A New Zealand Diary

Byline By M.J. Akbar : A New Zealand Diary

Auckland takes its beauty for granted. A wondrous four-hue rainbow borrowed from a fairy tale rose gently from a small flurry of white clouds to the left, vaulted high towards the forehead of the sky and dipped with ever increasing power into the horizon, its colours pouring into the pot of gold resting below eyesight. If, as New Zealanders are fond of saying, this glorious island is the last stop of the bus, then the pot of gold is, as promised, at the end of a world flattened by globalisation. How many metaphors are mixed in that last sentence? Let someone with a flat mind count. Our car turns a corner to change the street. The clouds darken, only to be brilliantly lit by the fluorescent light of the tail of my rainbow. I feel possessive because no one else seems interested: not the children chatting on their way to school, not the cars hurrying off to work, not my fellow passengers in the car, who are discussing journalism, civilisation and journalism. (How many contradictions have I juxtaposed by placing those three words beside one another?) Our destination is the Hoani Waititi Marae, where the class of 2007 from the Auckland University of Technology media department has been brought to commune with the wisdom and spirit of the Maori people. My rainbow has preceded me, now dressed in the finery fit for an admirer from across the seven seas. It is perfect, adorned with a fourth purple layer, an imperial band that seals its majestic dominance of the firmament as it vaults with a motionless grace from precisely above the centre of the roof of the Marae to the edge of vision.

The Marae is an open hall with a sloping roof and the simplicity and quiet humanity of a mosque, the feeling reinforced by the need to remove one’s shoes. A mosque is not the home of God, for God lives everywhere; it is the house of a community that comes to mingle and kneel in prayer before it disperses to a hundred homes. We cannot enter without the permission granted through a ritual prayer to nature, spirits, ancestors and the One who has given us the sensitivity to enjoy the wonders of life and the sense to survive its burdens. But once inside the space, you belong here forever. There is never a need for a second welcome. Outside on the lawns perfumed by the environment a gentle rain floats like overweight mist, reminding me of school, Shakespeare and Portia describing the quality of mercy to a businessman with a balance sheet in one hand and the law books in the other. The star of the morning is the leader of the newly-formed Maori Party, which has seven seats in Parliament. His patter is a hit because, I suspect, he never repeats an audience. He only repeats the jokes. But he is funny. The Maori, like any minority with a powerful past and an injured present, display the chips on their shoulder like a general showing off his epaulettes. But one of the great achievements of the present New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, is the conviction with which she is making her nation an inclusive, ethnic-equal society. There is still ideology left, even if you have to go to the end of the world to find it.

A fact and a factor made me feel uncomfortable during my first hours in the country. The fact was the weather. A grey, monotonous drizzle made me nostalgic for Indian sunshine. I knew that New Zealand had been recreated as a modern nation by British settlers, but did they have to bring British weather with them? What is the point of travelling across twelve time zones only to resettle under Scottish rain? The factor was a man in the hotel. If the weather was wet, the receptionist at Langham Hotel was cold. He brusquely informed me that I would have to wait three hours before I could get a room. That is absolutely the last thing my stomach wants to hear after a very long overnight flight. I tried weaselling. He stopped a decimal point short of being rude and ordered me off. I slunk off defeated. I would have accepted defeat but the very pleasant lady behind me in queue, a bureaucrat from Oslo, was given a room without any fuss at all.

Was this race or gender bias?

I am pleased to report that by the evening both the weather and my mood had cleared. The rest of the staff of this splendid hotel have been as pleasant and friendly as all New Zealanders. The rough edges of political manipulation have been left behind on Australian beaches. Helen Clark has not been defeated for nearly eight years but has begun to seem vulnerable, at least if the opinion polls in New Zealand are more accurate than the opinion polls in India. When defeat comes, as it must in any democracy, I suspect that she will have changed the political culture so much that a politician like Australia’s neo-virulent John Howard could never get elected in her stead.

I write this in a Turkish kebab and Coke shop on Queen’s Street. The top of the street is dominated by Koreans and Japanese, the Northeasterners of Asia, as they are known here. Two young Korean men in blonde hair, knee-waist jeans and fancy-label plain white T-shirts calmly light up a weed that is not tobacco. The streets drift towards Friday-afternoon crowds, the familiar cluster of brand-name shops and small stores and restaurants that confirm the charms of variety. The sun is out, warming the fluctuating temperature of an autumn breeze. The foyer of the hotel looks cheerful. I have not seen that frigid receptionist for two days. I hope they’ve sacked him, but I fear he may merely be on leave.

Maoris dance with their fingers, which flutter as rapidly as the wings of a small bird. Women sway to the music and song of lilt and emotion, plaintive or happy, as if time moved outside the pace of life. Men suddenly jump out of this serenity. Their voice becomes guttural, and they thump their fleshy breasts as the rhythm switches into battle mode. A leader pumps men and music into battle mode. But anger is exhausting. Almost imperceptibly, the women return to the forefront, and one is drawn, reassured, to that mesmerising peace of the fluttering hands below the hip.

We are in Auckland for a conference on an Alliance of Civilisations, one of the worthy causes that the United Nations periodically takes up to keep the righteous engaged. Be that as it may, surely a prerequisite for such a gathering is that the host must be civilised. Both New Zealand and her Prime Minister score top marks. They are neither coy nor cloying; the friendliness is just right. Helen Clark also understands that alliance, like charity, begins at home. She starts her speeches in fluent Maori. Dr Allan Bell of the Auckland University of Technology, a reincarnation of Professor Henry Higgins, has been recording New Zealand’s dialects for three decades. He has published evidence that his country may remain loyal to the Queen of England but is finally becoming independent of the Queen’s English. Radio and television broadcasters, who do so much to shape accents, once used to follow the BBC template. That was the definition of respectable standards. Now, New Zealand rules. Maori words like ‘iwi’, ‘mana’ and ‘whanau’ have attained currency and it’s no longer ‘fish and chips’ but ‘fush and chups’. ‘Bed’ is out and ‘bid’ is in. English was global long before globalisation. It flourishes because it is being nationalised everywhere. There are no discontents in its content.

Where is Nowhere?

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Where is nowhere?

A sectarian simmer in Punjab bursts into violence; in the patterns of that fire, the shadows of an old ghost begin to dance. Slogans of Khalistan are heard, albeit from the margin. But that is sufficient for a very senior officer of the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi to invite some journalists for a briefing. Pakistan, he whispers, is behind all this. The official will not permit his name to be disclosed.

A killer bomb, activated through a cell phone, goes off during Friday prayers at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, the largest mosque in Asia. Even before the echo of the blast has ebbed, "intelligence" officers of the police are talking to the media, once again on an off-the-record basis. Where do their fingers point? All the usual suspects, please, line up. Pakistan, take your place at the head of the line.

This is not unique. A dozen bombs go off in Pakistan for every one in India, and guess whom they blame for eleven of those incidents? India. The administrative systems of India and Pakistan have only one ideology left: Alibiology. They have become addicted to alibis, because no faith could be easier to follow. It is almost a miracle that the Pakistan establishment has not blamed India for the recent demonstrations and street carnage that have whittled the credibility of the Musharraf government.

Media in either country doesn’t waste any time in turning an unattributable whisper into a screeching headline. Public memory is conveniently short. For every investigation that reaches somewhere, a hundred go nowhere. "Nowhere" is a large cavern in the public unconsciousness, into which all that is unpleasant is dumped, where the dead are forgotten while life goes on.
No one has time for inconvenient questions. If the police theorists are so convinced that this or that organisation was behind the Mecca Masjid outrage, why did they not do something to prevent it? They may not have succeeded in preventing the incident, but is there any evidence that they tried to do so based on a tip or a clue? And if they were taken by surprise, why do they offer knee-jerk explanations before they have had any time to investigate?

Why does a senior official of the MEA in Delhi or Islamabad choose the comfort of anonymity when blaming the other? If he has serious evidence of complicity, he should hold a news conference. The Delhi official isn’t blaming his own Prime Minister, so why the secrecy?
Islamabad and Delhi should formally permit their intelligence bragging rights, instead of all this pretend-mysteriousness. They have a legitimate and even honourable role to play in the defence of people’s lives. If they can trace and implicate masterminds or puppeteers intent upon spreading havoc among the innocent, their efforts must be lauded.

One fears that the problem is not a veil over success, but inefficiency. The famed and feared ISI of Pakistan has the skills to instigate mayhem, but no ability to prevent what it has not started. Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have absolutely no clue about the perceptible collapse of civil society that is now the most serious threat to political stability and the economic revival that had begun to get visible in the last two years. In the absence of rational analysis, and proposals that might help in the formulation of serious answers to genuine problems, they provide a bazaar list of "enemies" to their embattled President.

Generals never see the problem as the enemy. They see the enemy as the problem.

There is no shortage of crises in India, but India is blessed with a mature democracy. If those in power don’t tackle the problem, the problem sweeps them out of power. A Constitution, and a mature political process in which elections are being further sterilised from corruption each year, ensure that there is a peaceful method with which to deal with leaderships that have lost their way, or lost their credibility.

Pakistan’s dilemma is not complex. There is no sanctity to the Constitution, or the rule of law. A figurehead of the judiciary may have become the symbol of the fight against a President who emerged from a coup, but the Supreme Court has always provided the necessary justification to cover the nakedness of any leader dressed in nothing but a silver pistol. De facto has been given the veneer of de jure. If Pakistan’s Epaulette-and-Moustache Presidents take the Supreme Court for granted it is because the record permits them to do so.

When was a coup in Pakistan ever declared illegal? When is a coup ever legal?

In practice, Pakistan’s political system has found an entry route for Army chiefs to come to power. But it has not discovered an exit route. Dictators have lasted much longer than democrats because there is no system of accountability. Civilians see the mood of the people when they look ahead; they see the hunger of the armed forces when they look behind their backs. They are hemmed in from both sides. The dictator shuffles off potential troublemakers (also known as corps commanders) behind his back, and ignores the people in front. He can concentrate on making speeches that sound good in America. Happy days are here again!

Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan had to fail in war to lose their jobs; Zia ul Haq was helped towards the Almighty by an almighty accident that still remains unsolved. Fortunately for Pervez Musharraf, he failed in a war with India before he led the coup, so he can’t be punished for that. What next? He has taken the battle to the streets, encouraging his vigilantes to inform the country that there is a King’s Party in this confrontation. Will he now contest and win a dubious election by disqualifying anyone who can defeat him?

A vulnerable government is the privilege of a democracy. Indian Opposition parties have the legal and moral right to hope that any incumbent will fall, and they can succeed in the ensuing election. But if a government is unstable, the system is stable. The nation is stable. There is the excitement of peaceful dramatic change, as took place at the national level three years ago, and has just occurred in Uttar Pradesh. Losers get depressed, and then gear up.

If dictatorship is the institutionalisation of ego, as today in Pakistan; then democracy is the destruction of ego. This summer’s road from Lucknow to Delhi is littered with punctured egos. The punctures will heal, of course, because democracy has restorative powers as well. It is both the bite and the serum.

Alibiology is less excusable in a democracy, and therefore grates all the more when Indian officials content themselves, and hope they can fool the country, with an excuse. There are certainly forces inimical to India, based in or sponsored by elements in Pakistan. But they would achieve nothing if we in India did not have weaknesses that could be exploited. Nor is it very wise to keep suggesting that the internal security systems of India are so weak that they can be continually and easily penetrated by a foreign agency.

Vigilance is the price of liberty, true. But vigilance needs three eyes, only one of which looks across the border. Two must look within.

Exit Polls

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Exit Polls

How much money can you make by selling a mirage? Quite a lot, actually, if you dress it up in jargon and put on a suitably pseudo-serious face before a television camera. When facts ventually interfere, the smart thing to do is disappear, your fat cheque safely tucked away.No reality check has ever persuaded a psephologist to part with his cheque.

One presumes that the reputations of all highly-paid, self-professed opinion pollsters who predicted a hung Assembly in Uttar Pradesh are hanging from the nearest lamp post, but I doubt it. This tribe’s ability to rise from the grave is near-miraculous. They are helped by the fact that opinion polls now fall into two categories. Both make money. The first is unscrupulous. The crooks, fortunately, are few though not far between. They come to secret arrangements with politicians, massage the "research" to suit these funders and get the "results" broadcast for a fat fee which is distributed as necessary. Politicians pay because they continue to delude themselves that lies can create positive vibes in the middle of elections.

The legitimate polls also make money all around, since television ratings rise when exit and opinion polls are announced, which means lucrative advertising. We in the print media are the ultimate suckers, because we print these poll-results without even getting the advertising.

The Election Commission is now in control of every minute detail of electioneering. The Uttar Pradesh poll, stretched over a month, was an exercise in patience and tenacity, above all else. The result of such thorough, and even intrusive, management is transparency and honesty. No one can now claim that the voting was rigged, or that booths were captured by the ruling party with the help of the administration. Even as late as in January, this was the charge behind the attempt to dismiss the Mulayam Singh government. But the Election Commission seems helpless over opinion polls. France had a general election recently. News of exit and opinion polls were banned on the eve of elections and during polling.

Exit polls are just that much more dangerous, since they purport to be more accurate. But utterly erroneous information is passed off repeatedly as credible. One example, that of the market leader in polls, will serve.

NDTV gave the Bahujan Samaj Party between 117 and 127 seats after its last exit poll. A three per cent margin of error either way is acceptable in such predictions. But to get the number wrong by 80 to 90 seats in an Assembly of 403 is breathtaking. At the other end of the electoral ladder, NDTV gave Congress between 35 and 45 seats. The Congress got half the higher estimate. NDTV must have been doing its research in some state other than Uttar Pradesh, or perhaps in some unwarranted state of mind. They projected the BJP as getting, with allies, between 108 and 118 seats. BJP president Rajnath Singh might today be strutting on all ten toes if his party had delivered what NDTV promised. In fact, its seats were less than half. Others were not much better: Star TV gave BJP a very precise 108 seats.

It is a terrible drop from inflation to deflation.

BJP and Congress claim to be national parties and, fuelled by dream merchants in Delhi, fantasise about a two-party system in which they are the only two parties. Let us check their status now in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP has only one MLA per one and a half district. The Congress has one MLA for every three districts. If you take the Rae Bareli and Amethi seats out, the average might get worse.

Both national parties played their aces. The BJP leadership distributed hate-Muslim CDs. The Congress put all its investment in the Family Charisma Bank. It is curious how elitist India accuses leaders like Mayawati and Mulayam of being "anti-modern" and "backward" when the real medieval politics is being done by BJP and Congress. Voters, both Hindu and Muslim, flocked towards the inclusive electoral strategy of Mayawati. The BJP and Congress did not even merit the limited joy of being runners up. "Maulana" Mulayam was an easy Number 2.

Will UP help BJP grow up? The drawing power of the Congress Family drew three fewer seats after five years in Opposition in Lucknow and three years of power in Delhi. Draw your own conclusions.

An interesting pattern is emerging at the national electoral level, and it will be bad news for the "nationals" if it sustains till the next general elections. The Congress and the BJP are, for the most part, only exchanging seats between each other, in states where third parties do not exist: Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and, to a lesser extent since it is a battle of alliances there, in Maharashtra. Wherever there are regional parties, they either dominate (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Tamil Nadu) or the "nationals" are turning into the tail of the train rather than the engine. The BJP needs Nitish Kumar in Bihar and the Congress will lose in states like Jharkhand and Haryana if it does not voluntarily give more seats to regional parties. The Congress could even become vulnerable in Punjab in the next polls if a non-Akali regional party emerges. In Maharashtra the Congress needs Sharad Pawar more than vice versa. Deve Gowda holds the balance in Karnataka and M. Karunanidhi may invite Congress leaders to his celebrations but will not let the party into the ministry despite being dependent on the Congress vote. The BJP is dead in Orissa without Navin Patnaik. If the Marxists, in effect a regional party in Bengal, are at all threatened, it is by another regional party, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul.

The space for both Congress and BJP is shrinking, and they have only themselves to blame. The former has become strangely trapped in an economic philosophy imposed by a triumvirate that often seems more loyal to the World Bank than to the Indian voter. The BJP remains mired in a partition mindset.

The Indian voter has two demands: economic justice and social cohesion. Both are essential if the Indian nation has to reach its own high standards of expectation. Political parties are no longer leading the voter forward; the voter is setting the standards for political success. The voter is more mature than the party, and that is excellent news.

But perhaps nothing is more enjoyable than the manner in which the voter fools the opinion pollsters. I presume the fieldwork is done over many many thousands, as repeatedly advertised in order to bump up the credibility of the projection. I assume that no one fudges the answers in the legitimate sector of opinion polling. Then how does it all go so wildly, comically wrong? Quite simple actually. The voter sees the young man turning up with a detailed questionnaire, courteously helps the young chap earn his daily bread by filling all the blanks as required. The relieved young person goes away. And the voter bursts out laughing. He has taken his revenge upon television.

Time to have a baby

Byline by M J Akbar: Time to have a baby

A remarkable coincidence, and two surprising decisions from asymmetrical orbits coalesced to put two honest men into the highest offices of India. Both were patriotic, professional, prudent, educated and unambiguously clean. Abdul Kalam became President of India in the summer of 2002 and Manmohan Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister in the summer of 2004. Both had high profile careers, one in defence weaponry and the other in finance, but neither was a public figure, or had a mass profile. Both are household names today. What do Indians think of them now?

President Kalam’s popularity ratings, one hears, are around 80%. For the life of me I cannot imagine what the remaining 20% have against him. It couldn’t be his hair, could it?
He has done everything right as President.

He has protected the national interest whenever called upon to do so, subtly, calmly, with neither rhetoric nor exploitative sentiment. He has remained above partisan interests, whether in the coarse game of Assembly manipulation, or while gently deflecting the government towards a more reasonable approach in the Indo-US nuclear deal. His patriotism found a wonderful mission: in teaching the young that their finest personal investment was in the future prosperity of their nation.

He was a marginal presence in the nation’s consciousness when he entered Rashtrapati Bhavan. He will be genuinely missed if he leaves it after only five years. Dr Manmohan Singh has taken just three years to become a disappointment. His career is a text book case of good intentions not being good enough. You can’t be pregnant all your life. You also have to have the baby.

The Punjab results were a direct indictment of the Prime Minister’s performance. Dr Singh is the first Prime Minister from an Indian minority community, and yet could not deliver the votes of his fellow Sikhs in sufficient numbers to his party. Muslim faith in him, which had soared three years ago, has sagged visibly after his failure to deliver on the Sachar report. The Prime Minister raised hopes when he publicly promised a massive increase in government spending on development for projects that would benefit minorities. When the Budget was announced a few months later, we discovered that the finance minister had actually cut spending on this head. The Prime Minister did nothing, and has now relapsed into his all-too familiar, and convenient silence.

Once again, lots of pregnancy, but no baby.

His reputation for honesty has also soiled just a bit. No one in his senses believes that he is personally culpable. But a very damaging question is being asked. It is common knowledge that corruption is rife in the present Union Cabinet. Of what use is the Prime Minister’s honesty if he is presiding over a dishonest government, with some ministers collecting money with both hands, and a couple of feet as well? Dr Manmohan Singh’s silence is a form of abetment, and worse. He has compromised in order to preserve his job. It is guilt by association.

In a smart piece of positioning, Dr Singh has preserved a waterproof image despite 16 years in the thick, and occasionally muck, of politics. The contradictions are beginning to chip at the waterproofing.

For starters, you cannot be above politics in a job that demands consummate political skills. Manmohan Singh has all the virtues required of his principal secretary when he needs the qualities of a Prime Minister. He is the first Prime Minister of India who cannot communicate with the voter. He goes to election meetings only because he has a wide-bodied aeroplane at his command, paid for by the voters. No one listens to him. Drummed up crowds fidget or yawn, eager to be released from ennui. Rahul Gandhi has to do the campaigning for him in Uttar Pradesh. Manmohan Singh has power without responsibility for the vote, which leads to disconnect with the voter.

It is now common to suggest that the Congress vehicle is stranded because it has two steering wheels. But consider another possibility. If Dr Singh had the qualities of a political leader, with the flexibility and communication skills needed to move forward, this vehicle might have acquired two engines instead of two steering wheels. Instead, Mrs Sonia Gandhi has had to write letters to the Prime Minister recording her objections to government policy. This means, at least in her mind, that even the single engine of this vehicle is stalling because the government has either gone into neutral gear, or is in reverse. Why else would she place her qualifications on record?

The voter has no sympathy for excuses. He — or, more important, she, for the really decisive voter is now the woman — elected a government that would deliver, not one that would dither.
The allies of the Congress know that they will have to share the costs of failed leadership without having been given the most important portfolios in this government. Their unease is seeping through in their body language, and is getting vehement in their private language.

When the Left and the BJP set aside their almost irreconcilable differences and came together on the floor of the Lok Sabha over the blatant attempt by some American legislators to pressurise Delhi over our relations with Iran, they were sending two messages, one explicit, and the other implicit. The first, obvious, one was to the United States: India is not, and never will be, a client state. The second message was unstated, and might even be denied if you discuss it. But they were also sending a signal to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who has eroded his credibility by seeming to cut corners in his hurry to push the Indo-US nuclear deal. It is true that Dr Singh was badly served by over-reaching bureaucrats who undersold the problems and oversold the advantages, but advisers don’t hang around to take the blame.

It is always bad news for a Prime Minister when Parliament feels that it has to draw a line he cannot cross on a matter of such vital national interest. A Prime Minister should know such cut-off lines out of a combination of instinct, knowledge, experience and honest advice.

Perhaps the reason why President Kalam smells of roses after five years in Delhi is because his job required him to be above politics. President Kalam was comfortable in this upper zone; he even enjoyed its temperate climate. A Prime Minister has no such luxury. He is a lung of Indian democracy, and democracy is a political nervous system. The Prime Minister is the executive authority of India, the first among equals in his Cabinet; he is not above his Cabinet. He cannot claim the Nobel Prize for Clean Hands while some of his Cabinet colleagues are mopping up the stuff from a swill.

It is possible that Dr Manmohan Singh’s preferred virtues would make him a better President that Prime Minister. President Kalam has laid down a condition for re-election that is virtually impossible for the political system to meet. He wants all three principal blocs, the Congress, BJP and the Left, to support him for a second term. Only a very remote set of compulsions could engineer that.

The President’s Palace is going to be vacant soon. Dr Manmohan Singh might consider changing his address. President Kalam has got us used to a soft-spoken, gentle, decent, likeable, honest, prudent, professional, courteous, educated person at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Dr Singh fits the job description down to every comma.

Up and Down

Byline By M.J. Akbar : UP and Down

When you can’t win, the best thing to do, naturally, is to change the definition of victory. Since no political party can win in Uttar Pradesh, all of them are in the process of redefining success.
This is a clever massage, done with much kneading by psephologists and media pundits. Victory is a clear measure; success is a comparative call. If you can keep the bar of expectations low enough, then you can always sound jubilant after crossing it. It is a high jump battle played by low jump standards.

The Samajwadi Party is in power, and began the election campaign promising it would return to power. It will now declare victory if it is the second largest party. The Bahujan Samaj Party thought it was riding a wave. There will be garlands of currency notes if it gets between 130 and 140 seats.

The BJP is best positioned to smile, since it began with no expectations at all after its disastrous collapse in the general elections three years ago. If the BJP crosses a hundred seats, its president Rajnath Singh can assert that its revival is now a fact. If it crosses 120 seats, it can bring out the drums.

The Congress is best positioned to cry, since its unexpected success in the general elections of 2004 lifted expectations skywards. Three years later, when it should have been looking at three-digit results, it has lowered the bar so far that it has become a very low jump. Congress strategists are getting ready to congratulate themselves if the party gets 35 seats out of over 400. A person who was not born in the winter of 1984-85, when the Congress swept every seat in Uttar Pradesh, has voted for the first time in this Assembly election. A generation has matured into a voter, but twenty years and three presidents later, the Congress has still not found the political pulse of India’s most important electoral state.

In a normal election, arithmetic should be sufficient to determine who has won. In Uttar Pradesh, the victor will be determined by algebra. Alliances will be shaped after the results. The chief minister will be selected not on the basis of what matters to voters, but on what matters to politicians.

Discount therefore all the statements about integrity being made during the polls. All options are open. Everyone is ready to sleep with anyone, as long as the pre-nuptial agreement is acceptable. The only possibility that can be ruled out is an alliance between the BJP and the Congress, but that is a non-starter even in mathematical terms: the two together will not add up to a majority in the House.

Rahul Gandhi, who seems to be campaigning as much against former Congress Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao as anyone else, remarked that the 1996 Congress alliance with the BSP, fashioned by Rao, was a historic blunder. That assessment is absolutely accurate, but it will not prevent Congress from supporting, or even joining, a Mayawati government if the Congress gets 40 seats and the BSP can top 140. (They can always turn that into a majority with the help of independents and defectors.)

Rajnath Singh might assert, with a straight face (and if you look at his picture, you will notice that he has a very straight face indeed), that the BJP treats every other party as untouchable but cometh the hour, cometh the touchability. If the numbers add up, both Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav will happily take BJP’s support to form a government. They might be less happy about lending support to a BJP government, but the future is all in the numbers. Crunch those UP numbers and you never know what might fall out.

The Congress, which keeps a lot hidden up its long khadi sleeve, also has what might be called a post-democratic option: to use the fractured result as an opportunity to impose President’s Rule so that it can exercise hundred per cent authority despite getting less than ten per cent of the seats. The governor of Uttar Pradesh will happily issue an edict declaring that no party is in a position to form a stable government, and therefore he should become the fountainhead from which all decisions and privileges flow. The snag, of course, is that while the Congress might have an obedient governor, it does not have a pliable President of India. President Kalam’s popularity ratings are exploding upwards precisely because he has been correct and Constitutional instead of tweaking ethics to play politics. He is not going to compromise in the last days of his first term.
It is entirely appropriate, then, that a second Kalam term will be heavily influenced by the election results of Uttar Pradesh. There should have been no debate. A direct election for President of India would have been no contest. Opinion polls show something in the nature of 80% support for President Kalam. But the electorate consists of MPs and MLAs so it becomes a game between political parties.

The UP results will not affect the numbers too much, but they will affect the course that different parties choose to take. Without anyone realising it, support for the ruling UPA coalition has whittled down by over 45 MPs. The government still enjoys a majority, but it is an open question how comfortable that will be in a secret ballot. Partners must have confidence in the popularity of the core party in any coalition. That confidence is ebbing from the Congress, and if it shows no hope of revival in Uttar Pradesh, after having displayed none in Bihar and Bengal in the last two years, then tiny little question marks begin to form in the mind, waiting to grow up into huge exclamation marks.

The Congress government in Delhi has been singularly responsible for wasting a historic opportunity to rebuild the party’s momentum, and rediscover its place as the preferred home of Indian politics. Government is an opportunity to put together the blocks that can establish a network of voting groups that can re-elect you. In 2004 the Congress skilfully created a coalition at the top, of parties who could dominate Parliament. It then forgot to create a coalition of voters, who would have kept the ruling alliance’s feet anchored to the ground. When power goes to your head, you can’t look down.

From the head, power seeped into the ozone layer. I wish I could say that it slipped through the fingers, but the metaphor refuses to descend. It is only when you live in the stratosphere that you believe that votes will come when a golden chariot ploughs through an election crowd. Votes stick in a honeycomb, patiently constructed, cell-by-cell, village-by-village. The Congress has no party structure left from one end of the Ganga to the other, in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Bengal, and no leader with the time, or interest, to do hard, street-level work.

If semantics were sufficient there could have been four chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, and maybe five Prime Ministers of India. There is a solution for such an inconvenient Constitution. Our legislators could always amend it. With three Prime Ministers acting as co-brothers, which coalition could ever fail?

If Rahul is future, who is the past?

Byline By M.J. Akbar : If Rahul is future, who is the past?

If Rahul Gandhi is the future of the Congress, then Dr Manmohan Singh must surely be its past. The Prime Minister’s definitive statement linking the future of the Congress to Rahul Gandhi, made in the midst of a faltering UP election campaign, suggests many things. But the most important surely is that the dynamic of Congress politics has shifted from preserving Dr Singh in office to making Rahul Gandhi the next Prime Minister.

Was Dr Singh mature, or premature, in being so specific?

It was not a casual remark. Nor was it meant merely to please. If the second were the reason then Dr Singh would have been parroting it ever since he was sworn in as Prime Minister three years ago. The point of the message lies not in the content of the remark but in the timing.

The content is not news. Rahul Gandhi did not win an election from his father’s constituency, Amethi, to become minister of information and broadcasting. The tea leaves could be read in the list of Congress ministers sworn in along with Dr Singh. No one from Rahul Gandhi’s age group was given a place in government, although you could virtually hear the crash of broken young hearts as the queue formed before the President of India. The young were told to wait their turn. It was implicit that their turn would come along with Rahul Gandhi. But in those early days an ‘if’ was attached to the ‘when’, as Rahul Gandhi’s will often seemed to veer towards won’t. Dr Singh’s statement is evidence that the ‘if’ has been deleted; the ‘when’ has been notified.

The statement is clear indication to two generations of Congressmen that they have no hope of taking Dr Singh’s place; that if the Congress returns to power, it will go unambiguously to the Gandhi family.

There has been much background jostling in the past few months, as the government’s failure to protect the party vote takes its toll at the state level. The Prime Minister is head of government and must take the blame. One politician’s failure is always another politician’s hope. There is a common view that if the Congress comes a poor fourth in UP, there will be turbulence in Delhi. There is also uncertainty about whether a government candidate can win the coming elections for President of the country. It is merely human if such circumstances encourage hope in the minds of stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjee, or old hands like Sushil Shinde. The Prime Minister has informed his generation of hopefuls that they can stop hoping.

Manmohan Singh belongs to GenerationWas.
Rahul Gandhi represents GenerationNext.
What happens to GenerationInbetween?

Dr Singh is over 70. Rahul Gandhi will soon be 40. Quite a few Congressmen, some of them with substance, are trapped in between, in that last decade of hope called the Sixties. They don’t seem to be in their Sixties, for two reasons. First, because the men dye their hair. Second, most of them came to prominence after Rajiv Gandhi’s victory at the end of 1984, when they were in their early Forties. More than 22 years have passed but we still subconsciously think of them as young. They will be squeezed, but they will adjust with the future as best as they can, keeping any regret intensely personal.

The problem will be with ambitions within the same age group outside the Congress. If the Congress could win a majority on its own, this would not be a problem. But that is not possible in the foreseeable future. Will non-Congress parties within the UPA coalition accept Rahul Gandhi as easily as Congress MPs? Lalu Prasad Yadav, for instance, has not been shy of claiming the prime ministership for himself at some future date; and it is difficult to see Sharad Pawar in a Rahul Gandhi Cabinet. But all options will be subject to a single consideration: how many seats Congress wins in the next general election under Rahul Gandhi’s leadership.

In 2004, Dr Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister because Mrs Sonia Gandhi stepped aside and Rahul Gandhi did not have sufficient experience. You could argue, of course, that he still does not have sufficient experience, or he would not have made the gaffes he did on the UP campaign trail. But you don’t get experience by staring at the computer screen. Experience comes when you have stumbled on the wrong phrase, or made some exorbitant claim that induces friends to search for worry beads and opponents to check out their potential for sarcasm.

Politics at the highest level, in a democracy, is above all the art of communication. Some masters, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Narasimha Rao, or Kamaraj, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Govind Ballabh Pant and Sardar Patel from an older lot — know that to talk less is to say more. To rise beyond this you need the confidence of a post-1969 Indira Gandhi, or a Jyoti Basu at any time in his career. A genius like Jawaharlal Nehru is exceptional. But neither confidence nor genius is achieved without effort. Indira Gandhi’s composure was not an overnight phenomenon. It did not descend upon her the moment Shastri made her minister of information and broadcasting in his first Cabinet in 1964. For years, the Socialist leader Dr Ram Manohar Lohia described her derisively as "Gungi Guriya", or the silent doll. But her silence had the last word over his eloquence. Indira Gandhi understood that silence is preferable to a mistaken assertion.

Rahul Gandhi needs to appreciate the virtues of minimalism until moderation is within his reach. The past is a trap if you do not appreciate its nuances. It helps to have a speechwriter who remembers Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the Mukti Bahini, and the innumerable Bengali refugees who fled Army repression in East Bengal in 1971. Politics is an examination in which the voter awards marks, and the voter is one tough invigilator. Rahul Gandhi can become leader of the Congress, but he cannot become leader of India without winning an election. Rajiv Gandhi emerged from his election at the crest of an unprecedented tide. Rahul Gandhi is swimming against an ebb current, for which he has no one to blame but his own government.

So was Dr Manmohan Singh’s remark mature or premature? His realism may have eliminated ambiguity in the Congress, but injected uncertainty into the coalition that he heads. If the other parties are uncomfortable with the transition in the Congress, and they know that the change is scheduled to take place before the next elections, then they could look for other alliance options. The Prime Minister might have been wiser to remain vague about the future. Could it be that there was a decision that the ground had to be prepared just in case unpredictable events catapulted the government towards an early election? We do not know.

Power is not stagnant energy; it is high voltage electricity that switches from one point to another without compunction. But you cannot indulge in too much voltage fluctuation without hurting the machinery.

If the past has beckoned the future, then it cannot allow the future to hang around idly outside the door because those with an interest in the future (which means everyone except the Prime Minister of India) will spend their time outside the room rather than inside it. A government works only when there is a sense of fusion. Confusion is its death certificate.

World Strikes Back

Byline by M J Akbar: World Strikes Back

Is peace patriotic? That is the nub of the debate consuming America, as it debates the meaning of victory and the implications of defeat in Iraq.

War, of course, has always been patriotic. Any leader with a gun in one hand and a bugle in the other takes care to wrap himself in a flag. As long as you have acquired sole-selling rights to the motherland you can always send young men and women to their graves. Militant patriotism is such a powerful mantle that it cloaks even the most irresponsible clutter of inefficient sins. Protecting the halo of the "Commander in Chief" becomes a patriotic duty if not a compulsion.

Politicians in search of votes prefer the war ticket to the peace flag. Peace is fuzzy while war is muscular. While common sense suggests that any voter should prefer peace, common experience tells us that he can be milked more easily with the promise of war when war is justified as the answer to that most evocative of emotions, fear. This is the powerful combination of sentiment and logic that has sustained the Bush momentum for five years.

Bush did not inject fear into the American consciousness. That was done by 9/11. But he has been masterful at exploiting this fear for a Bush agenda rather than an American agenda. In its simplest manifestation, this might be called the difference between his war in Afghanistan and his war in Iraq. There was an explicit legitimacy to his attack on the Taliban state after it refused to hand over Osama bin Laden. But the war against Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with the "war on terror". It has been proved over and over again that Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who has turned a sneer into an art form, used a deliberate maze of distortion, exaggeration and lies to turn Saddam into an ally of bin Laden.

The phrase, "war on terror", is a curious one. How do you fight a war against an abstract noun? But it did not emerge by accident. It is consciously elastic, to enable the White House to drag who it will into the target area. The mistake made by the Bush White House was to believe that the target would always remain a static fact, willing to take any punishment. The unexpected insurgency in Iraq has proved that a target can hit back with devastating results.

The daily count in casualties, an overstretched army, a soaring bill and an angry public opinion should suggest that Bush has exhausted the political lode which proved so lucrative for him and the Republicans. It says something about the tenacity of the "war-appeal" that it can be mined even after it has clearly outlived its utility. The debate for Bush and the Democrats now is whether there should be a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Democrats want the boys back home within 18 months, or just before America elects its next President. Bush accuses them of "losing the war" by setting a deadline.

There is something bogus about Bush’s argument. His current strategy, known as the "surge", which means an increase in American troop levels in order to bring "peace" to Iraq, has received the support of unconvinced Republicans only because there is an implicit time-line. If the "surge" does not work by October or November, Bush will have to change track, and the only change can now be a form of disengagement. In other words, the Republicans are in reality giving Bush less time to succeed than the Democrats.

But of course the Bush rhetoric is different, despite every sign of military and public exhaustion. The Pentagon admits that the armed forces are hugely overstretched. This week, the rules were changed to extend a normal tour of duty in Iraq to 15 months. Even at the height of Vietnam, a soldier on active duty knew that his nightmare would end in 12 months. The army claims that it has maintained its level at 1.4 million, but this is because it recruited (at very high cost) 80,000 men within last year. The number is not indicative of normal retirement; it also suggests the high attrition rate in Iraq. Most of the soldiers at war have joined because the armed forces offer much-needed money or incentives that can help them in the future. They come from the poorer families of America. Some Democrat politicians are even urging the return of the draft, which would force rich kids to go into battle. They add that the war would end very quickly if the elite had to send its children to die for George Bush’s policies.

No one knows either which generation will pay for them. The bill for Iraq has crossed $500 billion. The first casualty in war is clearly the accountant. Blood on the battlefield is paid for by red ink on the balance sheet. In September a new generation of flying machines will replace the helicopters in use in Iraq. This is the V-22 Osprey, a chopper with less manoeuvrability but more speed than the helicopter. There is uncertainty about its value against an insurgency, but there is great certainty about its cost: $80 million a piece. Someone in the offense industry is becoming very rich.

The American people have begun to realise that money, or rhetoric, cannot purchase victory in a war without horizons. The trick that sustains the Bush rhetoric is a simple one: there is no definition of victory, and hence no talk of objectives achieved. If you think about it, both the declared objectives of the Iraq war have been achieved. It is now definite that there were no weapons of mass destruction with Saddam Hussein, and Iraq is not capable of producing them for a hundred years. And Saddam is now dead, his regime destroyed. So why are American and British troops still there? To become the policemen of Baghdad? If that is their mission then it is mission impossible. Any day’s newspapers will tell you that every claim of "success" by the White House or the Pentagon is answered by an attack on the heart of the American and British presence. The insurgency will not end as long as foreign troops remain on Iraqi soil.

When an administration begins to crumble, it does not fall on only one pillar. The erosion of credibility affects the whole base. All the high-flyers of this government are on the front pages for the wrong reasons. Karl Rove, mastermind of victory, is trying to explain why millions — yes, millions — of emails have been erased from the White House archives. Paul Wolfowitz, mastermind of Iraq and now head of the World Bank, is trying to explain why he used his influence to get his girlfriend a much bigger salary.

Some of Wolfowitz’s accusers believe that he does not care about the World Bank. That is not true. Paul Wolfowitz, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George Bush care very deeply about the World Bank. They just don’t care about the world.

The world is now striking back.

Gore’s Revenge

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Gore’s Revenge

I love America! The New York Times has four pages of sports news and not a single word on cricket. The eastern coast of the United States is the only region in the English-speaking world that can claim to be in more or less the same time zone as the West Indies; over here, you don’t have to keep awake all night to watch India lose. But as far as the World Cup is concerned, we might as well be on another planet. Newspapers do not deign to publish a line of results in small type. What a blessing! One sub-section of an intermittent television channel in New York plays a few Hindi film songs in the morning, interrupting the music only to inform the world about the miraculous ability of Baba Manjhi or Sanjhi to foresee your future for the usual cash compensation, as well as to warn you that every other astrologer in the city is a fraud. But there is no creepy crawler at the bottom of the screen giving running details of the score or, worse, advertisements featuring the unique contralto of the Sachin Squeak. What bliss!

The only intrusion from Mars is the regrettable presence of the BBC, regrettable because BBC has the effrontery to attach World Cup news to its sports section. I see no future for BBC America in America if it continues this head-in-the-sand obstinacy. America plays something called baseball. It is a game played in which the players are required to chew tobacco very slowly before someone behind the bat makes a strange gesture and everyone starts hugging one another. When I checked with an expert, a former government official who has become a fulltime intellectual, during dinner he told me that baseball has been at least partly inspired by an Indian game. Gulli danda? I ask incredulously. He lowers the rim of his spectacles and answers with a meaningful silence. It proves my theory that when government officials grow up to become intellectuals, they become very kind to temporary visitors.

This is what happens when you don’t make Al Gore President of the United States just because of a few chads in Florida. He takes his revenge by changing the climate of the world. Spring has arrived in New York, but instead of fragrant breezes through Central Park, the city is shivering under snow flurries and a wind that was so cold that Canada let it go to America. In the BG Era (Before Gore), sturdy New Yorkers would have called this unseasonal, put on their overcoats and gone off to church on Easter Sunday. But now we have to discuss the litany of a parallel faith, Earth Science, full of measurements of carbon emission and dire predictions that the polar bear will be extinct in fifty years unless of course drought kills us all before that. Progress now is recognition of the evils of progress. Amen.

Al Gore may be able to convert summer into winter, and win an Oscar for being the prophet of gloom, but every serious political pundit believes that he cannot really win the next election for President. Gore himself is in a mood to tease, saying no with such a heavy implied wink that it would take an extinct polar bear to miss the point. However, the pundits would prefer that he save his cash and stay at home. Why? Because he is still too fat to contest. Unless he loses about fifty pounds, he has no hope in this telegenic age. Television puts on ten pounds to your image, and Internet is worse, but that is where elections are won and lost these days. Weight shifts ratings down. The surprise package of this election season, Barack Obama, who stunned the system by raising as much in the first quarter as the Clintons ($25 million) is lean, lithe, lissom. His equivalent on the Republican side, Mitt Romney, might not be able to reach the White House, but he is a perfect candidate for any casting couch which wants a President in a soap opera or polopera. Romney has raised $20 million, largely from his fellow Mormons, but I doubt if he would have survived if his stomach sagged like an obese gunny bag. Looks matter. Rudy Giuliani, the thrice married mayor of New York during 9/11with a thrice married wife, moves with the light step of a man who has known a treadmill on intimate terms. He is the current favourite, having overtaken yesterday’s frontrunner, John McCain. Has McCain slipped because of his expanding jowl? After all, we are still in the cosmetic stage of the campaign. Bill Clinton, who had begun to bloat as President, now looks like Cary Grant with a round nose, having cut down his consumption after his heart attack (barring ice creams, that is). Hillary is a bit stolid on the frame front, but fine. She has fat legs, but never shows them. That is why she always wears pants.

The campaign is about Iraq, and will continue to be so. One day’s news story, on an inside page, is enough to indicate why. This is what appeared in the papers on Good Friday: "Six Americans and four British soldiers were killed in separate attacks around Iraq ... an American helicopter crashed south of Baghdad, wounding four soldiers. Reuters quoted witnesses as saying that they heard heavy gunfire before the crash, suggesting that the helicopter had been shot down... (The British) unit repelled an insurgent attack... Later, the unit was hit west of Basra by a roadside bomb, followed by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades... Iraqi-American security stations in three Baghdad neighbourhoods were attacked in what may have been a coordinated offensive, American military commanders said..." This is after the surge in troops ordered by George Bush, and the "success" of this strategy peddled by the administration and its supporters. If this is success, what could failure look like?

Would Jesus have gone to war in Iraq? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that the question is being asked. Four Easters ago there was conviction, as much in the newsroom as the White House. Doubt is a necessary precondition for peace, or at least reconciliation. The question was posed repeatedly on Saturday morning Easter TV programmes as a resplendent variety of pastors queued up to address dilemmas on war, peace and whether the Church of Poverty had been consumed by the Church of Prosperity. The contemporary heirs of the Church Militant, like Jerry Falwell, are certain that Jesus would have been an excellent commander-in-chief in a holy war between Good Guys and Bad Guys. Others are less sanguine. Two thousand years ago the Romans were the Bad Guys, with some assistance from the Pharisees. Jesus was angry at usurers who cheated the poor and false leaders who misled the innocent; he left war to Caesar. The Sermon on the Mount would probably be too liberal a manifesto for today’s realists. But enough. This is a faith weekend and this column is in serious danger of drifting towards a sermon.

Double or Quits

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Double or Quits

It is an error to confuse the first of April with jokes; what is celebrated this day by those within the penumbra of "western civilisation", once lauded by President Woodrow Wilson as capable of doing the thinking on behalf of the world, is surprise. The civilised reaction, when you do get surprised, is to grin and bear it.

Grins in official Washington are noticeable by their absence in April this year, but then surprise is perhaps too mild a word for what it is reeling under. Shock is the more appropriate term. America’s Middle East policy is in free fall, its crucial support system knocked out by the most trusted Arab ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.

On 28 March the venerable Saudi monarch, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, told the Arab summit in Riyadh that the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq was illegal. The damage that this has done to America’s presence in Iraq, and its credibility in the region, is immense. King Abdullah’s precise words were, "In beloved Iraq, blood flows between brothers in the shadow of illegitimate foreign occupation and hateful sectarianism… We will not allow forces from outside the region to determine the future of the region."

This public snub was probably the good news. The private snub was, if anything, worse. King Abdullah sent his national security adviser, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to tell President George Bush that he was a bit tied up at the moment, and therefore could not fly over for a state dinner on 17 April: maybe they could do dinner another time? When your best friend is not free for dinner, it is time to look in the mirror.

The White House chose to grin and deny that any invitation had been sent, but it was impossible to deny the contents of the Abdullah speech. The State Department asked Nicholas Burns, still looking depressed after his non-talks on the nuclear deal in Delhi, to explain on television that the American presence in Iraq had UN sanction as well as the invitation of the Iraqi government. Mr Burns did not dwell on the finer points of both: that the Security Council held another view before the war began, and that the Iraqi government whose invitation he so admires did not exist then. And now comes news that young King Abdullah of Jordan has no time for dinner either. Although the Jordan monarch is so often in America that he could qualify for a frequent flyer programme were he plebeian enough to fly on a commercial liner, he too has sent word that it might be wiser to postpone a planned state visit in September. Would 2008 do?

It is not that America’s friends have become stronger, but that, under Bush, America has become weaker. Even genuine friends are tired of Bush’s posturing on fundamental issues like Palestine, and his self-defeating, lacerating war agenda. Five years ago, only a few months after 9/11, King Abdullah floated a plan for peace in the region which, in essence, was a land-for-peace option: if Israel returned to its 1967 borders, all the Arab states would accept it as a neighbour with whom they could live in peace. Only two Arab countries, Egypt and Jordan, have full relations with Israel at the moment.

In 2002, America was the most powerful country in the world, not because of the Pentagon, but because it had the genuine sympathy of the international community which condemned 9/11 as an outrageous act of wanton terrorism. America possessed the steel of moral strength. Bush has squandered an asset which history endows upon nations only occasionally, with the petulance of swagger. A wiser man might have chosen his enemies with more care, and used his friends to more purpose. The Abdullah plan still has legs when Bush has lost his. This is unfortunate, because every proposal still needs the momentum of American support to travel forward. Iraq has become the graveyard of Bush’s presidency.

George Bush has destroyed Iraq and wounded America deeply. It is a legacy that will take time to repair.

Weakness can be more dangerous than strength, since ebbing confidence often tempts you towards the irrational. The loser’s dream, when his stake has disappeared, is to take a chance one last time: double or quits. Another loss will not change his status as a loser, but a victory can bring the windfall that turns you into an unexpected hero. Will Bush add a third war, with Iran, in the hope that he can compensate for the two he is losing, in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The drama of 15 sailors being captured by Iran near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway is not the only incident reminiscent of the Cold War. It might be pertinent to note that both Britain and Iran may be right in their claims about the boundary, since that line on the sea has been in dispute ever since it was drawn. (I can’t help wondering, incidentally, about the fate of the Indian "smuggling" ship which was searched by the British: did it escape in the turmoil?) But the reasons for the escalation in the confrontation between Iran and Britain may lie in an episode that took place five weeks earlier.

On 7 February, an Iranian official, Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari, a former deputy defence minister, vanished in Istanbul. He was on more than one intelligence watch-list since he was known to have helped organise the Hezbollah in the 1980s and 1990s. An Israeli daily, Yedioth Aharonoth, broke the silence around the mystery by reporting that Mossad, Israel’s much-admired intelligence agency, had organised Asgari’s defection. Other reports suggest that Mossad, always in control of his case, may have misled Asgari into believing that he was a mole for a European country rather than for Israel. No one has any idea of where he is now, but when Franz Jung, Germany’s defence minister, was asked during a visit to Turkey whether Asgari was in Germany, he declined to give any answer.

There is never one single reason for chess moves in a complicated conflict. And spies may be knights and castles when they are at work, but become pawns when they are caught. That is the normal law of this game. There is no good reason why Iran should risk a larger battle for the sake of a mole. But governments are not one-dimensional either, and this dangerous chess tournament is played simultaneously on more than one table. Iran might be sending just this message: that Britain cannot patrol those waters with impunity, or that the probing missions that do take place in preparation for war will not get the kind of free run that they got in Iraq before 2003.

What is evident is that events could run in either direction. There is a peace plan on the table, and there is a war plan on the seas — and the skies. Perhaps we have no right to expect a victory for good sense, when so many powerful players believe that they can build something fresh out of rubble.

But since surprise is the theme of the first of April, which option do you think would surprise you more? A collective rush towards chaos, or a constructive step towards peace?

Money and Murder: The Making of a Bloodsport

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Money and Murder: The Making of a Bloodsport

Cricket, tea and murder in the vicarage were the three archetypal metaphors for the British empire: Dennis Compton (Brylcreem and straight drives), Rupert Brook (tea at four at Grantchester) and Agatha Christie are the architecture on the cultural landscape of an empire sleepwalking its way towards new nations that would throw out Britain but keep cricket and tea. Who would have thought that Hercule Poirot would be needed as the third umpire at the West Indies World Cup? Cricket is dead, murder is alive, and the game is no longer my cup of tea.

The ironies would leave Christie breathless. Bob Woolmer is an Englishman who served the progeny of empire, and was killed by the new culture spawned by independent nations, a mindset controlled by crime and greed. Crime has maimed Pakistan, and greed is crippling India. Cricket is only one symptom of an all-pervasive cancer. India and Pakistan can take comfort in the fact that the only difference between them is that India defeated a joke called Bermuda, and Pakistan couldn’t.

Gentility began to ebb out of the gentleman’s game a long while ago, being shoved aside in rough stages by intensity. The British began to mix metaphors first, when the masters of the world were defeated by the minions of the world. Their first defeat by Australia created such heartburn that they declared cricket dead and preserved its ashes in an urn. It was intensity that led to bodyline, in which an English bowler, with the full approval of his captain and a typically weasel-MCC, turned a ball of leather into a lethal weapon aimed at the head of Australia’s immaculate batsmen. The two nations still go to war over the Ashes, as evident in the triumphs accorded to victors. When England last won the Ashes, even the Queen lost her reserve and handed out gongs. The star, Andrew Flintoff, arrived, so it was said, drunk to the gong ceremony and relieved himself on the regal lawns. What a jolly good lark, cheered everyone, for stupidity is the homage worshippers pay to idols. But of course, idols are perched on oily pedestals, as Flintoff found out when he drank after defeat and ended up in the ocean. He was pilloried by the most dangerous jury in the world, a press conference.

Cricket is a family game, hence the intensity. Would Cain have killed Abel were he not his brother? Unlikely. There is no ‘world’ in this World Cup. There cannot be, when you need seven joke teams to make up a tournament of 16. Bermuda was led by a sumo wrestler who defied the laws of gravity just once to take a magnificent catch against India, but confirmed that science cannot be dismissed lightly on a hundred occasions. India’s defeat was evident during the victory against Bermuda.

You could see the smugness return into the eyes of our spoilt, overpaid, pampered, immature dead duck cricketers as they hammered Bermuda’s jokers. Sachin Tendulkar, who cannot be allowed to retire because so much advertising rides on the memory of what he used to be, had the look of a man who had won the World Cup after he made a few runs. Rahul Dravid, who now believes that cricket should not be front page news, should retire from press conferences. I could go on, but what is the point: how many synonyms can you find for pathetic? But why blame an Uthappa alone, when we all conspire to convert him from unknown extra to divinity on the basis of just one innings in Chennai? Everyone is to blame, not least being the politicians, from Bengal to Jharkhand to Maharashtra to Kerala, who have muscled into cricket space in the hope that it will get them votes, and of course because they want a stake in the huge monies that have destroyed the game.

Pakistan looked a team in distress even before they had played a match. Their captain, Inzamamul Haq, could triple his personal endorsement revenues if someone eased that look of permanent pain on his visage. He also has the slightly irritating habit of confusing the Almighty with a cricket coach (irritating, I am sure, to the Almighty as well, which might explain the results). Apparently, he thought that massive quantities of ghee-strewn parathas and meat followed by a long sermon on religion from a cleric were adequate preparation for a World Cup match. It was entirely appropriate that a ‘joke’ team, Ireland, ended the fun.

Crime and corporations are the godfathers of Indian cricket. The two keep their distance from each other, but both know that they are linked by the cricketer. Crime got its opportunity because governments imbued with false morality have refused to permit licensed and regulated betting on cricket. For some obscure, fundamentalist reason, it is perfectly moral in India to bet on the performance of horses, but not on the performance of men. There is no point arguing that men can be corrupted and horses can’t, because the shenanigans of the race course would put any decent mafia to shame. Cricketers might even fetch a higher price from illegal bookmakers. Bribes are also race- and colour-neutral, as South Africa has shown.

Everyone knows that a cricket team on tour lives two lives. One is on the playing field that you see on television, and the other is in hotels with groupies who cajole and bribe their way to the penumbra of cricket celebrities. That is where the stench of corruption begins. It is in the interest of cricket’s administrators to pretend that they cannot smell the stink, since cricket has given them budgets that are beyond their wildest fantasies. But it has always been understood that this malicious odour would not waft into the public domain. Criminals have broken this implicit rule with the murder of Bob Woolmer. The culprits have surely left enough clues. Woolmer recognised his murderers, or he would not have allowed them into his room. That tightens the circle of suspicion. It is very likely that the murderers were seen by others when they knocked on Woolmer’s room or after they left. Woolmer was living in the team hotel, not in a monastery. If the murder is linked to betting syndicates, then either the game finds the will to change its structure or it will die an ignoble death.

Corporations may be guilty of no worse a crime than hysteria, but it is time to check what price their artificially injected mania has begun to demand. It is always a trifle risky to place nationalism in the custody of multinationals. Multinationals never get the balance of nationalism right, since their functioning ideology is non-patriotic. You do not have to scream like a banshee in order to sound like an Indian. That Jharkhand fan who broke a wall or two of Dhoni’s new home, being built on land gifted by a stupid government, was absolutely right when he alleged that Dhoni was much more interested in modelling than in cricket. Even if this is not completely true, since that modelling contract will not come without performance, it is fair to suggest that the Indian cricketer has acquired a split personality. A new, young and semi-tried fast bowler whose name I prefer to forget makes millions out of a war dance on the field, and is honoured by his state government after his idiocy: on which rational axis would you expect his brain to function? And it might be a good moment to ban all those ho-ho-ho cricket commentators who glamorise absurdity in order to keep on the right side of their paymasters.

The purge of Indian cricket can start with a simple decision. Sack the whole team and select a completely new eleven. After all, they would still defeat Bermuda. Naturally, this will not happen. The leaders of Indian cricket will not dare risk accountability, since they would also have to resign on that principle. The world’s administrators will try and dismiss Woolmer’s murder as a one-off crime, rather than a malign disease on the body of the game. Greed will screen the truth.

How do you convert a sport into a bloodsport? Mix greed, megalomania, nationalism, God, politicians, advertising and murder.

Storm Signal

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Storm Signal

The standard rate seems to be one word per dead policeman, so Dr Manmohan Singh did his duty when he called the Maoist insurgency across half of India the gravest threat to the nation’s internal security since independence. Fifty-five policemen were surrounded and killed in their forest camp at Chhattisgarh by Naxalites, and agency reports that I read quoted the Prime Minister’s statement at around 55 words, give or take a few for poor mathematics (mine).

We can now expect the powerful Indian state to do one, or more, of three things: hold a conference of chief ministers on the "Naxalite menace" at which there is a lot of back-slapping when old friends meet across party lines; pull out a number of police battalions from a fire and send them to a cemetery, on the valid assumption that Naxalites will not hit the same place twice; agree upon a debate in Parliament during which backbenchers are given a chance to speak by party whips. This is how Delhi dresses up its windows when it wants to protect itself from reality.

But why blame Dr Manmohan Singh? He is an honest man. By his own admission, explained during innumerable speeches at favourite forums like the Confederation of Indian Industry, he has said, in so many words, that he became Prime Minister in order to make the rich richer so that a portion of their wealth could eventually trickle down to the poor. Unfortunately, after three years of speeches, nothing has yet trickled down to the forests of Chhattisgarh, or even to the slums of its capital, Raipur. The proper thing for the poor to do, of course, is to wait for the momentum of Manmohanomics to reach their hovels. But our Indian poor are a spoilt lot. They have become addicts of democracy, and expect a gush instead of a trickle. Moreover, they want it within the lifetime of a government they have elected.

For the decision-makers within the Indian elite, and its Prime Minister, Dr Singh, Chhattisgarh is another country, as near or as remote as Vietnam was in their youth, and as Iraq is today. The dead are an accidental number, not real flesh and blood. Even those who protect the elite, the policemen in Chhattisgarh, are not real, since constables are the few lucky ones among the poor to be given a uniform and a salary. Casualty rates in a battle between constables and Naxalites are an exchange of statistics among the have-nots. How does that affect the quality or abundance of a meal in Delhi?

The Prime Minister described this as the gravest internal security threat since 1947. Those words were, or should have been, chosen with care. So who has raised the obvious question: what has he been doing about this gravest crisis during the last three years he has been Prime Minister? The crisis did not erupt between 13 and 15 March. Dr Singh will soon be completing (I hope no one uses the ambitious term, ‘celebrating’) a thousand days in office. A fortnight ago his government presented the annual budget. I cannot recall hearing anything about the gravest internal security threat in sixty years, or a remedy to suggest how it could be met through economic policy. And if Maoism is not an economic problem, then it is nothing.

Did it need 55 police corpses to wake up the Prime Minister of India?

Nor is it very certain what he does achieve when he wakes up. The last time he was woken up was a few months ago when the Sachar report on the plight of Indian Muslims was presented to him. In the first flush of dawn-energy he suggested that a portion of government expenditure should be set aside for projects to help lift Indian Muslims. His finance minister chose that moment to go deaf, and when the budget was presented, treated the suggestion with contempt. Dr Singh responded with silence. Someone must have informed him that Indian Muslims are familiar with betrayal, and in any case they have nowhere else to go apart from the Congress in national elections. Maybe I could tell the Prime Minister tomorrow’s news today. The minorities of Chhattisgarh are drifting towards the Naxalites.

The biggest disappointment of the last three years has not been Dr Singh, but the Left. The Maoists are today occupying political space either vacated by the Marxists, or which should have been occupied by them. The spread of the Naxalite movement is evidence of how large a national party, and force, the CPI(M) could have become if it had not been trapped by power, first in Bengal, and then, in the last three years, fooled by the honeytraps of Delhi. Three years ago, for the first time, barring the odd exception of unstable experiments, the CPI(M) became the occupant of two significant bastions, one regional and the other national. Power in Bengal is at least real. Their power in Delhi is an illusion. Whenever the Congress does them a favour and tells them that their influence is an illusion, they retreat behind another explanation. Indian Marxists have become ensnared by the oldest Indian metaphor, the mayajaal. They should now take a few courses in Indian philosophy. Enough of Lenin already, as the theorists of globalisation might put it.

The poor are illiterate because the Indian state has not found the resources for their education. This does not mean that they are stupid. The illiterate may not be able to read the alphabet but they are brilliant at reading a signal.

In the last three years, if the signals from Delhi have been inadequate, then the ones from Kolkata have been appalling, if only because the poor have had higher expectations from Kolkata.

It is hardly a coincidence that the Naxalite attack in Chhattisgarh should occur in the same week that the Marxist government in Kolkata ordered the death of villagers protecting their land in the now well-known village of Nandigram (literally, Village of Nandi) in Bengal. The land is required by the Marxist government in order to sell it to an Indonesian multinational which will use it to create a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the new mantra of progressive enlightenment. All the classic elements of "bourgeoisie oppression" were at play: instead of negotiation with the people, force was ordered. An instrument of state that went on a rampage received the official protection of the state government in the Assembly, and the judiciary had to step in to force a CBI enquiry into the incident. The chief minister, who justified the police action, added that if the people did not want the SEZ he would not insist on it. How many more corpses does he need to complete his education?

The party line is known: three decades ago, the CPI(M) consolidated its vote through radical reforms that gave agricultural land to the sharecropper. The children of that sharecropper now need jobs, and industrialisation must be pushed through at any cost. The current cost is not only splashed with blood, but mocks ideologues with its ironies. Land that was given to the sharecroppers by the Marxists is being retaken to take jobs whose profits will go to multinationals. The party that sold us decades of rhetoric against Indian capitalism (the running dogs of imperialism) is not the flag bearer of international capitalism, willing to kill the poor to enforce the power of this flag. There are other routes to salvation for the poor, apart from killing them.

The bitter story of Nandigram is complicated by the fact that many of the affected are Muslims who trusted the Marxists for thirty years, and now feel abandoned by every political party in the democratic space. Where is their anger heading?

On 15 March, a rally of Muslims marched to Parliament in Delhi to demand that the Sachar report needed to be translated into economic policies. Among the banners were those of the Students Islamic Organisation of India. They carried a message: ‘Special Exploitation Zone’.

The poor are very good at reading signals from government. Is there anyone in government who knows how to read signals from the poor?

Hyderabad Blues

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Hyderabad Blues

Something does not quite gel in this extraordinary tale of hawala transactions by a certain Hasan Ali Khan, once of Hyderabad and now of Pune. It is difficult to correlate billions of rupees, let alone dollars, with the languorous leftovers of an exhausted Nizam nobility in the same sentence. Unlike so many nameless Mumbai and Delhi business and political VIPs who must, right now, be shivering in their sleep, I have never had the privilege of meeting Mr Khan, but my psychograph suggests that he is much more likely to send a cheque for Rs 20,000 to the wife of an income-tax officer, which then has the temerity to bounce, than to wallow in billions. It is obvious that Hasan Khan is involved in something outside his grasp or class; he was an intermediary, an agent, and this was not his money. The scraps of such transactions must have kept him content.

Hyderabad is still full of characters who have dropped from the decay of an effete class and saved themselves from social extinction with a soft landing on the margins of the race course. The asset side of their balance sheet, both fiscal and social, is dim: they survive by selling the past, either their inheritance, or their memories. The charms of both have been overtaken by time. If they had homes they have either rotted or, with better reason, been dynamited; if they had businesses, then, exceptions apart, only those that were sold still live. Decline has been accompanied by a rigid personal and public religious morality, which is a paradox, since their parents were far more relaxed: perhaps this is a form of atonement for wasted lives.

However, such morality never prevents a flutter at the race course or the flush table; nor does it come in the way of a fluid attitude to the famous twins, bribery and corruption. The one indisputable plus of this class, though, is an exquisite sense of tehzeeb: they are walking, and often bowing, examples of extraordinary grace and superb manners, redolent of an age that once illuminated many chapters of our nation’s social history. Such qualities make them affable, and lift them seamlessly to the highest echelons of the business and political elite. For most of this sinking aristocracy, tehzeeb and a proud sense of honour are a safety net: decay does not quite collapse into degeneration.

Hasan Khan is an exception, because he made an early reputation for white collar crime, a forged signature here, a fudged car there. In time he changed both wife and city. This did not affect his social circle, or his social circulation. He was apparently quite the lad on the Pune race course, up there among the studs of the grand boxes. There is, alas, not that much distance between grace and disgrace. When the law arrives, unexpectedly of course, the VIPs who used cutouts disappear behind the protection of connections, and the agent is left to fend for himself in the glare of the spotlight. Suddenly, the suave charm crumbles into the brittle dust of police files.

One wing of government has denied that the hawala sums were as much as Rs 30,000 crores, a figure that floated through the media, or that Swiss banks (an almost inevitable component of such a story, despite the fact that Swiss banks are no longer as rigid about secrecy as they are famous for) were involved. But that is not really the point. What is it about such colossal figures that media, or the public, never pauses to ask whether it can be true? We have become so inured to corruption of every kind, at every level, that every figure is accepted without question: ‘Rs 30,000 crores sent out by one individual? Must not only be true, but is probably an underestimate’. Who makes up such figures and passes them on to media, which then proceeds to make them a public truth? How long does that truth remain a reality? Till the media’s interest is shifted by another story. What happens then to a Hasan Khan bandwagon? Nothing much, in all probability: he is bailed out by the powerful interests on whose behalf he was working, and is again visible at glittering parties, oiling his way across the floor (in the immortal phrase used by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady). The crooked businessman will return to the podium to give lectures on honesty, and flail against the evils of Delhi; politicians will return to their desks to think up new laws with which to punish businessmen.

If it is any consolation to anyone, that both tribes have an example on exhibit. The horse whisperer from Pune has more than his match in a Member of Parliament from Assam, M.K. Subba, who has simply bought his way into India’s ruling party, Congress, and ruling institution, Parliament.

One man’s crime is a problem; but what we have now in India is a crisis.

Corruption is not just the luxury of the rich. It is also the aspiration of the poor. In so many cases, success is defined by the size of the take. The jobless dream of government jobs where the bribe is the highest. Corruption is a pack ritual, with small communities — take the police thana, for instance — protecting one another and sharing the loot on a carefully calculated pro rata basis. If you break rank and culture, you are in danger of being dismissed as an untouchable. There is no class which is immune from corruption, or ready to place any barricades. Corruption is no longer an issue which affects voters.

I thought once that a market-driven private sector would provide at least a partial solution. The logic went something like this: if profit was the only motive of a listed company driven by share prices, then there would be at least some social benefits to compensate for the many liabilities. Profit does not have caste or creed. Many of the old business mandarins, protected by political patrons, indulged in rampant casteism and communalism when they hired. Bias is always wasteful, and cannot compete with competence as the sole criterion, and therefore selection in jobs would be less partisan. But, as the hawala case shows, you cannot dam the inventiveness of a private sector businessman intent on thieving from his own business, particularly when there is an obliging middleman waiting at the door to shift the swag around.

So how come, if we are all guilty, anyone gets caught? Fortunately, we are not all guilty, although most of us might find a place in the category. Does luck have anything to do it? A little, perhaps. If you are standing in the way when a law enforcement truck happens to roll around, you have only kismet to blame for getting hit. The more relevant answer may lie in limits: while corruption may be pervasive, it is not yet limitless. There is a law, and while it is realistic enough not to chase every minnow, it does need to bait and reel in a big fish to send a message to the sea. Hasan Khan is not that big fish; he was operating on the surface. The sea will get a message only when those lurking at deeper levels are in the net.

The 2.5% rate of Growth

Byline by M J Akbar: The 2.5% Rate of Growth

The BJP is in serious danger of declaring victory in the quarterfinals. There
is already a strut in the air that has not been seen since the barely-remembered Venkaiah Naidu was predicting that the party might even get 300 seats, so strong did he see the wave in its favour. We all saw how that wavelet stopped far short of Delhi: the BJP could not even win in the capital, its traditional bastion.

There is good news for the BJP, but good is a comparative word. The NDA began to ebb when the BJP started to lose the urban vote. Its revival has started exactly where its decline began, in the cities. Mumbai went back to Shiv Sena and BJP in the municipal elections; and the urban seats in Punjab, where there was a massive pro-BJP swing, have brought Parkash Singh Badal to power. But this is only the starting point of the end-game in the current phase of the power struggle. Yes, the pace of the game will become faster, and in the month between the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and the elections for the President of India (whose electoral college includes MLAs) it could become frenetic.

There is good news for those Congressmen also — a substantial section which exhausts its frustration by muttering under the breath — who are convinced that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sent the "Hindu" vote back to the BJP by appeasing Muslims. Not to worry, my friends: all this talk about helping Muslims was only lip service. When the time came to deliver in the budget, the Prime Minister had nothing to offer. We’ve seen the pattern before; Dr Singh’s government has repeated it. Other deprived sections like the Dalits and Backwards get concrete benefits; Indian minorities get enquiry commissions. Dr Singh’s historic contribution to Indian Muslims is the Sachar Commission report. I hope he will do them a favour now, and stop talking about this report, particularly since his sincerity once fuelled high expectations. Lip service can be a very cruel form of betrayal.

Dr Singh once suggested that 15% of expenditure should be allotted to welfare and economic empowerment schemes for Muslims, since they constitute a little less that 15% of the population. So what happened when the honourable finance minister presented the Budget to the Lok Sabha?

Let us check out paragraph 36 of the Budget speech. "Last year, I made a modest contribution of Rs 16.47 crore to the equity of the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation." The finance minister admits that it was modest; we should be thankful for small mercies. This year, the war drums were sounded, so how did he respond? "Following the Sachar Committee report, NMDFC would be required to expand its reach and intensify its efforts." So,a meagre Rs 63 crore is added to the share capital. The next paragraph notes that there are a number of districts with a concentration of minorities, but does not specify how many, for that might be both revealing and embarrassing. What is the provision? Rs 108 crore. It is so small the money may not be visible by the time it reaches the district headquarters. Add to this scholarships worth Rs 210.60 crore for all "minority communities".

There are around 150 million Muslims in India, and about 50 million Sikhs and Christians. The total allocation for them is less than Rs 320 crore. The annual expenditure of the Union government is Rs 680,521 crore. Do the math. Send your answers to the Prime Minister. He lives in Delhi and the post office should find him quite easily.For a comparison, read paragraph 33: the allocation for schemes benefiting only Scheduled Castes and Tribes is Rs 3,271 crore, and for schemes in which they will get at least 20% benefit, the sum is Rs 17,691 crore. In addition there are scholarships worth Rs 790 crore for the children of these communities. These SC/ST communities need all the help they can, so funds for minorities do not have to come out of their budgets. There is enough money elsewhere. But there is no will to help the minorities.

This thin gruel did not come without prodding. In an extraordinary gesture,the Prime Minister actually wrote to his finance minister late last year suggesting that the findings of the Sachar report should be taken into consideration. It took a reminder from the Prime Minister’s principal secretary and a formal letter from the Marxist MP Brinda Karat to persuade the finance minister to read what his leader had said. He might as well have ignored it completely. As the budget reveals, the letter produced a molehill instead of a mountain. If a Prime Minister cannot get his finance minister to read his letters, he can’t be much of a Prime Minister, can he?

The Budget is as dismissive of the poor as it is of minorities. There is a kind
of implicit contempt for have-nots: if they don’t like what they see, they can lump it.

The penultimate paragraph of the speech lists the balance sheet after three years in power. "The UPA government has delivered on the promise of savings and investment… It has delivered on the promise of growth…" But, "it will deliver on the promise of making growth more inclusive". When it comes to including the poor in the benefits of growth, the verb moves into the future tense. When shall this "will" come? There are no timelines indicated. But there is a formula: "given the right mix of policies, the poor will benefit from growth that is driven by savings and investment and that is more inclusive". Have we got the right mix of policies yet?

Dr Manmohan Singh first chanted the growth mantra in 1991, fifteen Budgets ago. Its proponents believe that the poor will benefit from a "trickle down" effect. For a decade and half it has been just that: the gush has gone in the direction of bank-balance Indians, savers, investors and share marketers. The poor have been condemned to a trickle from a municipal tap. Government propagandists keep churning out the statistic that the growth rate has crossed 9%; no one talks about the fact that the growth rate in agriculture is only 2.5%.

This is the central reality. A part of India may be growing at 20%, but most of India is growing at the rate of 3%.

This might work in a dictatorship like China, but democracy demands a different dialectic. One critical problem of the UPA government is that the Prime Minister and his finance minister speak from a dictionary that is music to the confederations of industry and unintelligible to the poor. A Budget is not just a description of the national economy; it is also a critical means test of its politics. Theoretically, Dr Singh has two Budgets left under his stewardship, unless one of the laws of Indian democracy catches up with him: if you are not in control of events, events will be in control of you.

The defeat of the Congress in Punjab is remarkable for one reason. The first Sikh Prime Minister of India could not persuade the Sikh voter to stay with the Congress. This is a tribute to the voter’s maturity, for she (women polled in higher numbers in Punjab than men) is no longer swayed by the false sentiment of accidental identity. She measures her vote on the scales of her vegetable shop. She is the judge and the jury, and she is hearing the evidence.

Only one thing is certain: the time between quarter finals and finals will pass in a rush.

Four Into Two

Byline By M.J. Akbar : Four Into Two

Do you know what Quattrocchi means in Italian? Four eyes. I have this from an extremely reliable source. Actually, the source isn’t that exciting, but the information is correct. And what does Ottavio indicate?

The eighth. The Eighth Man with Four Eyes. This sounds as mysterious as something out of The Da Vinci Code, but let us just agree that even if Ottavio Quattrocchi, the Italian businessman accused in Bofors payoffs, had eight eyes instead of four he could not possibly have foreseen that he would be picked up in February 2007 by the Argentinian police in a barely-known province called Misiones in pursuit of an Interpol "red corner notice number A-44/2/1997".

He could be forgiven if he had begun to believe that he was now safe from the arm of Indian law, his money out of the freeze of British bank accounts. He has been sitting for years in his comfortable home in Milan, talking to media when he chose to do so, and no one from the Italian police ever interfered with his peace.

Doesn’t Italy come under the jurisdiction of Interpol, or does Italy make an exception for specially favoured sons? If the warrant could lead to detention in Latin America, then what was Scotland Yard doing when the ageing Quattrocchi withdrew funds that had been frozen in his British bank accounts? Why did the Argentinians, who must be as indifferent to Indian politics as we are to the shenanigans in Buenos Aires, break the silent code that protected Quattrocchi from Interpol for so long? Was there someone in Delhi who tipped the Argentinians off?

These are grave matters, and let someone more competent than me search for answers.

There is always something amusing in the gravest of events, and I am not talking about the "Four Eyes" name.

My sympathies are with the police officer in the Central Bureau of Investigation who was told to cook up a reason for the mysterious 17-day delay between Quattrocchi’s arrest and the release of the news by CBI. We know now that the matter went up, but obviously, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, where it lay for 17 days before a decision could be taken on what to do. One option that was surely considered was whether the arrest could remain a secret, and the thirty-day period, during which a demand for extradition had to be made, be permitted to lapse. The vibrant Indian media had been fooled for 17 days; why not another 13? The risk of course was that if the story broke while Parliament was in session, and the government was found culpable of protecting as highly wanted a man as Quattrocchi, the session would have come to a halt. Dr Singh also surely knew that his personal credibility was on the line. He opted for transparency.

But how then to explain those 17 non-transparent days? I can see a CBI officer scratching his head very hard as he came up with two reasons. The first was that it took time to identify Quattrocchi. But these are days of a telephone and the Internet. A photograph can be transmitted instantly. Try again. The second round of head-scratching must have removed all traces of dandruff. Ah: the CBI could not find anyone to translate from the Spanish.

Narasimha Raoji! Where are you when we need you? There was a time when an Indian Prime Minister used to be fluent in Spanish, and now we cannot find someone competent to do a simple translation — not in Delhi, not in our mission in Argentina, not in the foreign office, not even in the language departments of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Questions of course will be raised in Parliament; and decibel levels could hit the ceiling. The government has surely formulated all the answers. The home minister, Shivraj Patil, or even the Prime Minister, will certainly assure the House that every effort will be made to bring Quattrocchi to trial in Delhi. The Opposition will milk Bofors again, as it has done often enough in the past. Somnath Chatterjee, now in the Speaker’s chair, might even suffer from a twinge of nostalgia for the good old days when he used to thunder with increasing levels of moral indignation at Rajiv Gandhi. This will be the nth Parliament session to echo with the Bofors boom.

Unavoidable, I suppose, but I hope that Bofors does not obscure or even drive away a far more important issue, particularly since this is a Budget session. The country is angry about economic policy, and in particular about prices. Economic reform was launched by Narasimha Rao, continued by Atal Behari Vajpayee and pursued by Dr Manmohan Singh. The policy itself has acquired support across party lines, but there is a fundamental problem with its consequences that no one has had either the will or the time to address.

All change, or progress, tends to displace some section of the economic chain. Cotton factories, for instance, made the weaver either irrelevant or marginal. This is inevitable. The answer is not to stop new machinery in cotton mills, but to create a new economy around the displaced so that reasonably prosperous communities do not sink into impoverishment and despair. Democracy, as well as humanity, demands concern for the dispossessed. There is no trace of such concern in the much-vaunted economic reform. Voices are beginning to rise, as the poor begin to understand that the haves are driven by profits and share prices, not by notions of social justice. Anger from the forests is taking the form of Naxalite violence; anxiety from farmlands is turning into angry demonstrations against Special Economic Zones; the threat to food-sellers from the capital-driven malls is driving an agitation in Chennai. The fires are burning separately, but if Delhi continues to show an obstinate indifference, flame could touch flame to create a conflagration.

After more than half a decade of stability, prices of basic products have risen sharply. In such a climate, traders are happily raising prices of even those commodities that are not propelled upwards by forces out of their control. Elections have just taken place in Punjab and Uttarakhand; and prices were a deciding factor in the mood of the vote. There is an electoral Bofors waiting to explode in every marketplace in the country.

Prices do not rise because someone orders them to, but they do rise as a consequence of either policy decisions or the lack of control measures. For the present Central government, there is only one definition of success: the growth rate. It is a statistic that wins applause from those who do not have to worry about the price of onions. Monetary policy is now tied to just the growth objective. An overheated economy needs a harness, but a harness interferes with the high of a gallop. Our ruling class is in gallop mode, even if in the process it leaves the people behind. You might get away with this if India were not a democracy. But those who are being ignored have a vote, and fortunately for them, elections are now a continuous excitement. There is accountability around every corner.

This is going to be a high energy year, politically. Bofors has returned, literally from the blue. But this will be only the beginning. Election results from Punjab and Uttarakhand will come this week, and Uttar Pradesh has been set alight by Congress ham-handedness in its effort to subvert the law for political gain. It doesn’t work. It did not work in Bihar, and will not work in Uttar Pradesh.

At the best of times you need an extra pair of eyes to survive in Delhi: this year, you might need eight. 2007 is an Ottavio year.