M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist

Fasadi, not Jihadi

2008-08-19T22:36:00.002+05:30

FASADI, NOT JIHADI
By M J Akbar
(Sunday Column in Times of India)

It is safe to assume that the Indian Mujahideen, which prides itself on being a terrorist organization, killed innocents in Gujarat, uses a logo displaying guns on either side of the Holy Book, sends threatening email signed by a split personality (both "Al Arbi" and "Al Hindi"), would like to be judged by Quranic law.

I presume they would not suggest the application of Sharia to non-Muslims. We Indians are unique in many ways: include among them the depressing fact that we have had terrorists from four major faiths - Muslims in Kashmir, Christians in Nagaland, Sikhs in Punjab and Hindus in Assam’s ULFA. Terror has been a constant weapon of Maoists and Naxalites, none of them waving a green banner.

The Quran makes a very clear distinction between legitimate war, a jihad, and illegitimate violence that spreads havoc among the innocent, a fasad. A fasadi is one who "spreads mischief through the land". The Quranic word entered our language and is used commonly for a communal riot. The Urdu-English dictionary in my office lists some of its meanings as "disturbance, trouble, outbreak of rebellion, dissension, mischief...."

It appears in the Quran, in Verse 32 of Surah 5, in the context of the first murder, when Cain killed Abel, his brother, who had done no harm. The verse is a powerful indictment of anyone who kills innocents: "That if anyone slew a person (through fasad) it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people." An innocent’s death kills something in the whole community; protecting an innocent individual is akin to saving the whole. The worst mischief is, in the words of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, "treason against the state, combined with treason against Allah, as shown by overt crimes." For this crime, "four alternative punishments are mentioned, any one of which is to be applied according to circumstances, viz., execution, crucifixion, maiming or exile". I have used Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation and notes because they are accepted internationally. The message is supplemented by other verses (as for instance Surah 30:41).

It is instructive to note how the two most Islamic states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, one Sunni and the other Shia, punish Muslim terrorists. Saudi toughness is now exemplary to those who believe in tough methods. On Tuesday, August 5, Iran executed Yaghoob Mirnehad in the city of Zahedan because he was found guilty of involvement in Jundallah, an armed group operating along the Iran-Pakistan border along Baluchistan. Afzal Guru would not stand much of a chance in either Saudi Arabia or Iran.

When a fasadi calls himself a jihadi, it is an attempt to gain legitimacy among Muslims. The intermittent use of Quranic verses by the Indian Mujahideen is designed to reinforce the impression of Quranic sanction. Even a cursory examination shows how this terrorist group has snatched text out of context. Take the deliberately provocative quotation in one of their emails: "We are guiltless of you and whatever you worship besides Allah: we have rejected you and there has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever - unless you believe in Allah and Him alone." The idea clearly is to establish a Quranic sanction for hatred and enmity between Hindus and Muslims. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to reach this conclusion.

They have arbitrarily plucked out lines from a much longer verse about the great patriarch Abraham, who left home after his father began to worship many gods instead of the One Allah. But the "hatred" is for apostasy, not the person. Where the Indian Mujahideen have put a full stop, there is only a colon in the original. Abraham also says that he will pray for his father. He does not threaten to murder his father in the name of Allah, which the Indian Mujahideen seem to believe is their wanton right.

The Quran insists that that while there are differences among faiths, it is up to Allah, and not man, to be the judge. For man, there is a clear principle (Surah 2:256): "La iqra fi al deen (Let there be no compulsion in religion)." (This instruction, incidentally, comes just after Ayat ul Kursi, a magnificent evocation to the power of Allah and his protection of man.) A second principle is equally unambiguous: "Lakum deen-e kum wal ya deen (Your religion for you and my religion for me)." It was not an accident that Ottoman Sultans gave shelter to Spanish Jews after they were driven out by the Catholic Inquisition.

Every jihad is a war fought by a Muslim, but every war fought by a Muslim is not a jihad. Yusuf Ali explains in his note on Surah 9:20: "It may require fighting in Allah’s cause, as a form of self-sacrifice. But its (jihad’s) essence consists in a true and sincere Faith, which so fixes its gaze on Allah, that all selfish or worldly motives seem paltry and fade away...Mere brutal fighting is opposed to the whole spirit of jihad, while the sincere scholar’s pen or preacher’s voice or wealthy man’s contributions may be the most valuable forms of jihad." The Jihad-e-Akbar, or the greater jihad is a struggle to cleanse oneself; war is only the Jihad-e-Asghar, or the lesser jihad.

However, if jihad were only an internal struggle for purification, we would not be discussing it. Islam sanctions war, but with very strict rules. The call for a jihad cannot be given by a maverick. The killing of innocents, women and children is strictly forbidden. The first Caliph, Abu Bakr, laid down the rules when he sent the first armies out to battle: a jihadi could not betray a trust, misappropriate booty, mutilate a body, kill the old, women or children; he could not even destroy trees or slaughter an animal except for food. Terrorism has no place in jihad. There is one justification, in Islamic law, for jihad: when a nation becomes a Dar ul Harb (House of War) rather than a Dar ul Islam (House of Islam). Can India be declared a Dar ul Harb?

A Big 19th Century Question has seeped into the 21st.

The collapse of the Mughals from around 1720 witnessed the rise of regional powers, and substantial Muslim populations began living under the rule of Marathas and Rajputs. In 1803, the British broke through Maratha resistance and reached Delhi, where the wobbly Mughals became a protected species. That year, Shah Abdul Aziz, heir of Shah Waliullah and the most respected theologian of his time, declared India a Dar ul Harb because British law would prevail over the law of Islam. This inspired a jihad by his disciples (principally Ahmad Saeed Barelvi and his successors) that lasted till the last quarter of the century; 1857 was only one episode in a long war.

The interesting point is that there had never been a similar fatwa against any Hindu ruler of India, and the Barelvis sought and received help from the Marathas. Muslims never considered living under Hindu rulers a cause for jihad because Hindu rulers respected their right to practise their faith as they wished.

As late as in 1871, Sir William Hunter, the famous ICS officer, was attempting to answer the question, "Are the Indian Mussalmans bound by their Religion to rebel against the Queen?" He recorded the considered views of a number of alim. The answer, in essence, was that if a Muslim was permitted to live by his own law, the Raj could be considered a House of Islam. Muslim personal law was incorporated into the Raj code. Free India, through Constitutional statute and practice, permits Indian Muslims full rights to the exercise of their faith. You may not be able to hear the amplified azaan in London or Washington, but you can in Delhi.

Aberrations like riots do not change this fundamental reality. If that were so, Pakistani Shias would be entitled to declare a jihad against Pakistan since they have repeatedly suffered from communal violence.

Justice and equality are the heart and soul of the Quran, and the Holy Book knows what justice would do to a fasadi.

Appeared in Times of India, August 10, 2008

There are no Role Models

2008-08-19T22:29:00.003+05:30

There are no Role Models
By M J Akbar
(Leader Article in TOI)

Bollywood is the clearest mirror of popular perceptions, reflecting part of the truth even as it shapes other parts. Truth, after all, is a set of fragments, some contradictory, some complementary. When and how did the Indian Muslim become an indelible part of the Bollywood underworld. The arc of decline from the misty world of Nawabs in Mere Mehboob to the sentimental glitz of goons in Maqbool is a trajectory of shifting role models among Muslim youth.

Villains change on screen as necessarily as they shift outside the cinema hall. The three stereotype villains of the Fifties all belonged to upper Hindu castes. There was the violent, exploitative Thakur, whether in a classic like the Dilip Kumar-Vyjanthimala Madhumati or a potboiler like the Dharmendra-Jayalalitha Izzat. The scheming Brahmin, Narada, was a constant of mythologicals. The Bania moneylender, epitomised in Mother India , was the worst, leering at women and extracting wealth out of famine. These were not single-dimensional images: there was also the noble, patriotic, generous Thakur syndrome, for instance. Perhaps the most powerful symbol of Sholay was the armless Thakur, turned impotent in the line of duty.

Eventually, happy-go-lucky vagrants destroyed the evil Gabbar Singh. By 1976 the saviour had become a variation of the emerging audience. As befits the new corporate age, crime became more professional and sophisticated, and space between smuggling, business and politics narrowed. Gradually, the Muslim became the primary face among the foot soldiers of the underworld. A role model must merge contemporary compulsions and aspirations. The model for young Muslims in the 1940s was obviously Jinnah. They were oblivious of the traumatic potential of partition, and were charred by the killing hot winds of 1947 and the Fifties.

Nehru, rather than Gandhi (who they had rejected), became the new model as he began, gently, to restore their self-confidence and nurture some degree of security. But the security was partial, and Nehru did little to reverse the marginalisation of Muslims from the economy. The Sixties were the decade of despair. Desperation discovered a strange role model: Haji Mastan.

In the disturbed, distraught and fragmented mind of Muslim youth of the Sixties, no one else seemed to be giving Muslims any jobs. Since they had no faith in the white economy, and the white economy seemed to have no faith in them, they turned to the black economy. Haji Mastan was so impressed by the support he seemed to get from the community that he even started a political party. It did not work because crime does not work. What was the alternative? The elite had disappeared on the auction blocks of Lucknow and Hyderabad (pace Mere Mehboob); the professional middle class of the north had migrated to Pakistan in large numbers. Muslims felt deeply betrayed by Congress politicians, with their litany of double standards. The anger sharpened during the politics of Babri masjid: the Congress was responsible for everything, from the opening of the locks in 1948 to laying the foundation stone of the temple in 1989 to indifference while the mosque was destroyed in 1992.

The BJP was the perceived enemy, of course, but the BJP could not be accused of betrayal, because it had never been trusted. In this vacuum, the hysterical mullah, or his counterpart, became the role model of the Seventies and Eighties. There is little point in naming the prominent among them, for they turned irrelevant as quickly as they ascended. The demolition of Babri in 1992, the riots that followed and the bomb blasts of Mumbai in 1993, were a historical watershed. You cannot be disillusioned if you do not entertain illusions, so there was no rise in bitterness against the Congress; but there was sudden disillusionment with the Muslim purveyors of rabid rhetoric. The role model split after Babri. The overwhelming sentiment is for a new Sir Sayyid Ahmad, founder of Aligarh Muslim University, who argued that salvation lay in both English and the English, the emblems of progress and success. This is not a revival of the politics of separation; Indian Muslims know that they are the chief victims of partition. This is a revival of the culture of modern education. I have argued at every public forum, and in my writing, that this thrust will not achieve its full potential until the girl child gets an equal place in the Indian Muslim's quest for modernity.

If gender bias is not eliminated, Indian Muslims cannot enter the 20th century, let alone the 21st. The good news is that girls are being educated in far greater numbers than ever before. But there was another role model lurking in a corner of the consciousness, born out of the belief that those who started riots against Muslims were stopped only because of the 1993 blasts. The anger of the victim justified terrorism. This is a minuscule section, but it exists and has merged its fantasies with the Osama bin Laden phenomenon. This is the wart that could poison the future. It will not be eliminated by arbitrary repression; but it can disappear with the assimilation of the community into economic growth and educational opportunity.

Fifteen years after the watershed moment of 1992, Indian Muslims have reached another crossroads. The overwhelming majority will travel the road towards progress out of nothing more complicated than common sense. But there is a regressive minority within this minority. It needs as never before the leadership of a modern Sir Sayyid. History has offered a role, but there is no one capable of being model.

(Appeared in Times of India, Mumbai - 30 May 2008 )

Why Mumbai is the heart of Muslim Terrorism

2008-08-18T19:04:00.003+05:30

Why mumbai is the heart of Muslim terrorism
M.J. Akbar
(In Covert : 16-31st August 2008)[Subscribe]

There are only two Mumbai Muslims whose lives have been made the subject of movies that were released commercially. One film was official, financed by the Government of Pakistan. The other was unofficial, and fictionalised, made by the Mumbai film industry. The film on Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a tribute to a stalwart whose admirers will not tolerate a word of criticism against him. The second man evoked a strange kind of fascination because his was the story of unparalleled success against unbelievable odds, a trajectory that could only be measured by the thespian skills of an Amitabh Bachchan. This person was called Mastan Mirza in life, and is near-legendary as Haji Mastan. The first was the ultimate law-abider, a man who refused to break the law even as part of the freedom movement. The second made a fabulous career out of contempt for the law: and within the decline from the sublime to the unfortunate as role models lies the tragedy called the history of Indian Muslims in the second half of the 20th century.

After a public career that saw as many ebbs as flows, Jinnah emerged as the great hero of Indian Muslims by the late Thirties. Pakistanis, naturally, placed him on a heroic pedestal after 1947, while Muslims who remained in the mother-country shrunk from the memory of past adoration. Out of insecurity and trepidation, they shifted their trust to Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru honoured their trust, and initiated the gradual process of restoring their self-confidence. But he could not give them jobs. The thin middle class among Indian Muslims were denied jobs in both the public and the private sectors in the Fifties and Sixties; while their poor were exploited by whoever [including the wealthier Muslims] threw a few crumbs in their way.

Curiously, a now-forgotten, impossibly puritan Congress leader, Morarji Desai, became an improbable source of relief when as Nehru’s Finance Minister he passed the Gold Control Order. No politician should be so foolish as to come between an Indian woman and gold. The age of smuggling began in earnest. The saviour-model of Mumbai’s young Muslims shifted from Nehru to Haji Mastan. The former might have given inspiring speeches, but talk could not compete with nourishing work. The shift was entirely logical and justifiable. If you do not give the young a place in the white economy, where else will he go except the black economy? He is not a saint that he is going to starve to death. Bollywood has tracked the change. Till the Fifties and the Sixties there used to be a movie genre called Muslim social. Today, that might be called Muslim anti-social. By and large, this world was content to live below the surface, expanding its clout in cinema through financing, but unable to break through into respectable space, although Haji Mastan did personally emerge to settle down in Malabar Hill and even start a political party that dreamt of an alliance between Muslims and Dalits. The party flopped. Mastan died in his bed. The most startling aspect of the email sent by the previously little-known, but proudly terrorist, group self-styled the Indian Mujahideen, is that it was written in perfect English. This itself has created suspicions about whether it is real, or a plant. Those who consider these terrorist attacks to be a conspiracy always have enough questions to raise doubts. But, in the absence of concrete proof to the contrary we must assume that these organisations are based in some reality. Certainly the havoc they create is real, and the impact on non-Muslims is sulphurous.

The email destroys the subliminal connect we make between terror and deprivation; this is the work of someone who speaks English and therefore must be educated. He must belong to a widespread organisation, with links in Mumbai, Surat, Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Bangalore at the very least, and possibly in Chennai and certain cities of Kerala as well. These members may not be part of a single group; they may be scattered over different work environments. They have organisational skills of high capability, and managerial talent, or they would not have been able to coordinate the different elements of a complex operation so smoothly. I cannot imagine that they would have acquired these skills in legitimate business; they are more comprehensible as part of the management structure of the Mumbai criminal world. The email was traced to Sanpada in Navi Mumbai. Three Wagon Rs and one Maruti 800 were stolen and driven through Surat to Vadodara, where bombs were loaded. 24 unexploded bombs have been found, and there may be more.

There has to be some explanation for such a smooth operation. We tend to think of crime as primitive activity. Cloaks, dagger and masks are for comic books. Crime is much more than theft. Smuggling is as sophisticated a business, run by economic rules and managed by accountants and experts in purchase, storage, delivery, marketing and price sensitivity as any other business. Its volumes demand a large network of personnel on the soft side. A very small group is slowly distilled into the hard, dark side, to become killers and dons; the majority live in the grey area, and are thankful that they have some sustenance for their families. Their rewards would be significantly less, but they would be more at peace with themselves. They would have normal aspirations, hoping to bring up children who could get an education and find a job outside their nexus. The hard criminal graduates to violence and killing, an occupational hazard. It is from this small pool that the effective terrorist, the planner and the killer, emerges. Support for terrorism doubtless comes from a wider pool, but there is a wide gap between desire and delivery. Once the young are impelled towards violence, it is easy to reroute a core element into mass terrorism, particularly through false lure of pseudo-religion. A seminal moment for Mumbai Muslims came during the riots of 1992 and 1993 after the demolition of the Babri mosque, when Narasimha Rao and Sharad Pawar were presiding over the fate of the nation. To cut a long and grievous story short, those riots stopped only when in March an underworld-terrorist response brought down seven buildings in Mumbai. The message is still heard: the state terror that permits riots against Muslims can only be stopped by counter-terror.

The underworld has a natural contempt for the Indian state, for the daily face of the state is the policeman. It knows that the police is corrupt, it corrupts the police. It knows that India is a nation of crime without punishment. There have been innumerable instances of terrorism, and no one has been caught. The state seems incapable of finding the guilty, and impotent on the rare occasion when guilt is established.

The terrorist’s reasons may vary. There might be a terrible fusion of victimisation and frustration that drives him to believe that the most fitting way in which he can take revenge upon India is by destroying the nation’s peace, both directly and indirectly. The indirect desire is to provoke a communal backlash, and hope for a repeat of a Gujarat-style carnage, which can fuel the next generation of terrorists. It is possible that this is why three BJP-run states were targeted, and it must have been great disappointment that even Narendra Modi did not oblige. Modi managed the consequences with a calm skill he should have shown six years ago.

But the repeated instances of terrorism by Muslim groups are defaming the community, creating a scare within and anger outside. It has almost become ritualistic for Muslim men and women to protest against terror attacks, but the ritual is important because the mass of Muslims genuinely do not want to become trapped by a violent fringe. They know that their future lies in some form of accommodation with the non-Muslim, that terrorism is a disease that will kill the community as easily as it kills the other. The self-inflicted wounds of terrorism are only one of the many injuries on the body politics of Indian Muslims.

And they cannot find the leadership to heal the wounds. Why?

Melody needed Poetry, Sound needs Phonetics

2008-08-16T16:03:00.003+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Melody needed Poetry, Sound needs Phonetics

How many songs can you remember from the last 21 years? How many songs can you forget from the 21 years previous to Rafi's death? Hamburger versus biryani: if you don't know the difference, you'll never get it.

A child born in the year that Kishore Kumar died would be 21 years in the first week of August, out of college and already well into the most movie-and-music intense phase of his life. And if he had been born on 31 July 1980, the day Mohammad Rafi died, he would most likely be sharing baby duties with his wife. Would either be aware of the age of melody that they had missed?

Temperamentally, Rafi and Kishore were as far apart as men can be, and I am not talking geography, although one came from Lahore and the other from Khandwa. Kishore Kumar came to Bombay to sing, but could not get work because he had not been trained in classical music. His elder brother, Ashok Kumar, already a hit star, advised him to make a bit of money by acting. It would be safe to say that every film Kishore made was an autobiography. He was as mad off-screen as he was zany on-screen. He couldn't keep his limbs still, and his first songs were commissioned as part of patter-and-song comedy. He was the first, and only Hindi film singer with the ability to yodel, but of course yodelling was considered outrageously hilarious in the mores of those times. But the extraordinary timber of his voice seeped silkily through the false-front of ina-mina-dika nonsense-verse. It was only a matter of time before Dev Anand picked him up, and although Teen Deviyan, in which Dev woos three highly forgettable ladies, was a flop, its music was a singular success with the Kishore croon in full flow. [Raj Kapoor owned Mukesh, Dilip Kumar had first rights over Rafi; Dev floated.] Even when he sang in B-grade films like Mr X in Bombay Kishore could lift the music above the movie. When he made Door Gagan Ki Chaon Mein, whose music was a superhit, Kishore proved that his range could match that of Rafi. His one song in Guide was incomparable.

Rafi was the gentlest, most respectable person you could meet in Bombay, an artiste of the highest quality without a trace of the airs and arrogance that trail stars. He was grounded in classical music; he could not have sung the superb bhajan, Hari Om otherwise. The repertoire was unmatched, from O duniya ke rakhwale to Apni to har aah ik toofan hai to Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai to Chu lene do naazuk hoton ko kuch aur nahin hain jaam hain yeh to Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe to a thousand I could name and still feel that I had not done justice to Rafi.

Kishore Kumar made his first film, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, for the oddest of reasons in an industry driven by greed and commerce. He hoped that it would flop and he would lose all his money. His logic went thus. He had reached the top income tax bracket and hated the thought of handing out money coldly to a Delhi bureaucrat. He decided that he might as well have fun wasting it on a movie. Unfortunately, the film — starring all three Kumar brothers, Ashok, Kishore and Anup — became a breathtaking superhit. Kishore Kumar was so upset that he gave all the rights of the film to his secretary.

The story has to be true. No one could have made it up, except possibly Kishore Kumar — but why make up something you can do? As it turned out, Kishore Kumar fell in love with the leading lady of his film, the glorious Madhubala, and married her, which turned out to be an expensive proposition as well. Poor rich chap.

Kishore would have been 79 today if he had been alive, about the average age for a top politician, and far better value for Indians. Rafi died of that typical Lahori-Punjabi weakness, good, rich food. Melody ebbed with them, leaving space for the emergence of the age of sound.

I do not mean to disparage contemporary music; some of it is quite attractive, and even good for health, sometimes inducing the only form of exercise I get. And who can ignore the fact that India's growth rate was three per cent in the age of melody and is nine per cent in the age of sound? Dare sniff at that, if you can. It is simply that the two worlds are not only in different time zones, but set against cultural horizons that would not recognise each other. The pecking order of the senses has changed along with sensibilities. The ear has surrendered to the foot. You cannot really sing along with most modern Hindi film songs, but you can dance. The shift began with the arrival of the discotheque as a quasi-sexual sub-culture. It has been raised into a highly lucrative stratosphere by television. The passé singing contest, Antakshari, is dowdy and very Doordarshanish compared to the sexy dance contests on television that are now a staple of small town and middle India. Nautch, a professional art, was once the privilege of the racier section of the elite. Sexy gyrations, meant for display before millions, are now the fantasy of possessive sari-clad middle class mothers for their middle class daughters.

Melody needed poetry; sound needs phonetics. Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri, Neeraj: it is good that you died natural deaths. These days you would have starved to death before Mumbai cinema commissioned your poetry.

The greats of the Old World add up to an untidy acronym, LAGAMMMMK. I know it sounds like the name of a movie as redone by a numerologist, a la Singh is Kinng. Less glamorously, it stands for [ladies first] Lata Mangeshkar, Geeta Dutt, Asha Bhonsle, four Ms — Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh, Manna Dey, Hemant Mukherjee, ending with Kishore Kumar. Mukesh and Hemant sang within a much narrower focus than the others on the list, but they were yet superior from the current stars, exceptions apart, who tend to repeat the same song with marginal variations in beat and accompaniment. The difference is between type and stereotype. One has to admit, though, that stereotypes end up with a much larger bank balance.

Perhaps the most authentic indicator is the average life of a hit song. Popular music of the Sixties and Seventies still packs the shelves of shops, and even the Fifties get a healthy look-in. Current hits are like floodtides. They swamp the market and then disappear. They are suddenly everywhere, and suddenly nowhere. How many songs can you remember from the last 21 years? How many songs can you forget from the 21 years previous to Rafi's death? Hamburger versus biryani: if you don't know the difference, you'll never get it.

Is nostalgia the last temptation of the bore? It isn't as if the thought hasn't crossed my mind while I was writing this column. And yet, and yet. Permit me the luxury of pity — pity for those who were born two and three decades ago and have not discovered Rafi and Kishore. They have one advantage though: they still have time.

Identity Wars

2008-08-11T13:24:00.001+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: IDENTITY WARS

Identity wars are raging both on and just below the surface of India. A few acres of land for pilgrims to Amarnath is not the real issue. The hyperventilation of Kashmir's valley politicians is even less so. These politicians, whose concern for Jammu is, to put it politely, less than emotional, are merely seeking to fertilise the shrunk seeds of a now arid insurrection. What we are seeing is street wars over rights and possession in a multi-ethnic, multi-polar state that has gone flabby with complacency at the top and corruption from top to bottom. Competing identities, released from any discipline by a democracy where appeasement has become the key to electoral success, are constantly trying to encroach across political and psychological boundaries.

To a certain degree this is inevitable. Competition is an integral part of freedom. But, as always, it is the degree that becomes the problem. Democracy cannot be digested when raw, and turns poisonous when over-ripe.

After 1947, free India realigned itself around language. India has always been a mix of linguistic regions, but there had never been political empowerment around linguistic identity. A linguistic region, Rajasthan or Orissa, might have dozens of principalities; conversely an empire might stretch from Punjab to Bengal and govern in a state language that belonged to no one, Persian or English.

Indians relished the post-feudal-colonial states as a historic gift. We know how possessive they became about language in the South. But even Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, who share so much linguistic and cultural overlap, have developed completely different politics. Till the early Eighties, they shared the same political mood, but now their regional parties have no influence in the neighbouring province. The formation of smaller states like Jharkhand, Uttaranchal and Chhattisgarh proves that the Indian polity retains the elasticity to accommodate fresh identity-pressures without injuring the whole.

But two powerful identities could not find political space in modern India, the Dalits and Muslims. The principal reason was that there was neither geographical nor linguistic consolidation in these two communities. In that sense, Dalits and Muslims can be called the two national communities of the country. Kashmir might be Muslim-majority, but Kashmiri Muslims never identified with Muslims in the rest of the country, and Muslims elsewhere returned the dubious compliment. This is why the Jammu agitation does not carry the spark of communal violence that can spread into the Ganga-Jamuna belt. The best that the few acres would elicit from non-Kashmiri Indian Muslims would be a shrug. Similarly, Nagaland might be a Christian-majority state, but the other Indian Christians do not see it as part of any common identity. Indian Christians do not have a specific political space either, but they are too thinly spread. Sikhs, in contrast, are in a consolidated area with a specific language and thus have successfully wrested a state that was denied to them in 1954, when linguistic states were chalked out.

The linguistic realignment of India became an effective bar to the rise of new leaderships, since states are the natural cocoon for emerging leaders. No one sought this deliberately, but even accidents have consequences. Muslims, in any case, were never going to be trusted easily after the creation of Pakistan, and the continuing haemorrhage in Kashmir. If India is determined about anything today, it is about its unity.

Dalits had one advantage; they were above suspicion. And so their first genuine leader, Kanshi Ram, could energise a dormant community through radical slogans that might have provoked violence if it had come from anyone else. Kanshi Ram, a genius, found a brilliant successor in Mayawati. She knitted an amazing coalition that made her Chief Minister of India's most important province and empowered Dalits to an extent that can change the social dynamic of Indian society.

The Congress used to recognise the need for creating for what might be called artificial political space for Muslims. Mrs Indira Gandhi was far more conscious of this than her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. She always tried to keep a Muslim or two in the Congress mix of Chief Ministers. She gave Bihar its only Muslim Chief Minister, Abdul Ghafoor. Her most daring experiment was to make Abdur Rahman Antulay Chief Minister of Maharashtra in 1980. Antulay underestimated his opposition and overplayed his hand. Maharashtra is not going to get a Muslim Chief Minister again.

Neither Dalit nor Muslim has been able to grow at the pace of the Indian economy. For Muslims this is especially frustrating because they remember their past as a success story. The Muslim stereotype used to define all the pleasure of high living: great cuisine, a fine dress sense, education, high poetry. Unable to afford their traditional self-image, they are now seeking identity-assertion through visual metaphors of faith: short pyjamas, long beards, rimless caps, spotted male foreheads. For those who might wonder about the last, an increasing number of Muslim men create a dark spot on their foreheads to suggest that they are saying the namaaz so often that a spot has formed. It is a pious fraud, of course, but prevalent nevertheless. (Muslims do not wear rims on their headgear because a rim would prevent the forehead from touching the floor during namaaz.) There is also a new hum around shrines: travel east and west of Delhi and you will see fresh building activity around shrines, mosques and madrasas.

All this is public activity. The Hindu sees it, accepts it, and carries on with his own life and religion. There is an equal upsurge in Hindu religiosity, whether on evangelical television or in the number of Kanwariyas going barefoot to worship Lord Shiva. There may even be an unstated competitiveness, but the Muslim and Hindu tides take care not to flood beyond their own territory.

But there is always a flashpoint lurking in the subconscious, waiting to explode. The trigger is hurt, a grievance that emerges from a perceived sense of injustice. The Hindu who has quietly watched mosque and dargah expand around him, explodes when a few acres are denied to pilgrims on the arduous trek to Amarnath. He has seen Haj Houses sprout around him for Muslims on their way to Mecca. These Haj Houses are not loaned to the community for the two months involved in the two-way journey for Haj; they have become community centres all year round. He asks a question: why should he be denied a place for tired feet on the way to Amarnath?

There is fundamental disconnect at a critical seam: the Muslim sees himself as a victim, the non-Muslim views him as a perpetrator of turbulence and injustice. The image leaps across time, bypassing inconsistencies, ignoring facts. Foolish politicians like Lalu Yadav, who seek the mass by pandering to the extreme, do Muslims great harm. His latest, in which he has the company of Mulayam Singh Yadav, is to offer SIMI a certificate of innocence even while the government of which he is a part goes to the Supreme Court to ban the organisation. If Lalu Yadav has the courage of his convictions then he should resign on this issue. If not, he should keep his garrulous tongue under control. The extremist Muslim, of course, takes comfort in such contradictions, and retreats to his haven convinced that between corruption, complacence and appeasement his excesses will remain unpunished.

This is a moment that demands sagacious leadership. The government is lost in gazing at its navel, or in the manipulation of currency notes, with neither the language to soothe a wound, nor the will to confront an aggressor. An individual can afford the luxury of indifference. A nation cannot.

Band Aid for Cancer

2008-08-02T15:47:00.003+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Band Aid for Cancer

The most serious instance of comfort food was the formulation he offered to his good friend George W. Bush during the latter's official visit to India. He said that no Indian Muslim was involved in terrorism, and offered as evidence that you could not find any Indian Muslim in Osama's Al Qaeda. President Bush, in his wisdom, picked this up as proof of his theory that democracy was a panacea for all ills. Not only did democracies never go to war against one another, but they also managed to secure Indian Muslims from the temptations of terrorism.

In the general elections of 2004 the irrepressible and sometimes irresponsible Lalu Prasad Yadav used to tow around a maulvi when in campaign mode. Nothing particularly wrong with that. Politicians have this tendency to turn mullahs into best friends at election time. What was the particular competence of this maulvi that attracted Lalu Yadav? Was he a great alim, or scholar, erudite in the finer points of Sharia? Was he a fine economist with specialised knowledge in the intricate problems of rural Bihar?

The reason was less subtle. He was a lookalike of Osama bin Laden. He even handed out autographs signed "Osama".

Lalu Yadav sent out two unmissable signals with his thoughtless pandering. He told non-Muslims that the true role model of all Bihar Muslims, irrespective of what they said in their politically-correct avatar, was a person whose name had become synonymous with terrorism. And he told Muslims, particularly their impressionable young, that Osama was a legitimate role model.

Did Mrs Sonia Gandhi, an ally of Lalu Yadav, question him or even raise the subject? Not a word. Votes were more important, even if they came in the name of Osama bin Laden. Did the subject arise when Mrs Gandhi offered Lalu Yadav a prominent place in Dr Manmohan Singh's Cabinet?

No.

To be fair to Lalu, this travelling Osama was not by his side in the Assembly elections that soon followed the general elections. He had switched over — or, to be more precise, had been purchased by — Ram Vilas Paswan. Did the Congress ask questions this time around? Not a chance. Votes votes votes: that was the only morality. It was all dismissed as a joke, and the laughter was doubtless very hearty in the comfortable drawing rooms of Lutyens' Delhi.

The joke has soured on the killing fields of Malegaon, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and a roster of cities that could enter the list of dread. The dead do not laugh even when there is a comedian as rich in range as Lalu Yadav.

The innocents have been killed and maimed by terrorists who have Osama bin Laden as their inspiration. I could produce a spread of direct and indirect evidence, from the manifesto of Indian Mujahideen to the taped speeches of Mohammad Masood Azhar (released by the BJP during the bargain over the hijacked Indian Airlines) to the honorifics used by "commanders" of the terror groups. A little will suffice. Zakir Naik, a television evangelist who has a devoted following among the terror groups, glorifies Osama as the ultimate Islamic hero. On a different level, Maulana Sufiyan Patanigia, once head of the Lal Masjid seminary in Ahmedabad, and now on a revenge mission after the Gujarat carnage of 2002, is known as the Indian Mullah Omar, while his deputy Suhail Khan delights in the nickname "Chota Osama". The hate literature spawned by the Indian terrorist groups are full of the anti-Hindu venom that is encouraged by organisations like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, with its haven in Pakistan.

Common sense would suggest that those Indian politicians who claim to have some sympathy for Indian Muslims would seek, in their speeches, to create a distance between this deadly extreme fringe and the broad mass of the community, not only because this was wise but primarily because this was true. Instead, such of their ilk who are in the present government in Delhi have indulged in a curious, and inexplicable, dichotomy. On the one side the Lalu Yadavs tout an Osama to fuel the worst kind of sentiment. And, on the other, there is what amounts to a complete denial that is inconsistent with facts. The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, seems to subsist on comfort food, perhaps because the truth is politically indigestible.

The most serious instance of comfort food was the formulation he offered to his good friend George W. Bush during the latter's official visit to India. He said that no Indian Muslim was involved in terrorism, and offered as evidence that you could not find any Indian Muslim in Osama's Al Qaeda. President Bush, in his wisdom, picked this up as proof of his theory that democracy was a panacea for all ills. Not only did democracies never go to war against one another, but they also managed to secure Indian Muslims from the temptations of terrorism.

Dr Singh had clearly not consulted his intelligence agencies when he came to such a conclusion. Even a check with the Mumbai courts might have persuaded him otherwise. Indian nationals have been involved in terrorist conspiracies at least since 1993, after the trauma of the demolition of the Babri mosque and the Congress government's startling indifference to both its loss and the communal havoc that ensued. It is possible that Dr Singh meant well. But self- delusion is not diagnosis. It is perhaps such a frame of mind that takes the government towards a soft view of the guilt of Afzal Guru. Afzal Guru has been convicted for possibly the most outrageous attack on the Indian state. His conviction has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. There are no more legal avenues to traverse.

Look at this situation from the point of view of the veteran or the prospective terrorist. To start with, he knows that in India there is a lot of crime and very little punishment. If the guilty do get caught, it is often fortuitously. For lesser crimes, corruption is the sanctioned solution. For unforgivable crimes like terrorism, there is a pattern. An incident occurs, and lights flare in media. Worthy dignitaries visit the site and trot off to hospital. The Home Minister of India repeats the same inane things he has been saying for four years. And then everyone retreats into the default mode of complacency. What is there to worry about? And when an Afzal Guru is caught and convicted, the state dithers. Perhaps this is why the Indian Mujahideen had the belligerence to taunt the government, through an email (sent before the timers wreaked their damage) that they were Indians and that there was little use in explaining this away with alibis.
The most interesting characteristic about homegrown terrorism is the degree of sophistication it has acquired. The Ahmedabad bombings began with an automobile theft in Navi Mumbai; the cars travelled to Surat and Vadodara to pick up their arsenals before reaching Ahmedabad. The detonators were timed to inflict maximum damage on innocents, with a first, second and third tier of victims. This is a large operation from mastermind to foot soldiers, with a foreign connection but an Indian network. If our policecannot fold in a net, then policing has lost all meaning.

The battle is in India. India is being poisoned with a cancer. And all the government has as an answer is Band Aid.

Headmaster of A School for Scandal

2008-07-26T18:49:00.005+05:30

Byline by M J Akbar: Headmaster of A School for Scandal

In the end it's the jokes that get you, isn't it? SMS, that deadly virus, has been spreading sound bites like "Sting is King". Its first cousin, email, has been circulating emotional pleas to the heartless Finance Minister: "Don't you know how old MPs are? They have bad backs! Can't you print Rs 100,000 notes instead of measly little thousand-rupee notes??? Do you know how heavy a sack of 30 crores is?" There are heart-rending stories of MPs breaking down because they did not know how to take their loot, collected in Delhi, back to the security of their small towns.

One email was untouched by levity and weighed by hurt and anger. Dr Manmohan Singh had repeated Guru Gobind Singh's famous battle hymn, in which he asked the Lord to ensure that "shubh karman mein kabhu na darun [may I never be afraid to do right]" before the debate began. How could the Prime Minister have recited this just before he launched into unprecedented "dushkarman [misdeeds]"?

The Prime Minister won his battle in July. He may have lost the war that is only a few months away. He won the confidence of the House only to lose the trust of the nation.

Dr Manmohan Singh's reputation for personal honesty was the last remaining undiluted asset of the Congress after four years of government. The voter did not ever believe his ministers to be clean. Some of them have established fresh records in corruption. But he was certain that the Prime Minister was an honest man. After the cash-for-votes-and-hide-the-tape scandal, Manmohan Singh is just another sullied politician, willing to feast on Grub Street in the company of the most famous bagmen, and travel the Gravy Train chatting with fixers and pushers in order to remain in office.

As the cash disbursers have proved, the Congress is full of calculators. It needed a mathematician. A strategist would have analysed the cost-benefit ratio and sabotaged the cash-and-carry operation on grounds of common sense. What has been won is nothing compared to what will be lost.

There is enough evidence that the voter punishes corruption and rewards probity. Leaders like Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Naveen Patnaik, Nitish Kumar and Narendra Modi have won support because they are believed to be personally honest. It may not be the only reason for re-election, but it is a primary reason. The Congress had that advantage in the image of Dr Singh. That reputation has self-destructed.

Inflation had already weakened the voter's confidence in Dr Singh's abilities as an economist. His second asset was wiped off the books in July.

The Prime Minister cannot hold his nose above the stink anymore. He was personally involved in the purchase of MPs. He was visibly uncertain at his own dinner on the eve of the debate, despite the fact that Shibu Soren had already been bought in what should be called the real "1-2-3 Agreement": the cash-stoked coal portfolio for Soren, deputy chief ministership of Jharkhand for his son, and a second ministerial berth for a party MP in Delhi. By Monday morning, the Prime Minister was smiling, and waving the V sign as he entered Parliament. Late at night he received word from his money-managers that enough MPs had switched, or been neutralised, to ensure a comfortable victory. Parliament had become a sleaze house, but so what? The mask of morality used to fool us for four years now lies in that great receptacle called the dustbin of history.

There is a problem when you tread on sleaze. You can slip on it, hurting yourself badly, even as your fall becomes the source of cynical laughter.

The Prime Minister's face turned visibly ashen when three BJP MPs threw bundles of currency notes into the well of the House. For the nation, that was the turning point of the debate. They may or may not have understood the intricacies of the Hyde Act. But they did recognise the corruption that had been hidden.

Sections of the urban middle class which welcomed the idea of closer relations with America [you could call them the Green Card Party of India] felt utterly betrayed by a man they had trusted, and besmirched by corruption.

In the process, Dr Manmohan Singh has one remarkable achievement: he has united the Opposition. For the last three decades, this has been the most difficult act in Indian politics. The irony is that he subverted what Mrs Sonia Gandhi had woven in order to bring the Congress back to power: she had used the Gujarat riots to create a formidable coalition against the BJP. Dr Singh has destroyed that framework by breaking with the Left and turning the Congress into an irredeemably right-wing organisation, with a foreign policy to match its economic thrust. This turn to the right will change the character of the Congress irrevocably.

By opting for the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, he has catapulted a dynamic agent of social change, Mayawati, into the leadership of the Third Front. Mayawati is the only regional leader with a national base, for she has a constituency in every constituency of India. She can lend Dalit support to an ally in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as easily as in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. Her candidates do not have to win; by contesting they slice enough Congress votes by ensure its defeat. It would have made more sense for the Congress to keep Mayawati as any ally, but that would need a leader who was a mathematician instead of a cash-broker.

The Government is trying very hard to "prove" that Mayawati is corrupt. Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh must be regretting deeply that they let her off the in the Taj-market development case during those happy days when they were attempting a deal with her instead of Mulayam Singh. The important fact is that Mayawati's voters are unimpressed by such accusations against their leader. She has empowered them and they are grateful to her.

Corruption is not a sudden swerve into perdition for the Congress: the first jeep scandal [an extremely innocuous, by today's standards, desire for vehicles] broke out before the first general election in 1952. But flexibility in election expenditure is one thing; the purchase of elected MPs at exorbitant rates quite another. Venality turned into a rot when P.V. Narasimha Rao purchased Shibu Soren and his MPs in order to save his minority Government. Dr Manmohan Singh was finance minister, and no one heard the mildest protest from him. Perhaps he thought that he could repeat what his guru Narasimha Rao had managed. What was it that Marx said? History repeats itself, first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. But Dr Singh does not read Marx.

Power seems to have changed Dr Singh's character and temperament in crucial ways. Was it too much to expect some grace from him in this purchased victory? Instead, in his reply to the House he descended to the personal. That is not done.

But what is the point of expecting decorum when Parliament has been turned into a School for Scandal?

Inflation hits Delhi Politics

2008-07-19T15:19:00.005+05:30

Byline by M.J. Akbar: Inflation hits Delhi Politics
There is inflation in the political bazaar. Dr Manmohan Singh can now be held responsible for both economic and political inflation, a rare achievement. In such a volatile market, no sale is ever complete until delivery.

It was as easy to esteem Chaudhry Charan Singh as to underestimate him. I knew him reasonably well during the critical days when he brought down the Janata government in 1979 and won the undying contempt of urban India which had invested so much passion in the first non-Congress government in Delhi. At one level he had charming simplicity. There was nothing he enjoyed more, after work, than playing ludo with his wife.

But he also had a sharp self-interest in the rural, Jat- dominated constituency of west Uttar Pradesh. Since he was the pre-eminent leader of the Jats, the line between individual and collective was often blurred. In his mind, what was good for rural India was good for him, which is fair enough; but the reverse held equally true. What was good for him became ipso facto good for rural India.

He had the rustic virtue of trust; but in the end he became a victim of the rustic vice of naiveté. He broke the Morarji Desai government and became Prime Minister on the basis of support offered by Mrs Indira Gandhi. But the Congress stabbed him in the back soon after he stabbed Morarji Desai in the front. Mrs Gandhi withdrew support, and Chaudhry Charan Singh became the first, and only, Prime Minister who could not summon a session of Parliament.

Three decades later, in one of those U-turns for which history is famous, his son Ajit Singh's single-digit strength in Parliament could help keep Mrs Gandhi's daughter-in-law, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, in power. A sweetener has been spread before Ajit Singh. Lucknow airport has been named after his father. There are many reasons for remembering Charan Singh. This is possibly the worst. His name is now inextricably linked to a political bribe.

Given the track record, Ajit Singh should not be surprised if the airport is renamed again if things do not go as expected.

If a lollipop was sufficient to appease Ajit Singh, he would have announced his support to Dr Manmohan Singh's nuclear deal without any delay. His hesitation and willingness to socialise with distinctly anti-nuclear deal politicians indicate that he has a little more on his shopping list. Since his political outfit is confined to west Uttar Pradesh, he can never become Chief Minister unless he carves out a separate state. He wants a new one to be called Harit Pradesh.

Shibu Soren from Jharkhand, with five MPs, is demanding a place in the Cabinet with the lucrative coal portfolio, currently in the hands of a Congress fundraiser. Soren was dropped from Manmohan Singh's Cabinet for a fairly dramatic reason. He was accused of being involved in a secretary's murder. He has been exonerated and wants his job back, with some back pay if possible. The Telangana Rashtra Samiti wanted a separate Telangana, and became anti-nuclear when there was no response from the Union government. We have already witnessed the blatant intervention of corporate interests in the survival of the government. The unedifying sight of convicted murderers turning up to save or scupper the nuclear deal will doubtless fuel editorials worldwide on the mature state of Indian democracy.

There is inflation in the political bazaar. Dr Manmohan Singh can now be held responsible for both economic and political inflation, a rare achievement. In such a volatile market, no sale is ever complete until delivery. Mulayam Singh promised 39 MPs. On Friday in Delhi only 26 MPs attended the party meeting. It is possible that some MPs may have been afflicted with Mayawati-induced stomach upsets, and a few with heartache; and they may indeed turn up to vote behind the leader on the evening of 22 July. Sometimes 72 hours can be even longer than a week in politics.

Given such intense bargaining, the price of victory for the government might be far higher than the temporary despair of defeat. There is already an SMS doing the rounds which does not make pleasant reading for those in power: "Wanted: convicts, murderers, mafia, jailbirds, criminals 2 vote 4 Trust Vote. Parties need u if u r any of the above. U will get CM's post, Ministership, airport named after ur father etc. Good citizens need not apply."

In times of meltdown, we thirst for a glimpse into the future, and track it along the seam lines of what politicians can do. There is a much surer way of finding out. Check out what politicians cannot do, and you will discover what they will do.

Eliminate the impossible, and the possible begins to define itself.

Sentiment has little to do with power play. Likes and dislikes mean very little at crunch time. Politics is about the protection and pursuit of interests. Of course self-serving politicians will always clothe self-interest in the garb of national interest, but that cloth has worn thin.

The Left could never accept a strategic alliance with the United States, which is at the heart of the proposed relationship. It is a concept in which India becomes the eastern fortress of the "New Middle East", an expanded arc that stretches from the Nile to the Ganges and includes all the volatile regions of the Muslim world in which America has a deep vested interest because of energy. America does not hide this interest. India, including its waters, will become a region from which American forces can operate if they feel the need to do so. Obviously, this need will arise only rarely, but when it does India will be an undeclared base supporting forward operations. War is not only about fighting; it is also about logistics. The sop that is being thrown out by Dr Singh is that an American strategic alliance will create a balance of power between India and China.

Who is right is less relevant than the fact that these views are incompatible. The alliance, acceptable till the line was breached, is now untenable. Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi want to leave an indelible American mark on the Congress Party, with consequences that will change the organisation's fundamental ethos completely. That is their privilege. A substantial section of the Congress does not agree, but is voiceless in a party where debate has been extinguished.

Mulayam Singh's decision to support the Congress has nothing to do with the nuclear deal. His compulsions are regional and personal. Mayawati has driven him out of power in the only state where he can be in power. Defeat has unnerved him. The Congress, bed-ridden but not quite dead, makes a perfect ally, because it is too frail to make an independent bid for power.

When it comes to a division of Uttar Pradesh's 80 seats, Mulayam Singh will bargain with bare knuckles. The Congress will be lucky if Mulayam offers the party ten seats and relents to 12. Local luminaries like Salman Khursheed could discover that they have been sliced out since Mulayam will not concede a constituency like Farrukhabad. Once the Congress moves out of 80% of UP's seats it will never be able to return, for its remaining cadre will abandon the party. This suits Mulayam Singh even better, just as it suits Lalu Yadav in Bihar to restrict Congress to four or five seats. The Congress cannot revive if it sells long to buy short.

The short-term benefits for the Congress are dubious; the long term suggests disaster. The Congress will effectively eliminate itself from the spine of the nation, the Indo- Gangetic belt. If, five years or more later, the electorate tires of regional parties and seeks a national alternative, the only national party in Uttar Pradesh left standing will be the BJP.

Dr Manmohan Singh began with a majority of nearly a hundred. In four years, by becoming a one-point Bush- entranced Prime Minister, he has reduced that majority to a variable that could easily slip into a minority. We will soon see who wins the numbers game. What we do know already is that the government has lost its credibility.

Check the Impossible to find the Possible

2008-07-16T18:13:00.002+05:30

CHECK THE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND THE POSSIBLE
By M J Akbar
COVERT (16-31st JULY 2008)

In times of meltdown, the great eagerness is of course to get a glimpse of the future. The tendency, but naturally, is to track the future along the seam lines of what politicians can do. There is a much surer way of negotiating such minefields. Check out what politicians cannot do, and you will get a far better idea of what they will do.

Eliminate the impossible, and the possible begins to define itself. This is not to suggest that the contours of the possible will always be precise. Fuzz comes much more naturally to politics than clarity. But at least the route map will be broadly correct.

Second tip: Sentiment has little to do with power play. Likes and dislikes mean very little at crunch time. Politics is about the protection and pursuit of interests. Of course self-serving politicians will always clothe their self-interests in the garb of national interest, but that subterfuge is so old that it has worn thin.

It was never possible for the Left to accept a strategic alliance with the United States, which is the meat and bones of the new relationship that Dr Manmohan Singh and George Bush want. It is a concept in which India becomes the eastern fortress of the “New Middle East”, an expanded arc that stretches from the Nile to the Ganges and includes all the volatile regions of the Muslim world in which America has a deep vested interest because of energy. America does not hide this interest. George Bush is blatant in his assertion that American troops will remain in Iraq for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future, occupying 58 bases. The pro-American Iraqi government in Baghdad wants all American troops out within a specified timeframe, but that does not faze American policymakers. India, including its waters, will become a region from which American forces can operate if they feel the need to do so. Obviously, this need will arise only rarely, but when it does India will be an undeclared base supporting forward operations. War is not only about fighting; it is also about logistics. The sop that is being thrown out by Dr Singh is that an American presence will be protection for India against Chinese aggression. He, along with the Congress, has abandoned the notion that India can defend itself without becoming an American ally.

The Left has not. Who is right is less relevant, in the present context, than the fact that these views are incompatible. The alliance, acceptable till the line was breached, is now untenable. Dr Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi want to leave an indelible American mark on the Congress Party, with consequences that will change the organisation’s fundamental ethos completely. That is their privilege. A substantial section of the Congress does not agree, but is voiceless in a party where debate has been extinguished. However, it is absurd for the Prime Minister and Mrs Gandhi to expect the Left to rubberstamp their somersault. Congress spin-veterinarians (they are not quite doctors) tried till the last minute to suggest that the Left would beg for some patchwork formula rather than face “isolation”, but they were only fooling themselves.

Mulayam Singh’s decision to ditch the Third Front and support the Congress government has absolutely nothing to do with America or the nuclear deal. His compulsions are regional and personal. Mayawati has driven him out of power in the only state where he can be in power. Defeat in the last Assembly elections to Mayawati has unnerved him. He is no longer confident that he can take on Mayawati alone. The Congress makes a perfect ally, because it is too frail to make an independent bid for power: it is bed-ridden but not quite dead. If the Congress had been able to even walk, it would have sought to triangulate the non-BJP vote and expand its space in order to build its future. But it has abandoned its future in the heartland in order to seal a deal with America.

When it comes to a division of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 seats before the next general election, Mulayam Singh will bargain with bare knuckles. Those Congressmen who think the party can contest 25 seats are living in a very big fool’s paradise. They will be lucky if Mulayam offers ten and relents to 12. Local luminaries like Salman Khursheed could discover that they have been sliced out since Mulayam will not concede a constituency like Farrukhabad. Once the Congress moves out of 80% of the seats, it will never be able to return, for its remaining cadre will abandon the party. This suits Mulayam Singh even better, just as it suits Lalu Yadav in Bihar to restrict Congress to four or five seats. The Congress cannot revive if it sells long to buy short.
The short-term benefits for the Congress are dubious; the long term suggests disaster. If there is an electoral deal with Mulayam, the Congress will have effectively eliminated itself from the spine of the nation, the Indo-Gangetic belt from the point where the Ganga enters the plains to Ganga Sagar in Bengal, where it pours into the Bay of Bengal. If, five years or more later, the electorate tires of regional parties and seeks a national alternative, the Congress will have evaporated from the space where it could have reaped maximum benefits. The only national party in Uttar Pradesh left standing will be the BJP.

On paper, the nuclear-dealers should survive in the floor test in the Lok Sabha. Mulayam Singh has already made it clear that support will come at a price determined by how much benefit he and his friends can get. Those opposing the deal have nothing to offer by way of cash or policy-switch; and there are no trips to America to encourage them. The process cannot but further erode the credibility of the ruling coalition. The price will be high; the size of the parliamentary victory as low as single digits. Dr Manmohan Singh began with a majority of over a hundred. In four years, by becoming a one-point Bush-entranced Prime Minister, he has reduced that majority to a variable that could easily slip into a minority. Hard numbers may be less important than the more malleable commodity known as credibility. A shrinking government, tossed around by a last -minute Mulayam Rescue Squad, discovers that its authority has dissipated as well.

India is in a mess, its flesh weakened by inflation, its bones wracked by Naxalite violence. But the Prime Minister had a glow on his face when he met George Bush at the G8 Summit in Japan. Bush has been an uncertain asset over the last three years; he will be a liability in elections. But of course the two can still smile at each other when both their parties have lost national elections because of their leadership.

How Public is Public Opinion?

2008-07-12T18:05:00.001+05:30

Byline By M.J. Akbar: How public is Public Opinion?

As Parliament gears up for a vote of confidence on the Congress-driven nuclear deal, evidence of base realities is beginning to seep upwards. The virtual split in the Indian Union Muslim League over the deal tells its own story.

All opinion is not public. This is one reason why public opinion polls so often get it wrong. Some sections of the Indian public — generally, the less confident — prefer to keep their views to themselves, partly out of a nagging fear that the establishment might react adversely to a hostile opinion. And partly out of a sense of property rights in a democracy: why should anyone else know what I think? Let them find out when they check the ballot box. Instead of leading the opinion pollster towards the broad truth, the voter might even deliberately mislead.

Many Indian Muslims, a minority that has learnt to maximise its democratic opportunities, have become sophisticated in the art of misleading the establishment. In the absence of any direct communication with the grassroots, or the tea-stall, the establishment prefers to get its information through an intermediary class, the most prominent of which is the clergy.
Whenever political parties want to advertise "Muslim" support, they parade a queue of grey beards. Maulanas do have their place in Muslim society, a prominent one, but they are not the only determinants or mirrors of opinion. Their influence can be overestimated. It is hardly a secret that some of the Indian clergy are sustained by the establishment and can be counted upon to echo whatever any government wants to hear. Very few of the Maulanas- for-hire actually believe in the statements they make for Delhi's consumption. The rhetoric of the same Maulanas at the next Friday khutba [the sermon at Friday prayers] could easily be at great variance from their public posture a few days before.

Muslim voters, in any case, are not mechanical one-source consumers. They hear, they watch, they read but, most important, they remember. They are affected by their individual woes, but equally bear a strong sense of community. Television has made the world a village, and Iraq is as close to Kerala as Gujarat.

As Parliament gears up for a vote of confidence on the Congress-driven nuclear deal, evidence of base realities is beginning to seep upwards. The virtual split in the Indian Union Muslim League over the deal tells its own story. On 25 June, just a day before he died in Mumbai, G.M. Banatwala, then the party's national president, issued a press statement saying that the deal was not acceptable and that the party should oppose George Bush's "imperialism". He advised the Congress to "reconsider its decision". This of course was unpalatable to the establishment lobby within the IUML, led by E. Ahamed, who has done well as Minister of State for External Affairs in the UPA. He has the distinction of being the first Muslim League minister in Delhi since 1947. The pro-government section of the party therefore has a vested interest in supporting what the Congress orders it to do, and will ratchet up the usual list of advantages and alibis in defence of its alliance with the Congress. But there was strong resistance when the deal was discussed at a three-hour meeting of the party in Mallapuram on 10 July. The compromise that emerged was a typical fudge: the party would vote for the government, not the deal, and would convey Muslim anxiety to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. "The Muslim community is worried about the deal," said Panakkad Syed Muhammadali Shihab Thangal, president of the Kerala unit.

The Muslim League has rivals for the space it has acquired in the Malayali Muslim's affections. The most notable competitor is the People's Democratic Party, led by Abdul Nazar Madani. Madani publicly castigated the League and added, "The Muslim community across the world has been facing atrocities sponsored by the United States. The deal with an anti-Muslim country should have been opposed by the IUML." The CPI(M), which would like nothing better than to crack open the hold that the League traditionally has over the Muslim vote in Kerala, has accused the IUML of being loyal to American imperialism, adding for good measure that the Congress was in collusion with America, which had killed Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Like all other voters Indian Muslims too are influenced by both regional and national issues: the Muslim League's views in Kerala does not impact on the way Muslims vote in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. But on national and international issues there is a clear majority view across the states. The nuclear deal is both a national and an international issue, and it is only logical that national and international realities will enter the argument.

The only point being consistently hammered by Congress, Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party and the IUML in order to change Muslim sentiment is the spectre of BJP in all its manifestations. Let us look at the list.

At the top is the statement that if you oppose the deal it will help communal forces, in that it will enable the BJP to come to power. Does this mean that the Congress and UPA have already conceded defeat in a future election? I thought the Congress believed that the nuclear deal would be an election-winner, sweeping up votes with every clause. In fact, instead of searching for a harrowing and narrow victory in Parliament, the Congress should have had the confidence to go the people and been vindicated by their support. The Congress did not have the courage to do so because it does not believe the deal to be a vote-winner. If the BJP-led NDA wins, it will not be because of the deal, but because of the mismanagement of the nation over four years.

Second: the Congress tried desperately to get BJP support for the deal, and is still propping up former national security adviser Brajesh Mishra in order to try and break BJP unity. Would the deal or the Congress have become communal if the BJP had supported it?

The most lurid accusation is charging the CPI[M] with supporting "communal" forces because it opposes the deal. The Congress has a very convenient memory. The last time that a government was defeated on the floor of the House, the Congress and the BJP voted together — to bring down the V.P. Singh government. Did that make Congress, and Rajiv Gandhi, who was leader of the party then, communal? During the term of the V.P. Singh government the Marxists and the BJP were allies, supporting Singh. They had weekly dinners, from which Harkishan Surjeet and L.K. Advani would emerge, smiling and laughing for the cameras. Did that make Surjeet communal? Why should Prakash Karat become communal because he is against the nuclear deal, for reasons, incidentally, different from the BJP? You have to be very arid, mentally, and believe as well that Indian politicians and voters have nothing called a memory chip in their brains in order to market such logic.

It would take a very inept government to lose a test on the floor of the House that it had sought. Dr Manmohan Singh has brought down his majority from over a hundred to perhaps five or less, but surely he could not have dragged it into negative territory. The real test, however, is not a contest for 272 MPs in this Parliament, but for 272 MPs in the next one. Politicians will decide the fate of the Congress in the coming days. Voters will decide its fate in the coming months.

Have you ever heart a cake crumble? (Covert)

2008-07-01T14:07:00.002+05:30

Have you ever heard a cake crumble?
-by M J Akbar
COVERT (1st-15th JULY 2008)

In the second last week of June, after nearly fifty months of office, Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered Congress President Sonia Gandhi one of two options. She could either support the Singh-George Bush nuclear partnership and shoot herself in the Left foot, or she could abandon the Marxists who had carried the government on their uneven shoulders and shoot herself in the Right foot. If the bullet went Left, the partnership would fracture, hobbling the Congress severely in its effort to remain the core of a future non-BJP alliance. If the bullet went Right, the credibility of theManmohan Singh government, already in hospital, would be put permanently to sleep.

The root of the dilemma is a paradox. Dr Manmohan Singh has run a Right-wing government with Left-wing support. The Prime Minister is Right, if not right, by instinct and conviction. The Marxists knew this, but calculated that if this was the price to be paid to keep the BJP out, then so be it. Every price is a trade-off between cost and value. The Left offered Dr Manmohan Singh a credit card, but every credit card has an upper limit, unless you are a fool ready to be parted with all your money. The upper limit was reached with the strategic, technological and economic partnership that the Prime Minister arranged with the United States, a pact that would keep India in the American camp for the foreseeable future.

Dr Manmohan Singh came to power on the strength of the common man, the aam aadmi. He has spent four years courting just one khaas aadmi, George Bush. It was his bad luck, I presume, that the alliance should have been with a man who is now the most unpopular President in the history of the United States since polling began in 1928. But one must laud the power of true love: nothing could deter Dr Manmohan Singh from investing all his assets in one man, Bush.
In actual fact, Mrs Sonia Gandhi had little real choice. Allies like the DMK, desperate for a few extra months in power, largely so that they could make yet more money, urged her to save the government. You can only save what exists, and Dr Manmohan Singh’s government no longer exists. The joy has gone out of this administration, as is evident from every photograph of any Cabinet Minister; they look punctured and limp.

If that statement surprises you, it is because we associate a break with a sharp sound, and there has been no such crackle from Delhi. But only something hard breaks with a snap. Think instead of a cake. Have you ever heard a cake crumble? Disintegration can also be soundless.

The image of a cake is doubly appropriate because this government has lived on the principle of a cake won in a lottery. Everyone has been digging into the national cake with a diligence and greed that will find their place in the annals of our time, while the Prime Minister has watched helplessly, unable and unwilling to control the corruption that is rife.

Dr Manmohan Singh has worn a brilliant camouflage. He has smiled his way through four years. He positioned himself above politics, which won him much empathy among the urban middle class, which has grown tired of the cynicism that imbues contemporary politics. But politics was always lurking below him, in its many different manifestations. Perhaps he began to believe that CPI[M] general secretary Prakash Karat too was purchaseable, and all it needed was successful negotiation to complete the deal. He forgot the upper limit of the Marxist credit card, beyond which an individual or an institution becomes a pauper. The distance between wealth and the poorhouse is often no more than a single mistake.

The final decision on the direction of the bullet was not in Dr Manmohan Singh’s hands, because he has always been in office, rather than in power. But his assessment was correct when he told Mrs Sonia Gandhi on the morning of 18 June that he could not continue as Prime Minister if the nuclear deal was aborted. He is identified with a single cause, central to his Prime Ministership, both domestically and internationally. In India, he cannot go to the electorate with nothing to say except that he had survived by pawning his convictions. In the more immediate term, he surely wondered how he was going to face Parliament during the Monsoon Session. Between a deflated deal and inflated prices, the enlarged Opposition (now including the Left) will expose the government’s impotence each day on national television. A majority in Parliament is more than a technical necessity; it must be a vocal fact, or a government can get drowned. One of the advantages of an early election would be that the Singh government would not have to face a Parliament session during which it could get repeatedly humiliated.

Out of India, the Prime Minister would be a faceless nonentity at the G-8 Summit in Japan between 7 and 9 July, the last opportunity to push through a deal with the personal intervention of the Singh-Bush partnership. The official deadline for the compact is 20 January 2009, the day Bush demits office and hands over power, hopefully, to Barack Obama. The practical deadline is 9 July 2008. To have any hope of success, Dr Manmohan Singh must reach Japan with a formal decision in his files. Anything else would fetch him a few wan smiles, and an occasional hullo while the rest continue with discussions of substance between themselves.

I am an avid reader of bridge columns, largely because the mathematics of games of chance can be engrossing. But there is a second reason to check out some of the popular American bridge columns. They tend to begin with a wisecrack, which may or may not be wise, but is certainly a crack. On the day after the non-meeting between the government and the Left, Frank Stewart of the New York Times had a good opening bon mot: “If you let a smile be your umbrella, your rear end will get soaking wet.”

For four years Dr Manmohan Singh has let his smile be his umbrella, and the monsoons have arrived.

War and Consequences

2008-06-29T15:09:00.005+05:30

Byline by M.J. Akbar :War and Consequences

In a delicious irony, American policy towards Iran has shifted 180 degrees. In the last few days America has announced that it will open a diplomatic presence in Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad's Tehran. This has to be seen in the context of both the original break with Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and the dramatic seizure of the American embassy three decades ago, and Bush denunciation of Iran as the villain in chief of the Axis of Evil.

George Bush went to war in Iraq in order to create a new Middle East. Six years later, much to the shock of his allies and the horror of perceptive Americans, he has. The shock and horror arise from the fact that the Middle East has been changed by the Bush intervention in a direction sharply divergent from America’s fundamental interests as perceived by the Bush doctrine.

The Middle East was a term coined in 1903 by an American naval historian and strategic thinker, at the very height of British power across the world, when the Boers had been defeated in South Africa, the Ottomans had been virtually displaced from their most important colony Egypt, the Arabian Sea confirmed as a British lake and India itself was preparing to celebrate the glory of the Raj with a glittering durbar summoned by the Viceroy of Viceroys, Lord Curzon. India was a bulwark of this concept called the Middle East, a fortress of trade and imperial might that had neo-colonised China, and supplied the bulk of the troops for British expansion. The rupee was king from Singapore to Jeddah.

When George Bush’s team visualised their new map of the world they included India in what they termed the ‘Greater Middle East’. India was not an intrinsic part of the new power flows, but it was integrated once again as the fortress of the East. Since India was run by Indians rather than British allies, Indians had to be co-opted into the engineering of the new design. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was the man for the job.

Six years later Project Greater Middle East is tottering all across this strategic map. In Delhi the Singh government has been unable to bear the burden of an alliance with Bush. The Congress encouraged the illusion, with the help of a cabal of analysts, publicists and lobbyists, that the Left was a lapdog rather than a watchdog, and could be either appeased by a bone or silenced with a stick. When the moment came to choose, the Congress stood with Bush instead of Prakash Karat. The official excuse for this decision is energy. But this is deception. Dr Manmohan Singh deliberately sabotaged a much cheaper and more immediate source of energy for the country when he deliberately undermined the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, raising one false spectre after another to mislead the country, so that it would seem that there was no option but to go ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal. We have forgotten now that the first objection he raised, three years ago, was that financing would be a problem. This is not raised anymore since it is obvious that finance would be easily available at a time of rising energy prices. Countries like Russia are ready to invest in overseas projects of this nature even with equity participation as the present Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (chairman of Gazprom from 2000 to 2008) has confirmed. A second scare was puffed up: the unrest in Balochistan. This did not travel when Iran and Pakistan laughed it off. The real problem was always the fact that American legislators had made India’s relations with Iran a condition of their support for the deal. The best oil minister we have had in memory, Mani Shankar Aiyar, was suddenly removed from his job because he was more sceptical of America than the Prime Minister’s latitude permitted.

In a delicious irony, American policy towards Iran has shifted 180 degrees. In the last few days America has announced that it will open a diplomatic presence in Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad's Tehran. This has to be seen in the context of both the original break with Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and the dramatic seizure of the American embassy three decades ago, and Bush denunciation of Iran as the villain in chief of the Axis of Evil. This should be sufficient to resurrect the ghost of Senator Henry Hyde, who ensured that there were 18 references to Iran in the Act that gave legislative approval for the Indo-US nuclear deal. Add to this the fact that Bush has repeatedly threatened war to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and we begin to get an idea of the degree of capitulation — or return to realism — in American policy.

America is learning to live with the consequences of Bush's war. The single biggest beneficiary of the Iraq misadventure has been Iran. Before 9/11 Iran was chained by international diplomatic sanctions and hostile neighbours: a virulently anti-Islamic Revolution Saddam Hussein and a virulently anti-Shia Taliban. America cleared the Taliban out of Kabul and Saddam out of Baghdad for its own reasons, but no one thanked America more than the Ayatollahs in Tehran, although they may not have advertised their applause. Even as America got swamped by two wars that refused to end, Tehran used the new opportunity to strengthen its allies till they rose from the margins to the frontlines: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

At the heart of the Arab conflict with Israel, Iran's allies are in control: Hezbollah dominates Lebanon while Hamas continues to increase its influence in Palestine. In another dramatic turnaround, Israel has been forced into substantive peace talks with Syria, and has agreed to place the Golan Heights, advertised since 1967 as sacrosanct to its safety, on the negotiating table.

These shifts pale before the impact that American intervention has had on Iraq. For better or worse is not the real issue; there are new facts and we have to deal with them. Under Saddam, Iraq was a secular, anti-Ayatollah dictatorship. Under America, Iraq has become a Shia dominated democracy with a religious ethos and excellent relations with Iran, another fact that the Bush administration finds it convenient to ignore. The Baghdad government is also beginning to assert itself against America. Washington wants a security pact with Baghdad which is a carbon copy of the pact that the British imposed on Iraq in 1930 as a condition of granting “independence”. The one significant difference is that while Britain was content with two permanent military bases in Iraq, America wants 58. It was in this blithe spirit that Bush dismissed a question about when all American troops would leave the country. America still had troops in Korea, Japan and Germany, so why not forever in Iraq? Permanent is a very American term in Bush’s lexicon. Even the pro-American administration in Baghdad is beginning to baulk at this language of hegemony. Nor will the Arab world remain a mute spectator.

The change that Bush wanted in the Middle East has merely begun but the arc will not move in the direction of Bush’s dreams.

The one success that Bush can flaunt is in North Korea, the only region where Bush opted for diplomacy — hard and meaningful — instead of the rush of war. Given the enormity of damage he has done elsewhere, this is minor relief. There is a Hindi proverb that might sum up the Bush achievement: khoda pahaar, nikli chuhiya (he dug a mountain, and there emerged a rat).

Are economic reforms the solution to communal riots?

2008-06-22T15:13:00.003+05:30

Croissants & Crescents:
Are economic reforms the solution to communal riots?
By M J Akbar (22 June, 2008)

Are economic reforms the solution to the Great Indian Curse, Hindu-Muslim riots? Economic reforms began in 1991. Between 1991 and 2008 there have been only two major outbursts of Hindu-Muslim conflagration, both connected to old wounds, in 1992-93 after the Babri episode and then six years ago in Gujarat. Those who take this comparative peace for granted might want to recall that riots had become endemic in cities like Ahmedabad and Hyderabad by the Eighties, and there was carnage in Bhagalpur, Bihar in 1989.

Are these disparate facts by any chance related?

Reforms have altered the culture of business, easing, unintentionally, a few genuine reasons for Muslim anger, like discrimination in private sector jobs. With products protected from competition and capital available through cozy deals, the closed economy businessman could afford the luxury of bias in hiring. The reforms economy is both more ruthless and more ruthful. Profit is its central compulsion. The stock market has no religion and only one faith: higher share values. Companies must hire on the basis of merit and maximum worth for every salary given.
Moreover, urban violence is anathema to commerce. In a city like Mumbai you can either have riots or a rising market. A bear might waddle into this market for any number of reasons, but a bull will never show its face if the city is in acrid flames.

Competition among small businesses used to be another reason for violence in medium-sized towns like Varanasi and Moradabad. The post-reform environment has suddenly expanded space for opportunity. You no longer need to wrestle for crumbs in a tight circle. The market has exploded. If you can create the product it will find its niche. Muslim businessmen in Calcutta can sell leather products on mobile phone to customers in Europe.

Have we reached then what might be called an Obama moment for Indian Muslims? I refer only tangentially to his startling ascent in democratic politics, and more particularly to his revolutionary speech to fellow African-Americans (as son of a goat-herder in Kenya he is more immediately African than the descendants of slaves). Obama told Black America that it was time to get out of the irresponsible sloth that was destroying families and turning the community into parasites — he did not use this phrase, but that is what he meant.

Indian Muslims cannot be accused of sloth. They have, indeed, to work harder to remain in the same place. Their big problem is a culture of self-pity fused with the politics of patronage, in which a demand for handouts becomes the principal motivator of their sentiment. This culture has been nurtured by successive governments who have given Indian Muslims the illusion of benefit, through a dribble of grants and denied Muslims a flourishing role in the economy. When the dole is inadequate, as it always is, self-pity sets in.

With the economy slowly seeping out of the control of governments and private sector bias unprofitable, a remarkable opportunity has opened up for Muslims as much as it has for other disadvantaged groups.

But this opportunity will not drop into their lap like manna from heaven. They have to make themselves equal to the opportunity. A revolution may be sweeping through the world around them, but in order to join it they must know how to open the doors of their mind.
The greatest enemies of Muslims are poverty, lack of education and gender bias. Common sense suggests that the three are linked. Muslims now fully understand the vital role of education, and thirst for English and its attendant benefits. But conservative elements retain their tight clamp on gender bias.

One reason why India has begun to lift out of economic stagnation is because of the social reforms that Jawaharlal Nehru initiated through the Hindu Code Bill. If Muslim families deny the girl child her rightful place in a modern world, they will only abort the community's productivity and potential by half.

Unless Muslims eliminate gender bias, they will not reap the extraordinary benefits of the twentieth century, never mind the 21st.

Appeared in Times of India, June 22, 2008

The Fine Art of Doing Nothing (Covert)

2008-06-17T14:00:00.004+05:30

Covert: The Fine Art of Doing Nothing
By M J Akbar

COVERT (15TH-30th JUNE 2008)

Sensible politicians are wary of big words: they never know when one will rebound and bite them, with painful consequences. The philosophy of power is one word too many in a phrase about politics. Politicians keep their nose to the ground, philosophy out of their thoughts, and their conscience in a safe deposit vault, so that, while it remains out of sight, it can always be taken out, brushed up and put on display when expedient.

And yet, everyone who exercises power does so on the basis of some logic, even if we cannot in justice extend its meaning to the expanse of a philosophy. You have to be not merely very brave, but also intellectually robust to be a disciple of Kautilya, or even of Machiavelli. Their treatises on governance are more comprehensive and demanding than their one-liner reputations might lead you to believe. The only Indian Prime Minister who saw himself as a potential Kautilya, as early as in the 1930s, and had the intellectual bravado to pull it off in the 1950s, was Jawaharlal Nehru. Mrs Indira Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee had read enough to appreciate the nuances of a Kautilya, but they chose to stress different elements of the Arthashastra prescription, creating vastly different medicines for the national health.

No Government of India has been as minimalist as the UPA regime. For over four years now it has survived on a simple basis: Do nothing, and nothing unfortunate will happen.

There are some good reasons for this.

The central motivation of the UPA coalition has been fear of failure. It wanted to survive in office above all else. It knew that the alliance was brittle, and so compromised on two basic elements of power. No action was ever taken on the corruption or misrule of ministers, for fear that it would break the alliance. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could not possibly have had two standards on corruption, a wink for allies like the DMK, and a taskmaster’s discipline for Congress ministers. So when DMK ministers began raking in the loot like there was no tomorrow (and maybe for some of them there isn’t) Congress ministers welcomed the signal. They got a free ride on a highway without tolls, and, being seasoned Congressmen, devised artful and even brilliant forms of bribery. I believe the fashionable thing to do now is to ignore silly old cash, and settle for benaami equity in private sector companies. Ministers with less imagination used power to get benefits for companies owned by relatives. Ritu Sarin of the Indian Express has done some superb investigation of how rules were bent and laws broken to favour a distillery owned by Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s son Shailesh. You only associated the Home Minister with starched clothes, white shoes, pomade and cluelessness, did you? Well, he had a distillery up his armpit.

What will happen?

Nothing.

Any action might cost Dr Singh his job and his boss, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, her reputation.

The Hindustan Times story on uranium might not have the drama of the Express investigation but it is, in a sense, even more damaging. It undermines the very basis of Dr Singh’s arguments in defence of the Indo-US nuclear deal, that India needs foreign uranium for its civil nuclear programme. As Neelesh Misra reports, “India has been sitting on massive, untapped reserves of uranium, hundreds of tonnes of which have been discovered over the past couple of years – adding to the over 1 lakh tonnes already identified in Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu.” That is enough for our requirements for at least 40 years. Why did the Prime Minister keep this a closely guarded secret for four years?

What will happen? Why, nothing of course. To do anything would mean that the Prime Minister would have to appear on national television and cough discreetly before declaring himself guilty of misleading the country.

Dr Singh learnt what little he knows of politics from P.V. Narasimha Rao, a Prime Minister who perfected the art of doing nothing, and flaunted indecision as a decision. The epitome of this model was reached on 6 December 1992 when, in an unparalleled display of comatose indifference Rao did nothing while the Babri mosque was being destroyed through the day. Singh was Finance Minister then, and arguably the most important minister after Rao. What did Dr Singh do? So much of nothing that you could write a book on silence out of it. But here is the surprise. The government got away with it. Rao manipulated the still dominant government audiovisual media from the evening of 6 December, sold a lie, and the Congress won a handsome victory in the Assembly elections held a year later.

Moral of the story? If you do nothing successfully enough, you can always drift back to power. The danger of doing nothing is that it can become a habit. Witness how government has tackled rising prices. Measures against inflation should have been put in place in December last year. The government did nothing. By March this horse, inflation, had bolted. However hard the government slams the door now, the damage is done.

Narasimha Rao could legitimately claim some redemption in his record. He did do something in one area, the economy. He might not have done what he did were it not for the financial emergency he inherited; and he certainly could have done more, as Dr Singh would attest. But economic reforms will stand against his name. The record of the last four years, in contrast, is marked by only one significant departure from the norm: the Indo-US nuclear deal. That deal seems to have been sacrificed to survival. The Dr Singh years add up to a fragile zero. Perhaps the Prime Minister is beginning to understand this. Those who saw him on television asking ministers to stop going abroad in order to save Indians from the whiplash of rising prices were not overly impressed.

His mien was never very colourful, although he could be brisk. If he began as a grey man, he has deepened towards an ashy pallor. The price of power was visible in his eyes. You might imagine that if you do nothing, nothing will happen to you. Your eyes betray you.