Cairo Talks -- Our PM Buckles again

I cannot forget what Michael Corleone once told Tom Hagen, the family lawyer and Consigliere, when the latter offered to take charge of the affairs during a war-like situation. Michael said something like this: Tom, you are a peace-time consigliere: you are not meant for wars.

Whenever I look at the way our PM Dr Manmohan acts vis-a-vis Pakistan, I am struck by the similarities with the above situation. Here we have a man at the helm of our affairs who would have made a good Finance Minister, but not the Prime Minister, especially with adverseries like Pakistan and China and 'allies' like the US who have designs of their own on us. The country badly needs somebody with more spine.

But the country obviously is in love with the doctor... so who am I to wail?

Election 2009

This year's election has been long over, a new government installed, and the result has been hailed in the media and the blogosphere in general as a victory for stability, for youth, for defeat of religious fundamentalism, and for development. I differ with these views on many counts as I do not think that voters throughout the country have come together and voted this present combine to power, in order to achieve all this. For example, if we look at the Mumbai results, Congress would not have won if SS and MNS did not divide their votes between themselves. So, the result is more due to the complexity of electoral arithmatic that the Congress/UPA played better than their opponents. If there is a single underlying trend, it is the consolidation of Muslim votes towards the winniers and away from the losers. More of electoral arithmatic there.

I am writing this not for analysing the results.. I am not qualified to do that, and also there have been some excellent analyses already. I shall extensively link my post to columnist Santosh Desai's op-eds in the TOI. For analysis, read this: Analyzing the constant election analysis ,
then this: What the election results say about us.

What particularly depresses me is the ascend and more ascend of Dynasty in Indian politics. My deeply-ingrained democratic outlook cannot ever conform to this. The whole thing is nauseating to me. Look at who have won: the INC -- once a party of stalwarts, now reduced to a single-family owned loyalty-to-the-family-bound party (I do not belive Rahul Gandhi will ever seriously do anything to topple the system where he and his immediate family are is the main beneficiaries... we all have noticed how he often mentions his 'family' in his speeches, almost equating it with Congress and India); the NC (the Abdullahs); the DMK (Karunanidhi and his children from many wives).... no need to give any more example. The parties which are based on families and personalities rather than on core ideologies have done better. For that matter, I do not think much of ideologies, becasue that pushes a a party towards dogma and rigidity, but then in a matured democracy it is also not desired that if a situation arises where the core leadership of a major political party suddenly gets eliminated by a mishap, the whole party collapses!

The parties that are structured and where power does not flow down bloodlines, are, on the one side of the spectrum, the leftist parties, and on the other, the BJP. Both have done comparatively poorly in the hustings. I cannot think this is a good trend... I'd not like to die seeing Priyanka's son as the future PM... :(

Please read anothe excellent article from the same santosh Desai that appeared on the 8th June's TOI: Dynasty: Undemocratic but alive and kicking

If we look at the media, almost the whole of the English media is partisan... we have seen Pronnoy Roy visibly getting irritated when he spoke with an NDA fellow -- smile returned to his lips only when the bearded face of Suresh Kalmadi came back into his focus again :) Less open in his bias, and (cleverly) subtler in his analysis, is Vir Sanghvi. He will occasionally even write against the dynastic politics, but his main focus then will be on the Karunanidhis and the Sharad Pawars, and not on the Gandhis (who I think are the real fountainhead of this dynastic malaise). He will also deride the Congress some times in his articles, but then it will be against Sheila Dikshit and her BRT corridor, which will be, needless to say, sweet music to the ears of the High Command! Sanghvi's masterstroke, however, is to regularly trash P V Narasimha Rao, never failing to use the term 'crook' to describe this ex-PM, who probably for the first time in recent history posed a real danger to the family, who was the harbinger of economic liberalization, did many more good things (I’ll write later on him), but who also allegedly bribed JMM (now now, what a coincidence, Manmohan Singh has also been alleged to do so in the aftermath of Left withdrawing their support during his last term, but then, as ironical as irony can go, one is termed a crook and the other a saviour, for committing the same sin!)!

Terrorism in the Indian context -- I

Fatalism

Responding to my anxiety over the well-being of my near and dear ones in Bangalore in the wake of the multiple blasts, my wise colleague assured me: “Don’t worry . . . nothing is going to happen to them, unless of course it is written in their destiny. If it is so, unfortunately, then no amount of taking precautions will stop it from happening”. I had to very strongly resist my urge to ask him why then he goes to a doctor when sick – isn’t it useless to gulp down those pills when everything is in the hands of destiny, after all?

It goes without saying that we need to shed this fatalistic attitude completely. Safety and security is our birthright, and also being vigilant citizens is among our most fundamental duties towards our country. I must admit that fatalism has its plus points too, in a morbid way. In terrorism-stricken situations, India behaves like a mammoth that refuses to respond to pin-pricks, which is surely not what the terrorists desire. They want India to suffer visibly, to moan, to try to get up and fight back, and in the process suffer even more. Not much pleasure stabbing a corpse! To make India stir, they need to hurt it in a grand scale… and this is what they are up to now.

Having said that, what a citizen has every right to demand is answers to why even a single life has been lost, why a single family has been destroyed. Is it not the responsibility of the state to provide safety and security to all its citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity?

The Policymakers

Our policymakers – the lawmakers and the bureaucrats -- they either cannot think of a comprehensive policy because they personally live a well-protected life (do they know how it feels to live everyday in terror, as scores of Indians have to do?) and therefore cannot comprehend the situation, or do not really want to act pro-actively (to turn the table on the terrorists, to hunt them in their own dens and not to wait till they hunt us), as this will affect their oh-so-important vote banks. Our PM famously spent sleepless nights worrying for doctor Haneef who was arrested in Australia (a country where you can expect a fair trial), but was he so forthcoming with his anguish at the plight of Indians working in Afghanistan or even in the Indian states of J&K (the Hindus) or the North-East (the Bengali and the non-locals)? At least I do not remember him (or for that matter anybody else) doing that. The so-called nationalist opposition party, the BJP, seems unable to rise above municipality-level politics – they have even invented a conspiracy in the recent attacks, hatched by their political opponents, to divert attention from the cash-for-vote scam in the Parliament!

Hopeless situation -- needless to say!

The Intellectuals

Come to the most deplorable part – the role played by our bleeding-heart intellectuals. It seems their hearts bleed truly only for the terrorists (never heard of organizations like SAHAMAT shedding tears for the victims of terrorism); it is the human rights of the perpetrators what they are only bothered about. Many so-called human rights groups are actually frontal organizations of the terrorists.. we hear of the MASS (Manab Adhikar Sangram Samiti) of Assam. I also cannot forget that a leftist Bengali intellectual once acted as an independent election observer on behalf of the Hurriyat Conference of J&K a few years ago, knowing fully well whose interests they represent. I can remember those times when huge rallies marched through Srinagar streets and letters dictating leave-the-valley-or-die were slid under the doors of the Kashmiri Hindus by the mob … did any human rights-wallah’s heart bleed then? Again, did it do so when Hindus were dragged from buses and gunned down in Punjab? Or when Assamese youth mobbed Guwahati’s city buses to hunt out the Bengali passengers and then play football with them (the method used to sort out was simple -- passengers were told to count from 1 to 10 in Assamese – the accent was always a clear giveaway to who were non-Assamese, particularly Bengalis).

(More on another day…)