The doctor of drift

Perhaps the question is not asked as often as it should be because the answer is either unexpected or unwelcome. Does a prime minister become stronger or weaker after re-election? The record, across the world of democracy, is heavily weighted in favour of pessimism. What should be a rejuvenation gradually slips into an unsavoury confusion. The reason lies in the leader rather than the system. The agenda of a
first term is driven primarily by the perfectly legitimate ambition to return to office. It therefore encourages a practical programme of governance rooted in the public’s immediate needs. A second term breeds both exhaustion and complacency: After the high of re-election there seems nowhere to go except downhill. A democracy like America has ended the very concept of a third term; in India, no national government has obtained one after Jawaharlal Nehru, and that was half a century ago.

 The concentration of a re-elected PM invariably shifts away from basics; he is content with a holding operation that serves nothing more than the personal comfort of glamour events like world summits, opportunity is frittered away in staged drama, and thoughts turn to largely unattainable temptations like world or regional peace. If Dr. Manmohan Singh seems to be doing all three, it is because he is doing all three. To be fair, he declared as early as in 2009 that he did not belong to the future and the future did not belong to him, when he offered to step aside for Rahul Gandhi at any time of the latter’s
choosing. The next election is Rahul Gandhi’s to win or lose, not his. This might have worked if there was someone furrowing a parallel policy line; but there is no one at the wheel, driving towards a political destination. Sonia Gandhi has lost the way because her nominated driver, her son, dispirited by defeat in Uttar Pradesh, has abandoned the midterm moment when a transition to the next generation could have taken place.

 It does not matter, in 2012, whether Rahul Gandhi spends his time abroad or in India, for even when he is in his country he does not contribute to public life by setting out a framework for the future with which he or the Congress can be identified. The Congress therefore is swimming in a vacuum; it is going nowhere very slowly and sweating profusely in the process. A veteran like Pranab Mukherjee could have held the wheel, as he did so ably between 2004 and 2009. But convinced, justifiably, that there was no hope of Congress making him Dr Singh’s successor, he took a practical  exit ramp to a high office that offers a chance to provide leadership of ideas, if you have any ideas, but is above  political minefields. The most senior Cabinet member after him, Sharad Pawar, leads a single-digit party; with less than 10 MPs he cannot even hope for a miracle that elevates him to the top of the UPA coalition. The power of a prime minister is, in a sense, office-neutral; he is only as powerful as his personal drive and circumstance permit him to be.

 Dr Singh’s second term has been neutered by the simple fact that he has ruled himself out of contention. He has sabotaged his own best asset, his record, with this denial. Neither his Cabinet nor his party is in any mood to listen to him, because he does not promise any reward. Rahul Gandhi, the man who has been given the key to the future, shows no inclination to grasp it. Rahul Gandhi cannot outsource his role, and then claim the applause if a surrogate does indeed play his part with reasonable acumen. In any case, there is not much talent left in the present Congress; the stage is full of hams, not stars. The party therefore clings on to Dr Singh, despite his minimalist attitude to performance. The Government has shifted gear from fast forward to drift to idle.

 The most optimistic projection of Congress fortunes lies not in its own capability, but in the hope that the voter will find the alternative worse. The theory is that all it has to do is serve out its second term and a third will come walking by. At a time when Congress needs some serious thought, this is slippage into wishful thinking. A swamp releases some strange drugs. Their very futility encourages greater hallucination. A flurry of soundbites can create an illusion of activity,  as happened when Pranab Mukherjee resigned and some sections of media projected the notion that 1991 had reappeared.
But 1991 was the beginning of a first term, not the end of a last term. There was the frisson of ideas, and the  energy to implement them. Despite this, Narasimha Rao did not get a second term; and the loneliness of his last days is a parable for his successors.

How foreign is foreign?

What does "foreign" mean? What exactly is foreign about a foreign country? The instant answer is "distant", but distance is deceptive. The Indian middle class is far closer to America than it is to Pakistan. It takes less time to reach Tashkent from Delhi than it does to arrive in Trivandrum, but we know which one is the foreign city. Till partition ravaged hearts and minds Peshawar was part of the psychological home of the Punjabi living in Delhi and a Malayali so far away that he was called a Madrasi. Today Peshawar is part of either family romance or nightmare; and Kerala an Indian tourist destination.

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Bedtime story for political fantasists

This story is true, for I do not possess the fabulous imagination necessary to make it up. Nor, I think, do the editors of the British paper the Sunday Times, where I read it.

A Russian became so livid at the rotten soup that his wife cooked for dinner that he stomped out of his home, and promptly got lost in the nearby woods. He was nearly dead of hunger and frostbite by the time he was found a month later. As he reached home, he had only one, deeply philosophical, comment to make: "This is the last time I criticise my wife's cooking."

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As a matter of fact

Facts come in every shape, size, variety. Their survival is determined
not by value but by how inexplicable they are. The human being has
23,000 genes, only “half as many as a tomato”, I am told. But humbling
as this formative fact of life might be, it does not quite catch the
imagination as much as the perplexity called death, particularly when
death escapes the boundaries of reason: A plague decimates a
continent, war murders a generation, or an evil maniac orders a
genocide.

Statistics distil facts to stark simplicity. Between September 1939
and August 1945, the period of the Second World War, 27,000 people
were killed each day.
(This figure does not include war-related casualties like the three
million-odd Bengalis who died of a famine that was a direct
consequence of war policy.) There is always enough to be learnt from
war, its machines and its machinations. Guess who is the largest buyer
of oil in the world? If you thought it was a country,  wrong. The
Pentagon.

America’s military consumes more oil each year than the whole of
Africa. And yet, when you think about it, is this very startling? The
armies of the British Empire surely drank up more oil than all the
colonies they ruled. None of us were there to count, and contemporary
historians had more delicious details to record, but you can safely
bet that Rome alone had more chariots than the rest of the Roman
Empire.

It has always been thus. To the victor goes not only the spoils of war
but also the far more substantial rewards of its blanket peace: A Pax
Romana then, a Pax Americana now. So what’s the story? The privileges
of power have not changed, but the world has.

If the ascent of America begins with victory in the First World War;
its supremacy after the Second; and domination after the Third (also
known as the Cold) War, then many of today’s contradictions also lie
in the liberal ideas that America encouraged as a template for the
future it hoped to control. America sought the rights of power without
the problems or obvious injustice of foreign rule. It tried to
fashion, particularly after 1992, what might be called the Good Empire
as distinct from the Evil Empire (Ronald Reagan’s description of the
Soviet Union). The thesis, broadly, was this: All nations would be
equal; post-colonial nations would be formed on the basis of public
will, with claims being resolved by plebiscite; the world as well as
its parts would be governed by the broad principles of democracy.

Confusion is the bridesmaid of change, so after the applause died down
there was achievement, failure and bewilderment in roughly equal
measure. The fault line of democracy is that while it offers equal
rights in theory, it does not guarantee equality in practice. Every
vote has the same weight, but every voter does not possess equal
weightage, whether in a municipality or the United Nations. Wealth
feeds power and power reinforces wealth, both at the macro and micro
levels.

In countries like India, the co-existence of democracy with degrading
poverty cannot be easily justified, by either idealism or intellect.
But poverty is both absolute and comparative. America’s poor,
famously, are better off than the middle class in most of the world.
However, they do not compare themselves to sub-Saharan Africa, thank
God for their good fortune, and live happily ever after.

They get angry with their president when their comfort zone is
threatened. No child suffers the anguish of malnutrition in Greece,
and yet Greek rage at loss of standards of living has boiled over into
a volatile crisis.  The battles being fought across the world are over
inequity, a perception of injustice. Democracy does not, unlike
socialism, offer economic equality, which is impossible; but its
spirit does insist on economic equity. When disparity between the top
5 per cent and bottom 50 per cent becomes obscene, the deprived do not
remain silent forever.

The establishment’s traditional response has been to blame the victim.
But democracy permits a victim to scream, and the Greeks are doing so
pretty loudly. Europe and America are rushing to its help, as they
should if they want to. It does seem odd, though, that India, where 50
times the population of Greece lives below the poverty line, should
gift $10 billion to help resolve a problem it did not cause. Till two
decades ago, rich nations still felt some mild moral obligation to
reduce poverty through aid. They now expect aid from the poor.
Miraculously, they get it. Delhi cannot find Rs 20,000 crore for
Bengal, but hands over Rs 56,000 crore for Greece. Bengal’s poor can
shout as much as the Greeks. Will India ever get this money back? Fact
from history: Greece is still waiting for Germany to pay what it
claimed as reparations after the Second World War.