A Bridge too Near

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Byline by MJ Akbar: A Bridge too Near

If there is the faint sound of a wobble in the Manmohan Singh government, it has nothing to do with the states. The Prime Minister’s credibility has been dribbling away ever since he decided to make the nuclear deal with the United States the central achievement of his government without thinking through the consequences of unsustainable triumphalism, or indeed the nuances of policy-making in Washington. His worst mistake was to hint that opposition to this deal was "communal", since some Muslim organisations had protested against George Bush. Credibility is all he had. If that goes he has little else.

Those who play bridge know that there are two routes to success. Either the combination of 26 cards on your side (13 each with you and partner) matches so well that even a two or a three bring in a trick; or the honours are so dominant that they make the opposition irrelevant. If you have both, of course, then you bid Grand Slam with a smile.

Elections used to be an honours game. The aces — from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Jyoti Basu — used to dominate the electoral game. Their charisma was the decisive factor. I was going to use "decisive edge" but it was always far more than an edge.

It is true that Nehru and Indira Gandhi might have won nothing without the broad base of the Congress they inherited from Mahatma Gandhi, and Jyoti Basu would have been merely a brilliant barrister without the party structure created by Promode Dasgupta and his selfless contemporaries, but equally, the Congress and the CPI(M) were sustained by the magnetic leadership of such aces.

The Marxists were sensible enough to appreciate that a combination of distribution and honours was unbeatable. So they retained the United Front even when they had the numbers to rule Bengal alone, and would not let Jyoti Basu retire even when he wanted to. (Not every politician thinks power is synonymous with life.)

But the aces have gone, or left the table; electoral bridge is now a largely distribution game. The allies make the difference, and even the smallest card, with one per cent of the vote, matters.

Few elections have been as fascinating, even breathtaking, as the one being fought currently in Tamil Nadu, because, unusually, everything matters. Our opinion poll, done by ACNielsen, believes that 48% of the vote will go to the alliance led by Jayalalithaa and 47% to her foes, led by M. Karunanidhi. That is a dead-heat, given that the standard margin of error is plus-minus 2.07%. Jayalalithaa personally commands 46% of the vote, but if Vaiko, with 1%, had not switched sides and joined her, the script might have become lop-sided. It is a tribute to Jayalalithaa’s sagacity and character that she never permitted her ego to come in the way of a political alliance: there are leaders in Delhi who could learn a lesson or two from her. She knew the statistics. In 2001 she won 132 of the 234 seats with 31.44% of the vote, and DMK got 31 seats with 30.92% of the vote. A difference of half a per cent in vote share meant a gap of 101 seats in the Assembly. Such are the tyrannies of first-past-the-post system.

The DMK is more dependent on allies than Jayalalithaa. It has 42% support, but is kept in the race by 3% from the Congress and 2% from the PMK. The Left is statistically invisible but has its role in key constituencies.

If the cards on both sides are evenly matched, then it is the aces that will make the difference. Karunanidhi might have made a fatal mistake when he projected his son M.K. Stalin as the face of the future. There was a visible sag in the DMK momentum at the start of the campaign, during the Stalin phase, and it is only when Dayanidhi Maran came into the spotlight did his alliance emerge from the shadows. Irrespective of the results in May, this Assembly election will have marked Maran’s evolution as a leader of his state. If his party does not recognise this, the smile on Jayalalithaa’s face could become even larger.

For she has the clear edge when it comes to personality. All the pointers in the opinion poll confirm this. Her party is four points ahead of the DMK only because of her (since it is a personality-driven business, if her party were to lag, it would also be because of her). She has only two allies; the DMK has half a dozen were anyone to count, and yet she is ahead. It may be a marginal lead, but Tamil Nadu is all about margins that transmigrate into broad sweeps. Two years ago to the month she suffered what was widely advertised as a death blow, losing every single seat in the elections to the Lok Sabha. To revive from that graveyard needed miraculous levels of self-belief and a head as cool as the South Pole.

The key statistic is surely that 90% of those who voted for her in that failed election are still with her, and only 4% have switched to the DMK. In comparison, there has been a switch of 8% from the DMK to her, and the DMK’s retention rate is 86%.

Unusually, both sides have been in power during the last two years. Jayalalithaa of course remained chief minister, while the DMK joined the Union government with key portfolios. Jayalalithaa used power to better public effect than her opponents. 52% of the people think that she has been either a "very good" or "good" chief minister; between 60 and 70 per cent believe that the three basics, drinking water, electricity and road conditions, have improved under her watch, and a clear majority thinks she did good work during the tsunami and the floods. These are the pillars of good governance. Unsurprisingly then, she has the lead among the young. The young poll more heavily than the middle-aged.

So what happens if ACNielsen is right and Jayalalithaa forms the government in Chennai again? A whole lot of nothing, actually. A few hours of genuflection, and life goes back to normal. There is no logical reason for turmoil. The Congress, after two years in power and daily megaphone publicity, will not have increased its vote share anywhere, and slumped in Kerala and Assam. Despite a fractured and unimpressive Opposition, the Congress will probably need a coalition in Assam, turning one more one-party state into coalition country. In Bengal and Kerala, the party remains a lower single-digit fact. So why should parties which have nothing to gain from uncertainty, risk the comfort of power in Delhi? The only partners of the ruling coalition in Delhi to gain will be the Left, which will add a Kerala wing to its Bengal fortress. The Left has no history of deliberately destabilising any of its comfort zones. A cat that gets cream late in life doesn’t believe in nine lives.

If there is the faint sound of a wobble in the Manmohan Singh government, it has nothing to do with the states. The Prime Minister’s credibility has been dribbling away ever since he decided to make the nuclear deal with the United States the central achievement of his government without thinking through the consequences of unsustainable triumphalism, or indeed the nuances of policy-making in Washington. His worst mistake was to hint that opposition to this deal was "communal", since some Muslim organisations had protested against George Bush. Credibility is all he had. If that goes he has little else. It was always a comforting myth that leadership is possible without understanding politics; that this, in fact, might be a virtue. He must be the first Prime Minister of India who would cancel a series of election meetings in a vital state like Bengal in order to attend an economic meeting in Hyderabad. Others would have done both, not one at the expense of the other.

A government is as strong or weak as its focal point. That focal point is blurred. Foreign policy is in shambles. Domestic policy is shooting off in different directions, depending on the predilections of Cabinet ministers.

Manmohan Singh might be a good man, but that, alas, is not good enough reason to be Prime Minister of India.

The Government of India is a pack of cards without an ace.

A Toast to Your Majesty

Byline by MJ Akbar: A Toast to your Majesty

It’s Friday the 21st of April in England, the sun is jesting with the rain and a faint chant rises from the television screen: "Two ... four ... six ... eight ... who do we appreciate? The Queen!" It is Queen Elizabeth II’s 80th birthday and we are all children now, staring at Windsor Castle.

Sky News, the tough TV channel, has an "exclusive" interview with the Queen’s younger son, Andrew, the Duke of York, and he takes us to an exclusive tour of the mailbox he made when he was nine, and which has been preserved, possibly because it was the most useful thing he has done. A man wearing a paper Union Jack hat tells us breathlessly that he has spoken to the Queen for the 114th time since 1982. He must be the royal version of the English cricket team’s Barmy Army. A schoolgirl who offered flowers to her monarch reveals, once again exclusively, what the Queen told her: "Are they from the garden?" Even the child sensed that there might be something less than adequate in the quote. "And that’s all," she added.

The Queen’s minders were politically correct. Once upon a time, many history books ago, the monarch of Great Britain had all the colours of the world among her subjects. The Queen of Britain still has all the colours of the world among her subjects, but they all live in England instead of across the globe. The sun definitely sets upon the British empire these days. A black girl in a pretty frock curtseys and presents flowers; children of South Asian origin, on holiday from school, line up among the 20,000 or so who have come to cheer their queen. There are gun salutes at the Queen’s various residences. Since we see them on the small screen, there is a feel of toy guns on doll grass booming across Lego ramparts.

Prince Charles, who has been teased by the cartoonists in the morning papers as the long-suffering heir of the Eternal Mother, pays an impressive tribute, but the theme is mother rather than queen, reinforcing the maternal and bringing the Queen into every mother’s heart. He recalls the child who waited anxiously for mama’s phone calls from exotic countries, a crackle travelling at pre-computer pace and a Marconi tremble. He mentions a vignette: before her coronation Queen Elizabeth tried on her crown to check its weight and size. One doesn’t want to be surprised, even by a crown.

It’s sycophancy, but it is endearing and it works. There is no logic to it, but that is obviously its strength. Does the British monarchy work precisely because it is powerless? Yes, of course. People cannot hate anyone without power, and the British royal family wisely edged away from politics before it could become politics’ victim. Instead of power, it has influence, and it would be foolish to underestimate the depth of this influence.

If only someone could convey this simple fact to the foolish man who pretends to be a king in Kathmandu.

We discussed the mysteries of the charisma over a jolly lunch at a Scottish fish restaurant across the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. My friend of thirty years, Alexander, was dressed with the careful scruffiness of the British upper class. His elder brother John, who is 78, buys rare books (which he buys from the widows of Cambridge dons) as a hobby and sells them for a modest living, offered a loyal toast. John then explained how to recognise a voice on the telephone that had been outsourced to Bangalore. It was the only one, he pointed out, with a proper upper class British accent.

Last week Alexander was at the funeral of Lady Heskett, widowed at 25, but lived to a grand old age as owner of one of the greatest homes in Britain. Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave the funeral oration and told a charming anecdote. When Edward Heath, a bachelor, became Prime Minister, he often asked grand Conservative ladies to be official hostess at his weekend retreat when he had important guests. Mrs Indira Gandhi had come to dine at Chequers, and was being very critical of the British Raj. When Lady Heskett, her hostess, could take it no more, she pointed out that there was at least one thing that Mrs Gandhi could be deeply thankful to the British for. What was that, asked Mrs Gandhi. "We abolished suttee, didn’t we?" said Lady Heskett.

Doubtless the conversation moved to other topics after that.

Class always wafts on wit. John wondered if I remembered the old Aga Khan, mentor of the Muslim League in pre-partition India and as rotund as wealth can make a potentate. My knowledge of the Aga Khan is theoretical, but John recalled a delegation of British Members of Parliament who went to visit India before independence. There was the usual obligatory visit to the Taj, along with intense political consultations with leaders of all parties. When the delegation returned to Britain, a reporter asked a Labour MP what had been his most memorable experience in India. "The Aga Khan by moonlight," replied the Labour MP.

Enough said.

My own encounter with the British monarchy has been, fortunately for me, limited. Queen Elizabeth and her German-blood consort Prince Philip were visiting India, and I was one of the small crowd invited to the reception at the residence of the British High Commissioner in Delhi. Dress was formal. I wore a long silk kurta, which was about as formal as I was inclined to get in those days, and since the Gurkhas at the gate didn’t frown, I thought I had passed the formality test. I joined the queue to receive their majesties. Everyone got a perfunctory fleeting smile, which was nice and gracious. Prince Philip paused in front of me, took a second look at my kurta, standing out among the suits, and wondered what manner of native dress I was wearing. Irresponsible by desire and irreverent by professional ethics, I suggested that the natives were in charge now, weren’t they? There was steel in Prince Philip’s subsequent fleeting smile.

Both Britain and the British monarchy are must improved by loss of empire. Britain is no longer in the colonies, but the colonies are now in Britain. That seems fair and equitable. "Your Majesty" is still in business. A toast to the Queen, Alexander and John, on her 80th birthday, but may it remain your majesty rather than mine.

The Prophet Motive

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Byline by MJ Akbar: The Prophet Motive

The RSS chief, Mr K.S. Sudarshan, has made the very interesting suggestion that Muslims should accept Lord Krishna "as one of the prophets" sent by Allah. If this is all it takes to unravel the complexities and ease the tensions of the Hindu-Muslim relationship in India, then consider the problem solved. This is the easy part, particularly since the RSS chief, very wisely, did not ask Muslims to accept the divinity of Lord Krishna.

Muslims believe that Allah is the creator of the entire universe, and it is axiomatic that he sent His messengers to all the people since Creation, and not only to Muslims.

The 47th verse of the Surah Yunus in the Quran says: "To every people (was sent) a messenger: when their messenger comes (before them), the matter will be judged between them with justice, and they will not be wronged." Since transliteration into English is never completely adequate, Abdullah Yusuf Ali explains this verse: "Every people or generation or nation had its message or messenger: Allah revealed Himself to it in some way or another. If that messenger was ignored or rejected, or his message was twisted or misused, the Day of Reckoning will come, when perfect justice will be done and the whole truth revealed."

The 36th verse of the Surah Al Nahl (The Bees) says: "For we assuredly sent amongst every people a messenger (with the command), ‘Serve Allah and eschew evil’." Yusuf Ali adds a footnote: "Even though Allah’s Signs are everywhere in nature and in men’s own conscience, yet in addition Allah has sent human messengers to every people to call their attention to the good and turn them from evil."

The 78th verse of Surah 40, known as both Ghafir (Forgiver) and Al Mumin (The Believer), says: "We did aforetime send messengers before thee: of them there are some whose story we have related to thee, and some whose story we have not related to thee." Yusuf Ali elaborates: "Allah sent messengers of His Truth to every people. There are some whose names are known to us through the Holy Quran, but there are a large number whose names are not made known to us through that medium. We must recognise the truth wherever we find it."

The fourth verse of Surah 14, Ibrahim, says: "We sent not a messenger except (to teach) in the language of his (own) people, in order to make (things) clear to them." Yusuf Ali explains: "If the object of a message is to make things clear, it must be delivered in the language current among the people to whom the messenger is sent. Through them it can reach all mankind."

There is repeated affirmation in the Holy Book that Allah sent prophets before the last of His messengers, Muhammad, across generations and nations, and to "every people". India has always been a great cradle, nursery, school and university of human civilisation, and it is therefore inevitable that messengers must have come to this land and its people as well.

Some Islamic scholars believe that there is a direct reference to Gautam Buddha in the Quran. Verse 85 of Surah 21 speaks of "Ismael and Idris and Dhu al-Kifl; all were the patient ones". Verse 48 of Surah 38 lauds the last-named further: "And make mention of Ismail and Al Yasaa and Dhu al-Kifl, for they were among the best". Dr Zohurul Hoque, who has translated the Quran, believes that Dhu al-Kifl is the Dweller (Dhu) of Kapil, or Kapil Vastu and refers to the Buddha, who was of course born in Kapilavastu. There are other interpretations, but at least Buddha is included among the options.

The verse from Surah 14, on the languages spoken by prophets, is particularly relevant since it clarifies that prophets did not speak only Arabic or Aramaic; they spoke the language of the people they were sent to. They were enjoined to take the message to all mankind, and mankind, untied in ancestry, is divided by language. This verse extends the ambit and specifies it as well. There is no reason why a prophet could not have spoken Sanskrit.

Take another look at this verse: "We did aforetime send messengers before thee: of them there are some whose story we have related to thee, and some whose story we have not related to thee." In other words, while the narrative of some prophets (Moses or David or Solomon) is told in detail in the Quran, the story of other prophets has not been told. In other words, there are prophets of Allah who have not been included in the narrative of the Quran. It is entirely plausible that a prophet sent to India has not been mentioned in the Holy Book, but that does not diminish either his role or his prophecy.

Krishna lived at least two millennium earlier than the Prophet Muhammad. This is important, because if he had come after the prophet of Islam, then Muslims would never have found Mr Sudarshan’s idea acceptable. In Surah 33, Al Azhab, verse 40, Muhammad is described as "the messenger of Allah, and the seal of the prophets". The metaphor of a seal is self-evident. The seal marks the completion of a document; there can be no further additions. Islam is also very clear that no man can be considered divine, and this is one of its principal arguments against the Church, which made Jesus a part of the Trinity. Allah is indivisible, and His creation must be ipso facto inferior to the Almighty. However, Mr Sudarshan has not demanded that Muslims consider Lord Krishna a god. So once again, there is no argument.

But I wonder if such happy agreement, always very welcome, is sufficient. Muslims revere Jesus as one of the greatest prophets of Islam; the Quran (Surah 6:47) reaffirms the immaculate conception of Mary, and says Allah created him as He did Adam. But this has not prevented hostility between Muslims and Christians.

While religious identity is an important and often vital component of mass mobilisation, faith and its nuances have rarely been a source of continued conflict between men. Occasional war, yes; but continuous war is fought over material possessions, like land and natural resources and tax revenues. One of the more remarkable facts of India is that while Hindus and Muslims may have been derogatory about one another, they have never insulted each other’s faith in a thousand years of literature. They have vilified or glorified kings and heroes, but there has been no slander against the deeply revered symbols of faith. Secularism does not mean that we abandon religion. Secularism is the right of every faith to co-exist as an equal, on its own terms. Secularism is the ability to leave space for the other.

The true problem is not what happens in the after-life, but what happens in this life. There are two key words. One is security: Muslims have every right, as equal citizens of a proud nation, to physical and economic security. An Indian economic boom must be equally their economic boom. The second is violence. No Indian, irrespective of creed or caste, whether Muslim or Hindu, has a right to seek answers through communal violence. No Indian politician, Hindu or Muslim, must be allowed to wash his hands in the blood of innocent victims to lubricate his passage upwards on the career ladder. These are the problems that need the attention of not just Mr Sudarshan but every leader who claims to have the concern of the country in his mind. The merits of Mr Sudarshan’s idea are psychological, but that does not make them a negative. He is at least attempting to place one stone of a difficult bridge over an unhappy divide.

To judge where this thought might come, look at where it has come from.

49.5% of how much?

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Byline By MJ Akbar : 49.5% of how much?

Caste is a fact, but is it a virtue? Government policy should seek to eliminate differences rather than consolidate them. And is caste the only statistic that the mighty government has? Is there no other definition of poverty?

Pardon me, but I have this inconsiderate habit of looking at the wrong end of a statistic. Let me explain.

When I hear the Honourable Arjun Singh declare that 49.5% of our best and brightest college students shall henceforth come from a particular combination of castes, I want to know not what the 49% consists of, but what that combination of castes constitutes.

Whenever there is a caste-based allotment of the fish and loaves of Indian development, it is ipso facto an allotment to Hindus, for the simple and obvious reason that caste is a Hindu phenomenon. Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, to name the three prominent Indian minorities, have no caste. Some formula-fudgers have tried to solve this dilemma by the theory that the poorer minorities, all converts, have retained a sub-identity of caste beneath their new faith.

This is the kind of thing that sounds very nice in Delhi but is a hoax outside, where real life begins. It is a linguistic tidbit thrown towards minorities who have been excluded from the meal at the main table. It is only partially true, and ineffective for at least two reasons. Minorities have a near impossible task in finding evidence for a sub-identity; and when they do it is generally from the bottom of the heap, which means they do not get a place in the limited queue. If the Honourable Arjun Singh can find one Muslim who has been admitted into a quality educational institution because he is a "Backward", it would be welcome addition to my knowledge.

Politics is a more fluid science than demographics. But when Mayawati strategises about elections, she does not automatically include "sub-identity Muslims" as part of her Dalit vote bank, nor does Mulayam Singh Yadav assume that "sub-identity Muslims" are an extension of his "Backward Yadav" vote base. They know that these are separate interests and they make a conscious attempt to harmonise varied interests on a common platform. But when it comes to allocation in educational institutions or jobs, the harmony becomes distinctly atonal.

Imran Ali and Yoginder Sikand have reported the findings of a recent study done by them, in collaboration with ActionAid (India), Jahangirabad Media Institute and Indian Social Institute, New Delhi to examine the "social, economic and educational" condition of Indian Muslims. A few, necessarily brief, quotations from their report:

Some ‘low’ caste Muslim respondents pointed out that while their castes had been included in the official list of Other Backward Castes, they had not benefited from this provision. Government facilities for the OBCs, they said, had been cornered almost entirely by more numerous and influential Hindu OBCs… The high degree of Muslim poverty is evidenced from the fact that 41.9% respondents (in rural areas) have a total annual household income of less than Rs 10,000, 17.5% between Rs 10,001-Rs 20,000, 5.4% between Rs 20,001-Rs 30,000 and only 0.1% between Rs 30,001-Rs 40,000… Many Muslim families complain of being deliberately neglected in government programmes meant for alleviating rural poverty… Overall, as this survey suggests, Muslims are among the most marginalised communities in India in terms of economic and educational indices and also in terms of political empowerment… A host of factors, as we have tried to show, have been responsible for the marginalisation of Muslims as a whole. This calls for urgent steps to ameliorate their condition.

According to the 2001 census, Hindus constitute 80.5% of India’s population, Muslims 13.4%, Christians 2.3%, Sikhs 1.9%. Others make up the remaining two per cent. The minorities are not included in reservations, nor are the upper castes: between them, the minorities and the upper castes would add up to 40%. So in real terms, 60% per cent of India is being guaranteed 50% of the seats in the best educational institutions. Do the math.

But mathematics is not a principle. What is the principle, if there is any? To help the underprivileged? Then why are India’s minorities excluded from the bonanza?

Is it impolite, or, worse, unpatriotic, to raise such a question? A subconscious fear is exploited whenever Muslims make any economic demand, like reservations, that they are reviving the ghost of partition. 1947 is over. Anyone born after India became free will be 60 years old next year. How long is the political class going to fool Indian Muslims by frightening them in public and purchasing their ever-available leaders in private?

I have never been comfortable with minorityism. In fact, I have tended to anger Indian Muslims by asking them a difficult question: at what stage of their history did they become a minority? Were Muslims of North India a minority under Mughal rule two hundred years ago? Were the Muslims of Hyderabad a minority when the Nizam was in power sixty years ago? The answer is, no. In other words, a minority status is not a function of numbers; it is a function of empowerment. The Brahmin has a miniscule population and lives across all economic layers, but no Brahmin sees himself as a minority, because he is socially and politically empowered. Democracy is the greatest blessing the dispossessed can have, for it is the only system that finds space for progressive empowerment.

But if the percentage game is going to be played into overtime, as is being done by this government, in educational institutions and jobs, the two most significant tools of empowerment, then a democratically elected government of India has no right to exclude minorities from this game. Arjun Singh has always positioned himself as a champion of minorities. Where are they when he has made his most significant political play?

If we are to get social change peacefully, then there is a legitimate place for positive discrimination. No one in his senses, for instance, can argue against positive discrimination for Scheduled Castes and Tribes: they carry a burden of neglect and enslavement that India should be ashamed of.

But a good idea has been perverted by excess. If half the students of a quality institution are there because of quotas rather than intellectual ability then they will affect the quality of the institution. Instead of the institution raising the standards of the students, students will lower the standards of the institution. The young are not unreasonable; the old do not have a monopoly on wisdom. Students have accepted existing levels of quotas because they too can see its limited need. But students will not allow politics to drag their schools into a swamp. Politicians can think no further than the next elections. The young have their whole lives to consider.

Caste is a fact, but is it a virtue? Government policy should seek to eliminate differences rather than consolidate them. And is caste the only statistic that the mighty government has? Is there no other definition of poverty?

I could argue that market forces have done more to change a repellent reality like untouchability than all government diktats put together. Urbanisation, driven by either choice or need, has not eliminated casteism, but it has dulled its cruelties. Does anyone know who is touching whom on a crowded Mumbai bus? Does anyone care? Can anyone afford to care?

A theory is floating through Delhi, and will doubtless find its way into national conversation, that Arjun Singh did not inform Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before this cynical midterm twist of the knife. This is partly because of the Prime Minister’s credibility with the middle class; it does not want to believe that its hero would sully his clean hands with conventional Congress vote-bank politics. A more cynical view is that the Prime Minister has denied foreknowledge of so many critical decisions that have been made by his government that one more can easily be added to the list. By being too non-political the Prime Minister might have sparred himself into a corner. He could end up as Prime Minister of only a happy Stock Exchange and a forlorn Indo-US nuclear deal. In the beginning, the middle and the end, a Prime Minister’s function is political. Dr Manmohan Singh may want to escape from politics. But politics will catch up with him.

Walking through raindrops

Byline by MJ Akbar: Walking through raindrops


There is a curious, perhaps inadvertent but certainly revealing, flaw in the Congress formulation of Mrs Sonia Gandhi as the Leader Under Siege. It is possible that the paradox escaped her think tank, since it is so very easy to miss the obvious. But her strategists made a mistake when they constructed a line that does not stand up to scrutiny: namely, that just as "everyone" had ganged up against Mrs Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, "everyone" was also ganging up against Sonia Gandhi.

All the heavy hitters during the struggle phase of Indira Gandhi — Morarji Desai, Kamaraj Nadar, S.K. Patil, D.P. Mishra, Ram Subhag Singh — are dead. But those who drove Rajiv Gandhi from power are still amidst us. Not all of them are in the best of health, but all of them are part of the national discourse.

If I had to prioritise the foes of Rajiv Gandhi, I would place them in this order (the ratings are based not on their place in politics, but on their effectiveness in media and opinion-creation). At the very top would be the name of Ram Jethmalani. It was his series of questions on Bofors, heavily promoted in Ramnath Goenka’s Indian Express, which established the tone of the acrimony. Second would be Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who was effectively if artificially built up as the symbol of anti-Bofors probity and went on to reap such extensive rewards, far greater than what landed in Jethmalani’s lap. Third would come the BJP, led then as now by Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, who of course were delighted to see the secularists get together to shred the Congress. Fourth, on par with the BJP in volume and invective, were the Communists, led then as now by Jyoti Basu and Somnath Chatterjee. Fifth, higher in both volume and invective than the previous two, were the Socialists led by George Fernandes and Madhu Limaye at the senior level and Lalu Prasad Yadav on the second rung. It might be noted that on ground zero Lalu was more effective than Fernandes or Limaye.

Where are they today?

Ram Jethmalani is publicly and forcefully on the side of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, as readers of the Op-Ed pages of this newspaper will confirm. V.P. Singh may be more muted, but he too is firmly on the side of Sonia, having nothing to say anymore about Bofors. (He once announced, during a public rally at Gandhi Maidan in Patna, that he had the full list of account numbers where the Bofors commissions were stored and would shortly disclose them.) Jyoti Basu and Somnath Chatterjee are active allies of Sonia Gandhi and come readily to her defence if she is under attack. It would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago that they could be part of an alliance with the Congress. The Socialists, being socialists and therefore less than sociable, are split. But one of the most important leaders of the movement inspired by Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Lalu Yadav, is with Sonia Gandhi. Looking across the political spectrum, if you see Sharad Pawar as a variation of the Congress(O) that opposed Indira Gandhi, then he too is within the alliance led by Sonia Gandhi. The "everyone" therefore is an exaggeration. Only the BJP and a section of the Lohiaites remain against Sonia Gandhi.

The reason for the strategists’ mistake is easy to discern. Subconsciously the Congress is still reluctant to accept that it is firmly committed to alliance politics, and struggles to return to its natural métier, as the dominant national party: "us versus all of them" creeps naturally into its dialectic.

It is equally natural that it should believe that Sonia Gandhi could restore the party to its Indira Gandhi-era status. If she can resurrect it once, she can be trusted to rebuild it further.

Desire, though, has to be married to opportunity for such political consummation. Opportunity, however, is not constantly available for wedlock. It can arrive without warning. Desire has to be ready for opportunity. Opportunity can be more flippant; it does not have to be as constant as desire. Opportunity can take its time, choose its moment, and arrive at the door through the most circuitous route. You cannot flirt with opportunity or keep it waiting at the door for too long. You must seize it.

Has opportunity arrived once again at the Congress door? The BJP provided one two years by first advancing the date of the general election and then announcing a landslide victory before the people ensured a slide in the reverse direction. Has a series of events beginning with the successful effort to unseat Jaya Bachchan from the Rajya Sabha created the conditions for Sonia Gandhi to seek the endorsement of the electorate at a national level? There are early signs of this possibility. The Congress has launched a campaign across the country with a simple theme: that Sonia Gandhi has an unparalleled sense of sacrifice and such a virtue is precisely the kind of nobility that the Indian voter wants to see in his, and of course her, leader. The memory of Indira Gandhi, the iron woman who had a soft heart for the poor, is easily evoked. So much effort can hardly be for a mere byelection in Rae Bareli, which Sonia Gandhi does not have to visit to win.

Opposition parties who think that they should put up a candidate against her in Rae Bareli will be wasting their money and time if they take their candidate seriously. It seems probable that psephologists are testing this proposition with market research and will have their suggestions ready by the end of April. Add a few percentage points for the fact that the anti-Congress Opposition is in about as unholy a mess as can be, and clueless to boot. If a trip on a chariot is all that is on offer, then the Congress has some right to optimism.

One might add in parenthesis that the results of the coming round of Assembly elections (in which the Congress will lose, probably everywhere) will have as little impact on the outcome of a general election towards the end of the year as the BJP’s victories in the northern states had on the overall results two years ago. The goalposts shift, changing the game.

The dilemma before the Congress is not the vote-pulling power of its foes but the vote banks of its friends. The Congress is in power because of an alliance. Can it return to power without an alliance, or with a reduced number of allies? It will seek the second option. It would be foolhardy to plunge into the first. But an alliance is a house of cards, and has to be carefully protected from any passing breeze. Will the structure hold if you remove a few cards from the north or the west? It did not when the BJP muscled into friendly space in Jharkhand and Haryana and Assam.

The BJP may or may not have learnt from this mistake; will the Congress learn from the BJP’s mistakes? The irony is unmistakable. Both the Congress and the BJP have the same strategic interest, to become dominant national parties. Their basic frustration is not each other, but the regional parties that they have to carry in the tactical search for immediate office.

The Congress believes that it has a story to tell the people, of Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s sacrifice. But does it have a story to tell its allies? The smaller parties in the ruling alliance can see no obvious merit in another general election, since the best result they can hope for is the status quo.

The Congress is walking through raindrops. As an exercise this has superb merits, not the least of them being that it keeps the party on its toes. If it can tiptoe its way through the drops, avoid that slip that turns into a splash, there could appear a rainbow on the horizon. It will be probably have to dump the Rainbow Coalition of 2004 to find the rainbow of 2007, but that is the fate of rainbows. They disappear as quickly as they come.

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Misty Mistakes

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: Misty Mistakes

The Great Indian National Crisis that can trace its origins to Allahabad, was brewed in Delhi and made ears tingle across the world, was sandwiched between two incidents. Entranced by the hype of the capital, no one had much time for Jharkhand or Orissa: starlit India can never really compete with neon-lit India. The news from the dark states flitted through a few columns of newsprint and disappeared into that great cyberspace of indifference which India reserves for the unwanted.

A friend who was in Brazil during the week of the seismic sacrifice was startled to discover that Sonia Gandhi’s resignation from the Lok Sabha was rubbing sleep out of his jet-lagged eyes in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s media has even less international news than America’s, but 10 Janpath was staring at him from the television screen, Sonia Gandhi at the microphone and Rahul Gandhi waited literally in the deferential shadows. Since the information came without much context, my friend had no idea of either the reason or the consequences of the resignation.

He felt a bit flat therefore when I suggested that the truth was far less dramatic than the news. It begins in the shallow waters of personal animosity, and ends in the swamp of political trivia. This story has no legs. The Congress wrote the first chapter when it used a much-ignored technicality to get Mrs Jaya Bachchan unseated from the Rajya Sabha. Power is the sibling of complacency and first cousin, arrogance. It must have been a combination of both that fooled the Congress into believing that there would be no second chapter. Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s name was written in the second chapter, since she too held an office of profit while being an MP. In fact there emerged a third chapter, with smaller players tumbling out of safe cupboards and sending their resignations. And there might be a fourth chapter since there is at least one Congress minister from Andhra Pradesh who believes he can brazen out the turmoil if he keeps his mouth shut and his purse open. But of course all eyes are stuck on the second chapter.

A power behind the throne has a distinct advantage over the throne. A king must be always seated on the throne, because that is the demand of office, or risk being dethroned. The power behind the throne can sit anywhere and remain as powerful. Whether Sonia Gandhi is inside the Lok Sabha or outside it makes no difference to the power structure of the Congress or the Congress-led coalition. She remains the primary decision-maker in the dispensation of political assignments and favours; the real dealer in any Cabinet shuffle or reshuffle, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in an advisory (or possibly cautionary) capacity. Just to reinforce her supremacy the Congress puts on daily shows of breast-beating and has said that she will remain leader of the party in the Lok Sabha even though she has quit the House, and the vacancy she leaves behind in the National Advisory Council will not be filled. The government was just being its normal obedient self when it adjourned the budget session in order to issue an ordinance to enable Mrs Sonia Gandhi to remain an MP. Such fidelity tends to make your eyes watery, so naturally no one could see what the future held. Watery eyes are a slippery disease. You never know which misty mistake will suddenly cause the slippage that leads to a sudden general election. I am not suggesting it will happen. I am merely pointing out that it could happen.

Certainly no one in Delhi, whether government or its many courtiers, had any time for the two events on either side of the Great Indian National Crisis.

On Monday 13 March, the Maoist Communist Centre of India hijacked a train in the Latehar district of Jharkhand, the 628 Down from Barwadih to Mughalsarai, which had about 50 passengers on board. I call them troops because they were in uniform; they were wearing battle fatigues. They stopped the train, took the radio communication systems from the guard and driver, detached the vacuum pipe between the bogies and the engine, locked the compartments from the inside and ordered the passengers to remain calm. The railway authorities only realised that a train was missing when it did not reach Kumandi railway station, a distance of half an hour from the previous stop, despite seven hours having elapsed. Apparently anything less than that is still considered a "normal" delay. They did not even bother to investigate when the driver of a goods train informed them that he had seen a stationary train with its lights off. The police eventually reached the spot. Details are hazy but the local administration has given out the story that the Maoists, or Naxalites, melted into the forest at the arrival of the police, which is now apparently launching a vigorous hunt. You may have heard tales of such vigour before.

The vigour was certainly on the other side in a town called Udaygiri in Orissa on Friday the 24th of March. Some 80 Naxalites, including a contingent of women revolutionaries, launched a multiple offensive at dawn. The jail was their main target, from which they freed more than 40 prisoners; but they also attacked the police station, a camp of the Orissa Special Armed Police, the treasury office, the tehsildar’s office and a telecom tower. The district collector, Binod Bihari Mohanty, lived to fight another day by taking shelter in his neighbour’s home. His official residence was presumably less safe. The police lost two men in a two-hour battle, and three Naxalites were apparently killed, but we cannot be sure since they took the bodies with them. They also took, as live hostages, the officer in charge of the local police station, Ranjan Mallick, and the jailer, Rabinarayan Sethi. They also looted enough arms to sustain themselves in the future. The police, naturally, have launched yet another vigorous hunt, this time in the Gajapati forests.

Two completely different narratives are being played out in different worlds, over a common timeframe: the story in the neon lights has absolutely nothing to do with the story in starlight. Disparity has been a timeless part of Indian life, and has not disappeared in the shine of either Atal Behari Vajpayee or Manmohan Singh. But it is the duty of the politician to link the two worlds. The bridge will be heavier on one side; but it will not break down as long as the other side is buoyed with hope: the hope that sheer and heartless poverty is not going to be a permanent fact of life. A democracy is designed to keep hope alive, but it needs democrats who understand that this is their fundamental responsibility. If hope cedes ground, then the vacant space will be filled by violence.

While Delhi contents itself with the theatre of the absurd (and sometimes the audience of courtiers is more hysterical than the principal actors), violence increases its domain across the breadth of India. It was once a thin belt, with occasional bulges, running through the middle of the country. It is now a fat belly, spreading north and south, growing obese on despair.

The drama of Delhi has no legs because it is running on empty: empty rhetoric, simulated slogans. There might be some forward movement if the law of unintended consequences takes over and drives mistakes that lead to accidents, which damage the relationships that keep an alliance together. Why do I consider this forward movement rather than regression?

Once, government was meant to bring the starlit world into the concern-structure of the neon-lit world. These days only a general election creates a meeting point between the two.

The elite rule India. But the poor rule the ballot box.

Air Power

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: Air Power

Just keep your windows open in the capital of the world’s only superpower, and lots of bits and pieces tend to filter through. Here is something that might be of particular interest to those who have built the nuclear deal between Delhi and Washington on the basis of a separation of civilian and military assets.The key is the American "concession" to leave Indian military reactors outside the inspections regime.

The catch is that our civilian and military reactors are within the same complex. Two reactors at Tarapar, for instance, are civilian; the other two will probably not come under inspection. Two reactors in Rajasthan are already under safeguards, but four are not. And so on.

The inspectors, if they come, will not be permitted to enter the military facilities. That is the good news. The bad news is that they now rely heavily on environmental sampling techniques, and work with instruments that work over a radius of four kilometres. They can, and surely will, therefore be able to intrude into neighbouring reactors without actually entering them. Improvements in inspections technology are taking place all the time. There is a "beetle" being manufactured that is designed to curb nuclear proliferation, and can provide details of military significance. It is called a "beetle" because of its miniature size.

Since Pakistan has signed nothing, its facilities will not be under any Vienna or multilateral inspection. Pakistan too has civilian and military reactors, and has indicated that it will multiply its nuclear power generation capacity forty times by 2020. It would be naïve and even counterproductive to dismiss this as fancy or fantasy. Nuclear power is synonymous with national security and therefore nationalism, so Pakistan will find the resources and the technology to do so. A Pakistan-China nuclear deal to counter the India-US agreement is already evident, with this difference that Pakistan will not be under any international obligation to display any card in its hand.

Nicholas Burns, who negotiated the deal with Delhi on behalf of Washington, has gone on record to say that by 2015 up to 90% of Indian nuclear capacity will be under inspection (by which time even the "beetle" will probably be passé). Since the substantive part of our nuclear technology in the future is going to come from the United States, the US administration will have further knowledge of our programme through non-IAEA inspections. The US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has indicated that India will buy eight nuclear reactors from America at an estimated cost of $14.4 billion. According to one Indian expert this is more than we have spent on our entire nuclear programme so far.

On the plus side, this is the best technology we can get. Moreover, everyone knows that the assurance that has been demanded, and been obtained, that "civilian" technology will not be transferred to the military side is pure hogwash. Both Washington and Delhi know this to be bunk. While it may not be possible to transfer parts from one reactor to another, there is no way to prevent the transfer of a scientist who has learnt how to make the most sophisticated parts by working on the civilian side to the military side.

This self-evident fact also destroys a hypothesis being currently pushed in decision-making circles. It accepts that China’s response to the India deal will be aggressive technological assistance to Pakistan, but suggests that China might not be equally willing to weaponise Pakistan. I do not buy this argument, since China’s self-interest is best served by letting Pakistan engage India in an arms race. In any case, once Pakistan gets the technology it can do its own algebra. As noted before, it will not have to worry about nuclear inspectors in the process.

One happy consequence of the India-US deal, irrespective of shades and tints that may alter the picture, is that non-proliferation as a comprehensive international objective has been buried by President George Bush. They are calling this realism in Washington, and they are right. Thrusting a non-proliferation treaty down the world’s throat was the Second Last Passion of Bill Clinton (his Last Respectable Passion was the peace treaty between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat: both passions ended in failure). The world according to George Bush is tougher, meaner, leaner and divided between friends and enemies. Friends of a certain stature will be permitted entry into the nuclear club. America has accorded Israel this special status for a long while, and Britain actively helped Israel create a nuclear arsenal. India now joins this elite group.

But while Pakistan has been denied the pleasures of American technology, it has not been excluded from the nuclear club. There is no proposal in Washington to curb or eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear capability. Pakistan is not Iran, which is still waiting to get its cascading (a critical stage in the development of nuclear capability) right. Pakistan has at least fifty atomic weapons if not more, and will soon have the capacity to increase the annual production rate. The United States has for all practical purposes recognised both India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states, and placed a restrictive regime only on its friend India, rather than its ally Pakistan. This might not seem the way it looks now, when trumpets are blaring in Delhi and Washington, but this is the way it will be when the fanfare dies down. The new nuclear policy is to accept proliferation from friends but come down hard on proliferation by enemies. Iran heads the second list.

On Thursday the White House released a 49-page National Security Strategy, the first since 2002, the gap year between 9/11 and the Iraq occupation, in which pre-emptive war became the official doctrine of the Bush administration. The focus this time is on Iran, and unambiguously. Bush described Iran, at a press conference in January, a "grave threat to the security of the world". The document informs us what he proposes to do about the threat if diplomacy becomes inadequate: "…under long-standing principles of self-defence, we do not rule out force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. When the consequences of an attack with WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction, of course) are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialise."

Washington is a city of power. Power has many manifestations. One of them is information. The word is out that there will be an air attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities within six months. It will be a limited air offensive, if for no other reason than that America simply does not have the ground troops for another occupation. America might have to go it alone, without the support of its most loyal feudal spirit, Britain, as Britain seems to have lost its appetite for world supremacy. Loneliness will not deter Bush. He might also be tempted by the view that war is the only issue on which he still retains some standing with the American voter, and there are crucial elections scheduled for November which the Republicans will lose badly if nothing is done to change the environment. Bush’s popularity is at an all-time low. One reason why the nuclear deal might be affirmed with bipartisan support by Congress is because India’s credibility is at the moment significantly higher than that of Bush.

George Bush will need a friend when he attacks Iran, and will ask Delhi to reciprocate. That is why Iran is already so heavy in the rhetoric of India-US relations. And that is probably why, incidentally, Mani Shankar Aiyar lost his petroleum portfolio: the articulate, America-sceptic could not be trusted with anything more than panchayati raj and the Commonwealth Games (in neither of which Bush has shown any interest).

I could have written "if" Bush attacks Iran rather than "when". But the sound that wafts in through open windows in Washington has a definite ring to it.

The Quiet Indian

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar:The Quiet Indian

If you want to hear the Indian story, listen to the sound of silence once the roar of the explosion has ebbed away into time.

India’s weakness is institutional. We have not found the means, although doubtless there is the will, to prevent terrorist action of the most brutal sort, in the cavernous heart of our most vaunted cities, whether it is aimed at shoppers in a public bazaar in Delhi on the eve of Diwali or worshippers at the Sankatmochan temple in Varanasi. India’s strength is the reaction. One is referring to the reaction of the people, for the reaction of the authorities is almost perfunctory: a lot of initial bustle, and then the hope that yet another tragedy will disappear, unwept, into the misery of dusty files. There is anger in the popular reaction, for only the supine do not get angry. But this anger does not degenerate into hysteria.

The terrorist has two objectives. The first is immediate: he seeks to leave pools of blood on the streets. The second is strategic and perhaps more important: he seeks to lace the lines, the thin lines that separate communities, with poison. The Indian people know that communal peace is the best answer to vicious terrorism, and the only way to frustrate the strategic design.

A self-proclaimed separatist group from Kashmir has claimed responsibility for the terrorism in Varanasi. The simple response is that the future of Kashmir cannot be determined by injecting fear in Varanasi. Those who think they can weaken the resolve of India do not understand the depth of India. This depth is not just geographical and demographic; India also has great reserves of psychological depth. That is what both Hindus and Muslims of Varanasi displayed when they were tested.

The test is becoming more difficult of course. There has been what might be called a fundamental change in the level of provocation. There is nothing new about Hindu-Muslim tension. Where there is a relationship, whether individual or collective, there will be both amity and the occasional spot of tension. Islam came to India through merchants and traders from the earliest days of the new faith, as it did later to South-East Asia, and Muslim communities appeared not only along the coast of Gujarat and Kerala but also in the interior cities of the North. Since then Hindus and Muslims have interacted commercially, socially — and politically. The first Arab-Muslim armies appeared in Sind in 711, the same year that the western momentum took Arab armies into Spain. But while Spain fell comparatively easily, the expansion of what might be called political space froze in the deserts of Sind. The Thakur principalities of Rajasthan, Punjab and Afghanistan maintained their power for another four centuries until Prithviraj was defeated in the second battle of Tarain (Prithviraj won the first battle of Tarain).

The story of kings is different from the narratives of people. The communal riot in its present manifestation is, by and large, a phenomenon of post-feudal India. Its causes form a pattern from the trivial to the significant, but are familiar enough to suggest that it is more often fomented rather than natural. What is undoubtedly true is that politics has been a principal agent provocateur, including the politics of democracy.

But whatever the cause, popular conflict very rarely extended to attacks on places of worship or deities: there was a sense that the sacred should be kept above conflict. This is not completely true, but it is largely correct. But the violence of terrorism is significantly different: it is aimed as much against the sacred as it is against the people. It does not require a degree in nuclear physics to appreciate that the Sankatmochan temple in Varanasi was selected in order to incite Hindu anger against Muslims, and inspire perhaps a Gujarat-style reaction. The variance is another clue in the argument that this attack has been planned by un-Indian if not non-Indian elements.

What the people preserve, so often the government manages to squander.

Let me note a second institutional weakness: the remarkable tendency of governments to sound triumphalist long before any real victory is evident on the nearest horizon. The trumpets are always out to herald a mirage. In Delhi a mirage is neither a desert phenomenon nor a fighter plane; it is a working philosophy, a way of life.

For a few weeks now it has been commonplace to hear, including from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that Indian Muslims have rejected violence thanks to the therapeutic virtues of Indian democracy. As a proposition it has the merit of not only being virtuous but also broadly accurate. But what is largely true should not be misconstrued as being wholly true. There is also the danger that someone with an agenda might want to prove the opposite. But it seemed that this proposition was not put into circulation accidentally, or only because it was true. President George Bush’s entourage joined this catechism in preparation of their leader’s visit to India. While this was of course a just and justified tribute to India, it was also part of the wider discourse to sell the future of Iraq as a democracy and thereby to rationalise the occupation of Iraq. President Bush is searching for democracy these days in Iraq, rather than weapons of mass destruction. Ironically, democracy in Iraq is beginning to look more and more like a weapon of mass destruction.

Be that as it may, Varanasi brings the agenda back to India, and its unsolved problems.

India is a nuclear power straining to become an economic giant with seriously solid military muscle, and with the proven capability of reaching its ambitions within a believable timeframe. It has a growing right to a place on the high table of world affairs, and the world, now led by the United States, is taking this claim seriously. But India also faces a grave danger, one that could sabotage its dreams.

This danger is internal, not external. It is a problem of governance, not of the people. It is the danger of an institutional ego that sends the government’s head into the heady superstructure of nuclear clouds, and, through an opposite of the gravitational pull, lifts its feet high above the harsh realities on the ground. The ground is swarming with cancerous problems. Varanasi is only an instance: security is so porous that terrorists who operate out of Kashmir can disdainfully slip into Varanasi and set off blasts that kill and maim hundreds. The real tragedy is that the perpetrators will never be found. The police has now become accustomed to alibi punishments: a few scapegoats to be sacrificed for public consumption in the hope that immediate passions are assuaged.

There is a parallel network of violence operating in India. No one really knows if Naxalites, spread across the breadth of the country, have linked up with separatists in Kashmir and Assam or not. All of them certainly have a common purpose, which is the destabilisation of government and governance.

Poverty feeds violence, and subsistence-level poverty is still the fate of four hundred million Indians. Communal anger is always hovering as a menace over stability, its noxious fumes wafted by despair. This too is shrouded in silence, but it is a different kind of silence. The story of India can be heard in both kinds of silence.

Separate Deal

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar:Separate Deal

Trouble is, ma-in-law ain’t approved of history yet. Arms-wide-open George Bush and simple-but-hardly-simplistic Manmohan Singh summoned history to witness their alliance. "We have made history today, and I thank you," Dr Singh told his guest in Delhi. Very coy, very nice. But it isn’t legal yet. Marriage awaits mother-in-law’s approval.

Mother-in-law is the Congress of the United States. She is particularly watchful about errant sons who declare victory before she has checked the fine print.

Once upon a time, long long ago, a President of the United States of America offered the President of Pakistan a whole bunch of F-16s, and even collected cash on the deal. Pakistan is still waiting to put those fighters to some historic use.

I don’t want to be a party-pooper at a particularly cosy love-fest, but here are a couple of quotes printed in the March 3 edition of ma-in-law’s favourite newspaper, the Washington Post. Republican Ed Royce, chair of the International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Proliferation, thought the Delhi deal had "implications beyond US-India relations" and that the "goal of curbing nuclear proliferation should be paramount." Democrat Edward Markey, co-chair of the Bipartisan Task Force on Non-proliferation, called the agreement "a historic failure of this President to tackle the real nuclear threats we face".

When ma-in-law talks from the side of her face she can be a tough old bird.

If history is made, then it will be certainly made in one respect: it will be the first time that India will sign an international protocol that has implications for its nuclear programme and nuclear military assets. A series of Prime Ministers, cutting across party lines, has resisted the most serious pressure to sign on any dotted line. The potential to build a nuclear weapon was created by Jawaharlal Nehru; the ability to build it was confirmed by Indira Gandhi; the decision to go public was made by Atal Behari Vajpayee. The one thing they, and others in between, knew was that any signature became a commitment that might fetch flexibility in the present but could become a prison in the future.

Since this is the first agreement that India might have to sign, unless the American legislatures sabotage it or the present government in Delhi makes way for a more sceptical successor, I hope those who have drafted it have read every line, checked the top line, bottom line, underline and then checked the little comma hidden in the fine print that discusses the separation of 14 civilian nuclear plants from eight military ones.

This is a marriage built on separation, in more senses than one.

The two constituencies, Delhi and Washington, are offering distinctively separate narratives.

Here, in sum, is what the spokesmen of Dr Manmohan Singh will be telling us as they take their message to the country:

This agreement will permit India to produce fissile materials for its nuclear military needs, despite the fact that the recognised nuclear powers have halted, voluntarily, such production.

The fast-breeder reactors, which can make super-grade plutonium when fully operational, will not be under international inspection or safeguards.

India can now hope to make up to 50 nuclear weapons a year, for the availability of imported uranium frees local supplies for use in military reactors.

India gets the latest technology long denied to its scientists.

Listen to the narrative on the American side, some of which has already begun to be articulated, even by the extremely sophisticated and persuasive American negotiator, Nicholas Burns.

India enters the inspection regime, a far better situation than the zero-influence that existed so far. (It needs to be pointed out, of course, that India rose from drawing board to major nuclear power, without indulging in theft, only because of this zero-influence, a status that the Manmohan Singh government is in the process of bartering away.)

The fast-breeder reactors that India possesses will be isolated, and unable to get new technology, thanks to the inspections regime, ensuring, over time, stagnation or decline. Implication: India has been sold a lemon thanks to a gullible government.

The deal brings India into the American zone of influence, and turns it into a virtual ally with a potential for assistance in American strategic interests (that is code word for American intervention). India’s conventional arms programme now shifts dramatically into the supply chain of the American industrial-military complex. If the Indo-Soviet treaty kept India within the Soviet camp till the Soviet Union collapsed, then this agreement will keep India in the American parlour for the foreseeable future.

There is a great bonanza to American industry of arms sales (this will be the most persuasive argument in the Senate, because the one thing a legislator does not want to be accused of is preventing jobs). The starting figure, according to Pentagon officials who admittedly have not dealt with Indian bureaucrats so far, is nine billion dollars. That is a lot of dollars. Keep counting, Senator!

There is no political quid pro quo. The Soviet Union intervened when necessary to protect India’s position on issues like Jammu and Kashmir with a veto in the Security Council. America has given no such commitment. Indeed, Delhi’s leverage with Moscow is reduced with the shift in arms purchases. China will never support India over Pakistan in the Security Council and the West will have the pleasure of balancing Pakistan’s interests with India’s on issues like Kashmir.

With time, the narrative in Washington will doubtless take on other hues, since emerging questions will demand creative answers if the agreement is to be pushed through the Congress. Senator John Kerry publicly worried about fissile material during a visit to Delhi. Others are wondering whether such a reward for a nation that has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is not a signal for others to risk going nuclear. And then of course there is the weight of Pakistan’s pressure to which there may not be any immediate give, but which will make its play in the coming months. Pakistan remains a frontline state in Bush’s war on terror.

Such voices may not be consistent, or even necessarily logical, but they will demand to be heard. Some will pick up claims made in Delhi and ask the Bush administration for clarifications, as for instance on the delicate matter of how many nuclear weapons India is capable of making.

If Pakistan is truly lucky, it will have the extraordinary good fortune of escaping the Bush embrace. The indications are that Bush will not offer the terms of the deal with India to Pakistan. What does this mean?

It means, first, that while India will sign a limiting commitment on its nuclear programme, Pakistan will sign nothing. Pakistan can, therefore, be held down to nothing. Bush is going to be in power for only another two years, and that as a terribly lame duck. His approval ratings are below freezing point, and his own party is distancing itself from him, raising the question as to whether he has the political capital to push anything through Congress.

What are Pakistan’s options? Pakistan’s nuclear programme has been created with China’s help. China may not have technology as good as America’s, but it isn’t a junkyard either. As a friend, China will be much more reliable than America. This is not because of any character defect. America is a democracy, and therefore always vulnerable to democratic discourse. China is a dictatorship.

China, most crucially, will not be propelled by mere goodwill or friendship; its policy will hinge on self-interest. Since a critical rationale for the Bush shift is to help India become a counterweight to China, Beijing will respond by playing the Pakistan card against India. China has already assured Pakistan three more nuclear reactors, and you never hear of any fuel shortage problems in Islamabad. President Pervez Musharraf has gone on record to say that Pakistan has its options. Is this what he meant?

We may never know what the complete truth is. But keep your ears open when the mother-in-law starts asking questions on Capitol Hill in Washington.

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Peace of Justice

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar:Peace of Justice

If there is justice there will be peace. Nine men from Baroda were sentenced to life imprisonment by a special court in Mumbai for a massacre of innocents (known as the Best Bakery case) during one of the most terrible communal riots in our history, the Gujarat carnage of 2002; and every Indian can declare with pride that he or she lives in a nation that has not only democracy, but something more: institutions of justice that deliver in matters of honour, truth, life and death. A democracy is much more than counting votes once in five years. A democracy is about rights and wrongs each living day. The peace that democracy delivers, therefore, is a positive, creative, enhancing peace, not the peace of the graveyard that settles like a pall on nations condemned to dictatorship.

Democracy is about civil society and equality, of high courts as well as a scene I witnessed in a 7 a.m. Indian Airlines flight I took from Mumbai to Delhi on the morning of writing this column: an airhostess taking special care of an elderly Muslim man with a cap and a beard who was unsteadied by age as he walked uncomfortably into the aircraft. He was not at all wealthy; this could have been his first flight, perhaps taken for medical reasons. The airhostess gave him more help and attention than she offered anyone else. This is equality and civil society without prejudice in India. The Gujarat carnage is part of the truth; the airhostess is part of the larger truth. India is not secular because it is democratic. India is democratic because it is secular.

In a democracy, elections may be the court of first as well as last appeal, but there is so much space in between. Governments are unstable in a democracy, which is an excellent thing; but society is stable, which is even better. Governments are stable in a dictatorship, but society is unstable, constantly simmering under the pressure of a forced calm, and threatening to erupt at the slightest crack in the edifice. Those in power did everything they could to subvert justice in the Best Bakery case, using authority to try and undermine the judiciary and money to change the evidence. The police are a mighty force in India, and never mightier than when they attempt to become the law. Governments bullied and bribed witnesses who were poor and vulnerable: I would not be too harsh on the poor and vulnerable, for we have very little idea of what constant, daily pressure by the police can mean. The important, and vital, point is that justice survived the malfeasance of the system; perhaps that is the only point. The courts were assisted by the dedication and sheer, determined obstinacy of civil society leaders like Teesta Setalvad, who refused to be defeated by the acquittal of the accused by a court in Gujarat, and went to the Supreme Court. One of those sentenced to life imprisonment, Sanjay Thakkar, begged for mercy once the judgment was announced. He once must have thought that his mentor, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, would succeed in saving him from retribution. Thank God for Teesta Setalvad and the Supreme Court.

And thank God for a free media too.

There were two judgments on the murder of Jessica Lal, in which the prime accused was a rich thug called Manu Sharma, son of a former minister of the Union government of India, no less, Vinod Sharma. There is little purchase in naming the political party to which he belonged, for all parties are infected with this insolent, brutal Delhi plague. The facts are simple, and their simplicity itself is evidence of how Delhi’s ruling elite believes that it can get away with murder after it has got away with theft. Jessica Lal, a model, was shot dead in public in a restaurant owned by Bina Ramani. It was a crime of power, wealth, corruption and arrogance: power was the means to wealth, wealth was the source of corruption, and corruption is the reason for this murderer’s arrogance. The murderer took out a gun in full public view, shot Jessica dead and walked off. As simple as that. The case was widely reported. On 21 February additional sessions judge S.L. Bhayana acquitted Sharma. The judge was hapless if not helpless: he explained that the three key eyewitnesses had turned hostile.

The media delivered the second judgment on this case. It refused to accept the judicial verdict. One of the truths of Delhi is the fact that the police believe that they are employed not only to implement the law, but also to twist it according to their will. The media refused to let police get away with their lucrative indolence in this case. Every newspaper gave headlines that accused the authorities of corruption. No editor, of print or audiovisual media, consulted anyone else. Each editor reached his or her own conclusion, and the conclusion was similar. The stench of corruption was too strong for even the most cynical nose.

This anger was not limited to the police. It was also addressed to the New Class that has become a running, cancerous sore of Delhi. It consists of rich, political or pseudo-political (by which I mean hangers-on of political progeny) thugs who are brimming with black money, and who are convinced that they are a phone call away from safety if they get into trouble. Their cars are a menace on the streets; their behaviour a menace to social life; their criminal side a menace to life. They are the middlemen of deals, the scum that has become obese thanks to cuts from the billions that are spent by the government each year in purchases. Their behaviour might have been funny were it not so deadly. Many of them actually behave like villains from the screen, flaunting their power as if there is no accountability in Delhi’s ravenous jungle, and never will be. The media was also saying that Manu Sharma, a perfect example of this class, would not be permitted the luxury of indifference.

By Friday, the Delhi High Court had summoned the files of the Jessica Lal case from the Delhi police. This too was recognition of injustice.

Standards change; yesterday’s scandal becomes today’s morality; we stop asking questions in the name of friendship, or in the hope of a good time; the culture of consumerism becomes the primal law; your dress becomes your address. Sab chalta hai. Anything goes. Delhi is the world’s largest glasshouse: who shall throw the first stone? But there comes a moment when you no longer care whether the glasshouse remains intact or shatters. If that glasshouse is going to protect the killers at Best Bakery or the murderer of Jessica Lal, then it is time it got shattered into smithereens. Civil society rose in both instances. It threw stone after stone in the Best Bakery matter, rousing the conscience and the best instincts of the highest judiciary. It rose again in the matter of Jessica Lal, and the Delhi High Court has taken the initiative. But one stone was not sufficient in Best Bakery; and one stone might be insufficient in the case of Jessica Lal as well. The establishment has a very very thick hide, thickened further by the belief that the public has a very very short memory. The establishment has an invaluable weapon in time. The media woke up in the immediate aftermath of injustice. How long will it remain awake when the files wend their slow way through the courts, impeded by procrastination and fudge? Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty etc, but how eternal is eternal? The Delhi High Court has asked Delhi’s police commissioner to send a status report in four weeks and said it will hear the matter on 19 April. Six weeks is a pretty long eternity in media terms. We will see if media has the tenacity of a Teesta Setalvad or not.

The dead do not return. But they will haunt us until there is justice.

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A middle-aged government

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline By M.J. Akbar : A middle-aged government

Let me first record my deep pangs of envy whenever I see a column written by an American. There is never a shortage of fresh subjects for him or her. That, as you are aware, is the first law of columns: stay as far away from your last theme as possible. Repetition equals boredom and boredom kills a reader faster than stupidity. In America the highest authorities step in to rescue a dull week. Vice-president Dick Cheney shot up his good friend Harry Whittington instead of quail, to give an example, guaranteeing the wastage of a few forests of newsprint in comment. The most exciting thing an Indian vice-president does, alas, is write his autobiography. He also presides over a House of Parliament in which an MP might tear his hair or tear his shirt. It says something about Indian political culture that tearing one’s shirt can be more revealing than an autobiography.

Indian politics is more exciting than an Indian government, but the adrenaline of politics follows a bell curve. It peaks around elections and disappears into the slough of despond after the results. Politicking is a continuous activity, full of sliced backs and hypocritical fronts; politics is continual. We journalists are fortunate that elections now come around at fairly regular intervals, and that the Election Commission stretches each one to its maximum tensile strength, stopping the process just a step before complete and sudden breakdown. The longer the political game the more the number of fouls, errors, wrong passes, egomania and hopefully a penalty or two. That’s the stuff of headlines and sermons, the meat and potatoes of media. The Indian government, in contrast, just hums along, making announcements that interest no one, and pronouncements that are either innocuous or illusionary. How much staccato can you get from a hum?

But at least a hum makes some noise. A transition makes none. That is why no one has noticed a remarkable transition in Delhi.

The Union Government of Dr Manmohan Singh has slipped into middle age.

In a very important sense, that is literally true. Everyone knows that time flies, except when it stands still, which can be even more painful. Two years have disappeared since Dr Singh ushered in yet another dawn in the history of our democracy. A government is elected for five years. Delete the last year for goose pimples and jitters as everyone moves into election mode and goes into best-behaviour, and you are really left with only four years. So we are smack into the middle of this government’s natural life.

There are many ways in which we react to middle age. There are those for instance who worry much more about what is on top of their heads rather than what is inside. They welcome middle age by filling bathroom shelves with hair dye and spending extraordinary amounts of money on hair transplants. Others give way to the indifference of sag, letting their appetites do the talking and their stomachs do the bulging. Dr Manmohan Singh is lean and has not interfered with his hair. He has accepted middle age with realistic pessimism. I don’t think he quite has the courage to acknowledge a misspent youth. If you examine the record you realise, with a bit of a start, that government has virtually stood still for two years, rotating upon its hidden anxieties and apparent contradictions. Witness the evidence in two key areas, which could have formed the reputation of this government and perhaps reformed India in the process.

Its economic policies are still trapped in a tug of war between the critical periphery, the Marxists, who are right in Bengal and left out elsewhere, and a shrinking core, the Congress. Two years ago there was upbeat talk of reform with a human face. The face has been promised a facelift that might or might not become a reality in 2015. Economic reform is still in embryo, waiting for sufficient heat to facilitate its emergence.

Similarly in the crucial area of relations with Pakistan there is stagnation. President Pervez Musharraf, for all his extraordinary worries, has been more articulate, imaginative and original in the search for options on Kashmir. (Note: I used the word "options", not "solutions"; but the search for peace can only be done through the cluster of options.) Delhi’s response has been as swift and inept as a kneejerk. Heaven knows who does the thinking in Delhi. I rather suspect no one. The old foolishness of treating Pakistan as a "failed state" that will crumble under the pressure of its own fissures seems to have returned. Hence the strategy of stall, pretend and buy time. This middle-aged government has not heard of spectacles, so it has lost the vision it once possessed, and which Dr Manmohan Singh epitomised in his early days. Don’t expect anything spectacular anymore.

The rational Dr Singh seems to have concluded that he cannot be sure of how much time he has left. He wants to use the remaining bit of his term in office to do just one thing, and perhaps not much more. That one dimension is to improve relations with America. He genuinely believes that the final equation between India and the United States, once the give and take has been worked out, will shift the balance in India’s favour. India’s nuclear status will be recognised, and India’s economy will benefit from flows of capital and technology. There is nothing wrong with seeking good relations with America, and everything right about it. Only the very stupid would object to this on principle. On the other hand, you don’t have to be very wise to realise the merits of the old adage: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dr Manmohan Singh, spurred perhaps by the thought that time is running out (middle age angst, really) is moving at a speed that seems reckless to many thoughtful Indians who worry that India’s most precious national asset, its nuclear military capability, is being compromised in the process. If this feeling becomes a conviction, this middle-aged government will not get passage to any other age. The Indian street has been nourished by the view that America is a democracy at home and a dictatorship abroad (I heard this again from an official at Mumbai airport on the morning of writing this column).

Indians do not make good stenographers. They simply do not like taking dictation.

High drama is good for journalism and columnists, but not necessarily so for the country. A middle-aged government should be averse to risk. They do say that one is most vulnerable to fatal heart attacks in middle age.

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The Answer is Gandhi

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: The Answer is Gandhi












Sequence and consequence do not always follow the same logic: the publication of the gratuitously offensive cartoons against the Prophet of Islam (you can translate that, literally, to the Prophet of Peace for Islam means peace) has already resonated through contemporary events. It will also echo far into the future. Any single day’s newspaper was sufficient to indicate that simmering resentment against the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan, for instance, found a reason to escalate into anger. There are too many questions around this conscious provocation by an irresponsible Danish newspaper, fuelled by a less than comprehensible Danish government, and not enough answers.

The first question must surely be the simplest one: Why? More than one answer has been offered. One editor of the paper appeared on European television and said, so primly that he was on the verge of sounding pompous, that the cartoons were not meant to hurt Muslims but only to represent, through an image, that a number of Muslims had become terrorists. This is the sort of argument that sounds reasonable to a neutral mind until you pare open the first layer of deception. If that was the purpose, why not use an image of Osama bin Laden? Why use the image of the Prophet, which by itself is offensive to a faith that rejects, very strongly, any iconography or deification? We have published cartoons on Osama fairly regularly in our papers without anyone raising any objection.

This is buttressed by the "freedom of press" argument, a view endorsed so strongly by the media of continental Europe (but not, repeat not, by British media) that sensible publications like Le Monde have reprinted the cartoons twice. Far be it for me to decry press freedom. It is my bread and butter. But I have yet to come across a nation or society that offers freedom of expression without the qualification of libel or similar safeguards. One of our editors asked the Danish embassy in Delhi to let us know if they had any libel laws. They promised to get back to us. We are still waiting. But text is not difficult to find in the age of Internet. I quote from Section 266B of the Danish penal code: "Any person who publicly or with the intention of dissemination to a wide circle of people makes a statement or imparts other information threatening, insulting or degrading a group of persons on account of their race, colour, national or ethnic origin, belief or sexual orientation, shall be liable to a fine, simple detention or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years." Section 140 adds, "Those who publicly mock or insult the doctrines or worship of any religious community that is legal in this country, will be punished by a fine or incarceration for up to four months."

This is as civilised as it gets. The reason for such legislation is not a history of abuse against Islam, but a history of virulent anti-Semitism, for which Europe holds some kind of pernicious record. I warmly applaud such laws which protect Jews from verbal and image-barbarism. There are laws in Europe by which anyone denying the Holocaust can end up in jail, and a poor British historian is in an Austrian jail at the moment for doing so. Excellent. Then why is the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, pleading helplessness? He did not have to convict anyone himself, for the very good reason that he cannot. But he could have easily referred the matter to his own country’s judiciary and awaited their decision. During the long months when nothing happened over the cartoons this would have been sufficient to calm Muslim unease over the insults. The cartoons appeared on 30 September. There was no public reaction in October, November, December and most of January. But there was official reaction. The Saudi and Libyan governments withdrew their ambassadors. The Danish Prime Minister, who is desperate for a peaceful dialogue now, held no press conferences then. Eleven ambassadors of Muslim countries wanted to talk to him. They got a polite letter which they construed as a snub.

One reason for the anger is the conviction of gratuitous bias against Muslims. It has now emerged, thanks to a story in the Guardian, that the same Danish newspaper rejected a series of cartoons against Jesus some three years ago because they were deemed to be offensive. It was the correct decision. Journalists like the editor of the German publication Die Welt, who has gone on record to say that the publication of the cartoons is "at the core of our culture" would not find enough freedom in his press to publish a cartoon (produced in a British newspaper, the Independent, in January 2003) showing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dining off Palestinian babies. I am a journalist too, and would not publish it either. But the editors of continental Europe have suddenly broken into paroxysms of moral indignation at any attempt to question their right to publish offensive cartoons against Islam. Freedom of press was not trotted out to defend nastiness against Jesus or indeed Israel’s Prime Minister. To do so now is mendacity.

The International Herald Tribune of 9 February reported that Fleming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten (the Danish newspaper that started the controversy) told CNN that his paper was ready to publish cartoons of the Holocaust that were being encouraged by an irresponsible Iranian newspaper, as if two wrongs added up to a right. His newspaper, however, quickly denied any such intentions.

I was in Britain last weekend when this storm was raging. I don’t think that British newspapers have any less desire for a free press than their Continental counterparts. And yet, none of them published the cartoons, although there was doubtless pressure to do so. The BBC (more accurately known as the British Boredcasting Corporation) did a typical weaselly sort of fudge, showing a bit and then removing the image so that it could claim to have it both ways, but no one was very impressed. Instead, newspapers from across the ideological spectrum, from the Observer on the left to the Sunday Telegraph on the right, published powerful and moving accounts of what it meant to respect the faith of the other. The British media, which is not wimpish and which can be the most aggressive in the world, can today claim the respect of Muslims because of its restraint. British Muslims today feel closer to their country.

Hindus and Muslims have lived with one another as long as Muslims and Christians have. You can go through the literature, popular songs or journalism of India and you will not come across a Hindu writer insulting the Prophet of Islam or a Muslim writer insulting a Hindu God. This does not mean that either has changed his faith. It merely means that in India we have a culture that respects the right of another to believe in a different creed, and values a neighbour’s sentiment as much as his own.

The Danish Prime Minister began to perspire only when Muslims across the world started to boycott Danish products. His God is commerce, so the only retribution he understands is an insult to that commerce. Muslims who think that violence is the answer, have got it wrong. Violence is wrong in itself, and counterproductive. A boycott of Danish products is far more productive.

Who did we Indians learn this from? Mahatma Gandhi, of course. His challenge to the British empire began with a boycott of British goods. It was only when he made a bonfire of the coloniser’s cloth did the world’s mightiest empire begin to shiver. It is not too difficult to live without Danish cheese, or even Bang and Olufsen. One would, in fact, like to extend the logic. If you have to buy a European product, buy British. That would be a nice way of saying thank you.

The Danish Prime Minister is searching for answers. But in order to get the right answers you have to ask the right questions. Here is a suggestion, Mr Prime Minister. Do not worry about the enemies Denmark has made. Worry instead about the friends Denmark has lost.

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A Goliath Called David

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by: A Goliath Called David

Relax. The days when the world turned to America to solve its problems are waning. America is now turning to the world to solve its problems, particularly when it needs help to clean up little pools of mess created by hyperactivity in those regions fortunate or unfortunate enough to possess oil.

Take relations between Washington and Delhi. America used to be the big bogey on Kashmir. Delhi was constantly haunted by the ghost of CIA wandering through the Kashmir valley, and the body of diplomacy chasing the ghost. American policy now has much more to do with how India can help America strategically, than with how the Indian arm can be twisted by means gentle or harsh. That, I believe, is why we might be missing the point of American ambassador David Mulford’s recent remarks to Indian media.

Not being privy to the inner dynamics of the Mulford mind, I can suggest four theories about why Ambassador Mulford rang alarm bells on the nuclear deal prior to President George Bush’s visit to India in early March.

No. 1: Mulford is a businessman, sent to Delhi in a grace-and-favour posting because he is a friend of Texas’ principal patriarchs. Like the famous protagonist of Gone With the Wind, the ultimate in American-south fiction, frankly, my dear, he doesn’t care a damn.

No. 2: Mulford is tired of the job. He is not particularly young, and there are personal problems that he would rather attend to at home in the US of A. Such remarks are one way of reminding the State Department that any arbitrary spray of verbal bullets would be far less damaging in America because they wouldn’t travel very far.

No. 3: This is a nuanced ploy, crafted by someone very clever in the Bush office, a sophisticated variation of good-cop-bad-cop and a new dimension to the Ugly American syndrome. In this theory, if Mulford mucks up the atmosphere really badly, expectations are lowered, which sets the stage brilliantly for Bush. After Mulford, anything that Bush says will sound better and positive, and everyone can claim that the Bush visit has been a grand success despite lower fulfilment levels.

No. 4: Mulford is telling the truth.

Pardon me for sounding naive, but I have a feeling that the last is correct. Mulford is doing no more than telling it like it is.

Ever since Dr Manmohan Singh returned from his last visit to Washington, clutching a piece of paper in his hand, the Delhi establishment has set about trying to convince India that there is indeed something called a free lunch in international affairs, that Washington has accepted India as a virtual sixth nuclear military power, and an ally, if discreet, in the emerging confrontation with China. Implicit in this conjecture was the assumption that America would no longer treat Indian and Pakistan nuclear military power as equal realities; that India would be permitted to float into superpower category and Pakistan dealt with after the new equations had been formalised with Delhi.

It is not difficult to buy the services of drums in Delhi, and a few free airplane tickets are sufficient to generate a lot of noise. The orchestra plays to the baton of the administration and to an audience heavy with media, for dissemination is crucial. The great thing about Indian democracy, however, is that you can never buy off everyone; and critical analysis finds its way into the intellectual space and public discourse with a persuasive power that can never be matched by purchased voices. And so the first optimism of a great leap forward in US-India nuclear relations has been slowed by reality checks: the leap is sort of frozen in mid-air, uncertain whether to travel forward, return to base, or simply descend to ground at the point where it is frozen.

Such self-congratulation always seemed fantasy-driven, if not amateur. Ambassador Mulford may have been publicly provocative to those who did not want to hear the facts, but he was only restating the facts that any honest reporting from Washington could have confirmed to the foreign ministry. Nuclear policy is not controlled by the White House alone, and while the White House, which is the executive wing of government, must of necessity use gloss to shade the difficult parts, there is no evidence that it sees the future of India in quite the same way as the ring around Dr Manmohan Singh. Did the Delhi establishment hear nothing from Senator John Kerry, who was in India only days before the Mulford remarks? Senator Kerry is a Democrat, and the man who might have been President if a few people in Iowa or Ohio thought so too. Kerry was not in Delhi because he had nothing else to do, or because he needed a winter vacation. He was in Delhi, with the full knowledge of the White House, to deliver a specific message: that the questions being raised were bipartisan, and, when you took the pretty phrases out, they were essentially about just one thing: fissile material.

Look at the conundrum from another perspective. Suppose India had not been a nuclear military power, would there have been any fuss at all? If India had a nuclear power plant in every city of the country, dedicated only to peaceful purposes, there would have been a queue of merchandise merchants sitting outside 7 Race Course Road hawking their wares without much regard for the views of the White or Green or Saffron House. The core issue is the military arsenal, and the basic message from Washington is this, cold and simple: separate military facilities from energy facilities; open the latter for continuous inspections so that they cannot ever be used for military purposes; and then freeze the capabilities of the military plants to levels that we can monitor now and reduce later. This is the project in simple English. Translate into any language you fancy. For reference, check why the discussions between Nicholas Burns and Shyam Saran failed in December.

America has double standards on nuclear arsenals in the case of only one country, Israel, and is beginning to pay a credibility price. Iran has made a few things clear in its confrontation with the United States and many Western nations over nuclear power. Iran’s preamble might be self-serving: example: We have not attacked another nation for two hundred years. So what? That does not guarantee that you will not attack another nation in the next two hundred years. President Ahmadinejad’s destroy-Israel rhetoric is unacceptable and counterproductive, but its core argument is finding echoes across the world. The Saudis, surely the best ally America can hope to have in the region, have said quite categorically that Iran’s nuclear potential cannot be divorced from the reality that Israel is a major nuclear military power, and unilateralism is not going to be permanently acceptable. This is why the big powers who sat in London and Vienna to discuss referral of Iran to the United Nations suggested that Israel could also be mentioned. The United States has rejected the idea, but the idea did not come from America’s enemies.

It was inevitable therefore that America would make Iran the test of India’s ability to compromise. For the moment, the government has bought peace with the Opposition by arguing that an international consensus is developing on Iran, but this is only the beginning of the story. John Negroponte, National Intelligence director, accepted in a rare appearance to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iran had not developed nuclear weapons yet, and was still years away from any realistic ability to do so. There is time for the arguments to develop, and more than one case to be made. Caution is a far better weapon than self-congratulation.

Pakistan is critical to American interests. In fact, as a wise former diplomat in Delhi pointed out, Pakistan should keep quiet and wait: whatever deal was finalised with Delhi would become a fact with Islamabad as well. This seems much more realistic than the wish that America would rubberstamp India as the only nuclear power in the region.

Ambassador Mulford’s term will get over, and he will go. He will be only the first; in a couple of years, none of the authors of the present arrangement, if it becomes law, will be in power. But the problems will not go with them. The nuclear policy of India is not, and has never been, the policy of one government. It is national policy, and therefore non-partisan. It must be conducted with care, consultation and support from all sides of the Indian Parliament and the Indian people. In government, you always have to juggle with the ball, and drop it at your own risk. When you juggle with the nuclear ball you drop it not just at your own risk, but at the risk of the nation as well.

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