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Congress rules region Glamour in House |
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Baggage of fanaticism
The runners-up
News analysis
Delhi Durbar
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Congress rules region THE Congress has decisively won in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, but, expectedly, not in Punjab. Pollsters can be excused if they did not know what was in the offing. Perhaps the result has been a surprise for the parties in contention as well. What has happened may have been dreamed about by the Congress (and suspected by the BJP), but no one can honestly claim that he had actually gauged the shape of things to come. The turning of the tide has been the most dramatic in Haryana. In the last Lok Sabha, the BJP-INLD combine held all the 10 seats. The belief this time was that they will have to hand over about half of these to the Congress. But the latter has simply turned the tables on both parties, who were bitter rivals this time, picking up as many as nine, leaving out only Sonepat for Mr Kishen Singh Sangwan to keep the tattered BJP flag flying. Not even BJP stalwart I D Swami could save his seat. The INLD could not even open its account. In fact, it was ahead in only nine of the 90 Assembly segments. To its mortification, both sons of Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala had to bite the dust. In Kurukshetra, Mr Abhay Singh Chautala had to bow to greenhorn Naveen Jindal of the Congress by a margin of more than 1.6 lakh votes. And in Bhiwani, Mr Ajay Singh Chautala could not even call himself the runner-up. He finished a poor third behind Mr Bhajan Lal’s son Kuldeep Bishnoi, who was declared victorious, and Mr Bansi Lal’s son, Mr Surinder Singh. Chautala senior has obviously annoyed all sections of the voters of the State good and proper during his tenure and will have to change his style of governance dramatically if he does not want to face similar disappointment during the Assembly elections. That is easier said than done. But Punjab has come as a saving grace for the Akali Dal-BJP combine, which has picked up as many as 11 of the 13 seats.
Infighting and anti-incumbency cooked the Congress goose which had to make do with the remaining two. Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh’s wife Parneet Kaur did scrape through but that is a small consolation for him. The reverses elsewhere will embolden his detractors all the more, who may call for his head. In fact, Deputy Chief Minister Rajinder Kaur Bhattal has already said that Capt Amarinder Singh is responsible for the rout and she would take up the matter of “change of leadership” once again with the party high command. It is another matter that the dissidents themselves contributed to a great extent towards the humbling of their party. Capt Amarinder Singh has said so, adding that he will leave no stone unturned for the removal of Mrs Bhattal from the government and the party. Troubled days are ahead for the Congress, at least in Punjab. Emulating what happened in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh’s wife Pratibha Singh has won the Mandi seat but there the similarity ends. The Congress is in the driver’s seat in the hill State. It has also wrested Kangra and Shimla (reserve) seats from the BJP and its former alliance partner HVC. The most notable is the defeat of former Union Minister Shanta Kumar, a two time Chief Minister of the State, who lost to State Forest Minister Chander Kumar of the Congress by about 20,000 votes. The Congress juggernaut was stopped only by Mr Suresh Chandel of the BJP who defeated State Industries Minister Ram Lal Thakur by just 2,200 votes. That shows the extent of change in the public mood. The Congress had lost all the seats in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections. Mr Virbhadra Singh has almost repeated the performance of the 2003 Assembly elections, unlike his counterpart in Punjab. In Chandigarh too, Mr Pawan Kumar Bansal has made light of the anti-incumbency bugbear. |
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Glamour in House THE voters will have to change their habits, or else they would miss seeing their favourite Bollywood stars in a completely new role. The uninitiated, wanting to see the proceedings of the Lok Sabha, should be pardoned for presuming that they had come to the wrong address. There is no record of netas having succeeded as abhinetas. Now they may have to live under the shadow of their more glamorous members of the fourteenth Lok Sabha. The names of the elected Bollywood stars read like the creditline of a blockbuster. Sunil Dutt, Vinod Khanna, and Raj Babbar fall in the category of veteran politicians. Even they may feel a little envious of the attention that the political greenhorns, Jayaprada and Govinda, and the evergreen star Dharmendra, may receive from just about everyone. Starry-eyed fans may now want to skip a movie to see their favourite stars in action — Govinda from behind the Treasury Benches and Jayaprada on the other side. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. The Speaker would have to be on his guard in dealing with Garam Dharam. He can be expected to break into expected dialogues. The House can make a substantial contribution to the Lok Sabha budget by charging a hefty fee for entry to the visitors' gallery. Nevertheless, all new and old members would be well advised not to ignore the entry of Navjot Singh Sidhu into the august company of lawmakers. He has always made popular laws — as far as English grammar is concerned. He is not Chetan Chauhan who used to put crowds to sleep with his dull batting and the Lok Sabha with his colourless interventions. The Treasury Benches would be well advised to demand a protective shield to avoid being hit by a sizzling Sidhu straight drive from his lips. |
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The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand. — George Moore |
Baggage of fanaticism THE phenomenon of suicide bombings is not new for Pakistan. Several such incidents have already taken place. But the one in Karachi on May 7 has made suicide bombers relevant to the more widespread sectarian discrimination. It was a horrible incident of a suicide bomber killing 16 persons and injuring over a hundred worshippers in a crowded downtown Shia masjid. Reactions could be predicted. It is being widely condemned, of course. Most people have complained that a presumed Muslim had attacked a crowded mosque during prayer time. But few ask what message he wanted to convey. Many refuse to go beyond condemning such incidents; there is a strange inability to regard them as manifestations of a deep-rooted disease. The need is to find out the root cause. The question recurs: what was the point the suicide bomber was making? A suicide bomber is one who is fired with a vision and purpose; he is to be highly keyed up. In this case, one can describe his ideological identity. He was killing a non-Muslim. A Shia friend made a snide remark: the earlier generation had made the task of born-again Muslims difficult by driving out most of the non-Muslims; now poor chaps have to be content with only the available second best: Shias and Christians. But laughing away will not do. This ideological physiognomy is strikingly clear. He belongs to the Sunni orthodox majority that is found throughout the subcontinent. Only he has had teachers and circumstances that have taken him beyond Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madni, the prisoner of Malta. In one manifestation he is a Taliban: a puritan determined to enforce his own primitive reading of Islamic values. He is also in other circumstances a member of Al-Qaeda, or for that matter a militant waging jihad in India-controlled Kashmir. Inside Pakistan he demands declaring Shias as non-Muslims in a new Sunni state. Such a person is ready to sacrifice his own life for the extremist truths he believes in. In practical terms, out of hundreds of millions of believers in orthodox values and beliefs, a few thousands have emerged as true fanatics, ready to lay down their lives for the cause dearest to them. Men like Maulana Muhammad Ali, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and, more particularly, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi made a great intellectual splash early in the last century. They said Islam provides a detailed code of life covering all aspects of life from cradle to grave. It was in Pakistan that Maudoodi’s Jamaat-e-Islami flourished intellectually. One heretical view is that it was a fine-sounding journalistic flourish insofar as Maulana Azad and Maulana Muhammad Ali were concerned — an overemphasis that comes naturally to the Muslims brought up amidst inherited beliefs and traditions. What was there on the ground throughout the first 1300 years of Islamic history included basically secular governments, most people connected with them being practising Muslims. Some were even fanatical in their beliefs. But, on the whole, whether in India or in various Muslim countries, from Spain to Indonesia, Muslim rulers were remarkably tolerant, intellectually easy-going and had settled down to promote an actually tolerant and more or less plural society. What the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan — and they have had contacts — produced was an Islamic adaptation of the communist ideology. Maulana Maudoodi indeed adopted some of the communist characteristics in organising his own party. But the great idea was to have an Islamic ideology which could be enforced as a totalitarian ideal. It was a superficially noble venture but an extremely dangerous political concept. At any rate, totalitarian attitudes and ideas are now common features of all Islamic movements everywhere. Much of the credit for this must go to the largest group of Islamic zealots in Pakistan. Leaders of the Pakistan movement were the followers of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who was widely condemned as a “nachauri”, farthest from being an orthodox. They were not too keen on independence from the British until the last when they insisted on Pakistan. They were West-oriented and if they could be accused of any ideology, it could only be pro-West modernism and simple democracy. Islamic faith was a political slogan for them. The new ideology was initially an anathema to other religious parties (other than the Jamaat) in Pakistan. But it caught the imagination of some and quickly became popular in the officer corps of the Pakistan Army and parts of the media. Seeds sown in the 1940s and 1950s are now powerful trees. Pakistan is virtually the headquarters of the international Islamic revolution. American and Saudi funds have played a key part, first in popularising Maudoodi’s writings and later organising a jihad against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That occasioned an expenditure of the order of $ 40 billion or thereabout. The trees are now heavily laden with fruit. Things might have gone smoothly in Pakistan but for frequent takeovers by the Army and bogus democracies being floated — until 9/11 came. General Musharraf had to make a 180-degree policy turn and started fighting the Taliban. The Islamic ideology-wallahs were shocked and angered. There has been confusion since then in almost all institutions that had long been attuned to promoting this ideology. After General Musharraf’s successive U-turns on Afghanistan and Kashmir policies — in order to avoid war with India and please Americans — his relations with the ideology-wallahs are said to have been damaged. But facts do not bear it out. Most observers of the Pakistani scene are certain that the election results in October 2002 were doctored; anti-Musharraf candidates suffered a strange loss of votes. Thus, the march of the two otherwise modern and West-oriented parties — the PPP and the PML (Nawaz) — was curtailed, though they polled the largest number of votes without winning many seats. The emergence of the religious parties’ alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), as the third largest force is attributed to the Army’s ubiquitous secret agencies. It has enabled General Musharraf to make all the strategic gains he wanted: passage of constitutional amendments and a resolution by the National Assembly confirming his presidentship as legal. The MMA was otherwise helped by General Musharraf to contest the elections by declaring its own seminaries’ certificates as equal to the BA degree, the condition for entering the poll fray. Even if many believe that General Musharraf and the MMA are at daggers drawn, they are not. The Americans do want to undertake military operations in the tribal areas to ferret out fugitives of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and others. They want Pakistan to arrest or kill them. Instead, the MMA is being promoted by General Musharraf as the peacemaker in the tribal areas, sending its image sky high. True, the Americans still insist on what they wanted and that is the difficulty. The regime’s intricate linkages with mullahs are at least 30 years’ old: intact and in good working order. That is why the difficulties arise. With the MMA comes the extra baggage of fanatics some of whom are now becoming suicide bombers. Which linkage will prevail is not
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The runners-up THE slim, grey-haired, bespectacled lady to whom I had been introduced by the youthful president of the university debating society, teaches at a well-known women’s college in Delhi. Her subject, she told me, was English in which, I had gathered from the introduction, she holds a doctorate. I discovered in the course of conversation that she had studied at my old college though 20 years after I had left it. Now, she and I were the two judges at the annual debating competition, the subject for discussion being, ‘It all began with Eve.’ I suppose both Adam and Eve had to be represented on the panel or it wouldn’t have been fair to either. Nine colleges were competing for the trophy, each of the teams consisting of two speakers. To begin with, the pronoun, “it” seemed to be causing some confusion. “Let’s get that straight first,” said my colleague. I agreed but I couldn’t get up and say so. “All our troubles”, said a boy. “Take the population explosion, for example.” “I suppose Adam had nothing to do with it?” parried a girl. “Then it must have been the serpent”, came a voice from the audience. Apart from this interruption the proceedings were surprisingly well-conducted. Exactly two minutes before the allotted ten minutes, the chairman, my young friend the president, would ring a bell. Questions were allowed after the speaker had finished. Not all the questions, though, were polite. One frequently put was, “Were you speaking for the motion or against it?” The usual reply was, “obviously, you can’t understand English.” A girl speaker, somewhat lacking in centimetres, couldn’t be seen or heard on the dais till the chairman obligingly got up and adjusted the “mike” on the lectern behind which she had disappeared. The debate warmed up. Phrases like male chauvinism, female drudgery, biological necessity, outmoded concepts were flung across the stage without any batting of eyelids, except mine and the lady professor’s. Came the judging. We agreed that the team from our old college hadn’t quite come up to the mark. So we awarded the challenge cup to its old rival, the one that was, and still is, referred to as “that place across the road.” There was unanimity, also, about the individual awards. A Sikh lad was undoubtedly the best in style as well as substance. Two girls were close seconds. I favoured the one with her hair curling up on her shoulders. She had bright, sparkling eyes and she spoke with a delightful lisp. My colleague turned round and looked at me rather severely. “This isn’t a beauty competition we are judging,” she said. So the girl with the lisp had to be satisfied with the third
prize.
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News analysis
THE Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee’s strategy of projecting a judicious mix of youth and experience while selecting its candidates for the seven parliamentary seats in the National Capital Territory of Delhi has obviously paid off. It has managed to wrest six of the seven seats from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Capital, once considered to be the saffron stronghold. The only sitting MP who has managed to retain his seat is Mr Vijay Kumar Malhotra from South Delhi trouncing Mr R.K. Anand of the Congress, a noted and experienced lawyer but new in politics. The attempt of the Delhi BJP to garner Sikh votes in the NCT of Delhi by reviving the 1984 anti-Sikh riots issue also failed as both Mr Jagdish Tytler from Sadar and Mr Sajjan Kumar from Outer Delhi, accused of participating in these riots, have won with convincing majority, defeating their respective BJP rivals, Mr Vijay Goel and Mr Sahib Singh Verma, both ministers in Vajpayee’s Cabinet. Initially, there was apprehension within the DPCC when both of them were given the ticket that this could antagonise the sizeable Sikh electorate in the city, but obviously the strategists had factored all this in while taking the final decision and the results have proved them right. This was the experience at work, say analysts. At the same time, the involvement of youth in large numbers , both for campaigning and in decision-making during the poll, has stood the DPCC in good stead. How else would one explain the victory of first-timers like Mr Ajay Maken over his rival, the veteran Mr Jagmohan, in the prestigious New Delhi constituency? According to Congress leaders, it was the youth power at its indefatigable best, both in the New Delhi and East Delhi constituencies. In East Delhi, it was again the young first-timer, Sandeep Dikshit, son of the Delhi Chief Minister, who trounced the three time BJP MP, Lal Bahadur Tiwari. The voters were also not taken in by star power. The BJP’s Chandni Chowk candidate, Smriti Irani (Tulsi) of the TV soap “Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” fame, managed to draw large crowds but lost to the suave lawyer and Congress candidate, Kapil Sibal. Of course the en bloc votes of the minority community to the Congress from this constituency, courtesy the Janata Dal (U)’s Shoaib Iqbal, proved to be decisive. Iqbal withdrew from the contest in favour of the Congress and even formed a secular front to campaign for the party in other areas as well. In Karol Bagh, it was the same story. Congress candidate Krishna Tirath defeated the BJP’s Anita Arya by a convincing margin. The success, coming close on the heels of the recent Congress victory in the NCT of Delhi’s assembly elections, where it managed a majority despite the so-called anti-incumbency factor, has further strengthened the hands of the Chief Minister, Mrs Sheila Dikshit, who was at the forefront of the party’s campaign during the run-up to the elections. What is also galling the opposition camp and its analysts is the fact that there were no star campaigners like Rahul and Priyanka for the Congress in the Capital. The onus of wooing the electorate was left to the DPCC cadre and their skill has paid off. The party President, Mrs Sonia Gandhi, herself stayed away from the Capital because of her preoccupation in other states and addressed only one rally at the Ram Lila grounds here on the last day of the campaigning. In contrast, the BJP had most of its leaders and some stars campaigning for it in the Capital. But the voter apparently was not impressed by the India Shining slogan. Nor was he impressed by the constant running down of the Congress-led state government over the perennial problems of water and electricity and the recent Unit Area Method of assessing property tax. The entire campaign was reduced to the local level, which suited the Congress very well. It countered the BJP by proclaiming its achievements in making the city a better place to live in, a long-cherished dream of every Delhiite. The Congress was also quick to come to the rescue of lakhs of jhuggi-dwellers, who were being relocated following the orders of the apex court. It was at the intervention of the DPCC that the Election Commission ordered that adequate arrangements be made for transporting these dwellers from their new abodes to the polling booths in their respective old areas as there was no time to revise the electoral rolls. This, apparently turned out to be the proverbial blessing in disguise for the DPCC, which has traditionally espoused the cause of the deprived and the downtrodden. Hordes of the relocated jhuggi-dwellers braved the heat to cast their votes, which some consider was the manifestation of their anger at being uprooted. They saw the BJP-led central government, which had spearheaded the move for removing jhuggi clusters, land being a central subject under Delhi’s limited statehood status, as anti-poor. The Congress workers exploited this to the hilt and reminded them how it was their party which had come to their aid when they were being displaced. They even cited the instances when the Chief Minister herself participated in dharnas to protest against their removal till adequate alternate arrangements were made. This ensured that the vote-bank remained intact, all this to the chagrin of the BJP, which had no answers except maintaining that they wanted to make the Capital an ideal place to live in as well and the relocation would be to their benefit. This argument obviously had few takers. |
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Delhi Durbar AFTER more than a decade, the group of original reformists will be back at the helm. Led by Dr Manmohan Singh, the Congress-led government at the Centre is most likely to have in its Council of
Ministers people such as P Chidambaram with Harvard-educated economist Jairam Ramesh also being an outside contender for a key economic ministry. The industry, on its part, is not too perturbed about the change of guard in Delhi. As one leading industrialist quipped: “The bunch of original reformists are back”. In the new government there are going to be at least three former Finance Ministers. While Dr Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram have been finance ministers in the reforms era, Pranab Mukherjee’s stint at North Block was much earlier. Interestingly enough Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh’s name had also come up as potential Prime Ministerial candidates at some point or the other.
Honeymoon continues For the women Chief Ministers — Delhi’s Shiela Dikshit, Uma Bharti of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan’s Vasundhara Raje — the honeymoon with the electorate is continuing. All of them have increased the tally for the Congress and the BJP in their respective states. Once again, Shiela Dikshit broke the back of the BJP in the national Capital by winning six of the seven seats in the national capital. Shiela Dikshit’s charisma of carefully mixing youth with experience in Delhi has paid rich dividends. The only person to fall by the wayside was well known lawyer R K Anand who was pitted against BJP’s V K Malhotra in the South Delhi Lok Sabha constituency.
Bureaucrats worried The bureaucracy, which like the ruling alliance failed to gauge the mood of the country’s vast and disparate electorate, was on Thursday nervous at the inevitable policy and personnel changes that follow the installation of a new government. “You know the new broom sweeps cleaner,” said an official about the possibility of sweeping changes in the bureaucracy that a new government may bring about. Said another bureaucrat: “There will definitely be a musical chair show as new favourites take over and old timers are shunted out.” Little work was done in the government and private companies’ offices as employees gathered around television sets to update themselves with the results of a momentous election.
When Naidu prevailed It was at the behest of the logged out Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrabau Naidu that Mr Vajpayee had called for a general election six months in advance. The cyber czar had his own scheme of things, like his desire to encash on the sympathy of an assassination bid on him. The NDA or the BJP did not stand to gain anything from Naidu’s compulsions of early polls. But Naidu managed to prevail upon Vajpayee and BJP strategists. And the rest, as they say, is history. Contributed by Gaurav Choudhury, Rajeev Sharma and R. Suryamurthy |
Happiness consists in the attainment of our desires, and in our having only right desires. — Augustine I will pray for that concord among people at home by which Devas do not separate nor ever hate each other. — The Vedas God is near; do not think He is far away. He ever cares for us and remembers us too. — Guru Nanak Knowledge of the self leads to instantaneous realisation here and now. The established proposition of all Upanishads is that final release results from knowledge. — Sri Adi Sankaracharya |
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