M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist

Andhra split opens up a Pandora's box

2009-12-13T15:42:00.002+05:30

Andhra split opens up a Pandora's box
By M J Akbar

The public school of politics has only one subject in its tutorials: Events. The big boys of Delhi have been playing truant, lulled by an imposter's mantra. Two victories in five years convinced them that delay is a solution.

Do not underestimate the siren call of procrastination. Fudge always remains an option when you have to straddle irreconcilables like partition and unity demands. There could still be an effort to delay the process necessary for the creation of Telangana through simulated disputes, like over the status of Hyderabad, which, geographically and historically is the natural capital of Telangana.

If Delhi had been as worried over the climate change in Hyderabad as it was over climate change in Copenhagen, it would have foreseen the tsunami. But Union Home Minister P Chidambaram did not whisper the word 'Telangana' until he was compelled to talk of nothing else. The speed with which the government slipped from stonewall to capitulation was bound to trigger anger in those who felt they had lost out. The government had five years to manage reconciliation; it did nothing. The Congress made a deal with K Chandrashekhar Rao in 2004 in order to defeat Chandrababu Naidu, and forgot the boatman once it had crossed the river. Complacency is a criminal offence in public life. The verdict may be delayed, but will not be denied.

In 2009, two constituencies tipped Congress into the comfort zone where it was seemingly safe from the threat of foes and nagging of friends - Andhra Pradesh and the Muslim vote. Within six months both have sent a powerful message: Deliver or face the consequences.

Drift has boxed the government into a lose-lose situation. If Congress had accepted Telangana a day before Rao began his fast, Rao would have been history, rather than an historic figure. Delhi has also sent a dangerous signal to half a dozen disparate stakeholders in a new map of India: Mere crying won't help; in order to get milk you need to pick up the kitchen knife and threaten murder or suicide. As also, that milk comes in cartons rather than by the glass. The hills of Darjeeling have ears, as do the sugarcane stalks of western Uttar Pradesh.

Behind all the sound, fury, mistakes and exultation, the promise of Telangana marks a significant but largely unnoticed shift in the dynamics of federalism. Language was the basis on which the States Reorganization Commission, consisting of Sayyid Fazl Ali, H N Kunzru and K M Pannikar re-fashioned India's internal geography. The untidy parts were sorted out under public pressure - Maharashtra in 1960, Punjab in 1966 - but once again on the basis of language. Only hill regions and the North East were offered criteria that were at a slight variance.

The shift came, logically enough, when the nation's priorities changed. Once it was evident that no regional language, or culture, was under threat from unitary pressures, language melted as a focal point of identity. The new federal politics is determined by economics. Telangana and the rest of Andhra speak the same language, but have diametrically conflicting economic interests. Telangana, in fact, accuses coastal Andhra of exploiting its resources. This fundamental change was evident in 2000, when Uttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh were created. Parent and newborn shared the same language. Indeed, the absence of fuss nine years ago is a template in consensus building, in the difference between negotiation and appeasement. Wounds were treated before gangrene could set in.

The seed of every demand lies in the perception of economic neglect, in the belief of a people that they have been left out of the story of rising India. Small then becomes sensible because big has proved to be bogus.

The ferment in the second decisive Congress constituency, Muslims, also has everything to do with economics. The dialectic is faith-based because Muslims have a nationwide presence rather than any specific space. Dr Manmohan Singh has sought to pre-empt a crisis by promising to table the Ranganath Mishra Commission report before the end of the current session of Parliament, but that will be only the beginning of his problems. The Commission has recommended 15% reservation in all government jobs, educational seats and resources for minorities, 10% of which is to be allotted for Muslims. Muslims will treat this as a benchmark and demand to know what action has been taken. None so far; since any action might fuel an equal and opposite reaction. Inaction has served Congress well, for Muslims did not raise the matter in the last elections since they understood the political fallout. But that alibi has been used and cannot be recycled.

The Congress dilemma is familiar to those who win elections: A promise that restores you, can always return to haunt you.

Appeared in Times of India - December 13, 2009

Muscular Instability

2009-12-13T15:36:00.000+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Muscular Instability

Can a stable government be a weak government? Yes. There is no compulsory correlation. Strength comes from concern, purpose and commitment, while fragility is the first manifestation of complacence — and sometimes the popular mood kicks in, turning the first into the second. Defeat in the China war punctured the strongest government we have had, Jawaharlal Nehru’s.

Mrs Indira Gandhi’s tenure can be divided into three phases: January 1966 to the 1971 general elections; then up to the Emergency and the elections of 1977; and the final, tragic term between January 1980 and October 1984. She inherited a government with the lowest ever majority, and then proceeded to turn it into a minority by splitting the Congress. Bangladesh apart, the most decisive period was when she was in a minority. She reshaped the domestic agenda, breaking almost as many moulds as had been nurtured in the previous two decades. Ironically, it was when she became a near demi-god, after Bangladesh in December 1971, that she lost control of the tides of public opinion. By 1973 India was in ferment; by 1974, in revolt.

Opposition parties have rarely been the principal architects of challenge to government, even if they do end up the principal beneficiaries. In 1972, the Left was defeated and sulking in Bengal; the Socialists were bickering and split [that has not changed] and the Jan Sangh was a flickering lamp in pockets of Hindu-Muslim antagonism without much oil. Mrs Gandhi returned to power in January 1980 with an astonishing majority, but her government never got into second gear and finally stalled over Punjab and Assam. In this phase too, the traditional Opposition parties had little to do with the establishment’s disarray. Rajiv Gandhi led the most powerful majority in Parliament’s history but in three years his government was defensive, and by the fourth year, immobile. Each time, the people mobilized, in one way or the other, while the regular Opposition leaders spent time in self-important confabulations.

Narasimha Rao, in contrast, never had a majority, even after he purchased one. He stumbled from crisis to calamity, propelled largely by cynicism. But despite instability in both Parliament as well as on the street, he managed to navigate economic reforms through turbulence, leaving an important legacy.

An election victory does not necessarily breed complacency in the sinews of authority, but re-election almost certainly does. The high-five of a renewed mandate persuades politicians to believe that they are sitting on a peak from which they cannot be moved for twenty years. I have no idea why they believe they have been given twenty years of eternity; maybe the human imagination, restricted by the limitations of lifespans, cannot be self-delusional beyond that. But the moment you step into that self-satisfied zone, your descent begins.

The Andhra crisis is a self-inflicted wound. When Telangana leader K. Chandrashekhar Rao began his fast unto death, or at least unto partition, he was treated with such supreme indifference that no minister in Delhi even bothered to treat it as a problem. The earth was warming in Hyderabad, but the statements and newspaper headlines were only about climate change in Copenhagen. Rao was dismissed as an irritant without a cause. After all, the Congress had just triumphed for a second time in the state. I suspect that the complete disconnect with Delhi multiplied the anger and brought Osmania University’s students out. Youth provide critical mass to any momentum and, as we have seen in the past, there is enough volatility in the state to induce the ultimate sacrifice of suicide. Rao himself could no more have ended his fast than he could have abandoned his dream of a separate state; it would have been political suicide. Those with a memory know that the Telugu speaking areas of Madras Presidency were merged into the Nizam’s Telugu domain as a result of a fast, by a Gandhian called Potti Sriramulu. Nehru allowed him to die, by 15 December; but even the enormous credibility of Nehru and Congress in 1953 could not stop the realisation of the demand. Sriramulu achieved in death what he could not in life, and forced Nehru to accept the principle of linguistic states. Rao has achieved what he may never have obtained without a Russian roulette gamble. The Congress of 2009 had neither the wisdom to negotiate on the first day of the fast, nor the strength to let the fast continue. The high command succumbed with startling speed, signalling to Gorkhaland, Vidarbha, Harit Pradesh and Bundelkhand that if they keep their eyes open and focused the government will blink.

Is this the point at which the Manmohan Singh government begins to bleed from an Achilles heel? Much depends on how well the Prime Minister and Mrs Sonia Gandhi bandage the breach, but the Andhra story is going to be in play for a while and will expose the contradictions inherent in a unitary national party that was unable to manage an epochal change. If the Andhra Congress bleeds from a local civil war the stain will spread.

Tension is good for governance; taut nerves keep your body on its toes, and the mind alert. After this year’s general election, the tension fizzled out from government, and rushed directly into the Opposition. Tension, by the way, is not good for Opposition, as is pretty obvious, isn’t it? If the government does not recover its balance we could have a very curious dilemma: authority is in disarray, and the Opposition spread-eagled. But the Indian people will be in array.

A Date with Theocracy

2009-12-08T16:54:00.001+05:30

A Date with Theocracy
M.J. Akbar

Barack Obama is clearly a post-modernist Commander-in-Chief. He announced the date of defeat in the Afghan war on the day he sent more troops in the hope of victory. The day American forces begin to leave Afghanistan in 2011, as promised by President Obama, the Taliban will begin its countdown to Kabul.

It is now clear to the Taliban what has been obvious to many observers. Obama is not interested in an American victory in Afghanistan by 2011. He is interested in an Obama victory in America in 2012. He wants to campaign as the President who brought the boys home without giving the impression that he has been weak in the process. He inherited an Afghan war with some 10,000 American soldiers in combat. That figure has been short-tracked upwards to 100,000, partly because Obama purchased his way into the muscular pro-war segment of the American vote by criticising Iraq and upgrading Afghanistan into the war of necessity. He is paying his dues to that section of American opinion by fighting a cosmetic war. The Taliban have often said that while NATO has a clock, they have time. In 2011, irrespective of ground conditions, the NATO clock will go into reverse sweep.

The enigma of this Afghan war, the fifth against a Western power since 1840, is located exactly where it was in the other four. It lies in the meaning of victory and defeat. For the occupier, victory means subjugation of the ruling authority to its will. For the defenders, it means the departure of foreign troops from Afghan foreign soil. Afghan fighters in the 19th century did not want to shape the way the British Raj should be run, and they resented the idea that they should be told how Afghanistan should be run. In the 20th century, the jihadis did not want to destroy Communism in Moscow [that they played a great role in actually doing so is incidental]. They simply did not want Communist soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar and Mazaar-i-Sharif.

The Afghan war of the 21st century could have been, and should have been, different, because a terrorist group with sanctuary from Taliban provoked America. Eight years later, roles are getting reversed for the Taliban and its allies have, increasingly, in the Afghan mind, begun to occupy nationalist space. Washington made a basic error at the outset, when it confused Al Qaeda with the whole of Afghanistan, gradually shifting the focal point of the war. This was understandable in the heat of 2001, but less so with the passage of time. Privately, Pervez Musharraf would surely have suggested this but subtleties were lost on the Bush White House.

Obama may be erring in the other direction. He has announced the three pillars of his Afghan policy: a strategic partnership with Pakistan empowered by finance and weapons; the creation of a “military condition” within 18 months that will enable “transition”; and “a civilian surge that reinforces positive action”. The third is the kind of gobbledygook that bemuses friends and consoles office-bearers of the speechwriters’ union. Does Obama expect Hamid Karzai to surge towards Kandahar in 2011, wafting on doves of peace?

The biggest problem may lie in the first proposition. Pakistan does not have the good fortune of being 8,000 miles from Afghanistan. Islamabad’s ruling elite, including the armed forces, will display full commitment in the war against Al Qaeda, where and when it can be found, and against the Pak Taliban, because both are serious threats to the Pakistan state and system. But it will have unexpressed reservations about America’s war against the Afghan Taliban, since the latter have been and will continue to be Pakistan’s ally in the geopolitics of South Asia. Pakistan’s war within its own country has become, willy-nilly, America’s war, but America’s war in Afghanistan has not become Pakistan’s war. Washington, for reasons unknown and incomprehensible, does not get this.

In fact, America’s primary partner in the war against the Afghan Taliban should be India, not Pakistan, since both nations have an ideological commitment against the forces of theocracy, as well as a strategic interest in keeping Taliban out of Kabul. Pakistan has no such motivation. The best period in the troubled history of Pak-Afghan relations was when Taliban was in power, since the Taliban looked at foreign policy through the prism of Islamic brotherhood rather than just the compulsions of national interest.

The real war in Afghanistan is between modernity and theocracy, but the wrong side is winning that battle. In the last eight years, for many Afghans, modernity has become synonymous with corruption, cronyism and non-Pakhtun warlords — the three hallmarks of the Karzai regime — while the Taliban has revived its image as God-fearing, honest, clean and able to offer stability and security in the villages. It is an American tragedy that while it seeks friends across the world who reflect its own values, it makes friends with those who ruin its reputation.

WHY MUMBAI WON’T WAIT TILL 2025

2009-12-08T16:47:00.001+05:30

WHY MUMBAI WON’T WAIT TILL 2025
by M J Akbar (In Covert 1-15th)

Going by the dubious precedence set by Justice M.S. Liberhan, a half-truth about the catastrophic events of Mumbai 26/11 should become available to Parliament and the Indian public by 2025. Bad luck if you want the full truth, or you want it within your lifetime; you can never hurry a judge determined to be slow.

A fate worse than death awaits the judge whose conscience cannot be purchased at the going rate of a Government bungalow in Delhi. In Mumbai, Justice Srikrishna delivered his findings on the violent consequences of the Babri demolition, a far more difficult and sensitive assignment, well in time. His report has not been allowed formally into the public domain, since it tells the truth, and truth is injurious to the health of a Government that was complicit in the mismanagement of the riots.

The duty of an enquiry is not to restate the obvious, but to repair any faults in the system through a thorough diagnosis of the malady, to lay out the findings fearlessly, and hold the powerful accountable where there has been a violation of trust or a betrayal of the responsibilities of office. A judicial enquiry is much more than a police investigation into guilt. It invokes the highest sense of justice, which is far more than legality. We have become indifferent to the corruption at the lower levels of the criminal-justice system. Are we now being trained to accept partiality and collusion in a judicial enquiry? If nothing is sacrosanct, we will be subject to the dictatorship of the profane.

We did not need 17 years of casuistry to reveal something that was visibly evident within 17 minutes of the first assault on the dome and structure of the Babri mosque on 6 December 1992 – that the BJP, RSS and Shiv Sena were involved. They had led the emotional movement that climaxed on 6 December. BJP leaders like Vinay Katiyar, the alleged mastermind, wear it as a badge of pride. Justice Liberhan has done us no favours by “concluding” what was reported in every newspaper the next day. But he has done the nation and the people a huge disfavour by twisting and contorting elements of the truth in order to hide the conscious collusion of Prime P.V. Narasimha Rao, his home minister S.B. Chavan and eventually, through a conspiracy of silence, the whole Cabinet. It requires a tremendous backward leap of logic to find Rao innocent and hold those who were working to protect the Babri mosque, like leaders of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, guilty. It is true that a few Muslim leaders were shrill in some speeches, but so what? Emotions were high, and their tenor was nothing compared to the rhetoric of others. Incredible as it might seem, this is one of the findings of the Liberhan report.

WITH THE credibility of enquiry commissions in tatters, it is hardly surprising that the protagonists and victims of the barbarous terrorist invasion of Mumbai a year ago are not waiting for any Government-sponsored investigation to run its course. I presume they do not, for starters, want to wait for 17 years. Officers at the very top of the hierarchy, like former police commissioner Hassan Gafoor, have begun to tell their versions to a hungry media. This is not the whole of it. Leaking by police officers on an off-the-record basis has reached monsoon proportions in Mumbai. This constitutes, in theory, an astonishing collapse of discipline; in practice, the Government is utterly incapable of taking any action because anything it does will also expose its own sins of omission and commission.

Widows of martyred police officers have no faith in the Government’s ability or desire to establish a credible narrative of what actually transpired, and why. They are publishing their impression of events, backed up by their individual research, like Vinita Kamte, wife of Assistant Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte, who died doing his duty while others chose survival over challenge. They are filling a black hole into which the Government has sought to consign that terrible memory. In the process, allegations have been made against serving police officers that cannot be ignored; they must be investigated, and the officers either exonerated or punished.

The reluctance of the politician to pursue the past can be easily understood. Much drama surrounded the resignation of the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Where is he now? Why, in the Union Cabinet, of course, a loyal colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, responsible for managing the whole nation rather than just one State. The resignation drama of 2008 was highly effective, since it staved off any punishment at the polls in 2009. Politicians are certain of one thing if they are certain of anything at all: the voter has a short memory.

Ruling party politicians might find it useful to recall, however, a well-known rule of democracy. When Opposition parties fail to play their role, the people become the Opposition. This takes a long time, and people give their Government a very long rope. But every rope is finite. And a rope can so easily become a noose

Bhopal: 25 years of sheer apathy

2009-12-06T17:47:00.000+05:30

Bhopal: 25 years of sheer apathy
By M J Akbar

Every anniversary of a trauma, whether Bhopal, Bhagalpur, Bluestar, Ahmedabad or the anti-Sikh riots on Delhi's streets, turns into a struggle between anger and amnesia. It is a no-contest. Amnesia wins every time.

Eyeless in Bhopal. Heartless in communal riots. Clueless in Ayodhya. Mindless in government. And, maybe, pointless in rage. Perhaps the determining fact is that everyone, apart from the victim, has a vested interest in silence since the guilt, active or passive, extends beyond the obviously culpable. Governments might inspire and abet riots, but they are never possible without participation of the people. Every political party has an inconvenient truth in its history.

What, however, explains the callous indifference to the perpetrators of the Bhopal tragedy, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical? Twenty-five years ago, Union Carbide's factory in Bhopal spat out 40 tons of aerial poison in the form of methyl isocyanate, killing nearly 4,000 immediately and some 15,000 since then. It was a crime of greed, since this gas was used because it was cheaper than safer alternatives. The cover-up was dubious, at the very least. Carbide attributed the accident to sabotage by a disgruntled employee who was never named. This evasion was prelude to escape. In 2001, Dow Chemical bought Carbide for $11.6 billion.

Dow priced the Indian dead at an average of $2,200 per corpse, or around Rs 1 lakh at today's exchange rates. The blinded and maimed were dismissed with a compensation of $550 on average. That, explained a Dow spokeswoman, was "plenty good for an Indian". When Dow Chemical sets the price for Indian lives, we natives had better accept with folded hands. How much, incidentally, do you think your infant's eyes are worth? Raghu Rai, who gave the world the iconic image of Bhopal, of a dead child's face, could have provided the answer, but which establishment, political or corporate, has time for a photographer's pain?

Our governments, whether led by Congress or BJP, made the usual thundery noise in public and, in private, cooperated with Carbide/Dow Jones, starting from the day Carbide chief Warren Anderson was airlifted out of Bhopal to escape local wrath. Over time, even the noise has become a passing perfunctory statement. We have never asked for Anderson's extradition, although there is an international arrest warrant against him. Is Anderson hiding in the Amazon forest? No. He is living in a luxurious American suburb. Why should American authorities worry about accountability if we don't? Our unstated reason has been that action against Anderson would frighten foreign investors. Why let a few thousand corpses interfere with the balance sheet?

In 2006, Dow wrote to America's then ambassador in India, thanking him for obtaining our government's assurance that Dow would not be held liable for the mass murder of Bhopalis. Dow should now send a letter to our present minister of state for environment, who went to Bhopal to jeer at those who are still protesting against continuing death from left-over toxic waste. According to critics, from 15 to 30 people are still dying every month.

Dow Chemicals dare not be as casual about Americans. In 2002, it set aside over two billion dollars to cover Carbide's asbestos contamination liabilities. An American cough is far, far more expensive than an Indian life. Why? Because America cares for Americans. The poor in America have won their right to justice, and every company knows that it cannot sweet-talk its way through sleepwalkers in power.
If there is any explanation for Delhi's fudge-and-fuss approach, it can only lie in the Indian elite's very real indifference to the poor. What, one wonders, would have been the reaction if Carbide had leaked its poison over Lutyens' Delhi rather than five kilometers from the old Bhopal city? Would Anderson have spent 25 years in Tihar rather than a villa in Hampton's? You can bet your last silver dollar that Dow would have been both poorer and more contrite.

Abdul Jabbar Khan, convenor of the Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sangathan, had much to say to the media as he led a rally from the homes of the dead to the death factory on the 25th anniversary. One sentence said as much as was needed: "We got no justice, no adequate compensation and not enough compassion." He was expecting justice from a meandering legal system, compensation from a caustic foreign company - and compassion from fellow-Indians. Of the three, the last hurts most.

Media has done what it could. The Times of India has done some moving reportage of the 25th anniversary in the last few days. It would be interesting to find out, possibly through market research, whether the readers of the nation's most powerful newspaper have been moved at all.

Appeared in Times of India - December 6, 2009

Liberhan: 17 years and few surprises

2009-11-29T17:29:00.001+05:30

Liberhan: 17 years and few surprises
By M J Akbar

A mere handful of professions are honoured with an honorific that survives beyond the office. Priests, judges, armed services officers, professors and doctors, of both the medical and academic disciplines: that’s about it. Journalists, even editors, and politicians, even cabinet ministers, would invite ridicule if they handed out visiting cards marked ‘Editor X’ or ‘Cabinet Minister Y’. Indians are, at best, ambivalent about media and politics. They respect our guardians of law, knowledge and security. There is a new tendency among former envoys to add ‘Ambassador’ before their name, a practice borrowed from America, but this is a title snatched from vanity rather than bestowed by popular acclaim.

Ego sometimes persuades a pompous politician to flaunt a bogus ‘Dr’ on his nameplate. This is not a reward for academic brilliance but an upgrade to a peacock feather, the ‘honorary doctorate’, a worthless piece of paper handed out by an institution desperate for attention. However, this does not matter too much, since we do not expect a high level of honesty from our politicians. Only two letters separate use from abuse, so there will always be a quack preening himself in the garb of a doctor. But when a person held in high esteem dilutes the trust reposed in him, it affects the collective reputation of the brotherhood.

Justice M S Liberhan did not need 17 years and a thousand pages to tell us what has been public knowledge since December 6, 1992. The Babri mosque was not torn down in the dark of night. It was brought down slowly, stone by stone, in Sunday sunlight, before hundreds of journalists, to the cheers of countless thousands of kar sewaks in and around Ayodhya. The mosque was not dynamited in a minute; it was demolished by crowbar and shovel.

Of course, senior leaders of the BJP and RSS were present, for they were kar sewaks as well. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was not there, but he was in nearby Lucknow, albeit a reluctant guest, but unable to refuse the invitation to the party. Newspapers the next day, and magazines the next weekend, published their pictures, some of which became iconic. We did not need a wait of 17 years to learn that Vinay Katiyar was responsible: he has been claiming responsibility for over 6,000 days.

Sharad Pawar, then defence minister, showed a filmed record of December 6 to an invited group at the home of a party MP a few days later. The Liberhan Commission could have completed half its report by taking a look at that film. The media was equally comprehensive in its coverage of the brutal riots that followed: The Sri Krishna report has done far greater justice to the truth in its findings on the Maharashtra riots, so much so that there is all-party collusion on its non-implementation. There was only one question trapped in doubt: What was prime minister P V Narasimha Rao doing while Babri was destroyed on the longest day of the last two decades? Why was home minister S B Chavan, father of the present Maharashtra chief minister, immobile, inscrutable and stolid?

Shock raced through Delhi when word filtered through that an assault had begun in Ayodhya. Phone calls began to pour into the prime minister’s residence in the hope that he would use the authority of the state to uphold the rule of law and fulfil a political and moral obligation. There was a monstrous response from the prime minister’s personal secretary. The PM was either unavailable or, worse, asleep. It was a lie. Rao’s inaction and Chavan’s collaboration were deliberate.

Liberhan protects Rao with an equally conscious fudge, shuffling the blame on to unspecified intelligence agencies. Everyone knew what was going on, IB officers better than most. Rao called a Cabinet meeting only in the evening, when there was nothing left to be saved — not even reputation. By this time, fires of hatred were lighting up the dusk of Mumbai and dozens of cities across the nation. An elaborate programme of blame, reward and punishment was put into place. Those (including bureaucrats and journalists) who acquiesced in Rao’s charade were rewarded; Congress Muslims got a bonus for silence. Rao remained in power till 1996, but he neither ruled nor lived in peace.

The words of this column will make no difference. A government can reduce the past to rubble as easily as an Opposition party can erase a centuries-old mosque. My apologies for a rare detour into the personal, but this is a rare moment. I was a minor part of the Rao government and resigned on the night of December 6 since the stone wall constructed around the prime minister’s house had become impervious to anything except sycophancy. Words demand a different kind of loyalty, and one was relieved to return to the world of words.

Appeared in Times of India - November 29, 2009

Terror threat: We have lost the plot

2009-11-22T15:56:00.001+05:30

Terror threat: We have lost the plot
by M J Akbar

The ebb from outrage to rage, its decline to umbrage, and then a drift to amnesia is the narrative of the 12 months since the terrorist assault on Mumbai, which shook India and startled the world. America's immediate response to 9/11 was over the top; our phased reaction has been under-the-table. But a message went out from Washington: you provoke the US at your peril, no matter what the collateral damage. We play piped music before one trapped cobra and call it an opera. Then we fall asleep at our own show.

It is both easy and pointless to blame the government. Every government keeps a thermometer in its holster and calibrates its decibel levels according to ground temperature. If it's warm, it will blow hot, as Delhi did so vigorously between November and January. If it has cooled, Delhi will cool it as well. It is meaningless to blame our Opposition. We have an Opposition that has become impotent without ever turning potent. The politician will only be as resolute as the citizen, and our sensitivities have been dulled by a culture of complacence. Even trauma has been reduced to television drama; once the scenes are played out, our bluster slowly splutters into silence.

It is possible that the military-intelligence-political establishment of Pakistan understands us far better than we understand them. They must have dismissed us as a soft state whose breast-beating is easily calmed by tokenism. On the first anniversary of 26/11, it is not Pakistan alone that is laughing at our weakness. Washington too has measured the tensile strength of a nation that finds unique ways to postpone its threats to the next calamity. Last year, we gloried in the belief that the US had promoted us to the ascending plateau of a regional power, en route to the status of world player. This week, President Barack Obama used a communiqué in Beijing, of all capitals, to tell us where we stand in his estimation, as one of the nations of South Asia whose border problems the worldwide partnership of equals, US and China, would help sort out.

The lean and lissome Obama has learnt to slap with a long hand.

Obama did not have a word to say, incidentally, about Dr A Q Khan's latest revelations on Chinese help in fuel and technology for Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, a clear instance of illegal proliferation. Do not be surprised, however, if India gets a lecture or two on nuclear proliferation.

War is not the only definition of strength. This fallacy has been promoted to disguise a policy of inaction. We have been cheated by this argument since it is obvious that war can have attendant consequences capable of deadly havoc. But there is a whole array or diplomatic and economic instruments that can be mobilized, nationally and internationally. We had the world's sympathy a year ago. We squandered it with inaction. Pakistan maneuvered its way out of international condemnation with some brilliantly painless promises. Islamabad bought the time that Delhi sold.

This week President Zardari presided over a meeting of the PPP's Central Executive Committee during which, in the words of Najam Sethi, an eminent Lahore editor, there was "a reassertion of Pakistan's maximalist position by both the prime minister and foreign minister on the resolution of the Kashmir dispute". This is probably a pre-emptive measure. Obama is likely to lean on Dr Manmohan Singh during the latter's visit to the White House, and push for a compromise on Kashmir acceptable to Pakistan. He might even wave a lollipop called a future seat in the Security Council as a distant prize for good behaviour.

Normalcy with Pakistan is a good idea: put me down as lead advocate of the band of peace missionaries. But before we seek normalcy, we must know what it means. Does it mean reward for unrepentant terrorism by post-Shimla Pact adjustments to the map of Jammu and Kashmir?

It used to be said that we do not have a foreign policy, just a Pakistan policy. We could have moved ahead; we may not even have a Pakistan policy now. We seem to indulge in a series of engagements with different nations, as if the world were an old-fashioned marketplace in which you could haggle your way through different shops, purchasing what was available at whatever price, without a coherent theme linking departure to destination.

Some politicians take recourse to fudge, and sell the notion of India as a soft power. This is a useful screen when you have turned the nation soft, instead of making it powerful. If we were in the midst of the Garden of Eden, this would have been laudable achievement. But we live in a region where terror haunts the headlines.

Amnesia is an invitation to the next terrorist assault.

Appeared in Times of India - November 22, 2009

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