Byline by M..J. Akbar: A Speck of Dust
We no longer expect politicians to write, but we still expect them to read. There will probably come a moment when they will neither read nor write. The descent from Jawaharlal Nehru will then be complete.
The lady who would be President, Mrs Pratibha Patil, clearly did not write the speech she delivered at Udaipur to mark the 467th birth anniversary of Maharana Pratap. What is less clear is whether she had paused to read the transcript. In any case, she has offered a view of history that might have been entertaining were it not so frivolous.
Muslim women, she claimed, began to wear the veil during Mughal rule in order to "save" themselves from "Mughal invaders".
Was this a slip of the tongue? No. Your tongue can slip for a sentence, or even two; it cannot slip for two paragraphs.
Mrs Pratibha Patil was obviously referring to the face-veil, rather than a head-cover. Why? Well, to begin with, Mrs Patil covers her own head in public. She certainly chose to do so when she came to Delhi to be presented as the ruling coalition candidate for President. Check out the pictures.
I am no advocate of the face-veil, a practice that was borrowed by the Arab Umayyads in the seventh century from their elite counterparts in the Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Sassanid lands that they conquered. Covering the head with a scarf, or the pallav of a sari, or a dupatta or a scarf, but keeping the face visible, is the more traditional expression of modesty among women across faith lines, as is evident in the manner that Mrs Patil wears her sari. I do not know if this will surprise her, but when Muslim women go to Mecca for Haj, they are not obliged to cover their faces. Iran has women in its armed forces: they carry guns and do not cover their faces. They only cover their heads.
The logic of Mrs Patil's thesis runs thus: Indian culture has always respected women; the face-veil - which is an affront to self-respect - system began during Muslim rule to "save women from Mughal invaders". Muslim women used the face-veil to hide their beauty, to avoid becoming targets of Mughal lust.
From one angle, of course, I suppose those who are interested in protecting the reputation of "Muslim rule" should be delighted. The Mughals were the last Muslims to invade India, not the first. If, as per the history of India written by Mrs Patil, the veil began only during Mughal rule, one must infer that there was no need for it before. This is high exoneration of all Muslim invaders prior to the Mughals. The ghost of Mahmud of Ghazni is probably writing a thank-you note to a possible future President of India at this very moment.
I do not want to show the tiniest bit of disrespect to Mrs Patil, who has made the dignity of women the central point of her manifesto. But I have to add, with the greatest respect, that she was talking utter rubbish.
Purdah existed among the upper echelons of Indian society long before the Mughals came to our country; and it existed, in different forms, in the ruling Rajput families. This did not mean that women were not respected; it was part of the elite culture of the time. In addition, the practice of sati was prevalent among Rajputs.
Mrs Pratibha Patil did not mention this, not because she forgot to, but because she was selling an argument.
Part of her motivation was, I suspect, political. She was a surprise nominee; in fact, it was a male Patil, home minister Shivraj, who did most of the running till the last minute. Since loyalty could hardly be advertised as her principal virtue, a politically correct justification had to be drummed up. Gender was the easy way out. The bureaucrat who wrote the speech may have shoved in the theme of "women's self-respect" to bolster the new image. Nothing in Mrs Pratibha Patil's record suggests that she has ever launched a crusade against the veil during many decades in public life.
The issue is not that the facts are wrong: politicians who barely read and rarely write are prone to such mishaps. The problem is a mindset in which the most obvious communal overtones never raise the slightest inner doubt.
The Pratibha Patil thesis is a perversion of history in which the Muslim has been vilified into an iconic invader and rapist. It is not an accident that the Mughals, arguably among the most enlightened and sophisticated of the many dynasts between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, are being vilified, for to destroy their reputation is to distort in public memory the finest examples of political synthesis and shared culture.
Mrs Patil was not a politician bending the rules in search of votes when she made the speech; she was governor of a state of the Indian union, and guardian of a Constitution in which secularism is a basic principle.
India's political class has long lost the sensitivity that would have once made such a speech a touchstone. Her invidious reference to 'Mughal lust' has already been shrugged off as a speck of dust that can be dusted off without any damage to the official ideological lustre.
I wonder what Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh would have said if President Kalam had ever made a speech like this.
But little specks of dust are like little drops of water. They add up. The Mumbai Central District Cooperative Bank has sent a notice to a sugar factory in Jalgaon, which was floated by Mrs Patil, for default on a loan of Rs 17.70 crores. The notice is not part of a conspiracy; it was sent following a Nabard directive to cooperative banks to recover bad debts after all efforts to do so had failed. People with political clout tend to believe that they will never be held accountable for loans taken from a government bank.
Whatever this may say about Mrs Pratibha Patil, it does say one thing about the Congress: the simplest form of due diligence was not done when nominating a candidate for the office that may not be the most powerful in the country, but certainly remains the most honourable.
By coincidence, the 39th volume of the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, edited by the eminent historian Mushirul Hasan, reached me while I was writing this column. On 31 October 1957, Nehru sent a note to his Principal Private Secretary about a riot in 1956, at a place called Orai, in Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the Congress. "As a result of this, I am told that twelve Muslims and two Hindus were killed," writes Nehru. "According to the report I have received, no step was taken against any Hindu, although so many Muslims were killed. A case was, however, started against the Muslims, and recently judgment has been given in this case, convicting about nine of them. I should like you to get full particulars of this case from the Uttar Pradesh Government. A copy of the judgment should also be obtained. You should enquire from them also, if any steps were taken against any Hindus because of these disturbances at Orai."
Nehru spent his life in service, to his nation, and to the minorities whose pain he felt deeply. Many Prime Ministers later, service has changed to lip service. If Mrs Pratibha Patil becomes President, even that lip will be removed from service.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Watering Hole
Byline by M.J. Akbar :Watering Hole
Governments do not generally fall; they erode. They dislocate before they disappear, slip by little slip.
A government is the opposite of a jigsaw puzzle: it starts as a jigsaw without the puzzle, and ends as a puzzle without any jig. It begins not as a jumble of little pieces in a bag that has to be laboriously put together, tile by tile, but as a fully formed scenic panorama, offering bright weather, fresh flowers, flush fields, and smiling children. Then, without anyone paying much attention, a nose falls off here, the sky gets punctured there, the balmy weather is sabotaged by a bad monsoon, inflation twists the smile.
When you take another look at the jigsaw, disarray has replaced array. Ambitious ministers, once so brilliant in their plumes, are plucking one another’s feathers with leaked documents. Bureaucrats pick up the tatters and redefine policy to their own ends, certain that distraught ministers will have neither the time for nor the interest in governance.
No one hears the sound of a falling chip, for its passing whisper gets lost in the surrounding din. Not all chips are equal. Those on the margins of the larger picture do not affect its core. But when a chip from the core disintegrates, or falls, it leaves a hole through which you can see the heart of government, and scan its ideology. One such small chip fell off last Friday evening and exposed the dangerous myopia that has seized the Manmohan Singh government.
Finance minister P. Chidambaram told a television channel on Friday that he could not understand why people did not mind paying ten or twelve rupees for a bottle of mineral water but made such a fuss when the price of wheat went up by one or two rupees. That throwaway remark revealed the mind of a government that has forgotten how it came to power, one that was elected by India, but cannot think beyond the logic of the elite.
Bottled water is the privilege of less than one Indian in a hundred. At the height of this baking summer we in this newspaper published a picture of children in Madhya Pradesh slaking their thirst in punishing heat by drinking from a public hose. That is how the poor of urban India get their water, and along with it the killer diseases that become little more than a paragraph in media. Rural India still, by and large, depends on nature. We have systematically turned some of our greatest rivers into polluted swamps for most of the year and destroyed the environment that feeds the rain cycle. On 21 June, S.K. Mishra, the eminent former civil servant who now chairs INTACH, and Prof. M.G.K. Menon, scientist and ex-Union minister who is the current president of the India International Centre, are conducting a discussion on the tragedy of the historic Yamuna, being strangled to death by pollution, encroachment and misrule. Their theme? "All this is happening because of the nexus between various vested interests and those who are directly responsible for protecting the river and its environs…"
Modern India’s extraordinary destruction of its water supply, in both quality and quantity, is collective suicide. The water that came from the goatskin of a bhishti of the Gunga Din variety a hundred years ago, or was offered in cool earthen pitchers fifty years ago, was better than the squalid liquid that emerges from a contemporary municipal tap. Indians who vote drink this water; Indians who rule drink bottled water, or buy small water-purification devices for their homes. Ten rupees, it is perfectly true, does not matter to the ruling class. But a rupee matters to the poor who eat wheat. The finance minister’s statement was not the view of an insensitive mind. It was the remark of a mind that has forgotten the difference.
Fortunately for governments, such erosion-chip-sentences do not add up to news: the television channel did not even challenge the comparison. It was not tantamount to a finance ministry policy statement either. But it does reveal the priorities of a person who plays a crucial role in policy formulation. And somewhere in that great collective consciousness of public opinion, it registers.
Paradoxically, the big story does not have as much impact on events as the small story. The headlines at the moment belong to the elections for the next President of India. The ruling coalition’s nominee is in effect Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s candidate. Her victory will be Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s victory, but her defeat will be every other partner’s defeat as well. That is the loop which has been effectively used by the Congress leadership to round up the allies behind Mrs Pratibha Patil, a lady who has climbed the charts from obscurity to limelight with a rapidity that rejuvenates Delhi’s faith in astrology.
A big story may have a dramatic beginning but it generally has a pretty tame ending, because every player knows the self-destructive powers of drama. Those who have something to lose take great care to protect what they possess. Whether their stakes are high or low, they are happy as long as they have a seat at the table. They are still in the game. They have to have a very strong reason to upset the stability of the table. It is certain that the table will topple eventually. Already a couple of props have been placed under a leg or two to prevent it from wobbling. But why cut off a leg before the life of the table comes to its natural end in five years?
The big story, with its tame ending, can preserve a government, but it is the small story, with a twist in its tail, that determines the fate of an election.
It is curious, therefore, while all the powerful leaders spend so much time on the management of the big story, no one has any time for the small story. The Congress spent a month tossing at least twenty names into the air, waiting for some to be shot down by allies, some to sit still on the tarmac, unable to fly, and yet others to float until they could be brought down by lame excuses. Raisina Hill is still echoing with the yodel of broken hearts. The hearts might have been of variable size, but they belonged to some pretty heavyweight egos. The more adept will swallow their bitterness and soldier on, but it will hurt. For the senior contenders this is the last dream. It hurts to walk through the live ashes of your lost ambitions. One Congress leader has publicly said that if Mrs Indira Gandhi were alive she would have made him President. He believes it, so it is true for him.
When was the last time that the Congress, and the ruling alliance — to be fair, any alliance, including the preceding NDA — spent a month, or even a week, discussing how to bring clean water to every Indian, and a clean environment to every river?
If all goes well for Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi, their candidate will become President in July, and the Prime Minister will make a speech in August and feed the hungry with a reshuffle in September. Parliament will sit, MPs will stand; a Budget will be presented before anyone realises it is the last Budget of the government. The politics of elections will then begin.
They will fight the elections with a slogan in one hand and a bottle of mineral water in the other.
Governments do not generally fall; they erode. They dislocate before they disappear, slip by little slip.
A government is the opposite of a jigsaw puzzle: it starts as a jigsaw without the puzzle, and ends as a puzzle without any jig. It begins not as a jumble of little pieces in a bag that has to be laboriously put together, tile by tile, but as a fully formed scenic panorama, offering bright weather, fresh flowers, flush fields, and smiling children. Then, without anyone paying much attention, a nose falls off here, the sky gets punctured there, the balmy weather is sabotaged by a bad monsoon, inflation twists the smile.
When you take another look at the jigsaw, disarray has replaced array. Ambitious ministers, once so brilliant in their plumes, are plucking one another’s feathers with leaked documents. Bureaucrats pick up the tatters and redefine policy to their own ends, certain that distraught ministers will have neither the time for nor the interest in governance.
No one hears the sound of a falling chip, for its passing whisper gets lost in the surrounding din. Not all chips are equal. Those on the margins of the larger picture do not affect its core. But when a chip from the core disintegrates, or falls, it leaves a hole through which you can see the heart of government, and scan its ideology. One such small chip fell off last Friday evening and exposed the dangerous myopia that has seized the Manmohan Singh government.
Finance minister P. Chidambaram told a television channel on Friday that he could not understand why people did not mind paying ten or twelve rupees for a bottle of mineral water but made such a fuss when the price of wheat went up by one or two rupees. That throwaway remark revealed the mind of a government that has forgotten how it came to power, one that was elected by India, but cannot think beyond the logic of the elite.
Bottled water is the privilege of less than one Indian in a hundred. At the height of this baking summer we in this newspaper published a picture of children in Madhya Pradesh slaking their thirst in punishing heat by drinking from a public hose. That is how the poor of urban India get their water, and along with it the killer diseases that become little more than a paragraph in media. Rural India still, by and large, depends on nature. We have systematically turned some of our greatest rivers into polluted swamps for most of the year and destroyed the environment that feeds the rain cycle. On 21 June, S.K. Mishra, the eminent former civil servant who now chairs INTACH, and Prof. M.G.K. Menon, scientist and ex-Union minister who is the current president of the India International Centre, are conducting a discussion on the tragedy of the historic Yamuna, being strangled to death by pollution, encroachment and misrule. Their theme? "All this is happening because of the nexus between various vested interests and those who are directly responsible for protecting the river and its environs…"
Modern India’s extraordinary destruction of its water supply, in both quality and quantity, is collective suicide. The water that came from the goatskin of a bhishti of the Gunga Din variety a hundred years ago, or was offered in cool earthen pitchers fifty years ago, was better than the squalid liquid that emerges from a contemporary municipal tap. Indians who vote drink this water; Indians who rule drink bottled water, or buy small water-purification devices for their homes. Ten rupees, it is perfectly true, does not matter to the ruling class. But a rupee matters to the poor who eat wheat. The finance minister’s statement was not the view of an insensitive mind. It was the remark of a mind that has forgotten the difference.
Fortunately for governments, such erosion-chip-sentences do not add up to news: the television channel did not even challenge the comparison. It was not tantamount to a finance ministry policy statement either. But it does reveal the priorities of a person who plays a crucial role in policy formulation. And somewhere in that great collective consciousness of public opinion, it registers.
Paradoxically, the big story does not have as much impact on events as the small story. The headlines at the moment belong to the elections for the next President of India. The ruling coalition’s nominee is in effect Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s candidate. Her victory will be Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s victory, but her defeat will be every other partner’s defeat as well. That is the loop which has been effectively used by the Congress leadership to round up the allies behind Mrs Pratibha Patil, a lady who has climbed the charts from obscurity to limelight with a rapidity that rejuvenates Delhi’s faith in astrology.
A big story may have a dramatic beginning but it generally has a pretty tame ending, because every player knows the self-destructive powers of drama. Those who have something to lose take great care to protect what they possess. Whether their stakes are high or low, they are happy as long as they have a seat at the table. They are still in the game. They have to have a very strong reason to upset the stability of the table. It is certain that the table will topple eventually. Already a couple of props have been placed under a leg or two to prevent it from wobbling. But why cut off a leg before the life of the table comes to its natural end in five years?
The big story, with its tame ending, can preserve a government, but it is the small story, with a twist in its tail, that determines the fate of an election.
It is curious, therefore, while all the powerful leaders spend so much time on the management of the big story, no one has any time for the small story. The Congress spent a month tossing at least twenty names into the air, waiting for some to be shot down by allies, some to sit still on the tarmac, unable to fly, and yet others to float until they could be brought down by lame excuses. Raisina Hill is still echoing with the yodel of broken hearts. The hearts might have been of variable size, but they belonged to some pretty heavyweight egos. The more adept will swallow their bitterness and soldier on, but it will hurt. For the senior contenders this is the last dream. It hurts to walk through the live ashes of your lost ambitions. One Congress leader has publicly said that if Mrs Indira Gandhi were alive she would have made him President. He believes it, so it is true for him.
When was the last time that the Congress, and the ruling alliance — to be fair, any alliance, including the preceding NDA — spent a month, or even a week, discussing how to bring clean water to every Indian, and a clean environment to every river?
If all goes well for Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi, their candidate will become President in July, and the Prime Minister will make a speech in August and feed the hungry with a reshuffle in September. Parliament will sit, MPs will stand; a Budget will be presented before anyone realises it is the last Budget of the government. The politics of elections will then begin.
They will fight the elections with a slogan in one hand and a bottle of mineral water in the other.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Past Forward
Byline by M J Akbar: Past Forward
On the morning of the results of the elections for President of India in 1969, Mrs Indira Gandhi had two speeches ready, one to be delivered in case her candidate, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, won, and the other to be delivered in case he lost.
The second was a resignation speech. But Giri won, thanks to about 10,000 second preference votes cast in his favour by a barely-remembered politician, Chaudhry Charan Singh, who became Prime Minister in 1979 with Mrs Gandhi's help and lost his job without ever facing Parliament when Mrs Gandhi withdrew support within a matter of weeks.
Giri's victory in 1969 launched the Indira Gandhi era in Indian politics. Before that she was her father's daughter; after that she became the head of a family that has given us at least one other Prime Minister and remains in politics in an effort to provide more. It is likely of course that Indira Gandhi would have called for early elections in 1969 and might have pulled off the kind of victory she did in 1971, but not probable. She used the authority she derived from the victory in the Presidential elections to offer the country a new legislative, left-leaning programme, and it was this that caught the imagination of the poor and enabled her to base her 1971 campaign on the remarkable, and undefeatable slogan: "Woh kahte hain mujhe hatao, main kahti hoon Garibi Hatao (They say, remove me; I say, Remove Poverty)".
Without a spate of decisions like bank nationalisation and the abolition of princely privileges, this claim would have been unsustainable. Indira Gandhi broke the mould of politics as usual.
Does this mean that a government that cannot ensure the victory of its candidate in the election to the office of President must resign? No. More specifically, Dr Manmohan Singh will be under no compulsion to resign if the Congress candidate does not, by some mischance, become President of India in July.
Mrs Indira Gandhi was vulnerable only because she had taken a risk so volatile that it amounted to a gamble with her political future. She had split the Congress after the announcement of an official Congress candidate and set up her own nominee, V.V. Giri, as an independent. Giri wasn't much of an independent; he was completely dependent on Mrs Gandhi, but that takes us to another story. The culture of the President's office shifted subtly but sharply; Presidents became personally beholden to their benefactors.
The Prime Minister of India is in office through the will of only the Lok Sabha, whose members are directly elected by voters. A government does not need a majority in the Rajya Sabha, whose members are elected indirectly, to survive. The electorate for a Presidential poll extends not only to the Rajya Sabha but also the Assemblies in the states, which have no part to play in the creation of a Union government. The President has a diffused constituency, relevant to the diffused nature of his responsibilities. The Prime Minister has a specific constituency and he lives or dies by the will of just the Lok Sabha. A Prime Minister's majority could be on a totally different trajectory from the President's.
In fact, this is the emerging scenario of the next few years. Power at the Centre will have little relation to power in the States. At one point, the Congress ruled 15 states while the NDA was in office at the Centre; within three years of reaching Delhi, the Congress has been reduced to Andhra, Assam, Haryana, Delhi and a bubble called Goa.
There is one simple message: Big Power politics is over in Indian democracy. Or, more accurately, it has been suspended until the Small Powers self-destruct, which may take a while. Decisions will have to be made through consultation and cooperation, rather than imposition.
However, despite being honed down to a Medium Power the Congress still cannot quite get out of the Big Power mentality, whether in government or as a party. We have just witnessed the faintly ridiculous sight of the Manmohan Singh government describing India as a Big Power, and dictating to Sri Lanka the policies it would prefer a "Small Power" to adopt. This is not the language of strength. It is the language a government uses when power has gone to its head, affecting it with cerebral malaria.
The Congress cannot take the Big Power approach towards partners in government either. Patronage is not the best way to protect a long-term relationship and an ego massage provides only very temporary relief from the headaches of co-existence. But if the Congress is tempted to insist upon a preferred party nominee, rather than a compromise consensus, for the next President, then there are good reasons.
The first, and most important, lies in the nature of the office. The President of India has, by the standards of Delhi, a sedentary job. His general requirement is to be nice, which, one may add, not all Presidents manage. But at crucial moments on the political calendar, he has to rise above partisan concerns and protect the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Very often, it is the spirit that determines what the interpretation of the letter should be. The most important of these moments for the next President will come after the next general elections, when the new government will be patched out of post-result alliances. It will lie in the President's will to give the first option on the basis of whichever standard he selects. It could be on the basis of the largest single party, or the largest bloc: the choice will be his.
The Congress is not buying the consensus-candidate bait for the very good reason that the consensus that is holding up the UPA will break down before the general elections. The Left, for instance, and the Congress will not have an electoral alliance. The Congress would prefer a President, therefore, who would be more sympathetic to its needs than to the interests of the Left Front after the results.
All political parties are, logically, playing the long game. This Presidential election is not about the politics of 2007, but about the potential formations of 2008 and 2009. If the Congress bends today, it might not be able to stand up next year. That is the thinking that has made Shivraj Patil the most likely candidate of the ruling coalition. Those who doubt his ability to win will hear a threat: the failure to elect Patil might bring down the government, and eliminate nearly two years of ministerial joy. That is not strictly necessary, at least according to the Constitutional fine print. If there is any erosion in moral authority, it will not trouble anyone's sleep. Political advantage, or necessity, is the glue that keeps a coalition together. No President, of any hue, would dare challenge a majority in the Lok Sabha.
There has been only one election for President that has shaped the future; every other President was elected without fuss, because he was a creature of the present, and represented the will of a consolidated establishment. The establishment was cracked open by Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1969, and out of that split emerged President Giri. Comparisons are never exact, but this much is evident: the Centre is not holding in 2007. This too has become an election about the future.
Get ready to count those second preference votes.
On the morning of the results of the elections for President of India in 1969, Mrs Indira Gandhi had two speeches ready, one to be delivered in case her candidate, Varahagiri Venkata Giri, won, and the other to be delivered in case he lost.
The second was a resignation speech. But Giri won, thanks to about 10,000 second preference votes cast in his favour by a barely-remembered politician, Chaudhry Charan Singh, who became Prime Minister in 1979 with Mrs Gandhi's help and lost his job without ever facing Parliament when Mrs Gandhi withdrew support within a matter of weeks.
Giri's victory in 1969 launched the Indira Gandhi era in Indian politics. Before that she was her father's daughter; after that she became the head of a family that has given us at least one other Prime Minister and remains in politics in an effort to provide more. It is likely of course that Indira Gandhi would have called for early elections in 1969 and might have pulled off the kind of victory she did in 1971, but not probable. She used the authority she derived from the victory in the Presidential elections to offer the country a new legislative, left-leaning programme, and it was this that caught the imagination of the poor and enabled her to base her 1971 campaign on the remarkable, and undefeatable slogan: "Woh kahte hain mujhe hatao, main kahti hoon Garibi Hatao (They say, remove me; I say, Remove Poverty)".
Without a spate of decisions like bank nationalisation and the abolition of princely privileges, this claim would have been unsustainable. Indira Gandhi broke the mould of politics as usual.
Does this mean that a government that cannot ensure the victory of its candidate in the election to the office of President must resign? No. More specifically, Dr Manmohan Singh will be under no compulsion to resign if the Congress candidate does not, by some mischance, become President of India in July.
Mrs Indira Gandhi was vulnerable only because she had taken a risk so volatile that it amounted to a gamble with her political future. She had split the Congress after the announcement of an official Congress candidate and set up her own nominee, V.V. Giri, as an independent. Giri wasn't much of an independent; he was completely dependent on Mrs Gandhi, but that takes us to another story. The culture of the President's office shifted subtly but sharply; Presidents became personally beholden to their benefactors.
The Prime Minister of India is in office through the will of only the Lok Sabha, whose members are directly elected by voters. A government does not need a majority in the Rajya Sabha, whose members are elected indirectly, to survive. The electorate for a Presidential poll extends not only to the Rajya Sabha but also the Assemblies in the states, which have no part to play in the creation of a Union government. The President has a diffused constituency, relevant to the diffused nature of his responsibilities. The Prime Minister has a specific constituency and he lives or dies by the will of just the Lok Sabha. A Prime Minister's majority could be on a totally different trajectory from the President's.
In fact, this is the emerging scenario of the next few years. Power at the Centre will have little relation to power in the States. At one point, the Congress ruled 15 states while the NDA was in office at the Centre; within three years of reaching Delhi, the Congress has been reduced to Andhra, Assam, Haryana, Delhi and a bubble called Goa.
There is one simple message: Big Power politics is over in Indian democracy. Or, more accurately, it has been suspended until the Small Powers self-destruct, which may take a while. Decisions will have to be made through consultation and cooperation, rather than imposition.
However, despite being honed down to a Medium Power the Congress still cannot quite get out of the Big Power mentality, whether in government or as a party. We have just witnessed the faintly ridiculous sight of the Manmohan Singh government describing India as a Big Power, and dictating to Sri Lanka the policies it would prefer a "Small Power" to adopt. This is not the language of strength. It is the language a government uses when power has gone to its head, affecting it with cerebral malaria.
The Congress cannot take the Big Power approach towards partners in government either. Patronage is not the best way to protect a long-term relationship and an ego massage provides only very temporary relief from the headaches of co-existence. But if the Congress is tempted to insist upon a preferred party nominee, rather than a compromise consensus, for the next President, then there are good reasons.
The first, and most important, lies in the nature of the office. The President of India has, by the standards of Delhi, a sedentary job. His general requirement is to be nice, which, one may add, not all Presidents manage. But at crucial moments on the political calendar, he has to rise above partisan concerns and protect the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Very often, it is the spirit that determines what the interpretation of the letter should be. The most important of these moments for the next President will come after the next general elections, when the new government will be patched out of post-result alliances. It will lie in the President's will to give the first option on the basis of whichever standard he selects. It could be on the basis of the largest single party, or the largest bloc: the choice will be his.
The Congress is not buying the consensus-candidate bait for the very good reason that the consensus that is holding up the UPA will break down before the general elections. The Left, for instance, and the Congress will not have an electoral alliance. The Congress would prefer a President, therefore, who would be more sympathetic to its needs than to the interests of the Left Front after the results.
All political parties are, logically, playing the long game. This Presidential election is not about the politics of 2007, but about the potential formations of 2008 and 2009. If the Congress bends today, it might not be able to stand up next year. That is the thinking that has made Shivraj Patil the most likely candidate of the ruling coalition. Those who doubt his ability to win will hear a threat: the failure to elect Patil might bring down the government, and eliminate nearly two years of ministerial joy. That is not strictly necessary, at least according to the Constitutional fine print. If there is any erosion in moral authority, it will not trouble anyone's sleep. Political advantage, or necessity, is the glue that keeps a coalition together. No President, of any hue, would dare challenge a majority in the Lok Sabha.
There has been only one election for President that has shaped the future; every other President was elected without fuss, because he was a creature of the present, and represented the will of a consolidated establishment. The establishment was cracked open by Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1969, and out of that split emerged President Giri. Comparisons are never exact, but this much is evident: the Centre is not holding in 2007. This too has become an election about the future.
Get ready to count those second preference votes.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Speechless
Byline By M.J. Akbar : Speechless
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave a thoughtful speech at the annual session of the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry for all you yokels who do not know what the country's most powerful acronym stands for). He asked the captain, majors, colonels and generals of Indian business to remember that those who are not members of the CII are also Indians. The speech was overdue by about three years, but no matter. The poor are ever grateful for the smallest mercies. He also made the speech to the wrong group. He should have begun with an audience of one.
There is an exclusive telephone system in Delhi meant only for the Very Very VVIPs called RAX. It is an internal line for the highest of the high in government. Dr Singh should have picked up his RAX phone and called his finance minister for a cup of tea. Over tea, stressing each sentence till there was no room for misunderstanding, Dr Singh should have read this speech to finance minister P. Chidambaram.Mr Chidambaram has produced three budgets. How come no one told him that Prime Minister Singh was interested in the welfare of the poor, and that he had thought out a Ten-Point Charter to save the nation? Each one of the issues raised by Dr Singh could have been addressed in the national budget. None was. Why should the CII listen to the Prime Minister when his own Cabinet could hardly care less?
Let's start with executive salaries, which Dr Singh condemns as "excessive remuneration" which can lead to "social unrest". Let us say that the owner-chief executive of a major company pays himself around Rs 2 crores as salary for working hard, and delivering profits as chief executive. He pays the maximum-slab tax on this sum. How much does the government pay him for being the owner? The latest issue of India Today informs me that in just one year, 2006-2007, Dr Singh's government permitted the shareholders of 1,100 companies to pocket Rs 40,000 crores in dividends. Did they pay any tax on Rs 40,000 crores? Not a rupee. Take out a calculator and do the math.
Why preach about Rs 2 crores a year, with tax, when you have handed out an untaxed Rs 40,000 crores a year to the members of the CII?Does Dr Singh listen to himself?
Just after he finished scolding the CII about salaries, he went on to ostentatious weddings, because the expenditure on them "insults the poverty of the less privileged, it is socially tasteful and it plants the seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots".
Very noble. Could we know how many such weddings Dr Singh has attended as Prime Minister, when he could have sent a polite (perhaps even warm) letter to the couple being wed ostentatiously, wishing them a very happy future but indicating that he would prefer not to give legitimacy to such vulgarity by his presence?
Why preach about vulgarity when you do not have the courage to reject it?
The sixth point of this Social Charter should have been Message Number 1, given the heavy damage that the continuous price rise has done to Congress fortunes. Dr Singh has named at least one of the villains. I had better quote the strong words used by the Prime Minister to avoid any accusation of misrepresentation. "The operation of cartels by groups of companies to keep prices high must end… It is even more distressing in a country where the poor are severely affected by rising commodity prices. Cartels are a crime and go against the grain of an open economy. Even profit maximisation should be within the bounds of decency and greed!"
I hasten to point out that the exclamation is the Prime Minister's, and not an intrusive addition from the fevered brain of a mere journalist.
What do we learn from this searing paragraph?
1: Cartels exist and control prices.
2: They are willing to push up prices even of basic commodities, the bread line of the poor.
3: Cartels are a crime.
So what has Dr Singh's government, now in power for over a thousand days, done to punish this crime? Even one gesture, executive or legislative, would be worth knowing. When an ordinary thief steals, the majesty of the law imprisons him and the less than majestic baton of the police turns his back into a sore mess. When a criminal cartel of businessmen, probably all CII members, robs the poor of food, and exceeds the limits of decency and greed (the Prime Minister's words, not mine), all that the Prime Minister of India can do is plead self-restraint! (This time the exclamation mark is mine.)
Why preach when you are so utterly helpless?
There is a certain inevitability about Point No. 9 on Dr Singh's Social Charter, because everyone in public life tends to use this cane as a crutch. May I quote? "Nine, fight corruption at all levels. The cancer of corruption is eating into the vitals of our body politic. For every recipient of a bribe there is a benefactor and a beneficiary."
How true. So who is this mysterious recipient? Trust me, without a recipient, with hand outstretched and power in his eyes, no one would pay a bribe. No business enjoys giving a bribe. He would rather spend the money on creature comforts. So who does he give the money to?
The politician. What has Dr Singh done to curb corruption in his government? Nothing. His personal honesty can no longer disguise the fact that money is being made at a rampant pace by many of his ministers. He knows this and is silent.Why preach about the mote in the other's eye when there is a beam in your own?Point No. 10 has an inevitable ring to it as well. He asks industry to "finance socially responsible advertising". I hope you know what "socially responsible advertising" means. It means taking out acres of full-page ads, paid for by taxpayers' money, telling the world how wonderful the government is. With Dr Singh's picture at the top, of course.
"India has made us," says the Prime Minister. "We must make Bharat." That is a good two-sentence one-liner, which rather forgets to mention that Bharat is no longer in any mood to be patronised. Bharat is setting Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and Bengal and Haryana on fire. Bharat has trapped both the BJP and the Congress in Rajasthan. Bharat has decided that downward mobility might be more useful than upward mobility: there is no point aspiring to be the equal of a Brahmin when the illusionary job quotas are for the depressed classes. Bharat's young men are brandishing country pistols in preparation for civil wars over employment. Bharat is indifferent to good intentions, and impervious to statistics. Bharat is ready to torch the super highways being built for the vehicles of 9% growth. The capital of India is Delhi. The capital of Bharat is the home of the farmer who has committed suicide.
Dr Manmohan Singh has given us three budgets since he became Prime Minister. All three were budgets for India. He has only one budget left. The election process will have begun by the time his budget of 2009 is due. Perhaps he can make the next budget for Bharat. As we have noted, the poor are always grateful for small mercies.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave a thoughtful speech at the annual session of the CII (Confederation of Indian Industry for all you yokels who do not know what the country's most powerful acronym stands for). He asked the captain, majors, colonels and generals of Indian business to remember that those who are not members of the CII are also Indians. The speech was overdue by about three years, but no matter. The poor are ever grateful for the smallest mercies. He also made the speech to the wrong group. He should have begun with an audience of one.
There is an exclusive telephone system in Delhi meant only for the Very Very VVIPs called RAX. It is an internal line for the highest of the high in government. Dr Singh should have picked up his RAX phone and called his finance minister for a cup of tea. Over tea, stressing each sentence till there was no room for misunderstanding, Dr Singh should have read this speech to finance minister P. Chidambaram.Mr Chidambaram has produced three budgets. How come no one told him that Prime Minister Singh was interested in the welfare of the poor, and that he had thought out a Ten-Point Charter to save the nation? Each one of the issues raised by Dr Singh could have been addressed in the national budget. None was. Why should the CII listen to the Prime Minister when his own Cabinet could hardly care less?
Let's start with executive salaries, which Dr Singh condemns as "excessive remuneration" which can lead to "social unrest". Let us say that the owner-chief executive of a major company pays himself around Rs 2 crores as salary for working hard, and delivering profits as chief executive. He pays the maximum-slab tax on this sum. How much does the government pay him for being the owner? The latest issue of India Today informs me that in just one year, 2006-2007, Dr Singh's government permitted the shareholders of 1,100 companies to pocket Rs 40,000 crores in dividends. Did they pay any tax on Rs 40,000 crores? Not a rupee. Take out a calculator and do the math.
Why preach about Rs 2 crores a year, with tax, when you have handed out an untaxed Rs 40,000 crores a year to the members of the CII?Does Dr Singh listen to himself?
Just after he finished scolding the CII about salaries, he went on to ostentatious weddings, because the expenditure on them "insults the poverty of the less privileged, it is socially tasteful and it plants the seeds of resentment in the minds of the have-nots".
Very noble. Could we know how many such weddings Dr Singh has attended as Prime Minister, when he could have sent a polite (perhaps even warm) letter to the couple being wed ostentatiously, wishing them a very happy future but indicating that he would prefer not to give legitimacy to such vulgarity by his presence?
Why preach about vulgarity when you do not have the courage to reject it?
The sixth point of this Social Charter should have been Message Number 1, given the heavy damage that the continuous price rise has done to Congress fortunes. Dr Singh has named at least one of the villains. I had better quote the strong words used by the Prime Minister to avoid any accusation of misrepresentation. "The operation of cartels by groups of companies to keep prices high must end… It is even more distressing in a country where the poor are severely affected by rising commodity prices. Cartels are a crime and go against the grain of an open economy. Even profit maximisation should be within the bounds of decency and greed!"
I hasten to point out that the exclamation is the Prime Minister's, and not an intrusive addition from the fevered brain of a mere journalist.
What do we learn from this searing paragraph?
1: Cartels exist and control prices.
2: They are willing to push up prices even of basic commodities, the bread line of the poor.
3: Cartels are a crime.
So what has Dr Singh's government, now in power for over a thousand days, done to punish this crime? Even one gesture, executive or legislative, would be worth knowing. When an ordinary thief steals, the majesty of the law imprisons him and the less than majestic baton of the police turns his back into a sore mess. When a criminal cartel of businessmen, probably all CII members, robs the poor of food, and exceeds the limits of decency and greed (the Prime Minister's words, not mine), all that the Prime Minister of India can do is plead self-restraint! (This time the exclamation mark is mine.)
Why preach when you are so utterly helpless?
There is a certain inevitability about Point No. 9 on Dr Singh's Social Charter, because everyone in public life tends to use this cane as a crutch. May I quote? "Nine, fight corruption at all levels. The cancer of corruption is eating into the vitals of our body politic. For every recipient of a bribe there is a benefactor and a beneficiary."
How true. So who is this mysterious recipient? Trust me, without a recipient, with hand outstretched and power in his eyes, no one would pay a bribe. No business enjoys giving a bribe. He would rather spend the money on creature comforts. So who does he give the money to?
The politician. What has Dr Singh done to curb corruption in his government? Nothing. His personal honesty can no longer disguise the fact that money is being made at a rampant pace by many of his ministers. He knows this and is silent.Why preach about the mote in the other's eye when there is a beam in your own?Point No. 10 has an inevitable ring to it as well. He asks industry to "finance socially responsible advertising". I hope you know what "socially responsible advertising" means. It means taking out acres of full-page ads, paid for by taxpayers' money, telling the world how wonderful the government is. With Dr Singh's picture at the top, of course.
"India has made us," says the Prime Minister. "We must make Bharat." That is a good two-sentence one-liner, which rather forgets to mention that Bharat is no longer in any mood to be patronised. Bharat is setting Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand and Bengal and Haryana on fire. Bharat has trapped both the BJP and the Congress in Rajasthan. Bharat has decided that downward mobility might be more useful than upward mobility: there is no point aspiring to be the equal of a Brahmin when the illusionary job quotas are for the depressed classes. Bharat's young men are brandishing country pistols in preparation for civil wars over employment. Bharat is indifferent to good intentions, and impervious to statistics. Bharat is ready to torch the super highways being built for the vehicles of 9% growth. The capital of India is Delhi. The capital of Bharat is the home of the farmer who has committed suicide.
Dr Manmohan Singh has given us three budgets since he became Prime Minister. All three were budgets for India. He has only one budget left. The election process will have begun by the time his budget of 2009 is due. Perhaps he can make the next budget for Bharat. As we have noted, the poor are always grateful for small mercies.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, May 14, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
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?
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?
Sunday, April 22, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
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?
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?
Sunday, March 25, 2007
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.
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.
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