M.J. Akbar - The Sunday Guardian

The price of ‘corrugance’

2013-05-13T13:07:00.003+05:30

The price of ‘corrugance’

M.J. Akbar

Someone described BJP’s drubbing in Karnataka as an innings defeat. This is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. The game has changed.An election used to be a test match. It is now a protest match.

The fulcrum of this anger is corruption. All else pales. Shed a tear then for poor Suraj Singh Thakur, Mumbai president of the Congress student organization NSUI, who was suspended merely for dancing drunk and naked late into the night, encouraged by the throb of a DJ’s beat at the end of a strenuous three-day conference on ways and means to save the nation. All that Thakur did was dance, albeit drunk and nude in equal proportions. Alcohol is no longer a hanging offence in Congress. For many future stars rotating in the highest orbits, Congress is now a party that begins at sunset.

Thakur must be bewildered at the Congress definition of crime and punishment. He sees half the Congress Cabinet caught with its pants down, exposed by CAG, CBI, a vigilant Haryana bureaucrat, or indeed the Italian police chasing bribes to Indian politicians in a helicopter deal with more zeal than any Indian policemen has displayed, and sees evasion to protect the mighty. Law minister Ashwani Kumar, who perverted the CBI investigation into the coal mines scam and subverted evidence submitted to the Supreme Court, is forced to resign with the greatest reluctance. Kumar was trying to erase the trail to the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, the very summit of government, and the government is still in place. It is not until tapes surface of railway minister Pawan Bansal incriminating himself with astonishing abandon that he is forced to quit. Poor Thakur must be wondering, in his few sober moments, whether there is any justice in politics.

Actually, there isn’t. But there is justice in an election. Statutory warning to all ministers, prime or lower down: voters do not punish young men drunk on student spirits. Voters punish older men drunk with power. The story from Karnataka is of a Congress victory. The moral of this story lies in BJP’s defeat. The humiliation of the party’s former peacock, the chief minister who triggered a selfdestructive avalanche, B.S. Yeddyurappa, is particularly instructive. He imagined he was going to become CM again. He has many years of contemplation ahead.

He was trapped in a suicidal pincer of corruption and arrogance. The syndrome is so widespread, across party lines, that we might need a word for it: “corrugance” would do. More names keep getting added to a long list: Bansal and Kumar are only the newest. Corruption kills; arrogance insures a long burial. This was fatal to BJP in Karnataka; it will be deadly for UPA across India when a general election comes. The voter is especially unforgiving when governments permit theft of natural resources, the people’s wealth, by cronies. The BJP’s collapse began with the rape of mines in Bellary.

It was an early scandal of the BJP’s tenure, but people did not forget, just as voters will remember a long UPA litany . UPA sanctioned loot of resources on an unprecedented scale: in spectrum, mines, or agricultural land gobbled up through shady private deals. The BJP lost the confidence of Karnataka long before it was whittled into a minority in the legislature. Ditto, UPA in Delhi. His personal credibility is shattered, his government’s reputation is an embarrassment, his party has become a national joke, but Dr Singh continues, primly, in office, hoping for a chance reversal of fortune through a spin of cosmic lottery. But there are no miracles left in God’s cupboard for the corrupt.

The Indian voter has more patience than the Indian temperament would suggest. Even a fog at the top will not deter the voter from locating his destination. The Congress did not have a candidate for Chief Minister in Karnataka during the campaign. It did not matter beyond a point. It will not matter beyond the same point when India votes. The Congress vote in Karnataka did not rise by much; the BJP vote collapsed.

Across the country, the BJP is rising only marginally, but Congress is falling with a thud. Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh have an additional problem. In Karnataka BJP operated from ground level, full of the usual slosh and pitfalls. Dr Singh and Mrs Gandhi opted for the moral high ground of saints. A fall from such heights is that much more shattering. Dr Singh, after claiming honesty as a first principle, permitted corruption in order to sit in the PM’s chair. This is betrayal, too. His ebbing admirers want him to resign. He believes he can squeeze out a few more months of power through sustained indifference.

The Congress is lost in the debris of a vote factory built on sand. UPA is dead. India needs another government, born through the labour of an election, immediately.

No country for confusion

2013-05-13T13:05:00.001+05:30

No country for confusion
M.J. Akbar

The results of the Pakistan elections should be far less important
than the fact that elections are taking place. There will always be
theorists who find comparisons between the past and present
irresistible. It is possible, for instance, to see faint ghosts of
1970 and 1971, albeit in a reverse mirror image: a new West and East
Pakistan emerging, with Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
gravitating towards dissension and bulwark Punjab holding up central
space. In this scenario the Pakistan of 1947, halved in 1971, is being
reduced to a mere Punjab in the teens of the 21st century.
Elections can trigger, or accentuate, seismic faults if sectarian
passions find a correlation with geography. The decisive phase of the
Bangladesh liberation movement began with a general election that
confirmed that East and West Pakistan were politically split. Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party, argued forcefully
after the verdict that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League had no
moral right to rule the West because its mandate had come solely from
the East. Awami League had an arithmetical majority in the national
legislature, not a political one.
Bhutto was right. By the same token, his PPP had no claim over what is
now Bangladesh since his party was not even in the contest in the
East. Of course Bhutto could never extend, publicly, the logic of his
assertion.
But two contemporary realities make disintegration virtually
impossible. Pakistan has a strong nationalist institution in the armed
forces. Even in 1971, Bangladesh could not have been born without the
defeat and humiliation of the Pak armed forces in a war against India.
East and West would have had to find a different solution, but that is
another story.
Second, Tehrik-e-Taliban and its allies do not represent a threat to
the geography of Pakistan. They are challenging what they believe is a
wishy-washy compromise that currently passes as the ideology of the
state. They want a hardline Islamic Pakistan, not a divided Pakistan.
They believe a Sharia-driven Sunni Islam can check sub-nationalism.
They do not want to drive the Baloch or the Pathan away; if anything,
their dreams are expansionist, seeking ideological territory in
Afghanistan and then an alliance with compatible Sunni movements and
militias further west. If they have an enemy within the folds of
believers, it is the Shia, who they condemn as heretics.
The Taliban has begun military operations against two sectarian
parties: the MQM, the front of North Indian refugees, and ANP [Awami
National Party] of the Frontier. The third enemy is PPP, which is
likely to become a Sindh party after this poll. The Taliban is not
talking about merely defeating them in elections. It is seeking to
eliminate them physically. Over a hundred died, and more than 300 were
wounded, during April alone, when campaign season began. At its end,
former PPP Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani’s son, Ali Haider Gilani, was
kidnapped in Multan. As Ahmad Rashid, the renowned author and
journalist, put it, the “polarisation, murder and mayhem” are
unprecedented.
In a land where peace is news, a large island of calm will inevitably
invite questions. Strangely, or perhaps logically, there is little
violence in Punjab. Most observers attribute this to an implicit
understanding between the principal adversaries for power in Punjab,
Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League and Imran Khan’s
Tehreek-e-Insaf. Even if this were true, this is only a very small
part of the story.
The Taliban and its friends are wiser than we imagine. This is so
obviously a tactical decision, not a strategic one. Taliban and
Company believe they can seize the surround, providing them with a
larger operating base for the final phase in their war for the control
of Pakistan, which will take place in Punjab. Neither Imran nor Nawaz
is a Taliban ally. For this election, the democrats [Nawaz and Imran],
and Taliban are using each other as a cat’s paw. Their turn will come
after the elections.
The extremists have also sharpened their appeal by exploiting a
fundamental weakness of Pakistan’s democratic parties, their
collective capitulation to feudalism. Pakistan has never had genuine
land reform. Bhutto, who flirted with socialism, tried, failed and
abandoned the thought. Islam plus land is a powerful slogan for the
peasant. The New York Times quotes Maulana Abdul Khaliq Rehmani, a
candidate of the Ahle-Sunnat wal-Jamaat, a legal offshoot of
Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, telling a rural rally: “Feudalism has
paralyzed Pakistan.” He also adds, for good measure, that “Islamabad
is a colony of America.” The Jamaat has put up 130 candidates, and
less than ten might win; but they are sowing seeds for conflicts
within the near future.
The most ominous result for Pakistan would be a confused legislature.
It would encourage the worst instincts of the army and inspire hopes
among extremists that their gun-stoked theocracy is the only option
that can bring order to the country. This is what makes results more
important than the polls. Whoever wins, should win big.

India has never seemed as helplessly weak as now

2013-05-05T13:25:00.001+05:30

India has never seemed as helplessly weak as now

Hell has more definitions than heaven , possibly because more of us expect to end up there than in the other place. A cynic described hell as other people. Men of religion generally promise hellfire for the wicked, an image that rather contradicts the doctrine that the body is terminal and soul eternal. A soul can't get roasted in flames, can it?

One much prefers the blind poet Milton's insight. Heaven is order, he wrote, and hell chaos. By Milton's standards, the government of Dr Manmohan Singh has already gone to hell.

Chaos is the wild weed rooted in corruption. Like an untamed cancer, chaos has destabilized the coalition, corroded governance beyond repair and perverted foreign policy. In 2009 allies were clamoring to attach themselves to Congress. Today the only ally left is Sharad Pawar; even the ever-reliable Dr Farooq Abdullah seems to have turned wobbly. Since UPA continues to survive in office like a patient spread across a table, it has become evident justification for euthanasia.

An indecisive Prime Minister spreads uncertainty along every artery of power. He does not speak, and when he does silence seems the better option. He appears to suggest that cliché or evasions are a solution. He demands justice from Pakistan after Sarabjit's deliberately authorized murder in a Pak jail, unable to comprehend that India is still awaiting justice for Hafiz Saeed, mastermind of the Mumbai terrorist attack. Pakistan will do nothing beyond raising the occasional flurry of dust; and Dr Singh is unlikely to do anything after the customary waffle.

India has become a joke in the Maldives, a foe in Sri Lanka, a doubt in Bangladesh, a shrug in Nepal, a snigger in Pakistan and a taunt in China. Every neighbour has tested Delhi and discovered that this government walks on its knees. India has never seemed as helplessly weak as now. Foreign minister Salman Khurshid thinks China's incursion into Despang is acne which will disappear - perhaps after an application of a multinational cream. Has no one briefed him or the PM about Chinese revenue officials trying to extend their jurisdiction into Ladakh, or the significant possibility that the area may be rich in un-mined uranium?

The Prime Minister has become either the target of dark outrage or the butt of black humour. The insulation that protected him while colleagues were falling on either side in the many corruption battles, has been ripped off by the coalmines allocation scam. The government has only one strategy for all the riveting scandals that have gutted its credibility: the purchase of time through delay or deception. Law minister Ashwani Kumar is caught tampering with the evidence to be presented to the Supreme Court, and gets a ringing vote of confidence from the Prime Minister. The only time Dr Singh shows any determination is when he is defending the indefensible. Additional Solicitor General and CBI counsel exposes the lies of Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati in a public letter, and Vahanvati laughs all the way back to his handsome bungalow in Lutyens Delhi to await the next set of cheques for his services. Laugh if you must, but it does seem entirely appropriate that this legal conspiracy against the Supreme Court began to unravel when Raval encountered Vahanvati in a cloak room. History is never made in a toilet, but farce is.

A question is often asked, and never adequately answered except in a partisan sense: why is UPA2 so precisely the opposite of UPA1 in its management of authority and public environment? India's Marxists believe that UPA lost its harmony once it began reading from a non-Left hymn sheet. That is at best partly true. A second view is that after nine years, every dubious chicken is coming home to roost: decisions like Commonwealth Games extravagance and the telecom scam were made in the first term. A better explanation is that hubris turned virtually every problem at this government's doorstep into a larger crisis. This arrogance was born of a belief, widely bandied about after victory in 2009, that UPA would remain in power for another 20 years because a broken Opposition had disappeared. Whenever your upturned nose comes in the way of your eyesight, you cannot see the obvious. When Opposition parties fade, the people become the Opposition.

A fundamental requirement of any democracy is anger management. Instead of calming periodic outbursts of anger on the street, sometimes led by mavericks, senior ministers went out of their way to provoke the people with insults. Voters were initially puzzled. They expected balm, and got astringent. Slowly their bewilderment consolidated into wrath. An increasingly defensive government sought refuge in belligerence. Ministers can laugh at the people and get promoted by the Prime Minister for their weird sense of humour, but in democracy the last laugh will always be with the people.

Hell is many things. It is also the final resting place of the impotent.

Anwar’s moment

2013-05-04T19:35:00.001+05:30

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Anwar’s moment

M.J. Akbar

In Malaysia, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s campaign is on song,
sometimes literally so. He does tend to remind his massive rallies
that it’s “Now or Never”. Even if everyone does not catch the
allusion, no one misses the message. Maybe Anwar has at long last
found time for a snatch of song after having suffered years of
soul-searing, unbelievable injustice and political barbarism, because
the mood around him is so buoyant.
I write this on the eve of what could be Malaysia’s most breathtaking
election result in 56 years of history as an independent republic.
Better men than me have tempted fate by making unnecessary
predictions. So let me just quote that ubiquitous taxi driver, the
first and last resort of any hack in search of an election forecast.
There are two remarkable things about Kuala Lumpur, he said, as I
settled down in his vehicle outside the Mandarin hotel and nudged
forward a conversation: the city’s infrastructure and the taxi
drivers’ brain. I bowed in homage.
The government, he continued without much need of a further prod, had
an overwhelming majority in the number of flags and buntings that
pockmarked the capital. Anwar had the votes. He laughed with some
gusto at his own joke, doubtless not for the first time. There were 30
taxis in his pool, he explained; only five or six drivers were with
the ruling party. The rest were with Anwar. How did they express their
solidarity? They could not refuse a passenger at the hotel, but if
they saw one flagging a taxi outside one of those sparse government
public gatherings they just drove on. Let the chap walk. More
laughter.
What about the growing talk that government agents were offering 500
ringit [about $160] per vote? “I will take the money,” he chortled.
“After all, it is my money. They took it from the public. But voting
is private.” The laugh lowered to a meaningful chuckle. Then he added
a caveat. He was only talking about Kuala Lumpur and adjacent
provinces. He did not know what was happening elsewhere.
Anecdotal evidence is in favour of Anwar Ibrahim. International
television channels like CNN and BBC, which prefer to be circumspect,
are beginning to broadcast that this election could lead to the first
ever change in government. Anwar’s theme is precisely that: change. He
has tapped into many levels of discontent, not the least of them being
anger against perceived corruption. There is a palpable sense that
enough voters are simply tired of the establishment, even when they
are not particularly angry over any specific issue.
The establishment will not surrender without a last-ditch stand, in
which every weapon from its well-stocked political arsenal will be
brought into play. The air is rife with talk of desperate measures.
Planes, say some, have been chartered to bring voters loyal to the
government to hop and jump through marginal constituencies, to cast
bogus votes. There are substantive rumours that mercenaries from
Bangladesh have been mobilized to add to their numbers. Each whisper
builds resistance among genuine voters. It is not as if government is
bereft of genuine support. The country’s ethnic divisions are sharp:
Malay, Chinese and Indians who were brought in by the British as
labour for plantations. In a quaint move, these Indians recently
petitioned the British monarch for compensation to atone for the sins
of her ancestors. Queen Elizabeth maintained her stiff upper lip, but
you get the point. Indians, exceptions apart, remain at the bottom of
the economic pile, but have still not been persuaded that they need to
challenge the establishment. They will decide, said a wealthy
entrepreneur, in a typically Indian fashion: on Saturday night.
Voting starts on Sunday morning. By Sunday night the Election
Commission will announce which of the two antagonists needs
prescription drugs for deep depression.
If the opposition is optimistic it is largely because of a new
demographic is going to play a crucial role, the first-time voter. Add
this lot to the second-time voter and you get the powerful vanguard
that is building momentum for Anwar Ibrahim’s call for change. Its
enthusiasm has become infectious in the cities; and there is reason to
believe that it is seeping into rural areas as well. This identity
operates outside traditional ethnic constituencies. Its momentum is
aspirational.
Malaysia is not alone; a similar phenomenon is at play in elections
that will sweep across from south east Asia to Iran in the next 15
months. Youth power is rarely good news for the establishment. Imran
Khan’s success in Pakistan will be properly measured only after the
results are in, but if he is going somewhere it is only because the
young are travelling with him. When India votes, the young will make
the difference. It is a fallacy to suggest that the young vote only
for the young. They vote for whoever can promise a better future. That
is the only meaning of change.

The will and won’t of corruption

2013-04-27T13:47:00.002+05:30

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The will and won’t of corruption

M.J. Akbar

A neuroscientist of Indian origin, V.S. Ramachandran, has noted that the human brain might get lost in variations of “free will”, but can certainly be clear about a “free won’t”. Mr Ramachandran should start classes for powerful Indian politicians. Dangle a temptation before them, and stick to “will”, rarely opting for “won’t”.

One sign of the march of Indian democracy is creative progress in the science of corruption. In the shoddy old days, someone took a bag stuffed with cash, a flunky counted the rupees and took it to the master’s bedroom. A high dignitary like a Prime Minister would get more respect; his cash came in a proper suitcase. A bull operator on the Mumbai stock exchange claimed in the early 1990s that he had gifted P.V. Narasimha Rao with a suitcase packed with Rs 1 crores in neat bundles. These days, of course, such a pittance would be below the dignity of even junior Cabinet ministers. You will recall that last year Beni Prasad Verma, a proud member of Dr Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet, laughed when his colleague was accused of skimming Rs 70 lakh. Too small a figure to be credible, Verma chortled. Did Dr Manmohan Singh frown? Not at all. Verma is still a Cabinet minister.

Perhaps suitcases are passé, perhaps not. More sophisticated politicians use a brilliant variation. They pick up loot through a relative, as payment for services rendered. And so a minister’s wife gets crores in legal fees for a transaction worth possibly lakhs, if worth anything at all. How can you argue with that? Value, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. If a chit-fund businessman treats your wife’s legal acumen at such worth, who are we to argue? Has Dr Singh done anything? Silence remains his only answer.

One great illusion of the last decade has been our belief that Dr Manmohan Singh would ensure corruption-free governance since he himself was above board. The latest expose in the spectrum and coal mine scams proves beyond any argument that his personal reputation provided cover for massive theft by his ministers. He knew, and did nothing about it, because his own survival as PM was at stake. The CBI affidavit to the Supreme Court in the coal scam is a devastating indictment of his government. It proves that CBI and law officers lied to Court earlier to protect the government. It admits that its affidavit was vetted by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Law Minister, Ashwani Kumar. The explanation that Kumar was making only grammatical corrections is not only stupid, but also arrogant. It assumes that the rest of us, including justices of the Supreme Court, are fools. The joint secretary in PMO, who got in touch with CBI, reports directly to the Prime Minister. Dr Singh made Ashwani Kumar Law Minister not because he delivers zillions of votes to the Congress, but because of his proximity to the PM.

Mrs Indira Gandhi once dismissed corruption as an international phenomenon. She was right. The nexus between politicians, big business and a few useful friends in media is also an old story. Witness this report, datelined Berlin, first published exactly 100 years ago and reproduced in the International Herald Tribune of 22 April 2013: “The charges of bribery of Government officials by members of the Krupp firm have momentarily sunk into insignificance compares with new charges launched against German armament interests of fomenting international rivalries and ill-feeling. Selecting France as a fertile field for these machinations, the armament interests endeavoured to circulate false reports in the French press with a view to frightening Germany into buying large supplies of arms. The false announcement that the French army intends to double its supply of machine was evidently intended to spur the Germans on to double their own supply.”

But neither age nor global expanse makes corruption a virtue. The difference between Europe and India a century later is that Europe reveals names of those who hold secret accounts in Swiss banks. In India we specialise in creating escape routes for the unlucky few who are discovered with their hands in the nation’s treasury.

There is a saving grace. India is a democracy. When Indians get angry on an epic scale, they rise with a fury that ravages the ruling party.

Whenever corruption tops the voters’ agenda, the establishment is reduced to roughly half its previous strength in the Lok Sabha. In 1974, the late Jayaprakash Narayan led an unprecedented stir against corruption. A desperate Mrs Gandhi was forced to declare an Emergency in 1975. In 1977 Congress lost over 200 seats, ending up with only 150 MPs. In 1989, Bofors allegations slashed Congress from 420 MPs to less than 200. Narasimha Rao, who had more than corruption to worry about, was similarly mauled in 1996. If the pattern persists, Congress could drop to around 100 after the next general elections.

Birnam wood is not moving, yet

2013-04-22T12:16:00.004+05:30

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Birnam wood is not moving, yet

M.J.Akbar

Macbeth, Shakespeare’s most self-destructive politician, was confident that he would never lose power until Birnam wood began to move. Since it seemed highly unlikely that a whole forest would trot across towards his fortress, he lived in the complacent world of invincibility.

Every government in Bengal is equally certain of survival till the Muslim vote begins to move against its citadel. The largest Muslim concentration in India is in Bengal; they constitute 28% of the population, or twice the national average. The effective percentage is higher. Muslims, conscious of the strategic value of their vote, poll in higher numbers. Second, geography is on their side. They are concentrated in an eastern arc that rises from South 24 Parganas and develops demographic momentum in districts like Murshidabad, Malda and Dinajpur. They make the difference in at least half of Bengal’s seats, if not more.

Quiz question: what is the Muslim vote in President Pranab Mukherjee’s former constituency? Above 65%. Rub your eyes again at the next fact. Barring one instance in the 1950s, neither the Congress nor the Marxists have put up a Muslim candidate from this constituency, until the Left did so in last year’s byelection.

Being a forest, this vote moves slowly, almost imperceptibly, but when it shifts the impact is decisive in Bengal. Till 1967, it supported the Congress. When the mood changed, United Front governments came to power. In 1971, it went back to Congress because of Mrs Indira Gandhi, but from 1977 it veered towards the Left and kept Marxists in power for over three decades. It now forms the vanguard of the Mamata Banerjee insurrection.

The decline in Mamata Banerjee’s urban popularity is evident to anyone who lives in or visits Calcutta. Calcutta has not returned to red yet, but the mood is belligerent. There is incipient nostalgia among the genteel bhadralok in particular for the last Marxist Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who had the kind of soft public style that is considered good manners.

Mamata Banerjee is too interventionist, a one-woman occupation force rather than a government. She has not understood the art of surrendering space to colleagues, if for no other reason but to share the blame when things go wrong, as they always will. If you hog the spotlight, warts from elsewhere will drift onto your face. Her nature is confrontational. This wins applause when she dares a Goliath called Delhi. It seems shabby when her ire descends upon little men from Lilliput who crowd the media.

But slip outside the metropolis and you can smell and see the change in mood along with the environment. Rural Bengal, on either bank of the Hooghly river, is as serene as urban Bengal is squalid. As we drive up towards Shantiniketan, where Bengal pays homage to the memory of Rabindranath Tagore, there are only a few patches of the potholed past. On one short stretch, a 20th century road was still being laid over a 19th century surface through 18th century methods. But these villages and small towns that echo through the early phase of East India Company history, remain Mamata territory. The devastation of famine, which came with the British, may have become a nightmare of the past but poverty remains pervasive, visible in the low wages and darned lungis of labour.

It is this constituency of the poor that gives Mamata her political strength. A recent opinion poll by the TV channel Times Now gave her 27 seats out of 42. Calcutta sneers at such projections, and believes that Mamata Banerjee will be, or should be, defeated. But these voters still trust her. She has raised minimum wages. This may not have had a radical impact on the largest employer of the poor, the domestic sector, but it has raised the poor’s bargaining power. The numbers are not ecstatic yet, but the percentage of Muslims in police recruitment is rising. Mamata Banerjee is also sensitive to any problem in Bengali madrasas or Urdu institutions.

But her true opportunity lies in an area of decision-making which is rarely discussed. Both Congress and Communists never lose a chance to claim secularism as their bread-and-butter creed, but neither has ever empowered Muslims when in government. In any other state a community with a minimum 30% vote would have claimed the chief ministership. Forget that thought in Bengal. Neither Congress nor Communists have even given a Muslim an economic portfolio like finance. As a senior Marxist once told me, Bengali Muslims are considered good enough for only livestock (he was referring to animal husbandry, and in any case the remark sounds fare more interesting in Bengali with a rural cadence).

So far Mamata Banerjee has remained within the conventional pattern. She has raised the political profile of some Muslim colleagues but that is not going to be enough for a community that is beginning to understand its power. If it continues to be taken for granted, fed with occasional tokenism, the forest will move much faster than before. Mamata Banerjee still has time. And time shall tell if she also has the will to be different.

The centre can indeed hold

2013-04-22T12:16:00.000+05:30

The centre can indeed hold

M.J. Akbar

Aspirant prime ministers often forget the first rule of Delhi: the Centre can only be ruled from the centre. Even in an age when ideology no longer sits on certain ground, there is still broad separation between ‘left’ and ‘right’. It may be only as thin as a comparison, but it exists. A finance minister can lean left or tilt right, but a prime minister must have the flexibility to take whichever lane offers a solution.

Left and right are European terms with no equivalent resonance in Indian economic or political thought. They came into currency only in the late 1920s, when Communists and semi-socialist Congressmen like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose began to dominate the discourse. Mahatma Gandhi was outside such categories.

There had been no leader in many millennia with a deeper commitment to the eradication of poverty and that hateful curse, caste oppression, but was Gandhi a leftist? Not by the logic of Marxists and their fellow travellers, who were convinced that the means must justify the ends, rather than the other way around. The Left has rather lost out on historical determinism in free India. Instead of striding along a shining path lit by dialectic debate, it became hopelessly tangled in that powerful British invention called a file-stricken, deskbound bureaucracy. The Indian right, untroubled by either doctrine or morality, placed its faith in the simplicity of greeddriven enterprise. It was naïve and self-defeating, particularly in a land diseased by poverty, but never waste your time arguing with the rich. Every morning their money whispers in their ears that they are always right. Even a self-made billionaire who started by asking splendid questions, switches to sermons with success. Money is an intellectual laxative.

Gandhi, an uncompromising bania from Gujarat, created the wide Indian centre of politics. There was, alas, something deeply unfashionable about it, but the only fashion that Gandhi needed was a loincloth that sometimes exposed more than he had bargained for. This sanyasi-alchemist authored an essential, if only partially acknowledged, philosophy for India: that economic liberation for the poor had to be preceded, or at least accompanied, by a social revolution. The toxic ruts of this country did not run along merely the deep divides of wealth. Oppression also had a cruel cultural sanction in the birth-re birth karmic cycle, which makes human beings with a right to equality, touchable or untouchable.

Marxists never really understood caste, which is why Indians never really understood Marxism. However Indian Marxists did eventually accept the virtues of pragmatism. Just as Hinduism became elastic enough to absorb the threat from Buddhism, Indian Marxism stretched its frontiers to accommodate religion. One of the more complex consequences was the manner in which as theist a community as Muslims began to vote for an officially atheist party like CPM. But the tensions were never resolved. Our Constitution followed Gandhi in its positive discrimination programmes. Its breathing lung was designed through the Pune pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar in 1932, which began the process of empowerment of Dalits through a politico-economic commitment.

The trauma of 1940s forced Gandhi to leave economic planning to the grandiose schemes of the Congress left. But we must flag a question that can never be adequately answered: what would have been Gandhi’s influence on economic policy if he had not been assassinated in January 1948? Leftists caricatured Gandhi after his death by making the charkha into the sole symbol of Gandhi’s legacy, but that is nonsense. For Gandhi the charkha represented a fundamental model: growth must mean something to the poorest individual or it is worthless. Gandhi had the extraordinary ability to invent and adapt with time, and it is possible to argue that if he had been around he would not have tolerated a policy framework that got mired in stasis by the early 1960s. Nathuram Godse did incalculable harm to India when he shot Gandhi; Godse may have also stolen three decades from economic reform.

Rule from the centre pre-empts the biggest danger to India, civil wars along the frontlines of caste and religion. As swadeshi saffron and communist red march shoulder to shoulder against FDI, nomenclatures inevitably escape from the single cage of economics and get defined by competing views on secularism. The competition is creative. As BJP shifts, as inconspicuously as possible, towards the social centre, Congress tries to shift the centre away from an encroaching BJP. A radical move in this bidding war has been made by Narendra Modi, through the Gujarat government’s appeal for harsher punishment for those convicted of fomenting communal riots. This is unprecedented. Modi will doubtless compare this in public speeches to the upward mobility within Congress ranks of Jagdish Tytler, an instigator during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

Indian politics is moving towards the centre. It began with elephant steps. There is nothing like a general election to turn it into a jog.

Off with his head? Hardly

2013-04-15T11:30:00.002+05:30

Off with his head? Hardly

MJ Akbar

Times of India

At long last we have an Indian Marie Antoinette. The Bourbon queen before the French Revolution of 1789 began to dislocate royal heads from their shoulders , imperiously asked citizens hungry for common bread to eat cake instead. Ajit Pawar's recipe for Maharashtra's farmers suffering from the worst drought in decades is not quite as delicious, but it has already earned pride of place in the political thesaurus of memorable insults. There is nothing like bodily fluids to stoke conversation in a thirsty teashop.

Ajit Pawar is no fool; far from it. Why would he taunt stricken farmers who have loyally voted for his party with an analogy one would be loath to suggest in the privacy of a drawing room? No one in his senses tells a public rally, not to mention subsequent multitudes on media, that he can do little about falling water levels in dams since peeing into them won't help.

This sort of intemperate outburst speaks of some deep frustration. What made Ajit Pawar stupid on such an epic scale? As he pointed out, rationally , he could not be blamed for dry skies; he is merely deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, not deputy chief god of Heaven. The reason for this rant lies elsewhere: guilt.

Over the last decade, Ajit Pawar has ripped through a cumulative fund of Rs 70,000 crore - yes, you read the figure right - meant for irrigation projects designed to protect the state's farmers from such vagaries of nature as drought. Much of this money disappeared in the usual dark hole through which cash is siphoned off: project cost escalation. The water saved through the dams that were built did not reach farmers. It was diverted to industries.

This manipulation became news when Pawar's own chief minister Prithviraj Chauhan asked a simple question: what happened? Those with fewer constraints than the CM accused Pawar of corruption. Ajit Pawar sulked and resigned from government. There was a brief media and political flurry, which soon evaporated. Coalition compulsions, the contemporary justification for fiscal appeasement, enabled Ajit Pawar to return to his old office. Story over.

Or not quite. You never know when anxiety, lurking in some shadow of the subconscious, is going to leap up and distort your tongue. The deepest wounds in politics are self-inflicted . When Pawar addressed that rally, he must have seen votes being lost on the face of his audience. Then he lost it.

The pundits of Mumbai are already doing long division on their calculators to assess the political cost of Ajit Pawar's urine therapy. One measure of the damage can be gauged from the flurry of apologies. Ajit Pawar did not actually hold his ears, put on a dunce cap and stand in the corner, but he did ruefully admit that this was the biggest blunder of his career. Contrition rarely compensates fully for injury; Pawar's impulsive snarl was thought, regret was very much an afterthought. His dilemma is compounded by the fact that the shadow of this drought falls across party strongholds. Almost 75% of uncle and patriarch Sharad Pawar's constituency , Madha, is affected and there is already talk of destitution suicides. Insensitivity in times of distress is not easily erased from voter memory.

The conventional analysis was, till recently, that even if Congress suffered because of rising prices and corruption in the next general election, Sharad Pawar would minimise his own accountability by some nimble footwork. That certainty has been punctured. It is not beyond repair, but Pawar will require a very long needle and some strong yarn to stitch this one back into shape.

Sharad Pawar does not slip easily in Maharashtra . He has worked hard in his state and been astute in Delhi politics, sliding alongside BJP when Atal Behari Vajpayee was Prime Minister and standing solidly by Dr Manmohan Singh when fortunes shifted. Parties come and go; Sharad Pawar stays in power forever, thanks to his fine nose, which can smell the wind from afar. But when you have been too long in office you can miss something far closer, the straw piling up, strand by strand, on the camel's back. An insult can so easily become the last straw.

The French Revolution, like any historic occurrence , offers more than one instructive anecdote. Marie Antoinette's husband, Louis XVI, who lost his mind long before he lost his head to the guillotine , heard the mobs in July 1789, when Paris stormed the Bastille prison, and asked his courtier Francois Alexander Frederic, duke of Liancourt and grandmaster of the wardrobe, "So what is it? A riot?" The duke replied, doubtless in silken tones, "No sire, it is a revolution." But Louis' diary entry for July 14, the day Paris changed the world, consisted of just one word: "Nothing." The heights of power are not always the best perch for a cool look when anger is sweeping past your door.

Ghosts do not die

2013-04-13T16:52:00.003+05:30

Byline

Ghosts do not die

M.J. Akbar

Check with the haunted: ghosts do not die. Since this sounds like the ultimate paradox, some explanation is necessary. Ghosts are not happy spirits. A ghost is spectre of justice denied, a moan from beyond the grave, revenge that has survived burial. A ghost does not leave judgement to God; it seeks its target while the assailant is still alive.

Many of those who instigated mobs in the anti-Sikhs riots of 1984 are dead; some have slipped, with age, into decrepitude. Legal justice has been tawdry, because the establishment has protected the guilty. But there are at least two VIPs who cannot shake off their ghosts despite 29 years of protection and promotion, offered by Congress, which has been in power for 21 of these years. Sajjan Kumar was an MP and would have remained one till now but for an accidental burst of anger by a Sikh journalist in 2009. Jagdish Tytler is a senior Congress leader, with a seat in its highest committee.

The ghost chasing Tytler is relentless. Each time Tytler becomes complacent, it pops up. Tytler has reason to be complacent. It took India’s premier police unit, CBI 23 long years to produce its final report for the courts; it concluded that there was no case against Tytler. The court was sceptical. Two years later, in 2009, CBI repeated its charade, despite the fact that the Nanavati Commission had held Tytler culpable. India, thankfully, is not a police state. A sessions court has again thrown Tytler back into the public limelight.

Tytler behaves likes a split personality when he appears on television to defend himself, half anxious, half smug. His central argument is equivocal: he does not challenge the Nanavati verdict, but adds with a shrug that it is hardly his fault if CBI did not find any evidence. The smirk is almost too much to bear. What Tytler, his guardians and acolytes do not quite understand is how much India has changed. There are many reasons obviously, but it can be said that one of the catalysts was the Gujarat riots. A cover-up is no longer possible. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi read out a speech written by an over-smart bureaucrat justifying the violence with the metaphor that when the earth shakes, a banyan or two is bound to tremble. No one would suggest this today. The Gujarat riots have been followed by unprecedented media investigation, and judicial scrutiny supervised by the Supreme Court. VIP politicians are in jail. The process is exhausting and exhaustive, but it will separate the guilty from those who were not directly responsible.

No politician ever went to jail for riots before Gujarat; in fact, hardly anyone went to jail at all. Take a count of major incidents in the last five decades: Jamshedpur in 1964, Ranchi in 1967; Ahmedabad in 1969, when some 2,000 died; Nellie in Assam in 1983, where 5,000 Muslims were estimated to have been killed [I shall never forget the rows of dead babies I saw when I went to report that story]. Hiteshwar Saikia of Congress was Chief Minister of Assam then, and Mrs Indira Gandhi Prime Minister. No one demanded his resignation. Instead, Saikia was often lauded as an astute political craftsman. In 1989 came Bhagalpur, when over a thousand died. Let alone Congress CM Bhagwat Jha Azad being held responsible, even the police chief was not shifted. Sudhakar Rao Naik was CM of Maharashtra during the three months of riots in Mumbai following Babri in 1992-93; the guilty named in the Srikrishna report have been left free. Narasimha Rao was PM then. It is a depressing list.

Public accountability, spurred by popular will, is principally responsible for the reduction in the scale and frequency of riots. Politicians may be worried about courts, but they are terrified by voters. The mood of the country has changed visibly. The young, who are in the forefront of this change, want to leave the past behind; for them governance is measured in economic growth and jobs. It is self-evident that violence and development cannot co-exist. Investment in Gujarat will shrink if there is another riot. The young want to vote for jobs, not for the problems of 1947.

If you want to predict election results, an astrologer may still be of some use; but it is far more useful to look at unemployment figures, followed closely by an examination of corruption levels. Voters resent corruption because it is theft; what makes them apoplectic is that it is theft of their money, or the nation’s resources. A nation belongs to the voter, not to a government. Governments are only temporary custodians.

There is no truth about politics, which is totally true. But that which is largely true determines the fate of elections. Caste and creed have not disappeared, but pillars of the old life are fading as another new age begins to rise on the Indian landscape. And when they are finally buried, they will not beget any ghosts.

The labyrinth beckons its generals, again

2013-04-07T19:46:00.000+05:30

The labyrinth beckons its generals, again

M.J. Akbar

Old soldiers, goes the saying, never die; they just fade away. Unless their career includes a spell as dictator of Pakistan, in which case they fantasize about a Napoleon-style comeback, cheered on by an adoring public now deeply regretful about having thrown the chap out. Pervez Musharraf, who ruled for nine years like an unforgiving sultan, has returned from self-sought exile because he wants to “save” Pakistan.

This seems odd to those who hold him responsible for ruining the country, but there is no restraining an egoist summoned by his imagination. “I cry when I see the state of Pakistan today,” lamented Musharraf to a motley crowd, evidence that there does not seem much of a market for his tears. Crocodiles rarely get handkerchief sets for Christmas.

Delusion is a curious disease. It does not affect the afflicted, since they are unaware of their condition. Musharraf cannot recognise an irony: In 1999, his coup succeeded because Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif would not let his plane land in Karachi although he was serving Army chief. In 2013, he was given permission to land, but departure will be another story. He seems condemned to wander through courtrooms disguising humiliation with a false smile. Perhaps there comes a time in the evening of life when even the prospect of prison at home seems a better option than meaningless speeches abroad.

But what precisely does Pakistan need to be saved from? The easy answer is chaos. The difficult bit is to define the origins of this impending chaos.

A new public opinion survey by the British Council does not suggest that Musharraf is quite the man for the job, but it does confirm that Pakistan is in serious need of some sort of saviour. The research was conducted within the 18-to-29 age group, which makes it more important . Youth shape a nation’s future.

Briefly: in 2007, 50% of the young thought that Pakistan was heading in the wrong direction; after five years of democratic rule, the figure has shot up to 94%. What is their preferred solution? The largest bloc, 38%, want sharia because they believe religious law will improve moral behaviour, end corruption and ensure electricity, water, education and healthcare. This number can only go up: 64% of young men and 75% of young women described themselves as religious and conservative. Such is their disillusionment with a corrupt political class that 32% have begun to yearn for the restoration of military rule. Only 29% have faith in democracy. Their most powerful memory of the last five years is painful: Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, the great flood, or the earthquake. A quarter have witnessed some act of violence.

When Pakistan tired of civilians in the past, it turned towards generals. When it got fed up of despots, it rallied behind politicians. Disillusioned with both, the country seems to be searching for some kind of “Islamic autocracy”.

There was one general, Zia ul Haq, who thought such a hybrid was the answer to Pakistan’s prayers. But he never made the mistake of testing this proposition in a free vote; he rigged every election held during his regime.

Would Zia have won the elections of 2013? The dangerous answer is, probably. The country seems poised on a tipover wedge. Some officers deputed by the Election Commission are measuring the qualification of candidates on the basis of their ability to recite Quranic verses; the fact that one nominee of the Jamaat-e-Islami fumbled might make you laugh but only if you are fond of black humour. One well-known columnist was rejected because he was deemed to have written against the “ideology” of Pakistan. Next step: filing a case against his editors for treason? Someone has objected to the candidature of Shahbaz Sharif, former CM of Punjab, because he does not wear a beard. This is what elections in Afghanistan are going to look like if the Taliban take over and think democracy is a good idea. Descent into absurdity can be quick and steep. A week ago, anyone predicting such behaviour would have been dismissed as a sceptic, or worse.

Take one statistic seriously: 32% support for military rule. This will surely raise morale in the cantonment, but that is not the relevant point. Nothing dramatic will happen before the elections. But in case the May elections produce a dysfunctional Parliament, generals could be tempted to step in. Liberals, who have been unable to stem the tides of fanaticism, would probably welcome them as the better option.

Politicians, headed by Asif Ali Zardari, having turned Pakistan into a sleazy mess, will surrender or flee, hoping to take their loot with them. Thoughts such as these may have encouraged Musharraf to return. However, the next generalissimo will not need an ancestor to show the way to the Chief Martial Law Administrator’s office. The local tank commander knows the route.

When spin meets reality TV

2013-04-06T15:20:00.003+05:30

Byline
When spin meets reality TV

M.J. Akbar

It is a long way back to zero point. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was re-elected in 2009, almost the first thing he did was to offer Rahul Gandhi his job. It was a public pledge, made through a press conference; since then he has repeated the offer whenever asked. Five years later, it is Rahul Gandhi who is ducking the question even as Dr Singh has begun to philosophize about a third term.
As we enter another election season, the Congress, with its discordant chorus over a prospective Prime Minister, has made one significant Opposition weakness irrelevant. Both camps will now leave the answer to circumstance rather than intention.

The much-awaited contest between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi, hyped by TV news stations anxious for ratings, could well be the non-event of this teenage century. Rahul Gandhi is uncertain in his mind. Modi is uncertain about the partners BJP needs to form a possible government. Nitish Kumar has made it clear that he wants a BJP without Modi at the top; indeed, if he was going to part with BJP there would be no need to harp on this subject. Naveen Patnaik in Orissa or Mamata Banerjee in Bengal or Jagan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh do not make a statement a week on Modi.

The Congress has not given up on Rahul Gandhi; it cannot, but he seems to have evolved into a long-term project. All his sympathisers point out that he has time; in ten years the latest Gandhi will be only 53. Does this leave Congress with a short-term problem? The party has reconciled itself to the fact that the interim will be fluid. Its fondest hope is that the worst-case scenario, defeat in the next general elections, will blossom into a best-case opportunity if the next non-Congress alliance flounders in the manner that the V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar governments did between 1989 and 1991.

In the meanwhile, it is the job of party spin doctors to maximise the positive side of whatever Rahul Gandhi chooses to do. But spin has a problem when it meets reality television. The audience of industrialists at the CII convention, where Rahul Gandhi projected India as a beehive — possibly with a Queen Bee at the helm and drones alongside — was far less important than the audience outside watching this performance live on television.
Industrialists come to such events pre-programmed. They have learnt that the best insurance is to praise the powerful in public; it may not help, but it cannot hurt. It does not matter who is in power. If L.K. Advani becomes Prime Minister they will sing paeans to the wisdom of grey hair. If Modi becomes PM, they will turn Gujarat into an economic model for every nation from America to Zaire. And if Rahul Gandhi is PM during the next CII convention, all those who rooted for Modi in the elections will wear a badge saying “India is safe under Rahul for 50 years”. Don’t blame industrialists. They lead a tough life.

The popular reaction is what matters. A daily newspaper which is reasonably sympathetic to Rahul Gandhi polled its readers on the impact of his CII speech. An astonishing 85% thought he had not addressed concerns about his leadership abilities; only 10% were positive. This probably reflects, in part, the widespread middle class anger against Congress, but even if that were so what is evident is that Rahul Gandhi is not yet the answer to this seething rage. He could be tomorrow, but he is not so today.

Perhaps the great dilemma of Rahul Gandhi is that he is less interested in political glory than his supporters are. Leadership in politics is a compelling, consuming profession which demands 18-hour days. Most of these hours are spent in that difficult art of being nice to strangers, and leaving them with some hope that there is something better on the horizon. The rest of the time is taken by implementing policy if you are in government, or offering alternatives if you are not. Politics is a business of detail. Short cuts are an invitation to accidents, and you cannot drive on both sides of the street. If you have been in power for nine years, you cannot give a lecture on systems failure. You have to explain why you did nothing about the system. Curiously, this is one job which does not become less demanding during the fallow phase. Whether you win or lose an election, you have to grind away if you are a serious player.

Rahul Gandhi’s CII speech was heard on TV by precisely those young voters who, buoyed by high expectations, supported Dr Manmohan Singh hugely in 2009. Perhaps such expectations had nowhere to go but down. Rahul Gandhi was perfectly placed to inherit their affections, but they are searching for other heroes in 2013.

It’s 11 o’clock

2013-04-04T14:08:00.006+05:30

Byline

It’s 11 o’clock

M.J. Akbar

Arithmetic obviously matters, for democracy is a game of numbers. But there is a smarter way for a minority government to ensure stability: good governance.

Dr Manmohan Singh has the requisite experience, for he was P.V. Narasimha Rao’s finance minister between 1991 and 1996. Rao never had the numbers but survived five years on the trot. He stumbled just once, on 6 December 1992, the day Rao deliberately sleepwalked through the destruction of the Babri mosque, inducing a minor Congress revolt. Rao understood Congress far better than Congress understood him. He purchased Congressmen in the only currency they recognised: power. The pseudo-rebels happily clambered over Babri’s stones and into ministerial office.

The broad rule has not changed. BJP has held on to numbers in Karnataka, but poor governance has left the party broken and aimless in Bangalore. It will pay a price in the next Assembly elections.

The present UPA coalition did not spring a leak when Mamata Banerjee punctured its hull a year ago, or when Karunanidhi punched a hole a fortnight ago, or Mulayam Singh Yadav began to sneer a week ago. This ship of state was lost when corruption drove it off-course, beginning with inflated Commonwealth Games’ bills and then onto telecom handouts on a spectrum scale, Robert Vadra’s cosy land deals, sleazy coal-mine allocations and Italian helicopter bribes. Karunanidhi used alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka to distance himself from Congress, but the real reason is that he believes Congress has become an electoral liability.

Mulayam Singh Yadav has shifted from proximity to uncertainty for similar reasons. Veterans like Yadav and Karunanidhi are graduates of the old school of demand, barter and concession. You never quite know which of the three is in the air. They can drag out a decision, maximizing space for manoeuvre in marriage and insisting on heavy alimony in divorce. Even when you think you have heard the final word, they leave a little wiggle room for a flexible narrative. They can make the process acrimonious.

Karunanidhi’s intentions were clear when former Telecom Minister A. Raja publicly sought to give evidence before the Joint Parliamentary Committee investigating the 2G case in which he is principal accused. Congress stopped Raja because it knew Raja would accuse the PM and then Finance Minister Chidambaram of being party to his decisions, generating unwelcome headlines. Raja had clearance from Karunanidhi.

Congress policy towards allies has so far been cool. It acts on the assumption that since they cannot ally with BJP, they have nowhere else to go, and will therefore accept any terms set by Congress. This increases their options, without raising their liability. If Mamata leaves, Mulayam arrives; when DMK creates trouble, Nitish Kumar can be brought into play. But polygamy can save you only up to a point. The problem is that partnership has lost credibility, even as a clock reminds you that the countdown has started and risk has begun to outweigh reward.

Dr Manmohan Singh, an astute reader of moods within the Lok Sabha, may well be right when he says that his government will last till its appointed hour. What is more to the point is that it is 11 o’clock already. As Yadav remarked, “Why withdraw [support to UPA] and make the government fall when it is just a matter of eight or nine months?” He is right. If UPA is defeated in Lok Sabha, the elections will be held in December; if this dead government is permitted to continue walking, elections will be held in March. Not that big a deal. Withdrawing support only adds an unnecessary controversy to an election which will be fought on corruption, inflation and poor governance. Bringing the UPA down now is tantamount to doing Congress a favour.

Congress has no reason to worry about a vote in the House. It should however be worried about the war of attrition that has already begun. Congress cannot dismiss Trinamool, SP and DMK as generically hostile, like the BJP; Mamata Banerjee, Yadav and Karunanidhi had inside seats in this circus. The Congress problem in the run-up to 2014 will not be the BJP, but allies who have drifted into negative territory. Congress spokespersons have developed a well-honed combination of loud counterattack and sneers whenever they are attacked. This will not be effective against parties which kept Congress in power through the trauma of corruption charges and the rough passage of decisions like FDI.

The story of the past year has been the isolation of Congress, a dramatic reversal from the situation in 2009, when parties were offering support without getting their ratio of office space in government. However, it is not very difficult to diagnose what is happening in Delhi now. Congress is engrossed in how to survive till March 2014; its allies are worried about how to survive after the next general elections. Very simple, really.

The other half of murder

2013-04-04T14:08:00.003+05:30

Byline

The other half of murder

M.J.AKBAR

Could death be a half-truth? This question is obviously a killer’s last hope and best alibi. There is enough truth in that great genre of mystery fiction to suggest that murder can often be an open debate. This does not help the dead, for there can be no murder without a victim; but this remains a serious concern for the living. Whether murder is committed in cold or warm blood, there is no legitimate end without justice.

The pictures depicting the killing of a 12-year-old child, Balachandran, in Sri Lanka, were stark. The chubby innocence of his face was a further torture to the imagination. His only mistake was being son of the wrong parents, as far as his killers were concerned. His father was Prabhakaran, the defeated and slain dictator of the LTTE, who spent his life trying to partition Lanka and create a separate country for its Tamils. No war is pleasant, but this one was especially ruthless. Balachandran became a hostage after LTTE’s annihilation in the winter of 2008-09. Channel 4, the British TV station, which has been running a campaign against human rights violations by the Lanka Army, aired footage of this murder and alleged that orders had come from the very top.

The official Lanka Army reaction, through a spokesman, called the story “lies, half-truths and…speculation”.

If that is only half the truth, then what is the other half?

The only speculative part is the bit about orders coming from the very top but that is common sense even if the source has not been identified. No officer would risk elimination of such a high-profile prisoner without clearance from the highest in the land. Twenty four hours later, someone more intelligent in the Lanka government added that the visuals had been morphed. The channel explained that it had verified the images.

But there is a simpler answer. If the pictures are a lie, then the child must be alive. If he is alive, he is in Lanka government’s hands. All the authorities have to do is produce the child. That would be the ultimate habeas corpus: produce the body, in this case hopefully alive.

That is unlikely to happen. What will follow is silence, tons of it, in the quiet confidence that media stories cannot be repeated forever. This silence is being, and will be, supported by the three major powers with an interest in Sri Lanka: India, China and the United States. No one will seriously question Colombo at a Geneva human rights forum, or weaken relations with the present government which took the decision. They will endorse the logic of this murder. Colombo has killed the child for one reason, and one alone: that he should not survive to wear his father’s mantle ten or fifteen years later. An extra-judicial exit was the only “solution”. Delhi, Beijing and Washington are not terribly squeamish when it comes to present or future terrorism. One false word and their own skeletons will clang noisily, awakening all sorts of demons in Geneva and elsewhere.

As in any conventional murder mystery, the killers did overlook an obvious detail, the sort of clue that sets the grey cells of a Hercule Poirot whirring at a frantic pace and opens up the path of discovery. Colombo’s wise men missed one of the great new facts of the contemporary age, the rise of the mobile phone.

All the mass manufacturers of such phones are as much camera makers as communication specialists. Everyone is now a walking camera. We are still groping through the full implications of this mobile phone revolution, but one thing is already clear: justice has moved from the time of eye-witness testimony to camera-witness evidence. We are undecided about CCTV surveillance. When there is a terrorist attack we want them everywhere. In calmer times we worry about government snooping into our private lives. Perhaps there is no such thing as privacy anymore already. Telephone conversations are routinely taped by secretive agencies. Governments have other worries. Any official today can take out his camera phone and copy a file in a second, exposing corruption if he so wishes, or simply waiting for the opportunity to indulge in some supplementary blackmail of his superiors on the side. Almost every event is being recorded, sometimes with a sense of celebration, sometimes out of a sense of grievance. We get antsy at the thought of a barbarian government assaulting our privacy. But the anonymous individual can be a greater danger.

There are two ways the footage of Balachandran’s killing could have reached media. Someone could have leaked it from government records. Or it might be a soldier in the death squad who thought he wanted a gruesome but historic memento, and then began to grapple with his conscience. We do not know, yet. But something slipped through that security net, and it was not a lie.

The prologue to war

2013-04-04T14:08:00.002+05:30

Byline

The prologue to war

M.J. Akbar

Is America planning to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the war which eliminated Saddam Hussein and destroyed Iraq with an intervention in Syria?

Jaundiced Arab eyes are asking a cynical question: if Lady Camilla and Prince Charles drop by to see war refugee Syrian children at a camp in Jordan, as they did on 13 March, can Nato troops be far behind? Observers are adding 2 plus 2, and perhaps getting 5. But they note that when Republican Senator John McCain puts on his best stentorian manner and claims Bashar Assad is committing genocide against his own people, something is beginning to cook in Washington. Across the Atlantic, Britain and France have urged the European Union to lift a ban on weapons for Syrian rebels.

Little flakes point towards a storm. This clamour, half official and half unofficial, seeks to suggest that only Nato can rescue a crucial nation on the geostrategic map from the despotic and dynastic rule of the Assad family. So far, the war in Syria has been an uneven contest between a Russian-backed authoritarian regime and disparate rebel groups.

International intervention means nothing without American involvement. Britain and France have neither the stomach nor the wherewithal for unilateral action.

Barack Obama is not a pacifist, as evidence from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen proves. But he is too smart to repeat the foolishness of George Bush the Younger. He will not use lies as justification for war. He has laid down a “red line”: the use of chemical weapons, which the Assad regime possesses. A flutter went up this week when both government and rebels accused each other of using chemical weapons. Washington reacted calmly, ordering its intelligence analysts to check the allegations. At the moment of writing this is still in progress. If Obama does go to the United Nations it will be with solid evidence, not hearsay manufactured in the neocon imagination, as Bush did.

Bush made unforgiveable errors. His target was Saddam Hussein, and he went to war against the whole of Iraq. Obama will choose his enemy more carefully. He will more probably concentrate his military attention on the elite that controls Damascus, and avoid battle to the extent he can with the Syrian army. This would mean maximum use of missiles and warplanes, and minimal use of infantry. The official Assad palace in Damascus is atop a high hill and very vulnerable to air assault, but the Assads understand that and have moved out. But dominant air cover will be invaluable to rebels who have already reached the edge of Damascus.

Obama is unlikely to risk American boots on the battlefield. The heavy lifting on the field would probably be left to Turkish troops; Turkey is a member of Nato, and has provided refuge and sanctuary to both civilians and fighters. It has an important national interest in the outcome of this conflict. Nor can Assad hope for popular support in his own country. His Shia sect, the Alawites, who form only 10% of the population, have alienated the Sunnis. Foreign intervention will get just that touch of local support that makes its efforts credible.

The tough part may not be the big war in the beginning, but the small wars of succession that will plague Syria in the aftermath. The rebels do not ride under a single flag. Their motivation varies. Some of them are Islamists; others dream of becoming regional warlords. They could turn Syria into another Lebanon. Afghanistan may be an extreme case, but it is always worth noting that three decades after the Soviet troops were driven out the wars of succession are not over. It is easier to end a war between nations than calm the consequences of an insurrection.

Whatever the eventual price, it is obvious that the present order in Damascus is no longer sustainable. When the conflict was still in its incipient stage, Turkey advised Assad to accept a compromise and lead the change rather than defy it and invite bloodshed. Bashar Assad had seen his father Hafez contain and defeat one challenge after another, and thought he could do so as well. But Hafez Assad lived in an age of dictators and comparatively settled internal and external relations. Bashar Assad rules at a time of turbulence on the Arab street and massive flux in the neighbourhood. He could have been an exemplar of transition. He chose a worse fate. Russia, and China to a lesser degree, will continue to back Assad, if for no other reason than to rebuff America, but not at the cost of their self-interest. Iran is a far more reliable ally, but its ability to protect Assad against a carefully constructed, UN-authorised American-Turkish operation must be in question.

This is a war whose opening stages have become a prolonged prologue. Every war is unpredictable, and no one can say how it will end. But once they start, the middle and end games will be quicker.

A Latin response to Latin America

2013-04-04T14:05:00.003+05:30

Byline

A Latin response to Latin America

M.J. Akbar

Karol Jozef Wojtyla, the first non-Italian Pope in more than four centuries, did not get elected to the throne in 1978 merely through a throw of electoral dice. The central purpose of his papacy was not advertised when he became John Paul II, but has become a proud part of the official narrative today.

He rose to prominence in 1964, when he was named Archbishop of Krakow: three years after the Berlin Wall cemented the partition of Germany and two years after the Cuban missile crisis brought the world as close as it has come, before or after, to nuclear devastation. It was the coldest period of the cold war, and John Paul II was assigned the most difficult job of his era; as shepherd to his Catholic country, Poland, through the dictatorship and depression of Communist rule. His mission was upgraded when he reached Rome: to destroy the Soviet Union from within, through the subversive influence of the church and its allies.

Through an exquisite paradox, the workers’ paradise of Lenin and Stalin was blown apart by men like Lech Walesa and their trade unions. Even the normally discreet CIA has let it be known through friendly authors that it worked in partnership with the papacy against the Soviet empire. John Paul lived on till 2 April 2005 but his principal mission was complete when the Soviet Union lay in smithereens by 1992. The Vatican did not wait for the minimum five years to begin the process of his beatification, which took only a fast four years. One requirement is performing a miracle. Officially, John Paul is said to have cured a French nun of Parkinson’s disease. This does seem a bit far-fetched given that the saintly Pope could not cure his own Parkinson’s; but John Paul’s real miracle was to help bring down the seemingly impregnable Soviet dispensation.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina has not become the first non-European Pope in 12 centuries through accident either; or indeed because his genetic origins are Italian. The most powerful religious order in the world has not survived by being sentimental. The 115 cardinals of this year’s electoral college displayed a sharp understanding of geopolitics and assessment of where they believe lies their true challenge in the foreseeable future. Observers, including sympathetic ones, tend to transfer their own concerns to the Vatican. It was thus widely inferred by the commentariat after the sudden abdication of Benedict that the new Pope would be chosen on the basis of his ability to address contemporary concerns like the ban on abortion, or gender equality in the clergy, or the horrifying abuse of children by priests who are required to be celibate. Instead, we have a Pope who is deeply conservative on such social issues. The Vatican views child abuse as a problem, not a plague. As defenders of the status quo point out, this crime is limited at best to just 4% of the priesthood. It is therefore something that the church can deal with without upgrading a dilemma to a crisis.

The Vatican, in my view, sees the coming decade as a historic opportunity to negate a far greater threat.

Latin America is home not only to the largest bloc of Roman Catholics, but has also seen the rise of a radical New Left. The old Left has been in retreat after the Soviet Union’s collapse. China has preserved some important elements of traditional doctrine, principally atheism, but has escaped economic implosion by converting state socialism into state capitalism. China is a story that awaits denouement.

But, quite surprisingly, Cuba defies the odds, and shows no signs of changing its colour. It has discovered strong allies like Venezuela, whose pugnacious Hugo Chavez has been transformed into some sort of secular saint after his recent death. A subcontinent tortured by vicious military dictatorships continues to nourish leftists through democracy. Would it be a stretch to assume that the first Latin American Pope’s true calling is to destabilize Cuba and challenge the Left in Latin America?

The Vatican does not camouflage antagonism. When critics questioned the new Pope’s record during the junta days in Argentina, Federico Lombardi, its spokesman, said, “There has never been a credible, concrete accusation against [Francis I. His accusers are] anti-clerical left-wing elements that are used to attack the church.” The church has fashioned its response. If Cuba crumbles, then the barricades are breached.

Pope Francis is being promoted as “pro-poor”; this is obviously essential if he wants to wean the Latin poor away from the Left. John Paul used trade unions; Francis could use slums. Barack Obama has done his bit by describing Francis as “a champion of the poor and the most vulnerable among us”. The first stories about him talk of simplicity. This is not to suggest that the stories are untrue; merely that this is the ideal profile in the Church’s coming confrontation.

What odds that the first Asian Pope, perhaps in the 2020s, will be from China?

Real story is the Tale of a Raja

2013-04-04T14:03:00.003+05:30

Byline

Real story is the Tale of a Raja

M.J. Akbar

Conspiracy is a natural morsel in the media diet, a vitamin that adds energy to a news meal generally more flat than nutritious. It also works because the audience loves it. In theory people want news because it is vital for the health of democracy; in practice, they like information because it is fodder for gossip. It is much more necessary to rescue a dull afternoon than to save the nation.

There is no electricity therefore in a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and patriarch L.K. Advani. No one believes that either will switch sides, or be quietly helpful to the other. The verdict is similar on a PM-Prakash Karat meeting, if indeed there was any chance of the two getting together. Our PM exhausted everything he had to say to Communists during UPA1. BJP and Communist MPs are actually quite friendly when they meet off-screen in Parliament’s lobbies, but there is no dialogue. Everyone, and everything, else is up for virile media speculation.

The number of times, therefore, that Bihar CM Nitish Kumar has been sent into the waiting embrace of Congress is legion. All he has to do is be polite and the drum roll picks up cadence in the background. Less musically, for the discourse is more strident in Chennai, every consonant in DMK supremo Karunanidhi is analysed for proximity or distance towards his partner in Delhi.

This is good enough as a game, but should not be confused with realpolitik. There are always pressures in any alliance, for different parties would not be different if they did not differ on policy. This does not necessarily make them adversaries. If Karunanidhi could swallow, however painfully, the incarceration of his daughter Kanimozhi in Tihar jail on a corruption charge, then he is hardly going to bring down the government over human rights violations in Sri Lanka. DMK and Congress have much larger domestic interests to protect. There is nothing personal in politics.

The relationship between Nitish Kumar and BJP will also be measured purely by electoral mathematics, not ideological purity or the lollipops offered by Delhi. The only time this equation was under serious threat was when Nitish Kumar thought that he might be able to win an election alone. Wisely he refused that temptation, and that moment has passed. There can never be any guarantee against miscalculation, but Nitish Kumar is no longer in a position to risk a lone battle against his nemesis Lalu Prasad Yadav. The sap is rising in the enemy camp, as the growing multitudes at Lalu’s rallies indicate. Nor is the BJP likely to provoke its most consistent ally by projecting Narendra Modi beyond a point. Nitish needs Muslim votes and BJP needs Nitish. This is arithmetic, not algebra.

The wonder is how the siren charm of speculation can drive out a legitimate story, or bury it in a secondary plot. If there is any future instability in the DMK-Congress marriage it will be because of A. Raja, principal accused in the 2G scam and rockstar presence in the Radia tapes, not foreign policy. Raja is suddenly eager to depose before the Joint Parliamentary Commission on 2G. The Congress is anxious to stop him from doing so, which at the very least is amazing. The bridegroom wants to confess exclusive details about the huge, illegal dowry he received, and the chief political prosecutor is telling him to keep quiet. Opposition MPs in the JPC want to hear Raja, but not Congress. Is Congress worried that Raja will expose the part played by its leaders in the 2G scam? CBI, surely acting under instructions from political masters, has deftly eliminated the Radia tapes from attention: it did not have time to transcribe the thousands of tapes it seized.

Many questions. Why has Raja suddenly decided to sing? He knows surely that any warble will implicate him as well? Has he decided that he is done for, and that he will bring the house down in the process? Has he taken Karunanidhi’s permission? He is known to be close to his leader; would he have acted without consent? Is Karunanidhi setting in motion his strategy for the next election after having gone by the script to protect the government for four years?

Can this impasse be resolved? A friend suggested a neat solution. The Supreme Court should step in and ask Raja to depose before it, since Raja was being blocked by elements within JPC. The court’s credibility has been strengthened by intervention whenever it has acted in the national interest. Here is an obvious and public case of obstruction. Perhaps Raja can make it easier for the court by seeking to place his version in the court records. That should provoke a flutter or two.

There is always the media as a last resort. Let the speculation begin! The afternoons are getting dull.

A hole in the heart of the budget

2013-04-04T14:02:00.004+05:30

A hole in the heart of the budget

Byline

M.J. Akbar

A Union budget can help a ruling party win a general election, but only if it is a first budget, not its last. Voters understand the difference between a policy and a promise or an alibi. We are so conditioned to think about a government as either stable or unstable, that we ignore a more familiar fact: in its last year, every government in a democracy enters the zone of uncertainty, for no one dare take re-election for granted. UPA2 looks a shade worse than uncertain; it already looks depressed. The years of fluff and flounder have taken their toll.

You can place a silk hat over P. Chidambaram’s head, and a flute between his lips; he will become neither magician nor god. There is no point blaming him for doing little, for there was little that he could do. He is finance minister of a government that has run out of finance.

Chidambaram cut spending with quiet and perhaps even courageous will over the past few months in order to reduce the punishing fiscal deficit. He has slashed plan expenditure by some Rs 91,000 crore. That is not enough, because politics has forced him to make obligatory allotments, as for instance in the rural sector. He hopes to reach February 2014 on hope. For starters, he hopes that ministries like rural will not actually call for the money he has slotted on paper, because they have not devised the means to spend it.

But his biggest hope is that the economy will grow by 6%, raising revenue, rather than the projected 5%. If the past is any evidence, actual figures could be way below. In 2011 the economic survey predicted 7.6% growth; we got 5%. There is no visible reason why a gloomy economy should shift into an optimistic curve, particularly since the government has entered the zone of uncertainty. Investors might find it more reasonable to wait to see what the general election brings.

Those who cheered the finance minister, both journalists and politicians, consistently argued that this was the best he could do in the circumstances. But no one seemed interested in logic: who created these circumstances? UPA has been in power for nearly a decade. It can no longer blame anyone else for mismanagement.

A sort of forced cheer went up because Chidambaram did not succumb totally to the siren of populism. Once again, whose populism did he save India from? He was not under pressure from BJP, Marxists, Mulayam or Mamata to rig his proposals with handouts. Populism was a Congress demand. The party was eager to contest the next general elections armed with a National Food Security Bill, and credit had already been given where it always is in such situations, to Mrs Sonia Gandhi. Has Chidambaram then saved his budget from Congress?

Chidambaram’s memory is not short. He knows, even if he does not discuss, the price paid by India when in 2008 he wrote off rural debt, introduced NREGA, and raised government salaries. Today’s crisis began with that spending spree. The fiscal deficit rose to 6% of GDP from 2% the previous year; and kept rising to the point where India is threatened by junk status.

Conscious of history’s judgement, Chidambaram will not allow that to happen. This may require a heavy axe by next August or September. An axe is the politician’s biggest enemy on election eve in the kind of handout democracy we have become.

The hole in the heart of this budget was the absence of a big idea. Chidambaram desperately needed a radical spine in his speech; even a minor bone would have helped, anything to electrify the business environment, and inspire a resurrection of pro-growth sentiment in a way millions of bureaucratic words can never do. Here is a thought.

The finance minister hopes that disinvestment will fetch Rs 55,848 crore. He could have begun by putting Air India on the block, at whatever price the market was ready to pay. Instead he added Rs 5,000 cr for this mismanaged airline, after handing out Rs 6,500 crore last year: and the estimate is that it will bleed for at least a decade at a cost of some Rs 30,000 crore of taxpayers’ money. Here is a better idea: shut down the civil aviation ministry, leaving only a department for aviation safety headed by a professional. If Kingfisher can be grounded by market forces, why not Air India? The cynical answer is that Air India is the only airline ever ready to upgrade politicians and bureaucrats. This may even be true. The concept of a “national carrier” is surely as outdated now as nationalised steel mills and indeed Maharajahs. If the Prime Minister needs an aircraft, we should get one for him; why keep an airline alive just to keep a Prime Minister in thin air? We persist in what might be called an Aeroflot mentality.

A government on its last legs can only totter its way through the last mile.

The politics of not having to apologise

2013-02-25T11:17:00.001+05:30

The politics of not having to apologise

MJ Akbar
The Times of India

If an apology could change the past, it might mean something. If it could rescue the future, even more so. But no apology arrives until the mind has already changed, making it a historical tautology. It took a British PM 93 years and 11 months to admit that the Jallianwala massacre was “deeply shameful”. The “sorry” word still did not slide through British constipation, but who cares?

The slight delay in David Cameron’s pseudoapology was logical. The British remain convinced that the Raj was a good thing for the natives. Britain’s best-known , as distinct from its best, historians get lucrative media space and happy television assignments to add decibels to collective self-congratulation. Their narrative glosses over some inconvenient facts. The British empire was launched in 1765 with the zamindari of Bengal. Almost immediately , a man-made famine killed one-third of Bengal’s population, estimated at a staggering 10 million, because of the East India Company’s insatiable greed for land revenue. British rule ended in an equally devastating Bengal famine; this time, some three million died.

The average rate of growth in the last five decades of the Raj was just 1 per cent, and the rural economy lay devastated, but who dare argue with the march of bagpipes at heaven’s command through textbooks? Even our Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh thanked the British for their rule.

The majority British view was that Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer saved the Empire in 1919 when he ordered his Indian and Gorkha troops to open indiscriminate fire on peaceful protestors gathered at Jallianwala on Baisakhi day, April 13. With 1,650 rounds, they killed 530 and left over a thousand seriously wounded. That was efficiency. Barely a bullet was wasted. Dyer had not imposed martial law, nor given warning. He shot to kill and justified this decision before the subsequent Hunter Committee by claiming that he had scotched a serious Punjab rebellion with this show of force.

The governor of Punjab in 1919, Michael O’Dwyer , thought Dyer went overboard when he ordered Punjabis to crawl, but supported the carnage at Jallianwala. Public opinion in England was vigorously supportive of Dyer. The Morning Post opened a subscription to reward Dyer, ‘Defender of the Empire’ ; its editor, Sir Edward Carson, was the first to send a donation, followed by O’Dwyer. The grateful British gifted a purse of £30,000 to Dyer.

Dyer and O’Dwyer (who was shot dead in London in March 1940 by Udham Singh) could not comprehend that their only significant achievement , in historical terms, was to put India on a radical orbit that ended with freedom in 1947. Rabindranath Tagore returned Western honours; Gandhi switched from a recruiting agent for the British army to the Swaraj struggle; Motilal Nehru abandoned European furniture at Anand Bhavan and Savile Row suits to wear homespun.

The 20th century was born at Jallianwala Bagh. In a curious way, India should thank the butchers of Jallianwala for ripping apart the last mask of British colonization.
But colonization was an achievement, not a regret , in the age of empires. There is no particular reason for Cameron’s contrition. But there are many reasons why Indians should apologise.

When will Indians and Gorkhas apologise for killing fellow Indians at Jallianwala? They continued to squeeze the trigger on unarmed, helpless civilians amid screams and shock until ammunition ran out. When will brown bureau crats of the Indian Civil Service, who found clever explanations for colonial exploitation apologise ? British rule was never a solely British enterprise. It could not have survived a day without an obedient Indian comprador class, most purchased by nothing more glamorous than a salary. When will the zamindars and nawabs, who squeezed a famished peasantry to death and feasted in garden-palaces on the rewards, apologise?

The British used a million Mir Jafars, who queued up to serve, during their 150 years of true power. They had come a long way to rule, not to turn the other cheek. A transfer of wealth to the “mother country” was standard procedure in the era of European colonization, and not uniquely British. It must also be stressed that British rule, for all its faults, was much more humane than that of France in Algeria, Belgium in Congo or the Dutch in Indonesia.

India’s problem with history is a consistent unwillingness to do some serious research in a mirror. The British did not establish their rule, step by careful step, merely because they were strong; they succeeded because Indians had become weak. How about a collective Indian apology on behalf of our recent forefathers?

Cameron could do both Britain and India a favour by clarifying that his “deep shame” was only a political nod to his domestic Punjabi voters ahead of a difficult election in 2015. That would make sense. Britain and India could then forget about any silly apology, and continue treating each other like very good tourist destinations.

The other half of murder

2013-02-23T15:47:00.001+05:30

Byline for 24 February 2013

The other half of murder

M.J.AKBAR

The official Lanka Army reaction, through a spokesman, called the story “lies, half-truths and…speculation”.

If that is only half the truth, then what is the other half?

The Pope and the Caliph

2013-02-19T12:31:00.002+05:30

Byline

The Pope and the Caliph

M.J. Akbar

Pope Benedict XVI will be remembered not for the ease of his arrival, nor for the unremarkable quality of his tenure, but for the courage of his departure. It takes character to sublimate one’s ego to the demands of duty, and to recognise that both body and spirit have now lost their ability to serve the great cause of an institution such as the papacy. His example has inevitably inspired questions about a Prime Minister, or two, who seems to have passed his sell-by date. As the poet might have remarked, nothing he did in his grand office excelled the humility of his exit.

When history is written with a cold pen, Pope Benedict will be seen as no more than a brief hyphen between predecessor and successor. But this extraordinary event just might begin to raise questions, albeit along a tangential arc, about a doctrine that has controlled the image of the Pope for the last 140-odd years: infallibility.

There were more similarities between the Catholic Pope and the Islamic Caliph than either might care to admit. Both were territorial monarchs who imposed a halo of divinity upon a worldly enterprise. Both could use religion as a shield for their politics of power. Succession was limited to an oligarchy in the church, and dynasty in the Caliphate; but equal care was taken to ensure that the throne did not fall into careless hands. The Pope’s ceremonial attire is no less opulent than any king’s. In one respect the Caliph was more cautious; he did not outsource his power to any Holy Roman Emperor. But both ordered armies into the field, used torture against their enemies, took booty, amassed and lost fortunes, and were a major factor in the power play of their areas of control and influence. The Caliph actually displaced the church across all his territories, from Byzantine Turkey to Asia Minor and north Africa.

By the 19th century and the gradual rise of a modern nation-state, both the papacy and the caliphate began to lose their energy and purpose. The Caliph’s empire was whittled away by nationalist urges [encouraged by traditional and new enemies] in Greece, the Balkans and finally the Arab regions. The Pope’s lands were limited to fiefdoms in Italy, and Italian nationalists soon reduced the Vatican to a handsome church and a few marketplaces in the heart of Rome.

It was at this juncture, in 1870, that Pope Pius IX saved the institution in the short run. He called a council and forced it to declare that a Pope was infallible; he could do no wrong. Unable to compete with men, he elevated the papacy to the voice of God. Quite a few previous Popes might not have sniggered in public, but they would have laughed heartily in private at the thought that a Pope was the epitome of virtue. There were colourful Italian Popes who enjoyed excesses of the flesh with insouciant joy. They sired illegitimate children and delighted in the delicacy of their food. Their greed and crass exploitation of faith led to the protests which the German Martin Luther channelised into the Protestant church.

But the best of them were brilliant politicians; most of them were extremely capable rulers. And when history made their temporal power a figment of imagination, they reinvented themselves in their alter ego: they claimed total control over the personal lives of their flock, issuing edicts of the sort that still makes birth control a sin among Catholics.

The Caliph was less fortunate when the time came for Turks to pack him off. The Sultan could not become an upgraded Sheikh ul Islam because Muslims, like Jews, believe in tawhid, or the indivisibility of God: it would be sacrilegious for any Muslim to claim that he had become as infallible as divinity. [It might be mentioned, in passing, that it was only in the early part of the fourth century that Christian bishops adopted the trinity as a central tenet of their faith, at the Council of Nicea; before that most Christians did not consider Jesus son of God.] The Vatican survived, and flourished; as an independent state with supranational power over Catholic believers, it has ambassadors across the world.

Pope Benedict’s retirement creates the unique situation of two infallible Popes being alive at the same time. One answer to any potential dilemma is obvious: it is the office which is infallible, not the individual. Benedict returns to life as Joseph Ratzinger, this time even without the privilege of being Cardinal. But what if he differs with a successor who suggests that long-held convictions, as on birth control or women priests, need to be revised? The Catholic church changes, if it changes at all, from top down. But a democratic age builds pressures from down-up, as for instance in Catholic Ireland, which is in the midst of debate on abortion.

Pope Benedict protected the status quo in office. Would he be tempted to save his legacy with the moral power of abdication?

Propaganda Darshan

2013-02-19T12:12:00.002+05:30

Propaganda Darshan

MJ Akbar

Times of India

Thank heaven for little Doordarshans . An offshoot of the government-controlled TV behemoth, Doordarshan Bharati, broadcast a moving hour-long documentary on the late genius Ustad Amir Khan, at least 35 minutes of which was free from the excesses of a garrulous presenter and experts tripping over their own repetitions . This unknown channel had the pawmarks of its parent's ethos: a logo like a design patch from a 19th century sari; a script font quivering in a style that was synonymous with deep emotion in the 1950s. But whenever Doordarshan dips into that treasure house, its archives, there is magic.

This should be Doordarshan's true public calling. It should eliminate news from its oeuvre, since it is run by politicians. News is almost always injurious to any government's health. Propaganda is safer, so Doordarshan is ordered to sell propaganda as news. Why should our taxes pay for political propaganda?

You can measure a government's desperation by the effort it puts into disinformation. Doordarshan reported the AgustaWestland scandal not, as others did, with evidence gathered by the Italian police, but with stress on some heavy breathing by our defence minister, St Antony of Kerala, who suddenly discovered the virtues of transparency and "experts" of the sort who claimed they had never witnessed such ministerial integrity ever before. There was, naturally, no mention of AK Antony's shocking silence over the past 11 months when he repeatedly shrugged off details of the scandal brought to his notice.

Fortunately, the Italian government did what the Indian government refused to do: investigate on its turf. Antony remained curiously unmoved even when the name of a service chief popped up, with implications on the credibility and morale of the force. A Member of Parliament, Prakash Javadekar, wrote to him. Antony continued to do nothing. Why? Antony calls himself an honest politician. If, therefore, Antony was not protecting himself, who was he protecting?

The defence ministry's explanation for inaction was silly. It sent a request for information to Rome through the external affairs ministry. When it got nothing, it did nothing. But this was always an Indian crime as much as an Italian one. Italy did not wait for information from India; why did India wait for Italy?

In any cover up, deft use is made of that extremely useful fish called the red herring. A shoal of facts, mostly irrelevant, is thrown into the stream of information to divert the chase. Let's keep this simple.

What are we looking for? Evidence of bribes through agents. The concern is not about the quality or specifications of the helicopter, which may all be very good indeed, but the fact that commissions were given to honour what former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi has called the rules of the system. According to the confession by Guido Haschke, the principal middleman, to the Italian police, bribes began to flow from 2007 and continued till 2011. We know who was in power in Delhi then. Haschke got 20 million euros, and allegedly passed on 12 million to Sanjeev and Rajiv Tyagi, relatives of ex-IAF chief SP Tyagi. Why did the Indian government look the other way?

There is at least one good political reason for Antony's prevarication. It is reasonable to assume that he hoped that delay would push the investigation process beyond the general election in 2014. This government's bliss is directly proportionate to voters' ignorance. Antony's shock at Italy's speed was evident on his face.

The manipulation of time is part of political strategy. CBI moves rapidly against an electoral adversary of the Congress like Jagan Reddy. CBI becomes immobile when told to move in the coal block fraud, since friends and cronies of ministers are involved. Five months ago, after massive public outcry, CBI was given charge of "coalgate" . We have just learnt from CBI's director Ranjit Sinha, who appeared before a parliament committee, that his agency has not yet received files he asked for. The distance between the two offices can be covered by a pleasant walk, but neither demand nor delivery was considered worth any hurry.

Jagan Reddy has been repeatedly denied bail on the specious argument that, despite being out of power, he might still have enough influence over officials to subvert their investigation. Compare this with the generosity towards coal minister Shriprakash Jaiswal, who is suspected of being complicit in the scam; he is close to the owners of AMR Iron and Steel Pvt Ltd, one of the beneficiaries. Jaiswal was not even shifted to another portfolio, let alone dropped. Officials in charge of files report to him. Should we be terribly surprised if CBI cannot get them?

Once there were double standards. We have raised the game to triple standards. But democracy has its own way of rescuing truth from a maze, and handing it to independent media, en route to the voter.

Is Rahul able and capable?

2013-02-10T17:33:00.001+05:30

Is Rahul able and capable?

M.J. Akbar

The Times of India
10 February 2013

Nothing happens in a waiting room. 2013 is the waiting room for 2014. Do not expect too much excitement. Time will disappear through the passage of the predictable, occasionally diverted by a faint dread of what might happen once the great surgeon of democracy, the voter, gets his scalpel on the body politic in a general election.

A huge yawn greeted Mulayam Singh Yadav’s statement that there could be elections in September this year rather than March next year. Yadav’s support is crucial to the present government’s survival, and even a few months ago the shrill buzz provoked by this claim would have rattled window panes in every television studio. But no one took him seriously. He has become the boy who cried wolf and then laughed precociously at his little joke. The only people predicting a 2013 election are a few astrologers, and they have been around the block once too often.

In real terms it does not much matter whether elections are held early or on schedule. Patience is a democratic virtue. Voters take time to decide, but once they have done so they do not easily change. Politicians who see public opinion drift away always encourage the self-sustaining hope that some last-minute miracle will ensure survival. Bengal’s Marxists were palpably surprised by their defeat in the last Assembly elections, when no one else was. The famous British dictum that a week is a long time in politics is often repeated. It is equally true that a year can be a short time.

Voters know already that Dr Manmohan Singh is the last of the past. They are searching for the first of the future. If you cannot understand why Narendra Modi gets a rapt audience at a Delhi college, turn to the duller news items. We now learn that, despite the long sequence of illusion strung by UPA’s nominated cheerleaders, the Central Statistics Office predicts that GDP will grow at only 5 per cent in the coming year, the lowest in a decade and down from 6.2 per cent in the previous year. But, poor as this is, it is less politically harmful than the conclusions of another government body, the Institute of Applied Manpower Research, a think tank of the Planning Commission. It reported that despite becoming the world’s fourth largest economy, employment was not growing either in India’s non-agricultural sectors or overall. It described the Indian story as “jobless growth”.

The young like statistics as much as anyone else, but what they really want to read in newspapers is advertisements for jobs. Delhi’s college audiences believe that Modi can engineer and encourage the industrialisation that will create jobs, and has confirmed his credentials in Gujarat. That, in their lingo, is “awesome”.

The voter’s question about Rahul Gandhi is uncomplicated: what precisely has he achieved to justify a claim to become Prime Minister? Genetic entitlement is passé. Rahul is 42 but has never held a job in either the private sector or public life. A fitful presence in Parliament, interspersed with long holidays abroad, does not constitute a job. Rahul could have become a minister at any time in the last eight years, and proved he was competent, as, to take one instance, Sachin Pilot has done. Rahul has campaigned , sometimes with his sleeves rolled up, but that is not quite executive experience. And after three decades as a family borough, life for the poor in his constituency, Amethi, is far below voters’ expectations. The voter is influenced by facts, not claims.

It is a myth that the young are only searching for youth in a Prime Minister: they also want proof of competence. Age is less important than ability. When the young want glamour they go to the movies, not to Parliament.

This of course is only one factor in that complex potpourri called an Indian election; Modi’s increasing appeal, to state the obvious, still has to cross the acceptability barrier for many voters. The parliamentary system is not as personality-driven as the presidential, so local variations will throw up their own patterns.

The big danger for UPA lies in the possibility that government could lose sense of purpose in a year of drift. Politics does not offer the luxury of a gap year in governance. Schemes that were meant to kindle embers are already wandering in limbo. The Budget could provide a fillip, but finance minister P Chidambaram has a problem: there is simply no money left in the treasury for drama. Even defence is probably heading for a cut.

A waiting room does, however, provide both opportunity and time for prayer. UPA ministers should pray very hard that onion prices do not go berserk in February 2014.

Ghosts of past hover over gender justice

2013-02-09T13:58:00.001+05:30

Byline for February 10, 2013

Ghosts of past hover over gender justice

M.J. Akbar

A Supreme Court judgement may be anchored in law, but it sails a long way through the mind of judges before it becomes a public pronouncement. Law and justice are both human and therefore prone to frailty and error. But we respect the Supreme Court as the final authority because we trust its integrity enough to believe that even the occasional mistake is an honest one.

One means through which the legal system protects its credibility is the doctrine of “contempt of court”. Dissent is not recommended, at least if you want to stay at home rather than in a cell. But surely their Lordships will permit some space for perplexity? There must be an ante room for discussion, particularly since a Supreme Court judgement is much more than the final word on the fate of an individual criminal. It is also the template by which all courts in the nation will shape their decisions in millions of cases in process of judgement, or in crimes of the future.

On 5 February newspapers reported that a bench of Justices P. Sathasivam and J.S. Khekar confirmed the death penalty on an adult who had kidnapped a seven-year-old boy and then killed him after failing to obtain ransom. The justices concluded that they saw no hope of reform in the criminal, that his perversion was inhuman, and the murder was cold and premeditated. All of this is absolutely true; the rationale for their decision to confirm the dealt penalty is inarguable.

But there was a curious codicil in the justification, which their Lordships noted as aggravating circumstances. I quote: “The parents of the deceased had four children, three daughters and one son... Kidnapping the only male child was to induce maximum fear in the mind of his parents. Purposefully killing the sole male child has grave repercussions for the parents of the deceased...” The bench continued, “Agony for parents for the loss of their male child, who would have carried further the family lineage, and is expected to see them through their old age, is unfathomable.”

The implications of such thinking are astonishing. It implies clearly that the parents’ agony would have been less if one of the three daughters had been similarly kidnapped and murdered, for the girl would not continue family lineage or provide for her parents in old age. The judges stressed “sole male child” factor as bearer of “the family lineage” and sustenance provider.

Which world are the judges living in?

We know the world they inhabit from another judgement, delivered just a week before, also involving an appeal against a death penalty. Justice Sathasivam was again on the bench, this time in the company of Justice F.M.I. Kalifulla. It is difficult to repeat their decision without a sense of horror at the double standards that the Supreme Court has applied. Before them was a man convicted by both the trial and high court. This savage murderer had raped his minor daughter, and been arrested after his wife complained to the police. When released on parole, he axed both his wife and daughter to death.

This abominable, barbaric rapist and killer lives, thanks to their Lordships Sathasivam and Kalifulla.

One wonders: has the great ferment rising across India against rape and gender prejudice escaped the attention of the Supreme Court? Chief Justice Altamas Kabir has certainly heard the howl of anguish from women. He said that if it were possible he could have joined the protests in Delhi. Was the Chief Justice helpless while his brothers delivered such discordant pronouncements? What will trial courts and high courts do in future when a father who has raped and killed his minor daughter, and has axed his wife for being a mother, appears before them? Will they stop long short of a death sentence the next time, because of the precedent sent by Justices Sathasivam and Kalifulla? Is the life of a raped and murdered minor girl less than equal to the life of a kidnapped and murdered boy? Does a man who killed two women deserve clemency, while the man who killed one boy gets hanged?

Is this justice?

The Honourable Supreme Court has the option of silence. We cannot push our questions beyond a limited point. Is silence the only answer that the court will choose?

If the Supreme Court, and Parliament, have the courage to do so they should abandon the death penalty. Then there will be no debate when governments delay the implementation of a death verdict on Afzal Guru for years, and finally act only when the President of India indicates that his patience is over. Our prisons can teem with rapists who have also killed minor daughters and wives. But as long as the law permits this ultimate weapon called the death sentence, that sword of justice must swing without conscious or unconscious prejudice.

Gender bias is dead. It is being buried in parts each day by modern India. Justice cannot be swayed by ghosts of a past age.

Questions for Hafiz Saeed

2013-02-03T10:27:00.002+05:30

Questions for Hafiz Saeed

MJ Akbar
03 February 2013

Times of India

A question for the internationally recognised terrorist, ideologue and mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attack, Hafiz Saeed, resident of Lahore, who has just offered sanctuary in Pakistan to our superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Pakistan was carved out in 1947 to ensure security for this subcontinent's Muslims in a separate homeland. Why, six decades later, has Pakistan become the most insecure place for Muslims in the world? Why are more Muslims being killed each day, on an average, in Pakistan than in the rest of the Muslim world put together?

This continual mass murder is not being done by Hindus and Sikhs, who were once proud residents of Punjab and Sindh but are now merely a near-invisible trace. Some Pakistan leaders even express pride in the fact that non-Muslims , who constituted around 20 per cent of the population in 1947, have been reduced to less than 2 per cent. In contrast, the percentage of Muslims in secular India has increased since independence. Hindus and Sikhs are not killing Muslims in Pakistan; Muslims are murdering Muslims, and on a scale unprecedented in the history of Punjab, the North West Frontier and Sindh. Why?

There have been riots in India, some of them horrendous. But the graph is one of ebb from the peak of 1947. When a riot does occur, as in Maharashtra recently, civil society and media stand up to demand accountability, and the ground pressure of a secular democracy forces even reluctant governments to cooperate in punishment of the guilty. When Shias, or other sectarians, are mass-murdered in Pakistan on a regular basis, the killers celebrate a "duty" well done.

History's paradox is evident: Muslims today are safer in India than in Pakistan. The "muhajirs" who left the cities of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 1947 would have been far safer in Lucknow, Patna and dozens of cities in their original land than they are now in the tense streets and by-lanes of Karachi.

Could Shah Rukh Khan have become an international heart throb if his parents had joined the emigration in 1947? Since he is talented he would have gained some recognition on the fringes of elite society, but he could not have become a central presence of a popular culture that has seeped and spread to every tehsil and village. Nor is Shah Rukh the only Muslim superstar in Mumbai's film world; Salman Khan is bigger than him. Shah Rukh and Salman and Amir Khan do not hide their identity through an alias; their birth name is their public persona.

The television set in my office serves two main purposes: it shows cricket and offers access to an FM radio station which plays old film songs. A song by Muhammad Rafi was on the air while the previous paragraph was being written: Man re tu kahe na dheer dhare. It is a beautiful classic, written by Sahir Ludhianvi. Rafi, as his name confirms, was a Muslim. He was born in 1924 in western Punjab and came to Mumbai as a very young man in search of dreams. Those dreams had not come true by 1947. Rafi had the option of returning to Lahore. He chose to remain in Mumbai, and brought his family in what might be called the reverse direction. It was a wise choice. Mumbai made Rafi's voice immortal. Rafi, like India, was the distillation of many inspirations.

Hafiz Saeed and his ilk possess cramped, virulent minds which condemn the ragas upon which our subcontinent's music, both classic and popular, is based, as inimical. They want to destroy a shared Hindu-Muslim cultural heritage in which Muslim maestros took classical music to splendid heights under the patronage of padishahs, rajahs and nawabs . Instead of art, they possess vitriol, even as the violence they spawn turns Pakistan into a laboratory of chaos. They call themselves guardians of their nation, but they are in fact regressive theocrats who are shredding the Pakistan that Jinnah imagined.

There is an answer to the opening question. Extremists who reduce faith to a fortress do not understand a simple truth: faith cannot be partitioned. Islam was a revelation for mankind; it cannot be usurped by a minor tract of geography. Nations are created by and for men, within boundaries of language or culture or tribe. Religion comes from God; it is not a political tool for human ambition. Those who equate religion with nation distort the first and destroy the second. Pakistan has become a battlefield for dysfunctional forces because theocrats will not permit it to become a rational state.

Logic suggests a reciprocal offer: Pakistani Muslims would be safer in India. But that offer cannot extend to Hafiz Saeed. His mission is to be India's adversary. What he does not understand is that he is really Pakistan's enemy.

Men are the weaker sex

2013-02-02T12:14:00.002+05:30

Byline

Men are the weaker sex

M.J.Akbar

The one certain fact about this uncertain business called advertising is that you can’t do without it. Such compulsion does not mean this hit-and-run affair necessarily works. It is difficult to predict when a campaign will be a hit, and when the agency has merely run away to lubricate its salary sheet.

The worst spiel in recent times was surely the advertising of a brief, and eminently forgettable, India-Pakistan cricket encounter last December. The agency was not promoting sport between traditional antagonists; it was announcing the consequences of an existentialist war with all the finesse of the massacre-friendly Nadir Shah on a Delhi weekend in 1739. Conversely, the best campaign I have seen in a long while has been the television advertisements which raised the curtain on the women’s cricket tournament: wry, tongue very much in cheek, and emasculating men with a pleasing insouciance.

There is no mystery about why. Women’s cricket went well because the agency believed in it. It represents something far more than fund raising for an already bloated game.

Women’s cricket has been around for a long while, scratching at the turnstiles, seeking attention and the legitimacy of public support. At long last, it is an idea whose time has come. It now represent the third great revolution in a sport that has long been a mirror of social mores.

The first liberation came when “professionals” in Britain won equal terms with “amateurs”. Professional is a term that carries so much pride now that we quite forget that once it was synonymous with something as “grubby” as earning money for talent in sports. It took a world war, the second of the 20^th century, to destroy the stupid pretentions of aristocrats who forced their working class “professionals” to use a separate entrance to a cricket field. The nobles wore silk scarves and gloried in the vanity that they were, literally, a class apart because they did not have to actually do anything for a living. They were lords of the manor, and hence lords of the field. Today, mercifully, merit rules. Commerce bows only before success, and success is not a genetic entitlement.

The second revolution matured in India and Pakistan, when merit took cricket away from the confines of the middle class, and into the small towns or city bylanes where a new India and Pakistan was being incubated. The urban middle class shares at least one trait with the white or brown aristocracy; it has many alternative routes to achievement. Cricket was a pleasure, even when exacting, but it was not quite a hunger. The gnawing desperation to beat the odds of life through excellence in a game whose financial value exploded beyond the dreams of avarice created a new base for triumphant upward mobility. If any astrologer had told 10-year-old M.S. Dhoni’s parents that he would one day become as wealthy as he is now, they would have given him a nice cup of tea and told him to go tease someone else. It is the same with many dozens of other achievers; and Dhoni was financially far better off at birth than Yusuf or Irfan Pathan.

Women’s cricket is one of the many reflections of the changing status of women. Women were once taunted by men as the weaker sex only because they could not compete with the brutal violence of males. In truth, you need a much tougher body and spirit for childbirth; men, by comparison, are sissies. They simply have more powerful muscles. Women have a far stronger mind.

But this assertion is only a part of the emerging story. Men have punished women through the ages with segregation, and then attached a false morality to their subjugation. Sport is freedom from segregation. We might not notice this in India, where trousers and jeans have become the preferred wear of women. But the fact that Pakistan’s women wear trousers when they go to bat and field will be a huge spur to a society that is still controlled too often by men who have not left the 19^th century. There was a time, during the regime of General Zia ul Huq, when some Pakistani fundamentalists wanted television coverage of cricket banned because women at home would be able to see the alluring Imran Khan rub a red cricket ball down the front of his trousers, and therefore near his crotch. It has been a long journey since then. We should celebrate this journey. Cricket will do a hundred times more for gender equality in Pakistan than a thousand speeches by well-meaning liberals.

There are countries which do not send women to the Olympics for “moral” reasons; or, more accurately, because they believe that the sight of women will encourage immorality. I cannot imagine anything more stupid. To display one’s face and ability is not nudity, neither among men nor women. Why shouldn’t women be allowed to behave as normally as men?

One thing is clear. It is men who are the weaker sex.