value transactions would be by either credit card or bank transfers. High denomination notes had been introduced to facilitate the cash-driven black economy.
The argument demands attention. Sudden demonetisation would, for a start, bring down the circulation of black money since you would have to explain to the authorities how you came into possession of the cash you wanted to exchange for new legal tender. Additionally, bribes in crores would become more inconvenient. You would need trucks for transport and godowns as private safety vaults.
Why do I think there will be no takers for such logic?
Corruption has become a devilishly tangled knot. There is no option except Alexander’s system. You cannot untie its strands. You have to cut with a slash of the sword.
The odour of crime pervades over all systems, but the definition of crime changes. The whole of America is currently enraged at the unthinking greed of the executives of American International Group, the biggest culprit in the financial meltdown. It has decided to pay $165 million in bonuses to executives primarily responsible for the massive mismanagement. The company survives only because it has been gifted $100 billion of taxpayers’ money. The House of Representatives has approved legislation that would impose a 90 per cent surtax on the bonuses. The Senate could get more punitive. All America believes this to be a crime.
And so it is. But it is, to resort to an oxymoron, a legal crime. The bonuses were part of a contract and all payments will be by cheque which is why they can be taxed.
The greed in Delhi is within the safety zone of privacy. There is no tax on Indian corruption.
Our notes proudly flaunt the image of Mahatma Gandhi. Is this the highest form of insult to the Mahatma?
At least Vijay Mallya bought the Gandhi memorabilia with a cheque. There is, I know, an incendiary and possibly unacceptable SMS doing the rounds: Gandhi’s samadhi will now read ‘Hey Rum’, and he will be known as the Old Monk who walks with an air hostess on either side. But I suspect that the old saint in heaven must be blessing Mallya with a toothless grin. At least the money was white, not black.
The last SMS on my mobile as I left Delhi was from a friend who has been watching cricket — on the field, not in the drawing room — for more than four decades. His SMS was either a cry from the heart or a joke, or possibly a cry from the heart disguised as a joke. It will be safe, he wrote, to conduct the IPL tournament during the elections as almost all the criminals in India will be busy contesting the elections.
Without dissecting the pleasantry with the heavy scalpel of bombast, consider this: if there was a vote on whether the cricket should be postponed or the elections, which way would the electorate go? Why miss out on a contest of skill and transparency when all we get in return is a murky game where a tribe of varied characters spend dubious money in a process that may not even declare a clear victor? At least the 20-20 rules do not permit indecision.
To be fair, democratic politics always needed money as a part-time servant. Unfortunately, the dependency has been reversed. Money now needs politics at its beck and call.
The most powerful people in India used to be elected politicians and the institutionalised bureaucracy. They were not well paid. Salaries have improved of late but are nowhere near private sector scales. However, authority was a proud compensation. There was some vicarious pleasure in seeing the fattest of cats purr before a joint secretary and meow piteously before a minister. Ministers would not deign to give appointments too readily. But equations have changed. Money has become an independent power. Ministers now seek appointments from fatcats in the guise of socialising. The business-political nexus is now celebrated over pleasant evenings. Business expect and get decisions tweaked to suit their interests as a price of their contribution to the political kitty. If there is nothing called a free lunch there is nothing called a free general election either.
Uncertainty over results has fuelled inflationary pressures. The present government purchased an extra year of life by buying MPs during the nuclear debate. The current talk in Delhi is that the next government may need a hire purchase system from inception.
If neither the BJP nor the Congress has enough seats to provide a stable core to the next coalition, Delhi could well become, at least temporarily, the most exciting auction house in the world.
Dr Manmohan Singh is said to have despaired privately of the amount of leeway he had to give his ministers, both in his party and among his partners, to keep his government afloat. But he did nothing about it. I wish I was able to use, at this point, a hapless pun and note that there was no check on cheques. But politicians do not deal in cheques. All transactions are in cash.
A friend has suggested a solution. The only way to kill, or maul, this chequeless corruption is to demonetise all bank notes above 100 rupees. His point, and a valid one, is that if the American economy did not need a currency note above 100 dollars why should the Indian economy? All high value transactions would be by either credit card or bank transfers. High denomination notes had been introduced to facilitate the cash-driven black economy.
The argument demands attention. Sudden demonetisation would, for a start, bring down the circulation of black money since you would have to explain to the authorities how you came into possession of the cash you wanted to exchange for new legal tender. Additionally, bribes in crores would become more inconvenient. You would need trucks for transport and godowns as private safety vaults.
Why do I think there will be no takers for such logic?
Corruption has become a devilishly tangled knot. There is no option except Alexander’s system. You cannot untie its strands. You have to cut with a slash of the sword.
The odour of crime pervades over all systems, but the definition of crime changes. The whole of America is currently enraged at the unthinking greed of the executives of American International Group, the biggest culprit in the financial meltdown. It has decided to pay $165 million in bonuses to executives primarily responsible for the massive mismanagement. The company survives only because it has been gifted $100 billion of taxpayers’ money. The House of Representatives has approved legislation that would impose a 90 per cent surtax on the bonuses. The Senate could get more punitive. All America believes this to be a crime.
And so it is. But it is, to resort to an oxymoron, a legal crime. The bonuses were part of a contract and all payments will be by cheque which is why they can be taxed.
The greed in Delhi is within the safety zone of privacy. There is no tax on Indian corruption.
Our notes proudly flaunt the image of Mahatma Gandhi. Is this the highest form of insult to the Mahatma?
At least Vijay Mallya bought the Gandhi memorabilia with a cheque. There is, I know, an incendiary and possibly unacceptable SMS doing the rounds: Gandhi’s samadhi will now read ‘Hey Rum’, and he will be known as the Old Monk who walks with an air hostess on either side. But I suspect that the old saint in heaven must be blessing Mallya with a toothless grin. At least the money was white, not black.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Tale of two nations: Indian order, Pak disorder
Tale of two nations: Indian order, Pak disorder
By M J Akbar
The most dangerous kind of lie is the one that has a tiny bit of truth mixed inside. As maxims go, that is not very well known. Liars do not advertise their wares, and the truthful are easily seduced. The broad space between honesty and deception is occupied by the gullible. To prey on the gullible is the politician's art.
Politicians in power have an advantage. They can segue the clout of office with the credibility of the medium to make a sale. The transaction is propelled by a primary rule of advertising: hearing is believing. Shoddy goods are packaged in the glamour of power. There is a catch, though. Those in power lose their capacity to notice when they have become stale, let alone putrid. Asif Zardari has long crossed his sell-by date.
There is a striking, albeit accidental, similarity between Islamabad and New Delhi. Both have governments on their way out without any certainty about what is on the way in. The difference in the transition is the story of the subcontinent.
The process in India is natural, orderly and bubbling with the excitement of many ambitions. Sharad Pawar is quite correct when he says that every political party can have its own candidate for prime minister. There is no divine right in democracy. Pawar is too astute a professional to have made his bid unless he was confident that the present coalition would need radical restructuring, starting from the top. The Congress has said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will continue; Pawar does not think so. Many hearts are beating more quietly, including within the Congress.
The contenders have been encouraged by the sight of NDA dropping a chunk from the side like an iceberg caught in Orissa heat. Every satrap is keeping all options open. Naveen Patnaik may have left the BJP but he has not joined the Congress or the Third Front. Sensible politicians know only one thing, that no one knows what might emerge when the verdict is read out by the greatest jury in the world, the Indian electorate. The array in India is in sharp contrast to the disarray in Pakistan.
Zardari has always used the dangerous lie to great effect. He used it to reach the president's office and then upgraded a non-executive post into an authoritarian outpost. The same tactic was used with Delhi over Mumbai terrorism; a little truth was fed into a massive cover-up to protect the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He bluffed Nawaz Sharif by promising an independent judiciary and then turned judges into a row of poodles on morphine. They obediently dismissed an elected government in Punjab, triggering off the long march of lawyers and opposition parties on Islamabad and the crisis that woke up the only uncle still sending Pakistan Christmas gifts. A phone call from Richard Holbrooke in Washington diluted the crisis by reversing Zardari's orders and castrating his role in government. It also indicated the degree to which Pakistan has compromised its independence. America has become the principal arbiter of its internal affairs.
Leaders depart when their moment is over in any nation, but in a democracy they depart with dignity. Delhi has, in my estimate, the largest collection of ex-prime ministers in the world - and given the likely evolution of politics in the next few years, more are on the way.
It would be dangerous if the victors and losers of the long march forget that the real danger to Pakistan still comes from the short march. The Taliban is only a short march away from Islamabad. The Taliban did not take Afghanistan in one swoop, but city by city. One is not suggesting that Pakistan is as vulnerable as Afghanistan was in the winter of 1994, or that wars between its politicians resemble the pitched battles between the various claimants to Kabul. But the fall of Swat is not a solution; it has become the fortress of a dangerous problem. Shopkeepers in Peshawar selling 'modern' clothes for women have begun to get the message and are fleeing to other cities. But is there sufficient space for retreat? Peshawar is less than 90 minutes from Islamabad.
A compromise that keeps Zardari in office but out of power is the application of a band-aid when the disease is cancer. Power abhors a vacuum. If it has left Zardari's grasp, then it can only gravitate back to where it has always been more comfortable: in Army headquarters.
Appeared in Times of India - March 15, 2009
By M J Akbar
The most dangerous kind of lie is the one that has a tiny bit of truth mixed inside. As maxims go, that is not very well known. Liars do not advertise their wares, and the truthful are easily seduced. The broad space between honesty and deception is occupied by the gullible. To prey on the gullible is the politician's art.
Politicians in power have an advantage. They can segue the clout of office with the credibility of the medium to make a sale. The transaction is propelled by a primary rule of advertising: hearing is believing. Shoddy goods are packaged in the glamour of power. There is a catch, though. Those in power lose their capacity to notice when they have become stale, let alone putrid. Asif Zardari has long crossed his sell-by date.
There is a striking, albeit accidental, similarity between Islamabad and New Delhi. Both have governments on their way out without any certainty about what is on the way in. The difference in the transition is the story of the subcontinent.
The process in India is natural, orderly and bubbling with the excitement of many ambitions. Sharad Pawar is quite correct when he says that every political party can have its own candidate for prime minister. There is no divine right in democracy. Pawar is too astute a professional to have made his bid unless he was confident that the present coalition would need radical restructuring, starting from the top. The Congress has said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will continue; Pawar does not think so. Many hearts are beating more quietly, including within the Congress.
The contenders have been encouraged by the sight of NDA dropping a chunk from the side like an iceberg caught in Orissa heat. Every satrap is keeping all options open. Naveen Patnaik may have left the BJP but he has not joined the Congress or the Third Front. Sensible politicians know only one thing, that no one knows what might emerge when the verdict is read out by the greatest jury in the world, the Indian electorate. The array in India is in sharp contrast to the disarray in Pakistan.
Zardari has always used the dangerous lie to great effect. He used it to reach the president's office and then upgraded a non-executive post into an authoritarian outpost. The same tactic was used with Delhi over Mumbai terrorism; a little truth was fed into a massive cover-up to protect the Lashkar-e-Taiba. He bluffed Nawaz Sharif by promising an independent judiciary and then turned judges into a row of poodles on morphine. They obediently dismissed an elected government in Punjab, triggering off the long march of lawyers and opposition parties on Islamabad and the crisis that woke up the only uncle still sending Pakistan Christmas gifts. A phone call from Richard Holbrooke in Washington diluted the crisis by reversing Zardari's orders and castrating his role in government. It also indicated the degree to which Pakistan has compromised its independence. America has become the principal arbiter of its internal affairs.
Leaders depart when their moment is over in any nation, but in a democracy they depart with dignity. Delhi has, in my estimate, the largest collection of ex-prime ministers in the world - and given the likely evolution of politics in the next few years, more are on the way.
It would be dangerous if the victors and losers of the long march forget that the real danger to Pakistan still comes from the short march. The Taliban is only a short march away from Islamabad. The Taliban did not take Afghanistan in one swoop, but city by city. One is not suggesting that Pakistan is as vulnerable as Afghanistan was in the winter of 1994, or that wars between its politicians resemble the pitched battles between the various claimants to Kabul. But the fall of Swat is not a solution; it has become the fortress of a dangerous problem. Shopkeepers in Peshawar selling 'modern' clothes for women have begun to get the message and are fleeing to other cities. But is there sufficient space for retreat? Peshawar is less than 90 minutes from Islamabad.
A compromise that keeps Zardari in office but out of power is the application of a band-aid when the disease is cancer. Power abhors a vacuum. If it has left Zardari's grasp, then it can only gravitate back to where it has always been more comfortable: in Army headquarters.
Appeared in Times of India - March 15, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Forward to the 18th Century!
Byline by M J Akbar: Forward to the 18th Century!
Such is the uncertainty of our times that astrologers are searching for politicians almost as fervently as politicians are looking for astrologers. Both sets of professionals want to feed off the other’s core competence. To be fair, politicians are far more unsure than astrologers. Their nervousness is understandable. They have much more to lose.
A good indicator in the circumstances might be called the “Nerve Test”. Who is better at holding his or her nerve, particularly in the edgy matter of negotiating for seat-share in an alliance? There is not a single party of any significance without an ally; indeed, which is not in search of more allies than it has. Leaders like Sharad Pawar have made no secret of their position. Their electoral ally, whoever it may be, is only a stepping-stone to post-poll alliances that could be dramatically different. Pawar is being honest. At least half a dozen others have the same scenario in mind but will not go public because of political or personal inhibitions. They do not know who among them will win the lottery, but each one is clutching a ticket.
Sixty years of democracy has brought Indian politics to the 18th century in one crucial respect. Delhi does not determine the fortunes of the regions; the provinces decide who will hold how much power in an increasingly wobbly Delhi.
The battle for Delhi will begin after we have established who is the new Chhatrapati of the Marathas, the Nawab [or Begum] of Awadh, the Maharaja of Punjab, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Sultan of Mysore, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, the Rani [or Raja] of Jhansi, the Maharaja of Gwalior, of Bharatpur, of Vadodara — and of course discover whether indolent Bengal has fallen to the East India Company or not. It cannot have escaped your attention that the person on the gaddi of the Delhi court has absolutely nothing to say or do about the regional power-plays. He waits to be either retained or replaced. The decision is with others. That is precisely what the fate of the Mughal Emperor was for three quarters of the 18th century.
Regional powers will regroup after 16 May, when their precise strength will become clear, and an epic battle of Panipat will follow to determine the fate of Delhi throne.
In the interests of the nation’s nerves if not the politicians’, we can only hope that the battle of Panipat will be swift, sharp and decisive. It could so easily become a desultory squabble stretching over weeks.
Three politicians with a reputation for both temper and temperament are handling the preamble to the first round in a surprisingly cool manner. Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee can leave a trail of destroyed egos in their wake, but their legislators put up with them because they have the support of the voter. All three have one fixed, non-negotiable target. Otherwise, they are as flexible as the situation warrants or opportunity permits. Mayawati will have nothing to do with Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jaya with DMK and Mamata with the CPI[M]. Their opponents return the sentiment. Politics is personal, as it so often was in the 18th century during the long decline and fall of the Mughal Empire. They have no hesitation in negotiating with any other party, whether it is the Congress or the BJP. P.V. Narasimha Rao had a pact with Mayawati in 1996, a decision from which the Congress has not yet recovered. The Congress has not been able to re-enter the space it vacated for Mayawati, and then lost more. Mamata was in the Congress, broke away, became an ally of the BJP and is now a partner of the Congress [unless there is a last-minute collapse]. Jayalalithaa, who had a sharp remark or two to make about foreigners holding positions of power in India, recalled recently that Mrs Indira Gandhi treated her like a daughter in an effort to work an alliance with Congress. All three are unfazed by questions, or simply indifferent to accusations. That is cool.
Are they also confident? They are, but not over-confident. That is why they are ready to discuss alliances, but not willing to surrender more than a pre-determined number of seats. Mamata will not give the Congress more than 12 viable seats in Bengal, plus a couple which the Congress can never hope to win. Jayalalithaa would never have been as generous to the Congress as the DMK is going to be. Mayawati of course is engineering social alliances rather than partisan ones, in the valid assumption that voters are more dependable than parties.
It is the compelling draw of the voter that has taken Naveen Patnaik out of the NDA. An alliance cannot be frozen in stone. The base of parties either expands or shrinks depending on public perception. If a party feels that the votes have stopped being transferable, or that it is giving more than it gets, then tensions arise. The question in Orissa is whether Patnaik hopes to increase his share by dipping into the Congress vote or the BJP vote — or perhaps both. Such are the questions that make a psephologist rich and an astrologer go crazy. Clarity will come on 16 May when the secrets of the electronic voting machines begin flickering across television screens.
How many seats will the three ladies control in the next Parliament? If you listen to their lieutenants, their tally could be well in excess of a hundred. A more realistic assessment would keep them somewhat short of three figures. Mamata Banerjee’s ambition is to decimate the Left Front in this election and demolish it in the Assembly polls so that she can become Chief Minister of Bengal. Not easy, but no one said politics was nursery rhyme. The other two have been there, done that. Mayawati is the other regional satrap, apart from Pawar, who has announced her bid for Prime Minister. Jayalalithaa never rejects the possibility.
Such is fluidity of fortune in a year of open relationships, bereft of commitment, that even “impossibles” are trying to smuggle themselves into the “possibles” category. Hearts will burn, of course, by the time a winner is declared. The great role models of the “possibles” are Inder Gujral and H.D. Deve Gowda, who became Prime Ministers out of some conjurer’s hat. Dr Manmohan Singh at least had a substantive party behind him. The mavericks might want to remember how brief those Governments were, and the price that the economy had to pay for instability and uncertainty. 2009 is a year when the country needs a stable Government as rarely before.
If politicians do not care, the voter should.
Such is the uncertainty of our times that astrologers are searching for politicians almost as fervently as politicians are looking for astrologers. Both sets of professionals want to feed off the other’s core competence. To be fair, politicians are far more unsure than astrologers. Their nervousness is understandable. They have much more to lose.
A good indicator in the circumstances might be called the “Nerve Test”. Who is better at holding his or her nerve, particularly in the edgy matter of negotiating for seat-share in an alliance? There is not a single party of any significance without an ally; indeed, which is not in search of more allies than it has. Leaders like Sharad Pawar have made no secret of their position. Their electoral ally, whoever it may be, is only a stepping-stone to post-poll alliances that could be dramatically different. Pawar is being honest. At least half a dozen others have the same scenario in mind but will not go public because of political or personal inhibitions. They do not know who among them will win the lottery, but each one is clutching a ticket.
Sixty years of democracy has brought Indian politics to the 18th century in one crucial respect. Delhi does not determine the fortunes of the regions; the provinces decide who will hold how much power in an increasingly wobbly Delhi.
The battle for Delhi will begin after we have established who is the new Chhatrapati of the Marathas, the Nawab [or Begum] of Awadh, the Maharaja of Punjab, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Sultan of Mysore, the Maharaja of Darbhanga, the Rani [or Raja] of Jhansi, the Maharaja of Gwalior, of Bharatpur, of Vadodara — and of course discover whether indolent Bengal has fallen to the East India Company or not. It cannot have escaped your attention that the person on the gaddi of the Delhi court has absolutely nothing to say or do about the regional power-plays. He waits to be either retained or replaced. The decision is with others. That is precisely what the fate of the Mughal Emperor was for three quarters of the 18th century.
Regional powers will regroup after 16 May, when their precise strength will become clear, and an epic battle of Panipat will follow to determine the fate of Delhi throne.
In the interests of the nation’s nerves if not the politicians’, we can only hope that the battle of Panipat will be swift, sharp and decisive. It could so easily become a desultory squabble stretching over weeks.
Three politicians with a reputation for both temper and temperament are handling the preamble to the first round in a surprisingly cool manner. Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee can leave a trail of destroyed egos in their wake, but their legislators put up with them because they have the support of the voter. All three have one fixed, non-negotiable target. Otherwise, they are as flexible as the situation warrants or opportunity permits. Mayawati will have nothing to do with Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jaya with DMK and Mamata with the CPI[M]. Their opponents return the sentiment. Politics is personal, as it so often was in the 18th century during the long decline and fall of the Mughal Empire. They have no hesitation in negotiating with any other party, whether it is the Congress or the BJP. P.V. Narasimha Rao had a pact with Mayawati in 1996, a decision from which the Congress has not yet recovered. The Congress has not been able to re-enter the space it vacated for Mayawati, and then lost more. Mamata was in the Congress, broke away, became an ally of the BJP and is now a partner of the Congress [unless there is a last-minute collapse]. Jayalalithaa, who had a sharp remark or two to make about foreigners holding positions of power in India, recalled recently that Mrs Indira Gandhi treated her like a daughter in an effort to work an alliance with Congress. All three are unfazed by questions, or simply indifferent to accusations. That is cool.
Are they also confident? They are, but not over-confident. That is why they are ready to discuss alliances, but not willing to surrender more than a pre-determined number of seats. Mamata will not give the Congress more than 12 viable seats in Bengal, plus a couple which the Congress can never hope to win. Jayalalithaa would never have been as generous to the Congress as the DMK is going to be. Mayawati of course is engineering social alliances rather than partisan ones, in the valid assumption that voters are more dependable than parties.
It is the compelling draw of the voter that has taken Naveen Patnaik out of the NDA. An alliance cannot be frozen in stone. The base of parties either expands or shrinks depending on public perception. If a party feels that the votes have stopped being transferable, or that it is giving more than it gets, then tensions arise. The question in Orissa is whether Patnaik hopes to increase his share by dipping into the Congress vote or the BJP vote — or perhaps both. Such are the questions that make a psephologist rich and an astrologer go crazy. Clarity will come on 16 May when the secrets of the electronic voting machines begin flickering across television screens.
How many seats will the three ladies control in the next Parliament? If you listen to their lieutenants, their tally could be well in excess of a hundred. A more realistic assessment would keep them somewhat short of three figures. Mamata Banerjee’s ambition is to decimate the Left Front in this election and demolish it in the Assembly polls so that she can become Chief Minister of Bengal. Not easy, but no one said politics was nursery rhyme. The other two have been there, done that. Mayawati is the other regional satrap, apart from Pawar, who has announced her bid for Prime Minister. Jayalalithaa never rejects the possibility.
Such is fluidity of fortune in a year of open relationships, bereft of commitment, that even “impossibles” are trying to smuggle themselves into the “possibles” category. Hearts will burn, of course, by the time a winner is declared. The great role models of the “possibles” are Inder Gujral and H.D. Deve Gowda, who became Prime Ministers out of some conjurer’s hat. Dr Manmohan Singh at least had a substantive party behind him. The mavericks might want to remember how brief those Governments were, and the price that the economy had to pay for instability and uncertainty. 2009 is a year when the country needs a stable Government as rarely before.
If politicians do not care, the voter should.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
A Flawed Idea
A Flawed Idea
By M J Akbar
Indians and Pakistanis are the same people. Why then have the two nations moved on such divergent arcs over the last six decades? The idea of India is stronger than the Indian, and the idea of Pakistan weaker than the Pakistani. Multi-religious, multi-ethnic, secular, democratic India was an idea that belonged to the future; one-dimensional Pakistan was a concept borrowed from the fears of the past. India has progressed into a modern nation occasionally hampered by backward forces. Pakistan is regressing into a medieval society with a smattering of modern elements.
Pakistan was born out of the wedlock of two inter-related propositions. Its founders argued, without any substantive evidence, that Hindus and Muslims could never live together as equals in a single nation. They imposed a parallel theory, perhaps in an effort to strengthen the argument with an emotive layer, that Islam was in danger on the subcontinent. Pakistan's declared destiny, therefore, was not merely as a refuge for some Indian Muslims, but also a fortress of the faith. This was the rationale for what became known as the "two-nation theory". The British bought the argument, the Congress accepted it reluctantly, the Muslim League exulted.
The Indian state was founded on equality and equity: political equality through democracy, religious equality through secularism, gender equality, and economic equity. Economic equality is a fantasy, but without an equitable economy that works towards the elimination of poverty there cannot be a sustainable state. India, therefore, saw land reforms and the abolition of zamindari. Pakistan has been unable to enforce land reforms. India and Pakistan were alternative models for a nation-state. Time would determine which idea had the legs to reach a modern horizon.
The two strands within Pakistan's DNA began to slowly split its personality. The father of the nation, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, thought he had produced a child in his own image, but his secular prescription was soon suppressed. His ideas were buried at his funeral. His heirs began to concede space to mullahs like Maulana Maudoodi who asked, in essence, that if Pakistan had been created to defend Islam, then who would be its best guardians?
After some debate, the first Constitution in 1956 proclaimed Pakistan as an "Islamic" state. It was an uneasy compromise. No one cared (or dared) to examine what it might mean. The principal institutions of state, and the economy, remained largely in the control of the secular tendency until, through racist prejudice, arrogance and awesome military incompetence it was unable to protect the integrity of the nation. The crisis of 1969-1971, and the second partition of the subcontinent, which created a Muslim-majority Bangladesh out of a Muslim-majority Pakistan, forced Pakistan to introspect deeply about its identity.
Perhaps the last true secularist of this Islamic state was the Western-Oriented-Gentleman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power in 1971, preached emancipation from poverty and did not mind a spot of whisky in the evening. By the end of his six years in office, he had imposed prohibition. The ground had begun to shift even before the coup that brought Gen Zia to power.
Zia had the answer to his own question: if Islam was the cement of Pakistan, how could you expect the edifice to survive if the cement had been diluted. Islam became the ideology of the state, not as a liberal and liberating influence, but in its Wahabi manifestation: compulsory prayers in government offices, public flogging, the worst form of gender bias in legislation, the conversion of history into anti-Hindu and anti-Indian fantasy, a distorted school curriculum, with "Islamic knowledge" becoming a criterion for selection to academic posts. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided the excuse for the adoption of "jihad" as state policy as well as a medley of irregular forces, liberally funded by American and Saudi money. The madrassas became not only the supply factories for irregular soldiers, but also the breeding ground for armed bands that are holding Pakistan hostage today.
If it had been only a question of an individual's excesses Zia's death could have been a swivel moment for the restoration of the pre-Zia era, particularly since his successor was Benazir Bhutto. But in the quarter century since his sudden death by mid-air explosion, no one in Islamabad has had the courage to change the curriculum or challenge the spread of the madrassas. There are now over 20,000 of them, with perhaps two million students, most (not all) of them controlled by extremists. Worse, prompted by thoughtless advice, Benazir engineered the rise of the Taliban and helped it conquer Kabul. The children of Gen Zia are now threatening Islamabad. Sometimes a simple fact can illuminate the nature of a society. During the 2005 earthquake, male students of the Frontier Medical College were stopped by religious fanatics - their elders - from saving girls from the rubble of their school building. The girls were allowed to die rather than be "polluted" by the male touch. This would be inconceivable in India.
For six decades, power in Pakistan has teetered between military dictatorship and civilian rule. When the credibility of civilians was exhausted the people welcomed the army; when the generals overstayed their welcome, the citizen returned to political parties. Pakistan is facing a dangerous moment, when the credibility of both the military and politicians seems to have ebbed beyond recovery. How long before the poor and the middle classes turn to the theocrats waiting to take over? The state has already handed over a province like Swat to Islamic rule. Men like Baitullah Mehsud, Mangal Bagh and Maulana Faziullah are a very different breed from the mullahs who have already been co-opted and corrupted by the system. They have a supplementary query which resonates with the street and the village after 9/11: why is Pakistan's army fighting America's war against fellow Muslims? Any suggestion that Pakistan might have become a much larger base for terrorists than Afghanistan ever was is met with the usual response, denial.
On the day that terrorists attacked Sri Lankan cricketers, I had a previously arranged speaking engagement at a university in Delhi before largely Muslim students. I began with the suggestion that every Indian Muslim should offer a special, public prayer of thanks to the Almighty Allah for His extraordinary benevolence - for the mercy He had shown by preventing us from ending up in Pakistan in 1947. The suggestion was received with startled amusement, instinctive applause and a palpable sense of sheer relief.
By M J Akbar
Indians and Pakistanis are the same people. Why then have the two nations moved on such divergent arcs over the last six decades? The idea of India is stronger than the Indian, and the idea of Pakistan weaker than the Pakistani. Multi-religious, multi-ethnic, secular, democratic India was an idea that belonged to the future; one-dimensional Pakistan was a concept borrowed from the fears of the past. India has progressed into a modern nation occasionally hampered by backward forces. Pakistan is regressing into a medieval society with a smattering of modern elements.
Pakistan was born out of the wedlock of two inter-related propositions. Its founders argued, without any substantive evidence, that Hindus and Muslims could never live together as equals in a single nation. They imposed a parallel theory, perhaps in an effort to strengthen the argument with an emotive layer, that Islam was in danger on the subcontinent. Pakistan's declared destiny, therefore, was not merely as a refuge for some Indian Muslims, but also a fortress of the faith. This was the rationale for what became known as the "two-nation theory". The British bought the argument, the Congress accepted it reluctantly, the Muslim League exulted.
The Indian state was founded on equality and equity: political equality through democracy, religious equality through secularism, gender equality, and economic equity. Economic equality is a fantasy, but without an equitable economy that works towards the elimination of poverty there cannot be a sustainable state. India, therefore, saw land reforms and the abolition of zamindari. Pakistan has been unable to enforce land reforms. India and Pakistan were alternative models for a nation-state. Time would determine which idea had the legs to reach a modern horizon.
The two strands within Pakistan's DNA began to slowly split its personality. The father of the nation, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, thought he had produced a child in his own image, but his secular prescription was soon suppressed. His ideas were buried at his funeral. His heirs began to concede space to mullahs like Maulana Maudoodi who asked, in essence, that if Pakistan had been created to defend Islam, then who would be its best guardians?
After some debate, the first Constitution in 1956 proclaimed Pakistan as an "Islamic" state. It was an uneasy compromise. No one cared (or dared) to examine what it might mean. The principal institutions of state, and the economy, remained largely in the control of the secular tendency until, through racist prejudice, arrogance and awesome military incompetence it was unable to protect the integrity of the nation. The crisis of 1969-1971, and the second partition of the subcontinent, which created a Muslim-majority Bangladesh out of a Muslim-majority Pakistan, forced Pakistan to introspect deeply about its identity.
Perhaps the last true secularist of this Islamic state was the Western-Oriented-Gentleman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power in 1971, preached emancipation from poverty and did not mind a spot of whisky in the evening. By the end of his six years in office, he had imposed prohibition. The ground had begun to shift even before the coup that brought Gen Zia to power.
Zia had the answer to his own question: if Islam was the cement of Pakistan, how could you expect the edifice to survive if the cement had been diluted. Islam became the ideology of the state, not as a liberal and liberating influence, but in its Wahabi manifestation: compulsory prayers in government offices, public flogging, the worst form of gender bias in legislation, the conversion of history into anti-Hindu and anti-Indian fantasy, a distorted school curriculum, with "Islamic knowledge" becoming a criterion for selection to academic posts. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan provided the excuse for the adoption of "jihad" as state policy as well as a medley of irregular forces, liberally funded by American and Saudi money. The madrassas became not only the supply factories for irregular soldiers, but also the breeding ground for armed bands that are holding Pakistan hostage today.
If it had been only a question of an individual's excesses Zia's death could have been a swivel moment for the restoration of the pre-Zia era, particularly since his successor was Benazir Bhutto. But in the quarter century since his sudden death by mid-air explosion, no one in Islamabad has had the courage to change the curriculum or challenge the spread of the madrassas. There are now over 20,000 of them, with perhaps two million students, most (not all) of them controlled by extremists. Worse, prompted by thoughtless advice, Benazir engineered the rise of the Taliban and helped it conquer Kabul. The children of Gen Zia are now threatening Islamabad. Sometimes a simple fact can illuminate the nature of a society. During the 2005 earthquake, male students of the Frontier Medical College were stopped by religious fanatics - their elders - from saving girls from the rubble of their school building. The girls were allowed to die rather than be "polluted" by the male touch. This would be inconceivable in India.
For six decades, power in Pakistan has teetered between military dictatorship and civilian rule. When the credibility of civilians was exhausted the people welcomed the army; when the generals overstayed their welcome, the citizen returned to political parties. Pakistan is facing a dangerous moment, when the credibility of both the military and politicians seems to have ebbed beyond recovery. How long before the poor and the middle classes turn to the theocrats waiting to take over? The state has already handed over a province like Swat to Islamic rule. Men like Baitullah Mehsud, Mangal Bagh and Maulana Faziullah are a very different breed from the mullahs who have already been co-opted and corrupted by the system. They have a supplementary query which resonates with the street and the village after 9/11: why is Pakistan's army fighting America's war against fellow Muslims? Any suggestion that Pakistan might have become a much larger base for terrorists than Afghanistan ever was is met with the usual response, denial.
On the day that terrorists attacked Sri Lankan cricketers, I had a previously arranged speaking engagement at a university in Delhi before largely Muslim students. I began with the suggestion that every Indian Muslim should offer a special, public prayer of thanks to the Almighty Allah for His extraordinary benevolence - for the mercy He had shown by preventing us from ending up in Pakistan in 1947. The suggestion was received with startled amusement, instinctive applause and a palpable sense of sheer relief.
Byline by M J Akabr: Arrows in the air
Byline by M J Akbar: Arrows in the air
What happens when Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party woos the Shiv Sena’s patriarch Bal Thackeray with cut glass and high-quality watches? Does Pawar become communal or does Thackeray become secular?
What do Rahul Gandhi and Sharad Pawar discuss when they are on a sight-seeing tour of the excellent work being done in Pawar’s factories? Do they stick to the welfare of the local community and the potential for agro-businesses? Or do they also discuss which one of them could become Prime Minister in case Dr Manmohan Singh thinks, once the votes are in and the verdict is the expected mishmash, that he simply does not feel healthy enough to carry the burden of a Cabinet that consists not of equals but of opposites? I can’t imagine that they would be saying “Pahle aap” to each other. In fact, a close confidant of Pawar, Govindrao Adik, might have indicated what is on the former’s mind by suggesting that Rahul Gandhi should be an apprentice — a sort of trainee Prime Minister — for ten years under Pawar so that he can understand the fibre of the ropes that bind this nation.
Sharad Pawar is not alone in declaring his bid for the Prime Ministership after the 2009 general elections. Lalu Yadav has not hidden such ambitions, although he may be hampered this year by the awkward possibility that his party’s tally may not enter double digits. The thought also seems to have crossed the mind of his Bihari colleague Ram Vilas Paswan. Leaders outside the UPA have been a shade more discreet, but lack of transparency should not mean that they would not grasp at the chair if the mildest glimmer of a chance came their way. H.D. Deve Gowda is surely checking up on the number of auspicious days in May with his astrologer. In fact, the only person not checking up with any astrologer is probably the declared NDA nominee for the job, L.K. Advani, not because he doesn’t the job but because he doesn’t want to be near astrologers.
Compare this with the situation five years ago. The parties that later created the UPA, including the Congress and its electoral allies, entered the last general election without anyone in the starring role of potential Prime Minister. Mrs Sonia Gandhi was hesitant; Rahul Gandhi was too young; and no one else was bothered by the thought.
What does this rash of potential PMs indicate? First, Pawar and leaders of the middle space between the Congress and the BJP seem quite confident that neither the Congress nor the BJP will get enough seats to become the uncontested claimants for the post. It is natural for a politician like Pawar to feel that parties against him — in this case the BJP — will lose. What is significant is that he should feel that the Congress is sinking. If Pawar thought that the Congress would get 160 seats, or even retain what it has in the present Parliament, he would not be wasting his breath or pumping up the expectations of his party.
He is also very certain that without a substantial victory the Congress will not be able to claim the office for Rahul Gandhi. He is equally sanguine that the present combination of the UPA will not get a majority on its own, and therefore will need support from parties in the Third Front as well as in the NDA. He is sure that his personal contacts will make him the magnet for the next coalition.
He is unperturbed by ideology. The principal glue of the UPA was a common desire to keep the BJP out of office, but Pawar has jumped across the BJP and moved to its extreme by reaching out to the Shiv Sena. It will be interesting to see whether this affects Muslim support for him in the coming elections. It would be illogical if it did not, but then logic is not always the main motivator for the electorate.
One reason why this general election seems enervating rather than energising, or even enigmatic, is because of a growing consensus in the political class that it will be a fractured House with no clear winner. The results of 16 May are seen as a starting point on the road to power, not as a destination. The game has begun for the result of the results.
Is there anyone in the current playlist who could change the nature of the post-result game? Yes. Mayawati. This is not the first time that she is being underestimated. No one expected her to get a simple majority in the Assembly elections. Conventional wisdom is giving her around 35 seats. This was the projection made by the Times of India, which had the honesty to call it an opinion rather than fool us, as some media continues to do, by publicising opinion under the mask of an opinion poll. But her formula still has legs. All her Muslim candidates — and she has got some formidable names — will get their community’s vote. Despite talk to the contrary, the state’s Brahmins have not quite deserted her. Some fluctuations in the vote are inevitable from election to election, but there is no evidence that the broad pattern has changed drastically. Her supporters believe that her tally will be closer to 50 than 35. She is also going to damage the prospects of others in a crucial state like Maharashtra where the big boys are not taking her corrosive threat as seriously as they should.
Memories are poor. We tend to forget that the incumbent UPA government was a post-election phenomenon, patched together after the results were declared. The election of Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister was the surprise of the decade. Why should we be surprised if there is another surprise? Further thought: the prospect of the unusual should not blind one to the possible success of the usual. Since we are getting ready for a “surprise” we might be surprised if there is in the end no surprise. All options are possible. There could be many permutations before there will be a combination; and an existing combination could make permutations irrelevant.
The truth is that no one, not even someone whose life has been steeped in electoral politics, really knows what is going to happen on 16 May. We are all shooting arrows in the air, and if one of them lands on the target the lucky chap will pretend he has been an Olympic champion sharpshooter. Until the next elections.
What happens when Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party woos the Shiv Sena’s patriarch Bal Thackeray with cut glass and high-quality watches? Does Pawar become communal or does Thackeray become secular?
What do Rahul Gandhi and Sharad Pawar discuss when they are on a sight-seeing tour of the excellent work being done in Pawar’s factories? Do they stick to the welfare of the local community and the potential for agro-businesses? Or do they also discuss which one of them could become Prime Minister in case Dr Manmohan Singh thinks, once the votes are in and the verdict is the expected mishmash, that he simply does not feel healthy enough to carry the burden of a Cabinet that consists not of equals but of opposites? I can’t imagine that they would be saying “Pahle aap” to each other. In fact, a close confidant of Pawar, Govindrao Adik, might have indicated what is on the former’s mind by suggesting that Rahul Gandhi should be an apprentice — a sort of trainee Prime Minister — for ten years under Pawar so that he can understand the fibre of the ropes that bind this nation.
Sharad Pawar is not alone in declaring his bid for the Prime Ministership after the 2009 general elections. Lalu Yadav has not hidden such ambitions, although he may be hampered this year by the awkward possibility that his party’s tally may not enter double digits. The thought also seems to have crossed the mind of his Bihari colleague Ram Vilas Paswan. Leaders outside the UPA have been a shade more discreet, but lack of transparency should not mean that they would not grasp at the chair if the mildest glimmer of a chance came their way. H.D. Deve Gowda is surely checking up on the number of auspicious days in May with his astrologer. In fact, the only person not checking up with any astrologer is probably the declared NDA nominee for the job, L.K. Advani, not because he doesn’t the job but because he doesn’t want to be near astrologers.
Compare this with the situation five years ago. The parties that later created the UPA, including the Congress and its electoral allies, entered the last general election without anyone in the starring role of potential Prime Minister. Mrs Sonia Gandhi was hesitant; Rahul Gandhi was too young; and no one else was bothered by the thought.
What does this rash of potential PMs indicate? First, Pawar and leaders of the middle space between the Congress and the BJP seem quite confident that neither the Congress nor the BJP will get enough seats to become the uncontested claimants for the post. It is natural for a politician like Pawar to feel that parties against him — in this case the BJP — will lose. What is significant is that he should feel that the Congress is sinking. If Pawar thought that the Congress would get 160 seats, or even retain what it has in the present Parliament, he would not be wasting his breath or pumping up the expectations of his party.
He is also very certain that without a substantial victory the Congress will not be able to claim the office for Rahul Gandhi. He is equally sanguine that the present combination of the UPA will not get a majority on its own, and therefore will need support from parties in the Third Front as well as in the NDA. He is sure that his personal contacts will make him the magnet for the next coalition.
He is unperturbed by ideology. The principal glue of the UPA was a common desire to keep the BJP out of office, but Pawar has jumped across the BJP and moved to its extreme by reaching out to the Shiv Sena. It will be interesting to see whether this affects Muslim support for him in the coming elections. It would be illogical if it did not, but then logic is not always the main motivator for the electorate.
One reason why this general election seems enervating rather than energising, or even enigmatic, is because of a growing consensus in the political class that it will be a fractured House with no clear winner. The results of 16 May are seen as a starting point on the road to power, not as a destination. The game has begun for the result of the results.
Is there anyone in the current playlist who could change the nature of the post-result game? Yes. Mayawati. This is not the first time that she is being underestimated. No one expected her to get a simple majority in the Assembly elections. Conventional wisdom is giving her around 35 seats. This was the projection made by the Times of India, which had the honesty to call it an opinion rather than fool us, as some media continues to do, by publicising opinion under the mask of an opinion poll. But her formula still has legs. All her Muslim candidates — and she has got some formidable names — will get their community’s vote. Despite talk to the contrary, the state’s Brahmins have not quite deserted her. Some fluctuations in the vote are inevitable from election to election, but there is no evidence that the broad pattern has changed drastically. Her supporters believe that her tally will be closer to 50 than 35. She is also going to damage the prospects of others in a crucial state like Maharashtra where the big boys are not taking her corrosive threat as seriously as they should.
Memories are poor. We tend to forget that the incumbent UPA government was a post-election phenomenon, patched together after the results were declared. The election of Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister was the surprise of the decade. Why should we be surprised if there is another surprise? Further thought: the prospect of the unusual should not blind one to the possible success of the usual. Since we are getting ready for a “surprise” we might be surprised if there is in the end no surprise. All options are possible. There could be many permutations before there will be a combination; and an existing combination could make permutations irrelevant.
The truth is that no one, not even someone whose life has been steeped in electoral politics, really knows what is going to happen on 16 May. We are all shooting arrows in the air, and if one of them lands on the target the lucky chap will pretend he has been an Olympic champion sharpshooter. Until the next elections.
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