Poker Faced

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Byline by M.J.Akbar: Poker-FAced

A reshuffle should not be confused with a shuffle, nor a shuffle with ministry formation. When a new government is sworn in it is at the high point of energy and potential, having just been selected by a popular verdict.

It has the thrill of virginity and all the hopes of fresh consummation. The electorate, like any beaming mother-in-law, wants children as soon as possible. The electorate, like any gruff mother-in-law, sours quickly when it gets only bath water instead of a baby. A shuffle after a year’s waiting period (normal pregnancy pause) is proof that not everyone in government is delivering.

The impending shuffle of the Manmohan Singh ministry is going to be a limited one. None of the allies will release any quality portfolios they might have got unless they are offered better ones and there is no hope of that.

Lalu Prasad Yadav and Sharad Pawar therefore are locked into railways and agriculture for the life of this government. The Congress ministers have no locks. Only Dr Manmohan Singh seems to be secure behind a lock and there too Mrs Sonia Gandhi has the key. This will also be the first shuffle in history where the Prime Minister will be consulted while the final decision is taken elsewhere. This is logical. The Prime Minister did not win the election, so his power is checked by a balance.

A shuffle is an image from a card game, and who can deny that Delhi is the democracy’s most expensive casino? A deck of cards is a good analogy for government and not only because so many governments are a house of cards. There is an ace of spades which is more equal than the other aces; there are kings, queens and jokers. And anyone below the level of a joker is obviously around only to fill the room.

Mrs Gandhi holds the pack with nimble fingers. There may be lapses on her part in understanding the nuances of the complete Indian poker game but she deals fluently within the Congress culture. The two criteria, either of which can make a king into a joker and an ace impotent, are efficiency and loyalty. There used to be a third dimension, that of ideas, but ideas, like the fabled river Saraswati, have gone dry. The Ganga and Jamuna are efficiency and loyalty. For best results there must be confluence at Allahabad.

Since Dr Singh is safe, Mrs Gandhi has 51 cards to play with and 15 honours to juggle. After a year, some performance results are evident. The aces have not pulled their weight. Decency is no substitute for leadership in the home ministry, and while sartorial elegance has its merits, the country expects something more than a daily fashion statement from home minister Shivraj Patil. Kashmir has been gradually eased out of his beat, and the Northeast has frozen into a septic swamp under his watch. A crisis across the country, the Naxalite revolt, has reached epidemic proportions. Andhra is linked to the arc under the Himalayas and there is neither the reality nor the perception of a response from Delhi.

The Naxalite revolt is not another communal problem that will spurt and wither; it is a mighty fever that will turn India’s body politic into a shivering mess if not medicated. It began when Jawaharlal Nehru was in power. It was controlled when Indira Gandhi was in power. It could turn into a plague of Chairman Mao’s dreams when Sonia Gandhi is in power. Mao promised a prairie fire across India, and young men saluted his name and carried his torch in universities and villages. That fire is now in full rage and the home minister seems out of his depth.

The foreign minister on the other hand seems curiously incapable of differentiating between shallows and deep waters: he gives equal time to both so that he has time for neither. This is curious because Natwar Singh should know his job. The foreign ministry has been his life. His time seems to be allotted according to travel schedules rather than concerns. It can be a fatal weakness.

The third ace, Pranab Mukherjee, is simply not interested in his job. There is little to do in defence except ironically defend the status quo and that does not need his talents. After having been finance minister in his 40s he expects to be Prime Minister in his 70s. Arjun Singh should have been an ace, but he is only a king and the kings are in flux. P. Chidambaram’s budget was neither a dream nor a nightmare, merely a pleasant nap from which the economy could wake up at the first sign of drought.

But the real problem with the Congress element of the Manmohan Singh government is not individual variance but a collective fault. The Congress is in power because it was elected, directly, to the Lok Sabha. It has a government that has been elected, indirectly, to the Rajya Sabha.

The Lok Sabha is represented by the allies.

The Congress began with 17 Cabinet ministers. All the powerful positions are either with Rajya Sabha members or with those who add no value to the party despite being in the Lok Sabha: the names of Dr Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil, Natwar Singh, Arjun Singh, H.R. Bhardwaj, P.M. Sayeed, Ghulam Nabi Azad come at once to mind. Chidambaram, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Meira Kumar have won because of fortuitous alliances and are therefore politically insecure. Pranab Mukherjee entered the Lok Sabha for the first time, possibly with help from the Marxists. In any case he and Priya Ranjan Das Munshi represent a state where the Congress has just been relegated to third position in the election for mayor in Kolkata. Ghulam Nabi represents neither Kashmir nor Muslims and Sayeed neither tribals nor Muslims, which is why both prefer silence on issues of their community and cannot help the party get a single Muslim vote in UP and Bihar. Bhardwaj is a good minister but politically insignificant in Madhya Pradesh or indeed anywhere else. Mahavir Prasad, if you recognise his name, brings nothing from the Dalits although he is in the Cabinet because he is a Dalit. Sisram Ola is not, trust me, going to set Indian politics on fire.

Only three Congress Cabinet ministers lend genuine weight to the party at the electoral level: Shankersinh Vaghela, S. Jaipal Reddy and Kamal Nath. All are men who have fed from the grassroots, irrespective of where they may have come from. Vaghela and Reddy helped revive their party in their states and deserve their place in power; Kamal Nath lost his state but will be part of the revival if it is to come. The Congress is in power because it won handsomely in four states: Andhra, Assam, Delhi and Haryana. If you look at the numbers, Andhra alone has more seats than the other three combined. In other words, there is a great deal of work to be done.

The task before Sonia Gandhi is so obvious that it hardly needs reiteration. She has to revive the electoral fortunes of her party through a proper management of power. She needs ministers who can deliver in both their portfolios and their states. A Nehru or an Indira Gandhi Cabinet always kept a little space for techno-competence, a Krishnamachari or a Kumaramangalam, but it was packed with leaders who were there not because either liked them but because they could deliver for the party.

Indira Gandhi once put her worst enemy, a man who had contested on the Janata ticket against her in a crucial byelection from Chikmagalur, Veerendra Patil into her Cabinet. He was more shocked than anyone else. But that sustained the Congress in his state, Karnataka, so she did it. Who among Sonia Gandhi’s preferred aces can add a single vote to the party? Natwar Singh is an excellent individual, but Rajasthan is beyond his reach. We have discussed the value of Azad and Sayeed, the two prominent Muslims. That is only the beginning of the syndrome, hardly the end of it. This is not personal judgment. These are obvious facts.

Now consider this. It is common knowledge in Delhi that a shuffle is imminent, and lists of hopefuls are doing the rounds. No one knows what Mrs Gandhi is going to do, but we do hear the names of the hopefuls high on her alleged list. Which are the names at the Cabinet level? A.K. Antony, Satish Sharma, Motilal Vohra, Ambika Soni, Ahmed Patel. What do they have in common? You guessed it. They are all Rajya Sabha members. The same is true of candidates for minister of state. Being in the Rajya Sabha does not automatically make you irrelevant. Antony deserves a place in the system and Ambika Soni has done sterling work while guiding Sonia Gandhi through the political marsh. But if you consider the problem coolly, you have to conclude that whatever happens in this shuffle, it will be certain individuals who will gain and not the party. And if useless sycophants are rewarded rather than politicians of genuine capability then a state like Andhra could well plummet as Karnataka has done.

Is this because the Congress has no genuine leaders who connect with the voter? If that be true, then the party cannot be revived in the large areas of the country where it has become fallow. It is not obituary time yet for the Congress.

But. It came to power by accident. It should not lose power through complacency.

Man of Irony

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: Man of Irony

Could President Pervez Musharraf ever have imagined, when he asked us to think out of the box, that a BJP leader like Lal Krishna Advani would leap out of the box and land at the doorstep of Mohammad Ali Jinnah? Peace has its compulsions no less dramatic than war.

When irony invites paradox for dinner, you can be certain it will be a riotous feast. We underestimate the subtlety of irony if we see no further than the obvious. L.K. Advani’s epiphany on the road to Pakistan is not ironic. It is an evolutionary, well-conceived step designed to serve more than one purpose.

An immediate objective is evident. By going to Pakistan, and praising Jinnah’s famous speech at the Constituent Assembly, Advani stimulated the bipartisan peace process. It was proof that you do not have to be in power to contribute to policy. As Advani notes, peace is built on trust, and you cannot gain a Pakistani’s trust by demonising the father of that nation. But the episode is much more than a diplomatic gesture. Consciously or otherwise, Advani has also sought to exorcise demons from a discourse that has punished the subcontinent with war, and condemned Indian Muslims to trauma and riots.

The reaction within the BJP, which has milked belligerence against both Pakistan and Indian Muslims, confirms the power of the Advani swivel. Advani is not a traitor to his cause. He believes that it is time his cause grew up and acquired a more mature rationale for existence. The dialectic of conflict can take you only so far, and the BJP has reached that point. It must now seek a dialectic of inclusion. This fits in with a larger conviction that the only way forward for the subcontinent is within the secular space. He was also reminding Pakistan of the Jinnah that many Pakistanis prefer to forget, the Jinnah who wanted a democratic, secular Republic of Pakistan.

The irony lies not in the action, but in the reaction.

Let us examine the worst. Praveen Togadia, whose face boils over with hatred at less provocation, decided that Advani had become a "traitor". Acharya Giriraj Kishore, whose beard camouflages his feelings but whose eyes are a giveaway, was livid that Jinnah had been called secular.

Ours is a free country. We even allow the freedom to hate, though not the freedom to be violent. Such reactions from these eminences were predictable. What was interesting was how the term "secular" had become, almost surreptitiously, a positive word in their terminology. How? They hated the thought that Advani had praised Jinnah as secular; ergo, "secular" was a positive attribute which they wanted to deny Jinnah.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that the one thing that the Togadias and Kishores hated was "secularism", that Gandhian concoction under which Muslims had been made free and equal citizens of a Hindu-majority India. "Secularism", a sort of Leftist-Congress disease, was, in their lexicon, a synonym for hypocrisy, anti-Indian and anti-Hindu behaviour. It was reassuring therefore to learn that Togadia and Kishore considered secularism a virtue, and did not want to extend the compliment to their favourite bogey, Jinnah.

Their compatriot in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Mahant Avichaldasji, has decided to launch a movement demanding the resignation of Advani from the Lok Sabha because he has "deceived" the Hindus. He is also upset that Advani called the day of the destruction of the Babri Masjid the saddest day of his life, and claims that the voters do not want Advani anymore.

Advani was elected from Gandhinagar, capital of Gujarat. What greater irony could there be than the fact that a city named after Gandhi, a Gujarati, should seek to reject Advani because he spoke a language that Gandhi would have understood? Gandhinagar has become a measure of Gujarat’s betrayal of Gandhi. The parallel irony of course is that Advani helped create such a voter, and now is being asked to pay the price of his own past.

Which, neatly, brings us to the next irony: Advani, who sparked the revival of the BJP in the second half of the Eighties with the Ram Mandir movement, had become to Pakistanis what Jinnah was to Indians, the object of a hate-cult. The role reversal has a particular piquancy. One can sense the depth of shock within the BJP. They had barely managed to digest the liberalism of Atal Behari Vajpayee, and now they were being confronted with a recast Advani. Who can remain stable when the world totters at both the North Pole and the South Pole?

The poles shook similarly when Jinnah made his speech on 11 August 1947: after having created a nation for Muslims, he rejected the idea of a Muslim nation in the sense of a theocratic state. Pakistan, he said, would become a great nation only if every citizen had "equal rights, privileges and obligations". He continued: "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan… You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State…"

But of course the debate that Advani has started over Jinnah, is not a debate about Pakistan but a debate about India, which takes irony to unprecedented heights. It is a debate with many contours around a central question: was Jinnah solely responsible for the partition of India? Who destroyed the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946, often called the last chance for Indian unity? How much did newly-elected Congress president Jawaharlal Nehru’s press conference in Mumbai on 10 July 1946, where he withdrew from the Congress commitment, affect the unity of India? (Azad was deeply upset by Nehru’s remarks and Sardar Patel wrote to D.P. Mishra on 29 July that Jawaharlal’s "emotional insanity" had wrecked everything.) How justified was Nehru in his conviction that to provide guarantees to one community would open a Pandora’s box from which India might never recover. Was the Plan itself too fragile to last? These might seem, after all these years, questions of detail, the trees preventing us from seeing the wood. But there is a basic question we cannot escape: how did a man who never believed in communal politics deliver a nation for a community? Did he change? Was he driven into that corner? Such questions will never be answered satisfactorily as long as the politics of bias shapes our "facts".

A politician with an inclusive attitude often rejects certain facts for the larger good. Dr B.R. Ambedkar has become an icon to Dalits. Will any leader of an Indian political party, with any sense, seek to hurt the Dalits by picking on some elements of Ambedkar’s politics, like cooperation with the British, or will he woo Dalit sentiment by recalling the extraordinary contribution Ambedkar made to the psychological uplift of his people?

The debate has a second hinge: is our future best protected by a secular, inclusive spirit, or by separatist urges? This question is relevant internally, for all nations of the subcontinent are divided by competing identities, as well as externally, for only a common commitment to a secular spirit will enable India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to cooperate as politically sovereign and economically inter-dependent nations. So far, the separatist urge has controlled our fortunes, literally: "fortune" is a word of economics.

It is a question that Advani has addressed to his own party much more than to others, and legitimately so. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, predecessor of the BJP, belongs to the third phase of the Hindutva movement. The first phase was a search for renaissance and reform, and came to an end with the death of Swami Dayanand Saraswati. The second saw the institutionalisation of this search. In 1907, a year after the Muslim League was created, the United Bengal Hindu Movement and the Punjab Hindu Sabha were born. At the Lahore Congress session of 1909 the Hindu Sabha was formally recognised as a Congress forum. The RSS replaced the Sabha as the institutional force after its formation in 1926. The third phase began after the tears of partition, with the birth of the Jana Sangh in 1952. It was a mirror-image of the Pakistan demand, for it sought power for Hindus in India in the way that Muslims had established their base in Pakistan. Five decades later the president of the BJP is telling his party to move away from the 20th century and into the 21st.

It is a debate that will be welcomed by Indian Muslims, who have long been burdened by the "guilt" of partition. The Congress, paradoxically rather than ironically, has been as insistent upon demanding this price as the Hindutva parties, creating a tribe of "Congress Muslims" whose rise to power has often been in direct proportion to their ability to pour venom upon Jinnah. Once again, it is time to move on.

I have been wondering which is the greater irony: that both Jinnah and Gandhi were Gujaratis, or that both Jinnah and Advani were from Karachi. Whatever the answer, of this I am certain. The BJP’s Man of Iron has become India’s Man of Irony.

Jinnah

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: Jinnah

Ambition and frustration are two reasons commonly suggested in India, but they are not enough to create a new nation. Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed. What happened, for instance, to the Constitution that the Congress was meant to draft in 1928? On the other hand, Congress leaders felt that commitments on the basis of any community would lead to extortion from every community. The only exception made was for Dalits, then called Harijans.

"Well, young man. I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria."

The young man was a journalist, Durga Das. The older man was Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The reference is from Durga Das’ classic book, India from Curzon to Nehru and After. Jinnah said this after the 1920 Nagpur session, where Gandhi’s non-cooperation resolution was passed almost unanimously.

On 1 October 1906, 35 Muslims of "noble birth, wealth and power" called on the fourth earl of Minto, Curzon’s successor as Viceroy of India. They were led by the Aga Khan and used for the first time a phrase that would dominate the history of the subcontinent in the 20th century: the "national interests" of Indian Muslims. They wanted help against an "unsympathetic" Hindu majority. They asked, very politely, for proportional representation in jobs and separate seats in councils, municipalities, university syndicates and high court benches. Lord Minto was happy to oblige. The Muslim League was born in December that year at Dhaka, chaired by Nawab Salimullah Khan, who had been too ill to join the 35 in October. The Aga Khan was its first president.

The Aga Khan wrote later that it was "freakishly ironic" that "our doughtiest opponent in 1906" was Jinnah, who "came out in bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done… He was the only well-known Muslim to take this attitude… He said that our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself".

On precisely the same dates that the League was formed in Dhaka, Jinnah was in nearby Calcutta with 44 other Muslims and roughly 1,500 Hindus, Christians and Parsis, serving as secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, president of the Indian National Congress. Dadabhai was too ill to give his address, which had been partially drafted by Jinnah and was read out by Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

Sarojini Naidu, who met the 30-year-old Jinnah for the first time here, remembered him as a symbol of "virile patriotism". Her description is arguably the best there is: "Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emancipation, languid and luxurious of habit, Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s attenuated form is a deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman’s, a humour gay and winning as child’s … a shy and splendid idealism which is of the very essence of the man."

Jinnah entered the central legislative council in Calcutta (the capital of British India then) on 25 January 1910, along with Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and Motilal Nehru. Lord Minto expected the council to rubber stamp "any measures we may deem right to introduce". Jinnah’s maiden speech shattered such pompousness. He rose to defend another Gujarati working for his people in another colony across the seas, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Jinnah expressed "the highest pitch of indignation and horror at the harsh and cruel treatment that is meted out to Indians in South Africa". Minto objected to a term such as "cruel treatment". Jinnah responded at once: "My Lord! I should feel much inclined to use much stronger language." Lord Minto kept quiet.

On March 7, 1911 Jinnah introduced what was to become the first non-official Act in British Indian history, the Wakf Validating Bill, reversing an 1894 decision on wakf gifts. Muslims across the Indian empire were grateful.

Jinnah attended his first meeting of the League in Bankipur in 1912, but did not become a member. He was in Bankipur to attend the Congress session. When he went to Lucknow a few months later as a special guest of the League (it was not an annual session), Sarojini Naidu was on the platform with him. The bitterness that divided India did not exist then. Dr M.A. Ansari, Maulana Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan attended the League session of 1914, and in 1915, the League tent had a truly unlikely guest list: Madan Mohan Malviya, Surendranath Banerjea, Annie Besant, B.G. Horniman, Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma Gandhi. When Jinnah did join the League in 1913, he insisted on a condition, set out in immaculate English, that his "loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated" (Jinnah: His Speeches and Writings, 1912-1917, edited by Sarojini Naidu). Gokhale that year honoured Jinnah with a phrase that has travelled through time: it is "freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him (Jinnah) the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". In the spring of 1914 Jinnah chaired a Congress delegation to London to lobby Whitehall on a proposed Council of India Bill.

When Gandhi landed in India in 1915, Jinnah, as president of the Gujarat Society (the mahatmas of both India and Pakistan were Gujaratis), spoke at a garden party to welcome the hero of South Africa. Jinnah was the star of 1915. At the Congress and League sessions, held in Mumbai at the same time, he worked tirelessly with Congress president Satyendra Sinha and Mazharul Haque (a Congressman who presided over the Muslim League that year) for a joint platform of resolutions. Haque and Jinnah were heckled so badly at the League session by mullahs that the meeting had to be adjourned. It reconvened the next day in the safer milieu of the Taj Mahal Hotel. The next year Jinnah became president of the League for the first time, at Lucknow.

Motilal Nehru, in the meantime, worked closely with Jinnah in the council. When the munificent Motilal convened a meeting of fellow-legislators at his handsome mansion in Allahabad in April, he considered Jinnah "as keen a nationalist as any of us. He is showing his community the way to Hindu-Muslim unity". It was from this meeting in Allahabad that Jinnah went for a vacation to Darjeeling and the summer home of his friend Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit (French merchants had nicknamed Dinshaw’s small-built grandfather petit and it stuck) and met 16-year-old Ruttie. I suppose a glorious view of the Everest encouraged romance. When Ruttie became 18 she eloped and on 19 April 1918 they were married. Ruttie’s Parsi family disowned her, she separated from Jinnah a decade later. (The wedding ring was a gift from the Raja of Mahmudabad.)

As president Jinnah engineered the famous Lucknow Pact with Congress president A.C. Mazumdar. In his presidential speech Jinnah rejoiced that the new spirit of patriotism had "brought Hindus and Muslims together … for the common cause". Mazumdar announced that all differences had been settled, and Hindus and Muslims would make a "joint demand for a Representative Government in India".

Enter Gandhi, who never entered a legislature, and believed passionately that freedom could only be won by a non-violent struggle for which he would have to prepare the masses.

In 1915 Gokhale advised Gandhi to keep "his ears open and his mouth shut" for a year, and see India. Gandhi stopped in Calcutta on his way to Rangoon and spoke to students. Politics, he said, should never be divorced from religion. The signal was picked by Muslims planning to marry politics with religion in their first great campaign against the British empire, the Khilafat movement.

Over the next three years Gandhi prepared the ground for his version of the freedom struggle: a shift from the legislatures to the street; a deliberate use of religious imagery to reach the illiterate masses through symbols most familiar to them (Ram Rajya for the Hindus, Khilafat for the Muslims); and an unwavering commitment to the poor peasantry, for whom Champaran became a miracle. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919 provided a perfect opportunity; Indian anger reached critical mass. Gandhi led the Congress towards its first mass struggle, the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1921.

The constitutionalist in Jinnah found mass politics ambitious, and the liberal in him rejected the invasion of religion in politics. When he rose to speak at the Nagpur session in 1920, where Gandhi moved the non-cooperation resolution, Jinnah was the only delegate to dissent till the end among some 50,000 "surging" Hindus and Muslims. He had two principal objections. The resolution, he said, was a de facto declaration of swaraj, or complete independence, and although he agreed completely with Lala Lajpat Rai’s indictment of the British government he did not think the Congress had, as yet, the means to achieve this end; as he put it, "it is not the right step to take at this moment … you are committing the Indian National Congress to a programme which you will not be able to carry out". (Gandhi, after promising swaraj within a year, withdrew the Non-Cooperation Movement in the wake of communal riots in Kerala and of course the famous Chauri Chaura incident in 1922. Congress formally adopted full independence as its goal only in 1931.) His second objection was that non-violence would not succeed. In this Jinnah was wrong.

There is a remarkable sub-text in this speech, which has never been commented upon, at least to my knowledge. When Jinnah first referred to Gandhi, he called him "Mr Gandhi". There were instant cries of "Mahatma Gandhi". Without a moment’s hesitation, Jinnah switched to "Mahatma Gandhi". Later, he referred to Mr Mohammad Ali, the more flamboyant of the two Ali Brothers, both popularly referred to as Maulana. There were angry cries of "Maulana". Jinnah ignored them. He referred at least five times more to Ali, but each time called him only Mr Mohammad Ali.

Let us leave the last word to Gandhi. Writing in Harijan of 8 June 1940, Gandhi said, "Quaid-e-Azam himself was a great Congressman. It was only after the non-cooperation that he, like many other Congressmen belonging to several communities, left. Their defection was purely political." In other words, it was not communal. It could not be, for almost every Muslim was with Gandhi when Jinnah left the Congress.

History might be better understood if we did not treat it as a heroes-and-villains movie. Life is more complex than that. The heroes of our national struggle changed sometimes with circumstances. The reasons for the three instances I cite are very different; their implications radically at variance. I am not making any comparisons, but only noting that leaders change their tactics. Non-violent Gandhi, who broke the empire three decades later, received the Kaiser-I-Hind medal on 3 June 1915 (Tagore was knighted the same day) for recruiting soldiers for the war effort. Subhas Bose, ardently Gandhian in 1920, put on uniform and led the Indian National Army with support from Fascists. Jinnah, the ambassador of unity, became a partitionist.

The question that should intrigue us is why. Ambition and frustration are two reasons commonly suggested in India, but they are not enough to create a new nation. Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed. What happened, for instance, to the Constitution that the Congress was meant to draft in 1928? On the other hand, Congress leaders felt that commitments on the basis of any community would lead to extortion from every community. The only exception made was for Dalits, then called Harijans.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who remained opposed to partition even after Nehru and Patel had accepted it as inevitable, places one finger on the failed negotiations in United Provinces after the 1936-37 elections, and a second on the inexplicable collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which would have kept India united - inexplicable because both the Congress and the Muslim League had accepted it. The plan did not survive a press conference given by Nehru. Jinnah responded with the unbridled use of the communal card, and there was no turning back.

A deeply saddened Gandhi spurned 15 August 1947 as a false dawn (to quote Faiz). He spent the day not in celebrations in Delhi but in fasting at Calcutta. Thanks to Gandhi - and H.S. Suhrawardy - there were no communal riots in Calcutta in 1947.

Facts are humbling. They prevent you from jumping to conclusions.

Surprise, Surprise!

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar : Surprise, Surprise!

Never underestimate the magnetic power of a sideshow. While the crosscurrents of history sweep through the larger stage, and Hurriyat does what was unthinkable day before yesterday and unacceptable yesterday; while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Pervez Musharraf lift the spirit of their language far above the stodgy bureaucratic wrangling that must inevitably inform discussions on detail; while the leader of the Indian Opposition and an architect of the Ram Mandir movement, Lal Krishna Advani, apologises for the destruction of the Babri mosque during a visit to Pakistan; Gohar Ayub Khan, son of Field Marshal Ayub Khan, pinches some of the headlines with the titillating claim that an Indian brigadier sold India’s 1965 war plans.

Who is this top spy? Mr Khan refuses to reveal the identity but strews the path with teasing hints. The spy is still alive. His wife needed the money for a hobby, canning fruits. The payment was made in London, through the Pak military attaché there, Brigadier Said Ghaus. The plan was so comprehensive that for a while Ayub Khan even suspected it to be a plant and had it double-checked by other intelligence assets in Delhi. The plan envisaged the Indian Army falling back behind the Beas in case of reverses. In later interviews Gohar Khan, never without a Frontier twinkle in his eye, said that the brigadier was director of military operations between 1951 and 1958. I saw one Indian television news interview in which Mr Khan blithely claimed that everything relevant on the table of the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru eventually reached his father, Ayub Khan.

As an Indian I was terribly reassured by this last statement, since Nehru was not Prime Minister of India during the 1965 war: Lal Bahadur Shastri had been Prime Minister for some sixteen months when Ayub Khan launched Operation Gibraltar in the autumn of 1965, and sank this subcontinent into an era of economic stagnation and human despair from which we are at long last making a serious effort to recover. Alas, the television interviewer did not mention this to Mr Gohar Khan. It might have clouded at least some of those twinkles. It is possible, however, that the TV interviewer himself did not know this. Presumably the papers on Shastri’s table were safe.

My problem with the story is not that Gohar Khan made these claims, but the effortlessness with which journalists swallowed them. Even a cursory check with common sense induces cynicism. If the Great Indian Spy (henceforth to be codenamed Gus, a variation of GIS) was brigadier in 1951 he must be in his Nineties now, and twenty thousand rupees in the Fifties must have bought a lot of cans for fruit. But these are negligible objections.

Field Marshal Ayub Khan was a Sandhurst graduate and saw action in the Second World War. People have called him many names, from hero to villain, but no one as yet has called him a fool. While every Army has standard operational plans against any neighbour deemed to be hostile, or even deemed to be friendly, to call something written in the Fifties the war plan for 1965, is about as absurd as it gets. It is even more stupid to believe that there can be anything like a comprehensive plan, for the simple reason that no one knows where the enemy will concentrate its strike, unless of course some Gus has told you. The alleged plan on Ayub Khan’s desk could not have been much use because India had no intention of starting a war in 1965. (This is in contrast to 1971, when India had every intention of starting a war, and a Gus in 1971 would have been extremely useful to President Yahya Khan. But like Shastri’s desk, Indira Gandhi’s desk was also clearly beyond the reach of any Gus.)

I know it is currently unfashionable to be aware of history, particularly the history of your own country, but there was a pretty startling episode in the history of the Indian Army between the Fifties and 1965. This was the war against China in 1962 in which the Indian Army was humiliated and India humbled. The catastrophe of 1962 came near to taking Nehru’s job; his defence minister Krishna Menon did have to pay a heavy price. The Army command inevitably was churned up. Once again, would any general in Pakistan with minimum IQ have believed that a document of the Fifties would have survived the rethinking and revaluation that took place after 1962? General Ayub Khan was not such a dud as to base operational plans for 1965 on intelligence purchased in the Fifties, if indeed there was any such Brigadier who sold any such plan. For starters, the Indian Army of 1965 was a very different force from the Army of the Fifties and indeed of 1962.

Here is a key question for Gohar Khan. If the Brigadier had given Ayub Khan the full Indian plan for the 1965 war, how come Pakistan was surprised by the Indian thrust across the international border, and shocked by the fact that Indian troops reached the Ichogil Canal? A war plan that did not include what happened was not much of a plan, was it?

There were three surprises in the 1965 war. Perhaps, in hindsight, neither side should have been surprised, but neither country had enough foresight. The first surprise was Operation Gibraltar, in which the 7,000-strong Gibraltar Force began to slip across the Cease Fire Line in twos and threes from the morning of 7 August 1965 with the objective of sabotage, disruption, distribution of arms and the creation of conditions for a mass, armed uprising in the Kashmir valley. The objective conditions seemed right for such a move. The Indian Army was still reeling from the shock of 1962. The valley was in turmoil, particularly after the disappearance of the Mo-e-Muqaddas (the hair of the Prophet) from the Hazratbal shrine in the last week of December 1963. Its recovery, and, more important, acceptance that the recovery was genuine, calmed matters for a while but convinced Nehru that Sheikh Abdullah’s long imprisonment was a costly mistake. The Sheikh was released in April, and in May — after consultations with Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Jaya Prakash Narayan and C. Rajagopalachari — introduced the novel idea of a confederation of India, Pakistan and Kashmir. On 23 May 1964 the Sheikh went to Pakistan to sell his three-nation theory, but Ayub Khan was in no mood to purchase uncertain goods. On 26 May however the Sheikh did announce that there would be a Nehru-Ayub summit.

On 27 May 1964 Nehru died, and the Congress began to backtrack, leaving the Sheikh furious. On 15 January 1965 the Sheikh said in a public speech that the peaceful agitation might not remain peaceful forever. He went on a Haj trip with political ramifications, meeting Chou en Lai (the visit was arranged by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto), and returned to India in May to find rearrest awaiting him.

By this time, Pakistan had tested Indian arms, with success, when fighting broke out in the Rann of Kutch on 9 April, and there were hopes of greater success when Gibraltar was launched. Instead, the Kashmiris, for the most part, supported the Indian response, which included moving to block the passes through which the Gibraltar force had come. But if Gibraltar failed, the second Pak punch, Operation Grand Slam, commanded by Major-General Akhtar Hussain Malik, launched on 1 September, was a stunning success. The bridge across Chenab lay in front of 7 Division and Jammu was at its mercy, with the possibility that the Indian Army in the valley would be surrounded and cut off. At this point something totally inexplicable happened. Malik, the hero of the hour, was shifted to Kargil and Major-General Yahya Khan was told to take command in mid-battle. While Pakistan soldiers were waiting for the code word to move forward, headquarters was playing favourites. (The memoirs of General Mohammad Musa are illuminating.) The stalled Pak offensive reached Jaurian only on 5 September, and despite orders to take Akhnur as quickly as possible, Yahya Khan dallied. He gave India the only thing she needed, time.

On 6 September India opened a front from Sialkot to Kasur, and it became a different story. This was the second surprise. It was Pakistan’s turn to be outflanked. It is true that India’s Army chief General Chaudhry had contemplated, during those days in which the situation seemed hopeless, that India consolidate behind the Beas, but his colleagues would not consider what would have been an abject surrender of Punjab. Punjab meant something to Sikhs like General Harbaksh Singh. Rather than retreating from Amritsar, they took the war into Lahore.

Gohar Khan exaggerates the role of one driver and his accident, which he says, prevented Pak armour from breaking through on the Punjab front. More sensible accounts talk of the lugubrious nature of tank movement. Suffice to say that Indian generals found a brilliant tactic: they stalled the heavy Patton tanks (heroes of the Second World War) by flooding the monsoon-moist fields of Punjab, and then poured withering fire on the trapped elephants in a decisive battle known in India as "Asal Uttar" (the Real Answer). This was the third surprise.

No plan can ever contemplate such realities.

Seven Deadly Sins

Seven Deadly Sins commited by Media has eroded its credibility.

These SEVEN SINS are:

* Media owners, journalists becoming players in game of business and politics
* Bias in various guises
* Pomposity of journalists
* Seriousness generating boredom in readers
* Triumph of trivia
* News on sale
* Ignorance

I feel the media owners and journalists who became willing players in the game of business and politics were committing a major sin.

The second sin is 'Bias' which is projected in various guises. The third one is pomposity which led scribes to think that they are more important than the reader.In the name of seriousness, many newspapers are generating boredom among the readers.

I presume, “A newspaper is like a thali where you have the main course along with pickles; The thali remains incomplete without pickles but it is suicidal to confuse it with rice”. Another ‘deadly sin’ is the idea of “news on sale”. The sacredness of news space had been compromised in this process. The seventh sin is ignorance which is strongly prevalent among the new generation of journalists.

- M.J. Akbar
(From Hyderabad, at the national round table on “Lakshman Rekha for the News Media)

Saturday Morning Fever

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar : Saturday Morning Fever

Indonesia, unlike India or the United States, permits cameras in the courtroom. And so a verdict against a pretty 26-year-old Australian beautician, Schapelle Corby, was a star story on the pre-dawn news bulletins of the principal bastions of Anglo-American television, BBC and CNN. The essentials of the case were not disputed. Corby, travelling from her home airport, Brisbane, to Sydney and Denpasar in Bali, was caught by Indonesian customs officials with 4.1 kilograms of marijuana in an open bag. The judgment of the court however aroused extraordinary passions.

Corby pleaded innocent. As a cynic might say, she would, wouldn’t she. To do anything else would have been an invitation to a death penalty. Indonesia, like other nations of the region, Singapore, Malaysia and China, has strict anti-drug laws. Four kilograms of marijuana is serious. The prosecution demanded the death penalty.

The defence, which had no evidence for Corby’s innocence, spun a great deal of theory. It suggested that the drugs had been planted in the open bag, possibly by a ring that wanted it to be picked up by an accomplice in the Sydney airport baggage area. "For some reason" defence counsel argued, the marijuana took the flight to Bali. Such presumed innocence is accepted as fact by 90% of Australians (including actor Russell Crowe) and has set off hysteria against Indonesia. Corby is the beautiful white flower of innocence while Indonesia is the cesspool of brown Asian corruption, intent on collective vengeance against the distraught Corby. Australian media did note earlier that Corby had a history of drug abuse, but that has been quietly eliminated from most of Australian media (but not all; serious newspapers have taken admirably objective editorial positions). However, the feeding frenzy is at its greediest. There is little time for questions. Why ask who left the bag open, or whether open bags are normal behaviour for Australians heading for a holiday in Bali. Since the bag was caught at customs, it must have been taken there by Corby: didn’t she notice a difference of four kilograms in weight?

Corby’s mother, Rosleigh Rose, and her sister, Mercedes, were in court when Judge Linton Sivait sentenced Corby to 20 years in prison. Their faces were contorted with virulent rage. Liar, shouted Rose at the judge. In any American or Indian court she would have joined her daughter in prison, for contempt of court. Here she was permitted to take her venom to the world via media. One phrase of hers stuck in the mind above the din. She looked at the judge and shouted that "Your people" are the ones who are really guilty.

Your people. People who are brown and Asian and Muslim.

From Japan came a story out of Reader’s Digest. Two veterans of the Panthers Division, Yoshio Yamakawa, 87, and Tsuzuki Nakauchi, 83, have been found in the mountains of Mindanao in south Philippines, where they may or may not know that World War II is over. It was thought that the last such Japanese veteran, Lt. Hiroo Onoda, emerged out of the caves in 1974. However, Yamakawa and Nakauchi might have simply integrated into the local community and even been of service to them. How?

They are living with the Muslim rebels of Philippines who are engaged in an armed struggle against the state, and could always do with help in military training.

No one really believes in opinion polls anymore, but no one has the courage to discount them either. Twenty-four hours before the voters of France decide to accept or reject the new Constitution of the European Union, conceived by France and Germany and now expanded to 25 nations, the polls suggest that "no" might win. This will be considered a catastrophe for the world’s bravest idea of the last century. As one commentator put it, a few thousand swing votes could decide the fate of 450 million people. All is not lost. As one Frenchman put it so charmingly, "My head is not made yet. I think I decide on Sunday."

Why the surge towards "no"? The reasons are many, from 10% unemployment to the proposed extension of the 35-hour-week to dislike of Chirac. But the key to the anger is the creation of a supranational state in which foreign policy will be controlled by Brussels. The French, already furious that the Poles are taking their jobs, are dreading the possibility that Brussels might allow the 70 million Muslims of Turkey into the European Union.

Turks are "Your people".

A blackout in Moscow left life in tatters for a day. Saturday’s bulletin reported that the Muslim Chechens demanding independence from Russia had claimed responsibility for the blast that blew up the power station and created havoc in the capital. I read a piece in the International Herald Tribune by Mark Medish, senior director in the US National Security Council for Russian, Ukranian and Eurasian Affairs in 2000-1. He was walking with his father, a world war veteran, in the Russian city of Krasnodar when he was picked up by the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB and interrogated for three hours for taking pictures of the local police building. After threats, questions and videotape they were released and told, "You should know about the extraordinary security situation in the Northern Caucasus."

Translation: Haven’t you heard about the Muslim rebellion of Chechnya?

Images follow of breast beating and mourning in Pakistan. A suicide bomber has attacked Shias gathered at the Bari Imam shrine of Shah Abdul Latif Kazmi, patron saint of Islamabad. The bomber had two kilograms of explosive strapped to his chest and flew through the air after the blast. 19 people died and over 65 were wounded. A grim President Pervez Musharraf called the suicide bomber a "religious terrorist".

In Pakistan, your people and my people even among one people.

Kashmir shut down on Friday to protest the desecration of the Holy Quran at the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay. Stories about such desecration by Americans have been appearing for a while now. In March 2000 prisoners went on hunger strike in protest. Former prisoners like Aryat Vahitov and Abdallah Tabarak have narrated behaviour that will only inflame passions if described. The Red Cross has confirmed other incidents. Why did a small item in Newsweek, semi-denied by its editors, catch fire across the world? Why does no Muslim believe the denial or accept George Bush’s word that no disrespect was ever meant? Not because Imran Khan held a press conference in Pakistan to encourage anger, but because Washington no longer has any credibility among Muslims. No one believes that America is in Iraq to save democracy; particularly not the Iraqis. The insurgency was supposed to have been crushed by now; the number of daily attacks is somewhere over 70. America’s death toll continues to mount, even on Saturday’s pre-dawn bulletin. No one counts Iraqi casualties. Iraqis don’t count.

Lebanon. It is an orderly political meeting. Rows of dignitaries are seated on chairs lined in neat rows. It is all utterly respectable. At the microphone appears Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, leader of the Hezbollah. This meeting is being held to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, often described as the only Israeli defeat since the loss of Sinai to Egypt in the 1973 war. In Lebanon, victory was claimed by Hezbollah. Sheikh Nasrallah says that he has 12,000 rockets under his command, all trained at Israel and warned that the war was not over. CNN then showed a video, shot by five cameras, on how to make a devastating bomb from chemicals you can pick up from your nearest chemist, put it into a simple pouch, strap it to your body, and — bang!

A war of the people.

The last major story mixed pleasure with business. The share price of the major pharmaceutical multinational Pfizer went down after a certain Dr Howard Powerantz reported with what I thought was a gleam in his eye (but I could be prejudiced) that he had found 40 cases of loss of direct or peripheral vision among over-50s after they had taken Viagra. Pfizer countered, as might be expected, vigorously. Some 23 million users had benefited from Viagra in the last seven years, the company said. In 2004 alone Viagra had earned Pfizer $1.7 billion in sales. The 40 alleged cases therefore were a minuscule sample. My own view is that the men were simply affected by shock of out-of-practice ecstasy. This is what the blinding flash of lightning is probably all about.

This was the only story of the early morning on Saturday in which Muslims were not being hated, or killed, or killing each other, or preparing to die. And even this story was depressing.

Victimorious: Only Victim is the Voter!

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar : Victimorious

The Indian voter has a simple formula for Indian democracy: he votes for himself. This may seem an obvious reality, but there are nuances.

I do not mean that he votes for a party that claims it will serve his interests, for the simple reason that everyone claims the same thing. Every party promises to eliminate poverty, end corruption, provide water and ensure law and order. No party’s manifesto declares that it will pollute the environment, take bribes in defence deals, institutionalise nepotism, incite violence between people for votes and leave you angry, frustrated and miserable after five years.

Since there is not much to choose from in manifestos, the voter needs a different measure to define the difference. It is pertinent to enter a caveat: we are talking about most voters, not every voter. However, since the majority trends determine the result, the qualification is probably irrelevant.

When I said that the voter votes for himself, I meant that he votes for the party or leader that comes closest to his image of himself. The Indian voter used to see himself as poor. As long as this was the case, the sway of the Congress was unassailable, culminating in the massive victory of 1971. By the 1977 election the self-image had switched. The voter now saw himself as a victim. The Emergency of course was a significant reason for the switch, but it was also a sign of greater democratic assertion, and stress on the rights of an individual rather than the largesse of the government. The stability of British rule depended on the concept of the government as mai-baap, both the mother who nourishes and the father who protects. The Congress, as the successor government, inherited that legacy, bolstered additionally by the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was the granddaddy of the national movement. But after 1977, the voter refused to be patronised by the government, or indeed by mere slogans. Instead of the voter being a child of the government, the government, very properly, became the creature of the voter. Good governance, a growing economy, law and order were no longer valued as "gifts" from the sarkar, but as the due right of a voter who had done the politicians a favour by putting them in office.

The Emergency crystallised the shift in self-perception, and because the Emergency was harsher in the North, the shift was more acute in the North. The South however soon caught up, provoked by incidents such as the one in which Andhra Pradesh chief minister T. Anjaiah was seemingly humiliated (I say seemingly, because Congress chief ministers were so obsequious that it was difficult to humiliate them). However, it was when the southern voter also became demanding that N.T. Rama Rao and Rama Krishna Hegde swept the Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.

There is no formula that can apply to every state in a nation as complex as India, but this is a broad rule of a broad thumb if not an absolute dictum. One exception comes to mind easily. In Bengal the Congress looks like a victim, talks like a victim and is a victim, but the Left always wins. The reason is that while you are permitted to be a victim, you are not permitted to be a pathetic victim. The victim must possess the self-respect to assert himself and not sink into shallow depths of self-pity.

Mrs Indira Gandhi lost the elections in 1977 because the Janata Party (conceived in jail, and produced, with much labour, outside) was the ultimate victim. Mrs Gandhi won in the winter of 1980 because in just three years of hunt and misfire, the Janata turned her into a victim. In the next elections, Mrs Gandhi’s assassination was something that the voter easily and powerfully identified with: who could be a greater victim than a martyr for Indian nationalism? In 1989, V.P. Singh donned the mask of a victim. It was a mask, but it worked. In 1991 the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi midway through the elections shifted the balance of seats in favour of the Congress in the South, giving the party just enough ballast to form a minority government. Atal Behari Vajpayee won in 1999 because the one-vote defeat in the Lok Sabha turned him into a "bechara" and he soon added flow of Kargil to his political persona. The BJP lost in 2004 because its spokespersons on television and its interlocutors were too well-fed and spoke in the orotund tones of a success they took for granted. The voter punished smugness by turning towards Mrs Sonia Gandhi, who represented the victim.

This is the difference between the Jayalalithaa of 2004 and the Jayalalithaa of 2005 in Tamil Nadu. Last year she was seen as the woman who had thrown the elderly Karunanidhi into jail, tried to impose her will on the free media, snubbed the bureaucracy and sniffed at a democratic culture. This year — thanks both to the fact that the alliance of her foes is in power in Delhi and is complacently waiting to come to power in Chennai — she is the victim. This transformation was not easy. Ms Jayalalithaa worked hard to refashion her image after her sweeping defeat in 2004. In order to change you first have to have the humility to recognise what is wrong, and then the perspicacity to realise what is right. The second is more difficult than the first. The electorate tells you in detail about the first; the second you have to figure out yourself. In a carefully thought-through process Ms Jayalalithaa re-positioned herself both politically and administratively. She struck at the DMK’s Dravida plank by taking on a symbol of Brahmins. And the competence and concern with which she handled the relief work following the tsunami, re-established her image among the victims of that tragedy (the resonance and connection reappear). The swing that she achieved in two constituencies that she had lost last year is phenomenal. Moreover, she did it alone. She has distanced herself from the BJP in the last year. Her foes, on the other hand, stuck to their alliance. As she put it, she had the coalition of the people behind in the battle against the coalition of the parties. And she did it while remaining in power. In Opposition you have to do nothing to look like a victim.

How many apple carts, and whose, did Ms Jayalalithaa upset? The fruit on the DMK’s cart certainly has a scattered feel to it now. Coalition politics is an ever-changing game of multiple options. Will Mr Karunanidhi be tempted by the apples of Delhi if he begins to believe that he might not become chief minister of Tamil Nadu? Incidentally, reports that he is unwell are exaggerations, or wishful thinking: he is fit enough for a spell in office.

It is curious, but entirely understandable, that no one looks like a victim in the Delhi scenario. The Congress is flexing muscle that it does not possess, as the Bihar elections proved; and stretching its power lines beyond their tensile strength, as Jharkhand and Goa proved. The BJP is amazingly depressed by its defeat, a curious state for a party that never expected to be in power. It has not got its act together, or even selected the scenes that will make up the act.

Dr Manmohan Singh’s government has found its feet, but not discovered a route map or a destination. It is there because it is there. A little more of this and it might get frozen in political cement. The Prime Minister is an honest man. He commemorated the first anniversary of his government by giving himself six out of ten. It might have been seven were it not for the fact that the one area in which his personal expertise is unquestioned, the performance of the government is being questioned.

The growth rate of the GDP has already been formally lowered to 7.5% and could slip below that. The victim-voter is not going to be terribly enthused since employment cannot be reduced unless growth rate is over 8%, and with half of that growth coming from industrial production (the projected share of the service sector in the growth rate is 65%). Industrial production is in fact sinking, and this year’s Budget offers no reason for hope that the curve will change direction.

Curiously, Dr Singh’s one chance of dramatic success, and perhaps the rescue of his government, lies in an area where he has no expertise: Pakistan policy. But to move forward on that dramatic front (the fortunes of peace with Pakistan incidentally are more dramatic than the fortunes of war) needs a Prime Minister who will rise above himself, and carry both his government and his nation towards a historic moment. Will that happen? That is a question that only Dr Singh can answer.

For the moment, the only victim in Indian politics is the voter. He is still awarding grace marks all around, but the day the victim feels that he is being deliberately victimised the silence on the streets will become a murmur, and the murmur will turn into a roar.

The Cotton Revolution

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: The Cotton Revolution

Last week the guardians of the civilised nations gathered in Moscow to commemorate the worst episode of sustained savagery in the history of the world. We do not know the exact figures of dead during the awesome and sweeping victories of a Chengiz Khan or an Amir Taimur between China and eastern Europe, for both victor and vanquished tend to exaggerate, one in pride and the other in anger. The less careful historians take recourse to that useless phrase "countless millions" which is both a tautology and an absurdity. At what point do the millions become "countless"? After twenty? Moreover, the population of the world in the 13th and 14th centuries was not enough to justify such casualties, even though whole cities were wiped out. But the dead of the Second World War, which ended 60 years ago in Europe and a few atom bombs later in Japan, were counted, more or less.

It was entirely appropriate that the political memorial services were being held in Moscow, with the victorious, defeated and bystander nations in attendance. (India was in the curious position of being both a bystander and an activist for reasons we shall address later.) For as much as 70% died in what is known as the eastern front, that vast expanse between Berlin and Moscow. It was on the eastern front and the conflict between Hitler and Stalin that the Second World War was won and lost. Compared to the Soviet Union, Britain and Winston Churchill were secondary players; America was a late but critical arrival and France was hors d’combat — out of the game.

Stalin won the war against Hitler and lost the propaganda against Hollywood. Vladimir Putin, his successor, was making a conscious effort to redress this injustice. A popular impression has been created that the tide began to turn against Hitler with the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944, D-Day. But D-Day only highlights the fact that no one was fighting on the European mainland for most of the war. The British empire retreated from Europe after the humiliations suffered in 1940, symbolised by the escape from Dunkirk and did not return till, bolstered by America, Allied troops crossed into Italy in 1943 and then into France (still with great trepidation) in 1944. The nadir for the British came with the fall of Singapore and the almost contemptuous Japanese victories that brought Emperor Hirohito’s rule up to the Burmese door of India. Japan lost the war when it provoked the United States at Pearl Harbour, and Hitler lost the war when he awakened the Soviet bear. Britain’s contribution to real war came in Africa under Wavell (made Viceroy of India after he was replaced) and Montgomery. More accurately, it was the British empire’s contribution, for empire troops were a critical element of the British armies.

Churchill, in a sense, was more important than Britain. His contribution lay in courage and conviction, and his power lay in rhetoric. It would be foolish to underestimate the importance of such qualities. Defeat begins in the mind and that is where Churchill refused to be defeated. This was in sharp contrast to France, where Marshal Petain, a genuine hero of the first war, compromised with Nazi evil. The figures tell the story: the Soviet Union lost 37 million dead. France does not advertise its casualty figures, although it was as key a battleground as eastern Europe.

America lost around a quarter million, but that is not a true measure of its contribution. Since the war was not fought on American soil it was spared the ravages of civilian agony. This was the true savagery of this horrific war. Nations who called themselves progressive and civilised (vis-à-vis the "barbaric" brown and black people of Asia and Africa) indulged in unprecedented rape and bloodlust against civilians. Women were raped and men killed. Nazi evil acquired an especially racist dimension against Jews and "non-Aryan" blood types such as the gypsies, who were treated as worse than vermin. Wars have always been fought between ruling classes in search of wealth and empire, but extermination of a race has rarely been a war objective. The nearest earlier instance was the Spanish Inquisition which eliminated Muslims and Jews from Spain and Portugal. Muslim kingdoms from Morocco to Ottoman Turkey provided space and shelter not only to the Muslims but also to the Jews who were welcomed as people of the Book and lived in those empires till the 20th century.

The Communists, who understand the relationship between motivation and definition, first ignored the Second World War as a clash between rival capitalist imperialists. Their analysis was right, but their complacency was wrong. Hitler turned towards the big prize, the Soviet Union, after he had occupied and pacified the rest of Europe and swept up to St. Petersburg and Moscow. But when Stalin began to fight back, he defined the war as the Great Patriotic War — a defence of the homeland rather than an offense against Germany. It was a war of liberation from the oppressor.

"Liberation" was a favourite word of the speech-givers in Moscow. But perhaps they should have extended the word into a term in order to complete its meaning. They were talking of self-liberation rather than liberation as a principle. In that sense, it was even a selfish liberation, for to the European powers liberation was never a universal virtue. Britain and France and even Holland and Belgium were the great colonisers in Asia and Africa, happy to brutalise black and brown people as immorally as Germany and Italy and Japan sought to colonise them. It is curious that even the horrors of the Second World War never taught Britain and France that imperialism was wrong and morally unsustainable in a changing world.

France, the weak link of the Allied coalition, and a nation which did very little to deserve the rewards of victory, was particularly insistent that its ravaged colonies be restored to French rule after the Allied victory. This led directly to punishing, wretched wars in Vietnam and Algeria: you put the millions who died directly to France’s account. General Charles de Gaulle, at best a pseudo-hero, was as contemptuous of the colonies of Francophone Africa as any dictator with a heightened sense of self. The Dutch had to be thrown out of Indonesia, which they happily demanded back from the Japanese after having done damn all to defeat Japan or Germany. Belgium, always pernicious in Congo, was eventually kicked out more than a decade later.

The British left India with less grace than they claimed, and might have been more stubborn had not the British electorate delivered a stunning defeat to Churchill in a general election just after he had saved his country from Germany. Churchill had vowed never to preside over the liquidation of the British empire.

Such duplicity (one principle of freedom and independence for Europe and another for the colonies) led inevitably to contradictions. In the same week that Dr Manmohan Singh was in Moscow to applaud the Allies for their victories in Europe, Shyam Benegal released his biopic of Subhas Chandra Bose in which the Indian nationalist’s escape from a British prison in Calcutta and his epic journey to Germany and Japan is a powerful theme. Bose, affectionately called Netaji, or the Leader, had a mature dialogue with Hitler who advised him to fight alongside Japan. Bose agreed, and led 80,000 Indians up to Indian soil before the tide of war changed. It must be stressed that Bose was critical of Nazi genocide against Jews, but he was willing to deal with Hitler as an enemy’s enemy. Does that make Bose a fascist? No. In his estimate, he was negotiating with one enemy to destroy another.

Similar sentiments persuaded Gandhi to keep the Congress out of the British war effort, although Gandhi had absolutely no sympathy for Nazism and was willing to describe Hitler as evil. Gandhi’s position was not quite the paradox it seemed: India would fight beside Britain, but only if permitted to do so as an independent nation. Jawaharlal Nehru took a dimmer view of fascism, and would have joined the war effort, but of course he would never break rank with Gandhi. Jinnah had no qualms about supporting Britain in the darkest days of British despair. The rewards were handsome.

The American President, Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat who was also a democrat, was sympathetic to the colonies and championed the vision of a United Nations (his term) of free countries. But he died before the war ended. His successor Harry Truman wore conventional glasses and remained indifferent to a change that Roosevelt could perceive. And so after the Second World War ended, a genuine world war began, for freedom and liberation of the colonies from imperialists. There was no alliance, but each nation rose in anger and eventually found freedom. During the Cold War many of the former colonies preferred to trust the official anti-imperialism of the Soviet Union to the neo-colonialism of the democratic West, but soon they realised that they had bought into an illusion. As East Europe proved and Afghanistan illustrated, the Soviet Union was an empire-monger as well.

Democracy has become George Bush’s leitmotif. He has all the zeal of a new convert since he discovered democracy only after he failed to discover the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But while zeal has its advantages, it is no substitute for understanding.

There is a basic and critical flaw in Bush’s prescription for the world’s ills. He is right to claim that democracy is the best medicine but he cannot seem to appreciate that democracy is impossible without sovereignty. Democracy is a flower, not a weed. It will bloom only if its conditions are honoured. Strangely, you can have independence without democracy, but you cannot have democracy without independence. The elixir becomes a killer if it is not administered correctly. That is the danger of the American policy in Iraq.

Gandhi understood this perfectly. It is a pity that his name is being erased from the scroll of memory at a time when his ideas have become indispensable. After Moscow Bush went to Georgia where he praised the "Rose Revolution" in which the people of Georgia got rid of dictators through non-violent struggle. This is the new dharma in a post-9/11 world, that even the fight against injustice should be non-violent. Surely the greatest of the non-violent wars was the Cotton Revolution led by Gandhi. It is unlikely that a speechwriter travelling with President Bush will mention the Cotton Revolution. But a speechwriter with Dr Manmohan Singh should have.

The slogan of the French Revolution was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". The cry of the Cotton Revolution was "Liberty, Sovereignty, Non-violence". The Cotton Revolution did not devour its children as the French one did. Instead of unleashing terror it found space for children of many hues and a multiplicity of views, united not by any plastic ideology but by commitment to a nation.

I know that cotton is also called yarn in America, because it is spun. Trust me, President Bush: Gandhi spun a loom around the British empire, but his doctorate was not in spin. Raise a cheer to the Cotton Revolution!

A Provence Diary

Edited & Brought to You by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: A Provence Diary




Do good food and good news taste better when touched by enchanting style and environment? Such questions of high philosophy seem inevitable after a few days in the south of France alias Provence. We are tucked into the first slope above the Mediterranean. Sunset is ahead, the sea behind, and the breeze pampers us from all directions. We overlook the serene village of Valbonne which despite its anonymity boasts of a one-star Michelin restaurant. The village has a modern town hall, ancient streets, a large pharmacy, a modest parking lot and an internet cafe that opens 15 minutes late but is managed with visible sincerity by a young man in constant need of conversation. A swerve of the road later is Mougins, where the chef Alain Llorca offers a 3-star Michelin meal and where Picasso came to die. The chateau which was his last home sits quietly with its memories. Inevitably the locals say that the unique natural light of these mountains drew the painter like a magnet, and to see the spreading blush above the kohl-black mountains long after sunset is to understand why "silhouette" is a French word.

Michelin’s stars are more respected by the discerning than its tyres although the tyres pay for the dilettantes who wander incognito through France checking the quality of levels of the nation’s highest art form, gastronomy. Fewer are aware of what the stars indicate. A restaurant can get only three at best. One star means excellent food. Two indicate that the restaurant is worth a detour. Three stars insist that the restaurant is worth a journey.

In front of us rise the Alps, the highest peaks still glittering with the glowing white glamour of winter. Behind us is the pearl necklace of fairytale beach-towns from St. Tropez to Monaco through Cannes, Antibes and Nice. The chances of seeing a pram are much higher in the touristy afternoons of St. Tropez than a bikini. The place is much too expensive for the young and the beach too public for the rich and famous who remain rich because of their accountants and famous because they stay at home unless summoned by the camera. There is a traffic jam of boats on the shore and villas on the shoreline. Boat to bungalow is via a Bentley. Nudists have their privilege of their own offshore island where you cannot wear clothes even when strolling with a trolley through the foodstore. There is no equality like nudity, which is one more reason for the rich to leave such options alone. And voyeurs must find such freedom simply too boring.

Cannes pouts and waits for its suitors. They come in all shapes, from all directions, enjoy a flirt and return home. Nothing more is expected, nothing more is delivered. Cannes is a strip of four parallel curvaceous lines between sea and mountain: beach, promenade, shops and exit route. The beach is the altar where the sun god is worshipped. Celebrities receive their homage on the promenade with its majestic hotels, paparazzi and throngs of hangers-on. The pantheon of the gods of fashion dwells on the shopping street, the Rue de Antibes. Common sense presides over the exit highway: there is only so much that you can take. The sea is saucer-calm all along the coast but water incidental to its joys. The true deity is the sun, demanding its daily sacrifice of skin and burn from men and women who flock in from the cold, wet, grey, dismal, depressing, dull, driven, regions of north Europe. The coast sparkles with dream towns till Monaco where it swerves south into the upper thigh of Italy, as beautiful a resting place for a tired head as any in the world.

If music is the food of love for Shakespeare then food is the music of love in Provence. To eat such food in a hurry would be a high crime. To expect such food elsewhere would be a misdemeanour. To return to our opening query: is pleasure enhanced by environment? Yes. It’s like love. Looks are not essential; but they always help. Taste buds need nature’s embrace to flower.

Eze is a 12th century village atop an ageless hill perpendicular to the Cote d’ Azur, towering above a sea of shifting colours. Walk the last stretch through dainty shops selling Provence jams and pottery, swing through the high gates and climb the final steps to reach the perch of the golden goat at the pinnacle. This is the Chevre d’Or, the restaurant at the heart of the four-Michelin, 33-suite chateau-hotel. (Hotels can rise above three stars.) The fuss of the waiters at the bar is the first indication that this is going to be an agreeable afternoon. The prices along the wine list suggest otherwise. The problem is quickly sorted out by the maitre d’ who offers an excellent Provencal chilled white and hints, through various facial contortions, but without saying a word, that all sensible guests prefer the local fare. We leave food to his safe hands and are offered the set menu. We are led, for reasons that we cannot fully comprehend but do not want to explore, to the best table with magnificent sea views. The food comes at the pace of a leisurely, sunlit summer afternoon, starting with a palate-searching aperitif that is off the menu. We meander through soup, shellfish, starters, fish, vegetables, meat, port, cheeses, two kinds of dessert, sorbet and coffee. When we rise after three hours we are consumed by the experience.

Note for tourists from our subcontinent heading towards Provence this summer: A brasserie in France is a kind of restaurant and not a kind of brassiere.

What else could disturb a night’s sleep other than politics?

If all politics, as famously said and often repeated in this column, is local, and all coverage is international then surely all results are comparative. The Conservatives managed to get only about as many seats as the much-derided Michael Foot won against Mrs Margaret Thatcher and have broad smiles. Labour has won an unprecedented third term under Tony Blair and is looking as glum as a Frenchman denied his holiday. Joy and sorrow are defined by the distance you have travelled from expectations, and by that yardstick Labour has won but Tony Blair has lost. He was defeated by Iraq. The British electorate might have forgiven him for a war they never wanted but they refused to forgive him for telling lies to justify the war. The percentage of the vote Labour polled, 36, was the lowest ever for a party that went on to form a government. The Tory vote did not rise by much, only .5%. But tactical spread of discontent ensured that their benefits were higher in seats. Tony Blair looked glum and Cherie could not conceal a twitch. Bliar cost Blair his credibility. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall.



Of all the voters who switched Blair could not have cursed anyone more than the 413 whose decision gave a certain George Galloway victory in the Muslim-heavy East London constituency of Bethnal Green. Galloway is a Scotsman who was thrown out of Labour for his strong, almost virulent opposition to Blair’s war. He has been at various times accused of every sin from smoking big cigars to wearing well tailored suits to adultery to friendship with Saddam Hussein. As he told BBC (questioners cannot stop hectoring him) he had met Saddam only twice in ten years — the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld, so what was this friendship all about? Galloway challenged Labour in one of its safest seats: safe not only because of popular support but also because of the control over the local government machinery that the party exercises in the boroughs. Galloway yet got 15,801 votes against Labour’s 14,978. They were separated by 823 votes, so a switch of 413 votes would have ensured that the man who will make Blair’s life miserable would not have reached Parliament. More important, Galloway returns to the limelight. He gave a taste of things to come from the limelight that he loves in his acceptance speech, beamed by BBC at four in the morning: "Mr Blair, this is for Iraq... All the people you have killed and all the lies you have told have come back to haunt you."

Tony Blair has the false strut of a lame duck. Gordon Brown has the smile of a successor. As the French commentator put it, Blair won but it was a short victory. You can’t do a long haul from a short victory.

On Your Marx

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: On Your Marx



‘We have to have a war. I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield."

The quotation is from Marx, but not the Marx you think.

Airline reading has its merits. The books I picked up for my latest long-haul flight were a biography of the world’s most famous orator, Cicero; a biography of the world’s second-most famous conqueror Tamerlane (more correctly, Taimur); and a biography of the world’s most famous comedian, Stefan Kanfer’s Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx. The first two books were inestimable. The third was irresistible. Guess which I began first?

Groucho Marx is not yet forgotten. He can be found in the back shelves of the modern generation’s favourite intellectual haunt, the DVD library. Julius, using the screen-stage name of Groucho (picked up from a cartoon-spoof on Sherlock Holmes called Sherlocko, the Monk), along with three brothers Chico, Harpo and Gummo, lifted popular comedy from vaudeville and placed it among the classics without losing the ravenous insanity of slapstick. The knockabout was not physical. It was intelligent gymnastics that never made the mistake of becoming intellectual.

No victim was out of range. In a sense, if you had not been insulted by this Marxist gang you hadn’t arrived. Their theatre and movies, Animal Crackers, At the Circus, Cocoanuts (sic), Night at the Opera, Duck Soup, Copacabana, I’ll Say She Is — in which Groucho is Napoleon without sacrificing his handlebrush moustache or round spectacles — could not be scripted for no one could reinvent their natural, instinctive madcap insight. Their movies are an inexhaustible riot. No one was safe, least of all high society or the pretentious.

Groucho got away with murder, or at least character assassination, because he was never afraid to assassinate himself. In a famous exchange his brother Chico once said, "I’d like-a to say goom-bye to your wife." Groucho replied, "Who wouldn’t?" He once rejected an offer to join a Hollywood club with this charming reply: "I don’t want to join any organisation that would have me as a member." When an anti-Semitic swimming club would not take in his daughter, he wrote to them: "She’s only half-Jewish. How about it if she only goes up to the waist?"

He had a devil in his eye and an angel in his brain. His insults are legendary. "I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll make an exception." A woman on his talk show claimed proudly that she had ten children because she loved her husband. Replied Groucho, "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while."

Groucho Marx should have been around to cover the British general election of 2005, for I haven’t seen a better analysis of why Tony Blair went to war in Iraq in the company of his best mate George Bush: "We have to have a war. I’ve already paid a month’s rent on the battlefield."

The moment Blair and Bush sent their troops to the frontlines along the borders of Iraq, long before the United Nation’s wars on the invasion and occupation of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were over, they simply had to have a war. The rent was costing them too much, in both money and credibility. Every ploy after that was only an excuse (which got thinner as the days passed) to justify what they had already decided had to be done.

Blair called a general election this year rather than in 2006 because the opinion polls were consistent in their view that Labour’s victory was certain. With less than a week left for voting, the polls still do so, although they are less strident about their future-mongering. There are so many hums and haws (if the vote is below 59% Labour is in trouble, if there is a minor negative swing against the government in a hundred marginals, watch out Tony Blair etc etc) that one wonders why anyone bothers about psephological stretch exercises based on samples of 2,000-odd voters.

The second reason that Blair went to the polls early was surely because he was convinced that time, and Bush’s re-election, had put the Iraq war on the electoral back burner: there might be steady heat but it was too low-level to burn up votes. And yet, like the ghost in Macbeth, the Iraq war refuses to leave the Labour banquet. Come to think of it, Blair has become an excellent instance of hubris.

The one thing that a majority of British voters are agreed upon, irrespective of their party affiliations, is that Blair lied to the country in order to drag Britain into this war. This is the one charge that evokes response even when it comes from the dour Conservative leader Michael Howard.

All politics, it used to be said, is local. That remains true. Television, curiously, had made all local politics international. We sit in India and watch a bus rolling through London’s East End proclaiming to Bangladeshi-origin Muslims that the moment has come to avenge a war they did not support. Cameras bring alive a debate in which the three leaders, Blair, Howard and Charles Kennedy of the Liberal-Democrats spar over Iraq. In which Blair is accused by a citizen of going to war to please his best-mate Bush, and Howard asks people to raise their hands if they think Blair is telling the truth on Iraq and very few hands rise.

It was noted, famously, of Howard that he had something of the night about him. The eyes of Tony Blair during that debate and through this election campaign suggest that he has something of the graveyard about him.

Blair could still be Prime Minister of Britain on May 6 but desolation will never entirely disappear from those eyes. Blair seems to have lost even if Labour wins, for victory will come because of Labour’s record on the economy and not on Blair’s record on the war. Power has already passed from Blair to his chancellor of exchequer and heir-presumptive Gordon Brown. Brown’s eyes have acquired the quiet sparkle of confidence as a much-cherished dream comes within striking distance.

A pro-Labour newspaper, the Guardian, probably settled the succession issue in Labour last week with its revelation that the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had clearly advised Blair that the UN Security Council was the final arbiter, and not the British government, on whether Saddam Hussein was complying with UN resolutions or not. This in turn would determine the legality of the war that Blair was determined to wage. Blair got away with an ingenious fudge: the attorney general would deem it satisfactory if Blair could be sure of Saddam’s guilt.

Anger over Iraq has returned to the core of this campaign. The Conservatives are not beneficiaries of this anger because of their familiar problem: they speak with a forked tongue. They believe the war was good but Blair was bad, which is why no one believes them. The Liberal-Democrats are the only party which has been consistent in its opposition to the war and now wants British troops withdrawn. But the Lib-Dems are stuck in that strange swamp called unelectability. Madhu Limaye, the socialist ideologue now, sadly, not with us, used to tell me that a political party needs to cross the 23% support line in order to emerge from this swamp and then stride ahead towards the crucial 30s in public support. The Lib-Dems are still stuck on the wrong side of 23%.

While the politics of war demands its wages, no one is paying a heavier price for this war than the Iraqi people. There have been a few welcome steps in Baghdad, but the carnage continues on the streets. The simple fact of relentless death makes nonsense of good intentions.

Where else to end but at the beginning? On May 6, 1972, the 81-year-old Groucho made his final faltering and moving appearance in New York, at the Carnegie Hall. With havoc of Vietnam preying on his conscience and consciousness he recalled an old Irving Berlin song in which the devil sings thus to his son:

You stay down here where you belong

The folks above you, they don’t know right from wrong.

To please their kings they’ve all gone out to war,

But not a one of them knows what they’re fighting for.

Way up above they say that I’m a devil and I’m bad;

But the kings up there are bigger devils than your dad;

They’re breaking the hearts of mothers,

Making butchers out of brothers;

You’ll find more hell up there than there is down below!

Trust Thy Neighbour

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: Trust Thy Neighbour

If life had followed the predictable arc for President Musharraf, he would possibly have been running a think-tank NGO on strategic warfare by now. Instead he is making the running for history. Dr Manmohan Singh is not the kind of man who would have ever fantasised about being Prime Minister. But he has grasped the opportunity with consummate ease and a beguiling confidence. The two leaders are agreed on two things: that there is no sensible substitute for peace, and peace will come only when India and Pakistan melt the rigidity that has created confrontation and sparked off war.

A without speeches is not necessarily a speechless dinner. One of the paradoxes of official life in a capital city like Delhi is that the more speeches there are the more silence there is during the rest of the meal.

There were no official speeches on the agenda at the dinner that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hosted for President Pervez Musharraf on 16 April since the President had not come on an official visit, he had come to watch cricket. (The British had no idea what they were leaving behind; without English and cricket, where would our subcontinent be?) But at about five in the evening that Saturday the Pakistani delegation was informed that Prime Minister Singh would like to make a few remarks.

When Dr Manmohan Singh brought out a printed speech during dinner, the hearts of Pakistani officials accompanying President Musharraf began to flutter. No equivalent speech had been prepared in response. On the rising scale of gaffes, this was in the penthouse apartment. High commissioners have been known to lose their jobs for less. But President Musharraf lost neither his temper nor his composure. After Dr Singh finished an emotional and stirring paean to peace between India and Pakistan, President Musharraf offered an unscripted, impromptu response that his delegation now characterises as one of his finest. At least they were left speechless.

Our first image of President Musharraf, seen on television after the coup against Nawaz Sharif, was of a general playing with a silver gun. Our most recent image is that of a peacemaker with a silver tongue. How did the change come about?

Surprise winners of the power lottery have one significant advantage over elected leaders: they have nowhere to go but up. They begin from a base of such low expectations that they have to be particularly silly to sink further in the public esteem. It is not as if this cannot happen. Very little was expected for instance of President Yahya Khan of Pakistan, who replaced the long-serving Ayub Khan. His main responsibility was to bridge the time difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. He bungled it so badly that the country split.

An elected leader has quite a different problem. A newly-elected leader has the opposite problem. His or her peak moment comes with victory. The voter has delivered a decision and the more unexpected it is, the stronger the need for emotional (through speeches) and practical (through policies) recompense. It is hard for the most accomplished leader to deliver: witness the problems Mrs Indira Gandhi had after her astonishing victory in 1971 and her even more astonishing recovery in 1980. The Janata simply withered under the weight of great expectations between 1977 and 1979.

If life had followed the predictable arc for President Musharraf, he would possibly have been running a think-tank NGO on strategic warfare by now. Instead he is making the running for history. Dr Manmohan Singh is not the kind of man who would have ever fantasised about being Prime Minister. But he has grasped the opportunity with consummate ease and a beguiling confidence. The two leaders are agreed on two things: that there is no sensible substitute for peace, and peace will come only when India and Pakistan melt the rigidity that has created confrontation and sparked off war. Who would have expected an Indian Prime Minister to cauterise the hardliners of his own bureaucracy and stretch out a hand of welcome that was transparently honest, and which was trusted by yesterday’s foe? Who would have thought that a Pakistani President, and one in uniform at that, would have said on Indian soil that there could be no military solution to the Kashmir problem, or that the peace process was now "irreversible"? He was not being unrealistic. He also warned that if no solution was found, he could not vouch for what might happen in five or ten years.

Two questions, possibly asked with a bemused look. How did we arrive here? And where do we go next?

Indo-Pak relations are not propelled by a single fact or factor. A number of atoms keep whirling within the reactor for a long while until they develop critical mass. Here is a quick list. Peace can only be built on a foundation of confidence. Confidence is not a flash of revelatory lightning on the road of Damascus; it takes time and the variations of experience, for the brick and mortar of confidence is realism.

Seven years ago India and Pakistan went nuclear, and with that began the last phase of the war that started in 1947. It was a war of brinkmanship that tested nerves to the limit; that included a hot phase in Kargil, insurrection, the near-demolition of Parliament in New Delhi and a moment when America ordered its non-essential staff out of the subcontinent because it felt that a nuclear fallout was imminent. Nothing, they say, clears your mind faster than the prospect of a hanging. Minds began to clear at that point.

Nuclear power is the strength of a closed fist; God forbid that anyone should reveal what lies in that fist. The key to its utility is paradoxical. Since a nuclear war assures mutual destruction, it prevents war. Nuclear power has served to eliminate a street-dread in Pakistan that India can destroy the country because of its anger against partition. Visible evidence came when both sides retreated from war during their eight-month-long eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.

9/11 helped: after that momentous day in America, as President Musharraf pointed out, the world changed and a military solution was no longer possible. But that by itself was not enough. America influences the world, as any superpower would, but it does not control the seminal fluid of historic passions that give birth to war. Fundamental to the new spirit is the popular support in both countries for peace. It was cricket that once again permitted the two peoples to rediscover each other, and they began to wonder why they had been tricked into hatred when there was such obvious and natural fraternity. There is also a strong belief, particularly among the young, that elites have turned into an alibi for economic stagnation or at least insufficient progress. People are simply not ready to accept poor governance and poverty any longer, and governments — whether dictatorial or democratic — have to measure the cost of disaffection.

If Dr Singh is at the start of his first term in office, then President Musharraf is, in a sense, at the start of his second. Both need momentum. Both know that in the present climate a peace dividend can sustain their governments as well their own place at the top. They are also surely aware of the risks of failure. The President has to deal with hardliners who will wave that slightly stale label of appeasement, and he has faced assassination attempts from the war lobby already. Dr Singh could be outflanked as well, if not now a little later. While the senior leadership of the BJP is committed to the peace process thanks to Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s crucial role in it, the BJP is in flux. There is Narendra Modi waiting to win votes by blaming "Mian Musharraf" for a dozen crimes.

Can India and Pakistan continue their forward movement if there is no forward movement on Jammu and Kashmir? No. The formula for hope rests on three legs. Peace must have a real meaning for the people of Kashmir, on either side of the divide. This much is now understood by Delhi as well as Islamabad, which is why there is a bilateral commitment to soft borders. It is axiomatic that if the line melts in the Himalayas, then it will thaw even faster in Punjab and the plains. The next step is engagement with Kashmiri leaders of all hues. There has been significant change in this respect as well. While Delhi is ready to meet the Hurriyat (if Dr Singh’s offer had not been foolishly turned down, the talks could have already begun), President Musharraf has publicly accepted that there are other voices apart from the Hurriyat in the valley. Delhi and Islamabad have also realised that any "final solution" has to be both acceptable and sustainable, and this cannot happen without agreement between the two.

The promise of peace must not be confused with peace. The optimism has come from the change in dialectic, but all the hard work remains to be done. There is still a walk through a swamp ahead, with leaves as markers. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf will have to tread lightly at every step, occasionally helping each other out. This is going to need huge investment in trust. They will have to find it along the way, for the one missing from the Indo-Pak vault is trust.

One Year Later

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by M.J.Akbar: One Year Later

There is a fundamental law of Indian politics: you can reach Delhi from which angle of the ideological prism you like, but when you reach the Centre you must rule from the center. The BJP could not run a government on the three wheels on which it ran its populist campaigns: the construction of a temple to Lord Ram on the site of the Babri mosque, which it helped destroy; the abolition of Article 370; and the enactment of a uniform civil code.

There is no evidence yet that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is planning any anniversary parties to celebrate his surprise elevation to the top job in India. But there is plenty to indicate that the BJP has begun to mark a year of its funeral with a spectacular civil war.

We know that a year ago the BJP-led government died in the general elections. Was the death of natural causes? Was it suicide? Was it murder? These are the vital questions that the Hindutva Parivar has grappled with for twelve-odd months without finding a convincing answer. After much deliberation, RSS head Sudarshan, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the BJP’s criminal-justice system, has reached a verdict of suicide and wants the two men who have led the party for the last quarter century to retire. But there remains some confusion about the verdict. Are Messrs Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani being punished for having lost the election or having lost their teeth? Were they wrong? Were they disobedient? Or are they simply too old for Mr Sudarshan, no spring chicken himself? The options are intriguing.

The fact that their election strategy failed is an old story. It doesn’t take a year to figure out that they fell on their face when trying to expand the BJP space at the expense of allies like DMK in Tamil Nadu, Asom Gano Parishad in Assam, Janata Dal(U) in Jharkhand and Lok Dal in Haryana. But the younger men and women in the party were equally guilty. There is no record of anyone having suggested that the party was heading towards the pavilion rather than the three-century mark. Moreover, the two elders have learnt to get along with each other. That is not a quality that the BJP’s Gen Next can boast of. The middle-aged leaders may have lost the elections, but they have not lost their egos.

Which of the younger leaders would Mr Sudarshan put in charge? The answer goes to the heart of a supplementary: did the BJP lose because of Vajpayee or because of Narendra Modi and the indelible scar of the Gujarat riots? I suspect that the RSS wants the two elders to make way for Narendra Modi, although that is not being said quite so plainly yet. For him, Narendra Modi is the solution rather than the problem. Mr Modi’s problem is not the BJP: the party’s knees get wobbly the moment it enters the vicinity of Nagpur. But the BJP is not yet ready to fight an election alone. It needs allies and its allies don’t need Narendra Modi.

The anger against Mr Vajpayee stems not from age but from disobedience, for he attempted to use power to reshape the party. He was, in a sense, trying to remake the BJP into a mirror of his preferred kind of government.

There is a fundamental law of Indian politics: you can reach Delhi from which angle of the ideological prism you like, but when you reach the Centre you must rule from the center. The BJP could not run a government on the three wheels on which it ran its populist campaigns: the construction of a temple to Lord Ram on the site of the Babri mosque, which it helped destroy; the abolition of Article 370; and the enactment of a uniform civil code. You do not have to be a Chanakya to recognise that all three are issues that are hostile to the sentiments of Muslims. Mr Vajpayee and Mr Advani, whatever the difference in nuance between them, could not run a government that was on principle hostile to Muslims. In six years of office, construction of a temple did not begin. The abolition of Article 370 was always an absurd idea, since it would sever the constitutional link with Jammu and Kashmir. And of course no one ever did anything more than pay lip service to the idea of a uniform civil code. The RSS is punishing Messrs Vajpayee and Advani for disloyalty to its agenda. It believes that prevarication cost the party power, and wants to retire them. But since political formations respect the social culture, such bloodletting will not be easy. Mr Vajpayee did not walk the plank after Mr Sudarshan’s fulminations. In a public speech he suggested that he might have lost his office but he had not yet lost his honour.

Confusion is the mantle of despair. Loss of government has turned the alleged swayamsevaks of the RSS into power-addicts. They can’t seem to survive without sniffing the glue of office each morning.

If the Opposition is fragile, the government is frail. Its principal redeeming feature remains the personality of the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, but while the goodwill generated by his integrity is fine, it is not good enough. The electorate has acquired a demanding voice. It expects a healthy government to deliver a child every nine months. So far the main things delivered to the people of India have been sermons in English. (It is a curious fact that all the leading lights of the Congress Party are far more comfortable in English than Hindi: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, Shivraj Patil, Natwar Singh, P. Chidambaram…) Sermons may be good for the soul but do very little for the stomach.

The principal achievement of the Manmohan Singh government has been the peace process with President Pervez Musharraf. So much of this process is atmospherics that there is always great danger of slippage over a stray phrase. Foreign minister Natwar Singh did indeed start off on a less than benign note, and it was not until Dr Manmohan Singh met President Musharraf in New York in September that stability returned, bringing back a whiff of promise.

There are facts, and then there are central facts. President Musharraf and Prime Minister Singh have done more in a few months than has been achieved in decades. The buses that softened the rigidity of the Line of Control are central facts, for they address the heart of the problem. Peace has meant many things to many people in the complex maze of Indo-Pak relations but it has rarely meant anything to the Kashmiris. One bus in fifteen days may not sound very dramatic, particularly when it remains vulnerable to mischief or accident, but a principle has been established that could begin to melt the difference. One sign is already visible. Militants who attacked the passengers on the eve of the first bus to Muzaffarabad are being disowned. Syed Salahuddin, commander in chief of the Hizb-ul Mujahideen, now says that he believes that "no ‘freedom-fighter’ will attack or fire a single bullet on the bus". He also adds that he is ready for peace talks if invited by Delhi. This is not sudden conversion. He is responding to the strong surge for peace in the valley. Kashmir is the problem. Could the Kashmiri become the solution? The thought is not without its virtues.

President Musharraf made a remarkable statement on the eve of his weekend cricket diplomacy. He said that the peace process was now virtually irreversible. "Virtually" was a thin safety clause. Dr Manmohan Singh promised that the sky is the limit, without lifting his feet too much from the ground. This momentum took a long while building. The question is whether it has developed critical mass or not. If it has, issues like the costly (in terms of lives more than money) confrontation on the Siachen glacier will be resolved with nothing more dramatic than an application of common sense; there will be a dozen crossing points on the Line of Control; a route will open up on the western seas; and even artistes like Shobha Mudgal might get a visa without a hassle. This is all part of the common-sense regime.

If there is an application of uncommon wisdom, then the neighbours will start thinking about strategies for the next twenty years. President Musharraf has said more than once that we need to think out of the box. The problem of course is not the theory. What is the practical content of life outside the box? Where are the ideas that hinge on known dimensions but have the strength to chart a way forward? Is there space enough in the mind to accommodate the other? If Indians and Pakistanis begin but to think without aggression, and plan without malice the world will suddenly seem a different place. Think differently and symbols of war, like nuclear arsenals, can turn into means of strategic cooperation. All you need is the will to change a won’t. Will that happen over dinner and cricket? I won’t rule it out.