Ghost in Obama Shadow

Ghost in Obama Shadow
By M J Akbar
In The Third Eye: India Today)
8-15th November 2010

The prevailing metaphor of Barack Obama’s relations with India is surely the sauciest gatecrash in the timeless span of diplomatic dinners. Michaele and Tareq Salahi probably deserve an Oscar for chutzpah in turning up, uninvited, for Obama’s grand evening in honour of Dr Manmohan Singh last year, and maybe the White House secret service now needs a tutorial from Delhi Police. But the hovering presence of an unwanted spirit has become the most unsettling factor in Indo-American relations.

Pakistan is now the omnipresent ghost in the room when India talks to America.

Obama did not send an invitation to Islamabad but he left the door open the moment he adopted, during his campaign, Afghanistan as his preferred war. George Bush, being strategically dysfunctional, decided that the only way to defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was to destroy Iraq, but this enabled him to engage India without bothering too much about Pakistan. Uncomplicated Bush liked India and complicated India returned the embrace.

Obama began with a contortion and slipped into contradiction because he made a false choice. Bush may have been right or wrong when he went to war, but he believed in what he was doing. Obama promised war only because America was never going to elect a peacenik in an age of terrorism. The moment he won the election, he began looking for ways and means to outsource the conflict. Pakistan’s role in Pentagon plans changed; it moved from an important but passive-positive third lead to centre stage.

Pakistan needed Bush more than Bush needed Pakistan, which is why Pervez Musharraf buckled under Colin Powell’s ultimatum within hours after 9/11. It may not be by much, since both sides seem desperate, but Obama needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs Obama. Obama prepared for his India visit in early November by being sweet to Pakistan. The third round of the US-Pak strategic dialogue was held in Washington in the third week of October, and ended in the usual ‘back-present’, another couple of billion dollars for the Pak armed forces. The Pakistan army, which is surely the most powerful mercenary force in history, simply sends a bill and Washington brings out the cheque book. Obama explained why: it’s known as “helping Pakistan in helping us in Afghanistan”. There must be something in the White House which destroys the syntax of even a former professor at Yale, but the substance is clear enough. Obama has not only promised a “comprehensive partnership” to Pakistan but also promised economic prosperity. When you are in love, you do tend to promise the moon. As if romance with a delegation led by a mere foreign minister was not enough, Obama telephoned Pakistan’s president Asif Zardari asking him not to fret just because he was going to call on the competition.

In any case, Obama is not coming to India bearing gifts. He will provide plenty of rhetoric of course, particularly since speech is free in a democracy. He may even be tempted to give Indian Muslims a patronizing pat on the back for being “good” Muslims rather chaps who commit suicide over the weekend. But a principal objective, hidden under the phrases, will revolve around what Obama can take away from India. His chance for a second term depends on whether he can bring unemployment down. His own job depends on how many jobs he can give Americans. He wants contracts. The 126 fighters for the Indian Air Force, for instance, will create 29,000 jobs in America. Have you ever wondered why American presidents avoid Bangalore like a bubonic plague? Whenever a domestic job is lost to some cheaper foreigner, they describe it as being “Bangalored”. Bush, therefore, preferred Hyderabad to Bangalore. No president wants to be “Bangalored” by the voter.

Obama will also, of course, reserve his widest smile for India, although he may not be in a very sunny mood after the congressional elections. But he cannot do very much to help the Indian economy at a time when the American economy needs repair. The best he can do, in political terms, is ignore Kashmir, but there is nothing on offer for India in Afghanistan. If anything, Obama will urge India to tone down, rather than ramp up, its presence on the American-Pak battlefield.

Barack Obama achieved what was considered impossible when in 2008 he became the first black person to become President of America. In 2010 he just might add a second historic achievement to his credit. He could make both India and the United States feel nostalgic for George Bush.

Between scam India and slum India

Byline by M J Akbar: Between scam India and slum India

It is entirely appropriate that a nation whose motto is Satyameye Vijayate should discover a metaphor for ravenous loot in a Mumbai building society called Adarsh. Greed is the new religion and all are welcome to feed at her trough. Nothing else is sacrosanct; not the highest offices in public service: Chief Minister, Army chief, Navy admiral, or top bureaucrat through whom the file must pass. If there is a flat to be stolen in a housing society sanctioned for the welfare of war widows, then every single one of these crooks is ready to cheat the blood of Kargil martyrs. Thomas Friedman did not know how many puns danced on the head of a simile when he called the world as flat and began his journey in India.

There is no shame left. It is tempting to ask whether there is an India left when most of its ruling class has abandoned every principle in its composite, vulgar commitment to theft, but hopefully India is larger than its ruling class.

Which came first, hypocrisy or greed? Tough question. I would give primacy of place to hypocrisy, since that is the cloak behind which greed flourishes. Hypocrisy is always a great temptation in a democracy, since compromise always begins in the name of either realism or service. The gap between true expenditure in an election and officially sanctioned levels is the principal propeller of corruption since it becomes the justification for taking illegitimate "donations", which of course is the polite word for bribes.

The stink of hypocrisy now permeates through all levels of authority, and institutions - like our defence forces - which cannot co-exist with corruption. They will be corrupt or a force; they cannot be both. The list of officials who stole from the Kargil dead is almost embarrassing: politicians, senior IAS officers, top defence officers. It was a rigged lottery handout.

It was robbery from the graveyard of Kargil martyrs. Those back-scratching cronies who distributed Adarsh flats between themselves should not be tried for corruption. They should be punished for treason.

But of course that is asking for too much from rulers who have become venal beyond belief. The system believes it can satiate any level of public anger with the meat of a scapegoat. Suresh Kalmadi was the officially nominated sacrifice for the putrid rape of public money during the Commonwealth Games. Ashok Chavan, chief minister of Maharashtra, will possibly have to resign because of Adarsh, unless he can, quietly, blackmail his superiors in Delhi by threatening to reveal how much cash he has been passing on to them.

We are being fooled by a clever set of manipulators in Delhi. Ashok Chavan did not become corrupt on the day media discovered that he had not only changed the terms of reference to cheat the "heroes of Kargil operation who bravely fought to protect our motherland" and then calmly stolen at least four of their flats for his family. He was corrupt the day he was made a minister in the Maharashtra government. He was promoted to Chief Minister not because he was competent but because he knew that the formula for upward mobility in the Congress, the happy combination of loyalty and corruption. When Delhi now puts on a mask of high outrage, it is only because it thinks this is the only way in which it can postpone retribution from the voter.

The voter does not live in Adarsh. 62% of Mumbai lives in slums. The distance between scam India and slum India is measured each day in the newspapers but discomfort prevents us from noticing. Even media seems reluctant to shorten this distance. While the front page of Saturday's newspapers in Delhi were full, justifiably, of the Ashok Chavan-led pillage, a small story on page 3 told of an unknown mother who left her two children, a boy, Pukar, and his sister Dakshina, outside a 'mazaar' [a saint's shrine] just outside the office of the Election Commission in Delhi, the home of the guardians of democracy. She gave her children all that was left with her, a bag with milk and some clothes, and told them she would return in an hour. She never returned. Her last trust was faith in the shrine. The children, said the temporary caretaker of the 'mazaar', Wazir Shah, cried the whole night. The children are now in a shelter.

They will learn to deal with the hungry, homeless, loveless reality that is the destiny of half of India while a thin skim ravages national wealth, and those in-between are trapped between dreams and insecurity. But will Pukar and Dakshina accept their "fate" and ignore Ashok Chavan and his fellow gangsters in the way that their helpless, nameless mother did? I hope not.

Three Bengalis

Three Bengalis
by M J Akbar
In Third Eye: India Today Column
November 1-7, 2010

Three Bengalis could have become Prime Minister of India. Each was staring at the summit, ready for the final ascent, when he discovered that his oxygen supply had been cut off – not by the enemy, but by the team leader.

Subhas Chandra Bose was undermined by Mahatma Gandhi with a rare pious savagery. We are familiar with savagery in politics, and piety is not unknown, but this deadly combination was unique. Bose had the temerity to challenge Gandhi from a Left platform at the Tripuri session in 1939. The reasons have become archaic, but the quiet ruthlessness of Gandhi’s response is still relevant to any student of Congress intrigues. Bose’s big mistake was to win, by 1580 votes to 1377, against Gandhi’s nominee, Sitaramayya. Gandhi declared that it was his defeat, not his candidate’s, and forced 13 out of 15 members of the working committee to resign in the gap between the election on 29 January and the Tripuri session on 8 March.

Bose resigned from the Congress on 29 April 1939 and formed the Forward Bloc on 3 May. The rest is known: escape from Calcutta in January 1941, a wartime alliance with Germany and Japan, the great Azad Hind movement, and death in a mysterious air crash. It was the British effort to put Bose’s soldiers on trial for mutiny that sparked off massive demonstrations, including in the armed forces; historians believe it was the final blow which delinked Empire from Britain.

If today’s Congress was a party with any form of inner democracy, which clearly it is not, it is obvious that Pranab Mukherjee would win in any secret ballot for the leadership, even if his opponent was Sonia Gandhi’s nominee. The party’s ideal combination would be a partnership between Mukherjee and Dr Manmohan Singh, but with roles reversed; that is, with Dr Singh as finance minister. Mahatma Gandhi could not afford Bose for the same reason that Sonia Gandhi will not tolerate Mukherjee. Bose would have publicly deferred to Gandhi, but implemented his own agenda; Mukherjee, likewise. Neither Bengali would have permitted either Gandhi to dictate terms.

The Congress lost Bengal in 1939, not 1967, when the United Front came to power. It is not an accident that Jyoti Basu and Pranab Mukherjee were both in the United Front, along with the Forward Bloc. The Marxists inherited the Bose mantle, because Bose’s party withered in the absence of his charismatic leadership. Congress has been unable to return to centre stage in Bengal even when the Marxists are falling through the cracks. Bengalis prefer a gutsy if cantankerous woman, Mamta Banerjee, as their alternative.

But the real paradox is quite extraordinary: Bengalis will not elect Mukherjee as Chief Minister because the Congress will not make him Prime Minister. The Mahatma chose Jawaharlal over Subhas, and Sonia preferred Singh over Mukherjee, because Bengali sentiment was secondary to their individual requirements.

The baffling anomaly is that the CPI(M), a party that has ruled Bengal for more than three decades through a thesis that reconciled the antithesis between Marx and religion, stopped its pre-eminent Bengali leader, Jyoti Basu, from becoming India’s first Bengali Prime Minister. The Durga-Communist CPI(M) exists in Kerala and Tripura but lives in Bengal. When their miracle-moment arrived, and Basu was named the unanimous choice for Prime Minister by a non-Congress, non-BJP coalition, the CPM politburo sabotaged the proposal. Being Communists, they found all sorts of convoluted theoretical reasons for a colossal political blunder.

Sentiment is the cement of India. Marxists, however, think, therefore they are. Their head gave them all manner of instructions on the evils of collaboration with bourgeois parties, not to mention pseudo-socialists and neo-opportunists. They forgot to check with the Bengali heart. Jargon so often becomes a substitute for ideology, expanding into a mist that obscures reality.

Bengal is the only province to offer three credible potential Prime Ministers: the Nehru-Gandhis never were ethnically from Uttar Pradesh, and are even less so now. Bengal’s loss has not been India’s gain.

The point missed between hyperbole and ridicule

Byline by M J Akbar: The point missed between hyperbole and ridicule

The question begs to be asked. Has the Congress changed its view of Jaya Prakash Narayan after 35 years, or has the Congress changed its view of Rahul Gandhi after 35 months? An official spokesman of the party has, after all, compared Rahul Gandhi to a national hero, a veteran of the Congress Socialist Party, the leftist group that became a power within the party in the 1930s, and a freedom fighter whose last fight for freedom was to liberate India from the censorship, suspension of democracy and Emergency which Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975 upon the country in order to save her Prime Minister’s chair.

The Congress line on JP, as he was popularly known, was unambiguous: the khadi-clad Gandhian was alternatively a “fascist”, “anarchist”, “anti-national”, and whatever else came into the mind of the Congress leaders after they had read yet another polemical tract written by forgotten Bolsheviks. The Seventies were a decade when it was still fashionable to be of the leftist persuasion. Mani Shankar Aiyar, one of the brightest minds in Congress, would not have been consigned to the doldrums: he would have been an intellectually vigorous colleague of Mohan Kumaramangalam and D.P. Dhar, rather than a mere nominated Rajya Sabha MP. That was a time when “CIA” was a dread acronym, an organisation accused of assassinating unfriendly world leaders, not a building block of an allied security system whose chief could get an appointment with the Indian Prime Minister whenever he sought it. It was an age when Palestine was an ally of India, rather than Israel. Anyone who opposed this “politically correct” left was therefore ipso facto a “fascist” et al. The “anti-national” bit was added not only because JP had the temerity to challenge the rule of a woman who had been equated with India [the Congress president in 1975 famously said “Indira is India”] but because JP in a public speech had come close to asking Indian soldiers to reconsider their oath of loyalty to a government that had become venal. As you can see, that was a tempestuous era.

One presumes that Rahul Gandhi has none of these JP-type political characteristics, at least in Congress eyes. No Congress spokesman would even dare to think of Rahul as a fascist, and even if his political views are a trifle fuzzy they are hardly authoritarian. There will of course come a time when a Congressman will claim that “Rahul is India and India is Rahul” without getting sacked, since sycophancy is eternal, but that is still into the future. So the spokesman must have been, at some internal level, comparing Rahul’s popularity to JP’s. But that too is a radical departure, since JP’s appeal was always dismissed as false.

The spokesman’s enthusiasm for historic parallels has, apparently, been snubbed into silence since it was clear to the high command, a single-person unit consisting solely of Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, that the hyperbole had opened Rahul up to ridicule. But while this is sensible [it always makes sense to cut your losses while the balance sheet is still manageable], the corrective is missing the point. JP’s place in the history of Indian democracy is not going to be determined by political social-climbers. The problem is not what the spokesman said but the impulse that made him say what he did. He was indulging in public sycophancy because he believed that this was the shortest route to promotion.

This disease is not limited to the Congress; most parties have created supra-human icons out of their leaders. This is because the life of the party is about as long as the life of the leader; one-man, or one-woman parties do not cross the lifetime of their creator. But the Congress is 135 years old. It was the torchbearer not only of the freedom movement but also of the values that have become enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Those values eroded, inevitably, and it is no longer the “central fact” of Indian politics, to use a phrase coined by Jawaharlal Nehru. But it remains a dominant force, and its implosion will leave vacant space that will not be easy to fill.

The paradox is that its opponents might do less damage to the Congress than its sycophants. The culture of obedience aborts proper discussion, for everyone around the table is eager to do just one thing: discover what the leader thinks, or wants, and then find a rationale that takes the participant to the same conclusion. This is not a meeting of minds. This is decision-making in a hall of echoes.

Rahul Gandhi has some way to go before he finds a working strategy: philosophy is passé these days, so it is unfair to ask him to get one. A good way to initiate the process is to use the door. A door is not only an entrance but also an exit. He should keep it open for independent thought, and show the door to sycophants.

The Fire this time

The Fire this time
By M.J. Akbar
India Today column: Third Eye
(October 18-25, 2010)

Small boys often dream of becoming either a fireman or a prime minister. But no child should be so precocious as to fantasise about becoming both at the same time.

The problem about becoming a heroic firefighter is that there must be a fire to fight. There is, moreover, an invisible line between the temptation to become a hero, and the immediate necessity of dousing the fire. The hero saves the child on the burning deck with a last-minute intervention. The art of public management is better judged, however, by the quality of prevention rather than the strength of a cure.

In his signature-stealth style, Dr Manmohan Singh seems to have acquired a child's fascination for fire. He watched the flames lick the tent before intervening in the Commonwealth Games. That did not matter too much, as everyone has been playing games with the Games. Arson in Kashmir is not child's play.

Fire has many origins in politics: historical, accidental, contemporary, deliberate, purposeless. Its motivation is covert, its behaviour surreptitious. It can emblazon the foreground and burn in perennial heat underground. It is never calm, never still; it dances in manic fury. The forest fire is lit by a spark.

Kashmir being Kashmir, every kind of incineration is at work, alternately, simultaneously: each line of fire awaits its moment and then converges into conflagration. Dr Singh, prompted surely by the thought of preserving the Rahul Gandhi generation through its mistakes, has opted for inscrutability in response to a fuse lit by Omar Abdullah's Assembly speech, in which he proposed the provocative thesis that Kashmir had acceded to India but not merged with it.

Is there a difference?

It is always a bit dangerous to prod history; you never know when it will bite back. While exact parallels are impossible, the difference, broadly, is between what was suggested by the 1946 British formula known as the Cabinet Mission Plan and the Indian integration effort led by Sardar Patel through which princely states became part of the Union of India. The Congress accepted the British plan until Jawaharlal Nehru, who was wary of any formula that could lead to the balkanisation of India, and suspicious of British intentions, challenged its provisions. The Cabinet Mission Plan had some strange curlicues but, most significantly, it permitted members of the Indian Union to secede in certain given conditions. This was, as Jinnah explained to his party, why the Muslim League, which sought Pakistan, accepted the Plan. When Patel integrated the princely states he did not offer them the option of secession.

This is the difference between accession and merger. Abdullah has mined a dangerous seam line. His speech was not merely the fluff of political rhetoric, but part of the official government record: text reinforced by context. He formally claimed that Delhi had "demolished" the agreement through which Maharaja Hari Singh joined India. He accepted that a solution was possible within the Indian Constitution but then kicked the door of secession just a little open. He wanted a resolution acceptable not only to the three regions of Jammu and Kashmir but also "to the neighbouring country". No prizes for guessing which neighbouring country he was referring to. I don't think Pakistan has much respect for the framework of the Indian Constitution.

One man who certainly does not have any respect is Syed Ali Shah Geelani, leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami. He has, within days of the speech, exacted the price of Dr Singh's silence. Abdullah's speech was instigated by Delhi, he said, and was an attempt to hoodwink Kashmiris.

This riposte achieves two purposes. It debunks the "concessions" made by Abdullah, but there is a clever side-swipe as well. It implies that Delhi has diluted its position on Kashmir's relationship with the Union of India because it has lost its nerve. This may not be true, but a week ago the scope for such an accusation did not exist. This may not constitute a material change for Delhi, but it is not immaterial either. Pakistan will certainly prefer to read it through the Geelani binocular.

The fire this time could have been prevented by good governance when the first young man fell to police bullets so many weeks ago. A wall of flame has risen. When will Dr Singh be ready to fight this fire?

China makes Chinese; Indians make India

Byline by M J Akbar: China makes Chinese; Indians make India

When does a small town grow up and become a big boy? Does size matter? Geography is a peculiar addiction. Fat makes you large, possibly very large, but it does not make you strong. Some nations have a quarter of their population herded in slums extending in myriad directions because they have not created the capacity to build more cities. America's strength does not lie in New York and Washington but in the fact that Microsoft can be born in Seattle and the world's software industry is controlled from a desert in California. India was weak as long as its strength lay in the traditional four great cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. These urban sprawls became sores instead of cities as the poor flocked toward them, driven by unrealistic hopes. It is only logical that all four were British cities. Chennai was seeded by an English adventurer who wanted to live within riding distance of his local girl friend; Mumbai harbour came as part of the dowry of Charles II and was then rented by the British monarch to the East India Company. Job Charnock founded Kolkata on a marsh because better points to the north along the Hooghly river were taken by European merchants who had arrived earlier. You might think of Delhi as a Mughal city, and so it was; but every bit of Delhi was razed to the ground by a vengeful Company after the uprising of 1857, and modern Delhi is a British invention with only a whiff of its glorious history. The great capitals of Indian India, Lucknow or Mysore or Patna or Jaipur, stagnated or decayed during the British Raj.

Modern India is rebuilding itself along its old centres of economic and political power, even as it lifts unknown one-street inhabitations into industrial hubs that are, to use a well-known phrase, the marvel of our age. Jamshedji Tata provided the template with Jamshedpur; Jawaharlal Nehru used state resources to create more steel cities. It was Dhirubhai Ambani who took the imaginative leap forward into the private sector ecopolis; the economic conglomerate around which Indians could create a new future. Imperceptibly, but indelibly, the map of India is now crowded with dozens of germinal points that make great labour migrations unnecessary. The future is in cities like Kochi or Aurangabad or Barmer: in less than a decade Barmer will rival Jaipur, and within the foreseeable future become the second or third heart of Rajasthan.

It is this India which is crashing through the glass ceilings of our social and economic history. It has turned Marxism on its head; instead of seizing from the rich in order to give to the poor, it is churning out its own cream. It is driven by a passion to improve the individual self, but knows that this is impossible without changing the collective well-being. It is not socialist, and indeed might be suffering from generosity-deficit when it comes to those at the lowest levels of our tragically tiered social order. But it is social-democratic, in an European rather than American fashion, willing to tolerate positive discrimination even if it grumbles relentlessly while doing so. The grumble is human; but tolerance comes from the fact that it has itself benefited from reservation policies.

It is this Indian who has swarmed across the medal podiums of the Commonwealth Games. Sport is a significant route to recognition as well as economic upsurge. The story of the farmer who could not enter the stadium to watch his wrestler son win a medal because of his unfamiliarity with the big city and its projects, and the contempt which police have for the poor, is both saddening and luminous. That unfortunate father will get over his hurt; pride in the son's glory has changed his life already. These athletes, including the many who did not win medals but learnt to compete, were not manufactured in some state factory machine, as in China; they are champions of free will, as well as champions through free will. China's achievements will be vulnerable to the contradictions inevitable within a state-dominated matrix; the idealism of Marx and Lenin could not prevent such contradictions from eroding its successes. Individualism makes Indian achievement more chaotic, but it is also the bedrock strength that will carry it further. China irons its dangerous creases once every fifty years; we do so as we go along, perhaps leaving the collar rumpled as we get the rest of the shirt right. The possibility of turmoil is far less in the second model. This is not to make a value judgement; one merely records an ongoing reality. Chroniclers do not always know how the chronicle will end, but we still have to do our reporting.

China makes the Chinese. Indians make India. Give me the second option any day.

When Age is Virility

When Age is Virility
By M J Akbar
India Today Column: Third Eye
October 11-18, 2010

In which year of Lord, or before the Lord, did India become civilised? According to the authoritative assessment made at the opening ceremony of year of the Commonwealth Games, Indian civilization is 5,000 years old. This means, obviously, that Government of India intellectuals have concluded, after careful scrutiny, that every Indian before that time was barbaric.

What is civilization? Is untouchability civilized? Was it civilized to make a fellow human being carry a pot around his neck so that his spit would not pollute the ground, and whip him if his shadow dared to cross the path of Brahmin? If not, then we may have started our trek towards civilization in 1932 when Gandhi and Ambedkar signed the Pune pact to forestall a social upheaval that would have left a still-dependent India in tatters.

Does the matrix of civilization include a full stomach? There are over 400 million Indians who still survive on a subsistence diet. How soon before we can declare our nation fully civilized? Is civilsation architecture? Is there a monument moment which marks a swivel point forward? Egyptians claim, with some evidence, that the Great Pyramid is 4,000 years old, so they have some right to the 5,000-years span: it requires a millennium of Knowledge in physics and mathematics, and much trial and failure, to attain pyramid-perfection.

The architecture of Indian antiquity is far more recent. As Tamil patriarch K. Karunanidhi has pointed out, in an oblique political manoeuvre that is by-product of a sophisticated mind, we have notbeeb able to trace the memorial of Chola king Raja Raja, who ruled between 985 and 1014, but there is at least one judicial pronouncement from the Allahabad high Court that places the birth of Lord Rama in the Krita yuga, which covers 17,28,000 years. The skeptical Karunanidhi believes that Dravidian civilization is about 3,000 years old, which leaves the Aryan north with 2,000 years of headway by Delhi’s calculation. He adds that Dravidians are descendants of a race that lived in Lemuria hundreds of thousands of years ago. Civilisation, then, forms only a small part of our heritage.

Is literature the alpha of modern civilization? The word is certainly more powerful than stone. Language bears the burden of time more easily, since it is consistently reinvigorated by popular invention. The finest expression of language is surely mystical. In the beginning, says the Bible, was the word. Irqa: read!, said the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad when the final message in the Abrahmaic tradition came down. Om is sound incarnate. Is organized religion, with its thesis of codes and plentitude of values, the starting point of civlisation?

A brave thought, for it moves the definition of evolution from the Darwinian template of incremental change through minute physical variations, caricatured in the progress of hunched, hairy ape to the semi-hairy biped called man, to the nuances of philosophy and belief. Alas: the theory of faith has rarely been in harmony with the behavior of the faithful. Every religion advertises the virtues of peace; each is consumed by a religiosity that engineers war. The ape kills as well, but for more rational reasons, and on a far smaller scale. Which forest has been denuded of life by animal war? It is only the human being who places a premium on existence over co-existence, and then compounds the arrogance by insisting that his version of behavior is superior to anyone else’s. Europe colonized the world in the name of civilising it. To be fair, this western march of greed was often provoked by Eastern folly.

However depressing and contrary the evidence, civilization remains the ultimate temptation, an umbrella identity that often rises above nationalism without disturbing its comforting limitations, a siren call to glory and its first cousin, war. Samuel Huntington was not particularly original. Selling the hunter as victim has been a familiar assignment for a certain kind of academic. He actually set out to justify a civilisational clash with China, but won a lottery with his back-up number, Islam.

For traditional champions of civilization, age is virility. 5,000 is not just a number; it is a cry of triumph. The Chinese seem to ignore the rivalry of claims as an inferior pursuit. There is only one reason why Indian and Chinese civilization have managed to stay alongside without too much conflict, the Himalayas.

Civilisation is a good idea, but with the Himalayas.

Sheikh of Options

Byline by M J Akbar: Sheikh of Options

You know a marriage has gone sour when one of the couple begins winking at the neighbour. The political wedlock between Rahul Gandhi and Omar Abdullah was the celebrity event of our times, a signature moment that harmonised the hopes of a new century with the promise of a generation free not only from the fuddy-duddy mindset of a Nehru-Sheikh ancestry, but also the overenthusiastic mistakes of the daddy partnership between Farooq Abdullah and Rajiv Gandhi.

It also aimed at being a sparky New India coalition that came into its own when Omar Abdullah used the 2008 debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal to offer a soliloquy on why he was an Indian first, with everything else in the queue of identities coming only after this primary assertion. This speech was the ideological bedrock of Delhi’s trust, and when Omar was sent to Srinagar in 2009, it was as if Rahul Gandhi was sending not just another Chief Minister but a virtual national anthem.

When the history of ironies is written it will be a thick book. Neither Omar nor Rahul knew in the glorious summer of 2009 what anyone with even marginal memory could have told them: the path of good intentions is not only strewn with stones but has innumerable by-lanes that wind their way to Islamabad. The world has changed since the 1989-1993 intifada, which is why the gun has given way to the slingshot, but the purpose is the same, provocation, and a message to the world that while there might be a government in Srinagar it is not in power in Kashmir.

The syndrome suffered from additional confusion, born out of the simulated halo dangling behind the Rahul-Omar partnership. These young men were in politics, obviously, but they were not quite the kind of grubby politician who had one hand in the till and the other dabbling in compromise. The phenomenon is not particularly original. The favourite weapon of every generation is a broom with which to sweep the past away. But the past is much more than a collection of mistakes. It is also a repository of lessons. However, Delhi was gulled by the “non-political” image it had generated out of a PR machine. It could not believe that Omar would descend from high ground towards the sub-text of Kashmiri nationalism.

Omar Abdullah was “above” politics as long as it suited him to waft on that lofty level. A politician does what is necessary to stay in power. Omar needed Congress to become CM; he had neither a majority on his own, nor even the boost of single-largest party in the Assembly. He succeeded purely because Congress was fashioning a new-gen success-story template that could be transported onto the national scene when needed. When that image exploded, a silent but obvious countdown began in Delhi. Threat perception invoked the political instinct in Omar. When a politician sees power slipping away he begins to prepare the conditions for a return. Power is the aphrodisiac. If Delhi cannot provide it, someone else will mix the potent powder. Loyalty to India got Omar an internship in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s ministry and barely 18 months of comfort under Rahul Gandhi’s protection. Time to move on.

The Great Indian Hope remembered, therefore, that Kashmir only acceded to India but did not merge with it; he did not add that this was thanks to Dr Karan Singh’s father Maharaja Hari Singh, who, unlike other princely states, insisted on Article 370 before signing the document of accession, because independence has been co-opted into a Kashmiri Muslim agenda rather than a Kashmiri cause.

This makes Omar Abdullah an accessory to India rather than a citizen. An accessory’s loyalty cannot be taken for granted, and so if there is a bit of adultery in an open marriage, why kick up a fuss? The Abdullahs like keeping a door open to Delhi and an ear open to Islamabad. They have to survive, you see, just in case you asked.

Peace is rarely an accident. Omar Abdullah negotiated a temporary settlement with the head of Jamaat-e-Islami, the openly pro-Pakistan Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Geelani welcomed the price of purchase after Omar made his “accession-not-merger” speech in the Assembly.

The discovery of Omar Abdullah as a Sheikh of Options is interesting. Far more intriguing will be the rediscovery of his mentor in Congress. Fudge won’t work. Omar was not writing a treatise, he was delivering a political speech fully conscious of its repercussions. So far the Congress left led by Digvijay Singh has knee-jerked towards Omar; its spokesmen bought time; and Rahul Gandhi preferred his usual way out of a dilemma, silence. At some point silence becomes consent. This is not the only problem. Farooq Abdullah is in the Union Cabinet. Does father share son’s views? If yes, what are the consequences?

Omar might have gained a little temporary space in Kashmir; he has lost many times that in the rest of India. It is not an intelligent trade-off for a man still at the beginning of his political career.

A peace of land

A peace of land
By M. J AKBAR
(India Today Column : THIRD EYE)
October 3-11, 2010

One challenge was old as Babar, the second as old as Nehru. Both are aspects of India’s most divisive dilemma, the Hindu-Muslim relationship and its impact on shared space. Why then, as the Allahabad High Court judgment showed and the sensible reaction of Indians proved, is Ayodhya moving from deathbed to health, and Kashmir slipping from wound to gangrenous coma?

The answer is simple even if its implications are nuanced. When politicians run the country you get fractious, ego-driven, fudge-coated misrule, as in Kashmir. When the country runs the politicians, there is healing. The message from the street on Ayodhya was unambiguous. Even if the dispute remains, the violence goes. Before the verdict the government was in greater panic than the people.

Indians did not suddenly become non-violent on September 30 in honour of Gandhi’s birthday two days later. But they have, almost imperceptibly, turned

anti-violence. The young are bewildered that their parents could have chosen chaos over construction, and acid over an economy. Their elders have abandoned nightmares from the past and joined a modern dream. The spirit of peace did not descend from leaders to the people, it rose from the street to the corridors of governance and justice. Politicians understood that if yesterday violence meant murder, today it means suicide.

The bjp realised that if 1992 catapulted it forward, conflict in 2010 could send it spinning into an abyss. L.K. Advani advised his party to remain calm in adversity and conciliatory in victory; rss chief Mohan Bhagwat described the verdict as neither a victory nor a defeat for anyone. The Congress, which has consistently exploited the politics of irresolution, so that it can be all things to all constituencies, discovered that this tactic had become a self-activating trap. Hallucination is not my preferred form of relaxation; I am not suggesting that we have entered some form of nirvana. But the message from the Indian voter is self-evident. The cost of provocation will be defeat.

The politics of irresolution has been the consuming tragedy of Kashmir. There is a substantive difference between life as usual and life as normal. Delhi’s politics in this summer of discontent has revolved around a belated effort to resume life as usual. The usual provides flexibility for games. Militants and separatists can play footsie with Delhi while they dine off Islamabad’s menu; Delhi can treat pacification as victory, after offering a sleeping pill and calling it medicine. The young picked up stones because they wanted change, not a couple of extra schools; women came out of their homes because they were angry at the usual and desperate for the normal.

The last time both Ayodhya and Kashmir were inflammatory was the period between 1990 and 1992: the fire across India was complemented by a rage for ‘azadi’ in the valley. We know what has changed in the Ayodhya confrontation. The poor have realised that poverty is not communal. They want the self-respect that comes with a full stomach; they have enough places to pray. This has dampened the politics of every form of communalism.

But something has changed in the Kashmir scenario as well. The promise of Pakistan as the elixir and purist paradise for Muslims has collapsed for a second time. In 1971 it exploded and Bangladesh was born. By 2010 Pakistan has visibly imploded. Many more Muslims are dying of manufactured violence in Pakistan than in India. There have been only two major riots in India since 1992; after Babri and Godhra. Pakistan is a daily litany of death, and a collage of seamless civil wars. Indian Muslims do not need a sermon to educate them; they see facts in media.

Kashmiris do not want to be annexed to a fractured geography. Their ‘azadi’ is ethnic rather than Islamic; it does not include Muslims from Jammu, let alone Muslims from Faizabad or Hyderabad. It is a heady, undefined fantasy that cannot pass the test of daylight. The solution lies, as in Ayodhya, when Delhi gets a simple message: the people are more important than politics.

The columnist is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and Editorial Director of India Today and Headlines Today.

2010 is a Century away from 1992

Byline by M J Akbar: 2010 is a Century away from 1992

The judiciary is more important than any judgement. Every institution has to be larger than the sum of its members, and nowhere more so than the two pillars of any democracy, Parliament and the judiciary. We do not question the legitimacy of an enactment just because we disagree with an MP, or indeed because the behaviour of some MPs might have been unsavoury. A substantial section of India did not agree with the passage of the nuclear bill in 2009; and evidence of bribery in the process was produced, in a fairly dramatic way, during the proceedings. This did not mean rejection of the new legislation.

Lawyers and leaders of the Sunni Waqf Board and the Muslim Personal Law Board have repeatedly insisted that they would abide by the judgement of the courts. This was both reasonable and acceptable [reason and response have not necessarily been in harmony during the long years of contention over a mosque at Ayodhya]. When the Allahabad High Court’s judgement was deferred by the Supreme Court for about a week, there was perceptible irritation among Muslims, who wanted the verdict to be announced. It is possible that such enthusiasm for the verdict was fuelled by a conviction that it would go in favour of the mosque. The lawyers and spokesmen of the pro-mosque movement displayed considerable confidence. Maybe they forgot that however strong a case may be, it still has to be argued before a bench, and complacency within the legal team can be a fatal flaw. It was the BJP that was preparing for an adverse judgement. Its leader L.K. Advani told his party repeatedly, before the verdict, that any remorse should be a private matter; and that violence was unacceptable. No disputant can deny the validity of the judicial process, or the credibility of the verdict, just because it has gone against you. That is counter-productive, and dangerous.

In any case, the Allahabad judgement is a semi-colon, not a full stop. The full stop will come when the Supreme Court takes a decision. Muslims will appeal, as they have every right to. It must also be stressed that in 1993 Parliament clearly prevented the courts from hearing any other dispute over a place of worship. Ayodhya is the last case of its kind.

The Congress, which has been in power during all four of the nodal points of the Babri-Ayodhya controversy — opening of British Raj locks and installation of idols in 1949, laying of the foundation stone for a temple in 1989, destruction of Babri in 1992 and the verdict in 2010 — is in search of an “amicable” settlement. The game is old and evident. Congress policy on the dispute has rotated around one axis: how to get the temple built without losing the Muslim vote. The BJP has no Muslim vote to lose, but it will support such an under-the-surface endeavour since it obviously wants a temple to be constructed as soon as possible. If Ayodhya is the last case of its kind perhaps we should let it complete the legal process as well. We have waited for six decades; why not wait for two or three years more? Any “amicable” settlement is unlikely to be amicable enough for everyone, to begin with and could degenerate into a “political” compromise that could strain community relations rather than heal them. If we trust our institutions then we must trust them fully.

Pseudo-politicians in religious garb seem to be able to resist everything except temptation, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. Unsurprisingly, therefore, one or two professional fire-breathers among Muslims have reinforced their reputation for irresponsibility by indulging in provocative rhetoric from the pulpit. They have not learnt from the experience of a quarter century what the price of provocation is, for they never suffer. The price is paid by the poor and the defenceless, who live in crowded lanes, defenceless on one side and hostile on the other.

There is however some good news. Those who think they can still milk hysteria are blind to an extraordinary change that has come about in India. The people, Hindu or Muslim, have risen above the negative politics of communal conflict; they want the positive politics of development. Faith and worship still matter to Indians; and it is a very limited, elitist, Delhi notion that the young have moved beyond religion. They have not. But they have moved beyond violence as a means to their horizon.

The impoverished have understood a simple, important, over-riding reality: poverty is not communal. There is no shortage of places for prayer in our country. There is, however, a shortage of self-respect, since every hungry stomach in our country is a sharp slap on the face of the idea of India. 2010 is a hundred years away from 1992.

Much Good from a Bad Games

Much Good from a Bad Games
By M J Akbar

Why have we become defeatists just because The Times of India has done such a brilliant job of exposing this strangely gut-wrenching but simultaneously hilarious loot of our wealth in the name of Commonwealth? Why are we so depressed merely because the world media has turned India’s image into a toilet seat, thereby fulfilling V S Naipaul’s dream first sketched in “An Area of Darkness” ? Away with the frozen frown! We must be sunny and optimistic. Let us look at the positive side and list the great achievements that await us during the Commonwealth Games.

India will win 200 medals. Given the rate at which the weak-livered champions from kidneyless countries like Australia -- imagine getting scared by a mere dengue mosquito! bah! -- are dropping out, we will soon be cheering ourselves hoarse as Indians win gold after gold in what becomes a virtual domestic competition. The downside is that our ministers will feel compelled to hand out Rs 20 lakh of our money to the winners, but at least the cash will go to sports stars rather than a greasy political shrimp masquerading as a whale or dolphin.

We Indians have, regrettably, forgotten our true strength. Do we remember that we were the first nation to defeat European colonialism? The British Empire never recovered from Indian independence; it was downhill all the way for London after August 15, 1947. It is but child’s play for a nation that destroyed the mightiest empire in history, to ruin the Commonwealth. Those who think of Suresh Kalmadi and the Group of Ministers in charge of the Games as merely incompetent or greedy or both are doing them a terrible injustice. They are, in truth, liberation theologians who are putting the finishing touches to a mission that Gandhi and Nehru were unable to complete. Our founding fathers killed the Raj; their faithful heirs have neutered the child of the Raj, the Commonwealth . Our generation achieved its goal through strict non-violence . All we did was to introduce the Commonwealth to Indian standards of hygiene and the Commonwealth became a gibbering wreck. The world is amazed only because it has always underestimated India’s destructive capacity, which is second only to India’s self-destructive capacity.

Delhi will be a divine city from October 3 to 14. Not a single foreign tourist will have arrived, and every Dilliwalla with the means will have followed Mani Shankar Aiyar out of the capital. Schools will be closed. Offices will be on semi-holiday . The Delhi government has already issued restaurant alerts through radio ads, saying anyone who tries to eat out is anti-national . Ergo: no traffic. Potholes will have been bricked up, with strict instructions to implode only after October 14. The skies will have exhausted themselves. The weather will begin to drift towards winter. Can you think of a more idyllic place to enjoy a fortnight of bliss? As nothing is perfect , the only precaution will be to ensure that you do not go anywhere near the entrance to the stadiums. The stadiums were built nearly three decades ago for the Asiad under Rajiv Gandhi’s stewardship at minimal cost, without any noticeable whiff of corruption, and therefore are excellent . It is today’s approach and the embellishment , done with amoebic dysentery spending that is the problem. If you are an ordinary Indian, please do not use any new connector bridge. The government will show some remorse only if anything happens to a foreign athlete when a bridge collapses.

Clear evidence has emerged that the inmates are no longer in charge of the asylum . It may have taken a press conference by one of our honoured foreign Games officials , in which he used a few indelicate words, and pictures that turned the world’s image of ‘Risen India’ into a horror story, but the high and mighty did finally stir. Intervention at nothing less than the Prime Minister’s level was needed to get chaps with long brooms to brush the dust out and use a bit of water in the bathrooms, but admit it -- it happened! Yes, we do not know yet what will happen when the athletes finally hit the turf, and whether swimming pool leaks have been plugged or not, but this column has already warned you that the best way to enjoy the Commonwealth Games is by staying as far away from the venues as you can.

A friend pointed out that we have only now begun to notice what happened some time ago: the CIA has taken over India. The CIA provides the core inner ring which pumps blood into the heart of the current ruling class of our country. CIA is: Corrupt Incompetent Arrogant. There is only one reason China is ahead of India; because it is run by the CPC: Corrupt, Perverse but Competent.

(Times of India Column, 26th September 2010)

Babri-Ayodhya Volcanic Eruption & the Judgement

Byline by M J Akbar: Babri-Ayodhya Volcanic Eruption & the Judgement

It is never easy to walk close to the precipice. The Supreme Court must be feeling very sure-footed to test its vertigo level on Ayodhya. It has put six decades of anguish, turmoil and a legal endurance test on the edge of a calendar. If there is the slightest mishap, and even the Supreme Court cannot claim the divine power of predicting what unknown factors might spin the coming week out of control, the Allahabad High Court judgement on the Babri title dispute could fall into a bottomless abyss. If the judgement is not read out before the end of the month it becomes infructuous since one of the judges is retiring. India does not have the energy to start another six decades of social, political and legal acrimony.

It would of course have been heavenly if time was the solution to a problem has proved intractable for both the British Raj and free India. Many problems in India do merge and disappear in that glacier called time. Faith, alas, arouses passions that have the resilience to defeat time. There is a view among those who have not experienced the depth of faith that the dispute has faded into unimportance. It was perhaps this assessment that persuaded Rahul Gandhi to claim that other things were more important. A little reading of history would be useful. The Babri-Ayodhya dispute has lain dormant for long spells before erupting suddenly, volcanically, and spreading its lava far and wide into the social streams of our nation. Sometimes it rumbles before bursting, and sometimes it surprises us with its arbitrary vehemence. This is why Sardar Patel, whose understanding of India was unmatched, advised Jawaharlal Nehru to find some way towards immediate closure of the two issues that had become symbols in the Hindu subconscious, the temple at Somnath destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni and the Babri mosque. Nehru was uncomfortable, but did not interfere with the reconstruction of the temple at Somnath, except that he would not allow the project to become a state enterprise. Somnath was comparatively easy since no one had built a mosque at the site. Patel warned that if the Ram-birthplace dispute was not resolved it would return to haunt India five decades later. It did, in less time than that.

Ayodhya was different because there was a mosque, built during the reign of Babar. L.K.Advani linked the two when he started his rath yatra towards Ayodhya from Somnath, exactly 20 years on 25 September. Another two decades of time have not brought any resolution.

Perhaps we are being lulled by the fact that there has been no violence over Ayodhya after 1992. Mistake. Indians, of any religion or denomination, are instinctively repulsed by violence, even if they can, on occasions, get as appallingly murderous as any crowd in history. But there is rarely exultation and always guilt. Even when top-of-mind recall has dimmed, it does not mean that an issue such as Babri-Ayodhya has disappeared from hearts.

The consequences of non-judgement will be horrendous. It is obvious from the statements of their spokesmen that the Congress is, typically, committed to irresolution. Its politics impels it to hunt with the mosque and run with the temple. This fudge was possible as long as the courts were taking their time. Time - a chameleon component of this drama - has run out, at least in the legal sense. There is at long last a judgement, by a respected high court. Even a stay on its implementation and the reality of an appeal cannot diminish the power of a verdict. The government would be very foolish to believe that it can bury the judgement in some legal maze, making it untraceable. If the judgement is not read by the court, it will still find its way to the people, through the media perhaps. The happy fact of any democracy is that suppressed information, like water, always leaks through the shackles of government.

The parties involved are already raising dangerous apprehensions. It is only natural for either, or perhaps both, to feel that the government is using delay as a tactic to deny them justice. The only salutary outcome of such a situation would be that the two parties forget their bitterness towards each other, and divert it towards the government in a common cause. Do not laugh. Stranger things have happened in Indian politics.

The Supreme Court has the liberty to hope that something could happen in six days that has not happened in six decades, an amicable settlement. But it has no right to abort the course of justice for reasons extraneous to the law. Tuesday is going to be a tense day, but I have no doubt that the Supreme Court will apply its own means test. It needs an answer to only one question: have the parties to the dispute reached a settlement outside the court? If the answer is no, as is likely, then before the Supreme Court rises it must give leave to its brothers on the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court to deliver their judgement. That is the only safe route back from the precipice.

Omar must know Army is not the Enemy

Omar must know Army is not the Enemy
By M J Akbar

Self-preservation is the default mode of the self-destructive. Omar Abdullah is trapped in an existential dilemma. He cannot blame himself for the wreck he has wrought. To do so would severely damage, if not abort, a political career born in genetic entitlement and wafted into that exhilarating but oxygen-thin ozone layer of celebrity. He cannot blame Delhi either, the favoured recourse of regional parties caught in a crisis, for he is a child of Delhi in more senses than one. He owes his job to the masters of the Capital, Congress and more specifically Rahul Gandhi. He tried blaming the local opposition, particularly his bete noire Mehbooba Mufti, but that is a futile dead end. It could not take him out of the maze. Mehbooba is in control of neither the street nor the secretariat. Blaming Pakistan is too obvious to raise anything more substantial than a yawn.

He has, therefore, selected the only escape route he could think of: blame the Indian Army. After 90 deaths in 90 days, the dilution of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has become the fulcrum of his political fortunes. He did not offer to leave because of the complete collapse of governance and total absence of ideas. He threatened to resign if the Union government did not punish the Indian Army.

For which sin? Not a single death in the present crisis has resulted from an Army bullet. Those bullets came from the guns of the J&K police and CRPF. Why has everyone chosen to obscure this fact with silence and raise dust against the Army?

This question has disturbing dimensions. Why have separatists and militants never demanded that the state government disband the local police and send back the CRPF for taking such a toll? Why is the secessionist, and alas political, verbiage targeted at the Army and no one but the Army? The Indian Army came into the picture for the first time only on the evening of September 15. That was during discussions with the Fifth Corps on how to respond to the next stage of a carefully designed strategy — sit-ins before Army camps, meant to sustain the focus on the Army and weaken its presence in the valley. The Army has not been deployed in the demonstrations, and is concentrating only on its counter-insurgency role.

Why is the Indian Army the one-point target of those who want to break India? The answer is uncomplicated. The police, whether state or central, cannot defend the territorial integrity of India. The Indian Army can. It is therefore in the interest of secessionists and their mentors in Islamabad to create discord between the Indian Army and the Indian state.

Why is the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir lending his voice to this cacophony? Which gallery is a desperate Omar Abdullah playing to?

This crisis did not begin 90 days ago or a hundred days ago. It began in the minds of people who had an agenda and whose intricate planning was propelled onto the street by the Kashmir Jamaat e-Islami and its leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The Kashmir Jamaat has never made any secret of its objective, which is to merge the valley with Pakistan. It has financial and ideological links with Pakistan. It has deliberately disassociated itself from the Jamaat e-Islami in the rest of India. This slings-and-stones model was crafted to elicit world sympathy, and create a David versus Goliath confrontation. (David is a prophet of Islam as well, and lauded as a supreme instance of a jihadi in the holy Quran.)

The timing was certainly influenced by President Barack Obama’s scheduled November visit to India. Both Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton have said, at some point in their campaigns, that Palestine and Kashmir required resolution. Pakistan wants Kashmir on Obama’s must-do list as part of its pay-off for helping in Afghanistan, and protest builds pressure.

Intelligence officers should have picked up what any well-informed journalist in Srinagar knew. Prevention is the true cure in governance. The administration compounded intelligence failure by behaving like a bumbling, stumbling Goliath once demonstrations began.

Delhi was so indifferent that it did not even bumble. It took 90 days to hold an all-party meeting that suffused the airwaves with inanities. Why was Delhi silent until the volcano burst and lava spread beyond the valley? Manmohan Singh promised this week to talk to “anyone” who abjured violence. Kashmiris have the right to ask: why did you not talk when there was peace? This government inherited a Kashmir in improving health. It has frittered away a legacy.

Rahul Gandhi, who can be PM any day he chooses, says, disingenuously that he is unfamiliar with the complexities of AFSPA. The Prime Minister knows what it means: to weaken the Indian Army in Kashmir is to weaken India.

Mandal chapter is now a book

Byline by M J Akbar: Mandal chapter is now a book

Has the Manmohan Singh Government ordered India’s first Hindu census? The exercise scheduled for 2011 to count the caste populations of the country excludes, by definition, those who do not believe in caste.

If someone asked me what my caste was, I would have no answer. I have a nationality: Indian. I have a faith: Islam. I have a birthplace: Bengal. I have a cultural identity even if this tends to get diffuse, since my father was a Bihari settled in Bengal, my mother a Kashmiri who was brought up in Amritsar, and I now live in Haryana. The answer may be complicated but it is still an answer. But caste? I have none.

Should I acquire a caste, if someone is willing to offer me one, in order to become politically correct in the era of Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi? I take these names quite deliberately, since, to the best of my knowledge, they too do not have a caste, at least if they are true to the philosophy of their faith. Will the Prime Minister claim that he is either a Jat or a Pappa Sikh or whatever when the men in white shirts with blank forms turn up at his door? Will Mrs Gandhi tell the censuswallahs that she has become a Brahmin-Christian because she married a man whose mother was a Kashmiri Pandit and father a Parsi?

What is the precise purpose of an additional, expensive and wearisome enumeration of our innumerable social differences? The normal census already delineates fractional, not to say fractious, identities which is why we know what is the percentage of Dalits and Brahmins and Yadavs and Muslims et al in every constituency, enabling politicians to select candidates on the basis of caste-communal mathematics. Government knows these percentages and publishes them for citizens to read and make demands for job reservation on a quota slide-rule. Are we now heading for the specific numbers of sub-castes and gotras, so that squabbles for the job-pie get even more intense, bitter and divisive?

Decisions with long-term consequences are being made with vision no greater than an eye-range of the next regional election. Cabinet ministers who objected to this caste census were warned that the Congress would lose crucial votes in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh if it did not succumb to pressure from the margins. No party is so angelic as to reject adjustments which serve partisan ends. But the moment a party sacrifices its core values for perceived surface benefits, it is in danger of losing its political equilibrium.

The celebration of caste as a democratic virtue was perhaps inevitable in a complex dynamic where the reality of economic injustice was enhanced by layers of identity inferiority. Such problems had to be purged out of the system, and that could not happen by pretending that they did not exist, as if we had achieved some form of Gandhian Ram Rajya by virtue of becoming free of British rule in 1947. If the Dalit struggle for equity preceded freedom, thanks to the brilliance and courage of Babasaheb Ambedkar, who demanded and got a commitment from Mahatma Gandhi on political and economic reservations, then agitation by the impoverished among those a notch or two above was only a matter of time.

There will always be a gap between economic growth and social aspiration, particularly since it is almost impossible to spread the benefits of growth in ideal proportions: Marxism could not make it happen, and it is silly for quasi-capitalism to even try. The democratic process is the only one devised for a peaceful transfer of wealth along a sustainable axis. This is not a favour that the rich do to the poor; higher reward for labour and expansion of remunerative employment is an entitlement in a democracy. The peculiar catch in our country is economic and political mobilization around the unique reality of caste. The Mandal report, therefore, was an inevitable chapter in the economic history of India.

The question, two decades after Mandal reservations were adopted, is whether this chapter should become the full book. The interplay between votes and gratification is a function of any democracy, but it is dangerous to make that the sole parameter for decisions.

In an effort to ameliorate an obvious injustice, in the case of minorities who do not accept caste, the system has taken retroactive measures, like assigning a pre-Islamic identity to Muslims and categorising them by their caste before conversion. Since jobs and reserved educational seats are on offer, many Muslims have accepted this variant. Compromise however is never an adequate solution; moreover, it can become a bottomless abyss. The caste census institutionalises an anomaly. Caste has become a vehicle without a reverse gear, and there is no U-turn visible on the road ahead.

Perhaps the answer will lie in the prospect that Government jobs will become an illusion, as the private sector absorbs the functions of state authority. Politicians have already caught on, and begun demanding reservations there as well. If we are sensible, we will draw the line long before we encroach upon the private sector.

If.

Memo to PM: Ego is unflattering

Memo to PM: Ego is unflattering
By M J Akbar

Could it possibly be true? Has Manmohan Singh begun to believe what some admirers have started to suggest with incremental passion, that he is India's best-ever Prime Minister? The answer must be no. He is clearly not self-delusional.

Why then did he suggest that his Cabinet was more coherent than that of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, noting pointedly that Nehru and Sardar Patel were exchanging letters by the day and Indira Gandhi had to fend off the ‘Young Turks'?

His analogy is ahistorical. Nehru and Patel wrote to each other when they sought to place a well-thought out policy position on record; they were, in a very real sense, creating precedence, administrative culture and an archive of an incubating government. To suggest that this was worse than the petty, ego-heavy squabbling for turf and lucrative territory that is the hallmark of the current coalition, is an extraordinary disservice to two founding fathers whose ideas and sacrifice shaped the birth of a nation. Nehru's letter to Patel in September 1947, warning of Pakistan's plans to seize Kashmir by force, and suggesting that Sheikh Abdullah, then in Maharaja Hari Singh's jail, would be India's strongest ally, is a classic of the genre. This generation was literate, and its natural forte was letters. Nehru used them as an instrument of governance. He wrote regularly to his chief ministers; this did not mean that he was at war with them. Moreover, Patel died on December 15, 1950, and Nehru had many cabinets till he died in 1964.

Indira Gandhi did have to deal with a fringe group that romantically styled itself "Young Turks", after the majors of the Ottoman Empire who sidelined the Caliph-Sultan. But the tallest of the Indian Turks, Chandra Shekhar, never found a place in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet. Two factors create coherence: agreement on policies, and personality of the leader. Policy today, whether right or wrong, is scattershot; decisions tend to be driven either by electoral compulsions or bribery. Nehru and Indira were charismatic. Singh has many virtues, but charisma is not one of them. As a leader, he was too weak to select his own Cabinet; Sonia Gandhi did that.

It is remarkable that Singh never considered comparing his Cabinet with that of Narasimha Rao, in which he served as finance minister. Instead, he positioned himself against and above the supreme icons of the Congress.

The anti-Nehru industry in our politics has a fertile past. The good that men do, as Shakespeare noted, is oft-interred in their bones; mistakes become an indelible national memory. Nehru is chiefly remembered now for referring Kashmir to the UN and a traumatic defeat in the 1962 war. No Congressman is anti-Nehru, but a very strong faction has believed that Nehru was a flawed genius who failed in two critical areas — the economy and foreign policy. India paid a heavy price, in this covert analysis, for Nehru's tilt to the Left, and his heirs did nothing to correct that inheritance.

Rao was the first prime minister of what might be called the non-Nehru faction of Congress. Over the last two decades, Rao and Singh, with occasional help from right-wing parties, have sharply diluted the Nehru-Indira legacy, even as they continue to pay lip service to their names. They sincerely believe that they have served their nation better with economic reforms that took an axe to the state sector, and a strategic partnership with the United States. Indeed, they have been widely applauded by the new-economy elite. Rao even damaged the social consensus that Nehru forged between Hindus and Muslims after the trauma of Partition. Singh, of course, does not contribute to such radical social revisionism. But in the vortex of his unexpressed thought is perhaps a sense that history will place Rao on a pedestal higher than Nehru.

The subconscious is the voice of the silent man. Manmohan Singh is a silent man. Ideas, issues, the temptations of pride and pitfalls of vanity, nestle in that nether region of the mind because better sense suggests that it would be inflammatory and self-defeating to let them rise to the surface. Some thoughts are incompatible with open air. But they tend to curl insidiously through the backdoor of a casual remark, or side-alley of a comparison. The less-than-laudatory reference to Nehru, Patel and Indira Gandhi was a revealing moment. No prime minister has, even through the slippery sinews of a breakfast conversation, placed his Cabinet above Nehru's. There is neither irony nor consequence in the aftermath, since Congress has long shifted out of its mildewed, timber-laden socialist mansion into a new, gleaming prefab condominium.

Maybe Manmohan Singh knows his party better than the party knows him.

(Times of India Column - September 12, 2010)

Wanted, a Nobel Prize for Honesty

Byline by M J Akbar: Wanted, a Nobel Prize for Honesty

Now that a legitimate recipient can be identified for a Nobel Prize for Honesty, it is time Oslo introduced such a prize. One sensible option would be to scrap the prize for peace since each year the committee has to torture itself to find a candidate — before it hands over the cash and plaque to someone who has just declared war.

I have an excellent nominee for the first winner of the Nobel Honesty Prize: Alexei Kudrin, Finance Minister of Russia. In the first week of this month he told the news agency Interfax that the best thing his countrymen could do to help the national economy was to smoke and drink more. These are his specific words: “If you smoke a pack of cigarettes, that means you are giving more to help solve social problems such as boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates…People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state.”

There is an also-ran in these stakes. On 10 September, Sha Zukang, Undersecretary General for Economic and Social Affairs at the UN, encouraged by a glass or four of alcohol, told Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General, “I know you never liked me, Mr Secretary-General — well, I never liked you, either…” But the winner is Alexei Kudrin, by a long shot. He was sober.

His message is simple. Smoking gives you cancer; cancer kills you early. A dead person cannot claim state pension, which is good news. Death also shifts the age-youth ratio in favour of the young. Further, you pay higher taxes on cigarettes and drink — more money, then, to the exchequer: wonderful! QED. Die to save the fatherland!

This is exactly how any Finance Minister driven to despair by deficits would express himself. But the rules tell him to talk like a weasel and promise more food, electricity, shelter and security even if he has to bankrupt the future in order to secure your votes today.

Dr Manmohan Singh, who had a hard time as Finance Minister and isn’t actually on a picnic as Prime Minister, is never going to give such excess, but you can almost hear him straining at the leash. Years of being politically correct at the cost of economic discipline are beginning to tell. He tipped over when the Supreme Court instructed his Government to feed the impoverished instead of letting grain rot. Dr Singh’s retort was sharp; in sum, that the Government was not in the business of charity. If the grain had to rot, so be it; if the impoverished wanted food they would have to go to the market. There is economic logic, apparently, in letting rats get fat. The Supreme Court, said the PM, should live outside the policy zone. If a lesser being had made such a remark, it would doubtless have invited contempt of court, but even supreme judges know better than to summon a Prime Minister at the drop of a remark.

The Prime Minister is a politician. Any suggestion to the contrary is promotion of a myth. Evidence suggests that his populism would be community-oriented rather than poverty-specific. He understands the nuances of the game better than some self-proclaimed professionals imagine. Community is the key: poverty is too amorphous an identity, whereas caste and religion are the truly powerful instruments of mobilization. It is not accidental that Dr Singh’s Cabinet has scheduled a caste census for next year.

Being a politician, he knows that his main responsibility is to keep the Government afloat until heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi declares himself fit to rule rather than merely campaign through non-sequiturs. Dr Singh keeps sane in the waiting room thanks to a quiet sense of humour. He has, for instance, advised his ministers to check out the United Nations code on corruption. Does he think that the whole Cabinet will begin to tremble at the thought of being caned by Ban Ki-moon?

Indeed, it is possible that ministers like Commerce Minister Anand Sharma who, poor chap, has declared to the Prime Minister that he has personal assets of a mere Rs 26,741, might apply for a UN poverty certificate, while we concerned Indians pass the hat for charitable contributions. It is a shame, in these post-Gandhian times, that as important a personage as Anand Sharma should have less in his bank than it costs to buy an official suit, unless of course he buys his suits from what lies in his cupboard rather than in his bank account.

Given the parlous state of so many of our ministers — the indigent Subodh Kant Sahai, for instance, has personal assets of only Rs 1.4 lakh — should we suggest to Oslo that they should also offer a Nobel Prize for Poverty?

Censorship is hereby imposed on all those who believe that what Indian politicians would really win year after year is the Nobel Prize for Hypocrisy.

Cricket row leaves Pak a nation sans

Cricket row leaves Pak a nation sans
By M J Akbar

Pakistan's cricketers seem unaware of the special burden they bear: they are the last idols left for the young in a nation bereft of heroes. There have been only two politicians who inspired the popular imagination, Jinnah and Zulfiqar Bhutto. A child born in the year Bhutto was hanged is already 31 years old. Jinnah was the epitome of financial integrity; Zulfiqar’s heirs are smeared by a reputation for corruption. You can only be disillusioned if you have illusions, and cricket still inspires pride among Pakistani youth. But for how much longer?

Perhaps the most revealing fact of the latest scandal is that the brilliant Mohammad Aamer, often described as the best bowler of his age in history, was born in 1992, the year his country’s current President Asif Zardari bought a chateau in France. Zardari’s garrulous spokesperson revealed a few weeks ago that this chateau had been in the Zardari “family” for 18 years, almost as if the Zardari-Bhuttos were Bourbons with ancient claims on choice retreats in Europe. Zardari is a Bourbon only to the extent that, like them, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. There has never been any explanation as to where Zardari found the money for the purchase of real estate at unreal prices across the world. Zardari’s parents did not own France; they merely possessed a few cinema halls in Karachi, and Zardari is not famous for having set up the Pakistani version of Infosys. His wealth came from bribery, a collateral benefit of the fact that his wife Benazir became prime minister in the wake of her father’s judicial assassination.

Aamer is a child of an impoverished family from a remote village called Changa Bangyaal in Gujar Khan. He could not afford an education, nearly died of dengue at 15 and developed a back problem that nearly wrecked his prospects as a fast bowler. He has watched the most exalted political family of his time thrive on loot. He has lived in an economic milieu where landlords enslaved the peasant, controlled the power centres of Lahore and Islamabad and, this monsoon, diverted floodwaters towards populated villages and towns so that they could protect their crops. He entered a game reeking of inside deals. Ian Chappell recalled, after this scandal broke, the Sydney Test in which Pakistan led by 200 runs in the first innings. Australia were only 50 runs ahead with eight wickets down in the second innings when wicketkeeper Kamran Akmal dropped four catches, enabling Australia to get a decent score and then run through Pakistan’s second innings. (It is probably easier to give away your wicket than to drop a catch.) Akmal is still a star of this team. Aamer’s captain Salman Butt is, quite apparently, complicit. Mazhar Majeed, the man at the heart of the furore, told the British tabloid that trapped him, that up to seven of the current Pakistani team could be bought. That percentage might be equally valid for the Pakistani political elite.

If Aamer was trying to maximize the financial benefits of his personal tryst with destiny, why blame him? He learnt from the culture of his ruling class. Zardari’s lottery was marriage; Aamer’s is cricket. If Zardari is the father of the fast buck, then Aamer is a jockey of the also-ran.

A Pakistani cricketer’s avenues for licit income are miniscule compared to an Indian’s. Newcomers in India with a tenth of Aamer’s talent become overnight stars and multimillionaires, not just from the game but from sponsorships because India has a flourishing economy. When all else is lost, Yuvraj Singh can always make a packet by promising to improve the tensile strength of a certain part of your anatomy. Still, no member of any national cricket team can consider himself poor any longer; nor does poverty justify fraud. This is the appropriate moment to congratulate Bangladesh cricketers like Shakib al Hasan and Tamim Iqbal, who were approached by bookmakers ahead of the two-Test series against India in January and reported the matter. Honour may be in a wheelchair but it is not dead.

There is a stale odour around cricket in India. We were once shocked when captains like Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin were implicated. The first has gone to meet the great umpire in the sky. The second has managed an adroit backward integration into politics. It says something about Indian politics that a person prevented from managing our cricket has been chosen to manage our nation. Shock has been diluted into surprise, and we are now surprised that someone has been luckless enough to get caught in a sport heavily insured by silence.

Pakistani cricketers thank God at every traffic light. It is possible that on the field they are actually bowing to their bookie rather than to their God.

Fiction? Non-fiction? Just a horror story

Byline by M J Akbar: Fiction? Non-fiction? Just a horror story

The most reassuring aspect of Tony Blair’s just-released memoirs was evident in the Reuters photograph of a bookstore shelf stacked with copies on opening day. A red sticker on the hardback cover bore the legend: “Half Price”. This is poetic justice. A man who sold lies to his nation has been peremptorily discounted by its public. All the oily self-pity that has stained the book’s pages – tears for the dead, alcohol for the living author – was placed in perspective by the cold reception that this unapologetic misleader has got from a people disgusted by his malodorous past and continuing hypocrisy.

Blair’s problem is not that he was mistaken when, in March 2003, he became a poodle-partner in George Bush’s gratuitous war against Iraq. Anyone in office during a time of turmoil will make mistakes that could easily blemish an otherwise favorable record. Blair’s problem was and is that he is an unrepentant liar who ordered the fabrication of excuses to launch a war and destroy a nation that had never threatened Britain militarily or shielded Al Qaeda. His foreign minister knew that Blair’s thesis for war was a lie, and resigned, but the rest of the Labour Party mortgaged its conscience for power.

It was a coincidence that Blair’s story [in the circumstances, an appropriate word] appeared on the day that America officially declared the end of combat operations in Iraq. The formal cessation of hostilities seems to have released many American commentators and officials from pretence. While some analysts struggled hard to justify the war with contorted definitions of victory, America’s defense secretary Robert Gates admitted, at Camp Ramadi, 100 km west of Baghdad, that he no answer to a fundamental question: “The problem with this war for any American is that the premise on which we justified going to war proved not to be valid. Even if the outcome is a good one from the standpoint of the United States, it will always be clouded by how it began.”

Blair knows how it began in 2003: Bush ordered his secretary of state Colin Powell to lie before the United Nations. Powell compromised his personal credibility by arguing that America had discovered incontrovertible evidence that proved Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Blair, never to be outshone in the deception stakes, told his Parliament that they were only 45 minutes away from mass destruction itself.

The natural growth trajectory of a serial liar is to become fantastically self-delusional. And so when Blair is forced, in his book, to admit that he lied, he compares himself with Nelson Mandela! After all, Mandela could spin a fast one along with the best of them, he writes with a smirk. It requires a temerity beyond the reach of mere mortals for a smug middle class lawyer with sharp wits and enormous luck to compare himself with a man who challenged apartheid and a barbaric, murderous regime; spent decades in solitary confinement and then, when he finally came to power, ushered in an age of harmony between the once-enslaved and their tormentors. But hallucinating Blair is not content with comparing himself to a mere Mandela. “I bet Gandhi was the same,” he squeaks.

He cannot get off this lunatic pinnacle even when he has to concede that he has been a manipulator. Princess Diana was another one, wasn’t she, he giggles. So that’s all right, then; if you are as good as Diana you can safely destroy the world.

Blair is unable to come to terms with the Great Mystery: why didn’t the Iraqis roll over before advancing Anglo-American armies, and welcome the Bush-Blair Viceroy who would lead them towards civilization and McDonald’s, whichever came first? Why, after Saddam had been vanquished, did the people resist the onward march of such impregnable armies and air forces? Since his porous intellect cannot find an answer from the behaviour patterns of the world, the reason must lie in heaven: Islam. He writes he misunderstood the hold that “extremism” had on Islam. Only “extremists” could fight the toy soldiers sent by Pentagon and Whitehall, carrying chocolates and democracy; “moderates” would have welcome the liberators while they looted the museum, took over the oil ministry and extended their march to the capitals of other nations on their “axis of evil”, like Syria and Iran. There are laws of libel; why are there no laws against hypocrisy? Or would that mean the end of bombastic memoirs? One records, with relief, that no Iraqi Arab memoir has, to my knowledge, called warmongers like Blair and Bush examples of extremist Roman Catholicism or American Puritanism.

Bush-Blair had a bizarre sense of humor: they contrived to name Blair a special peace envoy to the Middle East after he lost his job as Prime Minister. When Barack Obama hosted Israel and Palestine for talks on Thursday, along with Egypt and Jordan, he should have explored the potential benefits of amnesia. Alas, he forgot to forget.

An European cartoon shows a puzzled London bookstore employee asking her manager whether she should place Blair’s memoirs in the fiction or non-fiction category. It should really be among the horror stories.

Crown prince Rahul cannily turns left

Crown prince Rahul cannily turns left
By M J Akbar

Has Rahul Gandhi launched a campaign against Congress? More precisely, has the heir presumptive, affectionately dubbed a modern Lord Krishna by his more fervent fans, begun to undermine the Congress establishment, at the pinnacle of which sits Manmohan Singh and his home minister P Chidambaram?

This makes some political sense. Having milked the right-of-centre to the point of exhaustion, the Rahul Congress is steering towards left-of-centre. Meanings, of course, have changed. As the centre has shifted in the last two decades, 'right' and 'left' have moved along with it. 'Left' now represents populism, rather than ideology. Marx died in the 1990s and even his ghost cannot escape from the effective burial given by comrades Mikhail Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping.

The sabotage of big-ticket investment in order to fence the tribal vote in Orissa is only part of the developing story. The official catechism describes Naxalites as the biggest threat to India. If Chidambaram had his way, the air force would be bombing them. He must be a bit deflated at the sight of Lado Sikoka, a Naxal, preceding Rahul Gandhi at an Orissa public meeting around the same time that Manmohan Singh was urging, from a dais in Delhi, police chiefs to fight the good fight against Maoists. Sikoka had been arrested by this police on August 9 and beaten up, before being released so that he could welcome Rahul Gandhi with a garland at Niyamgiri.

It has always been clear to Delhi insiders that Digvijay Singh opened a front against Chidambaram with Rahul Gandhi's permission. Outsiders now have confirmation. Since politics has very marginal room for sentiment, Chidambaram could become the first casualty in a Rahul Gandhi cabinet. It would be a sad end to a fizzing career were Chidambaram to end up as governor of Chhattisgarh, the better to counsel his supporters in the BJP on how to tackle Naxalites without help from the air force. Indeed, it cannot have been very helpful to our ambitious home minister that the most laudatory references now come from BJP leaders. Perhaps he raised the issue of "saffron terror" to pick up some long overdue brownie points from his own side.

No prizes for guessing who would become home minister in a Rahul Gandhi government.

The ultimate success for a ruling party is that delicious bipolar ability to occupy both government and opposition space. The British in India perfected the art of functioning through a loyal opposition. The Muslim League was so loyal that not a single League leader went to jail during the three decades of our independence movement. The Congress tended to be less loyal, but always recognized limits, until Mahatma Gandhi liberated the Congress and enough Indians from either fear or temptation. One cannot think of a Congress leader who did not go to jail.

Democracy, but naturally, induced a variant. Jawaharlal Nehru ignored the feeble right and absorbed the non-communist left into the Congress in periodic stages. His own leftist credentials were impeccable, which helped.

Indira Gandhi artfully split the left and right, until the Emergency united the rest against Congress. Their common antipathy lasted, more or less, until the NDA gave Congress and the left common cause. The new element is the sudden implosion of the Left in Bengal, which threatens to convert vacant space into a vacuum. Even as Congress and Mamata Banerjee seek to destroy the CPM, they know the value of Marxist sentiment in the country's polity.

It is axiomatic that a largely impoverished nation needs a political party that the poor can identify with. The Congress has set out to be the party of the poor in daytime, and of the rich at night. Its sunlight politics will fetch votes, its twilight policies will enable it to govern. This is an extremely clever act whose opening scenes are being played out for a new generation that is vague about Indira Gandhi and amnesiac about Nehru. The hero of this drama must have the charisma to dazzle the poor and the flexibility to keep the rich onside. That is the challenge before Rahul Gandhi. His avowed role is to be the guardian of the poor in Delhi, which means that the poor need protection from Delhi. He is at home with the elite in the evening and is now making the effort to capture the sunshine hours.

However, regional parties have been there, done that. They continue to do so. Naveen Patnaik understands the trap of governance. He has been forced to take a position on one side or the other of the day-night constituencies; and he does not have a Manmohan Singh to play the foil. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee could not manage this contradiction, but others have learnt. Patnaik, Nitish Kumar, Mayawati or Chandrababu Naidu will not be pushovers.

Paradox and problem intersect in any country; India's size and potential make the challenge more complex. We will see whether Congress has the agility to use power to transfer power to yet another generation.

( Times of India Column - Siege Within/Out of Turn)

Income shall prevail

Byline by M J Akbar: Income shall prevail

The controversy over the MPs’ pay and emoluments is misplaced. We should lead a campaign to increase the salaries of MPs, but only if we can find a way of reducing their income.

The nation should not be irritated by a few thousand rupees more in legal pay for MPs. It should be worried stiff about the crores that they make unofficially. Mortals live off a salary; MPs live on their collection.

Corruption is not limited to MPs of course. A substantial section of the elite achieves fiscal immortality through the deathless alchemy of bribery. MPs, however, have a peculiar problem that becomes a suo moto excuse for greed. Even those who are averse to bribes, or those who live frugally, need a supplementary source of hard cash, since there is a total mismatch between the compulsory costs of a complicated job and official compensation. Did you ever meet any MP who looked as if he was feeding his family, educating his children, entertaining constituents, paying for at least two homes, all on a salary of Rs 12,000? Sure, there are millions of free phone calls and hundreds of paid flights, but phone companies have not yet devised a process by which calls can substitute for lunch. The salary is a thong, not a three-piece suit. It helps them claim that they are dressed. They make up the difference between pay and lifestyle costs by accepting “donations”.

The theory behind low salaries was that MPs did public service, and therefore should not be a burden on the public exchequer. Such idealism quickly degenerated into hypocrisy.

There are exceptions. A handful of MPs, generally but not exclusively of the leftist persuasion, live within their limited means, using party resources for their political expenses. But the only MPs who can afford to fold their hands instead of stretching their palms are professionals, like lawyers, who make a multiple of their peer salary in less than a morning’s work. Given our system, perhaps the only way a legislator can remain beyond the law is by being a lawyer — or an accountant with a lawyer’s account. The rest are condemned to polite, if inventive, forms of beggary. The system works on omerta, the code of silence. Strict adherence is essential, since the code is unwritten. When a club member breaks the silence, as Mayawati did by paying tax on at least some of such donations, there is withering unease.

Our antipathy towards politicians leads us into partial error; anger at the individual may have its uses, but the true problem is the malodorous system that sustains our democracy. The private wealth available to party leaders is astonishing; what they spend, while exorbitant enough, is a small percentage of the monies available to them. There has been no serious attempt to find a solution because it is virtually impossible to legislate against a functioning fiction.

The astronomical cost of elections has moved democracy into an unreal dimension, as distant from Election Commission rules as possible. Every commissioner knows that the expense statement provided by the candidate is an utter fraud, but signs on it nevertheless: if you punish 543 elected MPs the only presence left in the august chamber will be the lonely ghost of Mahatma Gandhi. Figures differ; a candidate’s expense in a parliamentary constituency can vary from Rs 2 crores to Rs 25 crores. And if you are buying votes on a wholesale basis, as has begun to happen in some southern states, then Rs 25 crores is what you put on the table before the first gambit.

The source of election funding becomes a regular resource for the elected MP. There are two reasons why two thirds of our MPs are crorepatis: according to numbers floating on the internet, 315 out of 543. The “regular resource” is one of them. The second, and more dangerous, is that elections are becoming a rich man’s game. Those outside the charmed circle are totally intimidated by the minimum requirement; and if they cannot raise that much, they cannot be credible candidates in any case. You cannot be elected without the support of the poor, but the Lok Sabha is no longer a place for the poor. It is unsurprising that the average worth of an MP has risen from around Rs 1.86 crores to Rs 5.33 crores.

What does it matter, then, whether an MP gets Rs 12,000 or Rs 60,000? At the top of this elite institution is the super elite of leaders, some of whom use private planes far more often than regular airlines. They don’t even bother to use the free airline tickets at their disposal.

No salary can ever pay for the lifestyle to which an Indian politician has become accustomed. The need is high enough, and when you top it up with greed, the upper limit of the cash inflow becomes a measure of individual, or ministerial, ability.

Heaven knows if we shall see any reform, but we can start with a refurbishment. We can remove the nation’s avowed motto, truth shall win, from Parliament.

On a more sombre note: what will be the outcome of such incomes?