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CURRENT BYLINE :
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.
I am familiar with the face of defeat – not least my own in 1991, when
I failed to get re-elected in the general elec tion, during my brief
departure into politics. But never have I seen a visage as utterly
depressed, seething with the last twitches of a withered dream, as
that of Bill Clinton standing behind Hillary on the night of 7 May.
For the record, she was delivering a “victory” speech after the
Indiana primaries, but her words turned instantly into ash the
moment they left her mouth. Poor Bill got the blowback. He knew that
this was the last dance of a dead campaign. Four more years of
adulation and power had disappeared into a blank. I’ve seen long faces
too, but that evening Bill’s
jaw was nearer his nipple than his lip.
There are no exact parallels, least of all between democracy in the
United States and India, but common questions can open fresh lines of
thought.
Does Barack Obama represent the arrival of a new role model? Will this
drama of startling shifts energise hope elsewhere?
Barack is young, but he is not about youth. George Bush and Tony Blair
were startlingly young when they won office; they have aged decades in
less than ten years. Power seems to be an aphrodisiac for the old (P.V.
Narasimha Rao
yesterday, John McCain today), and decomposes the young.
The Barack phenomenon is about identity, not youth, the vital first
act as America attempts to exorcise the demons that have kept the
enslaved and dispossessed on the margins, not totally excluded in
these “liberal” times, but
not fully included either. His personal history is the antidote of
convention. He is a child of an absentee black, talented Muslim father
and a white, bright, single mother who survived for a while on food
stamps. His personality, his success and his dramatic invasion of the
white political club, with -- to the shock of traditional America -- a
coalition of white college kids and his black community, provokes
reservations, suspicion and downright, barely-disguised hatred. The
Clintons, who are brilliant at surreptitious politics and
viral-marketing, positioned him as the ultimate Manchurian candidate
at a time of Bush’s war against “Islamofascism”: they converted him
into a “closet Muslim” without of course letting the phrase escape
through their noble, if clenched, teeth. Worse, he was an uppity snob
who had the temerity to wear Gucci,drink
latte, and, worst of all, dress and dance better than the Clintons.
The Clintons have every right to a bank balance of $109 million
between them, earned in the last eight years. An upstart should remain
a degree below latte.
Obama prevailed among the Democrats not because he had changed but
because enough of America has changed.
One suspects that Congress whizkids and a few whizuncles will rush to
sell Rahul Gandhi as India’s Obama. The similarity is superficial, if
there is one at all. Rahul Gandhi is an image of youth but not of
change; he is yet another rung of an ageing idea called dynasty. The
real parallel to Obama in India is the spectacular trajectory of
Mayawati. She never studied in Harvard, and the only law she knows is
that of the jungle through which her elephant has had to fight for
survival. But she rose from the margins and is imploding upon the
Centre by extraordinary political skills. Her coalition of Brahmin,
Dalit and Muslim is if anything more impressive Obama’s. She does not
wear Gucci (she thinks
Rahul Gandhi does). But she does wear diamonds; the
contempt/anger/hatred and pseudo-morality that her wealth induces is
evident enough. She does not belong to the class that has a
hereditary right to be dishonest. But the most important similarity
is that she has energised her own community to an unprecedented
degree. The Dalits are the blacks of India; Babasaheb Ambedkar is
their Martin Luther King; Kanshi Ram is their Jesse Jackson; and
Mayawati is their Obama. Being less suave than Obama, she is both the
acceptable and unacceptable face of Change; she can apply the
rhetoric of Obama and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr, the pastor who
has made incendiary remarks against white racism and America,
depending on the audience she is addressing, or dismissing.
Obama is leading a sophisticated upheaval. Maya is heaving against
prejudice that has congealed over many thousands of years. In neither
case has the Establishment surrendered, yet. The Republicans believe
they can slice Obama up and feed him to middle America. The Congress
is convinced it can undermine Maya after she has sabotaged herself.
All options are possible, for the turbulence and direction of change
can never be certain. Hillary Clinton
refuses to lie down even when declared dead because she still hopes
that the unpredictable will somehow emerge from the inconceivable. If
the correctly-pigmented John Edwards had pounded her as Obama has
done, she would
have shaken his hand and accepted the Vice President’s nomination some
time ago. But with chocolate-flavoured Obama, you never know when some
circumcised skeleton will fall out from the cupboard…
The candidate may be dead. The ghosts dance on.
There is a second old rule in politics. Stick with friends, but stick
closer to enemies. An Obama or a Mayawati has learnt that sentiment is
a trap. Once you have fought a foe to death, you can always dance with
the ghost on the way to power.
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CURRENT BYLINE :
May 10, 2008
Will we, won't we?
- By M J Akbar
Hearing about the
indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in the solitude of my
Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of will we humble
Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly domitable? What does
domitable mean? Is it the opposite of indomitable? Is there a word
called domitable?

One of the minor attractions of a foreign hotel room is the chance to
switch on a strange television channel. The field is open; any country
with a reasonable budget and a desire to be seen as an international
player now has a state channel airing its version of events.
Predictably, the British thought of this wheeze first: very few know
that 50% of the BBC's expenses are still paid by the British Foreign
Office. In the heyday of Empire this was considered a legitimate part
of national duty; and during wartime, the investment provided
extraordinary returns. The logic had to be twirled around in the
post-imperial phase, and the BBC repositioned itself as the
international guardian of truth, democracy, liberty, freedom and
whatever the British Foreign Office considered worthy and useful. To
its credit, the BBC was never as obedient as the government would have
liked, which is why it discovered an international audience. There was
a time when BBC radio was perhaps the most important source of news
for much of the world. The BBC could even dare the government in
wartime. It famously refused to describe British troops during Mrs
Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War as "our" troops and called them
"British" troops. At this distance this may seem a minor or perhaps
even a trivial distinction, but for those in media who have to deal
with nervous governments during wartime, there is nothing trivial
about standing up for identity. Still the umbilical cord exists, and
no one quite knows when mummy is tugging at the cord.
The American experiment in quasi-government media independence has
been, shall we say, less successful. The Voice of America is only
accurate in one respect: it is the Voice of America, with a
modification – it is the Voice of the American Government. The VOA's
spectacular spread is matched only by the spectacular failure of its
inability to reach anyone. Credibility cannot be purchased by dollars.
Or by Euros, for that matter. But what is good about European news
channels broadcasting in English is that they offer you a different
dimension of warzones like Iraq or Palestine. The American coverage,
including that of non-government media, tends to follow some invisible
consensus in which, for example, Israel can do little wrong and the
Palestinians little right. The consensus does not extend to all
aspects of coverage, but it certainly conditions reporting of war.
Even when you do not understand the language of television reporting,
as for instance on Turkish channels, it is always instructive to see
the images that are being broadcast. They are significantly different
from the "consensus" images of Anglo-Saxon media. The great effort to
take independent coverage to an international audience was made, of
course, by Al Jazeera when it followed up its hugely successful Arab
channels with an English version. The effort is brave; but the jury is
still out on the quality of its impact. There is a sense of discomfort
in English Al Jazeera, or perhaps the more accurate term would be
uncertainty. It is never sure which note to hit. This grey confusion
does not exist in Arabic, because it was always certain what it wanted
to do. It was the first channel to report the Arab street, even when
this caused great discomfiture to Arab governments. Although Al
Jazeera is owned by Oman's rulers, they have wisely kept a distance
between their channel and their foreign policy. Al Jazeera is hated by
more Arab regimes that it would care to count. That is its strength.
Perhaps its problem in English is that it wants to pander to its
claimed audience, even when it claims the high ground of neutrality,
instead of letting the news speak for itself. All audiences have
biases, and it would be a foolish media person who ignored these
biases completely; but media's true worth is tested only when it rises
above the clamour of the audience on the few occasions when this is
essential.
Perhaps the most interesting channel I have come across is the Chinese
English channel. The last time I watched it, in a Singapore hotel, it
was going on and on about the "indomitable" will of the Chinese
people. It is a phrase that makes me nostalgic, almost taking me back
to college and the good old days when anyone in Calcutta with any
sense of adventure had Chairman Mao's Little Red Book in his pocket.
(The Chinese were very kind; they sent it free.) They did go on a bit
about the indomitable will of the Chinese people, and how it would
inspire revolutions everywhere. India was reserved by Chairman Mao for
a prairie fire that would light up in different spots and then slowly
join up to set this uppity, half-baked nation ablaze with red flames.
The prairie fire at my college, Presidency, was quite fierce for a
while; but the one in Delhi's elitist St Stephen's College, I gather,
went up in smoke. I shall not describe what kind of smoke it was.
Hearing about the indestructible indomitable will of the Chinese, in
the solitude of my Singapore hotel, set me thinking about the kind of
will we humble Indians have. Is our will, in comparison, highly
domitable? What does domitable mean? Is it the opposite of
indomitable? Is there a word called domitable? There should be,
logically, but anyone who knows English also knows that logic has
nothing to do with its grammar and phraseology. Ever tried to find
what the opposite of "unbend" is? It certainly isn't "bend".
I suppose only a very domitable people accept the conditions we do.
The news is that our deputy chairman of the Planning Commission,
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a protégé of the Prime Minister, finally
discovered the state of Delhi airport and has called a meeting to find
why this experiment in state-private sector partnership has become one
unholy mess. It has taken Mr Ahluwalia time, not because he does not
travel abroad, but because all high officials are taken through a
gilded route when they traverse through airports. High Cabinet
Ministers of course have their own airport. They just don't tell
anyone about this. But we must give credit to Montek: he could have
behaved like others, ignored the punishment that is inflicted on
ordinary passengers and gone back to his desk. He could have scratched
the back of the civil aviations ministry and lived happily ever after.
He took some action. We shall see if anything comes out of it.
Carry on, Montek. Maybe one day you shall make us Indians indomitable
as well.
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BYLINES:
May
3, 2008
The Alibi Game
- By M J Akbar
Logic and politics are not necessarily incompatible. If you live
by the sword, you die by the sword. If you live by market forces you
die by market forces. Inflation is the most logical face of market
forces. It is the market that sets the agenda. It is the market that
raises prices based on its assessment of supply, demand and
profitability. The market has no loyalty, least of all to government.
The market has no social conscience: no food-trader ever died of
hunger in the famine, or emerged out of the crisis with his bank
balance depleted. The market is loyal to one concept, profit. The
politician wants to win; the market wants to profit.
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