A radical lasso

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Byline by MJ Akbar: A Radical Lasso

There is nothing personal about suspicion, General; it comes, to indulge in a mild pun, with the territory. If President General Pervez Musharraf has a fault, it is to take things personally.

When Lyse Doucet of the BBC asked him how he could allay suspicions that Indians might entertain about his radical offer to melt the Line of Control in Kashmir, he blew a minor fuse, answering on the lines of, "If they are suspicious about me then I will get suspicious about them" etc.

There is also institutional suspicion in relations between warring neighbours, as well suspicion of institutions. The Pakistan military establishment might harbour suspicions about India that are as justified, within the framework of its commitments and compulsions, as the Indian military establishment’s are about Pakistan. That has to be factored into any equation that seeks to balance the betrayals of the past against hopes about the future.

And yet, paradoxically, that personal element is also an asset. Pakistan’s peace initiatives towards India are propelled to a great extent by the dynamic of General Musharraf’s personal will. He is sincere, and has given as much evidence of his sincerity as is perhaps realistically possible. He also believes that Dr Manmohan Singh is equally sincere in his desire for peace, and has said so publicly; when personality is critical, trust is vital.

India’s Prime Minister is in politics but not of politics. Even those who disagree with him never go so far as to doubt his sincerity. Dr Singh, who keeps his private thoughts private, has not given us too many hints about what he thinks of General Musharraf, but the circumstantial evidence is positive. There would not have been a four-hour dinner between them in New York in September otherwise.

I cannot think of a parallel relationship between two serving chief executives of India and Pakistan. There was mistrust and worse between Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, which spilled over into the brief Nehru-Liaquat Ali Khan era. Liaquat’s civilian successors did not merit much attention from Nehru. By the time Ayub Khan came to power in Pakistan’s first military coup, and stabilised his regime, Nehru began to fade. Ayub Khan went to war with Lal Bahadur Shastri; ironically, the two established a certain rapport during the post-conflict peace talks in Tashkent. It was, tragically, too late, for Shastri did not survive Tashkent. Yahya Khan’s shallow obstinacy could hardly be good news for either his country or the subcontinent; his legacy is well-known. Theoretically, the Indira Gandhi-Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto relationship held promise. Both were populist in their politics and sophisticated in their personal lives. But they spent their time mopping up the dire consequences of war.

The oddest couple was surely Zia ul Haq and Morarji Desai. They had more in common than you might think. Both were 19th century prohibitionist puritans whose efforts at social reform energised a sectarian base. Both were pro-American in their policies, Desai by ideological preference and Zia by utilitarian choice. They came to power at the same time, but since only one of them was a democrat, they left power on different dates and through different routes. Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi shared a similar inheritance as well as a similar problem: they were disliked by their entrenched power centres, and were destabilised when they tried to reach out to each other.

The Nineties disappeared in alternate cycles of uncertainty and instability. The two bombwallahs were the second odd couple: Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif. They took one dramatic leap forward with the Lahore agreement, and were equally stunned when the leap ended up in a somersault. The relationship between Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf was always clouded on the Indian side by the memory of Kargil, in which trust was the first casualty. Their faces at the first official meal of the infamous Agra Summit, a lunch in Delhi, were worth a thousand pictures. Vajpayee’s face was ice, Musharraf’s was stone. Lal Krishna Advani’s face, for those who might be interested, was granite punctuated by two very careful eyes. Trust began to develop only during Vajpayee’s second gambit for peace, which went to ground when time ran out on him.

Manmohan Singh and Musharraf, having developed the trust, have time on their side. Experience, their own and that of others, should warn them that time is an unreliable ally, always prone to slip and crash on the unforeseen.

It is boring to repeat that a terrible tragedy can be converted into a momentous opportunity. But was the General running ahead of history when he made the most radical, even audacious, offer in six decades of confrontation over Kashmir? Analysts have suggested that by military training General Musharraf is a better tactician than a strategist. However, the offer to melt the border that separates two sides of Kashmir so that people can help one another in the aftermath of a numbing earthquake is a strategic masterstroke. It was made in the context of a crisis, but the idea has already been stretched towards an undefined timeframe. Is this the way to a solution of the one problem that has prevented India and Pakistan from being natural, friendly neighbours?

Much depends on how you define a solution. Is the solution about geography, or is it about people? Is it about Kashmir or Kashmiris? Geography is possessive, acquisitive. Once we shift the radar to the problems of Kashmiris, and how to minimise them if we cannot end them, then ideas, options and opportunities open up.

General Musharraf says that the world is aware of his ideas, and uses some key words: Identify … demilitarise … self-governance … superstructure (to oversee the process). Each of these terms is loaded with snares and infested with barbed wire from the past, not the least of them being identity. The map of Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947, before the first war started, was vastly different from what it is today, and I am not talking about the Line of Control, which came into being at the end of that war and has not shifted since. Demilitarisation will require trust between institutions much more than between individuals, however important the latter might be. Self-governance is a comfortable thought; the means of achieving the authority that will govern less so. Will such governments be democratically elected? Definitions of democracy are not the same on either side of the Line of Control, and indeed differ sharply within Pakistan. Democracy does not mean the same thing to Pervez Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Long before thoughts of superstructure engage us, the structure might be straddled with hurdles. And so on.

But what is undeniable is that General Musharraf has thrown an innovative lasso across the divide in a search for answers.

The critical fact of the Indian response was its immediacy. The suggestion had barely been made when Delhi said yes. A principle has been established, and we are already way beyond a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad. Yasin Malik has already tested the principle, and has reached Pakistan-occupied Kashmir with funds for relief. A year ago, the idea of Yasin Malik, or any member of the Hurriyat, visiting Pakistan was considered unacceptable by Delhi. Today we are discussing means of normalising contacts between a divided people. If there is some applause in the air it is only because both hands are clapping.

It is my view that the dialogue between India and Pakistan works when handled in incremental, digestible portions. Sometimes the increments are large, as in this practical move towards soft borders, but, since they are unencumbered by other demands, they become, slowly, digestible. The present chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed (who may not be chief minister by the time Id comes along) has suggested to Delhi that five crossing points be identified to turn the idea into reality. Another step, that is, in the digestion process. If you continue to change reality on the ground, minds will continue to open at the higher reaches of power.

Suspicion is a fog. The dense Kashmir fog is streaked with too much blood. A fog never lifts suddenly, except in fantasy. It clears slowly, invisibly, and only if the environment improves. The Kashmir fog has overpowered the day and seized the night. But it is in the ability of the leaders of India and Pakistan to improve the environment. This subcontinent suffered a political earthquake nearly six decades ago. The last bit of uncleared debris lies in Kashmir. A natural earthquake has given General Musharraf and Dr Manmohan Singh what can only be described as a God-sent chance to clear that debris.

Very Private Sector

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Byline by MJ Akbar: Very Private Sector

Is corporate India communal?As a broad theory it is safe to say that the rich in India and Pakistan are far more communal than the poor. Of course they pretend not to be, and either disguise their truth in deceptive manners or reserve it for closed door discussions when like speaks to like. Historically, divisive politics was led by the elite: either the Muslim landlords of UP and Bihar or their Hindu counterparts of Bengal, along with the rising and newly assertive bania in north and central India

The family reunites at least twice in a lifetime, once to celebrate a birth, and again to mourn a death and comfort the living. A tragedy beyond our control can become an opportunity within our means.

Death has placed an immense print across the north of the Indian subcontinent, in the shadow of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. Have the divided emotions of our subcontinent been jolted into some realignment by the massive earthquake from Kashmir to the Frontier?

The balance sheet is positive. To expect much more would perhaps be foolish. Money is always useful, but the vital need at such times is the immediate despatch of materials: waterproof tents, sheets and shoes, beds, blankets (winter has arrived), gensets, milk powder, analgesics, antibiotics, artificial limbs. India makes much of what is immediately needed and sent it by air and train. The government of Dr Manmohan Singh has been not only quick to respond to a neighbour, but very effective in rushing relief to quake-affected Jammu-and-Kashmiris.

The personal involvement of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed in the relief operations was visible. The Army responded with emergency speed, and its work in remote areas like Tangdar and Uri will be remembered by the people. The CPI(M), in an effective gesture, gave a donation of Rs 5 lakhs to the Pak high commissioner. After some unnecessary initial hesitation, help was received in Pakistan as gracefully as it was sent from India. Shoaib Akhtar was talking on behalf of his countrymen when he told Australian television in Sydney about Indian generosity. Islamabad went many steps further, and accepted aid from Israel. From such seeds will change emerge, slowly, and if the seeds are nurtured.

The debate in India swivelled around a sub-theme: why was corporate India so abstemious? It queued up to donate when an earthquake ravaged Gujarat; where are the photographs of cheques being handed to the PM’s relief fund this time? It is time to bring the question out of the closet. Is corporate India communal?

As a broad theory it is safe to say that the rich in India and Pakistan are far more communal than the poor. Of course they pretend not to be, and either disguise their truth in deceptive manners or reserve it for closed door discussions when like speaks to like. Historically, divisive politics was led by the elite: either the Muslim landlords of UP and Bihar or their Hindu counterparts of Bengal, along with the rising and newly assertive bania in north and central India.

If you examine the major political formations in India, you realise that ideology is created not only from top-down but also from bottom-up. Marxist secularism works well in Bengal because it sidesteps large portions of the middle class and goes directly to the peasant and worker for its support. Muslims and Yadavs are natural allies under Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav because they do not have a vested interest in communal conflict. When there is conflict between the two, it is almost always artificially engineered by the dangerous mix of lies, innuendo and the deliberate manipulation of crowd-mania. This makes, aberrations apart, the two Yadav parties secular in spirit as well as behaviour. Mayawati’s Dalit formation, the Bahujan Samaj Party, may be sectarian (as indeed others are) but it is not communal. The ideology that spawned the BJP, hostility to Pakistan, and aggression towards Indian Muslims, fits smoothly with the general sentiments of the trading community which constitutes its most loyal support base. The Congress, which gets support (or not) across the classes and castes, tends to respond with variable emphasis, depending on which element of its platform is making a demand. It can travel easily from quasi-communal to proto-secular.

India’s private sector emerged, by and large, from its trading class; and its primary instincts, inflamed by partition, were anti-Muslim. A cursory look at jobs given to Indian Muslims in the private sector in Bengal and the north (with the exception of Parsis and multinationals) during the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and perhaps even the Eighties will confirm this.

But the nature of Indian private sector has changed dramatically in the last twenty years. There has been a significant shift from traditional families to entrepreneurs, who have not only established new, highly successful businesses, but also bought failed brands and revived them. The names who dominate the telecommunication and aviation sectors, for instance, were unknown in 1980, or very marginal. Entrepreneurship, financed by bank or market capital, is driven by profitability, not family networks and influence-peddling. Muslims could succeed as easily, or with as much difficulty, as anyone else: CIPLA and WIPRO, giants in pharmaceuticals and IT, are owned by Indian Muslims. The rapid, even astonishing, growth in non-traditional businesses like outsourcing left no time for communal bias in hiring: competence was the only criterion, because whatever religion might do for the head and the heart, it had no influence whatsoever on the bottom line. A parallel arrival of a new, generally overseas-educated, generation in traditional business groups, like the Calcutta Marwaris, played its own role in eliminating bias.

Let me provide some completely unscientific data as evidence. It is based on the few eminences of corporate India that I happened to know socially. They are not intimate friends by any means, but long years of sniffing out communal breath helps one sift. An arbitrary checklist: the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil; Gautam Singhania; Vijay Mallya; the Jain brothers Samir and Vineet; Anand Mahindra; the BPL co-brothers (as they say in the South) Ajit Nambiar and Rajeev Chandrashekhar; the Goenka brothers Sanjeev and Harsh; the Neotia family, Suresh and Harsh; the Birla scion Shobhana Bhartiya. They may run their business brilliantly or badly, they may enjoy a lifestyle that might drive you up more than one wall, but the one thing they are not is communal.

So why is their hand so far away from their pockets?

One of the few industries to have donated immediately, and for Pakistanis as well as our own Indians, was Infosys, an extraordinary success story created by brilliant minds and financial genius of men like Narayanamurthy.

I wonder what the greatest of the modern entrepreneurs, Dhirubhai Ambani, would have done. I knew him a bit, if only because the journalist in me often sparred with the driving force in him. I believe that he would have made an exceptionally huge donation on both sides of the border within 24 hours, that is when the magnitude of the disaster became clear. He would have given the same amount on either side of the divide, although the destruction in India is far less. Why? That’s a no-brainer: because charity begins at home. However, charity does not end at home. Dhirubhai Ambani was utterly loyal and munificent to those who were loyal to him, but he was not generous. It is difficult to be both rich and generous. He was not sentimental. Sentiment and the Ambani clan have never been introduced to each other. He would have done it because he was shrewd. During my last meeting with him before his stroke, over a longish lunch, he had only one subject: improving India-Pakistan relations, because he believed that it was the only way to ensure the prosperity of both nations. Dhirubhai Ambani would have invested in the one commodity that is priceless, and whose returns are immeasurable, the goodwill of the people. Maybe if his sons stopped obsessing about each other they might remember what their father dreamt. Companies and industrialists who spend a fortune on advertising campaigns to improve their image, do not seem to understand that governments can rise or fall depending on how they respond to disaster.

The first, terrible week is only the beginning of a story that will take years of narration. Whole villages have to be re-built, lives rehabilitated, children rescued from shock and hope restored to adults. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, clearly a practical man, sees his opportunity in tragedy. Apparently he is planning to turn rubble into model, earthquake-proof villages, hopefully with modern infrastructure. That must be the goal in Jammu and Kashmir as well. Dr Manmohan Singh will readily appreciate that. Will the Indian private sector understand that too?

President Kalam Must Resign

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Byline by M.J.Akbar:President Kalam must resign

An alibi is the respectable sister of a scapegoat. Hunting the scapegoat is a common aspect of politics all over the world.

There is nothing particularly Indian, or partisan, about it. Anyone seeking to wound a chief executive must slaughter a clutch of scapegoats that line the path to his or her office. That is ritual procedure.

Opposition leaders were quick to demand the resignation, in order of merit, of Lalu Prasad Yadav, the don of Bihar; Buta Singh, the governor of Bihar; and Dr Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister of India after the Supreme Court decision striking down the proclamation by the President of India on May 23 dissolving a Bihar Assembly that had been duly elected but not yet sworn in. The Opposition leaders are missing the point. The person who should resign, if he has any respect for the office that he holds, is the President of India, Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam.

The Bihar Assembly was not dissolved by the wish of Lalu Prasad, the obedience of Buta Singh or the recommendation of the Prime Minister. All three may have been politically necessary for the decision. But the order came with the signature of the President of India. It was his decision, taken in atrocious circumstances, that has stained the history of Indian democracy.

It did not require a decision of the Supreme Court to see that the President was wrong. Common sense could have suggested this. The members of the aborted House had been properly elected in a legitimate election. An election is not complete until the elected members are sworn in. Instead of completing the process, the election was arbitrarily revoked and the will of the people suborned. Bihar is famous for rigging. This was unique in the sense that the rigging was done after the results were declared. This was appalling, in that the President of India rigged the outcome. The others — governor, Cabinet, Prime Minister — gave their recommendation. The President of India took the decision.

The manner in which he took the decision was utterly reprehensible. The President was in Moscow on the night of May 22-23 when the Cabinet decided that the Bihar Assembly should be dissolved even before it had met. The President was woken up at night to sign the proclamation. Why did he do it immediately, at that unseemly hour? Why could he not wait for daybreak and send the Cabinet’s recommendation for legal opinion, which he was fully within his rights to do? It was not as if he was being told to declare war, unless of course it was war on the Bihar voter. The political crisis in Bihar had simmered for a long while. Buta Singh had sent his report to Delhi that no party or coalition had secured a majority on 6 March, and there was President’s Rule in Bihar from 7 March. Parliament had approved this by 21 March, and there was no need to return to Parliament for an extension for some months. There was absolutely no time compulsion. The President could have taken a decision on his return from his foreign tour. And while he is bound to accept a recommendation of the Cabinet, he also has the right to check the legality of any recommendation and indicate his personal displeasure by returning it to the Cabinet for reconsideration. If the Cabinet insisted, the President would have no option but to sign, but he would have upheld the dignity of his office as well reinforced the concept of check and balance that is essential to prevent any tendency towards dictatorship. The President abdicated the dignity and demands of his office when he put a hurried signature to an act of blatantly political manipulation.

Why is the political class less culpable? Precisely because it is political. Power is its dharma, and that is both understood and accepted. Lalu Yadav’s sole desire was to retain office after losing an election he had bungled. If Nitish Kumar had been in his place, or a BJP leader, he would have done the same. The BJP’s behaviour in next-door Jharkhand has been as cynical. Lalu Yadav used his clout as an ally in Delhi to bully Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh to rush through a shoddy Cabinet decision only in order to pre-empt his opponents, who were on the verge of cobbling together an alternative coalition. There was nothing more idealistic in the stampede.

Equally, it would have been extraordinarily foolish of Dr Manmohan Singh to risk his coalition for the proprieties of Bihar. I am certain about Dr Singh’s personal views. Privately, he could never have approved of what he was being forced to do publicly. But he is not naïve. He does not believe in sending an invitation to civil war. He went by the letter and passed on the Cabinet’s recommendation to the President.

Why has the Constitution of India found room for a President and vested in him the "Executive power of the Union"? After all, the President is not directly elected by the people, and logically it is the Prime Minister, a creature of a directly elected Lok Sabha, who should be the final arbiter of executive power. But the office of the President was created not to teach schoolchildren how to live a better life, although that is always a good thing to do. It was created because the system needed a person who was solely the guardian of the Constitution rather than the representative of the legislature. While taking his oath, the President swears to "protect and defend the Constitution and the law", not the Parliament or the government. The framers of our Constitution knew that an elected executive would be occasionally tempted to bend the law to suit a political purpose and created a President to prevent such deviation. It gave the President the means to do so, by permitting him to seek legal opinion in case of any doubt from a Constitutional authority. President Kalam did no such thing when faced by an obvious malfeasance. If his doubts had been placed on the record, then he would have done his duty, and indeed the Supreme Court would have exonerated those doubts.

The fact is that the politicians have flouted the law and won the politics, because the fresh elections to the Bihar Assembly have not been stopped. They could not be, because the Supreme Court has to be at all times cognisant of realities. So Lalu has got the second chance he wanted, and corrected some of his mistakes in the search for a different outcome.

What guarantee is there that what has happened in Bihar cannot be repeated at the national level by another President? We are in coalition politics, in which deals will be made both before and after elections. (In Germany the Congress and the BJP are trying to patch together the grandest deal of all.) What if a President seeks to subvert the will of a general election by dissolving the House before MPs are sworn in?

You cannot be disillusioned if you are not illusioned. President Kalam was good enough to induce illusions. Like the rest of my countrymen, I do believe that he is a sincere and honest man, a simple man who has been placed amidst pomp and majesty by the curious dance of fate. I do not believe that he has been spoilt by his circumstances, or that he has been tempted by the luxury around him to the point where he has, like so many politicians, placed his conscience hostage to the luxury of office.

He has sought, during his term in office, to be a role model to the most precious asset of a nation, its children, its future generations. He has told them over and over again to place principle over gain. This is the moment for the President of India to teach those children he loves by the example of his own convictions.

The Supreme Court of India has indicted the President of India. Either the President takes a stand and says that the Supreme Court is wrong, and must be held accountable for bias and misjudgment. Or he should accept the validity of the judgment and hold himself accountable. It would have been meaningless to present this choice before those of our past Presidents who were politicians. The one exception would be, of course, President Rajendra Prasad, who belonged to the cloth of Gandhi and therefore had principles. This question could have been placed before the academicians, Dr Radhakrishnan and Dr Zakir Hussain. All three would have chosen principle over power. But only a very naïve commentator would have demanded such standards from Giani Zail Singh.

The choice is before President Kalam. He can choose to be remembered as Dr Radhakrishnan and Dr Zakir Hussain are. Or he can hide behind an alibi and be forgotten, as Giani Zail Singh is.

Royal Blush

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Byline by MJ Akbar: Royal Blush

What impressed me most about this theory was its foundation. It was based on a highly believable cause. It tore the many layers of deception around the anger of the players and reached the heart of their woes: "Chappell is bullying them into an obsessive frenzied fitness regime". Some of the greatest names in Indian cricket have traversed the green while fielding in the regal manner of an ocean liner; there is a strong tradition of stately majesty which some players consider part of their inheritance.

It would require a government to fall to get the kind of newspaper attention that the minor brawl between Indian cricket coach Greg Chappell and captain Sourav Ganguly received. Or not. Falling governments are not such big news anymore.

Even when they don’t fall, they slip each day, and how often can you ruin the front page, or the television screen, with a stumble over Iran, or a twisted ankle over Lalu Yadav? The public is hungry for real conspiracy: press conferences that rip a gut with poisoned sabres, and emails that slice through an artificial reputation like hot tongs on a gas balloon. They want the principal actors on the public stage to wear designer shirts even if they don’t have style, and our political life is a trifle short on such niceties.

I mean Praful Patel can claim a seat at any high table in the world of beau monde, but he is not in charge of conspiracies in his party. So could Jyoti Scindia, but he is not in the Cabinet, yet. Dr Manmohan Singh’s sartorial qualities have improved considerably ever since his tailors were put on the government budget, but he is not in charge of conspiracies in his party either. Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee’s tailor, alas, still lives in Bolpur.

Home minister Shivraj Patil does his best, but someone should tell him that while white shoes with white trousers and white jacket may be de rigueur for a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security, it is not going to make the cover of the Cosmopolitan. Actually one of the best-dressed politicians is Lalu Yadav, if only he could do something about his ear-hair, but only when he is not pretending to be poor.

The khaddar of his kurta-pyjama is spun from the finest cotton, and starched with an aesthete’s precision. But Lalu can’t send email so he can’t really be the kind of conspirator that modern media thirsts for. There are of course those who have been able to bridge the two worlds.

The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket in India) has the same chef de mission as the BCCI (Board of Control for Congress in India), Rajiv Shukla. But when you have weighed the balance carefully, on objective scales, you have to conclude that the political class cannot really match the cricket class in terms of media coverage.

The most reliable commentators on both cricket and politics are the bookies, but the bookies are kept as far outside media limelight as possible, because they compete directly with journalists for occupation of the punditry space. Once upon a time, the journalist was king. Anyone who wanted to know anything about the present and future of politics would ring up a Delhi journalist, possibly one smoking a pipe. Such a journalist’s word was the fatwa of fatwas. The journalist would be quoted at Mumbai parties in tones of hushed reverence. If his august presence was actually visible at any party, hostesses would order a waiter with an appropriately nourishing tray to hover permanently around him. Guests would hang onto the pundit’s every word, giving curvaceous babes a permanent inferiority complex. The luckier journalists can still maintain a foothold on the social circuit, but there are too many cynics around who have got far better information on the Bihar elections, and the fate of Rabri Devi, her eldest daughter and Lalu’s various brothers and brothers-in-law from the bookies. The big difference is that the journalist puts your whisky where his mouth is, while the bookie puts his money where his mouth is. Who would you rather trust? It’s a no-brainer.

The bookies certainly knew the end of the Ganguly-Chappell story long before the end was officially written in some hallowed five-star hotel in Mumbai. They said that it would be draw, and took bets of at least

Rs 500 crores on their convictions. Needless to add, this is precisely what happened. How did the bookies know? Wouldn’t we all like to know that?

There is a term in Urdu called 'noori kushti', a wrestling match whose result has been pre-determined by the sponsor, in which the wrestlers are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Was the Ganguly-Chappell encounter noori kushti?

The sound was loud enough to be heard from Zimbabwe to India, and the fury burnt acres of newsprint, but wait. The plot thickens. A theory has been floated by an afternoon paper in Mumbai, artfully called the Afternoon Despatch and Courier, that two popes of Indian cricket, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri, planted the story of Ganguly’s rift with Chappell (which was not a state secret on the Zimbabwe tour) on the talkometer-general of Indian cricket, Harsha Bhogle, who duly nudged and winked it onscreen, in order to improve the ratings of the dead series being televised by ESPN. Of all the reasons for this controversy this one seems the most cogent. If there is a conspiracy there must be a multinational around to blame, isn’t it? How else can we remain a socialist, secular republic? Second, multinationals are always keen to live up to their reputations, as long as they can find locals to be their patsies, so the pattern begins to form. Third, if there is no television, there is no cricket. And there will be no television if there are no ratings. So if you can’t get ratings by the game on the field, then you have to get ratings by playing some games off the field. This is logical. Pythagoras would have approved the symmetry of this construct.

What impressed me most about this theory was its foundation. It was based on a highly believable cause. It tore the many layers of deception around the anger of the players and reached the heart of their woes: "Chappell is bullying them into an obsessive frenzied fitness regime". Some of the greatest names in Indian cricket have traversed the green while fielding in the regal manner of an ocean liner; there is a strong tradition of stately majesty which some players consider part of their inheritance. The modern culture of lightning reactions and sprinting speed to save a single run could be slightly distasteful to anyone called a "Maharaja", one who has prospered in the glow of smothering protection. A New Zealander like John Wright was bad enough. Now this manic Australian called Chappell comes along and demands total fitness. Absurd. It was only a matter of time before the unstoppable force met the immovable object. However, we will not know the full truth about this theory until the courts decide, for surely Gavaskar and Shastri will sue the newspaper for slander unless it prints a decent apology. You cannot sully the reputation of popes without inviting the wrath of God.

I wonder if Sourav Ganguly, who has recovered the captaincy, quite realises what he has lost. Dignity. This has not happened suddenly. Decay is a slow process. It began with his silly and immature tantrums, done for television consumption: whenever he got out, it was someone else’s fault. Any player with self-respect would have announced his retirement the moment he stopped seeing the rising ball. Ganguly has become a public mockery with his spasmodic batting, jerking like a puppet out of control. He knows he is not fit to be in the side, but cannot keep his hands out of the till, for cricket is serious money. Popes who double up as commentators often remind us of his past brilliance to justify his present place. That is utter nonsense. Of course he used to be brilliant. That was why he was honoured with the captaincy. But as captain of India, he is more than an individual of the team. A captain is a symbol of the nation. A captain without dignity is an insult to the nation and the game. Sachin Tendulkar was and is a dignified genius. When he felt that captaincy limited his contribution to the team, he gave it up. The team was more important. When Sachin was injured, he remained out of the team and repaired the damage. Sachin Tendulkar is a god to us, precisely because he knows the limitations of men.

Sourav Ganguly is a god that failed because the demons of self-indulgence destroyed his genius. Sourav Ganguly is playing a game. It is not cricket.

A Date in Basra

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Byline by MJ Akbar: A date in Basra

Ever wondered about the difference between light and highlight? Information is softly diffused light across a flat surface. Highlight is the little bits we journalists select and treat as news. Information has no dimensions. It may not be totally accurate, since deadlines are the soot that nourishes the fog of fact; but it is more objective. News is subject to the journalist’s assumptions, convictions and prejudices even when he (or, increasingly, she) tries to be carefully neutral.

Patriotism leaves a natural and even understandable tint across the telescope when you view distant events. When you are British, sitting in London, and two British soldiers have clearly messed it up in spades, the heavy weight of the media elbow dams and diverts the free flow of information towards preferred contours.

So let’s take a test. What do you remember of the dramatic events in Basra this past week, in which two British soldiers were stopped, arrested and later rescued by units of the British force but not before two tanks were lost to petrol bombs, and their occupants pelted with stones as they fled in flames?

Do you recall that:

A: The British soldiers were disguised as Arabs?

B: That there was a substantial cache of arms in the car they were driving?

C: That, when questioned, they refused to show their documents to the police (which, of course, might have ended the whole fracas before it blew up into a crisis)?

D: That the Iraqi police were only doing their duty: it is their job to stop cars being driven by "Arabs" who look suspect (the British disguise may not have been totally clever)?

E: That no explanation has been given by the British authorities as to the nature of this undercover operation; nor has the press probed to find out, although soldiers have been given permission to grant interviews to convey their side of the story?

F: That the British soldiers shot and killed an Iraqi police officer who was doing his duty, and that this murder was unprovoked since there are no reports of the Iraqi policemen opening fire on the disguised British soldiers?

G: That the initial attempt to suggest that the arrested soldiers were handed over to some dreaded militia (very useful, that Moqtada al-Sadr) was quietly forgotten after it had served the purpose of muddying the sand, to reposition a phrase?

H: That the British blasted open the jail in which the soldiers were held, and in the process permitted over a hundred prisoners at the very least to escape, doubtless strengthening the insurgents thereby?

I: That the justification offered for this illegal invasion of a country’s prison was that "75%" of the Iraqi police had become loyal to anti-Occupation militias, and therefore could not be trusted with the lives of British soldiers? And that if it is indeed true that 75% of those who are meant to fight alongside the British forces in Basra have turned, then Britain and America are arming, training, feeding and building a force in which 75% are ready to turn their weapons against the British and Americans. Even Vietnam cannot boast of a somersault at such speed. I quote from a conservative British newspaper, reporting from Basra: "The two men were held in a building belonging to the shadowy internal affairs department." Hullo. The official internal affairs department of the Iraqi government in Basra has become "shadowy"? Where’s the light then, Brother Blair?

J: That, by the rules laid by George Bush, who has said that anyone not in uniform is an illegal combatant and therefore not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, the two British soldiers could not claim the status of prisoners of war?

I could, as you might imagine, go on. I dwell on the chiaroscuro of journalism not in an accusatory spirit, but as self-criticism. All journalists privileged to work in the few nations with genuine press freedom are prone to such lapses. We in India hardly deserve the right to accuse. But the strength of free media is that even if the details are sometimes wrong, we almost always get the big picture right. And that is what, in the end, matters.

In London, the first reports of the Basra incidents were drowned out by the power of the image, particularly on television. The sight of two British tanks in flames in the heart of Basra was stirring enough, but was eclipsed by the shot of a soldier leaping from his burning Warrior armoured vehicle, his uniform in flames; and a third picture of a British soldier being pelted with stones as he escaped from his private hell. All around were young men, their faces wracked with anger against the tanks and soldiers, each face condemning the British as invaders and occupiers rather than liberators.

Those images, in a profound sense, shaped the big picture that emerged for columnists of all persuasions. Boris Johnson, the Tory MP and editor of Spectator, concluded in the Telegraph: "Whatever we achieve in Iraq, we will not have made our world safer, or make the risk of terrorism less likely: quite the reverse… That claim (that the Iraq campaign was part of the war on terror) was a lie, and whatever good may come out of the Iraq war, we should never forget that it was based on a lie." Above his column was a brilliant cartoon by Nick Garland. The official photograph of the two British captives had blurred their faces to protect their identity. In Garland’s blur, you discern the faces of Bush and Blair, who have become the two great captives of the Iraq war.

Deborah Orr in the Independent, ruing the many "bad reasons why this country was occupied", notes, "People continue to be dragged from their homes, just as they were in Saddam’s day, to be executed in the squares and public places of frightened cities." Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad how the credibility of their so-called sovereign government is collapsing. He quotes a goldsmith, Abdul Hamid: "People here have seen that our government has no authority in Iraq. The British did not respect them when they smashed into the jail, so why should we respect our own leaders?" The political class is no longer afraid to demand a phased return of British troops from Iraq. Ken Clarke, frontrunner-aspirant for the Tory leadership, has called the invasion a major mistake. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats thinks it is the worst foreign policy fiasco since Suez. His deputy, Menzies Campbell, writes, "This was an illegal war, on a flawed prospectus, without the authority of the United Nations… The misjudgement of war has been matched by the mishandling of occupation… Now the insurgency threatens the unity of Iraq. The risk of dismemberment of Iraq increases, civil war is in prospect and instability threatens the whole region."

One answer that Tony Bush-Blair has found is to up the ante at home so that fear can remain his chief weapon. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian exposed the faultlines of a law that threatens to lock up — for five years! — anyone who "glorifies, exalts or celebrates" a terrorist act committed in the last twenty years. Master Blair’s government intends to list a series of "historic terrorisms" and the punters are waiting anxiously to see whether Stalin and Mao are included in the Gospel according to Blair. Irish terrorism has been deleted from the ambit of the proposed law, the better to concentrate upon Muslims I suppose. Jenkins describes this pithily as the "New Orwellianism". Boris Johnson’s headline summed up the mood in Britain: The war in Iraq was based on a lie — and policing Basra is an illusion.

Tony Blair, caught out, survives by shifting the goalposts. Once weapons of mass destruction were assiduously sold as the reason for a war ordered by Bush; and now the world is being saved from terrorism. The latest, and crumbling excuse for remaining in Iraq is the old excuse trotted out by the French king before the revolution: After me, the deluge. Amend that to, after we leave, chaos. Except that chaos is already there. Common sense suggests that a force will be needed to help Iraqis restore order, while they set about creating a law for their future. A joint force of Arab countries as well as units from nations whose credibility has not been destroyed, working under the UN flag, can help fill the breach for the limited period needed to calm the country.

George Bush and Tony Blair are the problem in Iraq. They can no longer be the solution. I am not alone in saying this. This is written on every Iraqi face in Basra.

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Unsettled Weather

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Byline by MJ Akbar : Unsettled Weather

There are only two political blocs that can threaten the Manmohan Singh government’s stability. The first, unsurprisingly, is the Left. But what could the Left gain from such adventurism? The Left has never been as powerful as it is now, dining off the high table in Delhi, master of the kitchen in Bengal and heady with the aroma of five fulfilling years of power in Kerala after the next election. The Congress has been eager to sacrifice its version of economic reform at the drop of any red flag to keep the Left on its right side. So where’s the problem, comrade?

Dr Manmohan Singh’s government is not unstable. But it is unsettled. After the six-year stretch of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s NDA it is not possible for a Central government to be unstable anymore.

Power in Delhi is now an equation in arithmetic. If two plus two equals 272 then there is no reason on earth, or in heaven, for anyone to ruin the distribution of office that constitutes a coalition government. All you have to do is keep adding some very flexible chips till the pile crosses the magic majority number in the Lok Sabha. And it will be as stable as a pile of chips at a casino, as long as you don’t gamble. Don’t risk anything for big rewards and you can always remain ahead of the game.

Flexibility is a far better glue than ideology, as the BJP’s partners in the NDA repeatedly proved, particularly when they became flexible over the gruesome Gujarat riots. The BJP returned the compliment, like a good, rubbery partner. Three core issues catapulted the BJP from relative obscurity to comparative prosperity: the demand for the construction of a temple to Lord Rama at Ayodhya; the passage of a bill in Parliament ensuring a uniform civil code; and the abolition of Article 370, the statute by which Jammu and Kashmir is constitutionally a part of the Union of India. All three were jettisoned the moment BJP ministers took the oath of office.

No comparable fissures afflict the United Progressive Alliance now in power. It may not be very progressive, but it is an alliance. Or, more accurately, the principal partners may have radically different views on the definition of "progress" but they have consciously abstained from the tug of war that can split the fabric. (How did fabric, a solid, virtuous word, evolve towards fabrication, with all its salacious implications? Could it be because of the spin put in the weave? There may be clues here for Prime Ministers who now cannot survive without plonking a spin-master’s face in front of television cameras on their behalf. They insist on doing so even when the chap is spinning at 78rpm instead of the required 33.)

There are only two political blocs that can threaten the Manmohan Singh government’s stability. The first, unsurprisingly, is the Left. But what could the Left gain from such adventurism? The Left has never been as powerful as it is now, dining off the high table in Delhi, master of the kitchen in Bengal and heady with the aroma of five fulfilling years of power in Kerala after the next election. The Congress has been eager to sacrifice its version of economic reform at the drop of any red flag to keep the Left on its right side. So where’s the problem, comrade?

The other group that could do Dr Singh in is, of course, the Congress. Its motivation would be logical: it would thereby force a general election in which it could significantly improve upon its numbers, which are only as good as P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri delivered. There is enough disarray within the BJP to tempt Congress calculators. A general election would have the additional merit of not only depleting the enemy but also clearing the air of dubious friends, Lalu Yadav being among the latter. But, as the old and wise proverb tells it, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Why tempt fate in this casino when you can enjoy power placidly for four more years? And who knows which way the chips will turn then.

Then why should the government be unsettled? Because the parts do not quite add up to the whole. Any tremor exposes a mismatch, and tremors are inevitable in the governance of a nation as complex as India. Candour can be seismic. One rumble was heard this week, and is doing the subterranean rounds.

I don’t know how right Rahul Gandhi was in his belief that he could have been Prime Minister of India at the age of 25, but he was spot-on when he said that there was no governance in Bihar. This has been an obvious fact for far too long. However, in conventional politics, such truths are reserved only for opponents. You don’t dish them out to friends, particularly an ally to whom you have declared undying fealty on the eve of a crucial election. Bihar will return to the polls in less than four weeks, and Rahul Gandhi’s verdict on his ally Lalu Yadav’s government will echo through the thicket as Yadav fights desperately for survival. It may be difficult for Rahul Gandhi to campaign now for the alliance, because doubtless his opponents will remind him of his remarks at every campaign stop. This is not just another election: it is literally do-or-die for Lalu Yadav, because if he loses power in Patna the ground beneath his feet will cave in. This was why Lalu Yadav virtually forced a nullification of the last Assembly election. If he is defeated, his bitterness will extract consequences.

Candour is a rare tactic in Indian politics, and a refreshing one. Rahul Gandhi’s straight-from-the-shoulder stuff will appeal to his core constituency, the young, who are fed up of the saccharine hypocrisy that sustains so much of political rhetoric. But in order to exercise such candour, Rahul Gandhi needs a Congress majority as big as his grandmother’s in 1971, if not his father’s in 1984. Ideology is not a problem among politicians, but they still want to win elections. Lalu Yadav knows that votes get trapped in mud, and he is always watchful about the direction from which mud is being slung.

There are other parts, smaller, that do not fit. Shibu Soren in Jharkhand does not suit the cleanliness standards that Dr Manmohan Singh correctly demands and the Telangana separatists have an agenda that is a direct challenge to the Congress ethos and conviction. The Congress will not divide Andhra Pradesh and hand over Hyderabad to a parochial group that in any case is too weak to bring down the Union government by itself. Mrs Sonia Gandhi hands out an irregular jar of honey each time the Telangana child begins to bawl. However, that bawl is threatening to become a brawl. And little brawls grow up to become a skirmish.

There is a way to calm the simmering unease. Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi should send out an invitation to all the UPA partners for a quiet, friendly weekend by the sea. They should then bring out the Common Minimum Programme, tear it up into tiny bits and throw it into the sea. That programme was drawn up, in a bit of a hurry, last year after the election results: a new dawn was lighting up the horizon, and the sky was flush with the rosy tint of great promise in which everything seemed possible. The government is now entering the noon of its life (time does not pass evenly in power). The sun is harsher, reality more visible, and sweat can be discerned on more than one brow. The group should sit together and write a second minimum programme. If the first was of minimum proportions, then this should be minimalist. There should be about a dozen essentials rather than a hundred wannabes.

There must be detailed and honest analysis of where the government, as well as each of its constituents, has reached since coming to power in Delhi. They should then discuss where they should, or can, go. There should be a political section as well as an economic agenda. The partners must define their territories on the political map, and shake hands against poaching. Dozens of bridges have to be planned to cover the innumerable pitfalls lying ahead. They should then pull out a three-year calendar and measure options against a timetable. The reinvention or rebirth of the Dr Manmohan Singh government can be celebrated from that weekend.

Just now, the great sin is a sense of ad hoc-ism. The Left discovers what has happened in Washington after it has happened in Washington. Others are bystanders while politics erodes a bulwark in Bihar or Andhra Pradesh. Some compulsions become too regional for the national interest, which must be the principal interest of a Union government.

Dr Manmohan Singh is a great believer in economic transparency, and probably induced more corrections into the economy than any finance minister before or after. He has to now lead the way in political transparency. Indian politics is not very holy, but it is Biblical in one sense: it does not live by bread alone.

King George Canute

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Byline by MJ Akbar : King George Canute

T.S. Eliot wrote, famously:
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

There are too many internet terrorists scurrying around planting stink bombs in the very heart of the Green Zone where George Bush’s credibility lives.

One of the most entertaining stink bombs that came my way compared the rain havoc in Mumbai in July with the rain havoc in New Orleans in August: 18 inches fell in New Orleans, 37 in Mumbai. Mumbai has

24 times the population of New Orleans. In 48 hours, 37 died in Mumbai and a hundred in New Orleans. In 12 hours the Indian Army and Navy were in Mumbai; it took 48 hours in America. Now which, asked this mischievous sender, is the third world country?

Four years ago, George Bush and Tony Blair were the undisputed masters of the response to arbitrary, provocative, barbaric terrorism. They strode the moral high ground.

Today a hurricane laps around the feet of King George Canute and erodes the sand below his throne while he helplessly orders the waters of New Orleans to recede.

A question does not become a fact; America is not a third world nation. But a question is always a part of an early warning system. Gods can slip and recover their footing: that is a familiar of all mythology as well as its first cousin, history. The test of leadership is the distance between slip and tip-over. For once you’ve lost your balance, descent is so much faster than ascent.

Victory is Rama; it has one face. Defeat is Ravana; it has ten faces. One of the latter is the cost of conflict. New Orleans is expected to cost $150 billion. That is not all that much for the world’s richest economy. But fifteen dollars can become difficult to find when a tycoon has crossed his credit limit many times. The most powerful businessmen, owners of the finest brands, know this — or learn it to their cost. The cost of the conflicts that Bush has taken his country into is not measured only in hard cash; it is being measured in wet blood.

Mahatma Gandhi used to say that all the hidden dirt of society flows into the hut during a flood. Hidden dirt of all kinds is flowing into American consciousness after New Orleans. The waters have to recede; the dirt will stay in the memory. New Orleans was not just a natural disaster. It was a mirror in which America saw the inherent inequality of the Bush world-view. The mind that protects the profits of oil companies at the expense of the Iraqi people is not so different from the mindset that persuades a powerful leader to head west towards a fundraiser while thousands die in the east of his own country.

George Bush has an accountant’s view of the world. On one side is a list of assets: friends, generally respectful and always obedient in a moment of need. On the other side is the column of liabilities: enemies, always evil, violent, barbaric, backward and without the redeeming virtue of having had a renaissance.

Reality, sadly, has more colours than black and white. A state of war is also a state of mind, and it is a poor leader who thinks that any conflict is a black-and-white confrontation.

On the fourth anniversary of 9/11 Bush and Blair must address one question: why have they lost so much respect across so much of the world? This collapse of trust has taken place in their own countries as well. Why were they trusted to lead a war against terrorism once and are now regarded as the Punch and Judy of a particularly nasty tragedy?

They don’t need to establish a commission to find the answer. They can take a hard look at the difference in the world’s reaction to the two wars that they launched, one in Afghanistan, and the other in Iraq. I cannot think of a nation that did not support them, particularly after the Taliban in Kabul did not hand over Osama bin Laden for trial. Pakistan, Afghanistan’s closest ally, sacrificed its strategic interests: India and Pakistan were on the same side.

By the time Bush and Blair had forced the hands of the clock towards Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the most powerful nations of Europe, France and Germany, both their people and their governments, had publicly rejected the rationale for war against Iraq, at that time. The last phrase is important, because if Hans Blix, the UN inspector, had been given time he might have proved that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Maybe that is why he was not given time. Four years later, even the legitimacy of the presence in Afghanistan has been eroded as it begins to look like an occupation. In Iraq, there is no doubt: it is an occupation.

George Bush should have listened to the man he sacked after re-election, his former secretary of state Colin Powell. Powell supported the massing of troops on the borders of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but he was a reluctant warrior. He did not want to tip-over into a war with all its unforeseen consequences (rarely have there been as many unforeseen consequences as in Iraq after Bush got onto an aircraft carrier in order to declare victory). Powell argued that intimidation had to be tried before the shooting started. But Bush and Blair were in heavy league with hubris. They thought that defeating Saddam was a stroll into Baghdad. That might have been true. But they did not realise that defeating Saddam was not quite the same thing as defeating the Iraqi people, and that the people would mobilise once they saw the war for what it was, and what became explicit when the records of the oil ministry were more important to the occupation forces than the treasures of the national museum. Or Bush might have thought about his father’s view of war when he successfully drove Saddam out of Kuwait. Nation-building, said Bush the Elder (and Wiser), was not something that American troops could do for Iraqis. To destroy a dictator as evil as Saddam might be important, but the world has to devise means that are morally acceptable. A moral cause cannot be sustained by immoral means. A war for freedom tends to lose its legitimacy when it ends up in the profit sheets of a Halliburton.

War is a course of last resort. It has a justification when it has a moral basis. When it becomes an occupation then those who oppose it acquire the moral strength. Bush and Blair surrendered the moral edge in Iraq that they possessed against the Taliban. To dismiss the response of the desperate in Iraq as terrorism, as Bush and Blair, will not get them anywhere. It will certainly not convince the young people who are ready to die in a battle against those they perceive to be conquerors rather than liberators. Even those who welcomed Bush and Blair because they hated Saddam and his brutal dictatorship have joined the war against the perpetrators of "collateral damage", the pretty phrase for excesses against civilians in Iraq.

T.S. Eliot wrote, famously:
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is the way some Presidents and Prime Ministers end, not with a halo but as a joke, destroyed by a stink bomb.

Blame Game

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Byline by MJ Akbar: Blame Game

Contrary to anything you may have learnt from sections of the right-wing media, the current price of oil is not a Muslim-Arab conspiracy to destroy civilisation. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than market-economics coming home to roost. If the price of a car can be subject to market forces there is no reason why the price of a national source should be subject to charity. Russia, which is a very Christian country, has not offered to sell its oil at thirty dollars when the market price is around seventy.

It is a well known axiom that the victor lays down the law, or at least defines the meaning of ‘justice’. But such behaviour is not sustainable because it will be challenged — effectively. The conversion of the victim into the monster is an old tactic. As the English proverb puts, give a dog a bad name in order to hang it.
The problem, of course, is not the fact, but the perception. I am writing this column on Saturday 3 September, and here is a list of facts listed in this morning’s Asian Age. It is therefore an arbitrary or accidental list; if I had written this piece yesterday, the list would have been different. The list was distributed not by the Al Islamic Jihad News Agency but by Associated Press, which sends out a package titled ‘Today in History’. According to AP, 3 September was a pretty tough day in world history.

On 3 September 1189 Richard I was crowned King of England, a few months before the left for the Anglo-French crusade against Saladin. In 1497, Isabella of Spain married Manuel, King of Portugal: one of the conditions of the marriage was that Manuel would have to expel all Jews from his kingdom. In 1609, Henry Hudson, looking for India, discovered Manhattan. In 1791 the French reversed their revolution a little bit and created a constitutional monarchy. In 1879 the Afghans massacred a British delegation in Kabul, leading to the second British-Afghan war.

In 1904 Japan defeated Russia (the first Asian nation to defeat a European army in modern times). In 1939 Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany and in 1945 Singapore returned to British possession that day.In 1950, said AP, surely quoting from its archives, "Several Viet Minh terrorists assigned to kill US minister to Indo-China Donald Heath (were) arrested". I hope that the Viet Minh suspects (they had only been arrested, not convicted) were called "terrorists" because they were allegedly on an assassination assignment rather than because they belonged to the Viet Minh, because at least in my book a guerrilla fighting for the liberation of his nation from a colonial occupier and imperialist is a nationalist rather than a terrorist. (That is why I have such high regard for George Washington.)

Check out what happened on 3 September 1497. Five years before, in 1492, Granada had fallen to the Castilians, ending 781 years of Arab rule over various parts of the Iberian peninsula. What was the foremost priority of the new Catholic rulers? The expulsion of Jews, who had lived peacefully under Muslim rulers for nearly eight centuries. But do an opinion poll and the overwhelming majority will believe that Muslims have been the enemies of Jews for 1,400 years. Try pointing out that Jews were given a place of dignity for four hundred years after being expelled from Spain and Portugal in the Ottoman empire and eyebrows will rise. I can’t help adding that Richard I had a peculiar sense of humour: one of the things that made him laugh was watching teeth being extracted from ageing Jews.Such mischaracterisation fits in with the portrait of Islam as a religion of war, spread by the sword etc etc. (If it had been spread by the sword there would have been no Christians left in Spain.) The few war verses of the Quran are lifted out of context and hammered into the collective consciousness of the world. A handful of stupid, or evil, clerics spewing nonsense — whether in India or Britain — are turned into the evidence required to demonise a whole community, which is a bit like saying that all Hindus share the disturbed thought-process of a fire-breather like Togadia or Singhal.

In a wise article in the Guardian of July 23, the Reverend Dr Giles Fraser,vicar of Putney, says about Tony Blair’s Britain: "Muslims who preach hate are to be deported and subject to new restrictions, Charles Clarke (British home secretary) announced in the Commons on Wednesday. So what would the home secretary have to say about stuff like this: ‘Blessed is he who takes your little children and smashes their head against the rocks’? Or this: ‘O God, break the teeth in their mouths… Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun… The righteous will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.’ No, this is not Islam, it is the Bible. And there is a lot more where that came from. Why, then, are so many commentators persuaded that the Quran is a manual of hate — compared to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, it is very tame stuff indeed." The good Reverend also points out that Samson could well be considered the world’s most famous suicide-missionary.The temptation is alluring, but it doesn’t help to blame Islam for the sins of Muslims. Just as no one in his right mind would blame Christianity for the deeds or misdeeds of Robert Mugabe today or Augusto Pinochet yesterday.

Clever politicians like Tony Blair, who will be in India this week, are always correct in their remarks, even while they encourage just that little touch of hysteria in mass media that will deflect attention from the correct diagnosis of their problems. Blair’s problem after the suicide bombings in London is to explain how young men, born in liberal, modern, progressive Britain could behave like children from a Palestinian refugee camp. It is an extremely pertinent question, and the answer lies not in Islam, but in Tony Blair’s mirror.Like a good politician, Blair has found his scapegoats, including one cleric who looks like a made-for-tabloids leftover pirate from a Peter Pan movie. But if he wants to know the truth, which I do not believe he does, he would be better advised to watch television news instead of Friday sermons. The war in Iraq comes home to Britain every day on television. The dangerous anger of those young men was not aimed against Britain, but against a government and its decision to go to war and occupy Iraq behind a gauze of lies. This does not make their violence acceptable. Killing innocents is a crime in any text (and specifically forbidden, incidentally, in the rules prescribed for a legitimate Jihad). But neither does their crime exonerate Blair from his crime. Blair is not paying for his sins. His country is.It is no accident that the Conservatives have an old candidate with a new message in their party’s leadership contest, Kenneth Clarke. The new message is direct: the war in Iraq is among Britain’s costliest mistakes. Clarke is an old-blue Tory, and a businessman (he is vice chairman of British American Tobacco). The only thing radical about him is the suede he prefers for his shoes. Conservatives are traditionally more pro-American than Labour. Clarke would not have made Iraq an issue if it did not have bounce. There was an inevitable spurt of support for Blair after the bombings. Good politicians always benefit from a crisis, and Blair is among the best at his game. But the fizz can leak as fast as it builds up.

The Arab-Israel war of 1973 changed the place of oil in the world’s economy. Opec has not looked back. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq has been the principal reason for the price of oil touching seventy dollars a barrel and remaining in stratosphere. War does not come cheap. George Bush and Tony Blair look steely when anyone mentions the number of soldiers who have died fighting for their misjudgments, and indifferent when Iraqi casualties are speculated. Nemesis appears in more than one form, sometimes as a child’s haunting coffin, and sometimes as a mother’s tent near your holiday home. Both Bush and Blair have fought their last election. Their successors will go broke paying death duties.

Dr Manmohan:Mukherjee!

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Byline By M.J.Akbar: Dr Manmohan Mukherjee

Since the question has not been asked seriously, it has not been answered properly. But it remains the dominant dilemma of this political season as the Left-Congress-Plus coalition government enters the fertile phase of its second year in power: Does the Left have a strategy?

A cat-and-mouse game is not strategy, even when roles change: sometimes the Left is the cat, and on occasions the Congress does the purring. That is tactical, and one can see such tactics extending into a love-fest. Since the Congress has no hope of even scratching the surface in the next Assembly elections in Bengal, we could very well see a Congress offer to stick to mock combat rather than opt for real hostility, an offer that the pragmatists within the CPI(M) will happily accept. Of course there are often regrettable casualties on one’s own side because of friendly fire, but commanders cannot be blamed for trivia.

It would be an error to believe that our Marxist Comrades would be content with Bengal, or that their politics is done without long-term thinking. If Dr Manmohan Singh, who again complained recently that economic reforms were no-hoper in the current arithmetic of the coalition, wants to get an idea of what the Left strategy could be, he should order a few pots of tea (a meal of hilsa fish and rice might be too distracting) and invite his colleague Pranab Mukherjee over. They should discuss another Mukherjee, Ajoy, who was as old in 1967 as Pranab is in 2005. They should discuss another Congress, the Bangla Congress, a flash in the history of our nation but one that had enduring consequences, because the Bangla Congress began the process of the disintegration of the Indian National Congress. Pranab Mukherjee was a young star of the Bangla Congress, and Ajoy Mukherjee was its chief.

In those turbulent days there was order in one respect: Assembly and Parliament elections were held at the same time. The curse of permanent elections had not visited the Indian polity. The elections of 1967 were dramatic.

The Congress monopoly over India was established in 1952, reaffirmed in 1957 and started showing signs of wear and tear in 1962. The Congress was fortunate that the elections of 1962 were held before the war with China or 1967 might have happened in 1962.

The well-preserved façade, constructed since 1947 out of secure borders, internal unity and a socialist economic programme, began to crumble with the defeat in the war with China, as if it was symbolic of much more than political illusion and military incompetence that lost the war. Defeat made the whole of the Himalayas vulnerable; language and sectarian urges from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu created seismic rifts; rural neglect and urban stagnation were to burst into widespread disaffection, most startlingly in the form of a Naxalite movement, fully aided and abetted by China. (The official slogan of the Naxalite movement was: "Chairman Mao is our Chairman." How unpatriotic is that?) The 1965 war with Pakistan, a possible catastrophe that was converted by brilliant military panache into a stalemate, fuelled inflation and by 1966 huge swathes of the north, with Bihar as its epicentre, was in the grip of full-fledged famine. Bengal, then among the most industrialised states in the country, was in a rage, but its Congress chief minister, Prafulla Chandra Sen, behaved as if life had not moved beyond the 1950s.

The Congress split; and the Bangla Congress joined what became known as the United Front. It included the Left. Marxists who had been jailed for being potential traitors in 1962 were ministers of the Bengal government in 1967. Marxists do not take these things personally. Jyoti Basu, in jail in 1962, was home minister five years later. Ajoy Mukherjee became chief minister. The story of the UF is too sordid even for journalism. Suffice it to say that there was a moment when Ajoy Mukherjee went on a fast against his own government. Such cupidity had to be punished, and it was. Mrs Indira Gandhi revived the Congress, and it returned to office in 1972: how could it not? She could do nothing wrong. People danced on the streets when she nationalised banks and they danced in their homes as well when Bangladesh was liberated. Such euphoria proved to be Band-Aid when the country needed surgery for cancer, and the Emergency ended the credibility of the Congress for generation. The Marxists, in the meanwhile, had moved one scale up on the Marxist ladder of evolution. From the United Front they had graduated to a more logical, and ideological, Left Front. The Left Front won power in 1977, implemented the kind of land reforms that Nehru had promised in the 1950s and then forgotten under "bourgeois" pressure inside his party. The Left Front will win power in 2006, and there is no apparent reason why they should not be in office in Bengal, continuously, longer than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. (Who knows: if the CPSU had been forced to accept democracy, it might still be in office!)

Is Dr Manmohan Singh the Ajoy Mukherjee of the 21st century, on a national scale?

The last time Communists supported the Congress in Delhi was when Mrs Gandhi had declared an Emergency, and they were on the wrong side of history. Fortunately for them, only the CPI was with Mrs Gandhi. 2004 and 2005 is vastly different. The Congress is not much stronger than the Bangla Congress was in 1967. Dr Manmohan Singh, like Ajoy Mukherjee, is a very decent and very honest man without much personal political chemistry. There is nothing wrong with the coalition, as there was nothing wrong in 1967, except that while there may be a common minimum programme, there is no common political or economic agenda. It is a government that can last as long as it likes, but governance will be difficult to sustain. You do not need to be a soothsayer to suggest that the general elections of 2004 produced an accidental partnership, and were a penultimate stage in the evolution towards a stable coalition.

The Communists have consciously kept themselves out of office, while they make sure that they remain in power. They do not want to pay the price of being in office when the next stage of accountability comes. If the ballot carries them to office then they want to be sure that they can implement policies and create a cadre that will ensure that they remain there. The Congress will not be part of the Left Front for two reasons. First, because the party’s heart has moved to the right. Second, the Marxists will occupy the dominant space in any coalition of their choice, a role that the Congress cannot concede. It is possible that the next election could be a battle between three fronts: a UPA headed by the Congress; an NDA marshalled by the BJP and a significant alliance controlled by the Marxists. The Left will obviously hope to cash in on the disenchantment towards both the BJP and the Congress, after the voters’ experience between 1998 and 2008.

Dr Manmohan Singh can take comfort from one lesson of the 1960s. Voters do not reward any party that brings down a government arbitrarily, or for reasons that cannot be adequately explained. The Left is not going to risk an invitation to suicide. Security regulations prevent the Prime Minister from taking the normal roads towards the international airport in Delhi, but if he did he would find graffiti on some of them, put up by the Marxist youth wings. "The future is ours" they say. They don’t see the present as theirs. They are a serious political party, which means that they have the ability to wait. Hurry is the preference of those who think they might never become ministers again. Marxists view power in terms of generations: after two decades of Jyoti Basu, two decades of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee.

The Congress and the Left alternate between cat and mouse to keep the government going. The Darwinian theory of Indian politics is waiting for one of the two to become a real cat: not just one with whiskers and a meow, but one with a mane and a roar.

Glass is Half Empty

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline By M.J.Akbar: Glass is Half Empty

In a democracy it makes much more sense to believe that the glass is half-empty rather than half-full. It is the empty part of the glass that determines election results. The half-full section chatters and pontificates. The other half votes.The best thing that Mrs Sonia Gandhi has done in the fifteen months of the present Parliament is to lead the passage of the rural employment guarantee scheme for 200 economically backward districts. It is the government of Dr Manmohan Singh which will pass this legislation and find the money for it. But the identification in the popular mind will be with Mrs Gandhi. Opposition parties have had the sense not to oppose the measure, and quibbles will not help them. It might mean only a meagre hree rupees a day, as Nitish Kumar pointed out, but it is three rupees more than he provided when in power for six years.

Facts don’t change. But the way you look at them makes a critical difference. The NDA gave wide currency to its claim that it had reduced the number of Indians below the poverty line from over 400 million to some 300 million. If, instead of advertising that as an achievement it had repositioned the fact as a challenge and as a national disgrace (which it is; try explaining the meaning of freedom to those who cannot find enough to eat), it might have connected better with the country. There is a difference between the constituency of a political party and the constituency of a government. The best politicians know the difference,and also know how to improvise a median between the two. A party’s political base is, very accurately, partisan; a government must reach out to the country, including those who did not vote for it. The disadvantaged, whether they be poor or insecure, cannot be sliced out of the safety net or the attention span simply because they do not support the political parties that form a government.

The rural employment guarantee restores populism to centre-stage. Ironically, it was Dr Manmohan Singh as finance minister in 1991 who convinced the country that populism had extracted too heavy a price. He would have argued in the Nineties that before you can be paying for jobs, you had to create jobs, and that an exchequer cannot pay for mythical work. This is good theory, but not practical politics, except in a dictatorship. China can afford to be stringent because the party of the people doesn’t have to bother about the vote of the people. Even the most capitalist economies buy peace with their disadvantaged through fiction. What else is the dole, or the unemployment benefit, in the West? The state, using tax revenues, takes the responsibility for the inability of the economy to provide full employment. The government robs Peter to pay Paul to prevent Paul from turning violent and wrecking the peace without which neither Peter nor the government can survive.

The problem in India is not populism but corruption and its first consequence, mismanagement. The carcasses of a dozen schemes similar to this lie in the files of the Government of India, waiting to receive an honest funeral. No one has the courage to inter them, and so they continue to increase the waste that clings to the annual budget. Money is siphoned off by middlemen, for the poor, by definition, are helpless. Once the initial euphoria wears off, the schemes join the long list of promises that failed and become counter-productive with the very voter they were meant to woo. Experience has made them cynical, and the poor hate being cheated, or patronised, or politically exploited: the anger against the free distribution of saris by the BJP before the last general elections was a spark from a much larger conflagration.

If the Congress therefore wants to convert populist measures into political capital, then it must do so while they remain popular, before time and venality have turned the sheen into rust. Logically speaking, if there is a guaranteed employment scheme in August, can general elections be far behind?


Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s window of opportunity is open. The once-lustrous image of the government has dimmed for the usual reasons, but its credibility has not yet eroded beyond repair. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh remains the biggest asset of is government. But a few more controversies over tainted ministers, a rap or two from the Supreme Court over malfeasance in Bihar, some more horrific indifference while Mumbai drowns and its hinterland dies, and there won’t be much of a tale to tell. Moreover,there is still enough buoyancy in the idea of a coalition that keeps the BJP out of power.This is critical glue for the core to hold.The battle in the next general elections is not going to be for a simple majority.That is out of reach. The definition of victory this time is between 180 to 200 seats.The rest will fall in place.

Critical to Congress hopes is the fact that the BJP is in trouble wherever it is in power.This has very little to do with Jinnah.The weight of incumbency is a difficult burden for any party, and impossible to bear for a party that is floundering.The Congress can easily add to its numbers in Madhya Pradesh,Rajasthan and Gujarat if elections are held in the next few months. But the BJP’s problems cannot be a permanent fact. If a week is a long time in politics, then a year is a lifetime. Rebirth is a natural law of Indian politics.The Congress should know that much.

The economy is still in reasonable shape.The real voter does not measure the health of the economy by the share market, but by the vegetable market.The inflationary pressure of fuel prices cannot be controlled by unlimited government subsidies. Retail prices are already rising in the United States and Europe, and there is no hope of any downward turn in oil rates particularly since George Bush has decided that one Iraq is insufficient to cloud his presidency and he should goad Iran owards a confrontation as well.(If the United States does move against Iran,its war will be in a contiguous zone from the east of Damascus to the west of Islamabad.There will be spillover on all sides. Maybe defence minister Pranab Mukherjee was aware of this when he signed the defence pact with Donald Rumsfeld.) Why take a risk with the vegetable market?

Then there is the enormous value of pre-emption. A patch-up coalition government is always in a state of temporary truce. Mrs Sonia Gandhi not only has to worry about the sudden emergence of a Third Front, but also flakes from her own party floating towards new directions. (If Shankersinh Vaghela does unite with Keshubhai Patel to form a regional party in Gujarat it would finish, at least for one election, both the BJP and the Congress.)

The alternative is to let sleeping coalitions lie. If only they would lie in peace we might even accept the lies necessary to sustain that peace. This is what the seniors in the Congress, enjoying a late-life lottery win, would like. It is not a prescription for the future.Once the politics of Delhi would impact on the states; today the politics of every state impacts on Delhi. Whatever the results in Bihar, there will be ensuing tremors in Delhi. Pranab Mukherjee is trying to bring Mamata Banerjee back into the Congress, which will not endear the Congress to the CPI(M). A shift in Gujarat could echo in Delhi. Such rifts can be papered over, but they do not add up to sustainable governance. A window of opportunity does not remain open or too long.By this time next year the window could be shut by the force of tomorrow’s storms.The Congress has the chance of turning a fortuitous coalition into a stable alliance.It is up to the party to seize what is visible instead of wandering into a gathering fog.

The Moral Code of Indian Democracy

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: The Moral Code of Indian Democracy

The BJP and the NDA will have every right to taunt the fulsome apology by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for 1984 once they have familiarised themselves with the letter "A". It is not only the first letter of most alphabets but also the first letter of the word "apology". They should then apologise profusely for the macabre riots of Gujarat on the last day of February and March 2002.

They could do it individually, with master baiter Narendra Modi leading them. Or they could orchestrate their efforts to include the Panchratna of the NDA: Vajpayee, Advani, Joshi, Sinha and of course the ubiquitous George Fernandes, who regularly charged in where angels feared to tread.

Of the five, Vajpayee, then Prime Minister, did sound apologetic but heckled mercilessly by the bright young things of his own party, retreated ceremoniously to the peace and comfort of his chair. There was no hint of regret from the others. After Modi won the Gujarat Assembly elections, even the need for regret was forgotten.

The three major sequences of barbarism in the last 21 years have been the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Babri riots of 1992 and 1993, and the Gujarat riots of 2002. Roughly the same numbers died while millions were traumatised. For the space of about three days mobs were permitted by a deliberately absent authority to kill Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in 1992 and 2002. There was no official explanation offered for the barbarism. How could there be, for those in power were either perpetrators or abettors of barbarism. In each case the unofficial explanation, advanced through the party network (party is an obvious pun), was "spontaneity" before which the administrative machinery was apparently helpless. This was an utter, malignant, unforgivable, immoral and inhuman lie. In all cases the government deliberately fed the violence for political profit for a carefully calibrated period after which the same government ordered the violence to stop. The blood tap was switched on. And the blood tap was switched off.

God knows there was provocation in 1984. What could be more provocative than the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi after the seesaw of violence through which Punjab had suffered in the previous years culminating with the assault on the Golden Temple, known as Operation Bluestar? This was further aggravated by images of Khalistani Sikhs abroad — note the adjective, it is Khalistani Sikhs, not all Sikhs — celebrating.

But a government is not a mob, unless it chooses to become one. I was in Calcutta in 1984. Jyoti Basu was chief minister. The anger in Calcutta was no less than in Delhi, and incidents began to occur. Jyoti Basu did not choose to win his next election by washing his hands in Sikh blood. Instead he ordered the Calcutta Police to do its first and foremost duty, and protect every citizen of this country, just as he gave security and safety to Muslims in 1992 after the destruction of the Babri mosque under the watchful eye of P.V. Narasimha Rao (the same watchful eye presided over the anti-Sikh riots in 1984 incidentally, this time as home minister). The Calcutta Police is made up of the same Indians who man the Delhi Police or the Gujarat Police. They are not particularly angelic. They obey orders.

Jyoti Basu’s moral courage also gave the lie to the dangerous cynicism that has become a core philosophy of the BJP and the Congress, which insists that electoral victory justifies every immoral decision. The Congress victory in 1984 and the Modi victory later became "self-evident" exoneration. But Basu and the Left Front have won every election in Bengal without pandering to the barbaric impulse.

The irony is that the Congress would have won in 1984 without presiding over the "spontaneous" reaction. I cannot be certain but I daresay that Modi would have won Gujarat also without Godhra because he is an efficient administrator with little interest in the parallel disease of Indian politics, corruption. But both were tempted by the easy option since their backbone had been washed away along with any moral fibre that they may have once possessed.

Anger can be spontaneous. Organised violence is stage-managed. The Congress and the BJP, along with the Shiv Sena in 1992 and 1993, perpetrated deliberate violence against minorities. The system buys time for political parties through commissions. It bought the Congress 21 years after 1984. But those who suffer the truth and those who know the truth do not need commissions. One of the most wrenching moments of my life was to watch a Sikh being burnt to death in front of a gurdwara in Delhi. It happened on the second day of the 1984 riots, and not on the first "spontaneous" day. The howling mobs on that day were mobilised by Congress leaders who saw victory and ministerships ahead and got them too. Gujarat’s pogrom against the Muslims was ordered by local BJP leaders and implemented by local thugs.

Dr Manmohan Singh was an economic bureaucrat in 1984, but he was finance minister in 1992, and therefore bears far greater responsibility for the events of 1992 and 1993. But at least he has apologised and done so from the office of the Prime Minister of India. An apology may not seem enough, and indeed it is not enough, given the horrors of the crime for which guilt is being accepted. An apology may mean nothing to the thousands whose world was ripped apart by lust of mob-evil. An apology does not exonerate the maniacs who fed on the blood of minorities. Such is the cynicism within the Congress that it actually thought it could get away without taking any action against the few that the Nanavati Commission thought fit to name. The Congress thought it could fudge its way with the help of a helpful report and Dr Manmohan Singh went along with his party instead of taking action at the beginning, instead of waiting for Parliament and media to place a mirror before his face. But an apology is something and something is better than nothing. An apology is the beginning of a process and not the end of the story. I do hope Dr Manmohan Singh remembers that.

Two decades have passed since 1984. A Sikh child born after those terrible riots has already voted once. More than a decade has gone by since 1992. Less than three years have passed since the Godhra riots. Dramatically differing time spans — with one thing in common. In each case the Congress or the BJP or the Shiv Sena won an immediate victory. And in each case the "victorious" party did not know that this was the last trumpet on the way to doom.

The Congress lost in 1989 and has lost its role as a national party. These days 145 seats in Parliament are advertised as a heroic victory. The Shiv Sena has lost its moorings, and is slipping into a coma. And within three years of Godhra the BJP, which thought that Gujarat was the base of a triumphant relaunch, has discovered that Gujarat was the basis of a defeat that has decomposed into an inner stench.

Time has its own law of justice. There is a moral law that operates in India’s democracy, a moral law whose judge and jury is the Indian voter and whose accused is the Indian politician. It is the same moral law that keeps the Left Front in power in Bengal and which will give it an overwhelming victory in the elections next year.

I believe that Dr Manmohan Singh apologised precisely because he is a deeply moral person. But this apology is only a first step. He should not confuse it with the horizon.

The Prude & Prudence

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar : The Prude & Prudence



How is a film song like Ishq ki gali vich no entry (No entry into the lane of love), currently being repeated ad nauseam by Indian music channels, conceived and written?

The first criterion is money. Amendment, the only criterion is money. The producer’s single motive is to cobble up a song that can become popular enough to carry the movie, and possibly make money on its own, for music can sometimes be a bigger earner than the film.

So the producer sits down with a versifier, if one can call the film-poets of the day even this, and opens the discussion with a three-letter word. It used to be a four-letter word in the old days, love; but now it’s a three-letter word, sex. Love in its infinite variety used to keep the whistlers in the theatre happy; sex in its finite variety keeps the punters going these days. So the producer lays down the first commandment. It has to deal with sex.

Then the supplementary: how far can one go? I don’t suppose they actually telephone Mahesh Bhatt to find out, but a pie chart, or a spreadsheet of statistics could be a useful management tool. X film had 12 kisses, six lip locks and two item numbers in which dozens of long-legged extras slipped down well-greased, aluminium, phallic poles. So that’s been done.

What do we do next? At which moment the versifier justifies his salary. "Don’t worry, boss. I’ll fill the song with salacious puns simple enough for Salman Khan and Bipasha Basu to understand. Every music channel will lap it up and every bar girl in Mumbai will make it her theme number. Just get me a tune."

"Tune? That’s no problem. There are hundreds lying in the same cupboard. We’ll mix bhangra beat in it, I think. That’s the rage now."

"Punjabi? I better put in a Punjabi word somewhere. Everyone sings only the opening line, who remembers a song after its 15 seconds of fame? Here you are. Ishq. Not true love, boss; true sex. Di galli. Love’s tunnel. Geddit geddit geddit?" Uproarious laughter all around. "Vich." That’s Punjabi taken care of. "No entry!" Everyone keels over laughing and a hit is born.

And when Salman Khan ends the song by pleading with Anil Kapoor to "Kar entry (Please enter)" the tunnel of Bipasha Basu’s love, he makes absolutely sure that even the dumbest idiot in the audience has got the point by acting out the process with a vigorous hand. You can’t blame the censor board. They thought this song was about traffic policemen.

To be prudent is not the same thing as being a prude. Television controls the mass idiom and this idiom, along with popular mythology, shapes mass culture. Let’s leave good and bad out of this. Yesterday always dismisses today as immoral, and today doubtless will have the same thing to say about tomorrow. The relevant point is that mass culture creates its own set of consequences, upon attitudes, thought processes, politics and the economy.

The print media still abjures the use of an unmentionable four-letter word, which is why it is not being used in this column. But its absence is a fiction. It has become part of everyday conversation, among all generations, and no one is particularly shocked. Certainly no one is ignorant of its meaning.

All mass communication has found space for high and low language. Theatre was the medium of Shakespeare’s age: he created the movies of his time. And so while Macbeth could fantasise or tremble in sonorous iambic pentameter, the jester would complain or joke in the earthy language of a mean pub. In journalism, till recently, it was quite common for the language of the editorial to be different from that of the news, not just in pace (which is necessary) but in attitude (which may not be). Bengali newspapers used what might be called the priest’s language for editorials and maidan-speak for news.

The most powerful, if not the most important, mass medium of the moment, television, speaks in just one language, with the bar being constantly lowered. Some of it must be driven by the democratic urge, the need to be explicable to all men. Most of it is driven by the compulsion for higher ratings, which we cannot condemn. But if as Marshall McLuhan noted, the medium is the message, then the message is bacchanalia. Salman Khan, Bipasha Basu and Anil Kapoor’s entry theme on MTV is followed immediately by an advertisement warning a middle class family about AIDS, and no one sees the irony.

This advertisement is part of a strong campaign being conducted by the government of India against AIDS. It is aimed at the middle class, the people next door who, 20 years ago, hinted to their kids, in the unlikely event of the subject coming up, that sex was something that Rekha did. The worried mother is thoroughly unglamorous, protective, loving and concerned about children who are just entering their teens. She recognises that the environment will have more impact upon her children than all her homilies, or religious morality, or indeed Dad’s threats if there is any Dad left who can successfully browbeat his children anymore. She knows that there is only one way to reach her children today, by appealing to their self-interest. Self-interest is the governing philosophy.

Equally important, the practical age of consent has collapsed in India. Or perhaps it would be more relevant to say that it has returned to the arranged-marriage era, when love was permissible at the age of 16 and girls were married by the time they were 18. You do recall Dev Anand’s classic film with Asha Parekh, Solva Saal. The sixteenth year. A girl was considered a woman at 16. In fact, the children in the anti-AIDS government advertisement are below 16, which is refreshingly honest. Sex is happening in some schools at less than that age; and awareness about its perils needs to be communicated early. (They are aware of its joys.) Government advertising tends to be as boring as government. It is unusual to see a professionally-crafted campaign that does not get tempted towards flashiness and misses the point.

If sex sells for the moviemakers, then it must also sell for the Tatas. The image of the giant House of Tata is synonymous with integrity, and may that never change. That integrity was not the least bit besmirched by the Titan ad for a new range of watches aimed at students. A teacher is taking a roll call, and calls out "Siddhartha". In response, a number of pretty girls, not together but sequentially, answer "Yes!", each "Yes" more orgasmic than the other until the crescendo reaches late-night movie pitch, and Mr Siddhartha hides his reddening face. All very contemporary and modern. Women are at least as aggressive as men in the battle of sexes, as long as the battle is treated as one between equals and there is no brutish physical aggression involved. There is absolutely no reason why they should not ogle as freely as men once did, or demand satisfaction, or shrug off the one-for-one approach of traditional true love.

Half a dozen girls were getting orgasmic about one Siddhartha after all. What upset me a great deal was not any collapse of morality, but the collapse of grammar. The sign-off line of the advertisement was "How many you have?" Excuse me? I know the line of watches is called Fastrack. You can fast-track a "t" from the word on an agency’s advice, but you can’t fast-track a verb out of a sentence. One expects certain standards from the Tata House. The protection of correct English is among them. Incidentally, this is not good economics either. How?

Television language slips easily into conversation. I can hear giggles across college canteens as a first year student gurgles to another, "How many you have?" Let that young man get a job as an outsourced voice, relapse into "How many you have?" and the company will lose the contract.

Every new layer in a language is welcome. Language has to be flexible, procreative to survive, and English has always lived in a virtuous cycle. But change needs the yeast of good sense. Don’t throw the prudent out with the prude.