The paucity of hope: Pleaders can’t be Leaders

The paucity of hope: Pleaders can’t be leaders
By M J Akbar

While the world is entranced by hope, I find myself more impressed by audacity. Barack Hussein Obama could not have found the first without an oversized dose of the second.

Since there is no leader without a listener, Obama could not have reached the White House, built partly by black slaves bought and sold a few blocks away, unless his nation had also changed. In three decades, America has moved from Reagan’s good morning to Clinton’s saucy, sun-lit afternoon, to Bush’s eerie twilight. Appropriately, it took a dream to end a nightmare. Since success is the father of sycophancy, Obama will now be compared to every icon short of divinity. He reminds me of Paul Newman in a different skin: a Cool Hand Luke, thirsting to break out of the prison that is his destiny, scornful of the warden, and confident of eventual victory long before the script is written.

Obama rose above the comfort of victim-status. He had to transcend the traps shackling his own community before he could inspire others to rise with him, on the wings of American democracy.

To the question, then, that has been hovering around the table but cannot find the respectability to join the dinner conversation: when will a ‘Hussein’ become prime minister of the world’s largest democracy? Indian democracy has the space; Mayawati has proved this. Why can’t Indian Muslims produce their own Obama?

The demographics are similar, roughly 15%. But the narratives are different. No black was invited to the White House before Theodore Roosevelt broke the taboo in 1901; India is dotted with the palaces of Muslims. Blacks were never empowered, and they did not partition the country to create their own enclave. The trust quotient, so necessary for social cohesion and political mobility, disappeared in India in 1947.

But Muslims are not the only Indian minority to have faced distrust. In 1984 there was carnage against Sikhs across the country. In 2004, a Sikh became Prime Minister. How long will Muslims have to wait?

The unvarnished truth is that neither India nor the Indian Muslim is ready. 1947 was not a solution; it became the source of a running sore that has not healed. Terrorism, and communalism, threaten to turn that sore septic. But if the Obama phenomenon proves anything, it is that alchemy needs an inspirational scientist. The state and the electorate are passive laboratories until that magic moment when a minority leader produces the touchstone that shifts the dynamic of emotion and judgment to create history.

Obama also understood a fundamental fact: change begins at home. You cannot expect the majority to reach out while pandering to insularity among the minority. The seminal turn in his campaign came when he told his fellow black Americans that the age of alibis was over; they could not blame the white man for all their ills. Black parents would have to switch off television sets and switch on education; that was the only way to integrate into America’s success story.

Equally, he did not appease the white man by turning into an Uncle Tom. His nuanced defence of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor at his church who had used volatile language, was perhaps his finest hour; he rejected the language, but could not find it in him to reject the man, or the reasons that had drawn the pastor towards rage. White America heard the anguish, and looked inside; the pivot began to swing.

Indian Muslims do not have leaders; they have pleaders. They plead with their mentors for crumbs; and they plead with their electorate once in five years for survival. Since they do not serve constituents, they need artificial inducements to get votes, either middlemen who can be purchased, or fear, which can be provoked. They cannot challenge the ills within the community because they need to hide their own venality.

They reach their perch through a nudge from the top, rather than a struggle from the bottom. They are kept in their place, which is on the midpoint horizon. Their principal, though not exclusive, vehicle for transport has been the Congress, which has no room at the top in any case. The satraps who rule regional parties are, if anything, even more calculating.

The Congress has compromised its Muslim pleadership into a comfort zone, where corruption is the reward for compromise. A seal has been placed on tongues that dare not be broken, no matter what the provocation. This is not a new phenomenon. You could have heard this silence all over the country on the day P V Narasimha Rao wilfully slept while the Babri mosque was brought down. The reward came in exactly six weeks when Congress Muslims were promoted or inducted through a Cabinet reshuffle.

I recall speaking at a largely Muslim gathering of teachers and professionals in Bangalore. When I suggested that the community should demand facilities like banks that could be sympathetic to Muslim entrepreneurs, the hall burst into involuntary laughter. I was puzzled until someone explained that a prominent neta from the city had done just that, and then embezzled all the funds in the bank. This honourable person is till on the list of high-ranking VIPs.

There is no Obama among Indian Muslims because they have surrendered audacity to pawnbrokers.

Free and Independent

Byline by M J Akbar: Free and Independent

One of the more illogical arguments promoted by secessionist elements on the margins of the country is that India is a fascist nation. This is the sort of thing that sounds suitably liberal in seminar rooms and doubtless envelops the audience in the warm glow of self-satisfaction. There: how brave of us! We have given shelter to the oppressed!

The irony of course is that in a genuinely fascist state you would be locked up before you could utter the first initial of fascist. The key would be thrown away. That Kashmiri secessionists, sometimes very thinly disguised in parallel demands, are given a voice by academia and mainstream media is proof of the liberalism of Indian democracy and its multi-faceted institutions.

The most egregious instance of provocation was the flaunting display of Pakistani flags by some demonstrators in the Kashmir valley. I wonder if anyone in Pakistan would be permitted to display the Indian flag in pursuit of his political agenda.

There is a substantive difference in the concepts of freedom and independence. Every nation today can claim to be independent, but that does not necessarily mean that it is free. Freedom is not merely release from the cage of recent history, an end to foreign rule or occupation. Freedom is a principle that the nation shares with every citizen in a post-colonial polity. India is both independent and free.

A nation can also be colonised by its own elites. A purist political scientist might argue that this is not the technical meaning of a colony, or that an undemocratic regime might be as nationalist in its objectives as a democratic one. But the spirit that pervades life in a dictatorship or an oppressive oligarchy is not all that different from colonial rule.

The British Raj was not a continuous exercise in brutality. In many instances it was liberal and reformist. Many would certainly compare it favourably to the feudalism that prevailed in much of India. Of course not every feudal dynast was a despot, but many were. It was only when it came to defending the right of the British to rule an alien land did the splendidly adorned Viceroys and Oxbridge civil servants descended to ruthlessness. If the lathi did not silence India's cry then the bayonet came out. If that did not serve, the machine guns appeared.

Paradoxically, it can be easier to defend a fascist state than a free and democratic nation. The former will not offer the generosity of habeas corpus ("Where is the body?") through which courts can set limits to the power of the executive. In a land not too far away suspects are picked up in thousands and cherrypicked for transportation to a foreign prison where they can be punished for real or imagined crimes. Intelligence agencies run an alternative government in the name of security, designed to intimidate their own citizens and backed up by its own foreign policy.

But because a democratic nation has a soft, perhaps even pulpy, interior it would be a fallacy to believe that it will be weak in the defence of national integrity. India may have more parties than voters, and the struggle for power might be laced with passions that ignite personal vendettas, but when it comes to the defence of India, differences melt and every party closes ranks.
There is nothing sectarian in the approach of the Indian state. If some Kashmiris have a long list of complaints they should check with Punjab and the Northeast. The list there might be longer.

The great healing power of Indian democracy lies in a simple fact: the door is never closed to anyone. Yesterday's secessionists are Chief Ministers today in the Northeast. Anger is not the sole prerogative of the secessionist or terrorist. There is a perceptible rage brewing among Indians who believe in India, against those Kashmiris who agitate for separation in the valley but have no qualms about taking advantage of academic institutions and business opportunities in the rest of India. There is a mounting view that the liberal rights of the Indian Constitution should be reserved only for those who believe in the Constitution and not extended to those who want to subvert it. There is some logic in this view and yet it hurts the very Constitution we seek to protect. Moreover, compromise with principles can so easily degenerate into abandonment.

The hour of crisis, such as the one we face today, demands that we rise above our anger to preserve the values of our founding generation. The worst of times calls out for the best in us.

US & us: United they stand, divided we fall

US & us: United they stand, divided we fall
By M J Akbar

The Obama-McCain election should be abandoned immediately for reasons of discrimination. It is inhuman to pit the young and brilliant against the old and insecure.

Barack Hussein Obama soars above pitfalls of race and colour, his vision lifted by oratory. John McCain, stunted by George Bush's death-and-dread legacy, crippled by a running mate he selected in a moment of maverick panic, whines with the self-pity of a dead idea struggling to crawl its way back from a grave. It is a no-contest, even though news channels like CNN, dependent on ratings-revenues, pretend that there is some tension left. (If I have to eat my words on November 4, I will be dining out alone for a long time; but let me take the risk.)

As if individual élan were not enough, look at the help in Obama's corner: the smartest politician in half a century, Bill Clinton, to his left, and the toughest candidate in the contemporary process, Hillary Clinton, to his right. McCain has Sarah Palin, who manages to plumb new depths of idiocy when you thought it was impossible to sink further. Ten days ago, in Pittsburgh, she attacked scientific research on fruit flies adding that some of it had even taken place, hold your breath, "in Paris, France". It was wise of her to add "France"; she wasn't overestimating the IQ levels of her base. No one had told her, or them, that Pittsburgh, a classic example of American reinvention after the collapse of its traditional steel and coal industries, is now the leading centre of medical research through its highly respected Pittsburgh University.

McCain's second running mate is someone he affectionately calls "Joe the plumber", a wondrous hick dredged up from anonymity in Ohio to symbolize the evil that Obama would unleash through "socialism", the most slanderous term in American politics. Why is Obama a "socialist"? Because he has the courage to attack the pernicious "trickle down theory" inflicted by neo-cons and thrust upon the world through institutions like the World Bank. Obama says, and repeats, "At a moment like this the last thing we can afford is four more years of the tired old theory that says we should give more to billionaires and big corporations and hope that prosperity trickles down." (Memo to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and finance minister Chidamabaram: if the theory isn't trickling down too well in America, I doubt if it will seduce the farmer in Andhra or Maharashtra.)

Joe hates the thought that Obama wants to "redistribute" wealth by taxing the top five per cent; McCain insists that this is utterly un-American. In an ungainly turn of phrase, he calls Obama "redistributionist-in-chief" while he sets himself up as "commander-in-chief". It turns out that Joe is not actually a plumber, that he would not have to pay more taxes under Obama's plan, and that he hasn't paid his taxes anyway but this has not stopped McCain from turning a canard into his most important campaign theme. Joe, in the meantime, has got himself a PR agent and is preparing to become a big-time celebrity. We shall see if Joe can survive a McCain defeat.

America wants change. That is obvious from Bush's ratings, down now to 22%, the worst in history. You can't call them popularity ratings anymore; they must be relabelled unpopularity ratings. The real story lies in the manner that Obama, and America, are creating change. Obama is restoring the idea of America as an inclusive, free and equal society where egalitarianism is the key to prosperity. This is democracy at its finest.

Democracy is not a love-fest. Elections can be corrosive. We in India are also in the midst of continuous turbulence as parties struggle for popular approval, while terrorists, secessionists and virulent sectarians choose this moment to amplify their destructive intent. But while Americans are gathering behind the idea of a better nation, Indian politicians are ever ready to reap the temporary rewards of long-term disunity. Democracy has become a playground for the dissection of the idea of India.

Comparisons are considered odious, particularly by those who can be compared. But think about it. How much difference is there between those who terrorise Bihari workers in Mumbai and those who drove out Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley? Both expellers want to restructure a complex subcontinent, blessed with a liberal Constitution, from shared space to exclusive compartments. The idea of India was the gift of a great generation with an open mind. It is being battered by petty men with closed minds.

The terrorists who set off murderous bombs in Maharashtra or Gujarat or Delhi or Assam must be laughing all the way to the graveyard. India is spinning on wheels that no longer seem to respond to a common engine. It would be distressing to conclude that we have lost the engine. The problem is that the driver at the centre has lost control, but refuses to relinquish charge of the steering wheel. This reinforces a perception of weakness, which is easily exploited by forces inimical to the nation, wherever they may be, whatever might be their methods.

Last Wednesday in Florida, Bill Clinton called the American presidential campaign the "greatest job interview in the world" with the voter getting to "make the hire". The Indian interview is even tougher, actually. This does not diminish the availability of candidates. If they were to be tested only for ambition, they would score high marks on the cynicism scale. The Indian voter, who makes this hire, is, however, getting fed up with quantity. He wants quality and commitment. Is that too much to ask?

Appeared in Times of India - November 2, 2008

The Quiet Shift to New Horizons

Byline by M J Akbar: The Quiet Shift to New Horizons

The sound of a stereotype crumbling travels deep into the individual psyche and the collective consciousness. The two largest democracies, India and America, comparable in size, demographics and ethnic tensions, have both heard such a rumble in the last few days. The trigger in both cases might have been the relentless pressure that elections bear upon social relationships, the amoral quest for power that brings subterranean flows to a boil.

In Malegaon, Maharashtra, a perception that had slowly grown into a public fact has cracked apart. Indian Muslims, perhaps many of them, have been responsible for acts of terrorism, but they are not the only terrorists in India. The kneejerk production of Muslim suspects by the police under all regimes, including Congress governments, an almost thoughtless projection by mass media and, of course, the opportunity provided by anarchist groups like the Indian Mujahideen with their hate-filled message, had convinced most Indians that the only face of terrorism was a Muslim face. The latest arrests in Malegaon are evidence that subversive violence has more than one visage, that sadhvis and their malevolent associates have been exploiting schisms to foment a unidimensional image of terrorism. It had reached a point where the police would routinely put out identity-kit sketches of suspects in beards and flat caps, whether bombs went off in a market, temple or mosque. The plural had disappeared from the phrase "the usual suspects".

Thousands of miles away, in Pennsylvania, a key swing state that could establish the social benchmarks of America in the 21st century, a story broke of a predatory attack on a young, white girl, a supporter of John McCain. She claimed that she had been assaulted by a tall ("six-foot-four"), powerful black man who branded her face with a "B" because she had dared to campaign against Barack Obama. Every racial stereotype was embedded in her tale: the dark, lustful outsider, inflamed by the thirst for revenge, ravishing a helpless young white girl. This was the real monster hidden at the core of the Obama thrust for power, the apocalypse that awaited the nation if McCain lost on 4 November. That "B" on her face was seen by millions on television, a horrifying omen of the nightmare that would descend upon civilisation.

The story fell apart under scrutiny. The "B" had been written incorrectly, indicating either illiteracy or stupidity. There was no assault. It was a lie designed to inflame white passions. Unable to bear her guilt, the woman admitted she had been set up.

Twenty years ago, in 1988, George Bush Senior, the incumbent's father, had become President by using a variation of this theme in his contest against a rather depressing looking Michael Dukakis. A black felon on parole was pumped up into a metaphor to incite majority fears. The 2008 version is far more crude and dangerous. This, if you think about it, is logical. There has been a marked degeneration in the wares of the merchants of fear, precisely because it has become much harder to sell such provocative merchandise. A baby born in the year Bush Sr was elected will cast his first vote in 2008. This will probably be the decisive vote on 4 November. This generation of Americans is, consciously, deliberately, rejecting the traumas that have bedevilled the past. This was obvious to me in the thinnest of possible samples. If the electorate had consisted only of the students I addressed at the University of Connecticut last week, Obama would have got 90% of the vote. (The other 10% would be undecided.)

The shift to new horizons may not be as marked in India, but it is happening. Those political parties who still cling to tired ideas, who do not realise that the culture of fawning sycophancy or communal antipathy is no longer sustainable, will not be able to avoid wreckage over the next decade. Leadership means lifting a nation from the quagmire of its own prejudice and inconsistencies.

Obama has already proved he is a brilliant politician and a sensitive son. Nothing he has done over two impossible years could top his decision to suspend his campaign for two days to visit his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, now on her deathbed in the modest Hawaii apartment where he grew up. He had postponed visiting his mother when she was dying of cancer until it was too late. He did not repeat that mistake. "My grandmother's the last one left. She has really been the rock of the family…" he said. Cynics might suggest that it was the perfect way to remind America that his grandmother was white, but for two days Obama was a child filled once again with his grandmother's dreams, and not the next President of America. This is why he will make a good President if he becomes one. As Colin Powell said, Obama knows what he doesn't know. That is the first qualification for maturity.

He even has the chance to transform himself into a great leader. It will not be easy. We do not know what lurks behind the steel on his face. We dare not underestimate the strength of the forces who will mobilise against him, not the least of them being big business. If you want to gauge the might of the private sector in America, take a look at this statistic. Between them the two candidates have spent about $2.5 billion trying to win the most powerful job in the world. Don't hold your breath. The annual advertising budget for just one corporation, Coca-Cola, in 2006 was $2.6 billion.

2009 is an election year in India as well. Does any Indian politician have the courage to graduate into a leader through the Indian electoral college?

Two of a Kind: Shades of Maya in Obama's Rise

Two of a Kind : Shades of Maya in Obama's Rise
By M J Akbar

Barack Hussein Obama could not have been older than he is. He is 47. Four years after he was born, America enacted the first set of electoral and positive discrimination reforms that lifted blacks from the deep depression into which they had been cast after their escape from slavery. President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan who understood the virulence of half of America, led the momentum of radical change. Martin Luther King's assassination was the last great crime of white racists. It proved the tipping point. A new generation of blacks answered with arson and terrorism.

That rage was calmed by care. Obama is a child of that remarkable achievement of democracy, a child wafted towards his destiny on the silent engine of a peaceful revolution. The genuis of any minority is wasted without the chemistry of circumstance. We will never know how many Obamas existed before Obama, for their talent was poisoned prematurely by prejudice - just as we in India will never know how many Mayawatis existed before Mayawati. She too is a combination of individual genius and six decades of social engineering through reservations on electoral and academic maps that has empowered a people enslaved for thousands of years by the inequities of the caste system.

Obama and Mayawati, despite their vastly different temperaments and trajectories, have understood two critical aspects of the transition from the margins to centrestage. First, you cannot achieve this by unidimensional community mobilisation. You have to consolidate your base, of course, but that is only the first layer of a pyramid that needs the support of many communities.

Obama reached out to white liberals, of course, but that was the easy part. He had the courage and wisdom to have faith also in middle class America in the middle west, and it has responded in sufficient numbers to take him so close to victory that now only a major self-goal can stop Obama. Mayawati could not have become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh without substantive support from Brahmins and Muslims. Her future progress in national politics will depend on how sustainable her alliance with others is. Muslims will be the hinge to her future.

The second realisation is that you cannot defeat the entrenched power of establishment without money. Their methods seem completely different, but they are not as different as you might think. Obama does not convert his donations into real estate in Washington, and I doubt if he likes diamonds. But the principal source of funding for both is grassroots donations - the expanse of the dribble effect.

Mayawati of course has exploited power to add to her stash, but in this she is no more culpable than any other Indian politician. You cannot hold her to different standards just because she is a Dalit. She probably has complete contempt for conventional political morality in any case; that is what kept her community in bondage.

Obama has left Republicans reeling, when they are not seething, with the amount of money he has raised in small donations - $150 million in October alone. Republicans are used to a money advantage. They are now whining in self-pity compounded by disbelief.

Republicans might have reconciled themselves to defeat against a traditional white Democrat. But to be upstaged by an "upstart" has churned their souls and turned them visceral. They have run through a range of slurs. They accused Obama of being an ally of a black racist, white terrorist, red socialist and finally green Islamist. This is yesterday ranting against tomorrow.
Obama also has that unique distinction that Napoleon demanded from his generals: luck. Victory belongs to he who can spice his talent with good fortune. Hillary Clinton should have stopped him in the primaries; instead she mismanaged her way to defeat. The fact that he had to fight every inch enabled a nationwide network that is paying dividends today. But his biggest stroke of luck was John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. Bill Clinton called her "hot", a view endorsed by his soulmate Asif Zardari. But America wants a cool hand at the top at this moment of grave economic peril. The Wall Street meltdown could not have been better timed for a Democrat triumph. Moreover, Palin is, to put it correctly, ignorant and politically foolish. As if she had not done enough harm, she bought $150,000 worth of clothes for the campaign from expensive stores. This is the kind of morsel that feeds a million conversations.

Obama is the dream that Martin Luther King had for his nation. The dream has come true within a single generation, against huge odds.

Mayawati is the dream that Babasaheb Ambedkar had for his India. It is still a work in progress, but the odds against Mayawati could not have been greater.

The Muslims of the subcontinent saw the realisation of Jinnah's dream in 1947. In 2008 we can only ask a question: was that a dream or a nightmare?

Appeared in Times of India - October 26, 2008

The Great Depression

Byline by M J Akbar: The Great Depression

The big debate about when the next general elections should be held, whether in February next year or April is a lot of wasted waffle. You have to be a bit out of touch to believe that the voter really cares whether it comes thirty days before or after. The moment of decision has long past.
I suspect that much of the hot air spent on the argument is either simulated or an expression of anxiety. The anxiety is not limited to those in power, although they have monopoly rights over the decision. Those who want to get into power are possibly even more tense. But seasoned politicians on both sides know in their gut that, minor variations aside, the voter has already made up his, or, more important, her mind.

The Congress missed its moment twelve months ago. Mrs Sonia Gandhi -- for she makes this decision, not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, though it is his government which will be held accountable -- should have gone to the people just after the monsoons of 2007, along with the Gujarat Assembly polls. There was still some marginal fizz around the Indo-US nuclear deal, largely because it was still within the zone of hazy promise. Since then facts have tumbled out slowly, as documents exchanged between George Bush and the US Congress could not be suppressed from public discourse. The deal is now flat, and vote-neutral. Compared to inflation and the fear of terrorism, the deal is very small potatoes.

Last year, this time, inflation was just a growing blip on the economic radar, not an established truth. Terrorism was a dull pain, not the searing psychological wound it has become. Very few governments can manage an adequate response to hunger and fear, particularly if they have been responsible for stoking both.

Nor had the Congress made the serious tactical mistakes that are going to cost it big, as in the mishandling of the Amarnath agitation. It takes a unique ability to end up on the wrong side of both Hindu and Muslim community sentiment, but the Manmohan Singh government has achieved that. If Amarnath was the tipping point for the former, the encounter in which the Delhi police killed two young men near the Jamia Millia became the turning point for the latter. It needs to be noted that Home Minister Shivraj Patil took personal credit for supervising that encounter.

Different sections of the electorate have separate reasons for discontent. Inflation erodes support among the band between the poor and the middle class. Deflation of stocks values hits those with surplus incomes. Shrinking credit and capital flows depress industrialists, and put pressure on prices and jobs, which hurts consumers and the salaried. Bad news always tends to have a multiplier effect.

The real bad news for the Congress may lie not just in the quality of its own fate, but in the electoral fortunes of its allies. In 2004 the Congress had assets on every side, while the BJP was weighed down with incumbency and the Gujarat riots. The Left was a huge plus. The Marxists do not exist merely in Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. There is a Left sentiment that reinforces any appeal to the poor and the minorities, particularly Muslims. It may not be a decisive influence, but it matters. This time the Left will accuse the Congress of running the most right-wing government, pro-rich and pro-American, since Independence. Allies with a more specific regional constituency are in bad shape. Lalu Yadav cannot repeat his success in Bihar, where Nitish Kumar has reinforced his support with good governance. The DMK will drag down the DMK-Congress alliance in Tamil Nadu, where losses will be heavy. The pro-Telangana movement bolstered the Congress in Andhra Pradesh; this time it will take revenge for the fact that Congress reneged on its implicit promise of a separate Telangana. In addition, the new phenomenon of Chiranjeevi will eat away Congress votes. In Maharashtra Sharad Pawar will be struggling so hard to preserve what little he has that he cannot be of much help to his partners.

Elsewhere, the Congress has lost a great opportunity by alienating Mayawati. She might have extracted a heavy price in Uttar Pradesh, but she would have been a boon in a dozen northern and mid-nation states. She could hurt the Congress in about a hundred Lok Sabha seats. The Congress preference for Mulayam Singh Yadav is curious. He is not going to be any more generous in Uttar Pradesh than Mayawati would have been, and offers nothing anywhere else. But when all your political calculations are compromised by the need to satisfy the Prime Minister's single-point obsession with one deal, then a mess is probably inevitable.

The only difference that an April instead of a February election can probably make is that the Congress would lose half a dozen more seats. A trend only intensifies with time.

The Assembly elections of November and December are a bit of a trap. If the Congress cannot exploit the anti-incumbency sentiment in the BJP-ruled states, which it should, then its supporters will be further depressed after losing a string of states over the past year. The Congress will need dramatic victories in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to create any buoyancy in its ranks.

The results of a general election are the sum total of federal results. The state of the states will determine who will form the next coalition in Delhi. If you want to find out who will rule Delhi, go south. And the south in the next general elections begins in Rajasthan.

Identity wars trump class wars for India's poor

Identity wars trump class wars for India's poor
By M J Akbar

It doesn't quite work out for the workers of the world as Karl Marx had envisaged. They do seem to have something to lose other than their chains. Poverty is not the only definition of India's poor. The struggle against economic injustice isoverlaid by wars of identity, principally caste, creed and faith. This is the biggest barrier between Indian Marxists and the Indian poor.
The former will not compromise with theory. The latter will not compromise with practice.

If class had been the principal motivator of political allegiance, Prakash Karat would have been in power in Uttar Pradesh, not Mayawati. Muslims, mired in growing despair, are reluctant to join the Naxalites in Jharkhand since they cannot comprehend atheism. India should have buzzed with the whirr of revolution, for it combines stark poverty with obscene disparity. But identity continues to be more inflammable than hunger. Hunger will always remain a crucial determinant in any election season, but it is not the only game-changer.

The rising tide of identity-insecurity across the country can be measured by the eagerness with which any community seizes the chance to project itself as a victim. These grievances are neither fiction nor an alibi. They are based on immediate experience. The last few months have brought submerged passions to a boil in a manner witnessed only during periods of deep social crisis.

The Church, using its international reach, has converted the attacks on prayer halls in the South and tribals in Orissa into a global story, persuading Rome, Washington and Paris to berate India publicly. There can be no justification for suchassaults on places of worship, for that undermines the humane values of Indian society and the basic tenets of our Constitution. But the narrative does not end there.

Hindus have also reasons to be upset. They hear India's Prime Minister intone that he is embarrassed by the rebukes he heard in Washington and Paris. That much is acceptable. But they do not hear India's Prime Minister tell Washington and Paris that some fundamentalist Christian missionaries , buoyed by fabulous donations, have said blasphemous things aboutthe most venerated Hindu gods. The Prime Minister cannot speak for only one side of the equation. I doubt if the same largely American missionaries would have attacked the Holy Prophet of Islam with equal impunity. Implicit in their vituperation is the assumption that Hindus are a "soft" target.

Hindu sentiment is equally perplexed at the ferocity with which the idea of a resting place for Amarnath pilgrims was opposed by many Kashmiris. This resentment is not addressed towards non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims because they had nothing to do with the Kashmiri outburst. But when they see Kashmiris travel and trade freely across the subcontinent, Hindus wonder if they have become second-class citizens in their own country. The denial of courtesy towards pilgrims hurts at the deepest point in the psyche.

The rage of Muslims has crystallized into outrage. The two current focal points have become the cynical hypocrisy of the Maharashtra government in the handling of riots in Dhule and Malegaon, and the killing of terror "suspects" at Jamia Millia and its myriad consequences, not the least of which has been the conduct of the Delhi police. Trapped in the contradictions of its own deceit, and blessed by the protection (given through public statements) of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and home minister Shivraj Patil (who claimed credit for the operation), the police seems to have embarked upon a policy of offering scapegoats for mass consumption. Muslims cite the manner in which the police once flaunted Tauqeer as the "mastermind" and India's "Osama bin Laden" but today dismiss him as a "media creation". And so when plainclothes policemen come in a black Hyundai without number plates enters the Jamia area on the night of 16 October to pick up yet another suspect, it meets with instantaneous public resistance.

The credibility of the police, and the government, has disappeared. The Congress has lost the plot, and presided over a meltdown in inter-community relations. Traditional tactics - create fear, and then offer to become guardian in exchange for the Muslim vote - no longer work.

If governments only managed to hurt themselves, there would be nothing to fret about. One of the great blessings of democracy is that it gives opportunity for every government to commit suicide through a thousand self-inflicted cuts. The worry begins when the nation starts to bleed as well.

Indian Muslims are bitter, but it would be very foolish of them to permit this bitterness to ferment into bile. Any government is a passing phenomenon; the nation is a permanent asset. Governments can fracture; a nation must hold. When those in power fail, it becomes vital that we, the people, Hindu and Muslim and Sikh and Christian, reach out to preserve the common good. Common sense is often the best recipe for the common good; alas, that is the first thing that a victim abandons.

Appeared in Times of India - October 19, 2008

In black, white and grey

In black, white and grey
By M.J. Akbar

Now that the hurly burly's done, now that the battle's lost and almost won, it all boils down to this. Can white Americans who are more white than American, defeat a black-and-white candidate with an "Arab" name for what is still the most powerful job in the world?

Barack Hussein Obama is not black: his mother was white, and he was brought up by his doting white grandparents. He is a child of modern America, increasingly mixed genetically, aspirational without being domineering, convinced that George W. Bush is the last of the 20th century Mohicans, that wars are not a solution, and that the world can only function as shared space between nations that may not be equal but have an equal right to a voice at the table. I write this from America; and this is the most heartened I have felt about America in many years of travel and discussion. It is wonderful to witness the curative powers of democracy, and the resuscitation of liberal values that made America a positive force for so long –– before it was consumed by the predatory greed of special interests that devastated both their own nation and the world. The pain of Iraq and Wall Street has opened American eyes, enabling it to see within for the inspiration to see ahead.

Washington is rustling with the sound of Democrat CVs being rescued from office dossiers, but the Republicans are not giving up without a vicious last stand. Senator John McCain's language has been deliberately downsized for a bar-room shootout between "white" and "black" as he stokes racism even as he affects an injured innocence when accused of the tactics of the "nigger-hating South". Before his last debate, he promised to "whip" Obama's "you know what". They understand "you know what" in the middle space of the American electorate. Sarah Palin's face flushes in excitement as some in her rallies rouse their passions by demanding Obama's death despite the presence of media. McCain clarifies later that he is proud of every single person who comes to his and Palin's rallies. Facts are not permitted to get in the way of the message. He chose to distil his economic plan through the symbolic mention of "Joe the plumber", who was earning $250,000, wanted to buy the business and live the American dream without paying any extra tax. The "socialist" [arguably a word even dirtier than "black"] Obama was destroying Joe's dream by spreading Joe's wealth in a class war. A day's research proved that Joe was no plumber [he did not have a licence]; that he earned only $40,000 a year; and that he owed the government taxes. As campaign strategy this was shambolic. Has this fazed the Republicans? Not in the least. The desperate can never be embarrassed.

Will this work?

No one is sure. Who can gauge the depth of subliminal fears? Opinion polls, at best, can only go by what people say; they cannot really measure what the voter believes. The voter may not even be aware of his true beliefs until the moment he enters the polling booth, with only fear to keep him company.

McCain has not accepted defeat and Obama is far from declaring victory. There is one revealing difference though. Over the last few weeks, McCain has turned grumpy, angry and shrill; and Obama has grown calmer, assured and even learnt to laugh. His smile was always attractive but he simply did not know how to laugh. He is learning.

He has been blessed with extraordinary, even unbelievable luck. Hillary Clinton should have stopped him long ago; the Democratic machine never expected Obama to last beyond the first few primaries. She mismanaged her way to defeat. McCain had the clear advantage for reasons expressed [experience, war heroism] and unexpressed [racism]. He was up in the polls by six points after the Republican convention. And then came Hurricane Wall Street.

If the terrorist in the last American election was an Arab with a long beard and wide turban nestling in the mountains of Pakistan-Afghanistan, this election's terrorist is an American in suit and tie with an expensive briefcase, a horrendously huge salary, an expansive apartment in Manhattan and permission to party just after he has been gifted $85 billion: the Wall Street executive. This chap frightens and angers the American voter at this moment.

Since Republicans need to redirect anxiety towards the stereotype they have discovered a "terrorist" friend of Obama called Bill Ayres who belonged to a violent sect called the Weathermen in the Vietnam years but has refashioned himself as a respectable professor in Chicago. The trouble is that he looks what he is now, a friendly, mild-mannered, well-meaning academic, which rather defeats the purpose. He is not even black, let alone an Arab. However, McCain and Palin can barely hold their breath as they gasp that Obama consorted with an America-hater.

It would be comforting to report that the future of the world was dependent on more serious considerations.

But you realise that the ground has shifted when Donald Trump, maverick construction and gambling magnate, and hardly an ex-Weatherman closet Communist, wants to impeach George Bush because, as he told a news channel, "He got us into this horrible [Iraq] war with lies… It wasn't Saddam Hussein that took down the World Trade Center … in fact Saddam killed terrorists because he did not want them in his country… Now Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists… What have we created [in Iraq]? A mess. The day we leave, forget it!" This may not work as an essay for The Brookings Institution, but on the nodal points of policy Trump could not be more correct.

Curiously, it is Bush who seems to have recognised the huge folly of warmongering, having prevented, in his last months, Israel from an unilateral attack on Iran, come to an accommodation with Hezbollah through Qatar, opened negotiations with Taliban through Saudi Arabia and recognised that the only exit from Iraq is a gradual creep-out, vacating space for largely pro-Iran elements to stabilise the country.

But as Bush comes to his senses, McCain takes leave of his. The American Republic should never be left to the Republicans.

Why Zardari said what America wanted to hear

Why Zardari said what America wanted to hear
By M J Akbar

No passport has yet been devised that can take one easily across the borderline of fear. Pakistan used to fear annihilation by India; now it fears the hegemony. India used to fear invasion across the Line of Control in Kashmir; now it fears the export of terror.

One nation's freedom-fighter can, of course, be a neighbour's terrorist. Pakistan may sincerely want peace with India, but it still has not reconciled itself to peace in Kashmir. Politicians, bureaucrats and generals sitting across a walnut table are not the only ones who determine the management of visceral fear. The street also has a say, the Pakistani street being a less than melodious orchestra of mohalla, madrassa and media.

Might I offer a suggestion for the new kid on the block, Asif Zardari, once "Mr Ten Percent" and now the honourable President of Pakistan. The next time he feels inclined towards discussing Kashmir in an interview, he should outsource the interview to his spokesman. It will save him the bother of claiming he has been misquoted or misunderstood.

Is there any rational explanation for what Zardari definitely told the Wall Street Journal - that those who had picked up the gun and bomb in Kashmir were terrorists, and that India has never been a threat to Pakistan?

Part of the reason lies in the fact that he was speaking to a conservative American paper. Zardari obviously shares one trait with India's Prime Minister, who in September offered the true love of every Indian to George Bush, the most hated president since polls began to measure such sentiments. Zardari was telling a Republican paper what he thought the White House wanted to hear. But this is useful only if it meshes into a larger framework.

Washington is reorienting its policy towards the entire region between Kabul and Delhi, and the basic foundations are being repositioned for a new architecture. At the centre of this shift is recognition that the failing war against Afghanistan was deeply flawed by an error of judgement.

It should have been against al-Qaida, fountainhead of terrorism, and not against Taliban, government of the Afghan nation. The determined Taliban have not only turned the flow of battle, but have emerged as champions of Afghan nationalism and good governance, compared to the utter corruption and incompetence of the Hamid Karzai regime. The British commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, admitted in the first week of October that absolute military victory was impossible and that if the Taliban were prepared to sit across the table this "insurgency" could be concluded.

He was only making public a process that had already begun. Between September 24 and 27, King Abdullah hosted a dialogue between 11 Taliban delegates, two Afghan officials, a representative of Gulbuddin Hekmetyar and three others. The talks had the official backing of the British government, and the unofficial support of the United States. America and Britain are talking to those they went to war against after 9/11 in the belief that they were "terrorists". Their rhetoric still describes the Taliban thus.

It is clear that US and UK are trying to declare victory before they get out of a war they cannot win. But since America cannot be defeated by "terrorists", the Taliban will have to be redefined.
The Taliban are delighted to play ball. Mullah Mohammad Omar has conveyed, through his representatives at the Saudi talks, that Taliban was no longer allied with al-Qaida.

Pakistan has repeatedly been told by Washington to disassociate itself from terrorists, a tactic that has become second nature to the ISI. If Taliban can walk away from Osama bin Laden, then Pakistan should be prepared to abandon Kashmiri terrorists.

In an ideal Anglo-American scenario, the security gap left behind by departing Nato forces would be filled by an informal, if difficult, alliance between India and Pakistan. This cannot happen as long as Kashmir remains a source of conflict. Hence, a new arrangement for the region needs a resolution of Kashmir. This process cannot begin unless Islamabad decides that Kashmiri militants are not freedom-fighters. Once this happens, the status of Kashmir can be negotiated as long as the governments in Delhi and Islamabad are amenable to American "advice".

In an interesting twist of fate, Pakistan has now more to fear from terrorists on its west than from India. Pessimists have even begun to talk, albeit in hushed tones, of the possibility of a second partition of Pakistan, with the Frontier becoming a virtually independent region, under the control of Taliban-inspired Pushtun theocrats. It is only such a context that makes some sense of Zardari's assertion that the real threat to Pakistan is not from India. He is right, of course: India has never had any desire for any Pakistan territory, preferring to let Pakistan stew in the contradictions of its own politico-ideological concoction.

For Zardari, this would mean burial of the strategic legacy of another man he should hate with passion, General Zia-ul Haq, who led the coup against his father-in-law, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and later hanged him. Zia convinced his country that what had been impossible through conventional war could be achieved through unconventional means. It was an attractive proposition in the 1980s: Punjab seemed utterly vulnerable and it was obvious that India could not hold on to Kashmir if it lost Punjab. Zia, a packed package of craft, laid siege to India through terrorists, even as he wooed its opinion-maker elite with time, double-talk, carpets and silver teapots in the hope they would find rational arguments for abandoning the defence of Indian unity. Two decades later, elitist knees continue to wobble far too quickly in Delhi.

Zardari's first serious attempt to test the elasticity of Pakistan's thinking has rebounded: the elastic has snapped back sharply enough to loosen a molar or two. He could not recognize the power of the Pakistani street because he has never worked on it. He has usurped the authority of the prime minister and turned the office of the president, which he reached through an indirect election, into the centre of power. It was a constitutional coup, aided by a sycophantic political party and a fragile polity. But bribes and bullying will not alter the Pakistani's most durable article of faith, that Kashmir belongs to Pakistan.

One presumes Zardari has learnt a primary lesson: sometimes it is easier to get into office than to sit in it.

The American argument can be beguiling to Islamabad, that when a final prospect of peace is offered, the Indian elite will accept the compromises in geography necessary to make a Kashmir deal palatable to Pakistan. A trial run has already been established in the nuclear pact, where vital commitments have been sacrificed by Delhi and ignored by most of the Indian elite, whether in Parliament or press. Mediocre leaders have an almost incurable urge to "enter history" through a single triumph, even if this means tweaking the national interest here or there. Zardari seems to have bought into the American dream for South Asia.

But nations are not chess pieces which can be arbitrarily rearranged through clever moves. Rulers might dream of turning a pawn into a queen; in real life, kings end up as pawns much more easily.

Appeared in Times of India - October 11, 2008

Who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?

Byline by M J Akbar: Who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?

It often needs a startling image to convey the dimensions of a crisis. Bloggers have time to discover such startling analogies. Someone on the net has had the time and patience to conjure up this image about $700 billion, the most dramatic figure among the many mountains of cash that Governments have doled out to capitalism's poster boys in order to save capitalism.
If you stacked up $700bn in 100-dollar bills [100, not 10 or 1], it would climb 54 miles into the sky. If you counted one billion at the rate of one digit a second, you would need 30 years. 700 billion? Don't begin.

Would you want to add the British crisis-management fund to this? On 7 October Britain announced an $87 billion rescue package for its banks, and offered a guarantee of $200 billion more. How high would you have to go if you added Japan and other nations to the list? And this is only the start of a story whose end is outside the comprehension of all the pontiffs who, with the support of obedient priests in politics and media, have turned unrestrained economic reform into the sole morality of our times. This is the bailout for a few companies. A western nation, Iceland, is trembling on the brink of a meltdown and no one knows quite what to do. Iceland itself does not know whether it needs $5 billion or a multiple of that. A desperate Gordon Brown is trying to protect British investments by threatening Iceland with sanctions, as if it was a renegade Iran.

What do the great capitalists plan to do with this waterfall of cash? Some of them think that the party can continue as before. Executives of the world's largest insurance company, AIG, which has already picked up $85bn and is thirsting for more, celebrated in the only way they know. They gathered at a top California beach resort for an eight-day jamboree and ran up a tab for $440,000, including pedicures, massage, golf and cocktails. [Former American ambassador to India Frank Wisner is vice president for foreign relations at AIG, but he was not part of such shenanigans.]

It has yet to strike anyone serious — at least to my knowledge — that throwing away money is not the best way to protect a system that has been shattered at fundamental points by a basic tenet of the capitalist faith, greed. The last decade has seen the escalation of greed into a primary virtue. The rise of executive salaries and bonuses is only one aspect. In our country, Governments have watched benevolently as some crooks masquerading as wizards have raped funds given to them in trust by shareholders. The Government, impelled by World Bankers, would have tied the Indian economy fiscally into the West much more deeply. Prakash Karat is right when he claims that the Left prevented the UPA Government from becoming a handmaiden of the American economy. With organisations like Morgan Stanley now an integral part of capital markets, India cannot escape the consequences of haemorrhage in New York, but it can yet avoid free fall.

Capitalism is in trouble because reality became a version of caricature. Growth became a cloak for venality. Everyone placed on the watch went to sleep. American commentators now admit that warning flags went up 18 months ago, and action should have been taken a year ago at the very latest. But who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?

No free ride goes on forever. George Bush thought his would continue for the duration of his term; better men than him might never have seen the tsunami, but he has been blind to anything but his whims for many years now. In a democracy, if systems and institutions do not hold you accountable, the people eventually do.

There was something a little funny about the apoplectic Republican at a John McCain town hall meeting railing at the prospect of a "Socialist" being elected President. You did not need exceptional insight to read his mind: in that closed and narrow mental chamber, every Black was a Socialist and that was only the least of his sins. A survey conducted by Stanford University, The Associated Press and Yahoo completed in September showed that some 10% of white America was irredeemably racist, and that another 6% was unconsciously prejudiced in the sense that he or she would make a racial decision without believing that this was the decisive factor. It is obvious that the Republicans have concluded that the only factor that can save them now is colour. John McCain's slur, when he called Barack Obama "That one!", was crafted to arouse subliminal and overt hatreds. The Republican effort is to arouse demons in the 6% that is not aware it has demons. In other words, Barack Obama has to lead by about 12% in order to win by perhaps 2%. It is safe to assume that if Hillary Clinton had been candidate she would have been ahead by 15% already.

History cannot be made without luck. Obama needed much luck to become candidate. He is of mixed descent rather than pure African-American; his mother was white, and he is devoted to his white grandparents who gave him love and a home. A high percentage of young voters are no longer of pure ethnic descent; the nation has become a genetic melting point as well. But that could carry him to the nomination, not to the White House. Obama needed divine intervention to become President. He prays effectively. He got it. If this crisis had broken a few weeks later, it would have been too late for him. The seismic shift came at the precise moment when it was needed, when he was lagging in the polls and the election was drifting away from him despite eight years of Bush. As long as the colour of failure was only black or Latino-brown, the White House was effectively safe for Republican America. But the crisis has sent a shudder of dread into the heart of white middle-class America.

Hands will be trembling when they reach the ballot, but they will no longer tremble only at the thought of putting a dark man with a strange name into the White House. They will also tremble in anger at the prospect of a lifetime's savings destroyed and confidence in the immediate future. It is that tremble that could shift their finger away from the Bush-McCain button on 4 November.

Will a President Obama change anything when he inherits a situation teetering on chaos in the last week of January 2009? No. That would mean stretching his luck a bit too far, and he will have exhausted much of his quota of luck reaching the White House. There is a more important reason why he will not do anything radical. No one yet knows what there is to do.

The radical answer for the Right is to discover capitalism without capitalists, and no one has any ideas about how to weave a route towards such idealism.

Deep Inside India, Secularism is a Way of Life

Deep Inside India, Secularism is a Way of Life
By M J Akbar

On October 2, Gandhi’s birthday and Eid launched the annual Bengali festive season that will last into the third week of the month. Eid in India is determined by the visibility of the moon; the Saudis, who check the sky with technology, celebrated the end of Ramadan a day earlier. Since one of the many definitions of Indian secularism is proprietary rights over holidays, some Calcutta companies shut down on October 1. The origin of holiday is ‘holy day’. Bengal has always been holier than thou.

Sour-brains who rearrange life by the calculus of productivity miss the point. Bengal understands GDP (Gross Domestic Product) but values GDH (Gross Domestic Happiness). Economists will never understand the power of the embrace, common to both Durga Puja and Eid. Every human being is an equal in an embrace.

That is the first gesture after the Eid prayer. I spend Eid at Telinipara, some 30 miles north of Calcutta along the jute-mill dotted banks of the Hooghly, where I was born.

The men of our family walk together to the Chhoti Masjid (Small Mosque) with heads bowed. This is not due to any excessive humility. We have to avoid stepping on pats of still-wet cow dung. Early risers have first use of public facilities. The municipality has sprinkled white disinfectant powder along the drains on either side, a practice started during the British Raj and followed twice a year, during Eid and Bakr-Eid. The cows were oblivious of municipal concerns even during British rule.

The official name of the mosque is the rather grandiloquent Masjid-e-Ibrahim (Mosque of Abraham); its popular name is more appropriate, although it has become a bit larger since last Eid. This need has been felt for more than a decade, with the increasing population of Telinipara, but it became possible only when the owner of the huts adjoining the mosque sold his property to the mosque.

Like any public institution, the mosque was strapped for cash. The owner gave it for less than the market value, despite higher offers. He was a Hindu. He was happy to take less because, in his words, the mosque too was “ Bhagwan ka ghar (God’s house)”. Five hundred bags of cement came as a gift from a renowned Calcutta Marwari business family. Neither made the contribution because they expected their names to appear in India’s largest English newspaper.

The maulvi leading the prayer was an angry young man. He offered an answer to a major dilemma of dialectical spiritualism. If Islam was the chosen faith, and Muslims Allah’s select people, why were they mired in poverty when non-believers in the West were flooded with riches and comfort? True wealth is not what you see in this life, but what you will be rewarded with in heaven. He went on a bit about the pleasures of heaven, not forgetting the heavenly wine that will not leave you with a headache. And his route to heaven was a trifle severe, demanding abstinence even from music. But his argument was a placebo, a calmative for a community bewildered by questions.

Later, around ten, enthusiastic young men of my mohalla took me to their single-room club, fed me sandesh bought from Bijoy Modak’s excellent shop, and asked me for “nasihat”. I had no advice to offer, just the essence of some experience along the road from Telinipara to Delhi. The peddlers of violence have nothing to offer but self-destruction, I said, and there were nods of agreement. The rungs of an upward ladder are a modern education; and education is the equal right of both boys and girls. The horizon will be outside reach, and the community remain fractured as long as there is gender bias. The young must leave the mistakes of their parents behind. We Indians laugh and cry in Urdu and Hindi and Bengali, but we rule in English. The language of economic and administrative power is English, so learn English.

The young men were ahead of such advice. They were determined to add a room to the club, which will serve as a library and a tuition centre for those who show promise but do not have the means to fulfil their promise.

Later, a father brought two teenage daughters and reminded them that they wanted to tell me something. Their eyes just a trifle hesitant, but growing with confidence, they said they would be giving their Madhyamik examinations next year, and were determined to go to college. The father beamed with pride. Elsewhere a mother was spending what for her was serious money to get her child into kindergarten in St Joseph’s Convent in Chandannagar, which was my first school. I chatted with a student of Aligarh University; she is in her second year, studying statistics. Her English diction was perfect. In another conversation men marvelled at the fact there was now a fortnightly market in our mohalla where goods worth lakhs were bought. Women were the big spenders. Only 10% of the milling shoppers were men, and they had come as bodyguards, someone said with a very hearty laugh.

This is not yet a gender revolution, far from it. But this is the first hint of a gender insurrection.
When I was in my second year, a student of Presidency College, this small street of Telinipara had descended into desolation through communal violence. On one black night, nearly every mud hut was set ablaze as Hindus and Muslims chased each other with spears, swords, country revolvers, kerosene and matchsticks. They are back together now, the past lost in conscious amnesia.

More than three decades ago, the Chhoti Masjid had become a refuge for Muslims seeking shelter from Hindus. It has become a Bari Masjid today, with help from Hindus who believe that this too is a house of God.

India may lose itself in Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore and Ahmedabad, but finds itself again and again in millions of Teliniparas.

Appeared in Times of India - October 05, 2008

The Parallel Streams of Anger

Byline by M J Akbar: The Parallel Streams of Anger

Dr Manmohan Singh said, on his return from France, that incidents in Orissa had shamed India before the world. That is important, but far less important than the fact that the violence in Orissa has shamed Indians in India. I measure what Indians do not by the standards of France, but by the values of modern India, which strengthened the spirit of our freedom movement against western colonialism and were enshrined in that noble document called the Constitution of India. The Bajrang Dal has shamed India before Indians.

Nicolas Sarkozy lives by French values, which is perfectly reasonable, for he is a Frenchman. But I am a little underwhelmed by the selective secularism of France, which permits schoolchildren to wear a small cross but will not allow a Sikh child to wear a turban or a Muslim to wear a hijab. One can't complain: if those are the values of the French, they are entitled to them. If Mr Sarkozy wants to hand out medals to Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen [now given safe custody in India by Dr Manmohan Singh] that is his privilege. No one has accused Ms Nasreen of being a claimant to the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Mr Sarkozy is entitled to the nuances of his critical faculties. Dr Singh should perhaps be a bit wary of discussing domestic problems on foreign soil. I presume he would not mind, now, if the Saudis raised the killing of Jamia Millia students in Batla House by the Delhi police, or indeed communal riots in which Muslims are victims. Or does he have a separate standard for Saudis and the Organisation of Islamic States — the French can complain, but not them? The French could not care less about the plight of Indian Muslims, but Saudis or the OIC might care. France does not even pretend to hide its bias against Muslims: it objects to Turkey's inclusion within the European Union because Turkey is a Muslim nation. [It must be noted that British policy is quite the opposite; it supports Turkey's membership.] I imagine that Dr Singh forgot to raise the small matter of French involvement in African genocide. Rwanda has just published the findings of an enquiry which claims that France armed, trained and helped Hutu militias that killed 800,000 Tutsis, and those Hutus who gave shelter to Tutsis, in just 100 days in 1994.

The Bajrang Dal's violence in Orissa shames me because it represents the destruction of the idea of India as shared space for all faiths, with each Indian guaranteed equal rights. This too is a form of terrorism. It has been pointed out that some of the conversion literature distributed by missionaries — for instance, a booklet titled 'Satya Darshini', where remarks have been made about Urvashi, Vashistha and Lord Krishna — is offensive. If that is so, there is a democratic way of addressing such issues. Who gave any fundamentalist the right to rape and kill? Governments that have tolerated this will suffer not only the shame of present censure but also the whiplash of public anger in the next elections.

There is a sullen mood across India, a sense of lowering clouds before a furious storm breaks. Every dimension of anger seems to be clamouring for expression. Secessionists in Kashmir taunt Indians by flaunting the Pakistani flag while the UPA government watches, impotent. There is a growing anger among many Hindus against such secessionist provocation, as well as against terrorists like those of the Indian Mujahideen who claim to act in the name of Islam: this effortlessly morphs into hostility against all Muslims. There is the rage of the Bajrang Dals who convert a perceived threat from conversions into irresponsible violence and worse. There is deep frustration among Indian Muslims who feel that they have been victimised for six decades and are being targeted on all sides now. They have faced the hostility of Hindutva; now they are dealing with betrayal by the Congress. The killing of Jamia students has crystallised this betrayal.

Political parties were meant to be guardians of public morality. That is too much to expect now. Their only purpose is to sip up votes from the parallel streams of anger, choosing whichever stream is compatible to their taste. To calm the nation's anger would be injurious to their electoral interest.

Evasion and lies come easily to political leaders. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has always advertised his probity, has absolutely no qualms about using deception. It would be boring to repeat the many kinds of deception that have characterised the progress of the nuclear deal with George W. Bush but the latest instance is useful evidence. Dr Singh always, and publicly, claimed that he wanted to be able to complete the negotiating process, and would return to Parliament before placing the final signature on any agreement.

On 30 June Dr Singh told the media, "I have said it before, I will repeat it again, that you allow us to complete the process. Once the process is over, I will bring it before Parliament and abide by the House." On 22 July he told Parliament, "All I had asked our Left colleagues was: please allow us to go through the negotiating process and I will come to Parliament before operationalising the nuclear agreement. This simple courtesy which is essential for orderly functioning of any Government worth the name, particularly with regard to the conduct of foreign policy, they were not willing to grant me."

The Prime Minister has walked away from this commitment without a hint of remorse. If Parliament protests, the government will simply adjourn the House. The credibility of politicians is not the real issue. The credibility of institutions cannot long stand the strain of irresponsibility.
This is a moment when the nation needs courage and leadership. Indians have, instead, to live with cynicism and misleaders. The disease stretches across the political spectrum. The country is getting infected.

Is it really Muslims whose credibility is at stake?

Is it really Muslims whose credibility is at stake?
By M J Akbar

There is nothing more subversive than the alternative narrative. A parallel version of the Godhra incident and riots sabotaged the re-election of the NDA government four years ago. A subaltern variation of the police operation at Batla House, near the Jamia Milia Islamia University on 19 September, is undermining the credibility of the Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi government today. It cannot undermine the credibility of home minister Shivraj Patil because he has none.

The first doubts began to circulate even while Patil, wearing a very self-satisfied expression on his face, began to congratulate himself in front of television cameras for delivering bullet-justice to two young men living in a small apartment of this building. He had, he said, personally supervised the encounter, presumably without taking any break whatsoever for fresh laundry.

Ironically, doubt needs the support of evidence. If it is mere partisan belligerence, it will last no longer than a puff of acrid smoke. Some things did not quite add up in the official story. It was, to use a phrase familiar from the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, the dog that did not bark that raised the first question. You rarely slip on hard concrete; it is generally the banana skin that turns a measured tread into a painful fall. The Rashomon effect, where the same event induces sharply different perspectives, can make for intriguing fiction; in real life, it can rip up communication lines carefully planted by a government trying to sell a fable.

The first question, followed by two photographs, began to dilute the triumphalism of the Delhi police even during the early phase of its self-glorification. The authorities noted, with satisfaction, that two 'terrorists' had been killed. They added that two had escaped from the rented urban cage where they lived, which was all they could afford. The deaths were explicable; the escape was not. The building had only one entrance, and hence only one exit. It was surrounded by policemen. How could the two escape?

When the murmur became a buzz, the police attempted damage control with a weak suggestion. The two could have escaped through the roof, hopping across rooftops. But it was daytime. The roofline was surely as closely monitored as the roadline. Neighbourhood eyes were tense and alert. Had anyone seen this acrobatic, even melodramatic, form of flight?

No.

Two pictures propped up two ends of a growing conviction of foul play. One showed Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, who lost his life, walking towards something, presumably the car that would take him to hospital, supported by two colleagues (one in a tie, the other in a T-shirt). His gunshot wound was obvious. There was a heavy patch of blood on the upper part of one arm, and only a faint discoloring on the lower front of his bush shirt, near the abdomen. Police had said that Sharma had died from a bullet in the stomach. The picture proved that the bullet had not hit the stomach, and that Sharma was able to come down four flights albeit with help. A bullet in the stomach would have left him a stretcher case, and caused far more blood loss, particularly through the exit wound.

The official story changed. The self-acclamation had been blared over media, the change was released discreetly, through a plant that said that he died of a heart attack caused by blood loss.
The questions multiplied: was Sharma hit by what is known in military parlance as 'friendly fire'?
The police would have been far more comfortable about their theories if some intrepid photographer had not snapped Sharma. The second picture, however, was part of their public relations offensive. It showed three suspects, Zia ur Rahman, Saqib Nishad and Mohammad Shakeel. As is usual in the case of suspects being put on display, their faces were covered with cloth: the police are gracious enough to disguise the identity of suspects for they cannot be deemed guilty until a court has passed judgment. But there was significant departure from normal practice. These three had been shrouded by Arab-style headdresses (made famous by Yasser Arafat, and now a staple of Arab identity in countless TV images) instead of the anonymous black cloth used by police.

Who had decided that these three suspects should be given an "Arab" identity? Was this a not-so-subliminal message to even the densest in the audience about the nature of the "enemy", that the headdress was a signature of "Islamic terrorism"? Did this brilliant idea emerge from the home minister, now the hands-on commander, or did it emerge from somewhere lower down the food chain?

Indian Muslims did not need to open a political dictionary to gauge the meaning of this forced symbolism? They knew that it was an attempt to stigmatize the whole community and link terrorism in India with an international conspiracy, with an implied hint at Osama bin Laden, the most famous Arab terrorist.

If the purpose of the UPA government's officialdom was to intensify fear of Muslims among non-Muslims, then it succeeded. Indian Muslims are used to being fearful - of riots, police prejudice and arbitrary authority. They have learnt to temper their response with realism. They believed in the government of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, if only because they reassured themselves that they had been primarily responsible, through intense electoral mobilization, in adding the crucial 20 odd seats to the Congress that enabled it to become the largest single party in the last general elections. That perception has been shifting slowly, almost reluctantly, because Muslims had no other national political anchor. The Jamia incident has become a wake-up call. The growing perception is that the UPA government has deliberately killed innocent men to satiate the demand for action against terrorism.

Is that the truth? I have no idea, because the truth is privy only to those who control the guns - on either side of the divide. But this much I do know. In public life, perception becomes the operative truth.

Appeared in Times of India - September 28, 2008

Fuse of self-destructive terrorism gets shorter

Byline by M J Akbar: Fuse of self-destructive terrorism gets shorter

Some three years ago, when President George Bush visited India, Dr Singh proudly told his American mentor that Indian Muslims did not believe in terrorism. As evidence he pointed to the absence of any Indian Muslim name in the rolls of Al Qaeda.

Governance is the easy part of being in power. You govern through systems. Systems are protected by institutions. Institutions grind their way forward on hierarchy, oiled by memory or precedence. When there is need for innovation, change is sifted through a time-consuming committee. The end product may not be brilliant, but it comes with minimal-risk insurance: it will not do damage, and might even do some good.

India's bureaucracy may not be the steel-frame of old. Corruption might have left it a brittle plastic. But it serves. Very often the difference between a good and a bad Minister — the titular head of the bureaucracy — is no more than his or her ability to leave well enough alone. Lalu Prasad Yadav has created a favourable reputation by the ingenious tactic of non-interference. He lets the Railway Board get on with the job and only appears on the scene when it is time to take credit. Give him full marks. More has been destroyed by the deadly combination of ego and incompetence than has been achieved in Government through genius. As the Railway Board has proved, India could be much better off if Ministers left Government on auto-pilot while they concentrated on what they know best: spilling each other's blood.

The difficult part of power is leadership. Any term of office is divided between phases of placidity and the roils of turbulence. If turbulence is not calmed it develops quickly into a storm. Terrorism has become a raging hurricane. The statistics are well known. There is no point wasting space on them. But there is no leader who can challenge this storm, manage its fallout and restore some balm to the jangled nerves of the nation.

Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi have, at best, the most banal phrases to offer. We do not need a Prime Minister to tell us that terrorism is a grave threat. That much wisdom is available from any taxi-driver, the familiar source of political perspicacity sought by a visiting journalist anywhere in the world. No one has yet written a speech for Mrs Sonia Gandhi that takes us anywhere near a remedy to this terrible disease.

An answer must begin with a question: when did terrorism begin? Too long ago. India is unique. Every faith has delivered its quota of terrorists. The Nagas who challenged Indian unity were Christians. The sister-regions of the Northeast gave us Hindu terrorists. Sikhs rose in Punjab, and Muslims in Kashmir. The overwhelming majority of Naxalites are Hindus.

And now some young non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims are playing with dynamite. Some three years ago, when President George Bush visited India, Dr Singh proudly told his American mentor that Indian Muslims did not believe in terrorism. As evidence he pointed to the absence of any Indian Muslim name in the rolls of Al Qaeda.

If this was true, then what has happened in the last three years? India has not been ruled by any party that Muslims consider hostile to their interests. Congress has been in power in Delhi. In fact, Indian Muslims believe that if they had not mobilised to an unprecedented degree the Congress would never have got enough seats in the last general elections to cobble together a coalition. Indian Muslims claim a sort of ownership of the UPA regime. Why have Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi been unable to prevent a spurt of despair within the community?

The Congress will not even admit this question, so it is difficult to see how it can introspect its way towards an answer. There are two principal reasons for the renewed rise of Muslim despair. First, the community has not got the justice it expected from the Congress. One fact will illustrate. While those found guilty of terrorism in the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 have been, rightly, punished through the legal process, those found guilty of crimes against Muslims in the preceding riots have been left untouched. The constables found guilty of state terrorism during the awful riots in Mumbai after the Babri episode in the report of the Justice Srikrishna Commission are wandering around, free. Dr Manmohan Singh, Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Mr Sharad Pawar cannot "find" them.

The second major reason is a sense of helpless hopelessness. The history of economic deprivation long precedes the UPA Government, but its mistake was to believe that it could fudge through its term as its predecessors had fudged through theirs. Dr Singh should never have asked Justice Rajinder Sachar to find out the truth if he wanted to do nothing about it. The truth has become the ultimate betrayal, for the report is a devastating indictment of Congress neglect of its most loyal constituency. Muslim youth watched as Mr Arjun Singh reserved even more jobs for others, and maintained an ultra-secular silence on reservations for Muslims. As I have written before, other communities got jobs under Congress; Muslims got enquiry commissions.

This was fuel for a fire that could so easily mesh into an international conflagration. The memory of riots, particularly in Mumbai and Gujarat, was equally incendiary. Indian Muslims have had apostates and middlemen as leaders. In the vacuum, a number of youth found it easy to drift towards the malevolent attraction of evil. They convinced themselves that virulent hate mail and unpardonable killing of innocents was the means to display a destructive strength. This terrorism, of course, is already hurting Indian Muslims far more than it damages their avowed targets.

The Congress is twisting this damaged psyche further with its cynical response to terrorism. There is a suspicion, bordering on conviction, among Indian Muslims that the Government of Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi has offered scapegoats in the form of students of the Jamia Millia University to appease majority anger after the terrorist attacks on Delhi. We do not know the full truth, but there is enough that is murky in the events of 19 September when Delhi police surrounded and killed two students of Jamia at Batla House, while two others apparently escaped. There are questions galore, not least being the manner of the "escape": if there was only one entrance, how could the two "escape"? Police have shifted their version after every question. The "escape" now is meant to have been through the rooftop. Did anyone see them in the daylit skyline? Nor does anyone believe in the version offered of the death of Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma. It was first put out that he had been shot in the stomach. Then pictures were published of him walking after being shot, with no evidence of a stomach wound. The latest theory is that he died of a heart attack following loss of blood. One TV station claimed that the autopsy report showed he had been shot from the back, hinting at what is known as "friendly fire". The UPA Government then sought to demonise the community when they covered the faces of suspects with the red, patterned, Arab headdress instead of the black cloth normally used. Who got these headdresses from the market? Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who claimed that he had personally supervised these operations? Was he telling India that these suspects were linked to Arab terrorism?

The questions grow each passing day, each one another fuse for anger.

Tentacles of dread and the terror Gameplan

Tentacles of dread and the terror Gameplan
By M J Akbar

Terror is testing the resilience of the Indian government and the sagacity of the Indian people. The first is in shambles, but the second is holding up. The will of the people has become the safety net protecting the Indian state from the wont (a slightly archaic English word for normal behaviour) of Manmohan Singh and Shivraj Patil.

The power of terrorism lies in its ability to generate fear. Arbitrary death — anonymous, place uncertain, extent unknown — is the principal means by which the terrorist seeks to shroud a nation under a pall of dread. But the essence of fear is personal: the collective is only a sum total of individual fears. This makes the potential reaction more intense, for the threat to one's life so easily breeds irrational rage. Rage is but one final provocation away from violence.

The Indian Mujahideen, whoever they might be (I am not totally sure they are truly Indian, and am certain that they are not true Mujahideen) know what they are doing. Their strategy of slander-and-slaughter is not aimed at the Indian government, for which they have utter contempt in any case. Their target is the real enemy, the people of India. They are sowing continuous poison along Hindu-Muslim seam lines in order to enrage the former, provoke communal violence and exploit the resultant angst among Muslim youth so that more might drift towards terrorism. They want gulfs that cannot be crossed without irreversible corrosion.

The Union and state governments have not been tested by a post-terror conflagration because the overwhelming majority of Hindus have shown an exemplary commitment to peace, but this can hardly be taken for granted. The Union home ministry seems to have a single, callous default position: amnesia. It has convinced itself that if it can fudge its way through a few days after any calamity, people will forget, or that popular consciousness will be overtaken by the next big story. Its abject failure to stem the tide of terrorism is evidence that its investigation is essentially non-serious, reminiscent of the police chief's formula in the famous film, Casablanca, whose solution to any problem was to “round up the usual suspects”.

A narrow pattern in names, suspect-sketches and allegations is pulled out from the same soiled bag within 24 or 48 hours of any incident. This cliché-approach begs a question: if the range is limited, why cannot the perpetrators be caught despite their repeated audacity? For starters, someone more qualified than me should check whether there is ever any resemblance between suspect-sketches and those eventually arrested.

In the absence of genuine culprits, alibis and red herrings are fed to public opinion in the hope that the appetite for punishment will be sated, memory dulled. But memory is an accumulator. Fear is a gathering storm, which needs to be dispersed before it breaks.

Terrorists have inflicted the greatest damage on those in whose name they pretend to act, Indian Muslims. Already burdened by multiple anxieties, Indian Muslim youth are now frozen in the headlights of suspicion, and thus easy fodder for a police force that exploits suspicion to harass a community instead of eliminating criminals. When the police admit a mistake, never easily done, there is nothing like a stainless release.

The victim of bias or misjudgment faces a hopeless future as even his meagre job disappears from the shrinking bundle of options. We never truly understand the despair of poverty, for even the sympathy of a brother does not extend beyond the fleeting breadth of emotion.

At one level, Muslims share the dread of sudden death with their fellow Indians. The bomb placed in the dustbin or a vehicle in a packed marketplace is not programmed to kill only non-Muslims. The killer devices do not have a selective device to demolish only the objects of the Indian Mujahideen's hatred. A bomb has neither religion nor discrimination.

But this pales before the dread of consequences, the worst of which is a riot. But consequences come in less hostile forms as well. Discrimination does not advertise, and the unwillingness to rent homes to Muslims in cities is only the most well-known form of it. Ghettos begin in the mind before they transfer into property. The desperate, and sometimes contradictory, search for alibis by Muslims indicates the pressure that the community feels. Conspiracy theories get fertile reception.

A measure of its collapsing faith in the Congress is the fact that these theories finger government agencies as frequently as they do traditional adversaries like the RSS and Bajrang Dal. Indian Muslims are relieved if anyone ascribes terrorism to Pakistan's ISI or America's CIA. The one Indian Mujahideen email that was traced to an American missionary resident in Mumbai was, for a while, the subject of much internet-advocacy.

Dissection pares arguments down to the bone in the search for any consolation: for instance, one of the two who signed the Mujahideen email signed himself as Al-Arabi; but Arabi was the name of a bridge-builder to other communities, unlike others who were aggressors. Would a terrorist have used such a 'peace-loving' pseudonym? Was this a mistake made by a non-Muslim mastermind?

Sometimes, a sense of discrimination propels some Muslims towards a prickly offensiveness. But these are palliatives that cannot hide the harsh truth, evident, after any incident, in the eyes of nameless Muslims, clouded by worry and uncertainty and in the shuffle of their step as they hurry home to their small mohallas in some corner of the urban sprawl.

News is a reflection of the visible. It has no space for the invisible. But each riot that did not take place also smuggles its way into the receptacles of the heart and the mind. For that we should be grateful to the sagacity of India, and not the capabilities of the government of India.

Appeared in Times of India - September 21, 2008

Plants and Implants

Byline By M J Akbar: Plants and Implants

You never know what you can pick up from the shambles of a large edifice, and little could larger than the financial architecture of American capitalism. Here is a nugget from Tom Friedman's column as he talks about America's energy planning and the economy. His particular reference is to Republican candidate John McCain's idea that nuclear plants can meet America's energy needs. Friedman writes: "McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from?"

Good question. An American columnist is convinced that nuclear energy is too extravagant for an economy as rich as America's, but Dr Manmohan Singh insists on foisting it on the Indian taxpayer. To put the comparison in perspective, at over $1 trillion, the combined value of around half a dozen major American companies that collapsed in the last fortnight was near India's GDP of $1.4 trillion.

As each deception is exposed, the goalposts keep changing. Now that people are becoming aware that even in thirty years nuclear energy will not contribute more than six or seven per cent to the energy mix, at prohibitive cost, a new fudge is in the works. Another energy plan will be formulated to increase, on paper, the share of nuclear energy. As for the cost, let those in charge in 2020 worry.

Former Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh has been asking the government for clarity on the cost to the consumer of this nuclear energy. He has still to get a satisfactory answer.

Almost every argument used by the government to sell the nuclear deal has been upturned by revelations. Dr P.K.Iyengar, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, summed up the American position in a statement on 4 September: "if India conducts a nuclear test, America will immediately abrogate the 123 Agreement, and take back all nuclear materials, including fuel, it has supplied;there are no guarantees of perpetual fuel supply or provisions to stock for lifetime; there will be no transfer of sensitive nuclear technology such as reprocessing technology;the US does not consider the 123 Agreement as the only document governing civil nuclear cooperation with India – its actions will also be dictated by the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act and the Hyde Act."

The White House cited India's vote against Iran at the IAEA as evidence of a pro-US Indian tilt in conformity with the provisions of the Hyde Act. Under pressure from the United States and Israel, we have also abandoned the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, which would have provided much cheaper energy than nuclear power. Moreover, even in the event of the abrogation of the treaty by the United States, the mandatory inspections of India's nuclear facilities will continue in perpetuity.

When such details became public, Delhi argued that we could always ignore Washington and buy from countries like France. On the evening of 18 September the French ambassador to India, Jerome Bonnanfont, clarified that the proposed Indo-French nuclear agreement is going to be on par with the American agreement – there will be no transfer of enrichment and reprocessing technologies to India. The Times of India printed this pithy comment: "Certainly, it's a blow to all those who trumpeted that if the US wasn't prepared to give things, let's go to the French."

Some long-time supporters of the nuclear deal, who accepted Delhi's assurances about the negotiating process on good faith, like former Indian ambassador to Washington Lalit Mansingh, have now advised Prime Minister Singh greater caution before committing the nation. They have even suggested that he avoid a visit to Washington during his tour to America for the United Nations General Assembly session. But facts are unlikely to deter Dr Manmohan Singh from inking a one-sided agreement.

We might note that Americans, who are so anxious to sell nuclear plants to India, has not built a single new plant domestically since 1979, when the Three Mile Island accident took place. They do a more careful cost-benefit analysis when it comes to their own money.

One of the more interesting items lying in the debris of collapsing business reports is the only economic success story that George Bush can boast of during his eight years. He has been an unqualified triumph in arms sales. Eric Lipton wrote in the 15 September issue of the International Herald Tribune, which carries stories from the New York Times, "From tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to missiles, remotely piloted aircraft and even warships, the Department of Defense has agreed so far this fiscal year [March to mid-September 2008] to sell or transfer more than $32 billion in weapons and other military equipment to foreign governments, compared with $12 billion in 2005…Deliveries on orders being placed now will continue for several years, perhaps turning out to be one of President George W. Bush's most lasting legacies…" And just in case you thought that Bush was not a good salesman, "most arms exports are paid for by purchasers without US financing."

Who are the greatest benefactors of the American arms industry? Those fighting alongside America in its strategic wars. Between 2006 and 2008, Saudi Arabia bought $8.6 billion worth of American arms; Iraq, $4.4 billion; Afghanistan, $11.4 billion; Pakistan, $4.2 billion; Australia, $6.5 billion. Saudi Arabia and Australia can afford their defence budgets, while Iraq has an $80 billion surplus, and Pakistan gets cash handouts from America. The truly appalling statistic is Afghanistan's, among the poorest nations in the world. Next year's figures should show a marked improvement, since India will be on the top of the shopping list. The architecture of an US-Indian military alliance is already in place, and construction has begun on various outhouses.

Will the Manmohan-Bush signatures be irreversible? If the UPA returns to power, in some variation or the other, the strategic pact will deepen. If the UPA is voted out, the next government will have to negotiate a difficult tightrope between perceived obligations and the need to protect good relations with America. It is going to be a complicated inheritance.

Fluff-and-bluff can't change harsh truths

Byline by M J Akbar: Fluff-and-bluff can't change harsh truths

We may have all missed the most interesting point in the kerfuffle over the Indo-US nuclear deal. Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi have emerged as the greatest advertising team since World War II. They have sold a personal obsession as a nation's lifeline. The strategy is not dissimilar to that employed by Germany and Italy in the war: repeat a lie often enough and it will be perceived as the truth. High-decibel propaganda has this hypnotic effect on the masses. To use a term from theatre, there is a wilful suspension of disbelief.

Take the promise of electricity to every village. The claim is arrant nonsense. The eight reactors the Government wants to purchase in the next four years — commissioning will be much later — will not increase the share of nuclear power in the energy mix beyond 2.5%. The Government's own estimates show that even after two decades and an investment of perhaps $150 billion, nuclear energy capacity will not increase by more than three or four per cent. The same investment in other energy sources would provide a far higher return. Does Congress propaganda mention either the percentage or the time? Of course not.

A second lie: the Hyde Act has nothing to do with the deal, which will be governed only by the 123 Agreement. This is astonishing disinformation. America has repeatedly stated that it will not — indeed, legally, it cannot — deviate from the provisions of the Hyde Act, and America is the supplier nation. Our only role is to hand out hard currency for what America decides to sell.

On whose authority do I say this? On the basis of a letter Jeffrey Bergner, Assistant Secretary in the State Department, has written to Tom Lantos, then Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives. He answered 45 questions, clearing every potential doubt. There was no question of the fluff-and-bluff tactics used by Dr Manmohan Singh.
The third question asks: "Does the Administration believe that the nuclear cooperation agreement with India overrides the Hyde Act regarding any apparent conflicts, discrepancies, or inconsistencies? Does this include provisions in the Hyde Act which do not appear in the nuclear cooperation agreement?"

The answer is unambiguous: "In his September 19 statement, Assistant Secretary Boucher twice made clear that 'we think [the proposed 123 Agreement with India] is in full conformity with the Hyde Act'. Indeed, the Administration is confident that the proposed agreement is consistent with the legal requirements of both the Hyde Act and the Atomic Energy Act… The agreement is also fully consistent with the legal requirements of the Hyde Act."

The letter makes explicit much of what was left deliberately implicit in the 123 Agreement. The only defence mounted by Delhi was that there was "nothing new" in the Lantos letter. If there was nothing new, why was it kept a secret?

Perhaps US Ambassador to India David Mulford was right when he claimed that Delhi was fully aware of its content; maybe the Indian Prime Minister simply forgot to let us know. India is already in compliance with Hyde. This is why Delhi did not place an order for fuel from Russia or France after the NSG waiver. The Hyde Act prohibits any transaction without approval from the US Congress, which is yet to come.

The letter unravels the striptease of illusions carefully nurtured by Delhi. Paramount was the implication that the deal would give India access to the most sensitive nuclear technologies. Check out questions 4, 5, 6 and 7, on "dual-use items for use in sensitive nuclear facilities", assistance to "India in the design, construction, or operation of sensitive nuclear technologies through the transfer of dual-use items outside the agreement" and whether US would adhere to the Hyde Act which discourages the spread of such technologies. Here are the answers: "…as a framework agreement it does not compel any such transfers, and as a matter of policy the United States does not transfer dual-use items for use in sensitive nuclear facilities … the US government will not assist India in the design, construction, or operation of sensitive nuclear technologies… The Administration does not plan to negotiate an amendment to the proposed US-India Agreement to transfer to India sensitive nuclear facilities or critical components of such facilities…"

Nothing new, is it? It seems we have a slightly castrated agreement.

There is insufficient space to quote the document in greater detail; suffice it to say that there is huge variance with the Indian perception on fuel supply, fallback safeguards and reprocessing rights.

America has absolute clarity on a fundamental issue that could cause much grief: India's right to test. Delhi has hyperventilated that India's right to test has been protected. The House asked Bush, in question 16: "Would any of these commitments continue to apply if India detonated a nuclear explosive device? If so, under what circumstances?"

Here is the reply: "As outlined in Article 14 of the 123 Agreement, should India detonate a nuclear explosive device, the United States has the right to cease all nuclear cooperation with India immediately, including the supply of fuel, as well as request the return of any items transferred from the United States, including fresh fuel."

Please note: this ultimatum already exists in the 123 Agreement, which Delhi continues to sell as sacrosanct.

Dr Manmohan Singh has a dubious formulation on testing: India has the right to act, America has the right to react. But while India has nowhere included a clause claiming the right to act, America has specified what its reaction would be — extensive and expensive. Nor can India respond by ending invasive inspections. We have agreed to them in perpetuity.

A second public-relations ploy, to make this concession seem like a mere extension of the unilateral moratorium announced after our test in 1998, is disingenuous. A voluntary moratorium has become a multilateral commitment; the difference is critical. In 1998 America and the world could do very little, apart from cursory noises and sanctions that quickly withered on the bedrock of reality, precisely because our nuclear programme was totally indigenous, and there was no agreement through which punitive measures could be taken against India.

The propaganda offensive includes attaching labels on anyone who disagrees. Dissent is either "Islamist" [some of the language used by Government has been communal], "pro-Chinese" or "anti-progress". Nationalism has become the sole preserve of the Government and its acolytes. This is silly.

A serious danger is the potential for misunderstanding with America, and the consequent damage to Indo-US relations. Pacts are always vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances. Bush has just frozen the 123 Agreement he signed with Russia because of differences over Georgia, a core Russian strategic interest. It is folly to sign an agreement vulnerable to circumstances that can easily be foreseen.

Advertising may be good politics, but national interest should be above politics.