M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist

The news behind the teleview

2009-11-21T17:31:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: The news behind the teleview

Dr Manmohan Singh’s American month began with a warm lunch for George Bush in Delhi and will end with a more constrained dinner with Barack Obama in Washington. Always happy to oblige on cosmetics, the White House has awarded this meeting the status of a state visit, although in India’s parliamentary system the Prime Minister is not head of state. But there is a hard question behind the glitter. Dr Singh signed a landmark nuclear deal with Bush last year. Was that a mere sentimental knot with a “best friend” or was it a substantive document capable of survival beyond the predilections of a President?

The value of the nuclear deal, which was about much more than peaceful nuclear energy, lies in its tactile strength, but Delhi and Washington have begun stretching in different ways. Dr Singh expected it to be the launchpad of strategic and economic privileges. Condoleezza Rice did, a trifle gratuitously, promise to make India a superpower. But that was so last year. This year, the broad Democrat view is that Bush surrendered too much on core issues like proliferation for too little, and this is payback time for India. This is compounded, in Delhi, by the apprehension that India does not occupy primary space on the specific Obama agenda. The cynical interpretation is that India has been allotted 1.5 billion words a year and Pakistan 1.5 billion dollars.

Behind the smiles demanded by “teleview” international relations, Singh and Obama will find their flexibility hedged by compulsions. Obama inherited an economic catastrophe and a military crisis. He took advantage of both to win his election, but his victory was someone else’s punishment. Answers are more difficult to get than votes.

It is evident from the time invested during ten months in office that Obama’s axis of interest is a direct line between Beijing and Islamabad. He has been forced into a tightrope walk between his banker and his security subcontractor. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that while Obama was walking the talk on the Great Wall, his national security adviser General James L. Jones dropped in to scold Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. The Pakistani armed forces, it seems, are so busy eliminating the extremist threat to Islamabad that they seem to have forgotten that American money is meant to solve America’s problems. Jones carried a letter asking Zardari to broaden the war to those elements of the Afghan Taliban who were using Pak territory as sanctuary.

America is discovering what India has known for a while: all terrorists are not equal. Those who serve Islamabad’s interests are kept in play through screens. It is common knowledge that Obama is increasing troop levels reluctantly, and wants to leave the Afghan battlefield as soon as possible. Hillary Clinton was candid recently on ABC’s This Week programme: “We are not interested in staying in Afghanistan. We have no long-term stake there. We want that to be made very clear.”

Pakistan, conversely, does have a long-term stake in Kabul, and America’s current foe, the Afghan Taliban, was its most useful regional ally till 9/11. It can hardly be lost on either Dr Singh or Obama that they will be meeting exactly one year after India’s 9/11: a year ago Pak-based terrorists launched an audacious and bloody attack on Mumbai. Doubtless there will be some variation of the two-minute silence in their talks, but tokenism has long past its sell-by date on the subcontinent. When American officials like the Ambassador Timothy Roemer in Delhi urge Islamabad to get serious about the masterminds in Lahore, it sounds worse than tokenism. America, which launched two wars in search of the perpetrators of 9/11, displays fleeting concern for accountability when India demands some from Pakistan.

Pakistan treats terrorists who attack India as “freedom fighters”: Islamabad may need the Afghan Taliban for strategic reasons; it supports anti-Indian terrorists for ideological reasons. China has a vested interest in the Kashmir dispute, since its own border disputes with India extend across the Himalayas. China has even tried to block efforts in the sanctions committee of the United Nations Security Council to name known terrorist organisations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Obama seems to have little interest in the complex regional conflicts in the nations south and north of the Himalayas, apart from what is necessary to pursue the American agenda as he has written. You do not have to be psychic to read Obama’s mind: he needs China on-side to prevent a collapse of the dollar; and his ideal end-game in Afpak would be to outsource the fighting completely to Pakistan so that American soldiers could return home. He was happy to project China as a benevolent partner in the effort to resolve disputes in South Asia, including Kashmir. Islamabad has not heard any music above the gunfire recently, so this particular aria must have sounded particularly mellifluous. But Obama’s next Asian engagement is with the Prime Minister of India. Delhi has already asked America and China to stay out of the Kashmir dispute.

For the last decade, since Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister, each bilateral between India and America has been preceded by high expectations and succeeded by an expanding comfort zone. Dr Singh has invested hugely in the America relationship. He goes to Washington, however, engulfed in uncertainty. There will be pomp and circumstance enough to please television crews. The hard news could tell a more muted story.

Why some political parties lost the plot

2009-11-15T15:28:00.002+05:30

Why some political parties lost the plot
By M J Akbar

Defeat is the distance between a bedtime story and a wake-up call. The former starts with ‘Once upon a time...’ and lulls the voter to sleep. The second is an energiser that addresses a fresh dawn.

Three political parties have become victims of their own success: their narrative has run its course, and they have not been able to find a further chapter to their saga.

The BJP story is the simplest: the fairies have abandoned its fairy tale. It began as the party of refugees from Pakistan. The robust economic and social resettlement of the dispossessed, evident by the 70s, paradoxically, liberated them from the party which helped them. After the high-drama blip of the Emergency and Janata Party phase, the BJP reinvented itself as a champion of a psychological rather than an economic need.

The temple movement brought great rewards, culminating, albeit through a parabola enhanced by the charisma of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in six years of power at the Centre. But within this time, the Indian mood turned. Economic aspirations took primacy over psychological needs, particularly since the temple movement was made irrelevant by the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya. A functioning temple has come up on the site, a fact that seems to escape the attention of those writing the BJP manifesto, which keeps promising to build a temple.

Every political party has colluded in this change; even though self-proclaimed secular parties encourage Muslims to indulge in the self-delusion that a dispute exists. In truth, all that the BJP can offer is to build a bigger temple, which does not quite have the same emotive force as ‘Mandir yahin banayenge!’ The BJP’s cousins, the Senas of Maharashtra, have regional chauvinism to fall back upon. If the BJP wants to reclaim national space, it will have to establish another horizon.

When socialism became passe, Mulayam Singh Yadav resurrected himself brilliantly as the anti-thesis of the BJP, blending it with a distinctive element of Lohia socialism, empowerment of the backward castes. However, when the thesis is faltering, the anti-thesis cannot be robust. That is the Samajwadi Party’s problem vis-a-vis the Muslim vote. As for the Backwards: Mandal has been milked dry. Mandal has delivered for those whose prayers were answered in 1990. A new generation of Backwards needs solutions for the 21st century.

The last time the Left had anything original to say was more than three decades ago; and it had remarkable staying power in Bengal. But Bengali Muslims, critical to any democratic algebra, are now tired of the Left’s soft secularism, a formula in which their lives were secure from communal violence but their livelihood was left to the wolves. The subalterns of Bengal, across the religious divide, have adopted an interesting strategy: they have become, to a great extent, a non-partisan opposition. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is merely expanding its elasticity to contain voter anger to the extent it can.

There are no internal structures, nor is there any serious thinking being done by Mamata on how to fashion an alternative delivery system when she assumes power in the state. It is now a question of when the Left will be driven out, not whether. But in the current turmoil also lies an opportunity for 2016, if there is anyone left with the imagination to think ahead.

Mayawati survives in Uttar Pradesh, despite setbacks, because she is still waking up her support base. The Dalit deliverance is far from over; and her cross-ethnic alliances are still in infancy. Mayawati was out of her depth at the national level because she could not promise stability. In regional waters, she is still an Olympian. Her personality may be her biggest obstacle, but her agenda is intact.

The key to Mulayam Singh Yadav’s future will lie in his ability to unlock the next dimension of Muslim demands, and spearhead it. There is a transparent anger, leavened by confusion, among Muslims which is provoking a drift to the most familiar port, the Congress. But the Congress has nothing new to offer.

What the Muslims of UP are looking for, but have been unable to articulate, is a defined political space within which they can find food-and-faith security. Given the passions that such a demand could arouse, this quest might surface obliquely rather than directly. On the table is Ajit Singh’s dream of a Harit Desh in western UP. Such a state will have a substantive Muslim population, as well as a string of important Muslim educational institutions, from Aligarh to Deoband. It will become a natural socio-economic magnet for Muslims of the north. The idea is still in an embryonic stage. Whoever articulates it, will have rung a wake-up call.

Appeared in Times of India - November 15, 2009

Unicorns in Kabul

2009-11-14T17:34:00.002+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar : Unicorns in Kabul

At 11 a.m. on 11.11 a cannon boomed in London. For the uninitiated it was a puzzle edged with apprehension. For the British the moment was 91 years old. It marked the end of the bloodiest — till then — conflict in history. The last soldier died only seconds before truce as officers continued to waste “inferior” lives till the last gasp. War can become an addiction.

Enemies change; war never seems to end. The British this week mourned past and present, as coffins arrived from the opium fields of Afghanistan. This Afghan war had nothing to do with the British Raj. Empire had dribbled away after 1945, for the Second World War exhausted victor as surely as it obliterated the vanquished. But the victors barely paused before investing blood and treasure on a cold war which also ended in November, the 9th, two decades ago, when a popular uprising brought down the hated Berlin Wall.

The Afghan war of 2001 has been a war in search of an enemy. It began as a legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden. When the combined skills of the Pentagon, the CIA and satellite science failed to find a six-foot-plus terrorist with a two-foot beard, the focus moved a few degrees. The Taliban, who had spread into nationalist space by challenging the foreign military presence, became the new reason for the military occupation of a rugged nation. Since the Taliban has refused to keel over, a supplementary logic is being disseminated in a bid to shore up ebbing public support: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal [estimated at between 80 to 100 bombs] must be protected from capture by “Islamists”. The proposition begs an obvious question: can a state which cannot protect its nuclear weapons be trusted to keep them?

The fog of war is being compounded by a mist of confusion over its rationale and finale. The Guardian warns, in a page-wide headline, that it could degenerate into a fiasco of Suez 1956 proportions. President Barack Obama seems keener on an exit strategy than an arrival plan. He dithers about whether to send 36,000 more troops or 40,000, as if 4,000 will convert potential humiliation into a historic victory. The US ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, cables the State Department that he wants no extra troops until Hamid Karzai has ended corruption. The officer-diplomat has a powerful friend in Washington, for his secret missive is leaked to the Washington Post. We soon know who the friend is, for a jet-lagged Hillary Clinton echoes this view during an ASEAN summit in Singapore.

If America is waiting for corruption to end, these troops will arrive in 2109 or Judgement Day, whichever comes first.

I have no idea whether Obama and Hillary have managed to instil some fresh fighting spirit into the Afghan armed forces, but they have certainly aroused the warrior in Hamid Karzai, who seems to have launched a vigorous offensive against Washington. Karzai publicly accused Britain of ferrying Taliban elements by helicopter from their base in the south to the northern provinces of Baghlan, Kunduz and Samangan, attributing this knowledge to his intelligence agencies. The fecund tribe of conspiracy theorists in Kabul, and elsewhere, eagerly linked this to the good-Taliban-bad-Taliban manoeuvre floated by no less a personage than Obama, near the start of his presidency. Obama refuses to fight a war which George Bush knew how to begin but no one knows how to end.

The perfect end from the Pakistani perspective is the replacement of Karzai by a non-Mullah Omar Taliban, which could declare peace through a bearded mutter and let America leave Kabul at a stately pace rather than via the rooftop helicopters of Saigon. In the absence of any other proposal, this must seem to have some merit. The “good Taliban” would send Afghan women back centuries and the country into puritan coma, but they would be allies of Islamabad and, by implication, its mentors in Washington and London. At least, that would be the theory. Of course Islamabad might have sounded more persuasive if a domestic Taliban had not been detonating its backyard.

Let us leave the last word to a warlord who has never been disturbed by sentiment. I have met the Uzbeg General Abdul Rashid Dostum once, in Mazar-e-Sharif; his views are always forthright even if they are not necessarily right. But he had valid points to make in an interview with Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer of the Daily Telegraph [published on 13 November]:

* Not one Afghan officer of the rank of captain or major has been killed in battle in six years, since Afghans do not consider this their war;

* Western leaders are mistaken if they believe that Taliban soldiers will defect, or betray Osama;

* Western aid has not touched poverty, but only killed local initiative and enriched the political elite;

* Taliban can only be defeated by a pragmatic military strategy that avoids categories like “good” and “bad” and involves local communities.

Dostum dismissed the anti-corruption sanctimoniousness in a classic sentence: “They are demanding unicorns in Kabul.” Touché.

Sex & scams: How we turn a blind eye

2009-11-08T13:22:00.001+05:30

Sex & scams: How we turn a blind eye
By M J Akbar

Our Indian response to a scandalous mess is neat and categorised. Cash and sex are the north and south pole of mass interest, each with a sprawling magnetic field. We divide the hemispheres with the equator of logic. Cash and corruption are the preserve of politics. Sex is the province of glamour. We refuse to recognise any cross-over evidence.

No one wants to know how much black money floats in cinema, although the float might be a flood from dubious sources. Film publications are apathetic to finance. Their cover stories are devoted to who is sleeping with whom, or, more likely, pretending to sleep with whom. Lead stars are sometimes required to manufacture an affair as part of a film’s pre-launch publicity even when it is obvious, from body language, that the hero and heroine are heartily sick of each other.

Equally, mainline media shrugs off a politician’s private life. This is in sharp contrast to the Anglo-American press and public, who hold a public figure to standards of probity they do not apply to themselves. It seems odd that societies so liberated on Friday nights should turn so puritan over politicians’ weekends, but there it is. The French are more honest. They vote for lunch hour frisson.

No journalist worth his or her laptop, therefore, would waste a moment on the private life of Madhu Koda, the 38-year-old Jharkhand politician who worked in a mine in the early ’90s but is apparently purchasing Liberian mines today. If CBI leaks are to be believed, then young Koda has enough left over to lubricate the silent wheels of hawala and make a bid for a Rs 4,000 crore SEZ. Think. If this is what Koda can do at 38, what might he have achieved by 76, which is within the age band of our PMs. Think again. If this is the loot from a small state, what could another Koda earn from Maharashtra, Andhra or Karnataka? The BJP government in Bangalore is not coming apart because of a deep and riveting ideological debate on Hindutva. It’s the money, honey. If the figures seem insane, just remember that greed spits at limits.

A relevant measure of Indian democracy is the shift in the scale of scandal. V K Krishna Menon was pilloried because he arranged some 50-odd jeeps for the Congress in the first general election in 1952. At the end of the decade, Feroze Gandhi, Mrs Indira Gandhi’s husband, commandeered the headlines by exposing a couple of businessmen. Their names are unimportant now. Suffice to say that it was all very secular: one was a Hindu and the other a Muslim. The sums involved were a piffle. No inflation-escalation calculation is going to bring them to Liberian levels.

The connivance of major parties in the Koda scam is the icing on the story. They all helped his upward mobility in one form or the other, with Congress support for his chief ministership being a stunning example of cynicism. Local journalists had reported much of this while he was in power. No one bothered.

The news from the south pole is actually far better. The filmstar scandals of the ’50s were often tainted by the communal acrimony of the post-Partition decade. A film paper like ‘Mother India’ used to go apoplectic when Nargis and Raj Kapoor practised in real life what they preached on-screen. Today, Raj Kapoor’s granddaughter lives with a man born a Muslim and no Indian owl cares two hoots. Nor is box office affected. Indians have shed much of the compulsive bitterness in Hindu-Muslim relations.

The north pole, however, is in meltdown, the body politic ravaged by venality beyond the voter’s comprehension. What was a nick in Nehru’s time, needing a mere Band-Aid, has spread into an incurable cancer.

Patriotism, goes the proverb, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. The first refuge of a man charged with swindling thousands of crores of public wealth is clearly a stomach-ache. The second refuge is high blood pressure. Between the two, you can always smuggle yourself out of the dreary confines of custody, with mere mosquitoes for company, to the more salubrious environment of a hospital, which is where Koda reached at a brisk pace. The stomach-ache is key to this life-enhancing, if not quite life-saving, switch. High blood pressure, regretfully, can be measured and lowered. A stomach can always ache at will, swerving away from the locational probes of a doctor, particularly in a well-nourished stomach.

In any case, time, and a generous bank balance, tends to soften the discomforts of incarceration. If the cash flow is supportive, a prison can even become a health ashram, with badminton thrown in as an optional extra. You never know: with diet control and regular morning walks that stomach might never need to ache again. It is not the health of a robust Koda that should be our concern, but that of a more fragile entity called democracy.

Koda has a stomach-ache. Democracy has cancer.

Appeared in Times of India - November 8, 2009

Davutoglu’s Doctrine

2009-11-07T00:23:00.000+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Davutoglu’s Doctrine

When Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul visits India early next year he will be representing a nation that has reinvented its geostrategic role through an independent foreign policy in barely eight years. I hope he brings along Ahmet Davutoglu, who shaped the theory and then structured the practicals, first as principal adviser to Prime Minister Recip Tayyab Erdogan, and now as Foreign Minister. He must be one of the few academics fortunate enough to get a chance to make ideas work.

The starting point was 2002, when the Justice and Development Party [AKP] won the elections and ended the monopoly on power exercised by a military-bureaucratic-civilian Istanbul-centric elite which claimed the inheritance of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his European-style secularism which still prohibits a Turkish woman from wearing a headscarf to university. This elite protected Ataturk’s secular vision, but, somewhere along the way lost sight of Ataturk’s independence.

The wives of Erdogan and Gul wear headscarves, but that is not the point: the wives of many Cabinet ministers and high officials do not, and are not required to. What is relevant is that AKP subtly shifted a policy that had become synonymous with America’s, without the angry rhetoric that has become a regrettable hallmark of so many who strut as lead actors on the anti-American stage. AKP proved that change was possible without compromising an amicable and mutually beneficial relationship with Washington. Their predecessors had America’s friendship. AKP has America’s respect as well.

Turkey has played a pivotal role in two of the three great wars of the 20th century. It was an ally of Germany and the Central Powers in the First World War, but refused to declare war on the United States even when the latter joined the Anglo-French alliance. Even though it lost its empire in the fighting, Turkey did not permit a single enemy soldier on its territory during wartime. Istanbul was occupied only after truce. Ataturk, victor of Gallipoli, was the great hero of this conflict; but took his true place in his nation’s history after 1918, when the vainglorious trio of Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Clemenceau, leavening their intent with anti-Muslim Crusader sentiment, armed and financed a Greek invasion of Turkey. Their aim was to partition the country and leave Turkey as a rump Anatolian state. Ataturk mobilised a proud army and people, and shocked the victors of World War I by destroying the Greeks after they reached the outskirts of Ankara.

Ataturk, protecting his nation’s independence, kept Turkey neutral in the Second World War. Historic fears of next-door Russia, now the Soviet Union, drove Istanbul into Washington’s embrace in the Cold War. But when in the 1980s flexibility became an option, and in the 1990s a necessity, Turkey remained rigid. When it looked south it could only see Israel; when it looked east it could see nothing more than Pakistan. Both were American allies. Turkey did not have a policy or a vision for the 21st century.

Davutoglu selected the moment of departure with uncanny vision: George Bush’s war on Iraq in 2003. It gave an early sign of change, when it refused to let American troops pass through Turkey on their way to Iraq. It also realised, fairly early, that America would be weakened by Bush’s Iraq folly, creating space for new players, since the Soviet Union was too weak to play any role at all.

Israel and Iran have sufficient muscle to fill a regional vacuum, but both were inherently belligerent. They would be able to intervene, but as destabilisers rather than stabilisers. Iran had a natural advantage in Shia-majority Iraq, but it simultaneously provoked deep suspicions in the Arab world. Turkey set itself up as the region’s centre of stability. Ironically, this was its role during the days of the Ottoman Empire; but this time around, it could create an arc of influence only through diplomacy and harmony, not imposition.

Turkey set about strengthening its relations with Arab nations. It distanced itself from warriors in Israel, without breaking ties of trade and cooperation. It criticised Israel’s Gaza war unambiguously. But it realised that a critical key to peace lay in the amelioration of its own antagonisms with its neighbours. This was, given the emotionalism that is attached to the past, difficult.

But Turkey has now signed historic protocols with Armenia, warmed icy relations with Syria to the point where visa has been abolished, lifted ties with Iran and become a vital partner of Iraq in the reconstruction of the country. In October Erdogan signed 48 MoUs covering energy, commerce and security (among other things) with Baghdad. Davutoglu paid a visit to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, which is equivalent to an Indian Foreign Minister dropping in on Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Not too long ago, Turkey’s air force was bombing this Kurdish region as punishment for being a base for terrorism. Turkey, America and Iraq are working together to bring the long and bitter Kurdish war against Turkey to an end -- another sign of Washington’s new respect for Istanbul.

Pakistan has recognised the change as well, but done so in its India-centric manner. It has asked Turkey to help solve the Kashmir problem. Istanbul is not so green as to try and do so; and certainly Delhi will be frosty towards any such misguided initiative. But Turkey has found its role on the world stage. A stem in the Cold War greenhouse has flowered in the fresh air of an open mind.

Indira: Great heroes make great mistakes

2009-11-01T13:25:00.001+05:30

Indira: Great heroes make great mistakes
By M J Akbar

Gandhi gave us freedom, Nehru protected our independence and Indira Gandhi saved the nation. Is that too neat to be correct?

A leader, unlike a mere office-bearer, possesses the ability to define the existential challenge of the moment, and guide a generation towards a promised destination. Gandhi, Nehru and Indira were leaders, albeit on different tiers of history, each a mixture of success and failure. Gandhi's pedestal is secure from controversy but elevation tends to deflect his achievement. As Jawaharlal observed, Gandhi freed Indians from fear; freedom from the British was a consequence. Gandhi's most significant failure, by his own values, was surely that he could not free Indians from violence.

Did Gandhi insist on non-violence for both moral and tactical reasons? He was committed to the principle, of course, but did he also suspect that only an inherently violent people needed the imposition of non-violence in order to save themselves from themselves? Did he suspect that armed Indians might destroy each other in the name of caste or creed long before they identified the true enemy? Untouchability is best described as insidious and silent violence. Gandhi lost his life to the gun he could not eliminate, but his cathartic death exhausted India's surge towards civil war.

Nehru understood, better than some of his successors, that freedom was not synonymous with independence. Neo-colonization is, after all, the grant of independence on condition you do not exercise it. British India was both colony and neo-colony, the latter being the status of princely states. Nehru saw, all around him, how quickly the post-colonial world sought the sanctuary of nurseries set up by both Washington and Moscow. He believed that India's tryst with destiny was something more substantive than occasional lollipops; that India's success could not be outsourced to even a well-wisher, let alone any cynical superpower searching for allies in a Cold War. He needed to look no further than Pakistan for a narrative of dependency. He stumbled when he trusted the Third World as much as he distrusted the First. His Himalayan blunder was a calculation, or miscalculation, that China would be a partner in such a world view. He confused himself with others, and the Chinese laughed at his commitment to peace. Trust is so often the ultimate naivete.

India welcomed the realism of Indira Gandhi after the travails of Nehru's idealism. Her two decades, between 1964 and 1984, as cabinet minister and prime minister, constituted an age of violence in all its myriad complexities: communal, ethnic, linguistic, Communist, secessionist. Language riots in the south; Hindu-Muslim mayhem across the map; Naxalite insurgents lighting a Maoist prairie fire; radical trade unions; a war with Pakistan; Emergency; and, in her second term as prime minister, upheaval in Assam, explosions across the North-East and a full-fledged rebellion in Punjab led by a charismatic theocrat. Calm was not written in Mrs Gandhi's fate lines. Was Bangladesh her high point and Emergency the nadir?

India could have gone the way so many post-colonial dictatorships in Africa and Asia if the Emergency, justified by sycophants as essential to the national interest, had stratified into long-term one-person rule. Some of her closest advisers were determined that it should continue for 20 years. The government had survived the initial outburst by sending the Opposition into prison and the press into coma. Individuals and institutions were gradually co-opted into the quasi-dictatorship. But just when hope for democracy had begun to ebb, one person realized that a government without a mandate was illegitimate. That person was Mrs Gandhi. In January 1977, she shocked friend and foe by calling a general election. In March, she was shocked when the Congress was routed. Democracy has never been challenged again.

It is odd that a leader who was so adept at war in 1971 should prove so gullible in the subsequent peace process. No matter which way you look at it, the Simla Agreement of 1972 was an opportunity thrown away. The cease-fire line of 1948 should have been converted into the permanent border, sealing, thereby, the 1966 Tashkent Agreement in which India and Pakistan inked a commitment to respect this line. Mrs Gandhi held all the trumps in 1972, and lost the hand to Zulfiqar Bhutto. His successor, Zia-ul-Haq, took revenge for Bangladesh by helping foment the Punjab revolt: its apex, in 1984, saw the destruction of the Golden Temple, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the frenzied massacre of Sikhs. Zia-ul-Haq could not tear India apart, but he left a wound in India's heart.

Mrs Gandhi's martyrdom washed away her mistakes from public memory. But only great heroes make great mistakes.

- Appeared in Times of India - November 1, 2009

An Indira Gandhi Moment

2009-10-31T17:55:00.002+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: An Indira Gandhi Moment

If so many male members of the Delhi establishment were not irredeemably bald, the loudest sound in the capital would be that of hair being torn in frustration. Those who have rescued their pates with American wigs [probably made with recycled hair from Tirupati] or artificial implants are not going to risk their camouflage by an injudicious display of temperament. So the prevailing noise in Delhi is the sound of gnashing teeth. The despair is over the upsurge of Naxalite violence.

While it is understandable that successful India should get antsy over subaltern anger, perhaps we should pause to consider what the Naxalites have not done; this would shade the focus, which is at the moment concentrated on what they have done. They did not kill the police officer they picked up in Bengal. They released him in exchange for tribal women in Government custody. They did not bargain for the release of their leaders, sending a message to a vast constituency that tribal women were equal, on their scale of values, to the top brass. You can appreciate the electrifying impact on their support base. And while relief will be the overwhelming sentiment among the passengers of Rajdhani, who were unharmed after five hours as captives, they will, on reaching home, search in the debris of memory for some answers. The Governments of Bengal and India were helpless when the train was brought to a halt, and impotent during the hours in captivity. The authorities did not rescue the passengers. The abductors freed them. These Naxalites have decided that their war is against authority and its structures and symbols, and not against the people of India.

This is a significant shift from Naxalite thinking in its first phase, the decade between 1965 and 1975, when the leadership was with Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal [a tribal leader] and their intelligent, if apoplectic, student comrades like Ashim Chatterjee, hero and scourge of Kolkata’s Presidency College campus. Then they targeted civilians, whether clerks or kulaks, and semi-civilians like constables. For the first time, traffic policemen in Bengal were forced to wear firearms, and all traffic points had to have at two least two men on duty — one to direct the city’s horrendous traffic and the other to guard his partner. This should have led, at least in my view, to learned internal dialectic debate on “Is the constable a class enemy?” I do not know if it did. What I do know is that when dread of Naxalites seeped down from those at the top of the power-pyramid to those in the middle and the base, it fomented a government-people-political parties partnership that destroyed the Naxalites. The state provided ruthless determination; the people gave information; the Congress and the CPI[M] used their cadres in the counter-offensive.

The Naxalites made a second serious ideological mistake, which they have consciously avoided this time around. The walls of Bengal were daubed with the slogan “Chairman Mao is our Chairman”. The Chairman of Beijing may not have been consulted on this honour, but he was not one to kick away a garland strewn in his path. Those were turbulent times in China as well; the Mao-inspired Cultural Revolution was an exercise in havoc, and mesmerised young Chinese waved Mao’s “Little Red Book” as the magical panacea for their myriad problems. No one wanted any little red book in India.

Mrs Indira Gandhi, who was martyred a quarter century ago, was Prime Minister for most of that long decade of insurrection. She did not waste any sentiment while dealing with the Naxalite threat. She gave carte blanche to Bengal’s political leadership [first, the United Front and then Congress Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray], police chiefs like Ranjit Gupta and finally the armed forces who, under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Jacob, played a decisive role in the state response to urban insurgency.

But Mrs Indira Gandhi addressed the fundamental cause of the revolt through a brilliant, almost instinctive manoeuvre. She realised that you could kill Naxalites, but you could not meet the challenge of Naxalism, unless the government brought the corroding problem of poverty to the top of its concerns. The theme of her re-election and government became “Garibi hatao [Remove poverty]”. She held out the hope that poverty could be eliminated through the democratic process, and was thereby able to convince the base that violence was not an answer.

In the event, Mrs Gandhi was unable to do very much to eliminate poverty — she was partly misled by the “Congress Left”, which was neither Congress nor the Left. But the special place she still retains in the hearts of India’s poor is evidence of her powerful political achievement. The state would not have succeeded as effectively without the parallel political mobilisation by Indira Gandhi.

In 2009, we are not short of Hurray-Henrys who would be happy to mow down Naxalites with blazing submachine guns in order to make India safe for themselves and their self-serving economic policies. They do not realise it yet, but they are going to miss Indira Gandhi.

Weak opposition and a sad state of Affairs

2009-10-25T17:31:00.000+05:30

Weak opposition and a sad state of affairs
By M J Akbar

Rahul Gandhi is the perfect post-ideological politician. Those who think he is preaching to the choir are missing the point: a significant chunk of the electorate is tired of grand creeds. Rahul Gandhi leaves behind a trail of feel-good bubbles on his travels. Contrast this with the hyperventilation of his cousin, who believes that B-grade histrionics pave the way to stardom.

But disdain for ideology can make you indifferent to ideologues. Pakistan is more than ‘‘just a piece of land’’. It is a powerful idea that broke Muslims from Hindus in 1947, Muslims from Muslims in 1971 and has now fomented a toxic civil war that could prove contagious. The hinge of its conflicts is the ideology of the state. Every Pakistani is convinced that the country should be ‘‘Islamic’’ but no one is completely sure what this means. At the moment, the argument is being conducted with air force raids, field artillery, roadside bombs, tanks, machine guns and suicide missions.

Obviously, Islamabad does not have the same interpretation as Hakimullah Mehsud, who told Sky News, ‘‘We want an Islamic state. If we get that, then we will go to the borders and help fight the Indians.’’ The map of the ‘‘Islamic state’’ includes the Kashmir valley. Both sides of the civil war, Army and Taliban, are in complete agreement on the map, and co-operate on the snatch-Kashmir project when they have time left from destroying each other. It is now academic that scholars like Maulana Azad pointed out that faith was never a touchstone for nationalism. The simple fact that the Arabs are spread across 22 nations is evidence that religion is insufficient as rationale for a state.

We Indians are curiously tempted towards a phallic view of geopolitics: size is strength. This is unsupported by our own historical experience. How big was Britain when it conquered those parts of the world worth conquering? A hundred thousand British civilians and soldiers ruled 300 million Indians. They did not have to be WWF wrestlers to do so.

The external threat to the Indian state from the arc of theocratic nationalism is now compounded by an internal threat arising from the anger of the impoverished, who have turned to violence as the last resort since the benefits of economic growth have been creamed off by an acquisitive class. ‘‘Rising India’’ promised a theoretical trickle to the teeming base of a bent cone, the famous ‘‘trickle-down theory’’. But very little seeped down, for an acquisitive culture is defined by excess. After 17 years of economic reform, the percentage below the poverty line has jumped from 28% to an astonishing 38%. Add the marginals and the homeless, who live outside the fluctuating zone of census statistics, and more than half of India sleeps hungry and hopeless.

The Congress, BJP and CPM have reached a seamless consensus on the need for sustained war against Naxalites, because they have no solution for poverty except for palliatives as a tactic and violence as a strategy. They have the nervous support of some 300 million better-fed Indians. This is why, as even the October election in Maharashtra and Haryana showed, anger against the establishment is either opting to remain outside electoral politics, or searching for the fractious fringe and radical formations.

When the fragmentation of the Congress began in the 60s, it created huge fissures in the ruling space that Congress had occupied since Independence, and provoked the instability of ridiculous coalitions at the apex of power. We are seeing a reverse phenomenon now: the fragmentation of Opposition space, since no Opposition party seems capable of creating a coherent narrative for the poor. This has caused instability at the base, whether in the shape of the massive Naxal challenge or regional agent provocateurs like Raj Thackeray.

The well-armed and unemotional state will probably win the battles against Naxalites, but at the cost of weakening the nation. Weakness is an opportunity for the ideological foe as well as the opportunist. Could China extend the pincer around and within India by extending help to Naxalites? The Chinese, thankfully, have deified Mao and abandoned Maoism, much in the way we have elevated Gandhi to camouflage our disdain for Gandhism. China will be motivated by opportunism rather than ideology but, as any footballer can tell you, a good opportunist scores goals. Moreover, it is much safer to export rubber dolls than it is to export revolution. There will, however, be no reluctance on China’s part to destabilize a debilitating India, should we begin to totter under the burden of expanding inequity.

The strength of nations has more nuances than the single dimension of geography. If the new aspirants to high office do not understand this, they will serve neither their personal nor their national interests.

Appeared in Times of India - October 25 2009

A gift for the past

2009-10-24T17:00:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: A gift for the past

When the ageing but still incomparable Groucho Marx, now trundling into his eighties, was asked what he most wanted as a birthday gift, his reply was succinct: “Last year.” Which is the year from their past that the BJP and Shiv Sena would most like as a gift? 2001. Since then it has been a steady trot downhill.

The Shiv Sena’s stagnation is easily comprehensible. After a lifetime of leadership by a dominant patriarch it confused the man with the mission. The Shiv Sena has two dimensions. In rural Maharashtra it is the regional, Marathi-centric alternative to the Congress, playing the democratic game with a slant but within the framework of conventional politics. Its urban manifestation is different. In Mumbai, particularly, and in Pune, to a lesser degree, the Shiv Sena’s success has been through the sharp articulation of grievance and local pride, through a sensational rhetoric and, when required, violent agitation. Balasaheb Thackeray has been, for some years now, unable to either breathe such fire or turn his rather mild heir Uddhav into a fire-breather. His nephew Raj Thackeray walked into vacant space; the sound of broken windows was sufficient to persuade the young unemployed that they had found their voice. Raj Thackeray picked up 23.35% of the vote in Mumbai. Translate that figure into ground reality and it becomes more comprehensible. If roughly half the vote of Mumbai is Marathi, then the nephew took around half the Marathi votes cast. This is a huge swing, with an impact extending far beyond the 13 seats that he won. The Shiv Sena, already down by three per cent in the Lok Sabha elections from its support in 2004, dropped a further three percentage points. Balasaheb still gets respect, but that is really a homage to his past. The mission has passed on to Raj Thackeray.

The BJP has a larger dilemma. It is simply out of focus. It has nothing by way of a new narrative to offer, and its old one is so tired that it can’t get out of bed. The party has gone through an identity crisis before. Its first incarnation, the Bhartiya Jana Sangh, submerged itself into the Janata, under popular pressure, in 1977. The Janata never functioned as the sum of its parts, and proved so incapable to understanding the compulsions of power that it collapsed and split.

The bruised Sangh resurrected as the Bhartiya Janata Party, preaching some strange form of pretend-Gandhism, and was promptly battered in the 1984 elections. It reinvented itself through the street politics of the Ayodhya temple movement, consolidated its gains with patience during the Narasimha Rao years and won unprecedented rewards in Delhi. The Atal Behari Vajpayee years can be summed up quite succinctly. As long as the party followed Vajpayee’s advice, it maintained a keel that was acceptable to the country. When the party imposed itself on Vajpayee, the balance went awry. It was only a question of time before the keel broke. Since then the BJP has been struggling to find the balance between regional demands and a national presence, emotionalism and shrill invective, communal rhetoric and the compulsion of social peace as the necessary bedrock of economic development — and, finally, an image that reflects concern for the future rather than the conflicts of the past. Such contradictions had a direct impact on the Maharashtra elections. When it joined the me-too Marathi manoos agenda of the Shiv Sena, which is essentially anti-Bihari migrant labour, its Bihar unit publicly disassociated itself from the decision.

And so, typically, the BJP fell between the traditional two stools. The Marathi shrugged and moved to Raj Thackeray; and one can safely assume that not a single Mumbai Bihari voted for the BJP. BJP leaders have neither understood the reasons for their now prolonged stagnation or decline, which is why they embarrass themselves and their party with silly excuses on the day results are declared. Some bright spark blamed the electronic voting machines the moment the trend in Maharashtra pointed towards defeat. That leader had not lost an election, he had lost his mind.

The BJP’s real problem is a sense that it has got lost in a time warp at a moment when young Indians, the decisive element in the vote, are either looking ahead or bursting with anger and frustration. The BJP has been unable to offer a road map for the next years, or — unlike say Om Prakash Chautala — become an effective mobiliser of voter resentment.

This has been a poor election for all major parties. The Congress actually lost one per cent of its vote from five years ago in Maharashtra; while its embarrassment in Haryana was plainly evident. The NCP vote dropped 2.4% from 2004. The ruling alliance won not because it was better but simply because it was less worse.

Depression engenders an enervating lethargy. Government is of course recognised as a full-time activity, but Opposition has become election season frenzy punctuated by a few forgettable speeches during Parliament sessions. Opposition is the time parties use to expand their base; the BJP can barely protect what it had two decades ago in a volatile state like Haryana.

You can only dream of the gift of a past year. To survive in electoral politics you need to create a future.

No election is an echo of the past

2009-10-18T15:23:00.001+05:30

No election is an echo of the past

By M J Akbar

In electoral science, statistics are illustrative, interpretation is critical and everything is fluid. Politics is evolutionary, and evolution - even Darwin’s - is a theory, not a fact. No election is an echo of the past, let alone a mirror of the future.

The statistics of this year’s general elections do not justify the self-evident depression that has overtaken Sharad Pawar’s NCP. He got as many votes (19.3%) as the Congress (19.6%). Moreover, he added support: NCP was up from 2004’s 18.8%, while the Congress lost 1.5% of its votes.

And yet, the seats went in the opposite direction. Congress led in 79 assembly constituencies in 2009 as against 69 in 2004 while NCP went down from 71 to 55.

The shock is that Sharad Pawar could not read the internal map of every constituency as well as he once did. Congress confidence lies in its brilliant management of the most important gene in democracy’s biology. It consolidated its vote, while Pawar dissipated his support. Congress has become the natural recipient of the non-Marathi and Muslim vote, both of which have well-defined geographies and therefore, tip their candidates into the lead. Congress strength in the next assembly election, too, will hinge around 40-odd seats within the Mumbai-Pune-Thane cluster. If there is any further dispersal of the NCP vote -- and do remember the ‘if’ attached - then its seat-slippage will continue.

Statistics across the partisan border are no less fascinating. Why is the BJP considered the junior partner of the saffron alliance when it got 18.2% of the vote against the Shiv Sena’s 17% in May? In the five years since 2004, the Sena lost 3% support, while the BJP increased by 4.5%. But, again, the seats were disproportionate. Both were ahead in 62 assembly constituencies. If the Sena had held on to its 2004 vote, the count in Parliament would have been substantively different. You can see the Raj Thackeray effect: he took 3% from Sena and 1% from other parties. Since the damage was not even, it rose to a decisive 20% in many areas. Despite these negatives, the difference between the two alliances is only 10 seats plus to Congress-NCP. Neither side has a majority in assembly-terms in May: it was 134 to 124.

The four big parties have nearly equal support, at least on paper. They should stop worrying about one another so much and take a look at the smaller parties consolidated into ‘Others’ on charts. ‘Others’ got 17.8% in May, and will fetch more in October since the Republicans have left Congress-NCP and are spearheading a separate front. If you add independents to ‘Others’, as one could, their vote share goes up to 25.9%. Madhu Limaye, the socialist veteran who passed away too early, had a theory that a political party began to convert votes into seats at geometrical progression only after its base crossed 23%. This figure will vary a little depending on circumstantial factors. Small parties tend to self-destruct through micro-rivalry, and independents are obviously individualistic.

The obvious, and key, question is whether the Republican-led front will damage Congress-NCP more than Raj Thackeray hurts Sena-BJP. If ‘Others’, including the persistent Mayawati, and independents cross the 30% mark they could skewer results into freakish numbers and produce an assembly with too many satellites and not enough planets. The argument against this possibility is that voters have tended to tilt sufficiently towards stability. A half-hearted endorsement is unusual. The sceptic may well ask how voters could possibly be full-hearted about a government that has driven Maharashtra down with relentless consistency, and an opposition that has driven itself into irrelevance with equal zeal.

A statistical approach to national elections is more likely to provide accurate predictions than to regional polls. A critical mass has now formed for a stable government at the Centre, but interest groups and legitimate demands in large states like Maharashtra have become too diffuse for coherent analysis. Maharashtra is now effectively a combination of four electoral zones with widely differing economies. In theory, good governance should ensure an inter-flow of resources and opportunities to create a better whole. In practice, there is uneven development, and sharp tensions not only along traditional urban-rural lines, but also big city-big town competition. It is a myth that votes gel or splinter only along a single dimension; there are variables even in the support that goes to Raj Thackeray. This is why opinion and exit polls have lost their excitement. The eventual truth tends to be far more exciting.

If you want to know who will form the next government in Mumbai, you will have to check with either God or Mayawati, and neither seem very communicative on the subject.

Appeared in Times of India - October 18 2009

The Hope Hype

2009-10-17T17:54:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: The Hope Hype

Diwali! Is The only serious danger in Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize for Peace is that he might take it seriously. The early indications are that he will. Obama might have saved himself a great deal of trouble by saying thanks, but no thanks. But he could not resist an award whose credibility collapsed the moment he got it.

After the obligatory reference to humility, he added, a little more grandly, “I will accept this award as a call to action.” At least he admitted that there had been no action so far. What on earth did the fatuous Nobel Committee see when they surveyed the map of the world in the last six months? Did they find that Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama had created an independent Palestine while Hamas was engrossed in playing Patience and Hezbollah had gone for a conference in Tehran? Or that India and Pakistan had signed a treaty solving Kashmir while benign Barack hovered gently in the background, always within camera range?

The only substantive decision that Obama has taken in terms of war and peace is to ramp up the war in Afghanistan far above George Bush’s scale of intervention. He is on the point of sending upwards of 50,000 more American troops so that Viceroy-Lord Dick Holbrooke, and his bevy of Pentagon generals, can fight for another decade on the killing rocks of a battlefield that saw serious action during Alexander the Great’s time and has not paused since. If outsiders do not turn up, Afghans simply go to war against one another. Alfred Nobel thought that his Peace Prize should go to leaders who disband standing armies. Obama may be perfectly justified in upgrading the still largely somnolent American presence in Afghanistan into a full-scale fighting force, but the chaps in Oslo might have waited till the shooting stopped. They waited for Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa to grow old. Why couldn’t they have waited for Obama to become middle-aged?

Their official excuse is that Obama symbolises hope. That’s nice. It broadens the scope for future winners. All you have to do is hope, and possibly pray, that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba have reinvented themselves into vegetarian Gandhians and your postbox might have a nice letter from Oslo in October 2010.

The big ticket hope is non-proliferation. If you think about it coolly — very coolly — one chap who has done far more than Obama for non-proliferation in the recent past is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He actually dismantled a nuclear weapons facility. He may have done so under pressure, but he has done something. Obama has given a few pretty speeches and knocked on the table at the United Nations. Obama has made no effort to rein in the most powerful nuclear weapons power in history, a nation that refused to accept any international control or convention and continues to develop the most sophisticated nuclear weapons technology. That country is, of course, the United States of America. I suppose Oslo did not think of a Peace Prize for Gaddafi for fear of ridicule. Gaddafi does not belong, as it were, to the right sort of country, plus his acceptance speech might have taken a full day. But does anyone have any idea when the ridicule for the Obama decision will begin to ebb?

Obama is too sharp not to understand this, and it will further whet the temptation to lend some substance to the hype. He is not going to withdraw from Afghanistan because of this medal; and climate change is Al Gore’s parish. So his big push is likely to be on non proliferation. He dare not do anything about America’s nuclear muscle; and he has assured Tel Aviv that he will continue the policy of ignoring Israel’s secret cache. There is little he can do about the Big Five, and North Korea is Hillary Clinton’s show. Pakistan is too much of a military pal at a time of dire need, and Pakistan has a good excuse as well, India. So his options boil down to just this: abort Iran’s programme and bully India into as much compliance as possible. If warrior Bush was dangerous for the region between the Nile and the Indus, peacenik Obama could be troublesome for the land of the Ganges.

IS IT possible that the Oslo peace mafia had run out of people to hand this prize to? Not every recipient is going to get a chapter in the history books, even though they might be worthy enough. It is not easy to recall the name of the winner in 2008. But the range of the prize has been expanded from reformed warriors to humanitarians. We all know of course that Mahatma Gandhi was never found worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, but then they would have probably considered Jesus Christ too good to be true as well. [Jesus was a non-violent opponent of European colonisation as well, in his case, Roman.] But we have not completely run out of worthy individuals or institutions. The doctors who do selfless work in conditions of utmost misery, like Darfur or other conflict zones in Africa, deserve both the applause and the money. The Aga Khan might not need the money, but there should be some recognition of the extraordinary restoration work his foundation has done to preserve the great monuments of human civilisation — that too is a commitment to peace.

But there is one good, even great, reason for giving Barack Obama the 2009 prize, although it was omitted from the citation. Barack Obama threw out Bush Republicans, the biggest band of warmongers in recent American history, from power in Washington. This must surely count as a signal contribution to world peace.

(In Covert Magazine)

The Lost Tribe of India

2009-10-17T17:02:00.000+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: The Lost Tribe of India

Is poverty boring? Or is it merely inappropriate, just too in-your-face during the holiday week that precedes Diwali? It doesn’t seem right to behave like a sourpuss when the national mood is celebratory, when traffic and shopping are indistinguishable from each other in Delhi and Mumbai, when those of us who can afford to be happy are happy with a bang, and when a strange form of cricket full of hugely unknown players dominates the television set.

I can blame it on Hindustan Times. This week it carried a front page report quoting a study done by worthies in the highest echelons of government, which showed that the number of Indians living below the poverty line had actually increased by ten per cent, taking the figure up to 38%. Add the marginals and more than half of India exists at subsistence levels. That sounds too polite actually. More than half of India does not sleep with a full stomach.

There are two categories growing in the Rising India of elephants, tigers and various Maharajah animals that grace the covers of silly books: the super rich, and the abysmally poor. At the top of the wealth peak are both legitimate businessman who have the skill, entrepreneurship and financial genius to turn enterprise into a pot of gold. Alongside them are the creators of illegitimate riches, the well-dressed, greasy scumbags who make deals with banks and politicians, loot the country and stash billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts that, naturally, our authorities can never access.

Since it is the commonly acknowledged dream of newspaper-reading Indians to turn our nation into a superpower within the foreseeable future, an objective question needs to be answered. Is poverty a hindrance to superpower status? Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep, Micawber and Scrooge lived in the world of Dickens and Charles Lamb wrote on chimney sweeps, young boys who climbed up chimneys to clean the soot. This did not prevent Britain from becoming a world power under the watchful eye of Queen Victoria and her successors. Did the British nabobs mope about the wretched beggars and prostitutes on the streets of London, or did they simply get on with conquering the world?

An impoverished population can actually be quite useful for such an enterprise. You need foot soldiers and cannon fodder for imperial armies: what would Britain’s generals have done in World War I without their local poor, or the million Indians ready to put on a uniform for a soldier’s pittance? The rich are not easy to turn into a battlefield statistic. A thrusting economy also needs cheap labour to keep prices competitive [owners never, of course, reduce the size of their profits and bonuses, they merely skim the wages of the lowest in the ranks]. China’s story is heavily dependent on the virtual slave labour on assembly lines; equally, Indian businessmen need sweatshops, just as Americans once did when they were in a comparable stage of economic growth.

Face it: those who invested in the poor for their political survival have been marginalised in the last two decades, and those who invested in growth have flourished. The latter had a ready answer, of course: only growth could eliminate poverty. The latest statistics show that it has not. Charity is alien to the culture of wealth, so the private sector is more interested in profit than welfare. The state, which should ensure that welfare gets priority, is more concerned with the glamour of growth. So, after nearly two decades of economic reform the poverty levels have increased at an astonishing pace, taking us back to the Seventies, at least on this count.

We began our exercise in nation-building with Gandhi’s talisman: whenever in doubt, think about the poorest amongst us and consider whether what we are doing would benefit him. Every socialist, whether inside Congress or outside, carried it around as a badge of honour. Look where the socialists have ended up, including of the tricolour variety. Socialists have become the lost tribe of India.

Communists had no time for Gandhi. They opted for either two beards or a moustache: the fulsome growth of Marx, or the pointy triangle of Lenin, or the Ottomanesque upper lip of Stalin. All three have been shaved clean in Kerala and Bengal. They might soon have to rename themselves the Communist Party of Tripura. Trade unions have become the spoilt brats of our system, limited only to their constituency interests, contemptuous of the unorganised poor.

Why have the poor turned away from povertywallahs?

They have not. The povertywallahs have abandoned the poor. The Naxalites, who had been virtually eliminated from politics by the mid-Seventies, have expanded into space vacated by the socialists and communists. Between them, they would have most of the seats in over 150 districts, which would probably have made them the largest bloc in Parliament. The true Opposition in India has moved away from Parliament, which is not good news for either democracy or India. The Naxalite vote does not get translated into seats, because Naxalites do not offer candidates, or indeed play the artful game of electoral manipulation along seams of caste or community or faith. It is perfectly understandable that the two principal parties in Parliament, Congress and BJP, are outdoing each other in schemes for massive state aggression towards Naxalites. It is in everyone’s vested interest that Naxalites are crushed, physically. The government throws around palliatives in time-honoured fashion, promising development the moment Naxalites are killed. Why did it need Naxalites to remind the government that these districts required development? That is not the only question. When Montek Singh Ahluwalia, honestly and bravely, reminds the country that Rajiv Gandhi was right, and that only 16 paise in the development rupee actually reaches the target, he is ignored. I suppose they will start calling him a socialist next.

Sorry for being a party-pooper, or at least trying to be one. Remember Queen Victoria, and have a happy Diwali!

The truth is, Gandhi is less of a draw than Jinnah

2009-10-11T16:14:00.002+05:30

The truth is, Gandhi is less of a draw than Jinnah

By M J Akbar

It is curious that six decades after 1947 a debate on Jinnah can pack halls in Delhi and Mumbai but a discussion on Gandhi might not fill a front row. Is this because Jinnah offers the drama of a court trial, the speakers being advocates for defense or prosecution, and the audience a silent, but ultimately decisive, jury? Jinnah, one of the great barristers of his age, would have relished the metaphor.

Has Gandhi become, in our subconscious, an irritating nuisance, a mirror before our guilty conscience? Who wants to be measured by the yardstick of a saint who was so disconcertingly honest that he turned his autobiography into a confessional? Jinnah, on the other hand, was so private, and even secretive in life that, in death, he is vulnerable to endless post-mortem dissection. Gandhi has become as ephemeral as an ideal. We can disturb the memory of Jinnah. Gandhi’s memory disturbs us.

Where would Gandhi have been on his 140th birthday, October 2, 2009, if he were not safely dead? He would have been on a fast in Maharashtra. Why? The state police has slipped into the public space a statistic made even more astonishing by the indifference with which it has been received: there has been, on an average, a riot every 20 days in Maharashtra during the last five years. Print media consigned it to a couple of statutory paragraphs inside. Television, crowded with high-decibel celebrities, ignored this completely. It seems that our innumerable guardians of secularism need familiar villains for their rage. Faceless violence is not attractive enough.

Gandhi placed the facts of violence above the politics of conflict. He would have been an inconvenient presence for those who profess to live by his creed today. As for the heroes of modern India: they would not recognize him. There is no way to reinvent Gandhi as a happy symbol of a rising sensex, checking out the value of an investment portfolio at five every evening. It makes sense on every side to convert Gandhi into a token portrait on the wall of a government office.

Jinnah’s problem, conversely, has been that he has been appropriated, or misappropriated, by a range of vested interests, each determined to resurrect him in its own image, to serve its agenda. Pakistan’s political elite, forced to compromise with the culture of theocracy, has converted the natty, lean, handsome owner of 200-odd London-tailored suits into a shalwar-and-cap chameleon. If, instead of being clean-shaven, Jinnah had sported a slight, fashionable beard, they would have extended the beard by six inches in official portraits. Most Pakistanis would be shocked today to discover that Jinnah did not know Urdu, never fasted during Ramzan, had little interest in the rituals of religion, and that his concept of spiritual sustenance was very worldly indeed. Jinnah sent out invitations for a formal lunch-banquet in honour of the visiting Mountbattens for August 14, 1947, the day the new nation was born. The meal had to be cancelled when someone realized that they were in the middle of Ramzan. Jinnah had been oblivious of the fact that observant Muslims had been fasting for three weeks.

Indian politicians have restructured Jinnah more subtly. Contemporary Congressmen needed a cardboard Jinnah as the all-purpose villain who could soak up all the guilt of Partition. An obstinate, communal hate figure was planted into Indian schoolbook history. This was then morphed into something more insidious.

When Jinnah’s utility as the father of Pakistan receded, he was transformed, surreptitiously, into the symbol of the guilt of Indian Muslims, who became the whipping boys of Indian nationalism as practiced on all sides of the spectrum. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, forerunner of the BJP, latched on to this projection with great glee, since it perpetuated the politics of isolation and accusation. Indian Muslims, in this construct, were genetically unpatriotic and therefore, deservedly condemned to the status of second-class citizens. When Jaswant Singh challenged this single-dimension mythology by lifting the record from the private domain of academic archives and flinging it into public discourse, he had to be expelled. He had spread the guilt to others, who were Hindus, and disturbed the equanimity of a half-truth.

The secular parties, whose expertise in the dynamics of electoral behaviour has always been more astute, quickly understood that fear is the easiest route to the Indian Muslim vote. Fear of the past, Partition, was compounded by fear of its future consequences. Muslims had to choose between the communal cage and the secular trap. One offered a diet of gruel, and the other a scrap of cheese. After six decades, Indian Muslims are beginning to bang on the door of both the cage and the trap.

Mahatma Gandhi would have heard the clamour.

Appeared in Times of India - October 11 2009

A paean to India's melody queen

2009-10-04T15:16:00.003+05:30

A paean to India's melody queen

By M J Akbar

The 80th birthday of Lata Mangeshkar, surely the greatest popular singer of our lifetime and beyond, invites an irresistible question: which song is the best of her six-decade oeuvre? We are spoilt for choice, of course: she has 30,000 on offer, which makes it about four a day, not counting holidays. Phenomena do not get more phenomenal than that.

Her usual is so much better than the best around her. She lifted ordinary into memorable, and was superb when the musical score was minimalist. She excelled with Naushad, who distilled the purity of a raga with an aesthete's light touch, never better than 'Khuda meherbaan ho tumhara, dharakte dil ka payaam le lo/Tumhari duniya se jaa rahen hain, utho hamara salaam le lo'. The second line is not there to remind you of lyrics but to recall the music.

Compare Shankar-Jaikishan when Lata sang for them, and when they were with anyone else. They made fools of themselves when they fought with Lata and switched to Sharda, and were soon piling violins into the background to ameliorate the foreground. Suman Kalyanpur, the would-be alter ego, could hold a note, but was simply not in the same class.

My great regret is that Lata and Rafi did not sing together for three years because of royalty disputes. Individually they were masters; together they were magical. Witness the eternal song from Kaali Topi Laal Roomal: 'Laagi chute na ab to sanam, chahe jaaye jiya teri kasam'. Rafi deserved a Bharat Ratna too, even if he died at 55 and denied us decades of thrall. Hemant Kumar, of Hemantada to Kolkatawallahs, was absolutely right to refuse a Padma Shri. That genius could never be an also-ran. The silken bonds of the Lata-Hemant number from House No 44, 'Neend na mujhko aaye, dil mera ghabraaye' could capture you forever.

As for the big question: preference cannot be locked into the straitjacket of mathematical formula. Since the personal is creeping into public space through this column, there will be those who sniff and others who snigger. But, as any politician says on the eve of an election, ''Please saar listen please, with folded hands.''

The finest Lata solo, on my admittedly prejudiced list, is that sublime harmony of voice, word and music so delicate that you can hear it only through Lata's vocals, 'Ja ja re jaa baalamwa, Sautan ke sangh raat bitaayi kahe karat ab jhooti batiyaan'. See what heights Shankar-Jaikishan ascended when they got themselves out of the way. The verse, lifted by near-absence of instruments, is an exquisite blend of mischief hovering above pain and captures, with love, the ethos of an age. Sentiment steps outside boring adoration, and smiles at its own excess. A lover's complaint that never descends into the self-abasement of a moan. English cannot hope to convey the meaning of 'sautan', so we shall merely describe her as a woman's competitor for her lover's affections. He has just returned after spending nights with the other, and Lata's hurt voice keeps pushing him away, but never pushing him too far, for he belongs to her.

There are a hundred ways in which to rebuke a man for telling lies. Have you ever heard anything quite like 'Kaisa harjai, daiya!'? Hindi flowers in the spring of dialect. We might run our governments in English and write our balance sheets in Roman, but we sing, cry, laugh and love in Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Kashmiri, Tamil or any of the innumerable mother tongues with which our nation is blessed. The tongue of a mother could never write a proper balance sheet for it is too heavily overloaded with assets. How in heavens to do you translate 'daiya!'? Note, incidentally, the dexterity with which the short line is worked into seamless melody.

Lata sang the largest number of film songs for the first of the moderns, Laxmikant-Pyarelal. The partnership provided unforgettable music to eminently forgettable films like Inteqaam (the difficult 'Aaaa jaane jaan'). The Lata who could mesmerize you in Vyjanthimala's Madhumati ('Main to kab se khadi is paar...'), hypnotize you in Sadhana's Woh Kaun Thi ('Naina barsey rim jhim rim jhim') and perhaps tranquilize you in Bina Rai's Anarkali ('Yeh zindagi usiki hai, jo kisi ka ho gaya') could also energize you with Gen Next Mumtaz in 'Bindiya chamkegi, churi chamkegi...' This, too, is the song of a new epoch, as much of a breakthrough as 'Aayega aayega, aayega aanewala' in Madhubala's Mahal. In the 1970s, Lata skins the soppiness out of sentiment and tells her lover that she may or may not be around when he arrives with his baraat, and if he loses any sleep over this, tough luck.

Love is so much sweeter when sprinkled with sauce.

Appeared in Times of India - October 4, 2009

Facts, Truth and Strategy

2009-10-03T19:29:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Facts, Truth and Strategy

Is there anything in common between an India-Pak cricket match in South Africa and China’s decision to give disputed status to Indian Kashmiris through disingenuous separate-sheet visas? Yes. Neither is a game.

China’s celebratory ascent into the top echelons of the modern world owes to a course correction by Deng Xiaoping, who recognised that Communism was injurious to China’s health. He replaced ideology with idealism and gave it pragmatic legs. The shift from pomposity to practical was based on an old Chinese principle: search for truth among facts. The only thing Maoist about China now is the portrait in Tiananmen Square and the mugshot on the currency notes.

China’s foreign policy is shaped by the same principle. It has looked long and hard at the facts of India, in particular at its defence. Thanks to the self-castration of a post-Bofors mentality, the hypocrisy of a system thirsty for bribes behind the burqa of bureaucratic-political piety, and the pseudo-morality of a defence minister who equates procrastination with self-protection, India’s defence capability is now at least a generation behind China’s in both conventional and nuclear warfare.

When an Indian air chief promises to bring his capability up to speed in a potential war zone like Arunachal Pradesh he is talking of what might happen by 2018 if all goes well. Make that a very big if. The Indian Air Force has been whittled down to a statistical accident. Our artillery has a goodwill-inventory. The communication infrastructure necessary to back up a fighting unit is waiting for the dust to be cleaned from the cover of the files.

China assessed Indian vulnerability years ago, and signalled its mood on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s last state visit, generally a time when states seek to stress points of mutual agreement. Instead, the then Chinese ambassador in Delhi chose to dwell on Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh, called Southern Tibet by Beijing. It was deliberate, calculated provocation to which Delhi responded with its familiar waffle.

The border provocations of 2009 have evoked a very queer reaction from National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan. He said, in defence of the Chinese, that the infringements had not increased beyond the normal. This begs a question: what is the normal level of infringements? A couple of hundred yards here or there – or, perhaps, there rather than here.

Jawaharlal Nehru once made the mistake of telling Parliament that the disputed territory on the China border was all rock and wasteland. In 1962 China proved how much it valued wasteland. Has China begun another “Mission Creep” which seeks to change facts on the ground so that the truth can be refashioned in fertile Delhi?

I do not believe that China wants war with India. The raison d’être of the post-Communist Communist Party is the promise, to its people, of stability. Stability is the cocoon in which economic growth can be spun. War would destabilise the Chinese stock exchange, if nothing else.

China also wants trade with India, now close to $60 billion. It is a useful hedge at a time of recession in the West. Moreover, the Indian market is undemanding. Wal-Mart will not accept toxic lead in toys, and American media do raise a typhoon if Chinese cat food ends up killing the cat. But the Delhi trader does not really care if the rows of Chinese Ganesh idols have been spray painted with death-dealing gamma rays as long as he can sell them for twice the price he paid. They must be laughing all the way from Shanghai to Lhasa.

The laughter in Beijing is probably restricted to the great debate on India’s nuclear tests. It takes courage, more than freedom, to pursue an argument on the most serious element of our defence spread through press conferences, the preferred methodology of both the plaintiff and the accused. If the eminent scientists who believe that the yield in 1998 was too low and India needs to test further are getting a hearing it is only because of their eminence, their knowledge [they are the hands-on people who actually created the nuclear deterrent] and their transparent sincerity. If they have no case, as a belligerent government [denied the right to test by the Indo-US nuclear deal] believes, then they have been utterly irresponsible. Why doesn’t the government accuse them of treason and bring them before the courts? They have shaken the nation’s conviction in its core assets and given comfort to the enemy. The government cannot clear doubts by a show of hands from within the establishment. It needs, at the very least, an independent enquiry.

There is a rational reason why China has decided to exploit Indian weaknesses and contradictions through rhetoric and provocative gestures on the border and in its Delhi embassy. It seeks to keep India off-balance, to the extent it can, at a time of great existential discomfort for its ally Pakistan.

Pakistan has always sought Chinese help in its confrontation with India. China has given it, although never to the point where it becomes counter-productive. The games theory in Islamabad and Beijing surely is that if Pakistan has to worry about two fronts, then, at the very least, so should India. Our weakness becomes an opportunity for China and an invitation to Pakistan. Witness the latter’s supreme indifference to concerns about the Lashkar e Tayyaba. A New York Times report published on 30 September could not be more categorical: “Ten months after the devastating attacks in Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, the group behind the assault remains largely intact and determined to strike India again, according to current and former members of the group, Lashkar e Tayyaba, and intelligence officials. Despite pledges from Pakistan to dismantle groups operating on its soil, and the arrest of a handful of operatives, Lashkar has persisted, even flourished…”

Pakistan cannot find Lashkar operatives planning another attack, but the New York Times can.

Nothing in the equation between India and Pakistan is a game, unless you include war in the list of games. Even cricket has become a war by other means. But that is another story, suitable for some future column.

Listen to the assertive new Indian woman

2009-09-27T18:25:00.001+05:30

Listen to the assertive new Indian woman

By M J Akbar

Sir Harcourt Butler was a great civil servant of the British empire, an icon who understood India, befriended Indians like the Raja of Mahmudabad and advocated causes like the Aligarh Muslim University. As a former governor of United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh), he offered a word of advice for the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in a letter sent from Rangoon on January 16, 1916. The most powerful influences in India, said Sir Harcourt, were priests and women. As long as any political organization was unable to mobilize both, the government had little to fear.

Mahatma Gandhi, who had no shortage of priests alongside, jolted the British during the non-cooperation movement in 1920 and 1921 precisely because he brought women out of their ancient closet, promising Hindu women the end of Ravanraj (British rule) in six months if they wore homespun and spurned luxury just as Sita had rejected Ravana’s temptations. There was a similar contemporary upsurge among Muslims. Maulana Muhammad Ali’s redoubtable mother Bi Amman was the first Muslim woman to address the Muslim League without a veil, and the wives of Hakim Ajmal Khan and M A Ansari set up the Women’s Khilafat Committee in 1921.

Nine decades later, priests and women remain the most powerful engines of political mobility, with one huge twist in a long tale. The influence of women now far outweighs that of priests. Social development is not even. There are sharp differences both between communities and within communities. But the dominant voice of the next decade will be an assertive new woman with a modern spine.

The Muslim vote remains powered by the exhortations of the ulema, but the queues of women in ballot order, even if in hijab or burqa, are evidence of a new dynamic. They have understood the power of the secret vote and exult in exercising it. The Congress, a principal beneficiary in the last general elections, may want to check why it lost a safe, minority-dominant seat in a Delhi by-election. Did veiled women register a protest against rising costs in the kitchen, or rediscover questions about the Batla House deaths last year?

One reason why the BJP’s Ram temple campaign succeeded in the late 1980s and the early 1990s was because it energized women, and made them stakeholders in the proposed temple by asking them to contribute a brick each. But that model has dated, or is in the process of becoming passe. A girl born in 1989 would have voted in 2009.

The BJP’s stagnation, or slide, can be partly explained by its disconnect with the changing profile of Hindu women. This is not limited to metropolitan India. The very presence of imitation brands in small towns is proof of the spread of aspiration. This is not a passing fad or fashion; it is rooted in a new mindset. The most powerful weapon in the armoury of the modern woman is choice. Choice is liberating at both the individual and collective level. Imposition, disguised as obedience, stability and security, is yesterday’s story. Today’s woman wants the final say, whether in dress, marriage, lifestyle or the vote; she does not want to be told that she cannot wear jeans or enjoy Valentine’s Day, or go to a pub of an evening if she so chooses. Indian women can see the suffocation of fundamentalism in the neighbourhood. That is the last thing they want in India.

Much is being made, in Delhi, of the fact that the Kashmir valley celebrated one of the most peaceful, happiest Eids in memory. Don’t overdo the celebrations. This may have less to do with India than with Pakistan. Even a cursory look at Pakistan tells the Kashmiri young — and particularly young women — that whatever its faults, India just might be the better option. How many young men would want to live within gunshot distance of the Taliban? How many young women would seek a future in a land where the clergy insists on twisted gender laws? As they might put it, India is ‘‘less worse’’.

Pakistan’s favourite Kashmiri leader, Jamaat-e-Islami’s Syed Ali Shah Geelani, pleaded with every Kashmiri Muslim to sulk along with him on Eid; he was ignored. Geelani was a teenager in 1947. The teenager of 2009 does not recognize the teenager of 1947. There are no jobs in conflict, unless of course you want early retirement from the burdens of existence. The young want life; old warmongers offer death.

The happiness of life, the joy of individual liberty, will define the politics of India in the foreseeable future. Those politicians who do not recognize this are condemned to irrelevance. Who understands life better than a woman? Women give life. Men take it.

Women have listened to priests in every age of recorded history. It is time for priests to listen to women.

Appeared in Times of India - September 27, 2009

High and Happy in Diwali Democracy

2009-09-26T14:11:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: High and Happy in Diwali Democracy

Rio de Janeiro or Munich might enjoy a reputation wrapped in an advertising package, but there is no country in the world that can compete with India when it comes to celebration. Others might turn a weekend into a party and pat themselves on the back, but when an Indian gets into a festive mood, time goes to sleep for ten days, and then wakes up most reluctantly. Who knows when Diwali begins, although we do have a reasonable idea of when it ends. It ends the day you stop losing money.

Of course we Indians celebrate in the name of religion, but then there is very little in India that remains untouched by faith. We even gamble in honour of the gods. Our holidays are an extension of religious tourism. Religion works in India because we make it so much fun, whether it be the worship of Ganapati Bappa Moriya in the west or Ma Durga in the east.

The rest of the world may have forgotten that “holiday” is a combination of “holy” and “day”, but not Bengal — except that Bengalis do not believe in the singular. Celebration is plural in every sense: spread over days, and enjoyed in the togetherness of family, friends and that special kinship which makes a metropolis like Kolkata a swirling city of community affections. London and New York might also claim that they do not pause between Christmas and New Year’s Day, but there is a great difference. In the West, every home comes alive but the city falls silent. In Kolkata the city becomes home and home becomes the city. If you have not experienced Durga Puja in Bengal, you have missed a true human wonder. There is no way that Pranab Mukherjee or Mamata Banerjee would be anywhere except at home during “Pujo”. I hope I am not accused of exaggeration and excess, but I daresay that even a Marxist atheist like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee smiles during Durga Puja.

And if this mood is burnished with special effects, all the better. Rome might boast that it is the ultimate destination in religious tourism, but Rome offers the visitor the political and cultural history of the West in its stones. Kolkata, in comparison, is a young city with less-than-impressive British buildings, many of them seemingly unpainted since the British left. The art of Rome is a magical explosion of individual genius. The art of Durga Puja is a magical explosion of anonymous genius. Each image is beautifully crafted with the commitment of adoration, but the Kumartuli craftsman knows that the Goddess will go away, along the river, just as we all will one day. Rome preserves marble; Kolkata preserves the moment.

Why then has the Election Commission, a body of intelligent, experienced and utterly reasonable men, become such a party pooper? We may no longer have the highest opinion of our politicians, but, as full-fledged Indian citizens, Arunachal, Haryana and Maharashtra’s politicians have as much right to a happy Diwali as the rest of us. Instead, they have been condemned to the misery of a campaign. For half the lot the anguish will end in a death pang when they get the results and learn that they have lost. They also know that only the very stupid or the very arrogant are confident of victory. This is why all political parties were happy when the Election Commission decided to declare the results on 22 October, nine days after polling on 13 October. When a suggestion was floated that the results could be announced earlier, politicians pleaded with the commissioners to announce their fate only after Diwali — no one wanted bad news during the festival. This is what is known as a perfect Indian solution.

Many reasons have been offered for the sharp paucity of women candidates in the lists of all parties, the most frequent being gender bias. This is true. If you removed women who became candidates because they are children or wives of Big Shots, their percentage would shrink further. Men still cannot get over the fact that theoretical rights have to be converted into practical numbers. But one would not be surprised if some women with the potential to become candidates decided, sensibly, that this was too much of a mug’s game in any event, so why waste a Diwali on such a barren objective?

Moreover, women are not very good at distributing liquor. The Mumbai excise department has passed an order that all bars in the city must report their daily sales till election time, so that it can judge, from any sharp hike, whether a candidate has been especially hospitable. I don’t know what kind of bureaucracy the excise department has, but it is obvious that it has absolutely no clue about how elections are managed.

There are two ways in which happiness is spread prior to an election. The first is through the distribution of cash to the straggle of sycophants charmingly described as “party workers”. These chaps start getting their handouts from the moment a candidate files his nomination. The “party worker” spends about a quarter of this cash for the benefit of the voter, and the rest on numerous benefits for himself. This might or might not include an investment in the joys of liquor. The more conscientious family types might, for instance, buy better furniture for their homes, or a larger refrigerator to keep the wife happy. But it is safe to assume that business at Mumbai’s bars will show a sharp rise from Friday the 25th of September and maintain a steady upward incline till 12 October. If the excise department asks the bar owner for an explanation the latter will attribute it to the Diwali spirit.

The disbursal of alcohol to the masses, a well-recognised facet of Indian democracy, does not happen through bars. Bars charge a huge premium. No candidate, however well-heeled, has money to waste. Bottles are purchased wholesale and distributed in the camouflage of dusk. The excise department should check out wholesale merchants, not retailers.

The spirit of Diwali will demand an extra supply of benevolence in this election season. For the political class in Maharashtra and Haryana, Diwali will come early. Many of you have probably become cynical enough to describe our system as Diwala [the Hindi word for bankrupt] Democracy, but I remain faithful to the system. Happy Diwali Democracy!

This austerity is all an eyewash

2009-09-20T18:00:00.000+05:30

This austerity is all an eyewash
By M J Akbar

That inimitable 20th century intellectual and sleuth Hercule Poirot listed an unforgivable sin in his moral code: overlooking the obvious. The media dust storm over that hobgoblin, austerity, stimulated surely by low TV ratings as much as by high-mindedness, has obscured the most obvious of questions. Who got the money?

Travel is a minor percentage of government expenditure, but every little drop helps, presumably, in a drought. However, where is the money saved by humbler travel going? Has a special austerity fund been created to collect drops from the comfort-squeeze on politicians? Or is the government, which picks up most of the bill, simply retaining the money in its common fund, the bulk of which goes to pay the salaries of babus? As is well known, the biggest beneficiary of government is government.

The cost of MPs’ tickets, as well as for pricey hotels when Parliament committees go on tour, is paid by Parliament. Have the chairman of Rajya Sabha and speaker of Lok Sabha placed the unspent cash in escrow, reserved for the families of farmers still committing suicide in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh?The Congress Party pays for Rahul Gandhi’s travels, as indeed is appropriate. When he takes a private plane, the bill is in more lakhs than one can readily count. When he takes a train, the bill is zero, at least to the Congress: government pays for security. Does the Congress pass on what it has saved to rabi-wrecked farmers in south Bihar? One does not know. A little illumination would be most helpful.

Two and half ministers (Nandan Nilekani has Cabinet status but not ministerial position) were ordered out of five-star hotels and into more modest bhawans. (One of them promptly told the world that innumerable friends had offered him a place to stay. He should dine out as often as he can. The third law of Delhi’s physics says that the number of friends varies in direct proportion to your perceived level of power.)

Between the three of them they are now saving a minimum of Rs 60,000 a day. Have they adopted a village in Jharkhand with the money now denied to five-star hotels? Or is this cash further strengthening their already well-nourished personal bank accounts? Here is a subversive suggestion. Why not make them contribute an amount equal to their hotel bills to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund? If they can spend Rs 60,000 a day out of their pockets for a comfortable bed and a cup of coffee, they should be able to spare a bit of small change for the drought-afflicted. The truly outstanding irony, of course, is that when the three get their official homes, they will enter a world beyond the dreams of the most luxurious hotel in the world.

America’s cabinet members would salivate at the prospect of acres of plush lawn in the heart of Washington, around a glorious colonial bungalow fitted with contemporary amenities, as a personal playground. Chinese cabinet members would probably get jailed for fantasy, or shot for corruption. The Indian minister has a home that is the envy of avarice. Who pays for it? Actually, you. If you pay tax, that is.

Grandeur is the only definition of power in Delhi, and bitter feuds erupt over a potential address. Any successful social climber in impoverished India’s capital will ask for your address before he, and of course she, asks for your name. But it is only fair to note that if there is one man who has a right, in this system so heavily layered by hypocrisy, to raise the issue then it is the man who set off the austerity fireworks. Pranab Mukherjee has, without any doubt, the worst bungalow in Delhi. He was allotted this residence when an MP and has not changed it despite being entitled to far more glamorous acreage. That is one reason why when Pranab Mukherjee talks, his peers listen. The second reason is that he runs most parts of the government.

Now for a little, closely guarded secret. The big ticket in travel costs is not high in the sky but closer to the ground. Somebody should tot up the fuel costs of the thousands of very austere cars allotted to ministers, MPs and bureaucrats. Fuel theft is rampant. A single decision would ensure greater comfort, cheaper fuel, environment protection and less corruption: replace the lot with CNG vehicles. Will anyone do this? Your guess is as good as mine, but my guess is ‘no’. If you want to know the identity of a murderer in any Agatha Christie-Poirot page-turner, answer a simple question. Who got the money? If you want a way out of the complex labyrinths of Delhi, ask the same question.

Appeared in Times of India - September 20, 2009

In a class of his own

2009-09-19T11:48:00.000+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: In a class of his own

Shashi Tharoor has to be the only Indian who was safer last week in Liberia than in Jaipur. After all, no one in Liberia had asked for his resignation, but the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Ashok Gehlot, a fellow Congressman, did suggest that the best option for Tharoor would be to resign. I cannot think of a previous occasion when a Congress Chief Minister has asked for the head of a Union Minister from his own party. This must, incidentally, also be the first time that a politician is in trouble because of a misplaced sense of humour.

We must all be familiar with the cause célèbre by now. For the few who need a reminder, it began with a newspaper report that Tharoor was waiting for his luxury ministerial home in Delhi not in the limited comfort of a state government hostel, as is the norm, but in a five star hotel. He was not alone; his senior minister in external affairs, S.M. Krishna, was waiting in an even grander suite, although not in the same hotel. Pranab Mukherjee, the guardian angel of the nation’s finances, was not amused, and publicly reprimanded both for self-indulgence at a time when large parts of the nation had been hit by drought. This must be another first in the history of politics: a foreign minister being told by the finance minister to get out of his starry abode and live it down it like the rest. Krishna moved out and on. Tharoor, who is so confident about his celebrity status that he informs his fan base about every minor detail of his life through a tweet [is twitter the plural of tweet?], was a trifle superior about his enforced downgrade, pointing out he could walk into the home of any well-heeled friend et al.

The austerity flu, defined by some cynics as an epidemic caused by the humbug, left upper class airline seats indisposed as well. Ministers were told to shift from the front of the plane to the back, where mortals sit. Tharoor, provoked by another kind of bug, a bugbear called the unremitting journalist, decided that he too would descend to “cattle class in solidarity with all our holy cows”. Ha ha ha ha and ha. Since India is the land of the holy cow, a literal translation of the term did not go down very well with either the politician or the voter. But a qualified apology by Tharoor sent on Thursday-Friday midnight through his favourite medium of public communication, the cellphone, might make things worse for him.

It may be irregular to place analysis before proposition, but it could be helpful in this case. I do not think it is Tharoor’s fault that he just cannot fathom the mindset of India. He has lived too long within the mindset of New York where holy cows are neither holy nor cows. Second, he has been a bureaucrat in the United Nations, where a tin ear comes with the salary. The first law of democracy is that what you say is less important than what the other person hears.

He clearly suffers from regional-language-deficiency syndrome as well, another symptom of those who have lived abroad for too long. He observed, for instance, that he had been told that his comments sounded worse in Malayalam than in the Queen’s English. If he had been more familiar with Malayalam he would have realised it himself. How do we know this? Tharoor said as much on his tweet. You never recognise how much you expose yourself when entranced by the spotlight. He added: “I now realize I shouldn’t assume people will appreciate humour. And you shouldn’t give those who would willfully distort your words an opportunity to do so.”

Not quite. Indians do have a sense of humour, but it is not the same sense as the humour of western sensibility. Nor is it a question of distortion. Every civilisation has its own mores, and it is not a matter of being better or worse than any other. The West lives by its own laudable values and its separate definition of sensitivities. India has a different code; China a third one. No one is better than the other, but we have to live by the code that is acceptable to a particular civilisation. There is an in-built screen that monitors, in Indian conversation, anything that might be construed to be offensive, even if you did not mean to be offensive.

Gehlot may not be able to compete in the Queen’s English, but he recognises the line over which you cannot step. You cannot rule India without understanding India. This is why the Congress has publicly distanced itself from a cultural implant on the body politic that it cannot fully comprehend.

It might be worthwhile to remember, also, that economy class on Indian commercial flights is not full of peasants and workers. Only two per cent of India travels by air, so this mode of travel has not even extended yet to the middle class. There are more movers and shakers in the back of the Indian jet than in the front, and when they are moved, they can shake anyone out of a chair.

Since Liberia is not yet a holiday destination for Indian VIPs, even for those with expansive bank accounts, the junior minister for external affairs was obviously there on work. I hope he did not have to make an austere journey in cattle class.

Vedic spirituality loses out in times of dishonesty

2009-09-13T16:27:00.001+05:30

Vedic spirituality loses out in times of dishonesty
By M J Akbar

It is common knowledge that the best way to argue your case in Delhi is through a suitcase. The capital's punters can neither control their laughter nor restrain their envy at the news that you can find your way to 44 acres of prime land in Marxist Bengal through an ayurvedic massage. Napoleon remarked that an army marches on its stomach. Lenin's Bengali army also marches on its stomach, as long as it is prostrate.

While corruption in rising India has moved with internet speed into the 21st century, Kolkata's deals are still in the Vedic age. Land worth Rs 20 crores was, it seems, handed over to promoters of a cottage-style resort called Vedic Village on the edge of Bengal's capital for just Rs 1 crore. The process began in 1997; the promoters added to their expanse by purchasing adjoining plots from villagers through the usual means of a cheque placed in one hand while the other arm was being twisted. It took a disputed football match on August 23 this year for rural anger to explode into arson: this is Bengal. Facts began to rise from the ashes. The police discovered a cache of arms in the sylvan peace of Vedic spirituality, although 'discovery' might be too optimistic a word. There is little that the Calcutta Police does not know, even if there is little that it does about what it does know.

The acquired land included wakf property. The good news, then, is that Bengali corruption is transparently secular. The names involved - Abdur Rezzak Mollah, Manabendra Mukherjee (ministers in severe need of ayurvedic treatment), promoter Rajkishore Modi, Rashid Ali Mondal, Sibnath Banerjee, Nuruddin Gazi - are a hymn to Hindu-Muslim brotherhood. Greed is clearly the most powerful antidote to communalism: Death to capitalism! Long live greed! Greed is also non-partisan. An MLA from Mamata Banerjee's party has also been named, which might explain her silence. Trinamool and CPI(M) finally agree on something. Even Ms Banerjee, a spartan if ever there was one, cannot contest elections from the straw tower of an ashram.

Unsurprisingly, the local media, which for a decade had no time for investigations of its own, gave maximum play to ministerial ayurvedic treatment. Was the issue, then, greed or hypocrisy? In Delhi, where few claim to be paragons of personal virtue, the spa-story would have been a snigger on a news cycle. In Kolkata, it has wafted through innumerable conversations with that sardonic twitch that only a Bengali can manage to perfection.

Indian Marxists are trapped in a systemic flaw: hyper-honesty is inconsistent with ''bourgeois democracy''. The cost of a Lok Sabha election now runs into multiple millions. Political parties are not profit-earning corporations. Their overhand collections are a miniscule proportion of need; the balance is met by underhand arrangements. The CPI(M) tries a finesse through institutional collection, but even this needs middlemen. Money is a trading currency; there has to be a trade. Ministers get involved. Is it any surprise if this nexus extends to a periodic back-rub? Land is repeatedly at the centre of Bengal's controversies because traditional industry has been driven into the doldrums between stagnant management and self-centred unions. Since new arrivals like IT czars will not ladle out cash, the only value left to exploit is land. Land belongs either to institutions that can be manipulated, or insecure villagers who can be bullied into temptation.

Corruption is the preferred means of the get-rich-quick lobby (if the poor were corrupt, they would not remain poor). But is greed the only motivation? Greed is not India-specific. The extent of our venality may have a supplementary reason. We are, by temperament, a short-cut people. We do not like waiting for due process, whether in a project or towards a destination. Indian corruption could well find an explanation in Indian traffic. We instinctively seek a faster way, whether on a cow-clogged country lane or an incomplete super highway. The Indian driver does not believe in the sober limitations of take; he is a devotee of overtake. Cars do not create traffic jams; drivers with hyper libidos do.

The long cut is demeaning to the Indian ego. A Delhiwallah measures his importance by the number of short cuts he has wangled. A favour is a measure of both the benefactor's value and the beneficiary's influence. Some people wait till the last minute only to prove that time will wait for them.

The system creates hurdles since it knows that short-cutters will pay to cross them. Bribes feed the system; the system therefore knits a framework for bribes. A hundred rupees to a traffic cop climbs towards millions at the top. If you are really lucky, the ayurvedic massage comes free.

Appeared in Times of India - September 13, 2009

Indian Muslims want jobs, not Iftar

2009-09-12T14:44:00.000+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Indian Muslims want jobs, not Iftar

As was once noted by a garrulous, if not very innovative, politician, India has, just now, a Hindu President, a Muslim Vice President, a Sikh Prime Minister and a Christian President of the ruling Indian National Congress. I cannot recall Mrs Pratibha Patil, or indeed any of her Hindu predecessors, inviting Hindu politicians, diplomats, and an assortment of Delhi’s Hindu A-listers to a splendid Diwali dinner financed by the Government of India. Nor has Dr Manmohan Singh gathered the capital’s elite Sikh brethren for a commemorative repast on Baisakhi, when the Khalsa was born. Mrs Sonia Gandhi does not throw Christmas parties for archbishops, bishops, Christian politicians, diplomats and educationists at state expense. Just to be clear: thank God they don’t.

So why does the Vice President of India invite the great, as well as the not-so-glorious, Muslims for an Iftar party, as he did on 7 September? It needs to be stressed that this is not the Vice President’s personal decision. His office is merely the conduit for a Government ritual, which is why the state picked up the tab for the evening at Hyderabad House.

As if this was not enough, the Ministry of External Affairs has this year muscled its way into this food-heavy tribute to tokenism. It hosted an Iftar party on 9 September. I hope the various Government VIPs, led by S.M. Krishna and Shashi Tharoor, did not turn up wearing skull caps in order to look holier than thou. It would have made a quaint picture, though.

The reason for such artless public artifice is quite simple. Delhi’s political establishment takes the Iftar guests, mainly bundled from the local chapter of the Indian Muslim elite, for fools. It treats them as saps who need no more than an annual dinner to keep them onside. Perhaps the establishment knows what it is doing. Experience has probably shown that this “elite” is packed with people who use Ramadan as an opportunity for taking something from Government, rather than giving all they can to the poor. The Indian Muslim elite gets taken for a ride because it enjoys the prospect of being an establishment jockey in the race to nowhere.

The state-sponsored syrupy Iftar drama is not unique to the present lot; every administration in memory has staged it, including that of the BJP-heavy NDA. This patronising smear has become so institutionalised on the Delhi calendar that no one dares to query its legitimacy, need or rationale.

Perhaps the most cynical patron of Iftar parties was the late P.V. Narasimha Rao, who insisted on hosting them even after presiding over the destruction of the Babri mosque. Maybe he was not the most cynical: worse surely were the Muslim acolytes who fawned around him, desperately trying to catch his eye to seek some reward for their presence. Rao was good at throwing handouts towards anyone who had the look of a beggar.

The Ministry of External Affairs, to my knowledge, has till date kept itself aloof from the politics of Iftar. But some well-lit spark seems to have finally heard what the rest of Delhi has known for many years: that ambassadors of Muslim countries in particular, and the non-aligned world in general, have been offered a very cold shoulder, tantamount to indifference, while the mandarins have been running around building strategic relations with the West. Someone got the bright idea that Muslim envoys would start smiling again the moment they received a gilt-edged invitation to an Iftar.

Indian Muslims need jobs and justice, not Iftar parties.

Ambassadors need diplomatic engagement throughout the year, not an early dinner on one evening.

But the behaviour of Muslim elites across the world invites the cynicism of others. The exploitation of Ramadan has now become a deeply-rooted practice among the well-off. If the Islamic brotherhood wants to understand why so many Muslims nations are in such a mess, they only need to examine how their elite have upended the holiest month of the faith, one in which they are meant to turn to Allah and practise the highest values of the Quran — piety, charity, self-denial, sacrifice — and turned it into a month-long tamasha. Id ul Fitr, which is the culmination of Ramadan, means the Id of Fitra, or charity. Self-centred Muslims will surely be astonished to learn that hundreds of verses in the Holy Quran urge charity and kindness towards the underprivileged. There is not a single verse that permits you to cheat your way out of Ramadan. The Quran understands the need to postpone fasting due to travel or ill-health; it does not provide any leeway for hypocrisy.

There are Muslims who escape self-denial by reversing the clock. They turn the evening Iftar into a breakfast, rather than a breaking of the fast, and while away the night till the pre-dawn Sehri, which becomes a virtual dinner. Then they sleep through most of the day, waking up in the afternoon. This is a perversion of the spirit of Ramadan. If all it took to fast was to convert day into night, then we could have fasted through the year.

My friend Arif Mohammed Khan has brought to my notice a hadith, or tradition, in which the Prophet said, “The son of Adam has basic rights on three things: a house to live in, a piece of cloth to cover his body, a loaf of bread and water”. Zakat is a Quranic principle of the faith. It is an Islamic duty to provide for the impoverished. All you have to do is count the millions who are hungry in Muslim countries and societies to understand how far contemporary Muslims have travelled from their ideal. Muslims seek great merit by reciting the Quran during Ramadan, for this is the month in which Allah’s message was sent to our world. They need to spend more time trying to understand what the Quran’s verses mean.

When the young try to defy death

2009-09-06T15:04:00.002+05:30

When the young try to defy death
By M J Akbar

The ageing rarely die suddenly, for they do not take life for granted. The young, particularly when armoured by success, laugh away danger, until danger has the last laugh.

Youth is more than a statistic. Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was 60 years old, when the tired are supposed to retire. But he had a youthful demeanour, the energy, spirit and mind of a man who saw more horizons before the inescapable grave or pyre. Risk is built into such a mentality, for the young, by definition, dismiss death as a distant fact. Madhavrao Scindia and Rajesh Pilot, like YSR, saw themselves as young, and behaved with the joie de vivre of youth. Scindia, in another fated helicopter, challenged the elements, and Pilot, driving a light car, pressed his foot too hard on the pedal. YSR must have smiled in disdain when told that the weather would be inclement. Optimism is synonymous with youth. Pessimism, or its boring cousin, realism, is for the depressed and the faint-hearted.

An election victory is an unreliable measure of a politician's value. Rajasekhara Reddy's triumph in 2004 might not have been possible without the hard work he put in, but it could be argued that it was Chandrababu Naidu's loss as much as Reddy's gain. One of the by-laws of democracy is that every good Opposition needs the full cooperation of a terrible government to succeed. The true worth of a politician is known only by his ability to manage the tedious task of administration. Victory prances on banners; there are no headlines for good governance. It is visible only after five years, during the battle for re-election. Rajasekhara Reddy was not without his share of controversy; his opponents accused him of corruption. But he won in 2009 because he understood that the key to delivery is what has been done for the poor. Fashionable economists sneer at populism. Any sensible politician prefers popularity to a certificate from the World Bank.

His death is a blow to his government, obviously, but an incalculable loss to his party, for he twice delivered the fulcrum of the Congress presence in the Lok Sabha. Factionalism was hardly the sole sin of the Andhra Congress, but it was the rampant crime. If you have any sympathy for the ruling party you don't want to know what the Reddys and Raos used to be up to. Their humiliation at the hands of N T Rama Rao intensified the civil wars, rather than calming them down; and the elevation of P V Narasimha Rao as the first prime minister from the state did nothing to improve the culture of this fractious lot. All that Rao did as prime minister was to add another faction to the Andhra Congress, this one headed by a less-than-competent son.

Rajasekhara Reddy found both ends of the solution. He won an election, without which factionalism cannot be controlled; and then he assuaged hunger on all sides. It is a stupid victor who believes in winner-take-all.

The danger before the Congress is obvious. A localized earthquake has scattered what had been built; rebuilding is so much more difficult, since moorings have been displaced. It will be virtually impossible for any successor to maintain internal peace, because we are back to a party of lesser-known equals. Irrespective of who gets the job - the suave and senior S Jaipal Reddy, the rugged veteran K Rosaiah who has served in every Congress government since 1978 and has been made caretaker leader, or the young and ambitious Reddy son Y S Jagan - there will be resentment among those who have been denied. Jagan has created a media sprawl across the state that could be particularly useful in any factional feud, and he will also consider himself beneficiary of the sympathy accruing from his father's early death. No politician considers himself an untested peer's inferior. Since only victory in an election will establish the next chief minister's credentials, and there are more than four years left for that, you can do your own political math.

Rajasekhara Reddy was a Christian; a close relative of his is a modern evangelist. He went to Jerusalem on a thanksgiving pilgrimage after his election victory. As a believer, perhaps he should have remembered that there is an angel of death. When you feel young, you never really worry if the angel leaves its visiting card behind after a close call. Three years ago Rajasekhara Reddy got into a hired helicopter at Giddalur and flew into dense cloud and incessant rain over Srisailam. His pilot dropped height, and his chief security officer studied maps he happened to be carrying to discover the nearest point at which a helicopter could land. The angel is rarely cheated twice. And the young are not invincible.

Appeared in Times of India - September 06, 2009

The wisdom of Dharma

2009-09-05T14:45:00.002+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: The wisdom of Dharma

Wisdom has a great advantage over philosophy. It is simple. Philosophy is so often tortured by the human mind that its meditations become a maze. We become so enraptured by the complexities of the maze, so fascinated by its labyrinths that we forget that we once had a destination. Wisdom is a straight line: it is the shortest distance between question and answer.

Such thoughts were prompted by an email from a friend at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, who sent a verse from the Mahabharata:

“Dharmam yo badhate dharmo na sa dharmah kudharmkah;
avirodhattu yo dharmah, sa dharmah Satyavikrama.

Any dharma [way of life, or religion], that violates another’s dharma is not true dharma. It is kudharma, or bad dharma. That dharma which flourishes without harming the interest of others is indeed the true dharma, O Satyavikrama!”

Why has this fundamental principle of Mahabharata, an essential text of Hinduism, been ignored by those organisations who seek a political philosophy for the nation in the name of Hinduism? It is possible that politicians are so busy doing their politics that they remain ignorant of the faith that they so readily profess. But that would be a kind interpretation. Most politicians ignore morality because cynicism has made them amoral.

As the swirl continues over ideological and personality clashes among the titans who were born in a colonised India divided into some six hundred pieces, and won freedom with just one division, new questions are emerging from previously silent corners of memory. Incidentally, it is important for our perspective to remember that India was not a single political entity under the British, and even the creation of a federal polity after the Government of India Act of 1935, by which the Princely States sent representatives (nominated rather than elected) to the same legislature in Delhi as British India, did not make them part of a single political unit.

An old query has crept out of the historic woodwork. Mahatma Gandhi framed his concept of freedom around the dream of a Rama Rajya. How could he expect Muslims, who did not believe in Lord Rama, to relate to a Rama Rajya? Was Gandhi communal as well?

It may seem anachronistic now but Gandhi was convinced that politics without religion was immoral. He believed that faith provided the moral compass essential for a lifetime’s journey through public service. Gandhi demanded the highest virtues from his disciples, extending not only to non-violence and financial honesty but also celibacy. There were not many takers for the last; and you might have reason to ask whether he had not confused an ashram with a freedom movement. But Gandhi’s commitment to religion did not mean commitment to a single religion. In his Rama Rajya, every faith had full freedom and complete equality. His prayer meetings were not just about his beloved Gita; there was space for the Holy Quran, the Bible and the Guru Granth Saheb as well. He could never understand why anyone should misunderstand this; and it pained him when opponents misrepresented him, sneered at his gentle idealism and challenged his pacifism with the undisguised threat of violence. Lord Rama was an ideal, an image that communicated easily with the majority of India. But there was no aggression in his concept of divinity, and there was always equal space for the other. The Mahabharata was his favourite text, from which he learnt the true meaning of dharma. Gandhi’s Rama Rajya was a realm of harmony, not a continual battlefield.

The post-Gandhi Congress abandoned “Rama Rajya” for at least three reasons: the term had become a negative with Muslims; Nehru was uncomfortable with a religious idiom; and you needed to be as morally secure as Gandhi to promise a “Rama Rajya”. But why did the RSS and the BJP, who wanted a “Hindu India”, shy away from Gandhi’s formulation? Because their ideal was different from Gandhi’s. Paradoxically, the “Hindutva” forces had modelled themselves on Pakistan: they wanted to treat Indian Muslims and Christians in precisely the same way that Pakistan was treating its Hindus and Christians, as second-class citizens.

Whether such politics gets you votes or not is beside the point. The relevant factor is that such thinking is antagonistic to the idea of India as a modern democracy. Discrimination on the basis of faith is what happens in a theocracy, not a democracy. You have to be extremely stupid to imitate any neighbour with suicidal tendencies.

What Gandhi understood in 1919, when he launched his first major political onslaught against the British Empire, is as valid nine decades later. India can flourish only in a spirit of conflict resolution, and not through conflict escalation, or conflict perpetuation. The young are far more clear-sighted about this than the middle aged or the old, for the young have learnt from the mistakes of their fathers.

A simulated debate has been whisked up about the takeover of the BJP by the RSS: the two were never apart. The issue is not whether BJP will shift gear towards a philosophy of conciliation, but whether the RSS will do so. They could not hope for a better starting point: the Mahabharata.

Needed most: A strong Opposition

2009-08-30T15:09:00.002+05:30

Needed most: A strong Opposition
By M J Akbar

Any democracy is hobbled without an Opposition. Are we condemned to replicate Haryana at the national level — where a government wheezes, gasps and limps triumphantly to the finish line because there is no other horse in the race?

Since the BJP has not finished its debate on 1947, it will be some time before it reaches 2009. With the Left neutered, and the Middle chasing its tail around a cemetery, what options does a voter have in the meantime?

The Left, which could have been taken seriously had it taken itself seriously, reminds one of an anecdote which should be better-known. The ever-punctual Comrade Gorbachev, who huffed and puffed so hard that he brought the whole Soviet house down, was once late for a meeting with a French delegation. He explained to his guests that he had been delayed by a problem in agriculture. When did the problem begin, asked the solicitous French. ‘‘In 1917,’’ replied Gorbachev.

Any democracy is hobbled without an Opposition. Are we condemned to replicate Haryana at the national level — where a government wheezes, gasps and limps triumphantly to the finish line because there is no other horse in the race? Haryana is not a particularly reassuring template. In the turbulence between 1967 and 1972, its ‘aya ram-gaya ram’ defections strategy infected democracy so badly that it destroyed the credibility of non-Congress parties. It is remarkable that Bhajan Lal, who once defected to the Congress with all his MLAs and the office typewriter, should still be a player in state elections. Now that he has allied with Mayawati, he can legitimately claim to have seen everything, been everywhere. She must have been a child when he was chief minister. However, nostalgia does not buy votes. Votes go to those who sell a future, not those who re-brand the past.

Nature and politics have one thing in common: they both abhor a vacuum. In some states, the Congress is doing its best to create its own Opposition. It has firmly rejected another pathetic overture from Lalu Prasad Yadav. Yadav has so much egg on his face that he can breakfast continuously from now till the next assembly polls. In Maharashtra, the Congress has begun to taunt its ally Sharad Pawar as the genie who bottled the sugar and opened the cap on price rise. The Congress is relishing a stalemate in which its primary intention is to make its mate look stale. Pawar’s reaction would make a sheep look sheepish.

It is useful to remember, however, that some sheep have been known to change their clothing at the opportune moment. The Congress has, cleverly, taken out some insurance by investing in the next generation: the daughters of Pawar and P A Sangma have a much better equation with Rahul Gandhi than the fathers have with Mrs Sonia Gandhi.

Although Congress numbers are less than half of what Rajiv Gandhi carried into the Lok Sabha in 1985, the comatose inertia of Opposition parties has convinced most Congress leaders that they can replicate Rajiv Gandhi’s achievement in the general elections of 2014. Moreover, the Opposition leaders are two decades older, some having fought their last battles and others in their penultimate round, while their leader will be fresh and 44.

More important, the major Opposition parties seem trapped in either geographical or ideological limitations, with their cadre having become part-asset and part-liability. Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose political skills should not be underestimated in a crisis, and who put them on display in a feisty performance in the last Lok Sabha session, has been unable to grow outside Uttar Pradesh. The ‘Yadav’ alliance with Lalu slips continually on the quicksand of the latter’s temperament. The BJP has reinforced its image of conflict by serial civil wars that are breathtaking for their irrelevance. The Left has slipped to a point where its candidate lost her deposit in a Kolkata seat because no one in Bengal understands what Buddhadev Bhattacharya represents anymore, apart from a fibreless diet of good intentions.

The situation is akin to 1985-86. But nature, averse to a vacuum, then threw up an individual to serve as a catalyst. A V P Singh can only emerge from the centre of the spectrum. A claimant from Right or Left has to re-position himself. Atal Bihari Vajpayee became acceptable because he stepped left of the BJP on social issues, and right of the Marxists on economic policy. That is where the sweet spot of Indian politics is located.

Individual dynamics require special circumstances, not to mention the heavy propulsion of hidden political boosters. Singh succeeded because he had terribly long arms; he held the CPM by one hand, and the BJP by the other, while he reinvented himself as an honest politician, sympathetic to minority concerns. It required too much heavy engineering and the end product was so unstable that it kept Delhi politics off-balance for a decade.

History does not repeat itself, but does it imitate itself? The answer will take a while.

-Appeared in Times of India - August 30, 2009

Death at Harrods

2009-08-29T14:45:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Death at Harrods

Can this possibly be true?

On 25 August 1909 the New York Times reported: “As a result of the death of Miss Helenora Catherine Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple, sister of Sir Edward Graeme Elphinstone-Darlrymple, during a dry shampoo with carbon tetrachloride at Harrods Stores, charges of manslaughter were yesterday preferred at Westminster Police court against Mr William H. Eardly, the manager of the department, and Miss Beatrice Clarke, one of the assistants. Miss Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple went to Harrods for a dry shampoo on July 12. She was warned she might feel faint…”

I am not doubting the fact of death [why isn’t there an Agatha Christie novel called Death at Harrods?]. Or that Sir Edward had enough clout with the local constabulary to send William and Beatrice up for trial. But could anyone really have had a surname like Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple? The answer must be yes. The London correspondent of New York Times might have been forgiven for getting a manslaughter mixed up with a mere tort. But no news editor would have used his copy again if he got a multi-barrelled name from the British aristocracy wrong. And if his spelling is as accurate, then William the writer of many many books has surely forgotten an “r” in his Dalrymple.

Can you rule an Empire with short names? Roman Emperors kept their names terse, but since they promoted themselves into gods, anything above three syllables became unwieldy on the common tongue. How do you worship a Fotheringay-Fotheringay Phipps? You don’t. You just throw bread rolls at him at Drone’s off Piccadilly.

The British ruling class was not alone in puling on the appendices to a Helenora [itself an affected extension of the more working class Helen, I presume]. If you wrote the full name of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, there would not be much space left over for this column. Reasons for longitude varied with culture. The Mughal dad could not stop praising his newborn prince; each additional word was an adjective. When the prince grew up, killed his siblings and plonked himself on the throne, he could not stop exalting himself and added a few pearls of admiration to the already long-winded paragraph that was his name.

The British yardstick for yardlong names was different. It was advertisement of the family tree. So Helenora was telling you that the family fortunes were established by old Darlrymple, and further fattened by Elphinstone and Horn. I don’t suppose they included the failures in-between the genealogical line. There may have been a Barrington, for example, who sold the family castle to pay off his gambling debts at White’s, but you could not keep him on par with Elphinstone, who slogged hard in the East India Company and bought back a country estate. And if Elphinstone turned out to be the chap who governed Bombay in the old days, then it was precisely the kind of family connection that would impress Scotland Yard when you wanted to file a case for manslaughter.

Logically, the lower down you go on the social order, the shorter your surname becomes. The John Carpenters, not to mention the John Smiths, must have been mere Johns until the era when labour was treated with dignity.

In India, Hindu caste names are a dead giveaway of origin. But those promoted to prominence by the British happily traded in the past for the present. “Chowdhury”, or “Malik”, are titles and thus used across the religious divide. Indian Muslims, technically, did not have caste names, but if you were an Ansari from east Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, you could be more or less sure that there was artisan blood in your veins.

Helenora’s tragic appointment with her hair-dresser took place in 1909. Five years later the First World War began. It was after this Great War, with its millions upon millions of wasted lives, that the pomposity of the British aristocracy began to dribble away, in my estimation. They had killed working class boys on an unimaginable scale in order to preserve their class-ridden societies, and a reaction was inevitable. The English lords had ruled beyond their sell-by date, just like the Mughals a century earlier. The barrels began to drop off the surnames, slowly, piecemeal, but surely. What could not be destroyed by war was surely erased by the floating notes of P.G. Wodehouse’s laughter, although Wodehouse was also in love with the class he teased out of existence. Even a Tobias prefers to call himself a Toby these days. He probably would not get a restaurant booking in the name of “Tobias”.

Harrods is still there, of course. But if parts of the great English store occasionally look like side lanes of a Cairo bazaar, there is a valid explanation. It is now owned by an Egyptian who is convinced that his son was bumped off by the British secret service because he was about to marry Diana, Princess of Wales and ruin the bloodline of the British ruling class for ever. Harrods customers are now more likely to be Asian tourists than the British gentry. The only institutions with long names now are law firms. [There is much anguish in Yale at this moment because the American law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy are not hiring. I would have used an ampersand in the law firm names, but I can’t find one on my keyboard.]

The old order giveth way to the new.