December 1 - 31st
COVERT
(November 1 - 15,
2009)
COVERT
(October 16-31,
2009)
COVERT
(October 1-15,
2009)
Past Issue
COVERT
October 1-15
COVERT
(September 16-30
2009)
 As
was once noted by a garrulous, if not very innovative, politician,
India has, just now, a Hindu President, a Muslim Vice President, a
Sikh Prime Minister and a Christian President of the ruling Indian
National Congress.
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Death at Harrods
By M J AKBAR | August
29, 2009
Can this possibly be true?
On 25 August 1909 the New York Times reported: “As a result of the
death of Miss Helenora Catherine Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple, sister
of Sir Edward Graeme Elphinstone-Darlrymple, during a dry shampoo with
carbon tetrachloride at Harrods Stores, charges of manslaughter were
yesterday preferred at Westminster Police court against Mr William H.
Eardly, the manager of the department, and Miss Beatrice Clarke, one
of the assistants. Miss Horn-Elphinstone-Darlrymple went to Harrods
for a dry shampoo on July 12. She was warned she might feel faint…”
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COVERT
(August 16-31 2009)
A Thin Hope
By M J Akbar | August
8, 2009
 How does one reconcile these news stories appearing on the same day?
In Islamabad, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik tells
Parliament that the Jamat-ud-Dawa [latest name of the
Lashkhar-e-Tayaba] is among the 25 groups banned under the 1997
Anti-Terrorism Act. In Srinagar, the Indian Army says it has killed at
least eight terrorists trying to sneak across the Line of Control,
seven in Kupwara and one in Poonch. Back in Islamabad foreign office
spokesman Abdul Basit clarified that there had been no change in
Pakistan’s stand and it still wanted an independent Kashmir.
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COVERT
(August 1-15 2009)
COVERT
(July 15-30 2009)
 A Monsoon
without Music
By M.J. Akbar
| July 10,
2009
There are two
ways of checking out the state of the monsoons. You can always enquire
from the meteorological department, and take their variable word at
face, or faceless, value. The more pleasant option is to switch on the
music channels of All India Radio; the radio jockeys of their Hindi
film song programmes look out of the window. AIR has a fabulous stock
of saawan
and barsaat
songs that it reserves for the season beginning from around the second
week of June, its monsoon music.
-
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COVERT
(July 1-15 2009)
God isn't
saving the left
 Bertolt Brecht, the leftist German playwright, was brilliant enough to
give cynicism a good name. Parliamentary democracy, for him, was a
moveable feast. He once suggested a great alternative to dissolving
the legislature and electing a fresh set of representatives. “Wouldn’t
it be easier,” he asked, “to dissolve the people and elect another in
their place?”
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COVERT
(June 15-30 2009)
Thank You for
the Nildus Speech, Mr. President
 Dear Brother-Husain,
I am certain about two things. I am a Muslim, and I live in this
world. Now the uncertainties begin. On 4 June you gave what was
heavily advertised as a major speech to the
“Muslim world”.
Does that mean that while every Christian believes in the divinity of
Jesus, he can be legitimately and widely varied in his political
interests, but Muslims must have both Allah and politics in common?
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COVERT
(June 1-15 2009)
Season of Mellow
Music
By M.J. Akbar
| May 23,
2009
 Has the BJP got trapped in the Bosnia
joke: nothing can succeed, not even a crisis? As the party thinks its
way through the present impasse, it needs two things that politicians
avoid since both come with uncomfortable demands: clarity and honesty.
Arun Jaitley, the general secretary who played a significant part in
shaping the campaign, summed it all up succinctly when he said,
“Shrillness does not pay.” It would be too much to expect Jaitley to
dwell in public on the shrillness that characterized the rhetoric of
too many disparate BJP candidates, the most notable of whom was of
course the overblown Varun Gandhi, but one presumes that he has made
the point in private confabulations that must be taking place in the
BJP leadership.
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COVERT
(May 16-31 2009)
Get Ahead, Get a
Headache
By M.J. Akbar
| May 9,
2009
 ‘The elections are dead. Long live the
elections!’ This may not quite possess the grand flair of a Cavalier
cheer for Charles the Second, but it does strike the more puritan
populist chord so essential to the simpler creed of republicans.
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COVERT (May 1-15 2009)
COVERT (APRIL 15 - 30, 2009)
(No cover)
When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty
By M.J. Akbar
| April 11,
2009
(In Covert - April 15-30th)
What would have been the reaction of Indians if the shoe thrown by
Jarnail Singh at Home Minister P. Chidambaram had actually hit his
face?
Sympathy is a sentiment best measured by mercury. A little shake of
the thermometer and it can shoot off in either direction. Jarnail
Singh did himself a great favour by missing. If the shoe had hit the
Home Minister smack in the face, who knows, he may have shared some
sympathy.
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COVERT (APRIL 1 - 15, 2009)
 Banking on Bankruptcy
By M.J. Akbar
| March 28,
2009
Washington: Why did the Washington Post downgrade its business section
when a crime story is always a great read and the best crime stories
of America are now on the business pages? Add this to the many things
one cannot understand about American media.
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COVERT (MARCH 16-31, 2009)
 Forward to the
18th Century!
Such is the uncertainty
of our times that astrologers are searching for politicians almost as
fervently as politicians are looking for astrologers. Both sets of
professionals want to feed off the other’s core competence. To be
fair, politicians are far more unsure than astrologers. Their
nervousness is understandable. They have much more to lose.
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COVERT (MARCH 1 - 15, 2009)
 The Congress has begun its campaign — for the general elections of
2012-13. All over Kolkata, to take a revealing instance, the party has
put up hoardings with a single face, that of a smiling,
heavily-dimpled Rahul Gandhi. The visual message is “cute”. The
written message is unambiguous: this is the face of the future. He may
be forced to share the limelight with his elders in 2009, but this is
the last compromise.
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COVERT (15 - 28 February, 2009)
 The High Fives of the Big Five are over
By M.J. Akbar
| February 14,
2009
The release
of Pakistan's serial nuclear-offender A.Q. Khan, after
five years of house arrest, is concrete evidence of the dual narrative
that all nuclear nations employ over proliferation. There may be
solemn sermons about law and security in public but there is hero
worship of scientists who have delivered in the national, and, in the
case of Khan international, interest.
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COVERT (1-15 February, 2009)
 The Public Faces
of Power
By M.J. Akbar
| February 1,
2009
Dr Manmohan Singh is the
Abdul Kalam of politics: both are admired among the middle classes for
decency, integrity, education and achievement in their preferred
discipline. Sometimes it takes a tragedy like ill health to evoke
emotion, and the response in the urban areas to the Prime Minister's
hospitalisation must have come as a bit of shock to the Congress
Party, which had convinced itself that Sonia Gandhi was its only mass
leader and Rahul Gandhi the only possible heir. Dr Manmohan Singh
today is far more popular than the Congress president among the middle
class.
-
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COVERT (16-31 January, 2009)
 Flattery, please;
who wants friends?
By M.J. Akbar
| January 17,
2009
One
of the most instructive stories I have read about democracy comes from
1865. Just to place the date in context, America had just saved the
Union from a civil war; Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated; Paris
was in turmoil; the fabulous Ottoman Empire was rotting at the roots;
and Delhi was still a ghost capital, being punished for the temerity
of having risen against the British Raj. Only America, with partial
franchise, and Britain, with limited franchise, could claim to have
governments which were accountable to civilian audit in the form of
elections.
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COVERT (1-15 January, 2009)
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.
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COVERT (16-31 DECEMBER 2008)
WHAT'S GENERAL ABOUT A GENERAL ELECTION?
By M.J. Akbar
|
December 6, 2008
 There is nothing general about a general election. It is the sum of a
set of particular elections in separate but contiguous and
occasionally overlapping geographical and demographic spaces.
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COVERT (1-15TH DECEMBER 2008)
POLICY, PROFILE,
POLITICS:MATCH GIVES YOU GAME
By M.J.Akbar |
December 2008
 What
wins elections? Policy or profile?
You can lose elections through failed policy but win them through a
positive profile. If the profile of a leader has been projected with
sufficient dexterity, an incumbent can even overcome the liability of
inadequate delivery during the years of governance.
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COVERT (16-30TH NOVEMBER 2008)
The Insecurity
of Petty Ideas
By M.J. Akbar
|
November 17, 2008
 The
times have changed. Patriotism used to be the last refuge of the
scoundrel. The scoundrel is now the last refuge of patriotism. This is
not because the cad and the poseur have filled up, but because we are
busy chopping democracy up into little pocket-sized units of petty
patriotism. Culture, economics and the history of the last hundred
years unite us. The greed for votes is beginning to divide us. It is
one thing for municipal-level politicians to try and survive by wooing
the lowest common denominator. But when politicians of some stature, a
Cabinet Minister hoping to rise to Prime Minister, or a Chief Minister
begins to parrot the pidgin politics of parochialism, then it is time
to address the infection with a scalpel. Regional separatism is the
sore that can deteriorate into secessionist cancer if not addressed in
time.
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COVERT (1-15TH NOVEMBER 2008)
 The Quiet Shift to New Horizons
By M.J. Akbar
The sound of a stereotype crumbling travels deep into the individual
psyche and the collective consciousness. The two largest democracies,
India and America, comparable in size, demographics and ethnic
tensions, have both heard such a rumble in the last few days. The
trigger in both cases might have been the relentless pressure that
elections bear upon social relationships, the amoral quest for power
that brings subterranean flows to a boil.
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COVERT (16-31st OCTOBER 2008)
 Who wants to be the pinprick inside a bubble?
By M.J. Akbar
It often needs a startling image to convey the dimensions of a crisis.
Bloggers have time to discover such startling analogies. Someone on
the net has had the time and patience to conjure up this image about
$700 billion, the most dramatic figure among the many mountains of
cash that Governments have doled out to capitalism's poster boys in
order to save capitalism.
If you stacked up $700bn in 100-dollar bills [100, not 10 or 1], it
would climb 54 miles into the sky. If you counted one billion at the
rate of one digit a second, you would need 30 years. 700 billion?
Don't begin.
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COVERT (1 - 15 OCTOBER 2008)
 Fuse of self-destructive terrorism gets shorter
By M.J. Akbar
Governance is the easy
part of being in power. You govern through systems. Systems are
protected by institutions. Institutions grind their way forward on
hierarchy, oiled by memory or precedence. When there is need for
innovation, change is sifted through a time-consuming committee. The
end product may not be brilliant, but it comes with minimal-risk
insurance: it will not do damage, and might even do some good.
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COVERT (15 - 30 SEPTEMBER 2008)
 Fluff-and-bluff
can't change harsh truths
By M.J. Akbar
We may have all missed the most interesting point in the kerfuffle
over the Indo-US nuclear deal. Dr Manmohan Singh and Mrs Sonia Gandhi
have emerged as the greatest advertising team since World War II. They
have sold a personal obsession as a nation's lifeline. The strategy is
not dissimilar to that employed by Germany and Italy in the war:
repeat a lie often enough and it will be perceived as the truth.
High-decibel propaganda has this hypnotic effect on the masses. To use
a term from theatre, there is a wilful suspension of disbelief.
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COVERT (1 - 15 SEPTEMBER 2008)
 Three Questions
for the Wandering Indian
By M.J. Akbar
To
jaded Delhi eyes, the sky is much more vast in Canada. That could only
be an illusion, right? Wrong. The horizon is not limited by
claustrophobic cement, concrete, stone; the vision is not trapped by
the tensions of road-crawl, or blocked by the arrogance of bullies who
believe that a steering wheel has lifted them out of the demands of
common decency. It is not distance that makes Canada seem like a
frontier, although it takes a while to ingest that London is only a
midway point between Delhi and Toronto. This frontier is not merely
the boundary wall of the familiar; it is also the gateway to new
space.
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COVERT (16 - 31st August 2008)
 Why Mumbai is the
heart of Muslim Terrorism
By M.J. Akbar
There
are only two Mumbai Muslims whose lives have been made the subject of
movies that were released commercially. One film was official,
financed by the Government of Pakistan. The other was unofficial, and fictionalised, made by the Mumbai film industry. The film on Mohammad
Ali Jinnah was a tribute to a stalwart whose admirers will not
tolerate a word of criticism against him.
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COVERT (1-15th August 2008)
 The
Headmaster of A School for
Scandal
By M.J. Akbar
In the end it's the jokes that get you, isn't it? SMS, that deadly
virus, has been spreading sound bites like "Sting is King". Its first
cousin, email, has been circulating emotional pleas to the heartless
Finance Minister: "Don't you know how old MPs are? They have bad
backs! Can't you print Rs 100,000 notes instead of measly little
thousand-rupee notes??? Do you know how heavy a sack of 30 crores is?"
There are heart-rending stories of MPs breaking down because they did
not know how to take their loot, collected in Delhi, back to the
security of their small towns.
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COVERT (16-31st JULY 2008)
 CHECK THE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND THE POSSIBLE
By M J Akbar
In
times of meltdown,
the great eagerness is of course to get a glimpse of the future. The
tendency, but naturally, is to track the future along the seam lines
of what politicians can do. There is a much surer way of negotiating
such minefields. Check out what politicians cannot do, and you will
get a far better idea of what they will do.
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COVERT (1-15th JULY 2008)
 Have you ever heard a cake crumble?
by M J Akbar
In the second
last week of June, after nearly fifty months of office, Congress Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh offered Congress President Sonia Gandhi one of
two options. She could either support the Singh-George Bush nuclear
partnership and shoot herself in the Left foot, or she could abandon
the Marxists who had carried the government on their uneven shoulders
and shoot herself in the Right foot. If the bullet went Left, the
partnership would fracture, hobbling the Congress severely in its
effort to remain the core of a future non-BJP alliance. If the bullet
went Right, the credibility of theManmohan Singh government, already
in hospital, would be put permanently to sleep.
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COVERT (15TH-30th JUNE 2008)
 The Fine Art
of Doing Nothing
-By M J Akbar
Sensible
politicians are wary of big words: they never know when one will
rebound and bite them, with painful consequences. The philosophy of
power is one word too many in a phrase about politics. Politicians
keep their nose to the ground, philosophy out of their thoughts, and
their conscience in a safe deposit vault, so that, while it remains
out of sight, it can always be taken out, brushed up and put on
display when expedient.
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COVERT (1-15TH
JUNE 2008)
 The secret
diaries of Manmohan, Advani
-By M.J. Akbar
How
could my fellow-traveller Buddhadeb Bhattacharya call me the worst
Prime Minister
India has had? That stung. I rather like Buddha. I know his type, a
sheep dressed in wolf’s clothing. I’ve done my bit of lip-service to
socialism. What option did one have if you wanted some trajectory up
the old Congress bureaucracy greasy pole? Indira Gandhi would spread
nonalignment at breakfast and turn pink with the salad over lunch:
poor dear, no one told her that nationalization and nationalism are
not quite the same thing.
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COVERT (15-30TH
MAY 2008)
 THE
DANCE OF THE GHOSTS
- By M J Akbar
(Posted from Princeton University where
he is giving a lecture on Talibanisation
of Pakistan)
Old rules get old because they
have legs to walk through generations. Time, then, to recall one
of the oldest: When you are dead, lie down. So many politicians
simply don’t get this, whether they are provincial wannabes like
the erst while Congress satrap from Uttar Pradesh Akhilesh Das or
the woman who wanted the White House, Hillary Clinton.
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