A Date in Basra

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Byline by MJ Akbar: A date in Basra

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

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

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

Do you recall that:

A: The British soldiers were disguised as Arabs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Unsettled Weather

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Byline by MJ Akbar : Unsettled Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King George Canute

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Byline by MJ Akbar : King George Canute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blame Game

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Byline by MJ Akbar: Blame Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Manmohan:Mukherjee!

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Byline By M.J.Akbar: Dr Manmohan Mukherjee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glass is Half Empty

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

The Moral Code of Indian Democracy

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Byline by MJ Akbar: The Moral Code of Indian Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prude & Prudence

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Byline by MJ Akbar : The Prude & Prudence



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revolt of the 19th Century

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Byline by MJ Akbar : Revolt of the 19th Century

Everything has been happening when nothing happens. Good management is not about solving problems; it is about preventing problems. And so when a part of India does not jump at us from the front pages, it is a safe guess that the chief minister has his eye on trouble spots and someone is doing something to lance the boil before the simmering and potentially septic puss erupts.

Haryana’s chief minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, is still an infant in office, which is when most mistakes of omission are made. He made every mistake possible in the confrontation between the workers of a Japanese multinational, Honda, and its management at Gurgaon. He ignored the slow burning anger of the workers for weeks. His first response to the crisis in which policemen were first beaten up, and then took barbaric revenge, was uncertain and irritable. When the fire, fuelled by stark television images, began to singe him and his leaders in Delhi joined the roast, he went into vocal appeasement mode and forgot the practical, as for instance the need for extra, emergency medical facilities, thereby feeding media with another day’s story. Finally, while he had to hold police officers accountable, since they were obviously and visibly guilty, he forgot to add that the workers were guilty as well, for they began the violence.

The Haryana police, which is going to be around when all the workers have gone back to work, will remember this lapse of memory. A chief minister with an indifferent police force is only a minister, not a chief.

Here is a suggestion for all executives in public life. If you want to manage the troubles of our nation, create a war room. Place a huge map on one of the walls, with lots of lights around it so that you don’t miss anything. Get the chief secretary and the police chief to flag all the places where social tension is likely, has spurted out but been controlled, or where it is growing and could go out of control. Get a status report every morning, and ensure that the officials briefing you are not telling lies, or covering their backs with evasion. Eruptions will still take place, for India is exploding with anger just below surface level. But at least chief ministers — or indeed Prime Ministers — will not be surprised when the splinters hit them in the face.

The story of the police onslaught on workers at Gurgaon, Haryana, is a little deeper than swinging lathis, however dramatic that might have been, or the failure of the Japanese management system, whose paternalism rarely has the breadth to reach industrial colonies in foreign lands.

We are in the summer of 2005. The last time Indian working class anger dominated the news was in the summer of 1974, when George Fernandes led a national railway strike and Mrs Indira Gandhi responded with harsh measures to break it. That is 31 years, or a generation-and-a-half, ago. (I am ignoring Datta Samant’s irresponsible and self-indulgent misrule of textile workers in Mumbai, because that was egotism, not trade unionism, and therefore turned sour and counterproductive. The millowners used the foolishness of Samant to close a meagre-benefit industry and became doubly rich as masters of vacant property in the heart of Mumbai.)

In a developed country three decades of peace would be good news. It is bad news in a country that lives across centuries: those below the poverty line are in the worst phase of the 19th century; the urban poor live in the early part of the 20th century; the middle class live in the middle of the 20th century; a minuscule few have entered the 21st century. There is too much anger at base volcanic level, waiting for a chance to turn into lava.

One reason is that the dialectic of India’s democratic politics shifted, in the 1980s, from economics to communalism. Then, in the 1990s, both organised labour and the middle class were pacified with sops — aspirations, consumerism and rising incomes thanks to fresh foreign capital, innovation and competition. Aspirations are a problem in an uneven economy, for while they comfort 20 per cent at the top (the creamy layer, to use a quaintly Indian economic formulation), they create great resentments in the thick slabs below. The slabs may not be even, nor the resentment uniform, but resentment exists.

Moreover, in 1975 television was not around, except as a droning black and white propaganda box that dished out half an hour of utterly boring news that viewers watched only to look at glamorous news readers. No one actually heard anything on television. Today, independent channels bring you news. But they are not half as potent as the entertainment channels that take the world of the rich and the beautiful into the homes of the impoverished and the plain. The poor now know what they are being denied. Television also promotes a greater sense of reality than cinema, which is always closer to fantasy. At one level this angst creates a market for products that promise to make young, or even old women look beautiful within 28 days. (Since in our unhappy self-image, beautiful is synonymous with fair, these globs of acid sold as cream have to make you fair as well. It would be interesting to find out how much of television ad revenue comes out of false promises.) At another level, this creates a sense of injustice that the political or the economic system has long stopped trying to assuage.

If this was all the news, it might still leave some room for comfort. The worry is, or should be, not the violence that we have seen but the violence that we could see. Those Indians left behind in the 19th century are beginning to mobilise, and Indians cocooned in the 21st century have no idea what to do about the spreading people’s armies. The plural is accurate, for there is more than one army. But they have a single motivation: to create a parallel state until they can destroy the state that has left them behind. We use a loose term for them. We call them Naxalites.

The Naxalites do not sit outside the gates of multinational factories for a month waiting to be heard. They collect taxes, they have funds, they buy sophisticated weapons, and they shoot. When the Naxalites feel threatened by the state machinery, or when they want to take revenge, they do not use the lathis that the workers at Gurgaon wielded. They plant powerful bombs in the way of a Chandrababu Naidu’s convoy in Andhra Pradesh; or they attack banks and police stations at Madhubani in Bihar. The Naxalites do not depend on Leftist Members of Parliament for publicity or a trade union movement for solidarity. They keep their wounds hidden, their secrets to themselves, and work through a network that crawls through village and jungle between Andhra Pradesh and Nepal, extending to Orissa and Bihar in the east and Maharashtra in the west. According to one report, more than 7,000 villages are already under their control, and two villages at the very least are joining this parallel state every week.

Underneath a thin sheen, we Indians remain casteist and sectarian. The two groups that have suffered the worst humiliation, through centuries, are the Dalits (formerly the Untouchables) and the tribals. The process of the politicisation of Dalits started with the venerable Dr B.R. Ambedkar and is in the aggressive hands of Ms Mayawati at the moment. They are beginning to find their niche in our democracy, even though their impoverishment has not ended.

The human and economic exploitation of tribals has been a shocking story, and one that is not told very often because the tribals do not have a voice. Their women suffer rape in silence; the men have no answer to sophisticated and crude economic exploitation. (The Church, incidentally, is one of the few groups doing exemplary work in tribal areas of Jharkhand, and is therefore targeted by the establishment.) At long last the tribals are mobilising politically and doing so under the banner of the Naxalites. Tribals are brought out by Delhi to dance at the Republic Day festival. They are now getting ready to make Delhi dance to their tune. It will be a danse macabre.

I did not use the image of a war room lightly. There is a social war going on, but since government survives behind the screen surrounding Delhi, or any capital city, it is blind to that war. Sometimes defeated candidates in a Parliamentary election return shell-shocked at the power of Naxalites; but winners of course never see anything, for they live under the illusion that their party or their charisma has got them victory.

The masses of the 19th century are at war with the elitists of the 21st in India. The latter are armed. The former are angry. Don’t take the outcome for granted.

The Club of 13

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Byline by MJ Akbar : The Club of 13

The twenty-first century definition of the national interest is economic power and nuclear power, because prosperity is the guarantor of internal stability and nuclear capability the true protection against external aggression. All nations in their senses want the first. For varying reasons a fortunate few nations have both, or can hope for both. America, Britain and France have both. China, Russia and Israel possess greater military power than economic power, but are catching up. India and Pakistan are nuclear powers without being economic powers, but India’s economy is now very significant steps ahead of Pakistan’s. North Korea has enough nuclear capability to protect its borders from American troops stationed there.

An era is a long and distinct phase of history; an age, although it sounds longer, represents a shorter period, "the length of time that person or thing has existed".
The operative meaning of concepts changes with the shift of an age. Nationalism as a concept includes both identity as well as the ability to defend the national interest. The first is incomplete without the second. If we assume that modern Indian nationalism begins with the age of Mahatma Gandhi then he expanded the identity to include the poor, the untouchable, the weak into the national struggle; and made mass mobilisation into his weapon to protect the national interest.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who had to redefine its purposes in the context of a free nation and an effective state, upped the ante to create an international alliance against traditional and modern imperialists by creating a movement that refused to align itself with either the West or the Soviet Union. At home Nehru concentrated on an industrial base (the "temples of modern India") and a knowledge infrastructure which could become the springboard of a modern economy.

Indira Gandhi inherited an India mired in famine and language riots, and an Indian Army that had been humiliated against China in 1962 and battled out a draw against Pakistan in 1965. Her thrust was on putting new life into the wheat fields, where the Green Revolution was born, and a new heart into the armed forces, which delivered victory on the battlefields of Bangladesh.

The twenty-first century definition of the national interest is economic power and nuclear power, because prosperity is the guarantor of internal stability and nuclear capability the true protection against external aggression. All nations in their senses want the first. For varying reasons a fortunate few nations have both, or can hope for both. America, Britain and France have both. China, Russia and Israel possess greater military power than economic power, but are catching up. India and Pakistan are nuclear powers without being economic powers, but India’s economy is now very significant steps ahead of Pakistan’s. North Korea has enough nuclear capability to protect its borders from American troops stationed there.

Iran is the hidden fist. It may not have much of an economy, but it has oil, which enables it to survive a harsh cordon thrown by the United States. And it is widely believed that its unknown nuclear capability has either achieved a clandestine weapons programme or is on the verge of one. For Iran the linkage between national interest and nuclear capability is particularly strong. Iranians believed that this is the only real deterrence against American aggression. While there were other reasons, a principal reason for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory over the favourite Hashemi Rafsanjani in the recent Iranian presidential election was the suspicion that the latter could have compromised Iran’s nuclear power to the United States.

It isn’t only fringe nuclear states like North Korea or Israel who treat nuclear weapons as their defence guarantee. Israel, which has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons or tested a device, retains the capability as its guarantee against annihilation by potentially hostile neighbours. And just in case anyone missed the point, China’s General Zhu Chenghu said, during the last fortnight, while discussing the possibility of American involvement in any conflict with Taiwan, "If the Americans are determined to interfere (then) we will be determined to respond … with nuclear weapons". What was Washington’s response? To grin and bear it. Just as it had done when a little while ago another Chinese general pointed out that China’s nuclear missiles could hit California. It wasn’t a threat. Just something for the record.

This is why the controversy over the agreement that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has signed with President George Bush is inevitable. India’s nuclear capability, built by every Prime Minister since freedom across party lines, created without the permission of the West or the Soviet Union, constructed despite their active hostility by Indian scientists and them alone, is at the heart of India’s sense of itself as a power that, after a long while in its turbulent history, will not take dictation from anyone. Any suspicion that a Prime Minister has taken dictation from Washington does not travel well with public opinion.

No one expects complete transparency on issues as complex as nuclear weapons. It is possible that gains have been made by Delhi beyond the verbal fluff offered by Bush, as for instance the patronising statement that India is a responsible nuclear power without according it a formal status. Bush pointedly and categorically rejected this option. The rest of what he has offered is subject to Congress. Dr Singh might want to make a phone call to Islamabad to check what Congress did to Pakistan F16s. However, while none of the possible gains are immediate, all the concessions made by Dr Manmohan Singh could become operational at once.

The concessions are major. If you want to know why separating civilian and military nuclear facilities and programmes is important, then all you have to do is check out why the United States has been so insistent about what seems an operational rather than a fundamental reality. You should also check why no other nuclear nation has accepted such a condition. The short answer is that separation will curtail our flexibility in determining the size of our nuclear capability. I hope Islamabad and Beijing have sent Washington a thank you note. They could do it on a common letterhead.

We have also allowed international inspectors free access to our facilities everywhere and at any time. The protection that every Prime Minister from Nehru to Vajpayee gave to our nuclear scientists has been removed. Think about it.

One of the key elements of our ongoing research is the thorium programme which can make nuclear fuel imports irrelevant. Will inspectors now monitor our scientists there?

Public opinion, and even specialist opinion, is also created by the context. Dr Singh has courted his British and American hosts in language that sounds more obsequious than friendly. We heard, from Oxford, about the splendours of the British Raj, which had, among its missions, a responsibility to "civilise" native Indians. Now we hear Dr Singh tell us, from Washington, that anyone who is civilised anywhere in the world cannot but support Bush. Who on earth thinks up such statements for the Prime Minister? Or does he do so himself?

Still, froth is of limited consequence, however soapy it might be. The Prime Minister’s visit was preceded by a Indo-US defence pact which has raised questions that have not been answered. And Dr Singh ended his visit to Washington with a shocking statement casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Iran pipeline. Dr Manmohan Singh is trying to reverse the declared decision of his own Cabinet (a coalition Cabinet, by the way, not just a Congress one) on dictation from Washington. This is unacceptable. The oil minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, has made it clear through his ministry officials that the project remains on track. I hope he does not have to pay a price and lose his portfolio for taking a stand.

Dr Manmohan Singh is at a crisis point in his tenure as India’s 13th Prime Minister. (There have been 14 prime ministerial terms but 13 Prime Ministers.) His luck is not in the number. It is in his own hands. He is still seen as a decent, honest, good man. But one flaw is beginning to stain his public image. He is beginning to get a reputation for weakness, and of being manipulated, of taking dictation, often against his own instincts and his own will. A vague view can easily consolidate into a conviction, particularly if it is tinged with suspicion that there is a puppeteer in Washington. It will be up to the Prime Minister to use Parliament to eliminate misgivings.

The Indian voter welcomes each new Prime Minister with trust, affection and almost unlimited power. Most of the Club of 13 ended lonely, unloved and without a modicum of influence. It is up to Dr Manmohan Singh to determine how he will be remembered.

The Last Trumpet

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar : The Last Trumpet


If Dr Manmohan Singh were mindless, one wouldn’t mind so much. The troubling part is that Dr Singh has a keen mind honed by a passion for reading. It is possible though that ever since he was catapulted from chiaroscuro to the national limelight in 1991, his primary reading has become files. Bureaucrats have a very simple methodology when they want to consume a minister’s time: they feed the minister with his passion. Since Dr Manmohan Singh is fond of reading, I am ready to wager a fair bit that the bureaucrats around him are making sure that he has enough files to read from waking-hour to goodnight-collapse.

The Prime Minister has been making some long-haul flights of late, a necessary part of his cumbrous duties in running the affairs of a virtual superpower. Last week he was in Scotland, with a place of honour in the waiting room of one of the most exclusive and glittering clubs, code-named G8.

The fact that the Prime Minister of China, Wen Jiabao, was also present in that resplendent waiting room added to the lustre. British hospitality at Gleneagles, the scene of the meeting, was at its finest. According to reliable reports, the British spent a hundred million pounds on the conference. This however is less impressive than the fact that France’s combative President, Jacques Chirac, who is known to sniff so loudly at the mention of British food that it can be heard across the channel, stood up after a meal and sent his personal congratulations to the chef.

Since academics is much higher on Dr Singh’s wish-list than food, the British were wise to feed him with what he wanted, an honorary degree from Oxford, the university that gave our Prime Minister a much-deserved degree in economics. Dr Singh was forthright. "I am truly overwhelmed," he told Oxford, adding, "…nothing can be more valuable or precious than receiving an honorary degree from one’s own alma mater… This is a day I will truly cherish". It was in such an expansive mood that Dr Singh remarked, in his speech, that "even at the height of our campaign for freedom from colonial rule, we did not entirely reject the British claim to good governance".

This week Prime Minister Singh takes an even longer flight, to Washington, where, when he rises to address the august Senate of the United States, he will warm the cockles of George Bush’s heart. Within a fortnight, Dr Singh will find a place in the hearts of both men who rule the world, and that is no small achievement. Some of the time on the long flight to America will doubtless go into polishing the speech, but I hope Dr Singh gets a chance to read some books apart from speeches and files.

The first book I would put on his table is Poverty and Famine, by a fellow-Indian, a fellow-economist, and a fellow-compatriot from Oxbridge, Dr Amartya Sen.

Dr Singh mentioned many names of those who had enriched the Indo-British relationship, men from public life, from academics (Dr S. Radhakrishnan and Dr Bimal Krishna Matilal) and literature. Even Salman Rushdie got a look-in. It is possible that Dr Singh might want to follow up this verbal honour by lifting the ban on Rushdie’s controversial book, The Satanic Verses. The Prime Minister of India did not mention Dr Amartya Sen, although the latter has received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on hunger, and his conviction that nature has much less to do with famine than man. There could be a sensible reason for this omission. Dr Sen has been master of Trinity College in Cambridge, and it is well known that any positive reference to a Cambridge man is a scandal in Oxford. Be that as it may, even a quick glance at Dr Sen’s book would have led Dr Singh to Chapter 6, on The Great Bengal Famine.

In the last years of the British Raj, resplendent as it was with good governance, between 3.5 and 3.8 million Bengalis died of famine during the period 1942 to 1945, of which most died between March 1943 to November 1943. This total does not include the normal mortality rate of any population. I would suggest you read the figures again. Nearly four million Bengalis died in less than three years in the most wretched, painful and inhuman manner possible. Dr Sen shows that there was no major grain shortage in Bengal in 1943, despite a cyclone that affected the aman crop and the end of rice imports from Burma due to war. Even the official famine enquiry commission, whose conclusions were sometimes at variance with facts, admitted that the deficit in food supply was only about six per cent. There is no space to go into the details of this extraordinary tragedy, but I offer a few sentences from Dr Sen’s book in order to whet the appetite of the Prime Minister for facts. Dr Sen says, "no matter how a famine is caused, methods of breaking it call for a large supply of food in the public distribution system". Not very difficult to understand. But what did the good-governance Raj do?

"One curious aspect of the Bengal famine was that it was never officially ‘declared’ as a famine, which would have brought in an obligation to organise work programmes and relief operations specified by the ‘Famine Code’ dating to 1883; Sir T. Rutherford, the Governor of Bengal, explained to the Viceroy: ‘The Famine Code has not been applied as we simple have not the food to give the prescribed ration’."

Later, the government admitted, on the record, that "the food shortages were mainly due to hoarding". Of course Indians were involved in hoarding, but surely the good governance of the British could have sorted what was an administrative matter.

The British inaction was more mala fide than that. "As it happens, even the request for permission to import 600,000 tons of wheat was turned down in London on 16 January (1943, the year of the worst deaths), only a small part of it being met." On the other hand, and please underline this heavily, "On 26 January (1943), the Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of State for India: ‘Mindful of our difficulties about food I told him (the Premier of Bengal [Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy]) that he simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself was short! He was by no means unsympathetic, and it is possible that I may in the result screw a little out of them’."

You screwed a lot out of us, Viceroy! Nearly four million Bengalis were to die of starvation and the good-governance Raj was exporting rice from Bengal to Ceylon!

I do not blame the British for the sins of India. That is stupid. India fell to the British because it had decayed and, as Robert Clive said, was ready for conquest with but a few thousand troops. Clive may have been exaggerating but not by much. But Britain was an imperial power, and operated on the logic of self-interest rather than Indian interest. If there was good government in many aspects, it was only to reinforce British rule, not to save Indians from their misery.

A second book for the Prime Minister’s reading list: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale. It was pertinent of Dr Singh to mention the work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison who showed that India’s share of world income was 22.6% in 1700, almost equal to Europe, and collapsed to 3.8% by 1952. As an economist, Dr Singh should also have answered the question, why. Let me offer, within this limited space, another statistic, this time from Kennedy. In 1750 India had 24.5% of the world manufacturing output and Britain had 1.9%. In 1900 Britain had 18.5% and India had 1.7%. While there was definitely more than one reason for the reversal, may I suggest that colonialism had something to do with this?

A third book, Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor. For only one quote. When Clive entered Murshidabad after victory at Plassey, he noted that "The city of Murshidabad is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London with this difference, that there are individuals in the first possessing infinitely greater property than any in the last city."

No one conquers a poor country, Prime Minister.

- M.J.Akbar

Goodbye Nehru, Hello Bush

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar : Goodbye Nehru, Hello Bush

If Dr Manmohan Singh seems to be in office without being in power, it is because he has not been able to establish his authority on the four big offices of state that constitute the substance of power in any government: home, defence, external affairs and finance. The big four, Shivraj Patil, Pranab Mukherjee, Natwar Singh and P. Chidambaram, pay lip service to the Prime Minister and pursue their own agenda (or, as in the case of the home minister, non-agenda).

Nehru

There is generally an iota of truth in any swathe of Delhi gossip. The certainties of Delhi are more dubious. The certainty this week is that differences between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are slowly corroding and paralysing governance.

Logic suggests that this is unlikely. There has been a clear demarcation in the Congress between Church and State, with Mrs Gandhi in charge of political management and the Prime Minister entrusted with governance. Differences are expected in any human relationship, and inevitable when power is in play. The two may, for instance, have differing views on whether Satish Sharma should be inducted into the Cabinet or not. But to stretch that into a deathly Singh-Sonia confrontation is stretching the imagination.

Why? Simply because it is in neither person’s interest to damage the government and neither has shown the tendency, as yet, to be suicidal. Could this equation change? Certainly. If Mrs Gandhi is persuaded that the BJP has weakened itself enough to give the Congress an opportunity for a breakthrough in BJP territory (the contiguous states of Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Gujarat), she could well set in motion a process by which the allies would seem to have brought the government down and forced another general election. But that moment has not yet come.

If Dr Manmohan Singh seems to be in office without being in power, it is because he has not been able to establish his authority on the four big offices of state that constitute the substance of power in any government: home, defence, external affairs and finance. The big four, Shivraj Patil, Pranab Mukherjee, Natwar Singh and P. Chidambaram, pay lip service to the Prime Minister and pursue their own agenda (or, as in the case of the home minister, non-agenda). The first three consider themselves unfortunate, in the sense that any of them could have become Prime Minister instead of the incumbent, and see no particular reason why they should accept his leadership. The fourth, Chidambaram, the weakest since he has no political constituency, and little to advertise except puff notices in backscratch media, has been encouraged by the example of his peers to behave similarly.

Is it a coincidence that two of the big four have created serious problems for the government with its principal ally, the Left, or is that merely an accident? The Left is not playing charades over disinvestments in Bhel or the Indo-United States defence pact. Its anger is serious. These are issues of hard politics and policy. The CPI(M) cannot risk alienating the working class in Bengal, which is the foundation of its strength, and which provides, at a rough estimate, some 70 seats to the party in Bengal (take away those seats and the Left Front’s majority disappears). The Congress cannot expect the CPI(M) to accept a decision that affects its core interest in its citadel in order to keep an alliance afloat in Delhi.

Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee’s sunny smiles in Washington had clouded by the time he landed in Delhi. He tried to placate the Left, and indeed important sections of the country, with semantics. This was only a "framework" rather than a "pact". Intelligent ministers should not believe that either their opponents or their friends are foolish. A rose by any other name smells as sweet, but onions do not begin to smell like a rose if you rename them.

The objectives of the "framework" signed by Pranab Mukherjee and Donald Rumsfeld have been defined in Clause 3. The first is, "defeating terrorism and violent religious extremism". No problem with that. The second is "preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and associated materials, data and technologies". This is more interesting.

Who defines "spread"? The last person accused of such nefarious behaviour, in case you’ve forgotten, was Saddam Hussein. The truth did not prevent the launch of a horrible war in which nearly two thousand Americans and a hundred thousand Iraqis have already died, a war which co-signatory Rumsfeld says might last another twelve years. Would we have been required to help America under the terms of this "framework" had it been signed three years ago? Saddam Hussein was also called a terrorist. Would we have been required to help eliminate him or remove him from power? These questions are relevant not only because of the past but because of the future. President George Bush and Rumsfeld believe Iran is in an "axis of evil", and accuse it of promoting terrorism and building nuclear weapons. Iran has an advanced nuclear programme that it says is for peaceful purposes. The dividing line between peaceful and not-so-peaceful purposes is thin. We claimed for decades that our nuclear programme was only meant for peaceful purposes until, to no one’s surprise, out popped the bomb. Supposing Europe, which does not want a strong Iran either, joins Washington in declaring Iran to be on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Are we then committed by this treaty (alias "framework") to join a campaign against Iran?

These are not idle questions, Mr Mukherjee; nor are they merely rhetorical ones. I presume the defence minister has noted that he has signed such a commitment twice, not only in Clause 3 but also in Clause 4E where he reaffirms that the two sides will "enhance capabilities to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction".

There is a sub-text to this clause that has not been addressed. India became a nuclear power without America’s permission, or indeed without anyone’s permission. America imposed sanctions against India, which became irrelevant over time. However, has the United States formally recognised India as a legitimate nuclear power, or are we still in an undefined penumbra? This has to be clarified. Otherwise, we become, paradoxically, an illegitimate nuclear state, and must, by the terms of this "framework" act against our own interests! As I said, all we need is a formal statement from Washington recognising India as a legitimate nuclear power. Did Pranab Mukherjee raise this point with his host Rumsfeld?

Will Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India, and therefore responsible for everything that his defence minister has signed, raise this with George Bush when he pays a formal visit to America in a week’s time?

The third objective should have been signed by commerce minister Kamal Nath. India and the United States have agreed to protect "the free flow of commerce via land, air and sea lanes". This is the ultimate homage that a defence minister can pay to globalisation. Pardon my ignorance, but I had no idea that government policy had become so committed to globalisation that we were ready to introduce such a clause in a formal defence agreement with the United States. I wonder if Mr Mukherjee checked with Mr Rumsfeld if America would, under this "framework" protect the free flow of gas in the proposed pipeline through Iran, or whether America’s definition of freedom is slightly different from ours. I presume we leave each other alone when our definitions differ. But what was the necessity of accepting a clause such as this?

Two lines in the "framework" need to be read together, although they are distanced in the document. Clause 4B says that the two countries must "collaborate in multinational operations when it is in their common interest" and Clause 4J adds that they must "assist in building worldwide capacity to conduct successful peacekeeping operation, with a focus on enabling other countries to field trained, capable forces for these operations". There is no suggestion, incidentally, that any multinational operation should be under the aegis of the United Nations; a bilateral agreement is sufficient. India has therefore formally replaced the Nehru doctrine of working in multinational operations only through the blue-helmet regime of the UN with the Bush doctrine that seeks to build alliances for intervention in third countries outside the UN mandate. Under the careful guidance of Pranab Mukherjee we have rejected Nehru and embraced Bush. Welcome to the future, boys!

It does not need a cryptologist to understand what this means. The second sentence is a direct and obvious agreement for Indian participation in what will be called the training of the new Iraqi Army and police (consistently being attacked by the insurgency). Against all this Mr Mukherjee has been waving the lollipop of co-production. He has not been totally candid here either. American defence production is in the private sector, and I would be pleasantly surprised to see transfer of technology from the private sector.

Did the defence minister take the Prime Minister into complete confidence about the intricacies of the commitments he has made? If he will not answer, the Prime Minister must.

Are the senior ministers indifferent to the Prime Minister because they believe that their jobs are in the gift of Mrs Sonia Gandhi rather than the Prime Minister? If that is true then the government of Dr Manmohan Singh is in trouble, because an animal with two heads will walk in different directions. To return to the classic analogy, the Church and the State work in the same country, protecting separate parts of a common interest. Mrs Gandhi named the Prime Minister. It was her right to do so after she revived the Congress. It is now the Prime Minister’s right to name his ministers, and hold their performance accountable. It cannot be in Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s interest if the government does not function. Who gains if Manmohan Singh fails?

If an animal with two heads cannot walk straight, then a cross-eyed Prime Minister cannot see straight either. Dr Singh has one eye on his duties, and the other on 10 Janpath. Realignment is essential for focus, and focus is critical for success.