Good Lord

From Byword- India Today (September 23)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the memory of millions

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 18)

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

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Bandwagon Politics

From Byword- India Today (September 16)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not very intelligent, Mr Chidambaram

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 11)

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

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For a Few Cusecs More

From Byword- India Today (September 9)

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

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

This makes even less sense.

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

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

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

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

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

Silence can stem a stain, but not erase it.

Be a sport, let go of sports

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (September 4)

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

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Day Of The Assassins

From Byword- India Today (September 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cancer at the heart of democracy

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 28)

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

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Alpha Male To Omega Limp

From Byword- India Today (August 26)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When power outstrips ability

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 21)

The eloquence of Jawaharlal Nehru at the approach of the midnight hour of 15 August 1947 was so magnificent that it has overwhelmed the contributions of other great Indians to that memorable evening, a landmark in the history of democracy and its institutions. Sixty-four years later, let us also hear the member from United Provinces, the philosopher-academician and later President, Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. He rejoiced in this wondrous achievement but cautioned about dangers ahead.

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Goodbye, Sir!

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 19)

Every childhood hero takes away a little bit of one's life along with him when he dies. Shammi Kapoor filled those wondrously difficult years when laughter and optimism were the only pathfinders from an unknown jute mill settlement in Bengal to an unwelcome Calcutta teeming with every variety of revolution. Even hope seems too ambitious in the second half of your teens. Shammi Kapoor was our torch, for he combined three essentials of teenage: he was mad; he got his girl on his own terms; and there was always a happy ending. He joined the dots between changing the world and dreaming of love.

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Now, freedom from some Indians please

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 14)

We lost the central hinge of the plot on 15 August 1947. We thought that raising the tricolour over Edwina and Lord Louis Mountbatten's palace marked the end of the freedom project launched by Mahatma Gandhi in 1919. It was only the beginning of a second and equally difficult freedom struggle. The first had been against the British. The second Indian freedom struggle would be against fellow Indians.

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Anything but London, Didi

From Byword- India Today (August 12)

Colour in Tuesday the 9th of August as a green-letter day in the history of Bengal (red-letter might be too provocative a suggestion). The first SMS joke about Mamata Banerjee was fired into cyberspace circulation that day. It is always reassuring to witness a return of laughter after some unremitting awe.

Perhaps laughter is too strong a word; the sms was more of a feather tickle along the ribs. It said: 'Mamata wants Kolkata to become like London. It seems her wish is coming true-London is becoming the Kolkata of old'. The wit was careful. Note the 'Kolkata of old'.

Hyperbole comes easily to politicians, even to the sincere, particularly at the start of their terms, when their world is young and every horizon is just a wish away. Dr Manmohan Singh promised to turn Mumbai into Shanghai, and Mamata Banerjee assured the descendants of the true capital of the British Raj that London was within their reach without the trouble of buying an airline ticket. Mumbai is still Mumbai, and a bit worse for the rancid wear and tear of seven Manmohan years. Every city is SUI generis, fruit and flower of its own socio-economic realities.

The Bengal CM's fantasy may have been doubly misplaced, however, for London, the great model of civic virtue and capitalist triumph, is straining at the seams across the BBC screen. The news has moved. Calm is news. The BBC headline, as I write, is that the capital is quiet after four nights of violence, which at best is pyrrhic relief since it is morning in London and the bonfires are lit in the evening. The Birmingham Test that began last Wednesday was sold out, but the stands had pockmarks of vacant space, which became larger after tea, for the centre of Birmingham had been alight for two nights.

British Prime Minister David Cameron's response was unadulterated muscle. He mobilised police, ordered water cannons to stand by and summoned his top security committee, called cobra. The acronym is conscious. cobra strikes fear; reality is less lethal: England does not have enough policemen to control an insurrection of the underprivileged. This was evident in the tv coverage of young people walking down besieged streets with cool confidence, as watching policemen wondered what to do. The most interesting image I saw was of a policeman hitting a black youth hard with his baton, and then retreating when the boy's girlfriend protested. The couple resumed their walk. They did not cower, or run. Voices from the establishment cried out for the Army: what next?

Britain's violence will not cease because of Cameron's bluster about "sickening scene" of "looting, vandalising, thieving, robbing" or promise to send these "criminal" to jail, as if British jails had the space. It will end when the poor have delivered their volatile message.

Law and order is a self-functioning mechanism. When people respect the law there is order. Mass upsurge can be dangerously destructive, or even life-threatening for a nation, but it is not crime in the conventional sense. Those children stealing trainers in Liverpool are the eye of a larger storm. They have a different definition of loot. They have watched bankers waste the nation's wealth, get bail with people's money and then re-reward themselves with egregious bonuses. If the rich can get away with loot, why not an extra pair of shoes or television set? The welfare of the stock exchange has primacy over the welfare of the people; profit is the one commandment left in the code. Cameron cuts social services with a hatchet while luxury goods are the only goods that fly off London shelves. Wealth has become dysfunctional. Loot and chaos is not the cure, but it is a symptom.

Dear Bengal Didi: May every dream of yours come true. But please don't make Calcutta into another London. Here's a thought. Why not make Calcutta tomorrow just what it was yesterday: with arms of steel and a heart of gold?

Note to Caesar: Mark this Antony

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (August 7)

Unqualified, unmitigated congratulations to All India Radio. The government's official broadcaster was not fooled by a mere communiqué from the All India Congress Committee, even when it was personally read out by the prevailing all-purpose party official, Janardan Dwivedi. Dwivedi put A.K. Antony at the top of the pecking order in the Group of Four authorised to oversee Congress affairs in the unfortunate absence of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, with Rahul Gandhi trailing at either number two or three, depending on whose version you consulted. [It is in tune with his character that the man at the bottom of the list, Ahmad Patel, is going to do most of the heavy lifting in this quartet.] AIR would have none of this nonsense. It insisted in all its bulletins on giving Rahul Gandhi top billing. AIR is right.

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It's all in the economy

From Byword- India Today (August 5)

The French politician who formally congratulated the mayor of Paris for losing the 2012 Olympics bid to London made perfect sense. The straitjacket of security, he explained, would drive summer tourists away from London towards grateful France. Paris would get the holiday business while London paid the 9 billion-pound bill for the effete glory of a forgettable media event. Win-win for the Eiffel Tower.

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, who has delivered all Olympics facilities within budget and a year ahead without being accused of anything more corrupt than an occasional ogle, must have sneered and chortled in response. But there is a major philosophical lesson to be learnt about fate. The lucky, win. The truly lucky know when to lose.

A very powerful Congress leader, his demeanour touched by a faraway wistful look, whispered a fantasy to me the other day: that the Congress had chosen to sit in Opposition after winning 206 seats in the summer of 2009. Some crumbly structure would perforce have made a grab for power, doubtless with former Congress allies like DMK queuing up for the telecom ministry as their price for support to a BJP prime minister. Within weeks the whole lot would have been compromised at bargain rates, since they would be trading in used goods. Suresh Kalmadi would have welcomed the return of this version of NDA, since he could have bought out their bigwigs with nothing more expensive than the occasional first class ticket to a sports jamboree. This government would have either sought to sabotage investigations into both the Commonwealth Games and 2G spectrum, or defended them on some silly technical ground, leaving the quiet but well-fed Congress on a high moral plateau. The rackety NDA government would have collapsed in derisive confusion; Congress would win a clear majority in the winter 2011 general elections and Rahul Gandhi would be sworn in as the undisputed prime minister.

The BJP should be feeling extraordinarily pleased that it lost the last general elections.

In 2004 the BJP was unprepared for defeat; but then no ruling party is ever ready for bad news. In 2009 the BJP was unprepared for victory, which is less forgivable. The fault lay not in any individual, but in a more basic flaw: it had not still fully absorbed the extent to which the Indian voter had shifted from an emotional agenda to an economic ambition. In 2009 some of the more media-magnetic BJP campaigners were still behaving as if they were on the sets of a 1950s Bollywood historical melodrama. That age had, paradoxically, exhausted itself with the culmination of the Ram temple movement; once the mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed, it took its emotions along with it. The BJP lost the Assembly elections of 1993 in the very heartland that had sustained its most powerful emotional appeal; Digvijaya Singh became chief minister of Madhya Pradesh that year.

Two general election defeats have created a double benefit for the BJP. The voter is ready to empathise again, feeling that enough punishment has been meted out. And the party understands that serious correctives are essential if the show is to go on. The first is happening. There is a visible rise in the BJP vote across the north. The party could shock its enemies and surprise its friends in the next Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. It has stemmed the bleed in Madhya Pradesh and returned to form in Rajasthan, while remaining steadily ahead in Gujarat. The correctives are still a work in progress. Nitin Gadkari's principal task over the next year will be to put together a viable economic policy for the party which the voter can assess, measure and then identify with.

Why has the Congress slipped? Corruption is the easy answer, but not a complete one. The voter is angry about the theft of public money, of course. But he is truly livid at the fact that corruption has derailed economic growth. The first is sufficient cause for the visible and escalating concern that we see around us; the second can lay the seeds for insurrection. The Indian industrialist is talking through his bank account, investing abroad rather than at home. The worker is seeing the gains for which he abandoned the culture of strikes, being frittered away. There is confusion in villages as the landowner demands a share in that fixed lottery called land prices.

Protest is a legitimate part of any Opposition's duty, but that alone cannot convert the BJP into a ruling party. It has to rise above protest and become an alternative; from a trade union into the management structure that the shareholders of democracy can hire when the present management is voted out.

It tells us something when the language of business becomes perfectly applicable to the business of contemporary politics.

The Old Man And The Sleaze

From Byword – India Today (August 1)

Although they have been, historically, loath to admit it, journalists are human. They err. But if error was their only offence, there would be no story. The true crimes of yellow journalism are bias, gossip and bribes. There is a class difference between bias, the privilege of owners and editors, and gossip, the diet of downmarket news rooms. But cash is classless.

Gossip is more honest than bias; there may be more chicanery but there is less deceit. Gossip rarely pretends to be what it is not; it has a breathless, giveaway style, heavily dependent on suggestion and suspicion. Gutter press lords float bias on wafts of pseudo-ideology. Bias is a culture, a genetic strain that runs through the DNA of a publication. Gossip is an industry, with reporters as its working class. Every level of the factory knows the algebra: gossip equals sensation, sensation equals sales, sales equal advertising, advertising equals pay-cheques. This is the confident mathematics of sensationalism. Sex, the most familiar ingredient of sensation, is a comparatively innocent indulgence: the merely salacious can never compete in impact and intensity with a high-ticket mobilisation of reader sentiment like fear, and its induced consequence, revulsion or hatred.

An authentic predator-genius of the media business like Rupert Murdoch derives his power from three generators. First is the vaulting ambition of a ruthless conqueror. This requires genius, of course; you cannot be Chengiz Khan or Taimur without extraordinary resources of will, ability and the unstoppable trajectory of a gambler whose adrenalin rises in proportion to the stake. You cannot run out of kingdoms to subjugate. Success is the only law. The only moral is in the marketplace: what sells must be good, because there is a buyer. Failure is evil. Readers get what they deserve, and deserve what they get. There is nothing sentimental about content: Those who want High Church get the Wall Street Journal; voyeurs are offered News of the World.

The voyeur is obviously complicit: sleaze is a shared pleasure. There is no Murdoch without the reader, and indeed there is no reader without a Murdoch. They are partners who need each other. The journalist, whether an editor like Andy Coulson who dines with Prime Ministers, or the celeb-hunter running with the pack, is a necessary hyphen, driven by the high cash rewards for prurience. The photographer who snaps topless models for a living is actually quite jaded. It is the reader who ogles.

Stories are cooked up by cynics who have lost any early appetite for good taste. The front page is driven by hysteria, fed by ravenous competition. Since money is the only value in this world, no one even wonders if there is anything wrong with hacking into the mobile phone of a murdered child, Milly Dowler, just 13 when she was killed in 2002.

The third side of a Murdoch power triangle is, well, power. Murdoch's tabloids have many times more readers than a political party has members. Voila: who sets the agenda for elections? Murdoch traded his readership for personal power. Politicians obeyed, or else. British politicians used to understand the dangers of pen-pushers without accountability. In the early days of print media, the press was barred from the British Parliament. Publishing reports of a debate was considered "high indignity" and "notorious breach of privilege".

Modern politicians find it easier to sup with Murdoch. The relationship is cultivated with great sophistication, of course, as behoves a ruling class with generations of pedigree. British Prime Minister David Cameron's personal circle of close friends, now dubbed the North Oxford Set, included Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of a Murdoch company before she was arrested; her husband Charlie Brooks; Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert's daughter, and her husband Matthew Freud, a PR smoothie; and James Murdoch, Rupert's son. His close adviser was Andy Coulson, who led the team as editor when Milly Dowler's phone was 'pinged' [the technical term used by the police for monitoring a mobile phone]. The Set sipped fine wine from cut glass in the shires, and elegant conversation doubtless improved the taste of dinner cooked in Cameron's million-pound kitchen. How could we ever have guessed that at the heart of this bonhomie was the multi-dimensional fiscal political profit from sleaze?

Paradise is lost when your moral compass disappears. Murdoch knew he was never in any danger from prime ministers or their police, who gratuitously looked away from the evidence for nearly a decade. But he made the fatal mistake of believing that his readers were as amoral as he was. Readers went along with titillation; but they drew the line at mercenary exploitation of a child's corpse. The algebra had a backlash: a Murdoch without readers is a useless Murdoch. Politicians have no use for the useless. There is no one more lonely than a prostrate god with feet of clay.

The power of the small story

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (July 31)

The big picture generates understandable excitement. Sholay will always get more hype than an "art movie", as state-funded cinema used to be called in the days when the state still had the will to hand out dollops to chaps wearing pyjamas and beards. But there is as much to be learnt from the intricacies of the small picture. The most famous portrait ever painted, Mona Lisa, was done on a small canvas.

Politics may be more reasonably compared to artifice rather than art, but the analogy holds.

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Revenge of the scapegoat

From Byword – India Today (August 8)

The slings and arrows of fortune, or more accurately misfortune, are a periodic affliction of high office. Serious politicians, however, are not flippant about fate. They do not attribute to divinity what can be measurably sourced to humanity.

Subconsciously, we seek comfort in hard times from the mysterious logic of destiny, which is one explanation for the deep Indian devotion to astrology. But while Delhi's power-mongers definitely keep one eye on the stars, and fill their fingers with protective rings, they keep the second equally firmly planted on their colleagues. When a poisoned arrow strikes, they check out the bungalow next door. That is why the classic Delhi shield is not held in front of the body. It is strapped to the back.

A. Raja and Kanimozhi, the two DMK leaders who have mutated from pillars of the regime in 2009 to caterpillars in the shrubbery by 2011, have had enough time in Tihar to ponder over the source and trajectory of the arrows that hit them in the spine. Their legal response is constructed around a simple question with complicated answers: how does a scapegoat escape the axe?

Conventional escape routes are not available. The DMK is fractured in Chennai and hospitalised in Delhi. Their leader M. Karunanidhi is in anguish, but too weak to alchemise his pain into politics. He does not have enough MPs to threaten the survival of the Manmohan Singh-Sonia Gandhi government, a fact that is being fully exploited by the principal beneficiary of the arrangement, Congress. Nothing is more self-destructive in politics than an empty threat.

Raja has in truth only one option. He cannot trouble the government's majority, but he can leave its leaders deeply troubled. That is precisely what he has set out to do.

Such a calibrated response has collateral advantages. The law of intended consequences appeals to other allies within the ruling coalition, which must factor in the possibility that the Congress has reserved a place for its high-fliers in the Scapegoats Corner of Tihar Jail. Sharad Pawar, who thinks through every move with a chess grandmaster's precision, took an unusually public risk when he sent one of his knights, D.P. Tripathi, to say hello to Shahid Balwa in an open courtroom. It was not an overdue courtesy call on an old pal. There was a message written in simple language, without any code. This saga has many more chapters to go, studded with enough twists and turns to make it an aerobic exercise of yogic proportions.

If attack is the best form of defence then counterattack is the most effective form of offense. If a scapegoat can demonstrate that he was not the only head at the head table then he has opened up numerous channels to safety. He will not sink alone but take the boat with him.

Raja has always looked, from his body language, more confident than his circumstances seemed to warrant. Now we know why. He kept the evidence of all those discussions at the high tables of governance. This, by the way, is now de rigeur with Cabinet ministers, from all parties-a classic symptom of unstable, uncertain times. The most effective weapon in the political arsenal is now a photocopier. Everyone keeps true copies of secret files. The president should order the deletion of the secrecy clause when she administers the oath of office.

The Government went for Raja's throat; he has gone for their jugular. Honours even. Or perhaps tilted a bit in Raja's favour. He has nothing more to lose. Mrs Sonia Gandhi, Dr Singh and P. Chidambaram have a government to lose. If Raja has his way, the prime minister and the home minister will be grilled in the witness box, with the nation's chief law officer in the vicinity. That will be a sight for television crews waiting outside the courtroom.

Raja's objective is transparent. He cannot do much about the survival of the upa Government. But he can do a bit about the survival of the government's credibility.

Democracy is much more than a game of numbers. It is a curious fact that Dr Singh was a far more assertive prime minister when his numbers were under continual challenge during his first term. He has been ambushed after he led the Congress to 206 seats in the Lok Sabha. The damage has been done by his friends, while his foes have watched in disbelief.

In any case, 206 is a false number: far below the 272 needed for single-party rule, and just enough to induce that deathly viral known as complacency. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had 271 MPs on his side when he lost the vote in the Lok Sabha, and he was seasoned enough to know that Parliament is not a gambling den.

If you live only by numbers, one day your number will be up.

Between a yawn and a yelp

From Byword – India Today (July 25)

It's becoming a habit. Whenever Congress gets a headache it orders a foot massage. Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi recognised the size of their problem, which is why they met four times, one-to-one, in their attempt to stabilise a government that had lost shape and begun to wobble. They did not need to save the Government, since they have not lost it, yet. UPA 2 can splutter along on the usual paradox: the bigger the crisis, the closer partners cling together, since elections can only bring bad news. What Government has lost is the confidence of the people. The reshuffle was an opportunity for radical renewal of an administration immobilised by corrupt politicians, comatose administration, an angry Supreme Court, and citizens outraged by venality and inflation. All that Mrs Gandhi and Dr Singh managed was surface tinkering that induced a yawn from a handful of winners, a yelp from a basketload of losers, and puns by the tonne in newspaper headlines which opted for wit in the absence of substance.

The smiles were few, silent and strained; the yelp was picked up by media nationwide. It is not, as the prime minister correctly noted, terribly significant that Gurudas Kamat and Srikant Jena were upset at being denied a place in Cabinet. Parliament is packed with MPs who believe that they should be in Cabinet, and Cabinet teems with ministers who think they should be prime minister. The story is that their behaviour is part of a growing pattern of indiscipline, which is slowly disintegrating into disarray.

Mukul Roy, the little-known minister of state for railways, had the audacity to taunt the PM when told to visit the site of a railway accident at Fatehpur. Instead of being dropped, he was promoted to independent charge of shipping. If Roy had insulted his party leader Mamata Banerjee, he would have been out of a job. Ergo: he knows whom to respect. Veerappa Moily blithely attributed his demotion from law to corporate affairs to "vested interests", implying that the PM is beholden to such interests. Every such remark whittles away the authority of a Prime Minister. A weak government begins to melt from the head, or at least the neck.

Immutable law of politics: Never shut a door that can be left ajar. The prime minister did himself no favours when he asserted that this would be the last reshuffle before general elections in 2014. I have never been able to fully understand why 'gruntled' is not the opposite of 'disgruntled', but mysteries of the English language include dysfunctional logic. However, for every gruntled person in Delhi there are a hundred who are disgruntled. Their self-respect survives in hope. They have no other answer to the question gnawing at their hearts when it is not sprawled over conversation: why have you not become a minister? The last alibi is gone. There is no next reshuffle. Their only option now is transference of hope, to the next prime minister. Since every Congressman knows his name, all future applications will be addressed to Rahul Gandhi.

Such pinpoint confidence certainly worked for the backward caste leader from Uttar Pradesh, who defected from Mulayam Singh Yadav's party to Congress, Beni Prasad Verma. He is our glistening new Cabinet minister for steel. This is not the messiah Indian industry was waiting for; this is not the economic brain who will bring inflation under control. Verma's star has evolved into a meteor through collateral benefit; Rahul Gandhi believes that this will bring him additional votes in the next UP Assembly elections.

All politics is sold as welfare of the people; the truth of democracy is that politics impels Cabinet promotion more easily than ideas or competence. The prime minister probably had a far more difficult time in making the environment ministry more environment friendly to investment, and law ministry more conversant with law than Rahul Gandhi had in putting some steel into his UP gambit. This is the conundrum that has harried Dr Singh. The time left to solve the riddle is ebbing, even as delay turns a headache into migraine.

Dream come true, or perhaps not

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (July 24)

The little patch of London I encounter is watching cricket and talking Rupert Murdoch. The colour of language matches the English sky; grey, rather than black and white. Media is not devil-black, and cricket is not virgin-white.

Heaven, for a cricket-fantasist like me, is a spectator seat in the committee room at Lord's on the opening day of the centenary Test between India and England. [A cricket-fantasist is someone who believes he should be captain of India because he scored 32 in a crucial school match.] The gentle murmur of nostalgia between a galaxy of greats is punctuated by acute observation on the prospects of the day's play ahead. Tea and coffee are the mildest libations available: opening time is 11 a.m. and I may have added my tiny bit to the cultural history of Lord's with a recipe called Coffee Mary.

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The Wheel of God

From Byword - India Today (July 18)

Arun Shourie's new book, Does He Know a Mother's Heart? How Suffering Refutes Religions, offers a choice. You can pretend it does not exist, or you can suffer. We are cowards before destiny, particularly those fortunate enough to waft on normalcy; we shroud sensibility with the alibi of indifference. Shourie rips apart this security blanket of feigned ignorance with an existentialist question: Who is the God of injustice? Who creates the gene that goes awry and twists an innocent life into lifelong tragedy? Who ravages earth with the mass annihilation of an earthquake or tsunami? Death is the law of life; but what is the logic of sudden death, or lingering misery that consumes existence, drip by slow drip, with wanton, cruel, endless pain?

Shourie, trying to keep his own torment aside, sets his laser-pen through the prism of his wife Anita's anguish. Her beauty is a marginal fact: this book is, partly, a narrative of her character, courage, and above all her love, all of which have been tormented by a feckless fate. They have a spastic son, Adit, who is now 35, but lives outside time. The bond between parents and child is a boundless, almost mystic, love; and if its price is unbearable for an outsider, how benumbed must be the hearts of Arun, Anita and Adit? Adit's limbs are helpless; his heart is full, and fully conscious. So answer the rage of Shourie if you have the audacity to do so: "He (Adit) loves everyone. Everyone in the family loves him. His maternal grandmother, Malti Shukla, was his life. He is ours. And...God just does not stop pounding this helpless, defenceless child. And then Anita goes down with Parkinson's.

Every faith knows that it must offer some rationale for the illogic that sways this life from the rationale we have absorbed, internalised since creation. Christianity believes that this world is a consequence of crime and punishment. Adam and Eve disobeyed the Almighty, lost Paradise and nurtured this capricious world. But who is responsible for punishment without crime? Adam condemned us all with his fatal step from original innocence to original sin. But has divinity abandoned this logic for human existence? Why are the sinful blessed with laughter? When has the threat of hell deterred Adam's child from evil? Which doctrine explains a hell on earth for the innocent?

Islam has the promise of justice in eternity, when Allah shall resolve the inequities of this arbitrary span from birth to death. Only the atheist believes in death; for a Muslim death is a pause in the continuity of life. The Quranic funeral verse is simple: from Allah we come, to Allah we go. But is there a radical soul who, on the day of judgment, will perhaps ask a question or two himself? The priest told him to fear God, the sufi asked him to embrace divinity: what should a spastic do?

Hindu philosophy is more nuanced. It takes the cyclical view of pain, and offers purification as an answer. Even the villain has a soul seeking release from villainy. When Krishna destroys the mischievous Shishupala by cleaving him from head to foot with a flaming discus, Shishupala's soul flings itself at the feet of Krishna "for even the enemies of the Lord go to salvation by thinking wholly upon him".

The human answer to this conundrum is trapped in contradiction. Shourie recalls Mahatma Gandhi's indictment of the victim after the Bihar earthquake of 1934, which left 30-foot chasms broad enough for four elephants to walk through. D.G. Tendulkar, Gandhi's biographer, quotes the Mahatma on Bihar: "I share the belief with the whole world-civilised and uncivilised-that calamities... come to mankind as chastisement for their sins...I regard untouchability as such a grave sin as to warrant divine chastisement" (Harijan, February 2, 1934). But the quake had no caste system. It did not spare Dalits.

Shourie's God is a croupier at the roulette wheel, indifferent to those whose number spells misfortune.

The Criminal and the Callous

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (July 17)

There is no category of criminals as brutish and barbaric as terrorists. The depravity of their intention is matched only by the perversity of their actions. Their target is the innocent citizen, the non-partisan, the individual, the nameless child who might have been drawn to death by the accident of circumstance, or the misfortune of destiny. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai on 13 July were cowards, hiding maliciously behind anonymity. Since we live in an age increasingly stripped of values, whether in war, peace or the indeterminate grey in between, a brave city like Mumbai has adjusted to the fact that terrorism is part of the price of urban density. But Mumbai will not reconcile itself to either the inefficiency or the alibi that politicians trot out to protect themselves from the whiplash of accountability.

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The high price of being a friend

From BYLINE- Sunday Guardian (July 10)

In a curious surge of counterintuitive energy, the Congress has in the last two years managed to revive the BJP and either destroy or alienate everyone who helped it come to power in 2004 and 2009. The principal party pillars holding up UPA 1 were DMK and Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD, who between them gave the alliance nearly 60 seats. Both are shattered. Congress can, and does, argue that both DMK and RJD are paying for their own sins, both venal and political. But such logic has only surface appeal. Their venality did not prevent Congress from taking their support when it was needed for a majority in the Lok Sabha. Both allies have been used and then left to twist in the wind when the weather changed.

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PMs Don't Dine on Humble Pie

PMs Don't Dine on Humble Pie
'Manmohan needs to assert his legitimate authority for better governance'
by M J Akbar
In Byword - India Today
July 11, 2011

Manmohan Singh's dilemma is unenviable. He still cannot make up his mind whether he has been elected by the people of India or selected by Sonia Gandhi. 'Both' is a compromise that survives in calm waters but comes apart at the first hint of turbulence.

Sonia Gandhi's problem is a complication of adversity: you can tell a Salvation Army that there is no Army, but you can't suggest that there is no Salvation. The Congress face of salvation is Rahul Gandhi, not Manmohan, which creates a disconnect between government and party. A senior party office-bearer like Digvijaya Singh, therefore, has no qualms about undermining Manmohan at will. Would Digvijaya Singh dare criticise Rahul Gandhi, even after the calamity of the Bihar campaign or the less than salutary results in Tamil Nadu? No. He knows where the source of bread and butter in Congress is. They are the reward of those who constantly demand that Rahul Gandhi replace Manmohan forthwith. The notional prime minister has more authority in Congress than the national prime minister.

A famous tycoon who built an empire out of a dream used to say that it was always possible to lose your way if a car had one driver; but a crash was absolutely certain if it had two. The UPA Government has three drivers, all in the front seat. Manmohan has been handed the steering wheel without being given the keys to the car. If nothing moves, he gets the blame. When he does try and move, driver and navigator often work at cross purposes. Sonia Gandhi's agenda is fixated on populist measures that she believes will make Rahul Gandhi electable; Manmohan is constrained by the limitations of fiscal responsibility. Almost any issue, including the corrosive management, or mismanagement, of corruption, exposes internal contradictions.

Manmohan became prime minister in 2004 but had to share power with a higher authority. After 2007, he has been denied even the privileges of his office. He has been shunted to a waiting room, awaiting the day Rahul Gandhi feels sufficiently stirred to do Indians the favour of becoming their prime minister. But the nation has no pity to waste on a prime minister who does not assert his legitimate authority. Every waiting room has a door. You can always exit through the door that brought you in.

Instead of moving, either to assert control, or to walk out, Manmohan seems frozen. The freeze included his vocal chords, because candour could easily have become incandescent in an environment where his party leaders are allowed to taunt him publicly. Manmohan is a humble man, but effective prime ministers do not dine on humble pie. He has been persuaded at long last to loosen his chords, and we learn that he will take tea with media "regularly", perhaps even once a week. It is always better to chat with the messenger than shoot him, but the point surely is whether there is any resolution for the contradictions that have trapped governance.

How long can a government last without governance? The technical answer is known. A majority in Parliament is often described as "brute" because it can become impervious to popular sentiment. If the Congress believes that it can be both government and Opposition, soaking up the advantages of power while stoking popular sentiment against a scapegoat prime minister, then it will pay a heavy price in the next elections. Duplicity does not work.

Manmohan is a reticent man, whose feelings are rarely visible. But he is unable to hide his discomfort any longer. He has never laughed in public, even in happier times, but he did flash the occasional smile, which sort of burst through his beard, but gently. He almost beamed after victory on the nuclear bill, which set the mood for re-election in 2009. Within two years of his finest moment, he has lost his smile. He should either get it back, or go home.