Calculator vs Calendar

Calculator vs Calendar
M.J. Akbar

Mrs Sonia Gandhi would not be out in this heat, which also means that it is more difficult to obtain a crowd, without an agenda and almost certainly a calendar. Do they indicate a general election in November? India is a large country, and the sooner you begin the better. You could argue that she is on the road, using her credibility to explain her government's policies.

Has Mrs Sonia Gandhi begun the Congress campaign for the next general election? June has already witnessed a trip to Mizoram after a decade and a half; later in the month, she will be in Aurangabad on a schedule that has taken the Maharashtra Congress a bit by surprise. The Northeast and Maharashtra are regions where support for her party has softened, but, according to her strategists, not beyond recovery. If the Congress cannot retain these seats, it is going to be in boiling hot water.

The theme of her speech is also a marker for the party's election campaign. It will flog the Indo-US nuclear deal as the panacea for all ills, hoping to solve two problems with one promise. The logic runs thus: the deal will make us independent of that evil thing called oil, which has created this vile inflation. Not our fault, brothers and sisters: it's either OPEC or the Marxists, take your pick. By placing it on the election agenda, Mrs Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will also hope to blunt post-election objections by the Left, arguing that the deal has been purified by electoral holy water. It is not an argument that will change the Left, but the Congress believes that the Left will be a much-chastened force, depleted by as many as 20 MPs from its current strength, while the Congress will return with its numbers more or less intact. If its current crop of allies withers away, it will use the leeway of time offered by a generous President of India to woo replacements from the Third Front or even the NDA ensemble. To be more specific, Mulayam Singh Yadav and his MPs will be invited to join the government the next time, instead of doing duty for five years near the door, waiting for crumbs to descend from the Prime Minister's high table. If Lalu Yadav collapses, intermediaries will rush to Nitish Kumar and attempt to wean him away from the BJP; and Naveen Patnaik of Orissa will always be welcome in the name of secularism. In any case, the Congress will not be vulnerable to Marxist "blackmail".

The only thorn amidst the roses of such a scenario is that it might be one year too late. Such an election outcome would have been far more likely if the Congress had gone to the polls last August, when the Left took a final decision to stop the Indo-US nuclear deal. The immediate Congress response was aggressive. The Prime Minister dared the Left to do its worst, and Mrs Gandhi went on the offensive during a speech in Haryana.

But it was a very different world in August 2006. The BJP was still in utter disarray. The Gujarat elections had not taken place, so the Congress had not been routed there: the BJP's self-confidence only began to return with that result. The nuclear debate still evoked a frisson of excitement from the urban Indian middle-class, which has convinced itself that America adds a Midas' touch to their present and future [the Greenback Dollar may be undergoing palpitations currently, but no Midas was ever more attractive than the Almighty Green Card]. That frisson has flattened. The middle class, whose interest had peaked with the media campaign of last year, has a question now: if the deal was genuinely crucial to the national interest, why didn't the Congress defy the Marxists and go ahead? Was survival in power for a few months more important for the Congress than the national interest?

For more than one reason, an election last autumn would have seen a return of the Congress-led coalition to Delhi. But that moment was lost, apparently because Congress' allies were not ready to forsake the comforts of office for 18 months in pursuit of that roulette game called elections. Lalu Yadav and Sharad Pawar went public with their objections; and the DMK murmured its unhappiness in the typical half-bitten vowels that are its political trademark.

Nine months later, the environment is besieged by concerns that are far more potentially fatal to a ruling coalition. Inflation and economic mismanagement have eroded its support. No one yet knows who will win the next general elections, but there is growing belief about who will lose it. Last August, a Sheila Dikshit would have ensured a Congress victory in most of the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi. This year the Delhi voter, still enamoured of Mrs Dikshit, is wondering if there is any way by which it can retain her but demolish the Congress. [There isn't. You either get both or neither. ]

When the body weakens it attracts the most curious ailments. If Mrs Sonia Gandhi goes to Vidarbha in Maharashtra, another traditional Congress seat-catchment area, and picks up a few sounds from the ground, she will hear a question from the fertiliser-and-hope-starved farmer. He watches television. He knows about the 20-20 cricket tournament organised by Sharad Pawar. He now knows that the state government, doubtless under pressure from the patron, waived away the entertainment tax on stadium tickets, losing more than a hundred crores with just this one decision. The farmer is asking why this money could not have been collected and used to alleviate the difficult conditions he faces.

Mrs Sonia Gandhi would not be out in this heat, which also means that it is more difficult to obtain a crowd, without an agenda and almost certainly a calendar. Do they indicate a general election in November? India is a large country, and the sooner you begin the better. You could argue that she is on the road, using her credibility to explain her government's policies. But why waste credibility on a practice match, rather than the real tournament? The most reasonable assessment, in the absence of any confirmation, is that Mrs Gandhi's tours are a precaution against the sudden necessity of going to polls before winter, along with elections to five states that have to be held by then.

The cynical school of Congress thought, always a large and ever-increasing academy, believes that a November election would serve no purpose other than slicing three months of power, with its attendant lucrative benefits. But each month of delay will mean a few seats less for the Congress, not more. The Congress party is staring obsessively at a calendar just now. Someone should also bring out a calculator.

The Secret Diaries of Manmohan, Advani

The Secret Diaries of Manmohan, Advani

- By M.J. Akbar

COVERT (1-15TH JUNE 2008)

How could my fellow-traveller Buddhadeb Bhattacharya call me the worst Prime Minister India has had? That stung. I rather like Buddha. I know his type, a sheep dressed in wolf’s clothing. I’ve done my bit of lip-service to socialism. What option did one have if you wanted some trajectory up the old Congress bureaucracy greasy pole? Indira Gandhi would spread nonalignment at breakfast and turn pink with the salad over lunch: poor dear, no one told her that nationalization and nationalism are not quite the same thing.

Rajiv was different. His instinct told him that this socialist claptrap might be good for the ballot box but would not do for the economy, dear boy. But Bofors blew him away before he could merge his brains to his instinct. However, all this jargon did help when Chandra Shekhar – I wish he had stopped wiping tears out of the eyes of the poor in every speech – became Prime Minister. He kept me in play with probably the last decision of his brief and unlamented term, when he put me at the head of University Grants Commission. That may not sound a big deal when you are Prime Minister, but it is one huge blessing when you are a retired babu in Delhi.

Like a good bureaucrat, I have always believed in what the boss believes in. What a miracle, then, was 1991, the Year of the Great Counter Reformation: I finally got a boss who was persuaded to believe in what I believe in. Narasimha Rao had an intellect but no beliefs. That was helpful. When the call came he somersaulted right into the economic reform box.

I thought Buddha was one of us: spouting socialism as long as the feed came from there, and switching instantly to my old bank’s free-market-leave-the-poor-with-a-trickle thesis the moment we were sworn in. Ah, the pleasures of that great ebb and flow of intellectual dialogue in the World Bank canteen! I didn’t expect Buddha to have as much faith in America as I did, but then he wasn’t lucky enough to land a job at the World Bank. Studied Bengali at Presidency College, I gather. Pity he couldn’t get into Economics. We would have pulled him up to Delhi School of Economics, saved him from the Commies and made him leader of the Congress in Bengal by now. Buddha telephoned to apologise of course, but the explanation was thin: election rhetoric. Bah! I am an honest man. Everyone knows that. How can I help it if everyone in my Cabinet makes money? Why should I be called the worst Prime Minister?

I gave my country the Indo-US nuclear deal virtually single-handedly; even George was saying so. Well, not single-handedly; that is immodest. There were a few others, I must admit it. But who can deny that I brought my nation to the brink of an understanding with the United States that could make India America’s most important ally in Afro-Asia after Israel! We made history, and history will remember its maker! Those who oppose the deal are relics of a dead past! The Soviet Union is long dead, Comrades! I never criticized Buddha for being wrong on the nuclear deal; I could appreciate that he had to toe the party line. Why did he get personal with me just because the Congress has lost every election under my watch?

What I can’t understand is why the geeks of Bangalore never voted for the Congress after all I did for them. I don’t get it. The Indo-US deal is for their India! I’ve sacrificed my future for their future! And yet they’ve shifted to the awful BJP, which didn’t have the decency to support a deal that they would have happily done themselves. I only sold the right to test – which fool wants another bomb, in any case; the BJP would have sold the whole store! Politics is so unfair…

Young Prithviraj Chauhan was wrong when he said we lost Karnataka because Deve Gowda split the secular vote. Judging by the speed with which Gowda’s secular vote rushed towards the BJP rather than towards us, we are lucky Gowda held on to 16%. If he had sunk further, the margin between the BJP and us would have been greater.

I can’t understand why chaps keep talking of inflation as the reason for the Congress slump. My economic policies are beyond reproof. What have prices got to do with defeat? Millions of honest Kannadigas voted for Congress. Don’t you think their wives go to the market? If prices did not affect them, why should they affect anyone else? I can’t stop the price of oil from rising, can I – and when I offer peaceful nuclear energy in 2020 no one wants it! I could have been a Gulliver during these four years but little men from Lilliput have tied me up, made me immobile.
Let us face it, Dear Diary: this is a moment of introspection. I must be honest in my analysis, for I am an honest person. I was reading a Reuters report on the election results; it is a Western news agency, so it was unbiased. Reuters described the results as “another blow for the Centre-Left Congress party”.

That’s it. There lies the problem. The branding is wrong. Congress is now off-message. Bangalore doesn’t want a Congress that veers between Centre and Left. It wants one that veers between Centre and Right. We should rebrand the Congress as Right-Centre, because we are both Right and Centre. Must discuss it with the media boys in the office tomorrow, if I can find one who isn’t looking for another job.

Goodnight, Diary.

Extract from the Secret Diary of Lal Krishna Advani: It’s nightmare time again. I won’t be able to sleep. This is precisely what happened four years ago. We swept the Assembly polls, stepped out with confident stride, brought the general elections forward and fell into a big hole from which we still cannot quite get out. If I had to offer one explanation for that catastrophe, it was the smug look on the faces of all our chaps on television. That cost us the general election. I can see that same glimmer back on some BJP faces on television sets. My sweat is cold already: remember all those who predicted that the BJP would get 300 seats…

It doesn’t bother me a jot when television channels are critical of the BJP. That is probably advantageous. Who cares if their opinion polls give Congress twice the seats it eventually gets. It makes no difference to the voter. The BJP cannot be defeated by its foes. But God save the BJP from its friends!

Is there no one who will ban television news channels till the next general elections are over?

From Promise to Compromise

Byline By M.J.Akbar : From Promise to Compromise

A government slips from "midterm" to "end-term" condition not when it has lost its majority, but when it has lost its ability to govern. Only a confident government goes for a midterm poll because it believes it will be re-elected; an "end-term" election takes place under an anxious one.

Language facilitates communication; but becomes a trap when misused. The misuse may not be deliberate, merely complacent. But a complacent phrase can enter the discourse, shape decision or indecision and leave a sharp, self-inflicted wound.

"Midterm election" is a case in point. One is not being pedantic; a midterm election does not have to be precisely in the middle of a government's term. But there is a political definition of "midterm" that separates it clearly from the "end-term" phase of a government's life.
In the British-Indian system of a parliamentary democracy, a "midterm" election means any election called prematurely, either because the government feels it is advantageous to go back to the people, or because it no longer has the majority to survive, and Parliament cannot offer an alternative ruling formation.

A government slips from "midterm" to "end-term" condition not when it has lost its majority, but when it has lost its ability to govern. Only a confident government goes for a midterm poll because it believes it will be re-elected; an "end-term" election takes place under an anxious one. Tony Blair, the most successful Labour Prime Minister in history, won three elections by going to the polls early. He had not lost his majority; he chose an earlier date because he considered it politically propitious, and it was the point at which he could maximise the extent of his victory.

His successor, Gordon Brown, took office a year ago and entered his "end-term" phase within four months, when he somersaulted out of an implicit promise to call an early election. He may retain the confidence of Parliament, but he lost the confidence of the country. Since then he has been Dead Man Walking. If Labour does not change him he will take Labour to the grave: where else would you expect a Dead Man to go?

A calendar has something, but not a whole lot, to do with a government's credibility. Governments do not explode suddenly, in a blaze of fireworks. The more objective metaphor is colder. Governments melt like icebergs, piece by piece, before sinking into oblivion. The moment this process accelerates, the "end-term" begins.

The decisive moment for the Manmohan Singh government came last August, when it seemed, for about a week, ready to challenge his coalition in pursuit of a policy which the Prime Minister believed was in the national interest: the Indo-US nuclear deal. The force and conviction with which the Prime Minister hyped up the deal was sufficient to convince many in-between that there must be something in what he said. The Prime Minister was, not so subtly, transferring his personal credibility to the deal, and many were ready to buy this transfer. But when the same Prime Minister walked away from the nuclear deal in order to save his government, his personal credibility took a beating. He became just another politician who was ready to compromise the national interest in order to remain in power. If the deal was truly so vital to India's future, then it was more important than the few remaining months of his government. And if it was less important than his government, then it was not so vital after all.

After that, the Communists began to wag the dog, creating just enough distance from the alliance they had delivered, baby-sat and nurtured. Last August, the Congress could have signed the deal and increased its seats in a subsequent election. After Gujarat, its tide began to ebb. In August 2007 the Gujarat elections had not taken place. The BJP was still a defeated party. Narendra Modi not only saved his party; he also shifted the key debate to governance. His victory was on the single issue of good governance. And just at that point, the Manmohan Singh coalition's reputation for competent governance, never particularly high, began to wither. If it had tainted itself with compromise on the nuclear deal, it began to seem pathetic in tackling economic issues.

It is now evident that inflation ate away any goodwill for the government at a rapid pace: the fire of the belly rarely leaves authority untouched. The mismanagement of oil prices speaks for itself. Oil prices did not start rising last week; this has been a phenomenon spread over the whole of last year. Many serious economists were predicting the prices we are witnessing today. A government with time on its side has the ability to take tough decisions. By winter it was clear that the government had limited options: it could raise prices, which would mean risking the stability of the coalition and a further push on inflation. If that was unacceptable, it could have initiated measures to reduce consumption. Or, it could have foreseen the crisis ahead, argued that only a government with renewed strength could handle such a crisis, and gone to the people. It did nothing. Today, it is in a complete bind. There is no money to meet higher costs (particularly after the great squander of national wealth in order to bribe voters in the Budget), and no will to raise it from consumers. If prices do not go up, we will see an oil famine in the country as oil companies run out of funds.

A government that could have won an election last August is sitting, heavy-bottomed, on a panic button eight months later.

There is only pseudo-drama in the much-debated question on whether the government should call an election in October-November or wait for the scheduled end of Parliament in March-April. It doesn't matter much anymore. The Opposition, which was once eager for a midterm poll in the forlorn belief that anything was better than the status quo is now quite happy at the thought that elections might take place only next March. In its view, the longer this government sticks around in office, the more seats it will lose. Yes, of course, a delay would enable some ministers to make more money, but who can argue with the kismat of the corrupt?

The Manmohan Singh government has travelled from promise to compromise; it will need huge dollops of good kismat to travel any further.

Double Jeopardy

Byline by M J Akbar: Double Jeopardy

The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendour to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day.

There is a television game called "Double Jeopardy" built around the rather depressing thought that the answer to a problem might be a problem in itself. India's Marxists have just discovered that this game could spill over into reality.

Moralists have long condemned those politicians who enjoy power without responsibility. The CPI(M) is now discovering the pain of having responsibility without power. That is probably closer to a triple jeopardy.

If ever there was a double jeopardy in politics, then the hammering they have just received across West Bengal in the panchayat elections is a gloomy, or glowering, example. From control of 2,303 village panchayats in 2003, the CPI (M)-led Left Front has stumbled to 1,633; the Mamata Banerjee-led disunited Opposition ascended from 917 to 1,463. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress won more than three-fourths of the village councils.

Two facts stand out in the Bengal results: Mamata won villages that she had not even bothered to campaign in; and the most decisive shift away from the Left was the Muslim vote which it has wooed so consistently with its absolutist opposition to the BJP. The upsurge against the Left in Bengal is therefore greater than these results indicate. If this pattern holds then the Left could lose more than 15 seats in the next general elections.

And it is no longer sufficient to go red each time you see saffron in order to pocket Muslim votes. Muslims want more, including bread and education. As the Sachar Committee's report proved, during more than three decades in power the Left has given neither to Bengal's Muslims. It has certainly provided security to the community, but that is not enough. You cannot take land with impunity from the Bengali Muslim peasant and yet frighten him into voting for you. That era is over. The tectonic shift in the Muslim vote has cut the ground from under the CPI(M)'s Fortress Bengal.

There are many reasons why the Muslims did not revolt against the Left Front before. The leadership of Jyoti Basu was both charismatic and reassuring. Basu knew the language that would communicate with the people, even if in practical terms (that is, bread and education) he did not do very much. He shepherded the community through its most vulnerable phase, 1970s and 1980s, with the kind of concern that the sentimental might even confuse with affection. It was psychologically impossible for Muslims to leave the CPI(M) as long as Jyoti Basu was at the helm. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was another matter. Buddhadev had been insensitive to Muslim sentiment even when a minister in Basu's Cabinet. Muslims might have accepted his lectures on the aazan and madrasas if he had begun to address their bread-and-education concerns. Instead, the lectures came with the most appalling usurpation of land in Singur and Nandigram. Muslims were among the worst affected.

There is a phenomenon that is being shrouded by the shift of the Muslim vote towards Mamata Banerjee. In the 1960s, as Bengal's Muslims abandoned the Congress, many of them first went to marginal parties, including outfits led by the clergy. In the elections of the late 1960s, parties that were variations of the Muslim League set up candidates and got a reasonable chunk of the vote. The CPI(M), under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, weaned the Muslims towards the Left and eliminated such parties. They have returned to Bengal politics.

A little before the panchayat elections, Jyoti Basu made a casual remark that was not so casual: it was time for another Front, he suggested. The CPI(M)'s partners are displaying signs of fatigue. But an alliance with CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc may be a smaller problem than the Left's dalliance with the Congress in Delhi. The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendour to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day. Blaming the rest of world doesn't really help: oil prices shot up to unprecedented levels in 1973 as well, but it did not help Mrs Indira Gandhi when she blamed the international situation for domestic inflation. The government can take comfort from clever opinion polls. A recent one showed that the UPA government had 34% support, as against 26% for BJP and its partners. Then buried somewhere deep in the copy lay an interesting fact: the survey was done among 1,600 respondents in the big cities, and restricted to the very rich, the topmost socio-economic categories. The rich find inflation less demanding than the poor. And if Dr Manmohan Singh cannot get the vote of this segment, which constitutes less than 10% of the population, then he has no vote at all. I am sure if you take a poll within my family, you will find my support at 34%. If you check with the whole mohalla, it could be a different outcome. The difference between the Left and the UPA might seem distinct over dialectical debates in Delhi; it seems a blur from the villages of Bengal. Jyoti Basu always had a wonderful alibi when faced with difficult questions. He would blame lack of cooperation from Delhi and send subliminal signals that this was also discrimination against Bengalis. Buddhadev Bhattacharya tried to blame the Prime Minister during the panchayat elections. No one bought his story. The voter had seen him cozying up to Delhi too often.

The Marxists will lose very little if they lose Delhi. The Left can afford to lose Delhi; it cannot afford to slip in Bengal, or it will disappear for a decade.

The Dance of the Ghosts

Byline by M J Akbar: THE DANCE OF THE GHOSTS
COVERT (15-30TH MAY 2008)
Posted from Princeton University where he is giving a lecture on Talibanisation of Pakistan)

One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whi­zuncles will rush to sell Rahul Gandhi as India’s Obama. The similarity is superficial, if there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty. The real parallel to Obama in India is the spectacular trajec­tory of Mayawati.

Old rules get old because they have legs to walk through generations. Time, then, to re­call one of the oldest: When you are dead, lie down. So many politicians simply don’t get this, whether they are provincial wannabes like the erst­ while Congress satrap from Uttar Pradesh Akhilesh Das or the woman who wanted the White House, Hillary Clinton.

I am familiar with the face of defeat – not least my own in 1991, when I failed to get re-elected in the general elec­ tion, during my brief departure into politics. But never have I seen a visage as utterly depressed, seething with the last twitches of a withered dream, as that of Bill Clinton standing behind Hillary on the night of 7 May. For the re­cord, she was delivering a “victory” speech after the Indi­ana primaries, but her words turned instantly into ash the moment they left her mouth. Poor Bill got the blowback. He knew that this was the last dance of a dead campaign. Four more years of adulation and power had disappeared into a blank. I’ve seen long faces too, but that evening Bill’s jaw was nearer his nipple than his lip.

There are no exact parallels, least of all between de­mocracy in the United States and India, but common questions can open fresh lines of thought.

Does Barack Obama represent the arrival of a new role model? Will this drama of startling shifts energise hope elsewhere?

Barack is young, but he is not about youth. George Bush and Tony Blair were startlingly young when they won office; they have aged decades in less than ten years. Pow­er seems to be an aphrodisiac for the old (P.V. Narasimha Rao yesterday, John McCain today), and decomposes the young.

The Barack phenomenon is about identity, not youth, the vital first act as America attempts to exorcise the de­mons that have kept the enslaved and dispossessed on the margins, not totally excluded in these “liberal” times, but not fully included either. His personal history is the an­tidote of convention. He is a child of an absentee black, talented Muslim father and a white, bright, single mother who survived for a while on food stamps. His personality, his success and his dramatic invasion of the white political club, with -- to the shock of traditional America -- a coalition of white college kids and his black community, provokes reservations, suspicion and downright, barely-disguised hatred. The Clintons, who are brilliant at surreptitious pol­itics and viral-marketing, positioned him as the ultimate Manchurian candidate at a time of Bush’s war against “Is­lamofascism”: they converted him into a “closet Muslim” without of course letting the phrase escape through their noble, if clenched, teeth. Worse, he was an uppity snob who had the temerity to wear Gucci,drink latte, and, worst of all, dress and dance better than the Clintons. The Clin­tons have every right to a bank balance of $109 million between them, earned in the last eight years. An upstart should remain a degree below latte. Obama prevailed among the Democrats not because he had changed but because enough of America has changed.

One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whi­zuncles will rush to sell Rahul Gandhi as India’s Obama. The similarity is superficial, if there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty. The real parallel to Obama in India is the spectacular trajec­tory of Mayawati. She never studied in Harvard, and the only law she knows is that of the jungle through which her elephant has had to fight for survival. But she rose from the margins and is imploding upon the Centre by extraordinary political skills. Her coalition of Brahmin, Dalit and Muslim is if anything more impressive Obama’s. She does not wear Gucci (she thinks Rahul Gandhi does). But she does wear diamonds; the contempt/anger/hatred and pseudo-morality that her wealth induces is evident enough. She does not belong to the class that has a hered­itary right to be dishonest. But the most important simi­larity is that she has energised her own community to an unprecedented degree. The Dalits are the blacks of India; Babasaheb Ambedkar is their Martin Luther King; Kanshi Ram is their Jesse Jackson; and Mayawati is their Obama. Being less suave than Obama, she is both the acceptable and unacceptable face of Change; she can apply the rhet­oric of Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, the pastor who has made incendiary remarks against white racism and America, depending on the audience she is addressing, or dismissing.

Obama is leading a sophisticated upheaval. Maya is heaving against prejudice that has congealed over many thousands of years. In neither case has the Establishment surrendered, yet. The Republicans believe they can slice Obama up and feed him to middle America. The Con­gress is convinced it can undermine Maya after she has sabotaged herself. All options are possible, for the tur­bulence and direction of change can never be certain. Hillary Clinton refuses to lie down even when declared dead because she still hopes that the unpredictable will somehow emerge from the inconceivable. If the correct­ly-pigmented John Edwards had pounded her as Obama has done, she would have shaken his hand and accepted the Vice President’s nomination some time ago. But with chocolate-flavoured Obama, you never know when some circumcised skeleton will fall out from the cupboard.

The candidate may be dead. The ghosts dance on.

There is a second old rule in politics. Stick with friends, but stick closer to enemies. An Obama or a Mayawati has learnt that sentiment is a trap. Once you have fought a foe to death, you can always dance with the ghost on the way to power.

Will we, Won't we?

Byline by M J Akbar: Will we, Won't we?

Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word called domitable?

One of the minor attractions of a foreign hotel room is the chance to switch on a strange television channel. The field is open; any country with a reasonable budget and a desire to be seen as an international player now has a state channel airing its version of events.

Predictably, the British thought of this wheeze first: very few know that 50% of the BBC's expenses are still paid by the British Foreign Office. In the heyday of Empire this was considered a legitimate part of national duty; and during wartime, the investment provided extraordinary returns. The logic had to be twirled around in the post-imperial phase, and the BBC repositioned itself as the international guardian of truth, democracy, liberty, freedom and whatever the British Foreign Office considered worthy and useful. To its credit, the BBC was never as obedient as the government would have liked, which is why it discovered an international audience. There was a time when BBC radio was perhaps the most important source of news for much of the world. The BBC could even dare the government in wartime. It famously refused to describe British troops during Mrs Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War as "our" troops and called them "British" troops. At this distance this may seem a minor or perhaps even a trivial distinction, but for those in media who have to deal with nervous governments during wartime, there is nothing trivial about standing up for identity. Still the umbilical cord exists, and no one quite knows when mummy is tugging at the cord.

The American experiment in quasi-government media independence has been, shall we say, less successful. The Voice of America is only accurate in one respect: it is the Voice of America, with a modification – it is the Voice of the American Government. The VOA's spectacular spread is matched only by the spectacular failure of its inability to reach anyone. Credibility cannot be purchased by dollars. Or by Euros, for that matter. But what is good about European news channels broadcasting in English is that they offer you a different dimension of warzones like Iraq or Palestine. The American coverage, including that of non-government media, tends to follow some invisible consensus in which, for example, Israel can do little wrong and the Palestinians little right. The consensus does not extend to all aspects of coverage, but it certainly conditions reporting of war.

Even when you do not understand the language of television reporting, as for instance on Turkish channels, it is always instructive to see the images that are being broadcast. They are significantly different from the "consensus" images of Anglo-Saxon media. The great effort to take independent coverage to an international audience was made, of course, by Al Jazeera when it followed up its hugely successful Arab channels with an English version. The effort is brave; but the jury is still out on the quality of its impact. There is a sense of discomfort in English Al Jazeera, or perhaps the more accurate term would be uncertainty. It is never sure which note to hit. This grey confusion does not exist in Arabic, because it was always certain what it wanted to do. It was the first channel to report the Arab street, even when this caused great discomfiture to Arab governments. Although Al Jazeera is owned by Oman's rulers, they have wisely kept a distance between their channel and their foreign policy. Al Jazeera is hated by more Arab regimes that it would care to count. That is its strength. Perhaps its problem in English is that it wants to pander to its claimed audience, even when it claims the high ground of neutrality, instead of letting the news speak for itself. All audiences have biases, and it would be a foolish media person who ignored these biases completely; but media's true worth is tested only when it rises above the clamour of the audience on the few occasions when this is essential.

Perhaps the most interesting channel I have come across is the Chinese English channel. The last time I watched it, in a Singapore hotel, it was going on and on about the "indomitable" will of the Chinese people. It is a phrase that makes me nostalgic, almost taking me back to college and the good old days when anyone in Calcutta with any sense of adventure had Chairman Mao's Little Red Book in his pocket. (The Chinese were very kind; they sent it free.) They did go on a bit about the indomitable will of the Chinese people, and how it would inspire revolutions everywhere. India was reserved by Chairman Mao for a prairie fire that would light up in different spots and then slowly join up to set this uppity, half-baked nation ablaze with red flames. The prairie fire at my college, Presidency, was quite fierce for a while; but the one in Delhi's elitist St Stephen's College, I gather, went up in smoke. I shall not describe what kind of smoke it was.

Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word called domitable? There should be, logically, but anyone who knows English also knows that logic has nothing to do with its grammar and phraseology. Ever tried to find what the opposite of "unbend" is? It certainly isn't "bend".

I suppose only a very domitable people accept the conditions we do. The news is that our deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a protégé of the Prime Minister, finally discovered the state of Delhi airport and has called a meeting to find why this experiment in state-private sector partnership has become one unholy mess. It has taken Mr Ahluwalia time, not because he does not travel abroad, but because all high officials are taken through a gilded route when they traverse through airports. High Cabinet Ministers of course have their own airport. They just don't tell anyone about this. But we must give credit to Montek: he could have behaved like others, ignored the punishment that is inflicted on ordinary passengers and gone back to his desk. He could have scratched the back of the civil aviations ministry and lived happily ever after. He took some action. We shall see if anything comes out of it.

Carry on, Montek. Maybe one day you shall make us Indians indomitable as well.

The Alibi Game

Byline by M J Akbar : The Alibi Game

In public life — and both the market and politicians are in public life — you need not only a thick skin but also a strong chin. You have to take the blow on the chin and keep standing. A totter is not a pleasant sight in public life.

Logic and politics are not necessarily incompatible. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. If you live by market forces you die by market forces. Inflation is the most logical face of market forces. It is the market that sets the agenda. It is the market that raises prices based on its assessment of supply, demand and profitability. The market has no loyalty, least of all to government. The market has no social conscience: no food-trader ever died of hunger in the famine, or emerged out of the crisis with his bank balance depleted. The market is loyal to one concept, profit. The politician wants to win; the market wants to profit.

Their paths converge most of the time, but not all the time. When their interests converge they are the best of pals: see the width of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's smile when, in normal times, the Sensex booms across the skyscrapers of Mumbai. But that boom follows its own laws, and not those of the government. If profits can be sustained then the Sensex will boom even during a period of high inflation, at least temporarily, when there is still purchasing power in the market.

When the interests of politicians and the market diverge, they can be obstinate in the protection of their own needs. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi would dearly love to wake up one morning and discover that prices had levelled off or were even showing a downward trend. If they could order businessmen to do so, they would have done it, for a general election cannot now be too far away. But the businessmen who cozy up to politicians in the privacy of drawing rooms, doling out large bundles of cash, will not take such orders even at the cost of hurting their political friends.

It is, to use an apt phrase, a trade-off. The market should not cry when the politician lets it down. The politician must not weep when the market betrays it. In public life — and both the market and politicians are in public life — you need not only a thick skin but also a strong chin. You have to take the blow on the chin and keep standing. A totter is not a pleasant sight in public life.

Inevitably, if not wisely, politicians rush towards the false comfort of alibis when under threat. The Indian consumer does not want lectures on whether food prices are rising across the world; he wants to know what the government has done about it. In any case, this phenomenon was evident at the beginning of last winter, and that is already six months ago. What did Finance Minister Chidambaram, or his economics-professor boss, Prime Minister Singh, do about it last November and December? If they had taken the measures that suddenly seem wise to them now, things would have been under some control today. Instead, they were cooling their heals and heating the market. Now the market is cooling its heels and lighting fires under the government.

Alibis can be cruel. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has already blamed the changing consumption pattern of the Indian poor for rising prices. Sharad Pawar has never blamed the bloated stomachs of the rich for rising prices — ever wondered why? He believes food to be the natural right of the rich, and an unnatural right for the poor. He does not quite put it like that, because that would be too direct, but that is the foundation of his thought process.

Mr Pawar has now some help from the Lord Protector of the World, American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She too blames the rise of food prices on the Indian poor. Has she ever paused a minute to think about the consumption pattern of pets in American households? They consume food worth over fifteen billion dollars each year, enough to stave off hunger among Africa's poverty-stricken children. I know this is an unfair world, and I don't believe that pets should suddenly be cut off their feed. But at least we should be spared pomposity from the privileged.

Prime Minister Singh seems to have a strange, hands-off look these days, as if he is not really responsible for the mess that has collected beneath him. Indifference may be the last alibi left, but it is not an answer. When the mask of indifference is punctured by incidents like the exposure of help given by the Prime Minister's Office to a less-than-honest minister like the DMK's T.R. Baalu, the search for alibis reaches panic-station because the image of a clean Prime Minister must be preserved at all costs. The explanations trot out, one after another. The PMO letters were "routine". There is nothing routine about a Prime Minister's Office recommending that gas supplies be made available to the industries of a Cabinet Minister's son. There is nothing routine in the fact that a reminder was sent within five days, the first of seven. In government snail-mail the first letter would probably not have reached its destination in five days. A second in such a hurry is not routine. Oil and Gas Minister Murli Deora suggested that there was nothing in helping a colleague. Really? Even at the cost of rules and regulations? And if there is nothing wrong, why was nothing done? The answer is simple: the bureaucrats in the ministry did not want to break the rules. That is why eight letters were needed. Clever Mr Deora wants to have his cake and eat it too. Difficult.

The Indian in the bazaar has a right to ask how many letters the Prime Minister sent his Finance Minister on inflation.

The Prime Minister is a calm man who hides his stress under a self-imposed blanket of resignation. He was the surprise choice four years ago, and his personality aroused hopes at street and village level. All that remains of that once-promising reputation is the belief that he is personally incorruptible. But what use is his personal integrity when all around him there is rampant corruption and mismanagement. Is there a friend of his who can tell him that there are many kinds of dishonesty in public life? Permitting Cabinet Ministers to feed from the corruption trough so that you may preserve your job also amounts to disservice to the people.

9% for 9%

Byline by M J Akbar : 9% for 9%

If political parties do not politicise the misery, what should they politicise? What are they in politics for? To celebrate Diwali every week? Heaven knows, enough politicians do that already. Corruption is so rampant that minimal proprieties have been abandoned.

There are two dangerous moments in the life of any politician. One comes when he has the misfortune to be the messenger of bad news. Good news is brought by a crowd; bad news is borne by an individual, for the crowd suddenly discovers it has other things to do. The messenger's loyalty and courage are always praised — he may even, in some circumstances, be awarded the Padma Vibhushan — before his tongue is sliced off and deposited in a very cold icebox. Bad news may be necessary, but that does not mean that it is welcome.

The Left Front, which is the raft on which the UPA government has been sailing for four years, decided that it would carry the news about inflation-turmoil to the closed mind into which every government retreats under pressure. The Left, which is still anxious to save the Manmohan Singh government from self-inflicted wounds, wanted to hear prescriptions. Instead, it got a sniffy sermon based on the extraordinary assertion that "political parties should not politicise the misery of the people".

Living in Delhi is sufficient to addle what little brains the Almighty has allotted to me, but I find this quite incomprehensible. If political parties do not politicise the misery, what should they politicise? What are they in politics for? To celebrate Diwali every week? Heaven knows, enough politicians do that already. Corruption is so rampant that minimal proprieties have been abandoned. One example is sufficient. The Prime Minister's Office has written eight letters between November 2007 and February 2008 to the petroleum ministry, headed by Murli Deora, demanding that gas supplies to companies owned by shipping and transport minister T.R. Baalu's family be expedited. Questions arise: for starters, it would be nice to know how many letters the Prime Minister's Office has written to finance minister P. Chidambaram demanding that inflation be brought under control. But of course the Prime Minister believes that inflation cannot bring down his government, while the DMK can, and therefore its ministers must be appeased.

More interesting: why does it need eight letters on the same subject? The PMO contains the most powerful bureaucrats in the country, backed by the authority of the Prime Minister. No letter can leave the PMO without the PM's personal sanction even if he does not sign the missive himself. Murli Deora is not famous for being subversive, or revolutionary. Why would he need to be told eight times? There can be only one reason: because the PMO's directive demanded that the petroleum ministry flout a rule in order to help the family of a fellow Cabinet minister. The sheer persistence — eight letters in four month — tells its own story.

If only such persistence had been shown, and during the same period, in the effort to curb inflation, the Left might have not needed to remind the government that the Finance Bill had still not been passed, and it could not be passed without the Left's support.

But at least the Prime Minister's formulation recognises that the people are indeed miserable. And when they are miserable it is hardly surprising that they tend to vote against those who have made them miserable. The Congress did have an opportunity in Karnataka to recover in the coming Assembly elections, but inflation seems to have punctured its chances.

Here is a fact of life that Prime Minister Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi, his mentor, may want to remember: it is the people who politicise misery when they convert their anger into a vote.

Which brings us to the second danger in the career of a politician. This is visited upon the more fortunate, for only someone who has been permitted to roar as a lion can be castrated into bleating like a scapegoat. You can't make a scapegoat out of a goat, can you?

When the political price of inflation becomes even more evident, there will be clamour within Congress ranks for a public sacrifice. There is already talk that this sacrificial lamb, or goat, will be finance minister Chidambaram. Since no Prime Minister offers his own head as sacrifice, Dr Manmohan Singh will gracefully step aside so that the chap down the pecking order can take the hit.

It is difficult for finance ministers to last the course; the portfolio is simply too demanding. By such norms Chidambaram has done better than most. He can be pleased at the fact that he has presented every Budget since the UPA came to power, and even if he ends up on the political platter his successor will inherit all the problems without the satisfaction of delivering the annual Budget in February. By then the general elections will be upon us, even if they are not brought forward.

But what he should be angry about is that it will be his head on the platter when the responsibility for inflation is not his alone, even among his peers. He might be particularly irritated by the fact that no one is raising a finger at his bete noire, Kamal Nath, for instance (the two ministers have been sparring with less courtesy than wrestlers in Haryana). One factor in the rise of steel prices is because Kamal Nath has pushed the export of iron ore at virtually any cost, both to the exchequer and the environment, and even now refuses to increase export duties. Or Chidambaram might legitimately ask why the DMK ministers, who are the well-heeled guardians and dons of the cement industry in Tamil Nadu, do not get blamed when cement prices rise.

There has always been a disconnect between the misery of the people and the joy of the winners in the 9% growth lottery, as the BJP-led NDA discovered to its horror in the last general election, and as the present government could find out in the next election. As someone archly remarked, India has 9% growth for 9% of its people. Unfortunately for the political and business elite, India has 100% democracy for 100% of its people.

Inflated Egos

Byline by M J Akbar: Inflated Egos

On 16 April finance minister Chidambaram announced that action would be taken against cement and steel cartels. Were those cartels formed over lulnch that day, forcing the finance minister to leap into action immediately? These cartels have been in business for many months. Prices have been rising for on an incremental basis for a while. Why didn't cartels attract the attention of the finance minister before 16 April?

Is inflation some kind of a sudden plague, which hits without warning, spreads contagious havoc for a while and then disappears as mysteriously as it came? Finance ministers would love such an explanation, wouldn't they? Government propagandists could command a high premium from their masters if they managed to sell such a myth. Unhappily for governments, and fortunately for mere mortals, the voter is not gullible.

Inflation is an interesting phenomenon. It is a consequence of decisions not taken, as much as decisions taken.

A simple analysis of statements made in Parliament during the debate on inflation by finance minister P. Chidambaram and cricket minister Sharad Pawar (who also looks after agriculture when he gets time from running the Board for the Control of Cricket in India) will indicate what I mean.

The most startling analysis of basic causes was made by Pawar when he pointed out that the poor had acquired more liquidity, were therefore buying more food, and this, in conjunction with a change in dietary habits was pushing up food prices.

Well, that's it then. All you have to do is tell the poor to behave. They should remain semi-starved, as they have been for thousands of years, so that the middle class and rich can buy food at acceptable prices.

The poor, Mr Cricket Minister, are not fools: they do not think that any government can suddenly change their diet from bajra roti and dal into pilao. Even a government that pompously claims to belong to aam aadmi, or the ordinary people, does not raise hopes among ordinary people. Life has taught them to be realists. The poor do not expect pilao, but they do believe that if they began life with just two rotis for a meal they have a right to three rotis after a while. Is that too much? The insensitivity of Pawar's statement did not seem to upset anyone in the political class, proving how insensitive everyone has become.

The point is more moot. When did the shift in dietary patterns – as for instance, the rising demand for wheat in traditionally rice-eating South – take place? On the morning of the debate in Parliament? This change in food habits has been a slow turn, years in the making, and the agriculture ministry has been studying this pattern for a long while. So what did the agriculture minister do about it? Nothing. Did he encourage a shift in crop production through, for instance, incentives to ensure that India did not face a wheat shortage? Here is a consequence of decisions not taken.

There is a further twist to the story. We underestimate the role of corruption in inflation. There was a wheat shortage earlier. When did Sharad Pawar step in to import? Not when world prices were low, but when prices had peaked and you had no option but to buy at available rates. The importer of that wheat on behalf of Sharad Pawar is probably flying around in the private jet. A check might unearth some interesting details.

On 16 April finance minister Chidambaram announced that action would be taken against cement and steel cartels. Were those cartels formed over lulnch that day, forcing the finance minister to leap into action immediately? These cartels have been in business for many months. Prices have been rising for on an incremental basis for a while. Why didn't cartels attract the attention of the finance minister before 16 April?

On the same day the government announced it would import one million tonnes of edible oil. Had prices of edible oil begun rising at the stroke of the midnight hour on 16 April? Why did the Honourable Minister suddenly wake up before a debate in Parliament? As long as prices only threatened the livelihood of the poor, the government of Dr Manmohan Singh did nothing. When prices began to threaten the life of the government, there was a flurry of activity.

The government of Dr Manmohan Singh is guilty of collusion in inflation.

The economic principle that has driven this government is the oft-repeated "trickle-down theory", a favourite of World Bankers infesting this administration. Every economic phrase has a human meaning. This particular phrase means that the government knew that there would be a waterfall for the few at the top floating in swimming pools, and only a trickle would reach those dying of thirst at the bottom. Its attention has always been focused on the management of the waterfall.

We should have expected this, but we do not have a memory. What was the rate of inflation during the five years that Dr Singh was finance minister under Narasimha Rao? In 1991-92 inflation was 13.7%, and these are the figures for the subsequent years of his finance ministership: 10.1%, 8.4%, 12.5%, 8.1%.

There is a correlation between inflation and political instability. Food prices are not the only factor, but they are a principal reason because food security is an important basis of collective national confidence. The government of Dr Singh, Chidambaram and Pawar believed that food security could be left to market forces. Market forces have now begun to bleed this government.

Inflation during the Jawharlal Nehru decade, between 1951-52 to 1960-61, was 1.8%. That was undeniably the most stable period of the last sixty years. Inflation averaged 6.3% in the Sixties, and the Congress was swept out of power in the states between Punjab and Bengal. It barely managed to survive at the Centre in the 1967 general elections. Inflation rose to 10.3% during the Seventies; the turmoil was as high as inflation. Two national governments were voted out of office. Inflation dropped to 7.2% in the Eighties and 7.8% in the Nineties, but the people still considered it too high and the turnover of governments was high. Calm returned when inflation was reduced to less than five percent in the first half of the new century, despite a serious drought for one year. Anything above five per cent creates political tremors.

Dr Manmohan Singh's five years as finance minister reduced the Congress Party from about 240 seats in the Lok Sabha to 145 seats. At the same rate of attrition his five years as Prime Minister could take the Congress to below a hundred seats.

Dr Manmohan Singh's government is so dazzled by market forces that even now it is reluctant to ban futures trading in agricultural products. Let me quote an American columnist, William Pfaff. He was not writing in The Theory and Practice of Soviet Marxism but in the distinctly American International Herald Tribune [Speculators and soaring food prices, 17 April 2008]: "Speculative purchases have no other purpose that to make money for the speculators, who hold their contracts to drive up current prices with the intention not of selling the commodities on the real future market, but of unloading their holdings onto an artificially inflated market, at the expense of the ultimate consumer…It is astonishing in the present situation that the international financial institutions and government regulators have done little to control or banish this parasitical and antisocial practice. The myth of the benevolent and ultimately impartial market prevails against all contrary evidence."

Dr Manmohan Singh has been kept out of the politics of power since he became Prime Minister, but the administration of power has been his responsibility. If he had spent even half the time examining the earth beneath his feet as he did staring transfixed at a nuclear deal with George Bush, he would have seen that angel of death known as inflation approaching many months ago. There was so much hope when Dr Singh became Prime Minister. He will now be remembered for a nuclear deal that was waylaid by allies, and an economic policy that was shredded by the arrogance of ministers and the complacency of servitors.

Maya and Reality

Byline by M J Akbar : Maya and Reality

Sonia Gandhi has been completely unable to stem the Mayawati tide, being swamped in Uttar Pradesh and driven out by parallel currents in states like Gujarat. She has now thrown Rahul Gandhi into this churn. His visit to a Dalit home on Mayawati's base was a direct challenge. This by itself is unexceptional. But after over four years of power, and single-point leadership, the Congress can no longer distinguish between an adversary and an enemy.

The good news for the Sonia Gandhi Congress is that Rahul Gandhi is finally beginning to irritate someone. The bad news is that he has irritated Mayawati, the increasingly iconic leader of India's Dalits.

Mayawati has achieved something unprecedented in the Dalit experience. She has come to power on her own terms. Her mentor, Kanshi Ram, indisputably paved the way, but in historical terms, he was only the herald of this extraordinary seismic shift in the demographics of Indian politics. Someone still had to deliver on the prophecy. Mayawati has both outpaced her mentor and risen to a higher trajectory: to push the metaphor, she has travelled both horizontally and vertically on the same momentum, which is quite unique political yoga. To claim power is a dream. To achieve it is to rewrite history. And to do so on your own terms is a glittering embellishment to an already impressive chapter.

The clash between Congress and Mayawati was perhaps inevitable, since both claim the same electoral turf. Sonia Gandhi has been completely unable to stem the Mayawati tide, being swamped in Uttar Pradesh and driven out by parallel currents in states like Gujarat. She has now thrown Rahul Gandhi into this churn. His visit to a Dalit home on Mayawati's base was a direct challenge. This by itself is unexceptional. But after over four years of power, and single-point leadership, the Congress can no longer distinguish between an adversary and an enemy. It has created a sub-culture of us-versus-them, and secret hit lists, giving a bitter edge to the normal tensions of political life. One can see the vapour rising in language, and the rancour rising in body language.

Rahul Gandhi has begun the Congress campaign for the next general election, and opted for a personal variation of what might be called the Indira Gandhi model. This was best exemplified by a decision Mrs Gandhi made during the bleak years of Janata Party rule, after the end of the Emergency in 1977 and the defeat of the Congress in that year's election. An incident took place in a remote village in Bihar, where Dalits were victims of upper caste hostility and violence. Mrs Gandhi decided to go there, and when no other means of transport was available for the last mile, she got on to an elephant. That gesture was the alchemy that transformed the fortunes of a depressed and divided Congress. A second incident, during which she squatted down and offered arrest when the Janata began to pursue her with expected, but unacceptable, animosity, offered an equally dramatic image to photographers. This is the parallel that Rahul Gandhi seeks to draw when he turns up "unexpectedly" in tribal homes in Orissa, or a Dalit village in Uttar Pradesh; or when Mrs Sonia Gandhi gallantly offers to send her son and heir to jail for a day or two to prove his heroic credentials in the struggle against Mayawati. But there are significant differences between 1978 and 2008.

To begin with, in 1978, Indira Gandhi was the only leader and Congress the only party that identified itself with the Dalit cause. The Janata government was a coalition of middle and upper caste power-brokers that paid occasional lip service to the Dalits, but not much more. The Janata lost a glorious opportunity to shift the demographic and political equations of the country when it refused to make the pre-eminent Dalit leader of the time, Babu Jagjivan Ram, Prime Minister after the elections and chose the anaemic Morarji Desai instead.

In 2008, Mayawati is the lodestar of the Dalits, the Indira Gandhi of her community. Nor is she a Brahmin with sympathy for the downtrodden; she is a Dalit herself, part of the poverty and the humiliation of thousands of years, with a ferocious sense of identity with her people. Jagjivan Ram sought change through conciliation; Mayawati seeks change through confrontation. Dalits feel empowered now; they felt helpless when Indira Gandhi was on her way to Bihar. 1978 was the season of bitter fruit; 2008 is the season of long-denied apples.

Mayawati's response to Rahul Gandhi's politicking is an indication of the new ferocity. Rahul Gandhi wants votes for himself; Mayawati wants a new horizon for herself and her community. When she invoked the images of soap and incense, and charged that the likes of Rahul Gandhi privately purified themselves after publicly associating with Dalits, she was arousing passions around the two great crimes against Dalits, poverty and untouchability. She was also hinting at a third crime, a modern one, induced by democracy — of hypocrisy. This was not a speech put together by some extra-clever boys around a computer; she etched those images into the speech herself. By throwing "foreign" into the mix, she raised the ante to the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi and the international lifestyle of Rahul Gandhi. Mayawati's message was carried by television and print across India.

The genteel might not consider Mayawati very gentle but the genteel are heavily outnumbered in Indian democracy. A friend watched this speech in his office, in the company of his colleagues. When an executive expressed his disapproval, a bearer said simply, "This is what has made Mayawati chief minister, and this is what will make her Prime Minister".

I would change "will" to "could" but otherwise the statement stands on merit.

What the Congress leadership does not understand is that dynasty cannot offer itself as an alternative to a genuine mass leader. The old Congress won the sympathy of Dalits because it encouraged Dalit leaders to rise in the party; today, only the dynasty has the right to represent every community in the country. Doesn't work in a maturing democracy.

The 5 April issue of the Economist makes the perceptive point that democracy does not necessarily throw up clean results: "...of 21 countries which have elected new governments in the past four months, the result of the vote itself was less than decisive in at least six. The number seems to be rising".

This pattern came into play in India after 1989, when Vishwanath Pratap Singh formed a minority government after an indecisive result. There has been no majority government in 18 years through five general elections. Government are now formed by post-poll rather than pre-poll alliances. The need for a stable government, or perhaps any government at all, trumps other differences. Numbers determine the level of power a leader exercises within a coalition. In Germany, Angela Merkel became Chancellor at the head of a grand coalition between long-standing adversaries because she got one seat more than her opponents. The power of one has rarely been higher. Such a syndrome in India opens the field for Mayawati, as well as others.

The Congress is desperately hoping that Mayawati fails, or collapses. Its wish has some probability on its side. Against such a probability, Mayawati is bolstered by a possibility.

Mayawati is not the pretty or handsome heir of a stagnant dynasty. She is monarch of a kingdom she has won on the field of battle. She believes that her kingdom can expand into an empire. This may happen; it may not. But remember this: a democracy encourages flexible, fluid boundaries. Some things are probable, but everything is possible.

This Maya is no illusion.

A Bali Diary

Byline by M J Akbar : A Bali Diary

The rich are different from you and me; they have the same airport. The first casualty of globalisation is identity. Every airport in the developed, or wannabe -developed, world looks the same: a confusion of corridors, conveyer belts, junk shops and a profusion of winding queues at immigration. You can recognise a nation from the look in the queues. There is faintly-hidden arrogance on the faces of officials in receiving countries, and barely-disguised relief in the manner of passengers chasing some better horizon than their native land can provide. Delhi is somewhere in the middle, there is both ebb and flow. The one thing in common between ebb and flow is torture. Signs advertise that the airport, currently in a compete mess, is on its way to becoming world class. This is apparently considered good news by the developer and presumably the civil aviation ministry. We will know what they mean when we finally see what we get; in the meantime don't raise your hopes too high.

Denpasar airport, in Bali, the exotic Hindu island on the southern tip of the Indonesian archipelago, is a gateway to the lost world of charm, grace and the sheer opulence of an environment lush with rain, paddy and forest. There is nothing artificial about the welcome in the Balinese smile, which begins in the eyes and spreads gently across the face. The airport is designed like a home, airy, free, spacious, sunlit.

It is an illusion of course but you get the sense that there are no walls in Bali. The architecture of wood breathes with the quiet harmony of nature. The doors are exquisitely carved, but they seem designed to remain open rather than slam shut. Stone comes to life in brilliant statuary, as deities and demons from a rich and vibrant belief system that ill-deserves the nomenclature of mythology. Epic scenes from the Mahabharata are carved high into the air at intersections of the road that takes us from Denpasar to the rain forest and Ayung river valley of Ubud. Lord Krishna and Arjuna, or Arjana as it is pronounced here, on the battlefield at Kurukshetra are favourites but there is a splendid variety from other events of the great epic. The genius of this art also lies in its anonymity. This is the work of a people and their faith, not an artist and his ego.

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The drive to the Alila Ubud hotel is a journey through many pasts. Language is a primary vehicle of multiple identities. One expects a nameplate like Pt. Cerana Citra Kartika, or a Krisna Yuva Dana, a Bhakti Shop or a Nira Gallery. But there is also an advertisement for an Amerikan Pillo. The bus stop is a page from the chapter on European colonisation. It is called 'Halte Pesanggeran'. Tourism flows through the sinews of the Bali economy. The street is lined with countless shops churning out Buddhas and gods that will seem fashionably antique in some western drawing room. The West begins next door, in Australia. The printed advice we receive at the hotel is frank. Never buy anything without haggling. All prices should come down by thirty to forty per cent. But such candour destroys the charm of haggling. There is no sense of victory when you know that prices have been marked up already to account for the haggle. A shopkeeper must look as dejected and defeated as a Lebanese trader who has sold a magic carpet at a plastic price. The Balinese look too happy.The afternoon darkens suddenly as I check in. Lightning splits the clouds and a thunderclap from the pages of a Somerset Maugham novel shakes the skies. Rain pours down in a furious rush; the intensity would have left any city flooded but the water slips down the terraces of the mountainside. The shower stops, but is replaced by a thin invisible spray that keeps you cool without leaving you wet. Organisers of conferences in Bali tend to take a precaution against the rain becoming too disruptive. The price for a puja to appease the rain gods is forty two dollars.

Drop
There is prasad everywhere. Deities do not live only in temples, but on walls, parapets, even within conference halls. Fruit is left in a small leaf bowl, presumably after a quick puja, perhaps for decorative effect, perhaps in memory of the prayer, in front of the idol. Faith, and its symbols, are a constant assertion, subtly, not aggressively. A taxi driver was rather more regretful than he might have been elsewhere after hitting a buffalo: he had to pay atonement
expenses for three pujas at three temples before the Brahmins exonerated his sin. The challenge to ritual comes, one understands, not from the non-Hindu presence but from Indian sects like the Krishna Bhakts and the Brahma Kumaris who come here and advocate a more spartan form of Hinduism. It would be a tragedy if the Balinese began to conform. The world comes to Bali precisely because Bali refuses to go to the world.

Drop
If you need to discuss the role of Islam in multicultural Asia, where better than in Bali? We are guests of the Asia Society, the highly esteemed New York-based intellectual powerhouse. Both Richard Holbrooke, its chairman, and Vishakha Desai, its president, are present to lead the discussion. Vishakha has enough power in her drive to make academics quiver and mere mortals quail. The conference is conducted under Chatham House rules, which means that we cannot report or quote from the proceedings without the specific permission of the speaker. I hope I break no rules when I convey that there was (by and large) recognition of the damage done by the rhetoric and myopia of George Bush. But we were a liberal group, which did not make us homogenous but certainly persuaded us that a fresh future could only rest on a concept that we
in India have made a cornerstone of our political philosophy: tolerance of diversity, respect for the difference and equality for all.

Drop
Question from the Olde Curiosity Shoppe: why do so many panelists at any conference, whether in Bali or Timbuktoo, want to make just three points? Making just one point, which is really the ideal, would seem as if you had nothing to say. Two points might suggest that you had not thought through your views. And four of course would be too excessive for the audience, which would switch from slumber to sleep. So the magic number is three: remember that when you are invited to confer at any conference.

A real chance in Kashmir

Byline by MJ Akbar : A real chance in Kashmir

Terrorism is an internal threat, and far worse than any external threat could ever be, for the enemy within is always much more dangerous than the enemy without.

What do Pervez Musharraf, Asif Zardari, Nawaz Sharif, Imran Khan, Altaf Hussain (chief of the MQM), Asfandyar Wali Khan (leader of the Awami National Party of the North West Frontier Province, soon to be renamed Pakhtunkhwa) and influential opinion-makers in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad have in common?

They have all come to a calculated conclusion: that the Indo-Pak impasse over Kashmir is now seriously detrimental to the economic and strategic health of Pakistan; that Pakistan has been held hostage to the Kashmir dispute and it is time to shake off the fetters of history and move on. These fetters have imprisoned travel and trade between neighbours and placed an expensive and unnecessary, if not quite unbearable, tension on the defence forces of Pakistan. They understand what common sense tells us: that free travel and mutually beneficial trade between India and Pakistan could transform the subcontinent, if not into a modern Europe then at least into the Europe of circa 1955.

They may not admit it publicly, but it is likely that the leaders of the Hurriyat in the Kashmir valley accept this privately. President Musharraf is on record as saying that borders do not have to change in any future accord. Zardari has told Karan Thapar in a television interview that Pakistan can no longer be held hostage on Kashmir to the detriment of its economy and defence. Columnists in influential newspapers like Dawn have written that Pakistan needs to break out of this suffocating straitjacket and get on with life. India and Pakistan have invested too much and too long in death.

This is not the view merely of an enlightened elite. The street is also tired of a hostility that promises nothing. War may have some meaning, however expensive and disastrous it might be, if there is a possibility of victory. But you do not have to be a strategic egghead to realise that Pakistan cannot capture territory in Kashmir from India. Since India is content with the status quo, it has no desire for a single square inch of "Azad Kashmir". What then is the point of confrontation?

The change on the street is reflected in an interesting shift of perceptions. 2007 was a traumatic year for Pakistan; the Afghan war had spilled over into the west of the country; the people were livid with Musharraf; and the turmoil peaked with the terrible assassination of Benazir Bhutto. But not once in the whole chain of lurching, searing events was India blamed for instigating any trouble. India and Kashmir were totally absent from the rhetoric of the Pakistan elections, for the first time in the nation's electoral history.

That old idiom has worn so thin that it can't be seen anymore. The people know that their problems begin at home and must be addressed there. A self-declared Arab friend of Pakistan was telling me, with despondent acerbity, that the national slogan of Pakistan has changed: "They used to say 'Pakistan Zindabad!' Now they say, 'Pakistan se zinda bhag!'" Terrorism is an internal threat, and far worse than any external threat could ever be, for the enemy within is always much more dangerous than the enemy without.

The solution is not with us yet, but it would be fair to suggest that the Kashmir dispute is over. The mutually-acceptable future border will be the present border: the line where the two armies ceased fire on the first of January 1949, and which they have guarded with such zealous ferocity for six decades. Six decades add up to two generations of lost sisters, forgotten cousins, and a relentless hostility that has aborted the potential of two nations. Everyone has heard the question: why do Indians and Pakistanis get on so well in a third country, and how come they do so well in a foreign habitat? The answer was always simple: because they were not living in India and Pakistan. Over the last decade India has begun to make such jokes irrelevant, but that is nothing compared to what it could achieve in harmony with a natural economic partner like Pakistan. It would vitalise SAARC, and set the subcontinent, which still has the poorest parts of the world on its landscape, on the long route towards self-respect.

Is this column too optimistic? Perhaps. After six decades of pessimism perhaps we should be permitted an hour of optimism. The dynamic of power has changed in Islamabad. While the military-civilian partnership could be fraught with tension in domestic affairs, it is a good fit for India policy. Zardari and Nawaz Sharif are talking the language initiated by Musharraf. (Now that Pakistan has also got a Dr Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister, it is more important to find out Zardari says.)

But of course the moment has to be propitious on both sides. One of the minor tragedies of the Indo-Pak equation is that when one side is ready the other is busy, or seems to be busy: it is easy to manufacture an excuse when you do not want to do anything. However, India is heading into its election season just after Pakistan has cleared its calendar. No one readily fools around with either war or peace on the eve of an election, unless you have become either careless or desperate. Delhi lost a great opportunity when Musharraf was riding high; but even if high drama is not possible, there can be forward movement on trade and travel. But whoever forms the government in Delhi after the next election cannot afford to waste time, because by then time might be running out in Islamabad.

Should those Kashmiris who challenged India on the strength of support from Pakistan feel betrayed or relieved by this swivel? Practical sense suggests relief, because they were caught in a deathly squeeze between quarrelling elephants. The idea of an independent Kashmir was always a lemon; neither India nor Pakistan would have permitted such a state on such a sensitive geopolitical flank. Punjab and Bengal were divided in 1947; Kashmir was divided in 1949. Those facts are unlikely to alter. The fate of Kashmir may be settled, but not the fate of Kashmiris. Peace between India and Pakistan will give them de facto if not de jure unity because it will restore free movement of people and goods across the ceasefire line. That is not a small gain in a life that is finite.

The danger of ignoring this moment should be obvious. If peace cannot be found when it is waiting patiently in the drawing room, then we are creating an opportunity for some future warmonger. The continued American presence in Afghanistan, the repeated American incursions into Pak territory and the resurrection of Taliban are creating tensions that are making Pakistan's Army vulnerable to internal pressures. Instability breeds unpredictable brats.

I have long held the slightly heretical view that India and Pakistan will have to work as allies in troubled Afghanistan, but for that to happen we have to find an alignment of self-interest and identify a common enemy. A resolution of the Kashmir dispute is a first, and urgent, requirement to meet a much larger challenge.

The World is Round

Byline by M J Akbar :The World is Round

The Congress theory of political success in the next election consists of simple arithmetic. Rural sops will bring the rural vote. The nuclear deal will bring in the urban vote. The massage of promises and words will retain the Muslim vote.

If Dr Manmohan Singh loses the next general election — predicted for October by the knowledgeable — he will know whom to blame: his best new friend George Bush. Bush has achieved something unique. He has globalised defeat.

The reasons and means vary. In Britain Tony Blair may be eased out and in Australia John Howard may be driven out, but the word in common is "out". Bush crippled himself long before time made him a lame duck. He began to cripple his friends at the height of his power, and the curse continues in the twilight of his term.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh escaped the swamps of Iraq, but he could become the victim of one bilateral Bush initiative, the potential nuclear deal with India, and the huge, chaotic mismanagement of the economy that has compounded the gushing fiscal wounds of the Iraq-Afghanistan war. Bush has financed this colossal misadventure with IOUs on history and debt from the world economy, setting off a sinful (as opposed to virtuous) cycle.

Debt and war have destroyed perpetrator and victim alike in the past. They are doing so again. Bush's wars cost $33.8 billion in 2002; they have ballooned to $171 billion by 2007. Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel for Economics, has estimated that the cost of the Bush wars could cross three trillion dollars by 2017, that is, in another ten years. Go figure, as they say in America. Where has the money come from? Debt.

Debt has helped weaken the dollar. Producers who sell oil in dollars, seeking to keep their income constant in real terms, and oil companies who profit in whichever direction the wheel spins, have kept raising the price of oil. A spiral effect has driven prices into the stratosphere. Oil was $23 a barrel when the Iraq war began; it is over $110 now. The pressure of prices has induced an impassioned chorus for alternative energy. Bush decided to subsidize the production of ethanol to produce this alternative energy. American farmers switched from food-for-the-stomach to crops-for-cash. There is now a critical shortage of wheat and rice around the world. The temptation of cash and higher prices impact on the pattern of agriculture. Cash crops replace staple crops. The prices of basic edibles join the spiral. India is now on the cusp of inflationary pressures that could go ballistic, even as the government has no solution in mind except a series of sops that will be throwing a bucket of water into a desert. Prices of basic food and oil in the Indian bazaar are rising at a dramatic pace. For the poor, this is a kick where it hurts most, in the stomach. Their pain will be reflected in the vote in the next general elections.

This too is globalization, a chain of sequence and consequence that is linked across the world.

The managers of 'globalization', a vast and varied array of vested interests that may not necessarily be in harmony on some issues but always closes rank to protect its core interest, take care to cohere globalization to good news. It is a brand that needs protection in order to get promotion. Bad news, even when it becomes a worldwide epidemic from a single virus, is never called globalization. No one uses the term when the New York Stock Exchange sneezes and Mumbai catches a cold. This would tarnish the image of globalization as the panacea in a post-Marxist age, a libertarian answer to socialism's impenetrable dogma. Very few — although Stiglitz is famously among the few — wonder about the tipping point, when the liberty of this philosophy morphs into license into virtually printing money.

One reason — of course, not the only one — why share markets today are as flat as the globalize world is because the meaning of capital has changed, shifting in the process the original goalposts of capitalism. Capital was the means necessary for the production of goods and services that could be sold for a profit, creating jobs and higher-standard lifestyles. Profit, of course, has always been an elastic word, stretching as far as the market will bear. Hence, marketing became a tool by which a need was enhanced into an illusion in order to raise prices and maximize profits. Thus soap, a need for the elimination of dirt, was elevated into a magic wand that would make you into a film star. Perfume is no longer a discreet veil over body odour, but a sex accessory. A handbag is no longer a convenience; it is a photograph of your bank statement. A watch no longer merely tells the time; it is a status symbol. But all this is acceptable because, at the core, there is a product, created out of capital.

But we have now moved into share markets and a world economy where there is illusion without a base, and value is attached to a fiction; and when the principal purpose of money is not to add to the quantum of goods and services but merely to make more paper or plastic money. The Sensex keeps rising in increasingly thin air, crossing peaks that are not made of rock but are arbitrary niches in the financial ozone layer. Even in the best of times, turbulence in the American economy, by far the most powerful, would have sent shudders. But connectivity now honed to marginal shifts in value, a sub-prime crisis in America wipes out ban profits in India. There is little insulation.

The Congress theory of political success in the next election consists of simple arithmetic. Rural sops will bring the rural vote. The nuclear deal will bring in the urban vote. The massage of promises and words will retain the Muslim vote. Hallelujah! We are all in power for five more years. The arithmetic could get disjointed by algebra. Prices cross the rural-urban divide, leaving anger in their wake. The minorities have heard the talk, and got nothing substantive; while Muslims are angry at the alliance with Bush which makes India a possible ally in Bush's wars against Muslim nations.

The most consistent fact of democracy is its ability to surprise governments who think they have won elections before the votes have been counted. This happened with the last national government in Delhi. The BJP has still not psychologically recovered from the shock that told the party that India was not shining as luminously as it thought. If the Congress does not watch out, it could face some shock therapy soon.

The Long Onion Road

M.J.Akbar The Long Onion Road

For the Congress, the Budget is less important than the continuous reconstruction of Rahul Gandhi as a future Prime Minister. He has the privilege of dynasty, and is above conventions. One can understand a touch of nervousness in a first speech by a new MP, but after four years in the House you have to live by its rules.

A short cut is often the longest road in politics. As the time to the next general election shortens to months from years, both the Congress and the BJP are searching for a short cut to power.

The temptation is understandable. Politics is a difficult journey, rife with roadblocks and accidents. But who will persuade politicians that voters live on the long road, not the short cut?

There is something very irresistible about a short cut, with its promise of speed and good luck. The massive loan waiver in finance minister P. Chidamabaram's end of February Budge is such a classic short cut that the only reaction from ruling coalition MPs has been a demand for more handouts. They want waivers on everything: you merely attach 'poor' to a bank loan and sanctify a political purchase. Debit is being converted into political credit. When you have run out of good sense, you throw money and hope for the best.

The opposite of a bad debt is a good debt. If you could make a nation rich by handing out cash to the poor, every nation in the world would be wealthy. It costs very little to print cash, as the Germans of the Weimar Republic discovered when they discovered that it was cheaper to burn currency notes for heating rather than buy fuel with it. Eventually the Germans burnt their respectable inflationary government and brought Hitler to power. There are many factors that are pushing up today's Indian inflation, but the sudden injection of non-productive cash into the system will certainly not bring inflation down.

You don't have to win the Nobel Prize in Economics to realize that an economy is lifted by an investment of good debt. How does that concept translate into policy in the case of a starved rural economy? You have to invest in a ruined farm, not in a ruined bank account; the future earnings of a revived farm should pay off the debt, which can be amortized over a longer period. It took no more than a day for the synchronized post-Budget applause to muffle. Economists and analysts punched holes in it.

Congress used an old tactic to cover up mistakes in the hurriedly-packaged offer, by packing remedies into Rahul Gandhi's speech on the Budget, which he read from a prepared text. He may not have fully understood the details, since economics is not his strong subject, but his staff did a good collage of newspaper clippings.

Why is there a convention in Parliament that you do not give your speeches from a prepared text? Parliament is not a test of memory. Parliament is not a classroom where the student with the highest rote-quotient wins the most coveted prize. An MP is permitted use of notes, and the best orators refer to them during a debate. Most debates are on complex matters of governance; much of the detail can be infuriating in its obscurity. But that is what governance and Parliament are about. The reason why you do not read from a prepared text is because you are meant to have a grasp of your subject. You place your own views in front of the House, not a speechwriter's; that is the difference between a speech that is delivered and one that is read out from a prepared text. For the Congress, the Budget is less important than the continuous reconstruction of Rahul Gandhi as a future Prime Minister. He has the privilege of dynasty, and is above conventions. One can understand a touch of nervousness in a first speech by a new MP, but after four years in the House you have to live by its rules.

A further privilege is that the dynast is placed in charge of all the good news. The bad news is left for minions to handle.

The BJP is consistent; it does not change its short cuts. It has only one short cut in its route map: how to bring Muslims into every argument. This has become a bit of a yawn, but it seems to have run out of other things to say. Or perhaps it is simply on-message: Muslims are not going to vote for the BJP so why worry about them? It needed a terrific leap of imagination to link this Budget to that of another finance minister of India, Liaquat Ali Khan.

The two Indias were as unlike as the two finance ministers. Liaquat Ali Khan was finance minister of united India, or, more accurately, British India, for the princely states did not come under the purview of the government in which he was a Cabinet minister. He held the finance portfolio in the interim government formed a year before independence, in which both Congress and the Muslim League participated, a sort of partnership in regress. The two parties had nothing in common, not even a country. Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister: Gandhi and Jinnah, as symbols of their people, were above the latitude of mere governments. Finance was allotted to the Muslim League. Liaquat Ali Khan's most notable achievement was to throw dust in the machinery of government so that it ground to a halt; no one accused him of actually helping anyone, though he did hurt some businesses because, in the lexicon of that period, they were "Hindu". His name has been forgotten not only in India, and I suspect is barely remembered in Pakistan, although he was Jinnah's successor. That service was brief, since he was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 1951. I doubt if millions of votes will take a fast short cut to the BJP's ballot box because of its reference to Liaquat Ali Khan but there could be an inadvertent, minor revival of Khan's name.

In its desperate search for votes, the government – surprisingly, for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is an economist of standing, and has surely discovered the perils of electoral politics after four years in office – has taken its eyes off that dangerous curve ball that could become the most decisive factor in shaping the popular mood: prices. Inflation is running at over five per cent now, and the price of food is climbing at a much higher rate. This is not the first time that farmer-populism is being touted as the all-purpose panacea. One wonders if anyone remembers the name of Chaudhry Charan Singh. He too was a Prime Minister of India, if only for six months. Just before he took the top job he served as finance minister and threw as many lollipops as he could towards his core constituency in the only Budget he presented. Nine months later, Mrs Indira Gandhi swept to power on a decisive issue: inflation.

The price of onions made the government weep in the winter elections of 1979-80. Watch out for the onions, Prime Minister.

Double Play

Byline by M J Akbar: Double Play

The Congress election formula is in place. E=M multiplied by C raised to the power of 2. E stands for elections. M represents Money, public money of course. And C is for Chidambaram, the finance minister who delivers an annual elixir for permanent youth rather than a mere budget, unlike s more pedestrian finance ministers. When Chidambaram throws public money, he does so with a heft and dexterity that would be the envy of champions. Whether he heaves a discus or hurls a javelin, his target is the same: the ballot box. He is so delighted with the cheering from government benches during the presentation of the national Budget that he has been urging all and sundry to think of a general election as early as in May. He believes that Congress can sweep back to power on a Chidambaram wave.

Actually, he may get his wish, although not quite in the manner he expects, if the Left withdraws support to the UPA government this month over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Hallucination comes easily to anyone in power, but is there any merit in the Congress presumption that it can pick up the rural vote with this massive loan waiver, and the urban vote with the Indo-US nuclear deal? The political argument for the nuclear deal was put forward by Mrs Shiela Dikshit, chief minister of Delhi, just after Prakash Karat, general secretary of the CPI(M) asked the government for immediate clarity, and set a deadline for 15 March. Mrs Dikshit was given this difficult job because she is one of the few Congress leaders who still retains some credibility with voters. Electoral politics is never an easy partner of credibility, and Mrs Dikhshit’s might have suffered a scrape or two when she charged the Marxists with being anti-national Chinese agents who were coming in the way of India’s progress. This sort of thing is about four decades too late; it went out of fashion by 1965. Marxist leaders [including Jyoti Basu] were detained as potential fifth columnists during the Indo-China war of 1962, but proved, in the very next elections, in 1967, that the people thought them patriotic enough. The Marxists came to power for the first time in Bengal as part of a United Front in 1967.

They are still winning forty years later. The Marxists created history with a sixth straight victory in the Tripura Assembly elections. The Left Front got 49 out of 60 seats, increasing its numbers by eight; the Congress was down to 10, decreasing from 19. The CPM got 46 seats, a majority on its own; its allies got three. The Congress had done everything it could: it engineered an impression, pushed forward by sections of compliant media, that there was a huge anti-incumbency wave in the state. The Congress poured money into its campaign, and patched together a cynical and unhealthy alliance with a man who was on every terrorist list not too long ago, Bijoy Hrangkhawl. Mrs Sonia Gandhi raised the pitch with an intemperate speech that indicated what the Congress line on the Left is going to be.

The turnout was extraordinarily heavy: 92% of the voters cast their ballots. This is generally considered bad news for incumbents. The Left stood conventional wisdom on its head. There is no electoral bribe by the Congress that could have changed such a verdict.

Those who believe that they can hustle voters with large lollipops underestimate the maturity of the Indian electorate. The Indian voter can be persuaded with honesty and good governance; he cannot be purchased with handouts or fiscal tricks. In the last phase of its recent campaign in Gujarat, the Congress ran up a substantial laundry list of promises, including the offer to waive loans. It made not the slightest difference; the BJP won. Cabinet ministers like Kamal Nath have publicly voiced their skepticism, and serious economists have questioned the Chidambaram waiver [the details of which, by the way, are still the exclusive property of his intelligence, but will hopefully be made available for public viewing soon].

The Marxists, in the meantime, have decided to withdraw support to the Manmohan Singh government if it does not end all negotiations on the nuclear deal. That is the simple meaning of the formal letter written by CPI general secretary A.K.Bardhan. The estrangement could develop into divorce even as early as next week. The Congress has bought time so far by deliberate waffle, but that purchase is now exhausted. The real arguments will begin, before the court of public opinion, after the break.

The Congress cannot pass the budget without support from the Left. If the alliance breaks, the Congress will accuse the Left and the BJP of sabotaging what it will surely advertise as the greatest gift ever made to farmers in the history of farming. That hoary old cliché, “an unholy conspiracy”, will be the centerpiece of every Congress leader’s cyclostyled speech.

The Left will respond with its own accusation: the Congress could have easily delayed the deal and pushed through the budget. But since Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi preferred America and George Bush to farmers, they sacrificed the farmers to placate America.

The BJP will watch the fun and talk of Rama Setu bridge.

The Congress is in election gear. It is looking for new allies everywhere, and pushing the patience of even loyalists like Laloo Prasad Yadav. Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee recently wooed Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar with a trip to China. Amend that: he offered an ego trip to China in an effort to create a rift between Nitish Kumar and the BJP in Bihar. It has also thought up a facile way in which to challenge Mayawati, by throwing up the idea of a Dalit for Prime Minister after the next elections. Anil Shastri wrote a piece suggesting this in the official Congress publication, and then prodded journalists to spread the idea through their media. Such semantics will not dent Maywati’s support, which is rock-solid in her community; but they could
damage one of the very few clean faces the Congress has, that of Dr Singh.

Is everything fair in love, war and elections? Not quite. Love is a relationship between two individuals; war is a contest between two armies. The outcome of elections is determined not by the contestants, but by a third force, a massive jury, the electorate. The morality, immorality or amorality of politicians is measured against the values of the voter. The prevalent mood of the Indian voter is to reward honesty, and punish corruption and deceit. If the farmer thinks that the loan waiver is an elaborate hoax, the Congress will suffer.

All sides will make their case directly to the voter in rallies. The voice of India will become the noise of India. Peace will return only after the general elections.