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Small boys, big game
By M.J. Akbar | January 3, 2009

There is only one relevant question in an election year: who will win? The pundits have begun to get themselves into the usual tangle, most of the tangle created by the spin of bias. The right thing to do would be to admit that no one really knows, but that would reduce a column to just one sentence. Since pundits get their money from columns rather than sentences, this is an inadequate solution to their dilemma.

If they must stretch their wisdom to a thousand words, may I offer a suggestion? They are making a mistake by looking at the big boys. The elections of 2009 might well be a game whose result is determined by the small boys.

Allies, rather than principals, could be the key to the formation of the next coalition in Delhi. It will also depend on how many seats the Third Front gets, and on which side its partners fall if they have to choose between the UPA and the NDA.

The three major allies of the Congress are Lalu Yadav in Bihar, M. Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu and Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra. There is bad news for the Congress in all three states. The Chennai street is buzzing with talk about a triumphant return for Jayalalithaa. Between the pain of family feuds and the disgust of unprecedented corruption, the DMK seems to have lost it. It is often forgotten that the DMK has been in power in Delhi for two terms, first as an NDA partner and then in the UPA. That is a lot of temptation for DMK ministers in Delhi to handle, and they handled it by succumbing totally. They may have begun life from the usual humble origins, and they could be out of office soon, but trust me, they will never be poor again — for many generations.

In Maharashtra the Congress is facing a double-whammy. There is a dip in both voter-support as well as in the cadre. The voters have shifted to the Opposition after two nearly-full terms of a best-forgotten chief minister, who has had, uniquely, to be dropped twice. A good section of the Congress cadre has moved to Sharad Pawar, who has been building his party as a regional force for the state, on the lines of Telegu Desam and DMK/AIADMK. He has nominated an heir, his daughter, and the next general election may see her shift into the Lok Sabha from the Rajya Sabha. His best legacy is not a victory in 2009, but a strong party structure that can survive the ephemeral phases of democracy. Pawar is sharp enough to see the future clearly. For 2009 is a transition, not a horizon.

The UPA bastion in the east is crumbling. Nitish Kumar, with the simple offer of good governance, has made substantial inroads into Lalu territory. Muslims are moving towards him in substantial numbers, and Lalu Yadav's traditional vote-bank rhetoric about the BJP will not stop the drift, since the voter has made good governance his pre-eminent priority. The Congress has the difficult task of not only preventing erosion in its own numbers, but also compensating for the losses that will be suffered by its allies.

Since 1991, allies have gained far more from alliances with the Congress than the other way around. Lalu Yadav has boxed the Congress into just four seats out of 40 in Bihar. When a party does not contest seats, it withers at the roots, which is what has happened to the Congress. Mulayam Singh Yadav will not concede more than 15 seats out of 80 in UP; Mamata Banerjee will keep the Congress down to 10 out of 42 in Bengal. Congress will gain in states like Kerala and Punjab, and could improve its numbers slightly in Rajasthan, but that will not easily offset losses in big states like Maharashtra, Andhra and Tamil Nadu.

One assumes that Congress believes it can use the BJP bogey to bring in the Left and Third Front parties into its coalition after the results. This will not be easy. The Left believes it has been betrayed, and abused, by Dr Manmohan Singh, inside and outside Parliament, over the strategic alliance with the United States. It is not likely to hand over leadership of any alliance it supports to the Congress. Congress might offer to prop up a minority government from outside, but other parties will recall what happened to I.K. Gujral and Deve Gowda. They might prefer stability to a temporary triumph.

The balance will, in any case, swing towards the alliance with the larger numbers. To be in play, the BJP-led NDA must deliver over 220 seats. Will that happen?

Why don't we let the electorate tell us in April and May? The pundit pontificates. The citizen votes.

Before we bury another year (this one with great glee) it is only appropriate to write an epitaph for 2008.

A word coined by the growing tribe of wordsmiths, and an email doing the rounds (both gleaned from the special Christmas issue of the Spectator) seem to be the perfect epitaph for the dreadful year just behind us. The word is quite a good one, not the least because it resembles an expletive: "funt", meaning "financially untouchable". But the email is more fun:

Socialism: You have two cows. State nationalises one and gives it to your neighbour.

Communism: State takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism: State takes both and sells you some milk.

Capitalism: You sell one of your cows and buy a bull; herd multiplies, economy grows. Sell them, and retire on income.

Lehman Brothers Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at Bear Stearns, execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with tax exemption for five. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights of all seven cows to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option for one more. You sell one cow to buy the President of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the press release. The public then buys your bull.

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A Real Con Called Conspiracy Theory
By M.J. Akbar | December 27, 2008

If you forgot the source of a quotation in our parents' generation, you could safely attribute it to Winston Churchill. Churchill smoked Cuban cigars, drank champagne for breakfast, painted for pleasure and won wars for a living. He was the authentic hero of the age of imperialism in the English-speaking people. If you cannot recall a source now, the safest thing to do is to attribute it to Warren Buffett, who eats hamburgers, plays bridge, thinks up witticisms for a hobby and makes money for a living. He is the authentic hero of the age of capitalism in the dollar-speaking world.

It was Buffett, I think, who said that it is only when the tide runs out that you discover who has been swimming naked.

Well, with the next general elections only weeks away, the tide is running out on politicians who have dominated the last five years. To our increasing amusement, we are beginning to discover that there might be a whole nudist colony swimming in the political waters. Once upon a time, only the emperor had no clothes. But democracy is a more egalitarian business.

The position of chief nudist fluctuates, but at the moment there would be no questions asked if the award was handed to Abdul Rahman Antulay. Let me point out right away that Mr Antulay is far smarter than the emperor, who seems to have lost his wits after a child pointed out that he had lost his clothes. Mr Antulay has taken pre-emptive action to fool the child. If you throw dust in the eyes of the beholder, there is a good chance that your nudity will not be recognised. Mr Antulay has spent six of his eight decades in politics. You learn a great deal in the process.

One simple question will expose how nude Mr Antulay was under the enveloping tide: Can he name one single thing, anything at all, that he has done for minorities as the Union Minister for Minorities?

He could possibly reel off the number of occasions on which he has broken down and sobbed publicly, either in sympathy at their plight or in exasperation at his inability to persuade the system to deliver. The tears might even have been genuine. But they do not add up to re-election.

If the performance is poor in Delhi, it is pathetic in Maharashtra. An exceptionally good story in Mumbai Mirror revealed that the Congress-NCP Government had not spent a single rupee out of the Rs 167 crores allotted to the Minorities Development Department till 15 December. Not one rupee. It is sadder still that the more hysterical elements of the Urdu press, who spend yards of newsprint on conspiracy theories, simply ignore such a story. In fact, if you want a quick portrait of the Congress Government in Maharashtra then all you have to do is check out one statistic: only 34% of the State's annual budget of Rs 29,000 crores has been spent till the middle of December. And so Mr Antulay picked up conspiracy fluff floating down the media mainstream, which had found some anchorage on urban shores, in order to reinvent himself as a martyr for a "Muslim cause" — that Hemant Karkare had been "martyred" [some Urdu papers refer to him only as "Shaheed" Karkare] because he was on the point of discovering the truth about a "Hindu" hand behind the Malegaon bombings. Even as a theory it was extraordinary: it implied that some quick-thinking fellow police officer had misled Karkare into going to the exact spot where he would get killed, certain that the Pakistani terrorists would not be able to get anyone who went to Taj, Oberoi or Nariman House, but would certainly kill the officers who went towards the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station.

All the clichés were trotted out: that Antulay feared no one but God [loud applause], that he did not care for office ["Take my resignation!"] et al. But the record shows that while it takes very little to persuade Antulay to offer to resign, it takes a great deal to force Antulay out of office. When the Babri mosque was demolished, and Mumbai suffered two months of riots, Antulay did not even offer to resign from Parliament. There were two reasons: one, three and a half years were left before the next general elections, not just three and a half months. Two, P.V. Narasimha Rao would have accepted the resignation immediately. Actually, even three and a half months are too long. When the Congress Government humiliated him through a statement in Parliament debunking the conspiracy line, all he did was to sheepishly agree and accept that there was no longer any need for an enquiry. Of course, the man who fears no one but God was permitted to keep his job, however marginal it might be.

Siddhartha Varadarajan, writing in the Hindu, had the finest conspiracy theory of the whole lot: that Antulay was a BJP plant in the Congress. It is certainly more logical than the suggestion that Mumbai police officers conspired with Pakistani terrorists to kill a top officer of their force. At a time of serious tension, all Antulay did was break the unity fashioned in Parliament. Just when it seemed that India was speaking in one voice, he split the Cabinet and handed Pakistan a public relations coup. His bid for pseudo-heroism has given Pakistan effective ammunition in the psychological skirmishing that has become a substitute for open warfare. Before asking India to unite, the Prime Minister might have asked his Cabinet to unite. His abject retreat will not change the Pakistani narrative. Islamabad will accuse Delhi of using pressure to ensure silence.

It is only appropriate, if one has begun with a quote, to end with a misquote. Churchill is, by my guess, the second most fecund source for anecdotes and bon mots in English; the most fertile is of course Shakespeare, who was also familiar with tides in the affairs of men. Shakespeare also understood the politics of power better than most, as his history plays indicate. But since he wrote of heroes, he did not investigate the clothing of politicians at ebb tide. Hence, a variation: "There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when taken at the ebb, leads on to misfortune".

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Biting the BBC bullet
By M.J. Akbar | December 20, 2008

The butler who calmed his feudal lord by noting that the uproar was a mere revolt and not a revolution, had a point. A revolution needs the brains of a Gandhi or a Lenin, not to mention a replacement for the object of destruction. I would be loath to replace the BBC. I would not even dignify my little protest with the label of 'revolt'. Moreover, it was Gandhian, which makes it even less glamorous. Perhaps the only relevant part of my response was non-cooperation.

During the sixty hours of unabated terrorism in Mumbai, the one group that was almost as much in demand as security forces was journalists. With media desperate to fill space or time, a journalist could pass off any amount of gibberish as on-the-spot wisdom. Many international radio and television stations did not even demand, or perhaps expect, correct grammar: mangled phrases and minced diction can sound quaintly ethnic.

It was after the last terrorist had been shot in the Taj that something snapped during a telephone conversation with an extremely polite news anchor from the BBC in London. I refused. I said that I would not cooperate with the BBC as long as it described the murderers of Mumbai as "gunmen" rather than calling them what they were: terrorists.

The BBC is full of friends, with whom one has a happy and fulfilling professional relationship since the 1970s. I am privileged to consider the father of the BBC in India, Mark Tully, as a friend. Rita Payne, who headed the South Asia service for television till recently, is another. It was suggested that I might consider writing to Richard Porter, head of BBC World News Content. Perhaps my language was angry, but it only reflected the rage one felt: "I am appalled, astonished, livid at your inability to describe the events in Mumbai as the work of terrorists. You have called them 'gunmen', as if they were hired security guards on a night out. When Britain finds a group of men plotting in a home laboratory your government has no hesitation in creating an international storm, and the BBC has no hesitation in calling them terrorists. When nearly two hundred Indian lives are lost, you cannot find a word in your dictionary more persuasive than 'gunmen'. You are not only pathetic, but you have become utterly biased in your reporting…Shame on you and your kind."

Mr Porter's reply was worded in far more courteous language. "The BBC's policies on the use of the word 'terrorist' have long been a subject of public discussion. The guidelines we issue to staff are very clear — we do not ban the use of the word terrorist, but our preference is to use an alternative form of words. There is a judgment inherent in the use of the word, which is not there when we are more precise with our langu