Through the looking glass ceiling

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 30)

How much anger do you need to smash a glass ceiling?

A glass ceiling became the symbol of discrimination during the struggle for women's rights in western democracies. By the 1970s women had moved out of the stereotype steno pool into the infested rivulets of middle management, but there was no further room for upward mobility. An invisible ceiling prevented them from entering the boardroom. No rules prevented entry. It just did not happen.

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Arabian Knights

From Byword- India Today (October 28)

The Arab Spring is a rebellion on the cusp of becoming a revolution. It started as a sudden uprising ten months ago in Tunisia. Last Sunday it took its first stride into the future when Tunisia held its first free elections. The last time Tunisians "voted", in 1994, intelligence agents checked ballots and arrested those who had not stamped the ballot in favour of their preferred dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. On October 23, thousands of candidates from 80 political parties sought a place in the new Constituent Assembly.

A revolution, as has been famously observed, is not a tea party; a rebellion even less so. Peaceful transition in Tunisia and war in neighbouring Libya illustrate an old fact: it is up to the ancien regime to determine the difference. Ben Ali understood that he had cheated his people long enough, and disappeared into exile with his pot of gold. Libyans would have given Muammar Gaddafi gold enough, and his retinue of nurses plus an Italian football team for his vicious sons, as farewell gifts if they had left quietly. Instead the megalomaniac Gaddafi decided that Libyans were rats who should be exterminated.

I am surprised that anyone is surprised at the manner of Gaddafi's death. What did we expect the rebels to do? Offer Gaddafi buttered scones and an airline ticket to Geneva while the clock struck four at Grantchester? Lenin understood the dangerous romance of nostalgia fanned by dispossessed elites, particularly the media, and their ability to idolise false memory. He knew the halo of death can obscure the obvious and did not waste much sympathy on the Romanovs. Libyans had none for the despotic, avaricious family that turned a nation's resources into personal wealth, ruled by decree and terror and tortured anyone who opposed them till its dying day.

There is always some distance between a first step and destination but if Tunisia's election becomes a moment of true liberation it will shape the contours of the 21st century. Exactly a hundred years ago, a group of army officers known as the Young Turks launched the mid-eastern Muslim world's first search for modernity on the deathbed of the Ottoman empire, but history dumped this opportunity into the blood-soaked dustbin of the First World War.

This movement reinvented itself, under Mustafa Kemal, as a Turkish resurrection. The Arab territories of the Caliphate relapsed into feudal neo-colonisation or, later, into the mirage of officer sultans who promised socialism and justice but delivered tyranny. Gaddafi was Libya's version of this corrosive delusion.

It is entirely in order that the party expected to win Tunisia's polls, Ennahda, offers Turkey as its role model. Its leader Rachid al-Ghannouchi, is clear about his vision: a durable, plural democracy which protects minorities and promises women equality in education and employment and the freedom to wear or reject a head scarf if they so choose to. This, naturally, is sufficient to invite the appendage "moderate Islamist", as if that were a vaguely acceptable but not quite desirable sort of crime. I await the day when the great liberal newspapers of Europe and America call the Christian Democrats "moderate Christists" or America's Republican Party a "Biblicist Planet Coalition".

The Arab future will be rough, as freedom also enables the release of poisons in the storehouse of the defeated establishments. Egypt has already witnessed violence against Coptic Christians. But communal riots continued in India after freedom without derailing the nation's commitment to democracy. It took a century to reach from the Young Turks to Election Sunday; it will take perhaps a decade for the democratic revolution to become durable.

History is not an even story. A lifetime may deserve nothing more than a footnote, and a year that energises an epoch could require many volumes to comprehend. The last year has been a stirring chapter but the book is still being written. Dictators need paid chroniclers. Tunisia's narrative belongs to 30-year-old Amin Ghouba who told The New York Times on polling day: "Today is the day of independence. Today we got our freedom and our dignity from the simple act of voting."

Democracy is dignity.

The Shield of Higher Cause

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 23)

When Julian Assange, father of WikiLeaks, makes a viral enemy of a potential friend, he always does so in the name of a Higher Cause. Such mavericks are necessary in an age where information has become a frontline weapon.

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An Alibi Called Secrecy

From Byword- India Today (October 21)

Secrecy in government can be both dangerous and essential. The difference lies in the cause: secrecy is criminal when it veils misdeeds, and honourable when it protects the national interest. Unfortunately, only politicians in office can make that call. Their primary impetus does not drive them towards transparency. They are far more adept at justifying self-interest with some rant about national duty. Patriotism used to be the last resort of the scoundrel; these days it is generally a first preference.

The debate on the Right to Information (RTI) is caught in this warp. Governments argue that in certain circumstances they are duty-bound to shade the truth, or even lie. We understand that. We also understand when that privilege is exploited. Every nation permits flexibility in the lie-line during times of war, for instance; but even in the fog of high patriotism we condone the evasions of a warrior but punish the falsehoods of a warmonger. The scars of George Bush and Tony Blair, who lied to drag their countries into war with Iraq, will not heal in their lifetime.

Dr Manmohan Singh's Government is not engaged in any war, except with itself; but fractious civil war tends to encourage the temptation of censorship. It has quite deliberately started a public debate on RTI, albeit with the usual feints and side-trips into blind alleys, aimed at amendments which will curb access to documents. Privately, this administration is convinced that RTI has degenerated into a licentious free-for-all.

If we want to understand why, then the correct question to ask is 'why now?'

Dr Singh did not inherit RTI. He can claim parentage of this legislation. He placed it among his more noteworthy achievements during the campaign for the 2009 general election, and doubtless won at least a few additional votes. During his first term, Dr Singh was perfectly content with RTI. Why has it become a problem two years into the second term? RTI procedures have not become any more liberal, although activists have become sharper and more sophisticated, blocking loopholes before they can be used to escape disclosure. The difference between the RTI triumphalism during UPA 1 and RTI nervousness during UPA 2 is fairly simple. Before 2009 Dr Singh felt he had nothing to hide. That confidence has melted with the disclosure of malfeasance by his ministers on an industrial scale. A series of self-inflicted wounds has shredded credibility, with RTI inflicting most of the injury. Corruption is the source of these wounds, making them gangrenous. The nationwide symbols of corruption are the Commonwealth Games and 2G spectrum sales. In both cases files obtained through RTI not only broke the story wide open but also sabotaged the possibility of any cover-up.

When governments seek to set the record straight, a question must follow: who set the record crooked? Before RTI it was far easier to blame media for distortion. But when media has in its possession a true copy of original files, then the whistle of the blower sounds more authentic than the convoluted explanations of a minister. Our parliamentary system has a nuanced approach to lies: any minister caught lying to the House is expected to resign, but a minister who can avoid the truth is considered clever and competent. RTI leaves ministers bereft of such protection.

Dr Singh's Government is showing all the symptoms of "secondtermitis", a wasting disease that can turn fatal. Most governments thrive after election; it is rather more difficult to survive re-election. Even the great Jawaharlal Nehru began to wobble after re-election in 1957. The peace pedestal on which he had constructed his international persona began to crumble on the China front by 1959 and collapsed during the 1962 war. At first glance Mrs Indira Gandhi's case seems an exception, for nothing could go wrong at the beginning of her second term in 1971. But by 1973, nothing could go right. Her third term, between 1980 and 1984, drifted on the acrid smoke of mistakes and violence, ending in the tragedy of her martyrdom.

Governments which are re-elected atrophy in the squeeze between high expectations and complacent delivery. They also begin to believe the illusion that opposition is dead. Nothing dies in a democracy.

Public life has more than one meaning in a democracy; it is not only about the management of public affairs, but also public in its process. The shelter of privacy is accorded to only a few subjects, notably defence. In other areas of governance, secrecy is an alibi, not a solution, and alibis do not even buy you much time at the contemporary exchange rate. Dr Singh no longer has a government to gain by whittling RTI, but he still has a reputation to lose.

Media needs some immediate attention

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 16)

I can't quite determine which part of the story made me laugh, and which brought on tears, when I learnt that some zealous functionaries had passed around envelopes with Rs 500 notes to journalists in Satna who had been summoned to report on L.K. Advani's anti-corruption campaign. It was not Mr Advani's fault; he was victim of a prevailing system. However, as pitfalls go this was a bit of a crater dip.

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Brothers In Arms

From Byword- India Today (October 14)

Brotherhood is a moveable feast. The Abrahamic faiths have always been cynical about its virtues. Cain, first child of the first family, dispatched Abel and then artfully asked the Almighty, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Cain was never a likely candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he could have become, in a contemporary incarnation, a cold strategic warrior, much sought after by think-tanks. Abel the Good Boy merely confirmed that decency is an invitation to murder.

On October 4 Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai described Pakistan as a "twin brother" just hours after he signed up on a strategic relationship with India. Was Karzai encouraged by the fact that Afghanistan and Pakistan are locked in a property dispute across the Durand Line? Friends do not have ownership claims; brothers do.

Brotherhood was also on the mind of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad when, within the same week, he telephoned Karzai to say that "enemies never want to see friendship and brotherhood in the region and we should do our best to bring hearts and thoughts closer to each other." Ahmedinejad tends to talk like a Persian poet of the inferior sort; his point was not very subtle. He wants the three Islamic "brothers" Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to make common cause against "enemy" America. I am not totally sure that Karzai, who has just lost his real younger brother Ahmed Wali to a Taliban bomb in Kandahar, believes he has the same enemies as Ahmedinejad or Asif Zardari.

On October 12, India signed agreements with "maritime neighbour" Vietnam to deepen strategic ties, and, in a rebuff to China, continue oil exploration in the South China Sea. Vietnam is the only country in four decades to have silenced China on the battlefield, forcing Beijing to withdraw from its territory after a 17-day war in 1979. Vietnam did not defeat France and America in order to succumb to China.

International diplomacy is a layered mechanism. Every bilateral purpose leaves a bit of space for potential crosspurpose. Peacetime manoeuvres are often far more intricate than straight-line confrontations of nations in conflict: foreign policy is the art of establishing advantage without the self-injurious risk of forcing a war. The patterns emerging from Iran to Japan are fascinating, perhaps because they are volatile. Primary needs intersect with parallel initiatives, linked by self-interest when they cannot be held together by logic.

Ahmedinejad is testing the possibility of a "Muslim alliance" of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan as the dominant influence between the Caucasus and China, stretching down to the Indian border in Punjab. This does not necessarily mean that Iran would be hostile to India, but Delhi has no role in this "Muslim consolidation". Pakistan might get more "strategic space" against India, but become vulnerable to American pressure and Chinese worry; China fears secessionist Islamism in Sinkiang. India's response is ethnic outreach to Afghan Tajiks, who resent the domination of Pushtuns. India's strategic intervention is largely about training Tajik soldiers for war against Pushtun-dominated Taliban, a variation of the Northern Alliance strategy when India financed anti-Taliban forces before America returned to lead them into Kabul after 9/11.

India has one significant advantage. It has no brothers in a region overloaded with faith-fierce siblings. Nehru tried brotherhood in the Fifties, and we all know what Comrade Mao thought of it. Today, emotion has been squeezed out of Indian policy, making it leaner and hopefully a bit meaner. Even at the height of Indo-Soviet amity in 1971, Delhi side-stepped Brother Brezhnev's bear hug. The cool Vajpayee-Singh cultivation of America is bearing reward now, nudging ahead quiet partnerships. There is virtual understanding between India, Vietnam, Japan and the US in the blow-hot-blow-cold relationship with China. They are drawing a line on water.

In 1962, America was ready to send air force squadrons with bombs and pilots to the Himalayas. The key question since 1962 has been: Which nation will support India in a second India-China conflict? The answer is emerging in the Indian Ocean and Pacific.

As the wealth of the world begins to rotate back to resource-hungry Asia, confrontation and cooperation will be calibrated by both long-term perceptions and immediate needs. We will learn, over the next decade, which nations have understood the tilt of history. Fervour is not conducive to comprehension; far better to be cool. Delhi is getting good at cool.

Seen, obscene and unseen

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 9)

Wealth is far easier to recognise than poverty. Wealth is either seen or obscene; poverty remains largely unseen. Poverty of the worst kind is hidden in those parts of India — or indeed the world — where it is outside the provenance of government, and beyond the interest of individuals and institutions who fuel the engines of modern life, like business concerns or bureaucracy or media. Those of a liberal persuasion do feel the occasional moral twinge at the passing sight of near-starvation, but poverty does not appear on any balance sheet, liberal or conservative. The cure for liberal guilt is aversion. We take our eyes off the hungry. We leave the responsibility to government.

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Salt On Poverty's Wounds

From Byword- India Today (October 7)

There are three ways in which a journalist gets a headline right: deep thought, instinct, and good luck. Of the three, instinct might prove to be the most reliable, since it does not permit space for doubt. The favourite word used by media to describe the cessation of hostilities between Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and former finance minister P. Chidambaram, at a particularly volatile moment in their war, was "truce". Spot on.

The Oxford dictionary defines "truce" with its usual pithy perfection: "An agreement between enemies or opponents to stop fighting for an agreed period of time." A truce does not signify the end of war, and it isn't. Congress President Sonia Gandhi would of course like this truce to last at least till the next general election, or the installation of her son Rahul Gandhi as successor to Dr Manmohan Singh, whichever comes earlier. Both the contestants might be irrelevant to a Rahul regime, Pranab because he wants to retire, and Chidambaram because he is now too controversial. But the Pranab-Chidambaram ceasefire, negotiated through multi-tier back channels with a finesse that nations might envy, was held together by a band-aid rather than a bandage. It was always a veneer, and it crumbled within days.

The artillery of Delhi's intra-party wars is disinformation; the battlefield is mostly newsprint; the first casualties are bureaucrats, particularly those under consideration for some choice posting. There is an old Indian saying from the feudal days: when you want to destroy a king, first kill his parrot. That is the fate of officials close to ministers; they get trapped in poison weeds planted by the opposition. As in any war, the circumference of damage is inevitably far larger than the circle of target. Institutions get battered, as much as individuals. When critical ministries like finance and home are involved, government becomes dysfunctional. This is not sniper fire, this is civil war, symptom of a much more serious malaise.

Stability in power is not merely an attribute of numbers, and levels of support in the legislature. An American president does not need a majority in the Senate, but Barack Obama's mooring has come unhinged. There is no threat to Dr Manmohan Singh's tenure yet, but his coalition has lost its centre of gravity. Its majority is sustained by the compulsion to postpone accountability, although in a democracy this cannot be an indefinite luxury. Survival may be certain, but governance becomes uncertain. When a government loses discipline and direction, it can inflict self-damage in the most curious, if revealing, ways.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, to offer the most recent instance, has poured salt upon poverty's wounds with a fervour that the electorate will remember long after feuds fade into the subconscious. His economists must have done the math: calculated the minimal calorie requirements for survival, costed it and emerged with the now infamous Rs. 32 definition of daily urban need. Statistics are a trap in an insensitive mind. They may be necessary for policy, but they must be refurbished by the human touch in politics. Here is a statistic that Montek Singh Ahluwalia might consider worth a thought or two. He lives in the most exclusive residential zone of India, or perhaps Asia, in one of the string of multi-acre palaces built for the elite of the ruling class in Lutyens' Delhi. If the Government ever thought of selling Ahluwalia's bungalow, it would fetch Rs. 400 crore or more. Economists in the Planning Commission have computers which can count and divide. They would calculate that every blade of grass in Ahluwalia's expansive, grace-and-favour residence is worth more than Rs. 32.

Politicians who live in similar palaces are at least accountable at election time, and know that the price of callousness is defeat. Ahluwalia is where he is because of only one vote, the Prime Minister's. Dr Manmohan Singh is a generous employer. Ahluwalia's sole penance was to appear pseudo-contrite on a friendly television channel. The remark will prove more expensive to the party which hired him.

General Jack Jacob, our living hero of the Bangladesh war, told me of a cockney ditty British soldiers under his command would sing during the Second World War. It's the rich wot gets the pleasure, It's the poor wot tikes the blame, It's the same the whole world over, Isn't it a bloody shime!

Within months of victory in this great world war, these impoverished cockneys threw out Winston Churchill, the genius who saved his nation, in an election that became an avalanche, because they were tired of taking the blame while the nabobs drank champagne. Democracy hath no fury like the poor scorned.

The certainty of uncertainty

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (October 2)

The Congress is suffering from the hammer blows of ambition on the anvil of power. The BJP has a splitting headache in expectation of power. The first is serious. The second is silly.

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An enemy in common

From Byword- India Today (September 30)

America," Jinnah told author-photographer Margaret Bourke-White just one month after partition in 1947, "needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America." The shadow of Russia muted the claim from pompous to possible. Jinnah always understood the power of an enemy far better than the value of a friend. America, he believed, would buy into the Soviet threat, and Pakistan use it as a decoy to obtain arms for what Jinnah believed would be an existentialist war with India.

Bourke-White remarked, perceptively, while recording the conversation in her book Halfway to Freedom: "Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been playing off opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy." Pakistan, which abandoned Jinnah's domestic philosophy of a secular Muslim state very quickly, and without remorse, has been more faithful to Jinnah's foreign policy.

Jawaharlal Nehru, reflecting the philosophy of India's freedom movement, set India's foreign policy by a different compass: the search for common friends rather than enemies in common. He dismissed alliances as neo-colonisation. His idealism could bubble to levels unacceptable to his more sceptical colleagues, many of whom accused Nehru privately of dangerous naivete only to be proved publicly right during the 1962 China war.

American foreign policy, shaped by the life-and-death drama of a world war against fascism, quickly followed by another against Communism, understood the impulse of nationalism but was deeply suspicious of any internationalism that blurred the difference between 'good' and 'evil', as Washington defined the terms. Neutrality was almost as grave a crime as hostility. Wartime sensibilities stretched to accommodate any kind of government if it remained onside in the confrontation with the Soviets. The greater threat obviated the problem of lesser evils like dictatorship in the range of allies. To be fair, the Communist bloc was hardly a shining example of democracy, or even social justice; it was equally cynical and less productive to boot. In any case, Washington was at ease with either democrat or dictator in Pakistan as long as both were Cold Warriors.

Much has been written about the impact on India of the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather less about the consequences for Pakistan. The over-extended celebrations of the US-Pak victory in Afghanistan drowned out an obvious reality: friends become as irrelevant as enemies at the end of war. America's alliance with western Europe would quite likely have dissipated after 1945 had the ideological-military challenge from Russia not kept them together. Jinnah had wisely predicted that Soviet Union would force America to befriend Pakistan. But that wisdom was co-terminus with the existence of the Soviet Union.

Geopolitics is a variable science; geography may not change, but politics does. America and Pakistan have drifted into virtual conflict which both governments were loath to acknowledge for different reasons. The Mujahideen who declared war on America, a long list of militias including al Qaeda, continue to treat Pakistan as a sanctuary, a fortress from which they hit America, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. The Pakistan army offers terrorists succour and space in pursuit of a "patriotic" agenda, as a strike force against India and any government in Kabul that refuses to accept Pakistani hegemony in Afghanistan. The Pak military establishment is not particularly unhappy when America bleeds in Afghanistan.

For a long while Washington refused to read the evidence, or pretended it was satisfied with patently manufactured excuses. The Pentagon has swallowed its anger for a decade, in the belief that even a duplicitous Pak army is better than an openly hostile Pak army. It even kept quiet when Pak soldiers ambushed American officers and men on May 14, 2007 at a place called Teri Mangal after a tripartite meeting with Afghans. An American major was killed, and three other officers wounded; the Black Hawk in which they escaped was described as "blood-soaked".

But fiction has become difficult to sustain after the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden. On September 22 Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, put this duplicity on record when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that anti-American terrorists, responsible for 77 US casualties in one truck bomb strike alone, were a "strategic arm" of the ISI. It was a week in which Barack Obama could not find the time to meet Pakistan's Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani. Gilani canceled his trip to New York. Islamabad is scrambling to reorganise with its usual mix of bluster, sulk and SOS to old friends. It will have to come to terms with a radical shift in the strategic environment. India and America now have an enemy in common-the terrorist with a base in Pakistan.

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 25)

In the loneliness of the small town where I was born, and the shuttered years of boarding school, dream was a five-letter word called Tiger. Mansur Ali Khan's magic transcended the supreme piffle that passed for cricket commentary when radio, with a glowing green eye in the right hand corner, was our primary passport to Test cricket.

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Good Lord

From Byword- India Today (September 23)

The best doctor for the cure of pontification is surely the Pope. The best political Popes understand this. When Mikhail Gorbachev was asked at Harvard's Kennedy School what would have happened if in 1963 the Soviet supremo Krushchev had been assassinated instead of American President Kennedy, he took a grave look at the audience and replied, "I do not think Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs Krushchev." If Gorbachev's predecessors had possessed a sense of humour, and come down to earth from the high walls of the Kremlin at least occasionally, Soviet Communism might, just might, have survived. You can't afford to be pompous when the potatoes have run out at your signature store across the street from the Kremlin. More empires have died of pomp than circumstance.

It's bad enough when the Pope thinks he is God. What happens when God thinks he has been demoted to a mere Pope?

Of the many imponderables in contemporary Indian politics, there is one thing that stands out as certain. We now know the identity of the person in Chennai who hates P. Chidambaram the most. His name is R. Kumaramurugan. On September 16, the home minister's 66th birthday, he plastered Chennai with huge posters adulating Chidambaram as the modern Lord Krishna. Kumaramurugan, who is a "senior member of Tamil Nadu Congress", does not believe in metaphors. He is a literal man. His portrait of the Lord had all the requisite accoutrements of a calendar Krishna, including a pointy crown, bracelet, armband, garland and lipstick, but just in case there was any misunderstanding, the Lord's face had been refitted with that of Chidambaram. This was the first Lord Krishna in history to wear spectacles.

Kumaramurugan is not a man who believes in making mere claims. He offered three reasons why Chidambaram had become divine at the age of 66. I quote: "You disbursed educational loans...You are the one who can save the country from terrorist attacks...You are our God." Fair enough. Anyone who can provide school loans and save us from terrorism (except of course if you happened to be at the Delhi High Court in the same week) is clearly miles ahead on the road to divinity. Kumaramurugan also put other Congress divines into perspective. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were there, but looked like mere postage stamps on this huge celebratory envelope. In Delhi, the Gandhis get pole position in any poster or advertisement display. But we now know who is who in Chennai.

Obviously Kumaramurugan despises Chidambaram and wants to destroy him. He could not have created this poster out of love and admiration, could he?

Chidambaram cannot be blamed for the sins of his sycophants. The bizarre nature of Tamil Nadu politics, in any case, encourages hyperventilation from fans. Kumaramurugan may not actually next finance a temple to his Krishna, but embarrassment is not his problem. He flaunts ownership of the poster, and expects due reward in the form of a party position, or at the very least, public proximity to his personal god. What the Kumaramurugans do not understand is the difference between the culture of loyalty in a democracy and its alternative, dictatorship.

Adulation in a dictatorship tempts rulers away from reality, and ends up making tyrants out of leaders. A Gaddafi or an Assad genuinely begins to believe that he is indispensable to the nation, and criticism becomes either a foreign conspiracy or treachery. The police and the armed forces shift their focus from defence of the realm to defence of a megalomaniac. One of the more astonishing images to emerge from the people's uprising across so much of the Arab world was the sight of Syrian army units exulting with high fives in front of cameras, behaving as if they had just wrested the Golan Heights from Israel. All they had done was killed hundreds of unarmed Syrians in Homs. Assad has probably distributed hundreds of medals to honour this atrocity.

In a democracy, pomposity has only one destination: towards the sketch pad of a cartoonist. A caricature does not exaggerate, or it would not work; it captures the man the leader thinks he is, and then pricks the bubble with a sharp and painful nib. Kumaramurugan's Lord Chikrishna poster achieves the near impossible: it makes caricature unnecessary. Life has left art far behind.

A good politician knows how to make a cartoonist irrelevant. He understands that a sense of humour, like charity, begins at home. He laughs gently at himself long before others begin to laugh at him. Mikhail Gorbachev was a democrat trapped in a dictatorship. He would have done well in India, though.

In the memory of millions

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 18)

The appeared for just that split second that television reserves for images it cannot fully comprehend. She was in the pavilion stand at Cardiff, watching as Rahul Dravid bounded towards the dressing room after his last one-day innings, with a spring in his jump that belied the fact that he was in the winter of his career. She held a placard saying, "I love you Rahul".

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Bandwagon Politics

From Byword- India Today (September 16)

The relationship between an egg and a pudding is the definitive test within the art of cooking. A chef knows when to leave well enough alone. Overegging the pudding is not just a culinary mishap. It can ruin a great deal that has been achieved. Anna Hazare captured the popular imagination because of two ingredients in his menu. He addressed a pervasive crime. Corruption has seen many avatars in six decades of Indian democracy. It has now burst through the once elitist dam of cozy glad-handing between businessman and political don, and poisoned the people's river as much as the village well. It is no longer either exclusive or evasive. That is why the response cut across class, caste and religious lines.

It also bridged the partisan divide because Anna refrained from treating any party as holier than thou. Opposition colours fluttered more freely at the venue of his fast only because a ruling party does not protest against itself. A government bears the brunt of any crusade because power lends itself to corruption. It is difficult, but not impossible, to be corrupt when out of power. The tricolour that the young wore as a symbol of protest was therefore the khadi of the national flag, not the standard of the Congress. Conversely, you would not have seen too much saffron in the air if Hazare had been fasting at Cubbon Park in Bangalore.

This is the contradiction that threatens to skewer L.K. Advani's proposed chariot ride against corruption. It will be a journey without a specific destination. As an individual Advani can take legitimate comfort in the fact that he resigned from Parliament when the Narasimha Rao government accused him of taking bribes from a businessman at election time, and returned to the Lok Sabha only after he was exonerated by the courts. But he is not setting out in 2011 to vindicate his personal reputation. He is also leader of the BJP. He would not be so naive as to suggest that BJP has never touched any tainted money. And if he did no one would believe him.

As a political vehicle, BJP has gained much mileage out of the Anna campaign. But this is collateral benefit. The moment it tries to take ownership of honesty it is inviting trouble. The parties which coalesced into Janata benefited similarly in 1977 from Jayaprakash Narayan's movement in 1974 and 1975 but they were prevented from making their share of aggravating mistakes by Mrs Indira Gandhi, who threw their leaders into jail and surrounded them with the glow of temporary martyrdom. No one is going to grant opposition parties a similar favour in 2011.

There is the parallel danger of a yatra epidemic in Uttar Pradesh, where politics is on the verge of becoming a tour guide. As is obvious, these are road shows to raise electoral capital. Their nature is brittle. If the electorate is turned on by the sincerity of Hazare it can also be put off by the tokenism of any bandwagon.

Narendra Modi has found a unique reason for weakening his health by abstaining from food for three days. This will strengthen Gujarat, he says. The last time anyone checked, including with the Union government in Delhi, Gujarat has been pretty muscular during the decade when Modi ate three meals a day without a break for fast. If he wants to diet a bit now its purpose is personal, not regional. Word of caution: it is much more sensible to travel step by step from Ahmedabad to Delhi. When you rise on a pole vault you never know where you might land.

Is it possible that BJP leaders, convinced that the game with Congress is essentially over, have already begun to compete between themselves? That would be dreadfully premature. This opera aint over till the fat lady sings, and the lady has a title: Election Commissioner. There is always time in politics to make mistakes. Moreover, time is not neutral. It is generally biased in favour of the establishment.

The acquisition of power is also a process. The BJP should use time to consolidate alliances with past, present and potential partners. It cannot form a government alone. It needs to construct a maximal Bihar-style network of relationships driven by a minimum programme of good governance, which are sustainable only because they abjure emotionalism. The space for manouvre in democracy is never large enough to encourage undue optimism.

Moral science lesson number one: if you don't take the egg off the pudding, you will get egg on your face.

Not very intelligent, Mr Chidambaram

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 11)

Calm down, everyone. Relax. Our invaluable Home Minister P. Chidambaram has finally found the answer to terrorism. Indeed, he did so on 13 July, after the Mumbai blasts.

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For a Few Cusecs More

From Byword- India Today (September 9)

Dr Manmohan Singh, vegetarian by preference, went to Dhaka to eat some hilsa fish. He returned, alas, with a bit of ash in his mouth. But this failure to sign an accord over Teesta water is a story that makes no sense.

Failure, of course, is an orphan. No one wants paternity rights to a bastard. The blame game over the Teesta fiasco is already being played at a fast and furious pace with each player tweaking the rules from his or her vantage point. When Mamata Banerjee points, she does not do so with a mere finger; she flashes a full hand. Her aides do not whisper when they brief media; they shout when the news is good, and scream when it is bad. The truth is, or should be, an official secret but its versions are being fed to a starving media. The message from Calcutta is unambiguous; it was betrayed by Delhi. Mamata had agreed to part with 25,000 cusecs of Teesta water, but Delhi upped this to 33,000 cusecs. When Trinamool minister Dinesh Trivedi raised an objection in the Cabinet, he was brushed aside by Pranab Mukherjee.

This makes even less sense.

Anyone familiar with international treaties knows that the torture lies in the detail. The print is always fine. Diplomats hire smiles from plastic surgeons, and then fight like pit bulls in very slow motion over every comma. A pattern is etched onto grey areas, dot by dot. There is give and take till deadline. The Teesta waters have been floating across the Indo-Bangladesh dialogue ever since Teesta, or at least ever since Bangladesh was born in 1971. It took a quarter century of negotiations to sign the Ganga River Treaty in 1996; but the generation of Jyoti Basu and Inder Gujral went to Dhaka with clean ink because there was continuous consultation between Delhi and Calcutta. What was so difficult about maintaining similar transparency between Dr Singh and Ms Banerjee?

This treaty was not drafted by the foreign ministry; the Prime Minister's Office took ownership of the process, with National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon in charge of detail. He went to Calcutta twice in the last two months solely to brief Mamata on the sharing of Teesta water. And there lay the problem. It was not a conversation between equals. Menon was adequate when there was agreement; but when Dhaka wanted more, Calcutta was, inexplicably, kept out of the loop. Perhaps Menon thought that the pressure of a deadline in high-stakes diplomacy would persuade Mamata to be more flexible, always a risky manoeuvre. But negotiating with a mercurial CM were above Menon's pay grade. A bureaucrat can brief. Only an equal can persuade.

There seems, however, more to this episode than meets the eye, or ear. The fuss began before the catastrophe, when Mamata said she would travel independently to Dhaka. You float such political confetti only when you are itching to put some distance between Calcutta and Delhi.

It is always difficult to know if Dr Singh is crestfallen. His crest never moves, so how do you know if it has fallen? His voice gives even less away, when he chooses to speak. But you do not have to be a mind-reader to gauge a gathering depression. Unanswered questions, some born in the morning, others which are ghosts of crises past, are strewn around, a noxious debris sucking life out of this administration, event by event. The bomb that went off in Delhi on September 7 was not the first terrorist attack in the era of Dr Singh; but this was the first time that Rahul Gandhi was heckled after a visit to see victims in hospital. Delhi's question is basic: A terrorist bomb failed to go off in the High Court in May; why did Home Minister P. Chidambaram do absolutely nothing done to improve security? Alibis are melting in the heat of popular anger.

The mathematics has gone awry: things don't add up. Ever since UPA survived the Lok Sabha vote on the nuclear deal three years ago, the Government has insisted, despite dramatic TV footage, that no MP was paid to switch sides. If that is true then why is Amar Singh in jail? The Delhi police, which reports to home minister P. Chidambaram, believes Amar Singh paid money to MPs. On whose behalf did he do so? Amar Singh is not a philanthropist. If Amar Singh is guilty, he cannot be guilty alone. Is he yet another scapegoat in a lengthening queue?

Silence can stem a stain, but not erase it.

Be a sport, let go of sports

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 4)

Praful Patel had a good point to make. "If such a Bill is passed," the former Union minister for civil aviation and present Union minister for some portfolio which escapes my memory, said, "bureaucrats like a joint secretary will be running the sports federation. What is their competence in sports administration?"

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Day Of The Assassins

From Byword- India Today (September 2)

Curious. Thiru Dr Muthuvel Karunanidhi, patriarch of the DMK, ruling ally of the Congress in Delhi and defeated ally of the Congress in Tamil Nadu, has called the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, father of Rahul and husband of Sonia, a "man of honour". Is that why Karunanidhi's friends assassinated Rajiv two decades ago? Is this the fate reserved for a man of honour in the Karunanidhi moral code?

Perhaps Thiru Karunanidhi might object to being called a friend of Perarivalan, Santhan and Murugan, the three assassins on death row convicted of taking the life of Rajiv Gandhi. Would he prefer friend to be downgraded to "sympathiser"? If Karunanidhi can move a bit of heaven and a lot of earth in his efforts to save the assassins who merely elicit his sympathy, imagine how much of the stellar system would be disturbed if he had to save a murderer who was a friend.

Pardon me if I sound a trifle confused: I no longer understand the meaning of simple words being flung across the public discourse in the debate about whether the killers of Rajiv Gandhi should be hanged to death, as ordered by the law, or given a reprieve, as urged so passionately by a coalition of politicians, lawyers and, well, sympathisers. Why is a death sentence, passed through due process of law, wrong for those who have planned and then carried out the murder of a former prime minister of India because they did not agree with a political decision that he made? Karunanidhi is not interested in the abolition of the death penalty on principle, otherwise he would have campaigned for it, irrespective of this case. He is only interested in keeping the killers of Rajiv Gandhi alive.

No one suggests that there has been a mistrial. No one pretends that the judges who passed the sentence have gone beyond the remit of the law. Karunanidhi's case for mercy rests on the thin basis that "they have already served 20 years". That must be good news for any murderer. If he kills someone at the age of 20 he will still be 40, a youth by current political standards, and ready to enjoy a long and happy life ever after, or at least until God passes His death sentence. If the political class believes that the death penalty is inhuman, then it should have the courage to change the statute.

As long as the law exists, it will follow its course, and if the course leads to a noose, so be it. A protest by students in Delhi condemned this judgment as judicial murder, while one innovative poster demanded, "Give justice. End political revenge." Excuse me? Since when has escape from justice become justice?

Political revenge? The phrase clarifies one aspect, though. It admits, implicitly, that the assassination was not an emotional crime of passion; it was a cold-blooded political decision. The response of the Indian state was not Mark Antony's exhortation after the assassination of Julius Caesar: "Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!" It was long, transparent and even tortuous, full of the very delays that are now being used as reason for exoneration. Those who believe that 20 years in jail is sufficient punishment, might perhaps consider the decades that Rajiv Gandhi lost of his life.

Perhaps my confusion arises out of an inability to sift through the duplicity inlaid into the debate. Any relief for assassins is greeted with triumphalism by the Chennai legal and political elite. Celebratory slogans were raised and crackers burst in front of the court when execution was stayed on August 30. The Tamil Nadu Assembly, led by Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, has passed a resolution urging death be commuted to life imprisonment. The politics is transparent. Every public gesture by the Tamil regional parties all but justifies the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, who is being deliberately recast into the "villain" who prevented the birth of a Tamil state in Sri Lanka. The rout of the Tamil Tigers has only sharpened the need for artificial alibis.

Why was Karunanidhi less generous to these three assassins when he refused to recommend clemency for them in 2000, when he was chief minister? The defining difference, a decade later, is politics. Karunanidhi believes that there are votes to be milked from post-Eelam Tamil angst. A defeated politician is tempted into many swamps; this one has poison currents that corrode the national interest and infect vital institutions of state. Is there someone in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly already working upon a resolution for clemency towards Afzal Guru? Politics is the life of democracy. It should not become the death of national interest.

A cancer at the heart of democracy

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 28)

There is an eminently logical reason why the corruption debate reels like a drunk bounced out for being too disorderly even for a high-consumption bar. This is because everyone wants to end corruption but not end it completely. And so the BJP would like honesty everywhere, with a little margin for mine-diggers in Karnataka. The Congress wants a clean India down to every well in every village, but not so pure that it cannot feed the venal thirst of ministers or its holy cows — and these days the herd includes a holy bull. No political party is really free from this trap. A regional leader who postures as the epitome of simple, rumpled honesty sends a businessman whose blubber is not limited to his bank account to the Rajya Sabha.

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Alpha Male To Omega Limp

From Byword- India Today (August 26)

Mistakes are not the exclusive preserve of government. It is only fair that opposition contributes its share, even if it is only a trickle versus a flood. Enthusiasm clearly got the better of common sense in the eminently sensible Kiran Bedi, a ranking confidante of Anna Hazare, when she called Anna India, which is preposterous, and India Anna, which is pretentious. I could almost visualise the simple, but not naive, Anna Hazare cringe at the echo, for Indira Gandhi's sycophants equated her with the nation in order to justify the imposition of dictatorship in 1975. Power is a beguiling intoxicant; when a peg hits the head, it tends to encourage notions of divinity. The management of power, whether through the sinews of office or the roar of a crowd, is a test of balance on a tightrope across a fall.

An opposition's mistakes, however, are never as expensive as a government's. Kiran Bedi's blip is already forgotten. The mistakes of Congress are embedded in public memory. There they will lurk, awaiting an election. Kiran Bedi lives among the people. The ministers of Manmohan Singh's government, prime downwards, are imprisoned in high-security bungalows and cars, their sanitised routes cleared of popular presence. Even if our rulers noticed them, they would barely recognise the emotions of young men careering through Delhi's streets on motorcycles, wearing the Gandhi cap as a martyr's band, a tricolor flying overhead. The young are claiming back their country from the political class- from the whole of it, not just a part of it. Even those political parties who will benefit from this spreading anger would do well to factor in caution into their plans.

The young have mobilised to question the obduracy of a government that proclaimed victory when, with a sneer and a giggle, it threw a frail Anna Hazare into Tihar jail. When reports last came in, the same government was genuflecting with an agility which belied the average age of the Cabinet. Manmohan Singh's government descended, within 10 days, from Alpha Male to Omega Limp. It doesn't take all that long for Delhi's high and mighty to get neutered.

Anna Hazare came to Delhi to change the law, not change the government. His second fast for a Lokpal Bill was an option of last resort, not first choice. Shorn of bells and whistles, what he wanted on day one was what the government offered on day 9 before it changed its mind once again on day 10. The Prime Minister's critical mistake was to channel the government's response through the belligerent partnership of P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal. Power does different things to different people: in the case of Chidambaram and Sibal it brought out the teenager in them. They thought they could bully Hazare. Instead, in a dramatic counteroffensive, Anna has left this government writhing on the mat. Anna merely looks fragile; his strength is in his will, not muscle. It is a dangerous to dance around a yogi sleeping on a bed of nails.

A popular insurgency is always hard to read, even more so when the lava has been long lost in the heart of an invisible volcano. Whoever thought comparisons were odious never knew the half of modern journalism. Comparison is the stock in trade of journalists in a hurry, particularly those trying to make sense of a strange land in which activists wear pointy caps and popular discourse is controlled by a man who refuses to eat rather than one who presides over dollar-plate dinners overloaded with rubbery chicken. If apples and oranges are sold from the same fruit stall, who can resist comparing them? If there was an Arab spring in January can an Indian summer be far behind?

Anna Hazare and his youth are not demanding the fall of a Pharaoh; or an abolition of parliamentary democracy. They insist on a cure for a cancer eating at the body politic. Parliament is in question only because it has not been able to pass a Lokpal bill in 43 years, or indeed been able to debar criminals from contesting elections for ever. When a quarter of MPs have a criminal record, indifference is the preferred strategy of the establishment. The streets are screaming against this indifference.

I don't know how long this confrontation will take. But the toll of this conflict is already significant. Quite coincidentally, while writing this column, Begum Akhtar's voice came wafting over FM radio. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh knows Urdu, and is familiar with its poetry. If he wants to find out what the Indian middle class now thinks about a prime minister it once admired, he might find a minute to absorb the meaning of this couplet: Hum to samjhe thay kay barsaat mein barsegi sharab Aayee barsaat to barsaat ne dil tod diya.