High and Happy in Diwali Democracy

Byline by M J Akbar: High and Happy in Diwali Democracy

Rio de Janeiro or Munich might enjoy a reputation wrapped in an advertising package, but there is no country in the world that can compete with India when it comes to celebration. Others might turn a weekend into a party and pat themselves on the back, but when an Indian gets into a festive mood, time goes to sleep for ten days, and then wakes up most reluctantly. Who knows when Diwali begins, although we do have a reasonable idea of when it ends. It ends the day you stop losing money.

Of course we Indians celebrate in the name of religion, but then there is very little in India that remains untouched by faith. We even gamble in honour of the gods. Our holidays are an extension of religious tourism. Religion works in India because we make it so much fun, whether it be the worship of Ganapati Bappa Moriya in the west or Ma Durga in the east.

The rest of the world may have forgotten that “holiday” is a combination of “holy” and “day”, but not Bengal — except that Bengalis do not believe in the singular. Celebration is plural in every sense: spread over days, and enjoyed in the togetherness of family, friends and that special kinship which makes a metropolis like Kolkata a swirling city of community affections. London and New York might also claim that they do not pause between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but there is a great difference. In the West, every home comes alive but the city falls silent. In Kolkata the city becomes home and home becomes the city. If you have not experienced Durga Puja in Bengal, you have missed a true human wonder. There is no way that Pranab Mukherjee or Mamata Banerjee would be anywhere except at home during “Pujo”. I hope I am not accused of exaggeration and excess, but I daresay that even a Marxist atheist like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee smiles during Durga Puja.

And if this mood is burnished with special effects, all the better. Rome might boast that it is the ultimate destination in religious tourism, but Rome offers the visitor the political and cultural history of the West in its stones. Kolkata, in comparison, is a young city with less-than-impressive British buildings, many of them seemingly unpainted since the British left. The art of Rome is a magical explosion of individual genius. The art of Durga Puja is a magical explosion of anonymous genius. Each image is beautifully crafted with the commitment of adoration, but the Kumartuli craftsman knows that the Goddess will go away, along the river, just as we all will one day. Rome preserves marble; Kolkata preserves the moment.

Why then has the Election Commission, a body of intelligent, experienced and utterly reasonable men, become such a party pooper? We may no longer have the highest opinion of our politicians, but, as full-fledged Indian citizens, Arunachal, Haryana and Maharashtra’s politicians have as much right to a happy Diwali as the rest of us. Instead, they have been condemned to the misery of a campaign. For half the lot the anguish will end in a death pang when they get the results and learn that they have lost. They also know that only the very stupid or the very arrogant are confident of victory. This is why all political parties were happy when the Election Commission decided to declare the results on 22 October, nine days after polling on 13 October. When a suggestion was floated that the results could be announced earlier, politicians pleaded with the commissioners to announce their fate only after Diwali — no one wanted bad news during the festival. This is what is known as a perfect Indian solution.

Many reasons have been offered for the sharp paucity of women candidates in the lists of all parties, the most frequent being gender bias. This is true. If you removed women who became candidates because they are children or wives of Big Shots, their percentage would shrink further. Men still cannot get over the fact that theoretical rights have to be converted into practical numbers. But one would not be surprised if some women with the potential to become candidates decided, sensibly, that this was too much of a mug’s game in any event, so why waste a Diwali on such a barren objective?

Moreover, women are not very good at distributing liquor. The Mumbai excise department has passed an order that all bars in the city must report their daily sales till election time, so that it can judge, from any sharp hike, whether a candidate has been especially hospitable. I don’t know what kind of bureaucracy the excise department has, but it is obvious that it has absolutely no clue about how elections are managed.

There are two ways in which happiness is spread prior to an election. The first is through the distribution of cash to the straggle of sycophants charmingly described as “party workers”. These chaps start getting their handouts from the moment a candidate files his nomination. The “party worker” spends about a quarter of this cash for the benefit of the voter, and the rest on numerous benefits for himself. This might or might not include an investment in the joys of liquor. The more conscientious family types might, for instance, buy better furniture for their homes, or a larger refrigerator to keep the wife happy. But it is safe to assume that business at Mumbai’s bars will show a sharp rise from Friday the 25th of September and maintain a steady upward incline till 12 October. If the excise department asks the bar owner for an explanation the latter will attribute it to the Diwali spirit.

The disbursal of alcohol to the masses, a well-recognised facet of Indian democracy, does not happen through bars. Bars charge a huge premium. No candidate, however well-heeled, has money to waste. Bottles are purchased wholesale and distributed in the camouflage of dusk. The excise department should check out wholesale merchants, not retailers.

The spirit of Diwali will demand an extra supply of benevolence in this election season. For the political class in Maharashtra and Haryana, Diwali will come early. Many of you have probably become cynical enough to describe our system as Diwala [the Hindi word for bankrupt] Democracy, but I remain faithful to the system. Happy Diwali Democracy!

This austerity is all an eyewash

This austerity is all an eyewash
By M J Akbar

That inimitable 20th century intellectual and sleuth Hercule Poirot listed an unforgivable sin in his moral code: overlooking the obvious. The media dust storm over that hobgoblin, austerity, stimulated surely by low TV ratings as much as by high-mindedness, has obscured the most obvious of questions. Who got the money?

Travel is a minor percentage of government expenditure, but every little drop helps, presumably, in a drought. However, where is the money saved by humbler travel going? Has a special austerity fund been created to collect drops from the comfort-squeeze on politicians? Or is the government, which picks up most of the bill, simply retaining the money in its common fund, the bulk of which goes to pay the salaries of babus? As is well known, the biggest beneficiary of government is government.

The cost of MPs’ tickets, as well as for pricey hotels when Parliament committees go on tour, is paid by Parliament. Have the chairman of Rajya Sabha and speaker of Lok Sabha placed the unspent cash in escrow, reserved for the families of farmers still committing suicide in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh?The Congress Party pays for Rahul Gandhi’s travels, as indeed is appropriate. When he takes a private plane, the bill is in more lakhs than one can readily count. When he takes a train, the bill is zero, at least to the Congress: government pays for security. Does the Congress pass on what it has saved to rabi-wrecked farmers in south Bihar? One does not know. A little illumination would be most helpful.

Two and half ministers (Nandan Nilekani has Cabinet status but not ministerial position) were ordered out of five-star hotels and into more modest bhawans. (One of them promptly told the world that innumerable friends had offered him a place to stay. He should dine out as often as he can. The third law of Delhi’s physics says that the number of friends varies in direct proportion to your perceived level of power.)

Between the three of them they are now saving a minimum of Rs 60,000 a day. Have they adopted a village in Jharkhand with the money now denied to five-star hotels? Or is this cash further strengthening their already well-nourished personal bank accounts? Here is a subversive suggestion. Why not make them contribute an amount equal to their hotel bills to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund? If they can spend Rs 60,000 a day out of their pockets for a comfortable bed and a cup of coffee, they should be able to spare a bit of small change for the drought-afflicted. The truly outstanding irony, of course, is that when the three get their official homes, they will enter a world beyond the dreams of the most luxurious hotel in the world.

America’s cabinet members would salivate at the prospect of acres of plush lawn in the heart of Washington, around a glorious colonial bungalow fitted with contemporary amenities, as a personal playground. Chinese cabinet members would probably get jailed for fantasy, or shot for corruption. The Indian minister has a home that is the envy of avarice. Who pays for it? Actually, you. If you pay tax, that is.

Grandeur is the only definition of power in Delhi, and bitter feuds erupt over a potential address. Any successful social climber in impoverished India’s capital will ask for your address before he, and of course she, asks for your name. But it is only fair to note that if there is one man who has a right, in this system so heavily layered by hypocrisy, to raise the issue then it is the man who set off the austerity fireworks. Pranab Mukherjee has, without any doubt, the worst bungalow in Delhi. He was allotted this residence when an MP and has not changed it despite being entitled to far more glamorous acreage. That is one reason why when Pranab Mukherjee talks, his peers listen. The second reason is that he runs most parts of the government.

Now for a little, closely guarded secret. The big ticket in travel costs is not high in the sky but closer to the ground. Somebody should tot up the fuel costs of the thousands of very austere cars allotted to ministers, MPs and bureaucrats. Fuel theft is rampant. A single decision would ensure greater comfort, cheaper fuel, environment protection and less corruption: replace the lot with CNG vehicles. Will anyone do this? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is ‘no’. If you want to know the identity of a murderer in any Agatha Christie-Poirot page-turner, answer a simple question. Who got the money? If you want a way out of the complex labyrinths of Delhi, ask the same question.

Appeared in Times of India - September 20, 2009

In a class of his own

Byline by M J Akbar: In a class of his own

Shashi Tharoor has to be the only Indian who was safer last week in Liberia than in Jaipur. After all, no one in Liberia had asked for his resignation, but the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, a fellow Congressman, did suggest that the best option for Tharoor would be to resign. I cannot think of a previous occasion when a Congress Chief Minister has asked for the head of a Union Minister from his own party. This must, incidentally, also be the first time that a politician is in trouble because of a misplaced sense of humour.

We must all be familiar with the cause célèbre by now. For the few who need a reminder, it began with a newspaper report that Tharoor was waiting for his luxury ministerial home in Delhi not in the limited comfort of a state government hostel, as is the norm, but in a five star hotel. He was not alone; his senior minister in external affairs, S.M. Krishna, was waiting in an even grander suite, although not in the same hotel. Pranab Mukherjee, the guardian angel of the nation’s finances, was not amused, and publicly reprimanded both for self-indulgence at a time when large parts of the nation had been hit by drought. This must be another first in the history of politics: a foreign minister being told by the finance minister to get out of his starry abode and live it down it like the rest. Krishna moved out and on. Tharoor, who is so confident about his celebrity status that he informs his fan base about every minor detail of his life through a tweet [is twitter the plural of tweet?], was a trifle superior about his enforced downgrade, pointing out he could walk into the home of any well-heeled friend et al.

The austerity flu, defined by some cynics as an epidemic caused by the humbug, left upper class airline seats indisposed as well. Ministers were told to shift from the front of the plane to the back, where mortals sit. Tharoor, provoked by another kind of bug, a bugbear called the unremitting journalist, decided that he too would descend to “cattle class in solidarity with all our holy cows”. Ha ha ha ha and ha. Since India is the land of the holy cow, a literal translation of the term did not go down very well with either the politician or the voter. But a qualified apology by Tharoor sent on Thursday-Friday midnight through his favourite medium of public communication, the cellphone, might make things worse for him.

It may be irregular to place analysis before proposition, but it could be helpful in this case. I do not think it is Tharoor’s fault that he just cannot fathom the mindset of India. He has lived too long within the mindset of New York where holy cows are neither holy nor cows. Second, he has been a bureaucrat in the United Nations, where a tin ear comes with the salary. The first law of democracy is that what you say is less important than what the other person hears.

He clearly suffers from regional-language-deficiency syndrome as well, another symptom of those who have lived abroad for too long. He observed, for instance, that he had been told that his comments sounded worse in Malayalam than in the Queen’s English. If he had been more familiar with Malayalam he would have realised it himself. How do we know this? Tharoor said as much on his tweet. You never recognise how much you expose yourself when entranced by the spotlight. He added: “I now realize I shouldn’t assume people will appreciate humour. And you shouldn’t give those who would willfully distort your words an opportunity to do so.”

Not quite. Indians do have a sense of humour, but it is not the same sense as the humour of western sensibility. Nor is it a question of distortion. Every civilisation has its own mores, and it is not a matter of being better or worse than any other. The West lives by its own laudable values and its separate definition of sensitivities. India has a different code; China a third one. No one is better than the other, but we have to live by the code that is acceptable to a particular civilisation. There is an in-built screen that monitors, in Indian conversation, anything that might be construed to be offensive, even if you did not mean to be offensive.

Gehlot may not be able to compete in the Queen’s English, but he recognises the line over which you cannot step. You cannot rule India without understanding India. This is why the Congress has publicly distanced itself from a cultural implant on the body politic that it cannot fully comprehend.

It might be worthwhile to remember, also, that economy class on Indian commercial flights is not full of peasants and workers. Only two per cent of India travels by air, so this mode of travel has not even extended yet to the middle class. There are more movers and shakers in the back of the Indian jet than in the front, and when they are moved, they can shake anyone out of a chair.

Since Liberia is not yet a holiday destination for Indian VIPs, even for those with expansive bank accounts, the junior minister for external affairs was obviously there on work. I hope he did not have to make an austere journey in cattle class.

Vedic spirituality loses out in times of dishonesty

Vedic spirituality loses out in times of dishonesty
By M J Akbar

It is common knowledge that the best way to argue your case in Delhi is through a suitcase. The capital's punters can neither control their laughter nor restrain their envy at the news that you can find your way to 44 acres of prime land in Marxist Bengal through an ayurvedic massage. Napoleon remarked that an army marches on its stomach. Lenin's Bengali army also marches on its stomach, as long as it is prostrate.

While corruption in rising India has moved with internet speed into the 21st century, Kolkata's deals are still in the Vedic age. Land worth Rs 20 crores was, it seems, handed over to promoters of a cottage-style resort called Vedic Village on the edge of Bengal's capital for just Rs 1 crore. The process began in 1997; the promoters added to their expanse by purchasing adjoining plots from villagers through the usual means of a cheque placed in one hand while the other arm was being twisted. It took a disputed football match on August 23 this year for rural anger to explode into arson: this is Bengal. Facts began to rise from the ashes. The police discovered a cache of arms in the sylvan peace of Vedic spirituality, although 'discovery' might be too optimistic a word. There is little that the Calcutta Police does not know, even if there is little that it does about what it does know.

The acquired land included wakf property. The good news, then, is that Bengali corruption is transparently secular. The names involved - Abdur Rezzak Mollah, Manabendra Mukherjee (ministers in severe need of ayurvedic treatment), promoter Rajkishore Modi, Rashid Ali Mondal, Sibnath Banerjee, Nuruddin Gazi - are a hymn to Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. Greed is clearly the most powerful antidote to communalism: Death to capitalism! Long live greed! Greed is also non-partisan. An MLA from Mamata Banerjee's party has also been named, which might explain her silence. Trinamool and CPI(M) finally agree on something. Even Ms Banerjee, a spartan if ever there was one, cannot contest elections from the straw tower of an ashram.

Unsurprisingly, the local media, which for a decade had no time for investigations of its own, gave maximum play to ministerial ayurvedic treatment. Was the issue, then, greed or hypocrisy? In Delhi, where few claim to be paragons of personal virtue, the spa-story would have been a snigger on a news cycle. In Kolkata, it has wafted through innumerable conversations with that sardonic twitch that only a Bengali can manage to perfection.

Indian Marxists are trapped in a systemic flaw: hyper-honesty is inconsistent with ''bourgeois democracy''. The cost of a Lok Sabha election now runs into multiple millions. Political parties are not profit-earning corporations. Their overhand collections are a miniscule proportion of need; the balance is met by underhand arrangements. The CPI(M) tries a finesse through institutional collection, but even this needs middlemen. Money is a trading currency; there has to be a trade. Ministers get involved. Is it any surprise if this nexus extends to a periodic back-rub? Land is repeatedly at the centre of Bengal's controversies because traditional industry has been driven into the doldrums between stagnant management and self-centred unions. Since new arrivals like IT czars will not ladle out cash, the only value left to exploit is land. Land belongs either to institutions that can be manipulated, or insecure villagers who can be bullied into temptation.

Corruption is the preferred means of the get-rich-quick lobby (if the poor were corrupt, they would not remain poor). But is greed the only motivation? Greed is not India-specific. The extent of our venality may have a supplementary reason. We are, by temperament, a short-cut people. We do not like waiting for due process, whether in a project or towards a destination. Indian corruption could well find an explanation in Indian traffic. We instinctively seek a faster way, whether on a cow-clogged country lane or an incomplete super highway. The Indian driver does not believe in the sober limitations of take; he is a devotee of overtake. Cars do not create traffic jams; drivers with hyper libidos do.

The long cut is demeaning to the Indian ego. A Delhiwallah measures his importance by the number of short cuts he has wangled. A favour is a measure of both the benefactor's value and the beneficiary's influence. Some people wait till the last minute only to prove that time will wait for them.

The system creates hurdles since it knows that short-cutters will pay to cross them. Bribes feed the system; the system therefore knits a framework for bribes. A hundred rupees to a traffic cop climbs towards millions at the top. If you are really lucky, the ayurvedic massage comes free.

Appeared in Times of India - September 13, 2009

Indian Muslims want jobs, not Iftar

Byline by M J Akbar: Indian Muslims want jobs, not Iftar

As was once noted by a garrulous, if not very innovative, politician, India has, just now, a Hindu President, a Muslim Vice President, a Sikh Prime Minister and a Christian President of the ruling Indian National Congress. I cannot recall Mrs Pratibha Patil, or indeed any of her Hindu predecessors, inviting Hindu politicians, diplomats, and an assortment of Delhi’s Hindu A-listers to a splendid Diwali dinner financed by the Government of India. Nor has Dr Manmohan Singh gathered the capital’s elite Sikh brethren for a commemorative repast on Baisakhi, when the Khalsa was born. Mrs Sonia Gandhi does not throw Christmas parties for archbishops, bishops, Christian politicians, diplomats and educationists at state expense. Just to be clear: thank God they don’t.

So why does the Vice President of India invite the great, as well as the not-so-glorious, Muslims for an Iftar party, as he did on 7 September? It needs to be stressed that this is not the Vice President’s personal decision. His office is merely the conduit for a Government ritual, which is why the state picked up the tab for the evening at Hyderabad House.

As if this was not enough, the Ministry of External Affairs has this year muscled its way into this food-heavy tribute to tokenism. It hosted an Iftar party on 9 September. I hope the various Government VIPs, led by S.M. Krishna and Shashi Tharoor, did not turn up wearing skull caps in order to look holier than thou. It would have made a quaint picture, though.

The reason for such artless public artifice is quite simple. Delhi’s political establishment takes the Iftar guests, mainly bundled from the local chapter of the Indian Muslim elite, for fools. It treats them as saps who need no more than an annual dinner to keep them onside. Perhaps the establishment knows what it is doing. Experience has probably shown that this “elite” is packed with people who use Ramadan as an opportunity for taking something from Government, rather than giving all they can to the poor. The Indian Muslim elite gets taken for a ride because it enjoys the prospect of being an establishment jockey in the race to nowhere.

The state-sponsored syrupy Iftar drama is not unique to the present lot; every administration in memory has staged it, including that of the BJP-heavy NDA. This patronising smear has become so institutionalised on the Delhi calendar that no one dares to query its legitimacy, need or rationale.

Perhaps the most cynical patron of Iftar parties was the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, who insisted on hosting them even after presiding over the destruction of the Babri mosque. Maybe he was not the most cynical: worse surely were the Muslim acolytes who fawned around him, desperately trying to catch his eye to seek some reward for their presence. Rao was good at throwing handouts towards anyone who had the look of a beggar.

The Ministry of External Affairs, to my knowledge, has till date kept itself aloof from the politics of Iftar. But some well-lit spark seems to have finally heard what the rest of Delhi has known for many years: that ambassadors of Muslim countries in particular, and the non-aligned world in general, have been offered a very cold shoulder, tantamount to indifference, while the mandarins have been running around building strategic relations with the West. Someone got the bright idea that Muslim envoys would start smiling again the moment they received a gilt-edged invitation to an Iftar.

Indian Muslims need jobs and justice, not Iftar parties.

Ambassadors need diplomatic engagement throughout the year, not an early dinner on one evening.

But the behaviour of Muslim elites across the world invites the cynicism of others. The exploitation of Ramadan has now become a deeply-rooted practice among the well-off. If the Islamic brotherhood wants to understand why so many Muslims nations are in such a mess, they only need to examine how their elite have upended the holiest month of the faith, one in which they are meant to turn to Allah and practise the highest values of the Quran — piety, charity, self-denial, sacrifice — and turned it into a month-long tamasha. Id ul Fitr, which is the culmination of Ramadan, means the Id of Fitra, or charity. Self-centred Muslims will surely be astonished to learn that hundreds of verses in the Holy Quran urge charity and kindness towards the underprivileged. There is not a single verse that permits you to cheat your way out of Ramadan. The Quran understands the need to postpone fasting due to travel or ill-health; it does not provide any leeway for hypocrisy.

There are Muslims who escape self-denial by reversing the clock. They turn the evening Iftar into a breakfast, rather than a breaking of the fast, and while away the night till the pre-dawn Sehri, which becomes a virtual dinner. Then they sleep through most of the day, waking up in the afternoon. This is a perversion of the spirit of Ramadan. If all it took to fast was to convert day into night, then we could have fasted through the year.

My friend Arif Mohammed Khan has brought to my notice a hadith, or tradition, in which the Prophet said, “The son of Adam has basic rights on three things: a house to live in, a piece of cloth to cover his body, a loaf of bread and water”. Zakat is a Quranic principle of the faith. It is an Islamic duty to provide for the impoverished. All you have to do is count the millions who are hungry in Muslim countries and societies to understand how far contemporary Muslims have travelled from their ideal. Muslims seek great merit by reciting the Quran during Ramadan, for this is the month in which Allah’s message was sent to our world. They need to spend more time trying to understand what the Quran’s verses mean.

When the young try to defy death

When the young try to defy death
By M J Akbar

The ageing rarely die suddenly, for they do not take life for granted. The young, particularly when armoured by success, laugh away danger, until danger has the last laugh.

Youth is more than a statistic. Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was 60 years old, when the tired are supposed to retire. But he had a youthful demeanour, the energy, spirit and mind of a man who saw more horizons before the inescapable grave or pyre. Risk is built into such a mentality, for the young, by definition, dismiss death as a distant fact. Madhavrao Scindia and Rajesh Pilot, like YSR, saw themselves as young, and behaved with the joie de vivre of youth. Scindia, in another fated helicopter, challenged the elements, and Pilot, driving a light car, pressed his foot too hard on the pedal. YSR must have smiled in disdain when told that the weather would be inclement. Optimism is synonymous with youth. Pessimism, or its boring cousin, realism, is for the depressed and the faint-hearted.

An election victory is an unreliable measure of a politician's value. Rajasekhara Reddy's triumph in 2004 might not have been possible without the hard work he put in, but it could be argued that it was Chandrababu Naidu's loss as much as Reddy's gain. One of the by-laws of democracy is that every good Opposition needs the full cooperation of a terrible government to succeed. The true worth of a politician is known only by his ability to manage the tedious task of administration. Victory prances on banners; there are no headlines for good governance. It is visible only after five years, during the battle for re-election. Rajasekhara Reddy was not without his share of controversy; his opponents accused him of corruption. But he won in 2009 because he understood that the key to delivery is what has been done for the poor. Fashionable economists sneer at populism. Any sensible politician prefers popularity to a certificate from the World Bank.

His death is a blow to his government, obviously, but an incalculable loss to his party, for he twice delivered the fulcrum of the Congress presence in the Lok Sabha. Factionalism was hardly the sole sin of the Andhra Congress, but it was the rampant crime. If you have any sympathy for the ruling party you don't want to know what the Reddys and Raos used to be up to. Their humiliation at the hands of N T Rama Rao intensified the civil wars, rather than calming them down; and the elevation of P V Narasimha Rao as the first prime minister from the state did nothing to improve the culture of this fractious lot. All that Rao did as prime minister was to add another faction to the Andhra Congress, this one headed by a less-than-competent son.

Rajasekhara Reddy found both ends of the solution. He won an election, without which factionalism cannot be controlled; and then he assuaged hunger on all sides. It is a stupid victor who believes in winner-take-all.

The danger before the Congress is obvious. A localized earthquake has scattered what had been built; rebuilding is so much more difficult, since moorings have been displaced. It will be virtually impossible for any successor to maintain internal peace, because we are back to a party of lesser-known equals. Irrespective of who gets the job - the suave and senior S Jaipal Reddy, the rugged veteran K Rosaiah who has served in every Congress government since 1978 and has been made caretaker leader, or the young and ambitious Reddy son Y S Jagan - there will be resentment among those who have been denied. Jagan has created a media sprawl across the state that could be particularly useful in any factional feud, and he will also consider himself beneficiary of the sympathy accruing from his father's early death. No politician considers himself an untested peer's inferior. Since only victory in an election will establish the next chief minister's credentials, and there are more than four years left for that, you can do your own political math.

Rajasekhara Reddy was a Christian; a close relative of his is a modern evangelist. He went to Jerusalem on a thanksgiving pilgrimage after his election victory. As a believer, perhaps he should have remembered that there is an angel of death. When you feel young, you never really worry if the angel leaves its visiting card behind after a close call. Three years ago Rajasekhara Reddy got into a hired helicopter at Giddalur and flew into dense cloud and incessant rain over Srisailam. His pilot dropped height, and his chief security officer studied maps he happened to be carrying to discover the nearest point at which a helicopter could land. The angel is rarely cheated twice. And the young are not invincible.

Appeared in Times of India - September 06, 2009

The wisdom of Dharma

Byline by M J Akbar: The wisdom of Dharma

Wisdom has a great advantage over philosophy. It is simple. Philosophy is so often tortured by the human mind that its meditations become a maze. We become so enraptured by the complexities of the maze, so fascinated by its labyrinths that we forget that we once had a destination. Wisdom is a straight line: it is the shortest distance between question and answer.

Such thoughts were prompted by an email from a friend at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, who sent a verse from the Mahabharata:

“Dharmam yo badhate dharmo na sa dharmah kudharmkah;
avirodhattu yo dharmah, sa dharmah Satyavikrama.

Any dharma [way of life, or religion], that violates another’s dharma is not true dharma. It is kudharma, or bad dharma. That dharma which flourishes without harming the interest of others is indeed the true dharma, O Satyavikrama!”

Why has this fundamental principle of Mahabharata, an essential text of Hinduism, been ignored by those organisations who seek a political philosophy for the nation in the name of Hinduism? It is possible that politicians are so busy doing their politics that they remain ignorant of the faith that they so readily profess. But that would be a kind interpretation. Most politicians ignore morality because cynicism has made them amoral.

As the swirl continues over ideological and personality clashes among the titans who were born in a colonised India divided into some six hundred pieces, and won freedom with just one division, new questions are emerging from previously silent corners of memory. Incidentally, it is important for our perspective to remember that India was not a single political entity under the British, and even the creation of a federal polity after the Government of India Act of 1935, by which the Princely States sent representatives (nominated rather than elected) to the same legislature in Delhi as British India, did not make them part of a single political unit.

An old query has crept out of the historic woodwork. Mahatma Gandhi framed his concept of freedom around the dream of a Rama Rajya. How could he expect Muslims, who did not believe in Lord Rama, to relate to a Rama Rajya? Was Gandhi communal as well?

It may seem anachronistic now but Gandhi was convinced that politics without religion was immoral. He believed that faith provided the moral compass essential for a lifetime’s journey through public service. Gandhi demanded the highest virtues from his disciples, extending not only to non-violence and financial honesty but also celibacy. There were not many takers for the last; and you might have reason to ask whether he had not confused an ashram with a freedom movement. But Gandhi’s commitment to religion did not mean commitment to a single religion. In his Rama Rajya, every faith had full freedom and complete equality. His prayer meetings were not just about his beloved Gita; there was space for the Holy Quran, the Bible and the Guru Granth Saheb as well. He could never understand why anyone should misunderstand this; and it pained him when opponents misrepresented him, sneered at his gentle idealism and challenged his pacifism with the undisguised threat of violence. Lord Rama was an ideal, an image that communicated easily with the majority of India. But there was no aggression in his concept of divinity, and there was always equal space for the other. The Mahabharata was his favourite text, from which he learnt the true meaning of dharma. Gandhi’s Rama Rajya was a realm of harmony, not a continual battlefield.

The post-Gandhi Congress abandoned “Rama Rajya” for at least three reasons: the term had become a negative with Muslims; Nehru was uncomfortable with a religious idiom; and you needed to be as morally secure as Gandhi to promise a “Rama Rajya”. But why did the RSS and the BJP, who wanted a “Hindu India”, shy away from Gandhi’s formulation? Because their ideal was different from Gandhi’s. Paradoxically, the “Hindutva” forces had modelled themselves on Pakistan: they wanted to treat Indian Muslims and Christians in precisely the same way that Pakistan was treating its Hindus and Christians, as second-class citizens.

Whether such politics gets you votes or not is beside the point. The relevant factor is that such thinking is antagonistic to the idea of India as a modern democracy. Discrimination on the basis of faith is what happens in a theocracy, not a democracy. You have to be extremely stupid to imitate any neighbour with suicidal tendencies.

What Gandhi understood in 1919, when he launched his first major political onslaught against the British Empire, is as valid nine decades later. India can flourish only in a spirit of conflict resolution, and not through conflict escalation, or conflict perpetuation. The young are far more clear-sighted about this than the middle aged or the old, for the young have learnt from the mistakes of their fathers.

A simulated debate has been whisked up about the takeover of the BJP by the RSS: the two were never apart. The issue is not whether BJP will shift gear towards a philosophy of conciliation, but whether the RSS will do so. They could not hope for a better starting point: the Mahabharata.

Needed most: A strong Opposition

Needed most: A strong Opposition
By M J Akbar

Any democracy is hobbled without an Opposition. Are we condemned to replicate Haryana at the national level — where a government wheezes, gasps and limps triumphantly to the finish line because there is no other horse in the race?

Since the BJP has not finished its debate on 1947, it will be some time before it reaches 2009. With the Left neutered, and the Middle chasing its tail around a cemetery, what options does a voter have in the meantime?

The Left, which could have been taken seriously had it taken itself seriously, reminds one of an anecdote which should be better-known. The ever-punctual Comrade Gorbachev, who huffed and puffed so hard that he brought the whole Soviet house down, was once late for a meeting with a French delegation. He explained to his guests that he had been delayed by a problem in agriculture. When did the problem begin, asked the solicitous French. ‘‘In 1917,’’ replied Gorbachev.

Any democracy is hobbled without an Opposition. Are we condemned to replicate Haryana at the national level — where a government wheezes, gasps and limps triumphantly to the finish line because there is no other horse in the race? Haryana is not a particularly reassuring template. In the turbulence between 1967 and 1972, its ‘aya ram-gaya ram’ defections strategy infected democracy so badly that it destroyed the credibility of non-Congress parties. It is remarkable that Bhajan Lal, who once defected to the Congress with all his MLAs and the office typewriter, should still be a player in state elections. Now that he has allied with Mayawati, he can legitimately claim to have seen everything, been everywhere. She must have been a child when he was chief minister. However, nostalgia does not buy votes. Votes go to those who sell a future, not those who re-brand the past.

Nature and politics have one thing in common: they both abhor a vacuum. In some states, the Congress is doing its best to create its own Opposition. It has firmly rejected another pathetic overture from Lalu Prasad Yadav. Yadav has so much egg on his face that he can breakfast continuously from now till the next assembly polls. In Maharashtra, the Congress has begun to taunt its ally Sharad Pawar as the genie who bottled the sugar and opened the cap on price rise. The Congress is relishing a stalemate in which its primary intention is to make its mate look stale. Pawar’s reaction would make a sheep look sheepish.

It is useful to remember, however, that some sheep have been known to change their clothing at the opportune moment. The Congress has, cleverly, taken out some insurance by investing in the next generation: the daughters of Pawar and P A Sangma have a much better equation with Rahul Gandhi than the fathers have with Mrs Sonia Gandhi.

Although Congress numbers are less than half of what Rajiv Gandhi carried into the Lok Sabha in 1985, the comatose inertia of Opposition parties has convinced most Congress leaders that they can replicate Rajiv Gandhi’s achievement in the general elections of 2014. Moreover, the Opposition leaders are two decades older, some having fought their last battles and others in their penultimate round, while their leader will be fresh and 44.

More important, the major Opposition parties seem trapped in either geographical or ideological limitations, with their cadre having become part-asset and part-liability. Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose political skills should not be underestimated in a crisis, and who put them on display in a feisty performance in the last Lok Sabha session, has been unable to grow outside Uttar Pradesh. The ‘Yadav’ alliance with Lalu slips continually on the quicksand of the latter’s temperament. The BJP has reinforced its image of conflict by serial civil wars that are breathtaking for their irrelevance. The Left has slipped to a point where its candidate lost her deposit in a Kolkata seat because no one in Bengal understands what Buddhadev Bhattacharya represents anymore, apart from a fibreless diet of good intentions.

The situation is akin to 1985-86. But nature, averse to a vacuum, then threw up an individual to serve as a catalyst. A V P Singh can only emerge from the centre of the spectrum. A claimant from Right or Left has to re-position himself. Atal Bihari Vajpayee became acceptable because he stepped left of the BJP on social issues, and right of the Marxists on economic policy. That is where the sweet spot of Indian politics is located.

Individual dynamics require special circumstances, not to mention the heavy propulsion of hidden political boosters. Singh succeeded because he had terribly long arms; he held the CPM by one hand, and the BJP by the other, while he reinvented himself as an honest politician, sympathetic to minority concerns. It required too much heavy engineering and the end product was so unstable that it kept Delhi politics off-balance for a decade.

History does not repeat itself, but does it imitate itself? The answer will take a while.

-Appeared in Times of India - August 30, 2009

Death at Harrods

Byline by M J Akbar: Death at Harrods

Can this possibly be true?

On 25 August 1909 the New York Times reported: “As a result of the death of Miss Helenora Catherine Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple, sister of Sir Edward Graeme Elphinstone-Darlrymple, during a dry shampoo with carbon tetrachloride at Harrods Stores, charges of manslaughter were yesterday preferred at Westminster Police court against Mr William H. Eardly, the manager of the department, and Miss Beatrice Clarke, one of the assistants. Miss Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple went to Harrods for a dry shampoo on July 12. She was warned she might feel faint…”

I am not doubting the fact of death [why isn’t there an Agatha Christie novel called Death at Harrods?]. Or that Sir Edward had enough clout with the local constabulary to send William and Beatrice up for trial. But could anyone really have had a surname like Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple? The answer must be yes. The London correspondent of New York Times might have been forgiven for getting a manslaughter mixed up with a mere tort. But no news editor would have used his copy again if he got a multi-barrelled name from the British aristocracy wrong. And if his spelling is as accurate, then William the writer of many many books has surely forgotten an “r” in his Dalrymple.

Can you rule an Empire with short names? Roman Emperors kept their names terse, but since they promoted themselves into gods, anything above three syllables became unwieldy on the common tongue. How do you worship a Fotheringay-Fotheringay Phipps? You don’t. You just throw bread rolls at him at Drone’s off Piccadilly.

The British ruling class was not alone in puling on the appendices to a Helenora [itself an affected extension of the more working class Helen, I presume]. If you wrote the full name of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, there would not be much space left over for this column. Reasons for longitude varied with culture. The Mughal dad could not stop praising his newborn prince; each additional word was an adjective. When the prince grew up, killed his siblings and plonked himself on the throne, he could not stop exalting himself and added a few pearls of admiration to the already long-winded paragraph that was his name.

The British yardstick for yardlong names was different. It was advertisement of the family tree. So Helenora was telling you that the family fortunes were established by old Darlrymple, and further fattened by Elphinstone and Horn. I don’t suppose they included the failures in-between the genealogical line. There may have been a Barrington, for example, who sold the family castle to pay off his gambling debts at White’s, but you could not keep him on par with Elphinstone, who slogged hard in the East India Company and bought back a country estate. And if Elphinstone turned out to be the chap who governed Bombay in the old days, then it was precisely the kind of family connection that would impress Scotland Yard when you wanted to file a case for manslaughter.

Logically, the lower down you go on the social order, the shorter your surname becomes. The John Carpenters, not to mention the John Smiths, must have been mere Johns until the era when labour was treated with dignity.

In India, Hindu caste names are a dead giveaway of origin. But those promoted to prominence by the British happily traded in the past for the present. “Chowdhury”, or “Malik”, are titles and thus used across the religious divide. Indian Muslims, technically, did not have caste names, but if you were an Ansari from east Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, you could be more or less sure that there was artisan blood in your veins.

Helenora’s tragic appointment with her hair-dresser took place in 1909. Five years later the First World War began. It was after this Great War, with its millions upon millions of wasted lives, that the pomposity of the British aristocracy began to dribble away, in my estimation. They had killed working class boys on an unimaginable scale in order to preserve their class-ridden societies, and a reaction was inevitable. The English lords had ruled beyond their sell-by date, just like the Mughals a century earlier. The barrels began to drop off the surnames, slowly, piecemeal, but surely. What could not be destroyed by war was surely erased by the floating notes of P.G. Wodehouse’s laughter, although Wodehouse was also in love with the class he teased out of existence. Even a Tobias prefers to call himself a Toby these days. He probably would not get a restaurant booking in the name of “Tobias”.

Harrods is still there, of course. But if parts of the great English store occasionally look like side lanes of a Cairo bazaar, there is a valid explanation. It is now owned by an Egyptian who is convinced that his son was bumped off by the British secret service because he was about to marry Diana, Princess of Wales and ruin the bloodline of the British ruling class for ever. Harrods customers are now more likely to be Asian tourists than the British gentry. The only institutions with long names now are law firms. [There is much anguish in Yale at this moment because the American law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy are not hiring. I would have used an ampersand in the law firm names, but I can’t find one on my keyboard.]

The old order giveth way to the new.

Jaswant's Jinnah: Dividing India to save it

Jaswant's Jinnah: Dividing India to save it
By M J Akbar

Two questions frame the Jaswant-Jinnah controversy. Was Jinnah secular? Do Nehru and Patel share the “guilt” for Partition?

Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah has certainly provoked much ado about something, but what is that something? Would this biography have made news if the author had not been a senior leader of the BJP? The world of books requires some chintan, but fortunately no chintan baithak. Who or what, then, is the story: Jinnah or the BJP? The two are not entirely unrelated, for the BJP was formed as a direct consequence of the creation of Pakistan. The umbilical cord still sends spasms up its central nerve.

Two questions frame the Jaswant-Jinnah controversy. Was Jinnah secular? Do Nehru and Patel share the “guilt” for Partition?

Neither question is new, but both have an amazing capacity for reinvention. Jawaharlal’s great socialist contemporary, Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, fired the first broadside in “The Guilty Men of Partition”: the title implied that responsibility extended beyond Jinnah. But since his purpose was polemical, the frisson was lost in forgotten corners of libraries. Jaswant Singh had little to gain from searching for some good interred with Jinnah’s bones, and a bit to lose.

For most of his life, Jinnah was the epitome of European secularism, in contrast to Gandhi’s Indian secularism. Jinnah admired Kemal Ataturk, who separated religion from state. Gandhi believed that politics without religion was immoral; advocated equality of all religions, and even pandered to the Indian’s need for a religious identity. He never publicly disavowed the ‘Mahatma’ attached to his name, even when privately critical, and understood the importance of ‘Pandit’ before Nehru, although Jawaharlal was not particularly religious. Azad had a legitimate right to call himself a Maulana, for he was a scholar of the Holy Book.

Jinnah was not an agnostic. He was born an Ismaili Khoja, and consciously decided to shift, under the influence of an early mentor, Badruddin Tyabji, from the “Sevener” sect, which required obedience to the Aga Khan, to the Twelvers, who recognized no leader. But his faith did not include ritual. He might have posed in a sherwani to demand Pakistan, but he would have considered ‘Maulana Jinnah’ an absurdity. In the end, Jinnah and Gandhi were not as far apart as the record might suggest. Jinnah wanted a secular nation with a Muslim majority; Gandhi desired a secular nation with a Hindu majority. The difference was the geographical arc. Gandhi had an inclusive dream, Jinnah an exclusive one.

The Indian elite tends to measure secularism in pegs: Hindus who do not drink are abstemious, and Muslims who do not are puritan. Jinnah was content with a British lifestyle. He anglicized his name from Jinnahbhai to Jinnah, and dropped an extra ‘l’ from Alli. His monocle was styled on Joseph Chamberlain’s, and he even had a PG Wodehouse moment during a visit to Oxford, when he was arrested for frolics on boat race day (he was let off with a caution; he would never spend a day in jail). His secret student dream was to play Romeo at Old Vic, and only an anguished letter from his father (“Do not be a traitor to your family”) stopped him from becoming a professional actor. He relaxed after a tiring day by reading Shakespeare in a loud resonant voice.

His politics was nationalist and liberal. His early heroes were Phirozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji (known as “Mr Narrow-Majority” because he was elected to the House of Commons in 1892 by only three votes). After he met Gopal Krishna Gokhale at his first Congress session in 1904, his “fond ambition”, in Sarojini Naidu’s words, was to become “the Muslim Gokhale”. No one could have hoped for higher praise than what Jinnah received from Ms Naidu: “...the obvious sanity and serenity of his worldly wisdom effectually disguise a shy and splendid idealism which is of the very essence of the man”. Jinnah was only 28.

He scoffed at Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s two-nation theory, and wrote an angry letter to The Times of India challenging the legitimacy of the famous Muslim delegation to Lord Minto on October 1, 1906, which built the separatist Muslim platform. (The Times did not print it.) He ignored the convention in Dhaka on December 30, 1906 where the Muslim League was born. Perhaps the best glimpse of Jinnah’s idealism, in my view, is from the memoirs of his friends. The cool Jinnah broke down and cried thrice in public: after sitting, frozen, for five hours at the Khoja cemetery on the day his young wife, Ruttie, was buried; when he was taking the train back from Calcutta in 1928 after the failure of the talks on the (Motilal) Nehru Report; and when he visited a Hindu refugee camp in Karachi in January 1948.

In 1928, he thought he had lost the last chance for Hindu-Muslim unity; and as he watched the stricken Hindus twenty years later, he whispered, “They used to call me Quaid-e-Azam; now they call me Qatil-e-Azam.”

Since Jaswant Singh has written a thematic biography, rather than a comprehensive one, the book skims over personality and addresses the politics of partition. Jinnah’s life is a window through which the author sees the larger landscape of Pakistan, and the heavily mined road towards this green horizon. One of the best sections of the book is the detailed examination of the great debates of 1927 and 1928, although it does underplay the influence of the Hindu Mahasabha on the Congress at the time. What is evident is that Jinnah walked away from 1928 with a deep sense of grievance, and when he returned to politics in 1934, it was with a firm sense of entitlement. From this, emerged, propelled by steely commitment and brilliant leadership, Pakistan in 1947.

The alleged “guilt” of Nehru and Patel is the story of 1946 and 1947, since there were no disputes in the Congress on the unity of India before that. A point needs to be stressed for those who find Nehru-baiting irresistible. Nehru was not the predominant power in the Congress at that time. Not only was Gandhi alive, and deeply involved, but Patel was an equal. He could not impose his personal views upon the Congress, without support, and decisions were made through long and even tortured discussions. The Congress was democratic in spirit and practice. Even after Gandhi’s assassination Nehru faced a strong challenge to his leadership, from Purushottam Das Tandon.

The “guilt” centres around Nehru’s response to the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 and the Congress Working Committee resolution on March 8, 1947 accepting “a division of the Punjab into two provinces, so that the predominantly Muslim part may be separated from the predominantly non-Muslim part”. (Nehru had earlier voiced the idea of a trifurcation of Punjab; eventually, that is what happened.)

The Cabinet Mission Plan is now of academic interest since it was overtaken by Partition, but it is true that on June 25, 1946 Congress accepted it in the hope of establishing a “united democratic Indian Federation with a Central authority, which would command respect from the nations of the world, maximum provincial autonomy and equal rights for all men and women in the country”. And on July 10, Nehru, newly elected Congress President, rejected “Grouping”, one of the key (if still opaque) aspects of the Plan. Azad described this, politely, as one of those “unfortunate events which changed the course of history”.

But Nehru was not the dictator of the Congress. Gandhi could have intervened and declared him out of order. The working committee could have convened and reaffirmed its resolution to satisfy Muslim League doubts. The fact that the rest of the Congress was largely (but not completely) silent indicates rethinking. The provisions of the Plan could have left the political map of India an utter horror story, enmeshed by potentially rebellious Princely States, and “Groupings” with their own executives and Constituent Assemblies, buttressed by the right to secede in 10 years. Jinnah might have been content with a “moth-eaten” Pakistan. Nehru would not accept a “moth-eaten” India.

The Punjab resolution of March 1947 was passed in the absence of Gandhi and Azad. Patel and Nehru were its stewards. When Gandhi asked for an explanation, he got an excuse. Patel was disingenuous: “That you had expressed your views against it, we learnt only from the papers. But you are of course entitled to say what you feel right.” Nehru was even more evasive: “About our proposal to divide Punjab, this flows naturally from our previous discussions.” Gandhi and Azad were still adamant that they would not accept Partition: had Nehru and Patel surrendered behind the back of the man who led the independence movement?

The Punjab resolution was prefaced by a conditional phrase: “faced with the killing and brutality that are going on”. By March 1947, Nehru and Patel were more concerned about saving India from the consequences of Pakistan-inspired violence. The experiment in joint Congress-League had begun against the backdrop of the great Calcutta killings, which began with Direct Action Day on August 16, 1946 and never stopped for a year, when Gandhi went on his heroic fast for peace in Calcutta: Gandhi’s supreme courage and conviction have few parallels. This was followed by the gruesome Bihar riots. There was administrative gridlock in Delhi and a drift towards anarchy across the breadth of India. Gandhi did not intervene to revise this CWC resolution either, despite his public reservations. Elsewhere, Azad and Rajendra Prasad have explained what happened. Patel persuaded the Mahatma that the option was either Partition or open war with the Muslim League, which meant a nation-wide civil war. Perhaps only Gandhi believed that Indian unity could have survived the Calcutta riots, and he too wavered.

On April 21, 1947 Nehru said openly that those “who demanded Pakistan could have it”. He entered a caveat: provided they did not coerce others to join such a Pakistan, or indeed to set up separate Stans. Jinnah did his best to partition India further. Nehru and Patel saved India from anarchy by isolating a wound that would have infected the whole of India if it had not been cauterized and sutured. For this they deserve our deepest gratitude. By early May, Nehru was able, in private conversations with Mountbatten in Shimla, to defuse what he saw as nothing short of Balkanization of the subcontinent, the details of which are in my biography of Nehru.

The anarchy that is Pakistan today would have visited India six decades ago. What ironic stupidity that a self-styled admirer of Patel should ban a book that describes how Patel and Nehru overcame, groping through complex imponderables and unimaginable horror, the greatest challenge in modern Indian history.

-Appeared in Times of India - August 26, 2009

A contribution on the same subject, slightly differently worded, was carried in ‘Covert’, a fortnightly launched by M. J. Akbar in its issue ‘ 15 May – 31 May 2008

What SRK should learn from Kalam

What SRK should learn from Kalam
By M J Akbar Sunday

A celebrity is blessed with good fortune in many ways. A reporter, for instance, has to search for news. A celebrity merely has to look into the mirror. Such self-obsession requires sensational amorality and phenomenal lack of judgment. Ordinary, guilt-obsessed mortals do not possess these virtues.

A celebrity must have talent, of course, but brains are useless without gall. It requires courage to fall irrevocably in love with your image. It must be dreadfully tense to watch each step you take with such missionary commitment, but the rewards are probably worth the effort. The tiniest twitch now resides beside perceived, or stolen, wisdom, on Twitter, the miracle technology of celebdom. Pseudo-gods seek the pseudo-faithful as fervently as the reverse.

You have to be sure-footed to walk on air. The smallest ethereal miscalculation can bring you painfully down to earth. Shah Rukh Khan mobilized the resources of the Government of India when American customs and border security authorities treated him as just another human being.

This is not his first visit to the States, so there must have been some reason for the fact that this was the first time he was detained. As it turns out, the US government did have some reasonable questions about Shah Rukh’s hosts.

Old royalty used to treat an insult as high treason. What is fit punishment for the humiliation of modern divinity? A finger-wagging press conference by a mere cabinet minister seems inadequate for a mobile genius who charges crores of rupees for dancing at a wedding. Frenzy across content-starved TV channels is more like it, but we must not fetter our imagination. Perhaps India should recall its ambassador from Washington and abandon the nuclear deal unless the American secretary for homeland security is sacked?

No one likes racial profiling, even when done by an arbitrary computer. The incomparable computer seems to have not only altered the dimensions of time and space in our lives, but is now beginning to create a classless society of victims as well. Karl Marx would have been delighted by this communist child of capitalism. Shah Rukh has no complaint against the computer, however. He was furious at the inflexibility of the customs officer. Indian celebrities have created such a self-mesmerizing caste system of egos that they find any challenge difficult to comprehend.

Every celebrity is famous, but everyone famous is not a celebrity. Former president Abdul Kalam did not turn his cellphone into an advertising agency when confronted with an overzealous American security drill while boarding a commercial aircraft in Delhi, although he may have been within his rights to do so. President Kalam lived in the real world even when he was in Rashtrapati Bhawan. He knows that life is cluttered with glitches and inconsistencies. He shrugged in silence and boarded his flight.

Nor is racial profiling unique to the US. Every marital advertisements page in an Indian newspaper throws up multiple instances of colour-profiling. On the darker side, to stretch a metaphor, there is the unadvertised community-profiling in housing. People who are otherwise perfectly reasonable dread the possibility of conflict, micro or macro, with a neighbour who is not ‘One Of Us’.

Shah Rukh Khan was quick to deliver a slightly pompous sermon when his colleague in the film industry, Emraan Hashmi, complained recently that he was being denied a flat in an exclusive part of Mumbai because of his religious identity. Shah Rukh could have kept quiet, of course. But there are no brownie points for silence. You cannot be a celebrity if you do not celebrate your own importance at every opportunity. The superstar told the star to stop crying, grow up and so on. Why did Shah Rukh forget to give himself such advice when his imperial procession to Chicago was marginally interrupted? Instead, he wailed loud enough to be heard in Delhi.

Celebrities, who need a course in a National School of Drama, do need to be reminded that it helps to appreciate the limits of drama, particularly when you have arrived on the national stage. Acting becomes the only reality for some superstars, and their mind turns into an assembly line production house for scripted sentences. The dazzle of arc lamps blinds the star to the slippery ooze from the ego. You can slip so easily on it.

There will surely be more than one view on Emraan Hashmi’s search for upward mobility, and all sides will argue their case with perhaps more vigour than rigour. Hashmi is not yet capable of buying an independent bungalow, so all he can dream of is a better flat. But he is only pleading for a home. Shah Rukh Khan was demanding homage from the world. The difference is more than one of degree.

A Welcome Release from Politics

Byline by M J Akbar: A Welcome Release from Politics

Has the BJP lost the plot or has a plot lost the BJP? Curiously, both might have happened, though successively, rather than simultaneously.

The BJP missed the central point of this year’s general elections. Its miscalculations began after the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November last year, when it misread the impact the carnage had upon people. Every section of India may have wanted Pakistan punished for that outrage, but that did not translate into an excuse for confrontations within India. A decisive section of the electorate did not want Indian Muslims punished for what some Pakistani Muslims had done. Obviously, the Indian Muslim voter did not want to be tried for a crime he had not committed and so mobilised against a BJP which began to get more strident by the month. But a decisive section of youth had no appetite for the politics of conflict creation; it wants conflict elimination, or at least conflict resolution.

The BJP, judging by the promotion of Narendra Modi as a future Prime Minister and Varun Gandhi as a rising superstar, was still investing in conflict, not resolution. That switched enough seats to leave the BJP far short of its intended tally. The Congress, abetted by some amazing foolishness on the part of the Third Front, went far ahead of its expected numbers.

It is a rare leader, and an even rarer party, that can avoid rebellion in decline and defeat. This of course is only true of parliamentary democracy. In a presidential system the leader swims until he sinks; there are no real midterm gasps for breath. Britain’s Gordon Brown was showered with adulation in his first three months; got carried away; turned too clever by half; and has faced nothing but rebellion and disdain ever since. Indian party politics is far more stable than its British mother-version.

Rebels come in three categories after a defeat. There are those who believe that their political careers are over, and therefore there is nothing much to lose. Age could be a reason, or simply the accident of personal proximity to the defeated leader. Who remembers a Congress politician called Bhubanesh Chaturvedi? The political class barely knew who he was when P.V. Narasimha Rao made him one of the most powerful men in Delhi. The meteor disappeared into a black hole the instant Narasimha Rao was defeated. But the BJP is also passing through a generational transition. It is not just Mr Advani who will not contest the next general elections; his peers will be too old as well. Since he has not been able to ensure that his peers spend their last years in politics in ministerial offices, they can risk the frisson of some controversy. I imagine Dr Murli Manohar Joshi might discover he has a few things to say if all the temptations that could keep him silent and patient get exhausted by December.

The second reason is less subtle. There are rebels who are, in effect, cheerleaders of an alternative leader. This is normal politics, and you can hardly grudge such activity. Those who feel they have been sidelined by any leadership will exploit the opportunity offered by change. It is obvious that some of those who were unhappy with loss, vented their spleen on Advani.
Jaswant Singh’s detractors [whose numbers must have multiplied since his expulsion; that is the culture of Delhi] will put both reasons in the charge-sheet against him, but they will be wrong. Obviously, he would have preferred to spend this term as MP in high office, rather than in a publisher’s office. But the reason he published his book on Jinnah was passion, not ideology. He is a liberal of the old school, and proud of both, liberalism and the old school. Values and honour mean much more to him than a mere dictionary can convey.

Pakistan is both physically and emotionally close to him, and the many contradictions of partition have affected him deeply, as they have so many others. He has relatives in Pakistan. The ruling clan of Umarkot, in whose custody the Emperor Akbar was born, is his kin. He has spent many years, in the silence of his impressive library, examining the depth, trajectory and implications of his roots. He may not have admitted it, but in his personal scheme of things books overtook politics as his principal priority. The evolution may even have been unconscious, for one does not measure change on a periodic basis.

Jinnah was an obvious attraction, for he wanted to know how myth had overtaken facts in Pakistan, and demonology had diminished Jinnah in India. It is not possible to invest many years of one’s life in a biography without being fascinated by the subject. On a few occasions, this fascination is akin to being entranced by the venomous power of a snake, as Hitler’s biographers were. But Jaswant Singh discovered, as many others have done, that Jinnah was in the hero-mould, and deserved admiration despite his mistakes, no matter how awesomely expensive those mistakes proved to be.

In his personal preferences, Jinnah was a liberal-intellectual that a fellow liberal-intellectual could empathize with. It may not be entirely accidental that Jinnah’s Indian grandson is a friend of Jaswant Singh. Any biographer fond of his subject will give him the benefit of any doubt, and the road to freedom in 1947 was cluttered with doubt, misdirection, accidents and betrayal as much as it was resplendent with vision, courage and sacrifice.

Jaswant Singh did not set out to change his party through his book. Neither did he expect his party to change him because of this book. He thought he had served his party with honesty and commitment; and the party would show the grace to give him his space as an author. It did not.

Perhaps it could not. You could not survive in the Shiv Sena after claiming that Shivaji had any flaw. And life would not be happy in the Congress if you carped against Nehru. Politics needs its certainties even when those certainties are historically uncertain. Politicians are wary of books, because they are aware that knowledge can be injurious to their health.

The world of books welcomes Jaswant Singh’s release from politics.

Will it take a war to focus on Swat’s problems?

Will it take a war to focus on Swat’s problems?
M J Akbar

There is a foolproof way of gauging mainstream America’s interest in the rest of the world: through the New York Times crossword puzzle. On August 11, the clue for 17-Across (three letters) was “Islamabad’s land: Abbr.” The discovery of Pakistan has begun. India is an older, but static and occasional story, glimpsed occasionally through “Agra”, routed either via the Taj Mahal or Slumdog Millionaire. Wondrously, Nehru still remains on the iconic shortlist, but the presence is fading.

Credit must go to the military obstinacy of the Taliban and the linguistic dexterity of Richard Holbrooke for widening American consciousness, in perhaps the same way that Saddam Hussein and George Bush made ‘Eyeraq’ part of the American language. It seems a bit odd that you need a war to become famous but that is the way with superpowers. Britain became a household word in Roma only after Julius Caesar dropped by to say hello. Swat will probably be the next name to worm its way into puzzles, and very useful it would be for anagrams as well.

What are the odds that in 10 years the Swat valley, often called the “Kashmir of Pakistan”, will be the favoured American destination in “Incredible Pakistan”? Perhaps, realism demands a reframing of that question. In 2019, will Swat be Kashmir or will Kashmir be Swat? God knows, of course, but He is strangely uncommunicative these days.

The Pakistan army will prevail in this year’s battle for Swat, but we are discussing the war. The Pak army is motivated by the most effective impulse in war, self-interest. A Taliban victory would destabilise the institutions that share power in Islamabad, and radically alter the character, objectives and strategy of the Pak armed forces. Its officers are content with the status quo. They want to use the mullahs when they need them; they have no intention of being used.

But it is already evident that Islamabad has not understood a fundamental fact of its civil war. Irrespective of the outcome of the conflict this year or the next, the ground, and therefore the battleground, has shifted. The Taliban revolt has not emerged merely out of sentiment for religion. It is also a struggle for a reorientation of the oppressive economic relations in Pakistan, the worst of which is the land-peasant equation. Muhammad Sufi and Baitullah Mehsud found support because they challenged the landlords who have enslaved the Swat valley and so much else of Pakistan. After over six decades of independence, Pakistan still has not had land reforms. Independence has not translated into freedom for the peasant. Islamabad, like the Bourbons, seems to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. Now that the Army has taken control of many parts of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Islamabad is inviting back the landlords who were driven out by the Taliban.

In October 1949, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, founder-leader of the National Conference, called a special session of his party to confirm the provisional accession of the state to the Union of India. At the top of his agenda for a “New Kashmir” was land reforms. The twomillion-plus acres of cultivable land in the state was mainly in the possession of elitist Dogras and their jagirdars. A land ceiling of 22.75 acres was established. Farmers’ debt was brought down from over Rs 11 million to around Rs 2.5 million. Peasants who had been forced to mortgage their property because of high usury rates regained their rights; sharecroppers saw their share increase from half to two-thirds, while productions costs were now shared.

Jawaharlal Nehru, a Kashmiri Hindu, gave fulsome support to Sheikh Abdullah because, for him, poverty had no religion. Poverty alleviation and economic equity were the fulcrum of his secular, modern, dynamic “New India”. Nehru knew better than anyone else in Delhi that Hindus were the landlords of Kashmir. But for him the Hindu rich were no different from the Muslim rich, and the Hindu poor as deserving of positive discrimination as the Muslim poor. This is why he could force through land reform in large parts of India — although vested interests, and the inevitable compromises inbuilt into electoral democracy, sabotaged him at every step. The Nehrus and Abdullahs have been partners four times: in 1949, in 1975, 1987 and in 2009. The political relationship has veered from exhilarating promise to unmitigated disaster, although the personal equation has sustained itself well enough. Omar Abdullah and Rahul Gandhi are the fourth set in a chain. They might consider a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of October 1949, not to recall the poisons that seeped into their politics, but the purity that gave us land reforms.

The mood of the moment is governed by self-satisfied establishments that have for gotten a basic pillar of nation-building, economic equity. Today’s talent hunt throws up those who have cleared crores of rupees, not created crores of jobs. This week, Delhi and Islamabad celebrated their 62nd birthday with salvos and speeches, while a different kind of gunfire echoes in Balochistan, Swat, and the Naxalite highway that began as a corridor. Enjoy the first, but learn from the second.
Appeared in Times of India - August 17, 2009

Tying the knot in Tamil Nadu

Byline by M J Akbar: Tying the knot in Tamil Nadu

The South is another country, in just about every country. No one associates the north of France with holiday, cuisine or luxury. The north of Italy wastes its time in production, profits, brand-building, grumbling and fantasies of secession; the south goes to church, forgets to collect the garbage, remembers to collect tourists and has fun: would Berlusconi ever build a private palace improved with Putin beds and exotic weekend guests in north Italy? The south of America tried its hardest to secede in the 19th century. Today it is so convinced that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii that it has launched a movement called “Birthers” whose principal purpose is to delegitimize the first African-American President of the United States. The more north Britain gets, the more dour becomes its public image, although the Scots are far nicer than their reputation would suggest. But they have to live with the burden of being the closest British neighbours to the North Pole. Pakistanis of the Frontier could not be more different than Sindhis, although they could give each other competition in their eagerness to be hospitable to a stranger. Anything is possible in Pakistan, but it is difficult to envisage a Taliban in the deserts of Sindh.

I suppose a nation has to be vertical to claim a north and south. Russia is horizontal. It stretches through the extremities of east and west, through nine time zones. You never think of a south Russia; you just slip from Russia into Central Asia, as if Russia extended breast upwards. If the east and west of Russia are radically different it is because they exist in different continents, with powerful and distinct cultures. Even the bland single dimension of Communism could not merge Europe and Asia into a Soviet continent, despite seven decades of strenuous effort. Central Asians rediscovered their Turkish-Islamic roots with gusto when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Pacific east had always retained its own flavour. China is too round, and Han, to permit a political sense of north and south, although the cuisine, China’s finest cultural achievement, is gloriously divergent. Perhaps our contemporary sense of China as a seamless geography is a reflection of the political success of the Communist Party. But if you push Tibet into the category of south China, then the metaphor becomes poignant: the south is a different country.

India is rare, but not unique; it has north, south, east, west and a middle. Middle is the railway track that runs from Mumbai to Kolkata. The overlaps do not deny the reality. There are so many definitions of difference: language, aesthetics, cultural morality, aspiration, dress, forms of prayer, music. It is not just the difference between Hindustani and Carnatic strains; you do not hear the lilt of Bengali Baul in the west, while the sinuous sway of Rabindrasangeet is lost in the north. One would have thought that electoral politics, measured by the same Election Commission yardstick of numbers, would at least be similar if not the same. But democracy is resplendent in its own colours in the south.

You leave Coimbatore airport for barely a minute, and you are staring at the next election: the posters of the general election have not faded yet and the contest for the Assembly elections has begun. There is no confusion about who will lead the DMK. Karunanidhi, the Marlon Brando of this political epic, will remain the patriarch, but executive authority is being passed to his son, Stalin. Stalin will seek the legitimacy of popular endorsement in the contest against Jayalalithaa in a year and a half. Karunanidhi still sets the dialectic pace in the confrontation against his bête noire, but the next Assembly is Stalin’s to win or lose. His face is on every poster: lots of frizzy black hair climbing from the scalp, a filmstar smile, and very modern in a tie. Purists might pick holes. The hair is suspiciously luxuriant, its colour is a bit too uniformly dark perhaps, and the tie might certainly have been knotted better. But the voter sees a pleasant man who can still claim a working relationship with youth. Image is not all, but pretty good fuel for early momentum. The Jayalalithaa response has not begun. She is keeping her powder dry, perhaps literally. In any case, she is not blessed with the resources available to a ruling party. However, the Assembly elections, still many months and dozens of intermediate events away, are not our immediate worry. Our concern is the knot.

The father of the Indian tie is surely the Bengali western-oriented gentleman. The tie was not part of any Indian’s dress code before the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, and then took its time before becoming a fashion item. It begins to emerge, via a scarf after 1834, when the British made English the language of government and created a new British-centric establishment into which a slow dribble of Indians was permitted, particularly through the law courts. The walls along the staircase of Calcutta Club are decorated with portraits of past presidents, each attired in a handsome striped tie put together by a majestic knot, Windsor or its single-cousin. Would a potential Bengal Chief Minister campaign in a tie? Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has not even been seen in a jacket. Mamata Banerjee pursues an image of poverty with a vengeance. She does not possess anything but plain cotton saris. She made her male ministers wear a dhoti while taking the oath of office; among them were those who had never worn a dhoti.

In Tamil Nadu, Stalin wears imported ties and Jayalalithaa the most fabulous silks. Voters might once have demanded Kamaraj’s simple handspun; today, they do not particularly care either way. They have enough poverty in their own lives. Why would they want to impose it on their leaders, when they know that their leaders are not poor?

But, Thiru Stalin, do get someone to knot a better knot.

Time to play fair, Mr Deora

Time to play fair, Mr Deora
M J Akbar Sunday

Is live coverage of Parliament very kind to democracy? A friendly exchange of obscure questions and obtuse answers in the morning, and exclusive footage of MPs in mortal combat against sleep in the afternoon, does not make for high TRPs. The periodic slogan-and-walkout routine has become just that: routine. When the Lok Sabha debated steepling prices of essential commodities on Thursday afternoon, kind cameramen did their best to avoid empty spaces and vacant faces.

Compare this to the sui generis turbulence within the political class over the price of one reasonably essential commodity, gas. There has to be a good reason. The merchants of tur dal have cash in their pockets. The merchants of gas have both cash and MPs in their pockets.

The metaphor is not original. Murli Deora, minister for oil and gas, who tends to get communicative under stress, used it in Parliament. He lamented that alleging "this fellow is in his pocket, this fellow is in another's pocket" did no service to anyone.

It certainly does no service to Mr Deora. An independent MP, Parimal Nathwani, was candid about his personal pocket of residence. He was an advocate for Mukesh Ambani. The Marx in Ms Brinda Karat leapt to the fore and she became instantly cross. She demanded review of the candour clause in House rules, arguing that it had come into conflict with the "dignity of the House". She may have missed her mark by a few notches. She should have been discussing the dignity of the Union cabinet.

An Australian journalist, Hamish McDonald, has written an unauthorized, but semicollaborative (Reliance executives are thanked in the forward), biography of a great, but occasionally errant, genius, titled The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani. There are five references to Dhirubhai's first ally in politics, an alliance that began when Dhirubhai's vision was buffeted on all sides by cynicism. The first reference, on page 36, is sufficient: "After getting on his feet back in Bombay, Dhirubhai used to make frequent trips to New Delhi. He frequently went in the company of Murli Deora, a fellow yarn trader who was then working his way up the Congress party machine in Bombay... Dhirubhai and Deora used to catch an early flight up to Delhi, and park their bags with a sympathetic clerk at the Ashoka Hotel while they did their rounds of politicians and bureaucrats to speed up decisions on import licences."

The past cannot be held against Murli Deora's present. He might, in fact, justifiably feel that he should have been cabinet minister much before he was finally sworn in. He is certainly one of the more competent ministers. The question is about his portfolio, which he has held since he joined the cabinet. He takes decisions that affect the most substantive part of Dhirubhai's inheritance. Dr Manmohan Singh believes in the Caesar's Wife principle: in public life, you must be above suspicion. Would Caesar's Wife have accepted the oil portfolio if she had been a fellow yarn trader of Dhirubhai?

There is too much that is odd about Murli Deora's insistence on raising the price of a national asset that is in the private possession of Mukesh Ambani. This must be the first government that is determined to raise the price of an essential commodity, rather than bring it down, or indeed keep it at a level that a private company offered and accepted as part of a contractual agreement. On Friday, Sharad Pawar, replying to the debate on essential commodities in the Lok Sabha, blamed the higher price of energy as one of the reasons for rising food prices. Attendance on Friday was higher than on Thursday, with heavyweights present, possibly because it was the last sitting of the session, but was anyone listening?

The fight between the brothers, Mukesh and Anil, is a bit of a red herring. Mukesh Ambani is not going to sell his gas at nearly twice a contracted price only to his brother. NTPC, a nationalized Navaratna company will have to pay at least Rs 20,000 crores more to Reliance. Anil Ambani is a big boy. He can look after himself. If Mukesh Ambani needed a hundred million mobile telephones, Anil Ambani would have tried to double the price of his phones.

But public concern is legitimate when a public sector company cannot defend its interests because its nominated guardian, its cabinet minister, is supporting the opposition. NTPC is in litigation against RIL in the Mumbai high court to protect its interests, while its parent ministry takes a contradictory view in the SC.

Murli Deora's logic for raising the price of gas shifts from odd to downright curious. Gas, he says, is a national asset. The government therefore should fix the price. But who gets the money? Not the nation, but a private company. Finance ministers squirm even when forced to raise energy prices in order to bump up government revenues. But one cannot see a single squirm in this controversy. Patriotism has clearly become the last refuge of Murli Deora.

Appeared in Times of India - July 09, 2009

A thin hope

Byline by M J Akbar: A thin hope

How does one reconcile these news stories appearing on the same day? In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik tells Parliament that the Jamat-ud-Dawa [latest name of the Lashkhar-e-Tayaba] is among the 25 groups banned under the 1997 Anti-Terrorism Act. In Srinagar, the Indian Army says it has killed at least eight terrorists trying to sneak across the Line of Control, seven in Kupwara and one in Poonch. Back in Islamabad foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit clarified that there had been no change in Pakistan’s stand and it still wanted an independent Kashmir.

On the face of it, the last is most easily understood. Just as Dr Manmohan Singh has been busy trying to reassure India that he had given nothing away at Sharm El Sheikh, Yousaf Raza Gilani probably had to make his own clarifications. In any case, Pakistan is not going to abandon a core element of its India, or Indian subcontinent policy, just because Dr Singh included Balochistan in the joint statement. And yet, there is a delicate blur in a long-held position that might not be noticed at first glance.

What is Pakistan’s long-held position on Jammu and Kashmir? Not independence; of this you can be certain. Pakistan sent troops in 1947 and 1965 to absorb Kashmir into the Muslim country, not to create a separate Kashmir state. It set up “Azad Kashmir” as an interim arrangement, pending the amalgamation of the whole of the Kashmir valley into Pakistan. This region has been treated as “azad” [free] from India, but not “azad” per se.

In practical terms, Pakistan gave up on the plebiscite as the route to absorption, partly because there was no way of forcing India to agree; but not on the idea that the Muslim regions of Kashmir were a rightful part of Pakistan. This was reiterated as recently as during the autocracy of Pervez Musharraf. The concept of independence was never shouted out of the room because it kept Kashmiri groups fighting for “Azaadi” onside, and amenable to support from Islamabad. Most often this ticklish dilemma was addressed with silence, or a nebulous “let the Kashmiri people decide”. It helped keep pressure on India through both pro-Pakistan elements and pro-independence parties.

If the Pak foreign office spokesman was fending off a reporter’s question with the traditional mix of all-options-open phrasing, then there is not much to pursue. It was a casual combination of sentences, all in a day’s work. But if this is calculated policy line then it represents an important shift. The statement would have to be repeated, and at a higher level, to represent a significant change. In the meantime, we can only speculate whether Islamabad is edging, cautiously, towards an alternative negotiating stance. Once it abandons the Pakistani claim on Kashmir, then options open in which compromise can be reached with Delhi on a new nebulous status for Kashmir, one which can be interpreted by Delhi, Islamabad and Srinagar in whichever way it chose to. The domestic constituency, in each case, has to be persuaded through a grand fudge since that is what it will amount to given how hard past positions have been.

The problems of terrorism fall into a different category. It is possible that the Pakistan Government is just too weak and helpless to do anything more than make appropriate noises.

Musharraf’s administration had authority; Asif Ali Zardari seems merely to be in office. If the Jamat-ud-Dawa was genuinely banned as a terrorist outfit, then Hafeez Saeed could not be giving sermons at leisure in Lahore. Saeed is not in custody because Islamabad told the Lahore High Court that the Jamat was not on the list of terrorist organisations. In fact, it has only been removed from the list of welfare charities. Western correspondents who have interviewed senior officials of the Jamat have quoted them as saying that nothing had changed, and that the “liberation of Kashmir from Hindu rule” was still their primary objective. And so, irrespective of what Islamabad might desire, the infiltrators continue their steady progress across the Line of Control. The Indian Army knows the number apprehended, or killed; it cannot know how many got away.

The New York Times published a revealing story by Sabrina Tavernise and Waqar Gilani, datelined Multan, on Friday, about Fida Hussein Ghalvi, who testified against Malik Ishaq, founder of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. “In Pakistan, the weakness of the state is matched only by the strength of its criminals. When Mr Ishaq was arrested in 1997, he unleashed his broad network against his opponents, killing witnesses, threatening judges and intimidating the police, leading nearly all of the prosecutions to collapse eventually.” The report, noting that Ishaq could be out on bail this month, describes him as founder of “Pakistan’s most vicious sectarian group, whose police record has a dizzying tally of at least 70 killings — and has never had a conviction stick”.

This was the situation under Musharraf; things have only deteriorated in the last two years.

This, perhaps, is what impelled Dr Manmohan Singh to suggest that this is a time when a democratic Government in Pakistan needs all the help it can get, including from Delhi. But it is a fallacy to believe that any other country, particularly India, can be helpful beyond a very limited degree. The nuances and compromises essential to any solution would be heavy enough on a leader with broad and strong shoulders. It is too much to believe that a Government that has already lost the trust of the street, and the confidence of its administration, can pull off something as dramatic as an agreement with Delhi. If Islamabad can neither stop cross-border infiltration nor go forward on a deal, the peace process will splutter out completely.

Could a deal come precisely because Islamabad realises that conflict with India has strengthened forces that are now the biggest danger to Pakistan’s civil society, democracy and evolution towards a modern nation? That is a thin hope, but one which we should preserve.

Kashmir needs a stronger CM

Kashmir needs a stronger CM
M J Akbar

There are few juicy scandals in our public life, not because politicians are abstemious but because the public does not necessarily equate sex with scandal. Curiously politicians, the big beneficiaries, still think a prurient accusation is worth the effort. When you are a good-looking chap like Omar Abdullah, such hazards probably come with the territory.

So, what explains Omar's hasty resignation? When you wade into the rocky waters of Kashmir, you are bound to injure a toe occasionally on underwater reef. There was an unwarranted primness in Omar's haste. His father Farooq, who has been known to race a motorcycle or two around the Dal Lake in his younger days, would have found a nuanced means to reassure the people and laugh at the opposition. But in order to laugh you must know how to laugh and, more important, when to laugh.

Omar offered to resign because he could not work, he said, till proved innocent. Why not work harder till proved innocent? One assumes he is innocent. Voters elected him to work, not to go into a sulk when the jeering began in the legislature.

Indians, by temperament, are not interested in what politicians do in the private. The real scandal, surely, is what politicians do in the open. Corruption is no longer a shady business. It is all eyes-wideopen, media-couldn't-care-less deals. It works both ways: being a saint does not win you an election. Nor can anyone get very far by casting stones at bedroom windows.

Jawaharlal Nehru is the most honoured name after Mahatma Gandhi in our recent history. He was slandered with abandon even in the more discreet culture of his lifetime. His trusted private secretary, M O Mathai, waited for him to die before placing a few salacious suggestions into the public domain. This did not disturb Nehru's composure when alive, and did not dent his reputation after death. Gandhi did not need the investigatory skills of any hack to expose his private life. He did it himself, with breathtaking honesty and exemplary courage in the astonishing confessional that is his autobiography. The book was published 18 years before freedom, not as a post-retirement benefit fund: it is, by the way, much more than a route-map to celibacy or an unabashed defiance of temptation. The lords of the British empire who considered him, correctly, an existentialist threat, could do nothing with the material Gandhi placed at their command. Why?

Indians love gossip as much as anyone else, but when it comes to judgment, they become gossip-neutral. They might expect a faultless character from gods; they are far more understanding of human beings. Indian common sense is both sensible and common. Politicians, who would not have passed the first of a puritan scrutiny, have reached the highest reaches of public office; puritans have seen their ambitions aborted because they failed a political scrutiny.

What Kashmiris expect is not excessive rectitude from Omar Abdullah, but a far better daily existence for themselves. This adds up to life security, infrastructure and the zealous protection of self-respect. Omar's youth, sincerity and transparent lack of cynicism have raised hopes, which is dangerous since great expectations can also cause a great crash. A caveat is probably necessary at this point. Cynicism is the swine flu of politics. One sharp sneeze and it may hit young Omar any time.

Did Omar lose his nerve? Steel nerves are overrated in a democracy. Silver nerves work better, for they are flexible. He has been in office only since January and you can detect signs of uncertainty in his grasp of power. In public life, an administration transfers a leader's confusion instantly to the people. Experts in rousing rabble can checkmate any government unsure of the needed levels of response. There is no algebra that can be consulted, no theory that can be practiced. Experience, with its attendant baggage of precedent, helps, but only up to a point. It is fashionable among the younger lot to display the self-importance implicit in the adage made famous by US president Harry Truman: "The buck stops here." Let me suggest a wiser option. If you flip too often, you end up as a flop.

The politics of Kashmir is sharply contextual. Pakistan analyses each step and misstep. The generational change represented by Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, who could be the next chief minister, begs a collateral question. Are they going to lead their generation towards the emotional and psychological integration with secular, democratic and increasingly prosperous India, or will they preside over a drift to nowhere land? There is a great deal riding on their abilities, language and convictions. This is their tryst with an inherited destiny; they cannot afford to wilt before the first hurdle of democratic politicking. Resignation in the hope of martyrdom is for saints. Martyrs find their moment in death. Kashmir needs chief ministers who can offer life.

Appeared in Times of India - July 02, 2009