THE most abiding feature of Pakistan’s federal financial structure is its unitary and highly centralized form. The way this financial system has been crafted, the provinces do not figure in it as generators of revenue but as spenders of scarce resources assiduously collected by Islamabad that it, rather generously, shares with the rest of the 139 million inhabitants of this unfortunate country.

A common complaint of the provincial governments has been about the attitude of the federal government towards their financial plight, the frequent modifications of the rules of the game by the centre, tortuous revisions of legal and related definitions to suit the federal government’s version of what constitutes constitutional role, mandates, distribution and scope of taxation domain and powers between different levels of government. These complaints are compounded by their historical experience of the federal government transferring (by withholding information or by misrepresenting facts or simply by arm twisting) expenditure obligations that it had earlier taken upon itself. At times, riding roughshod over the provinces, the federal government has employed tactics that have contravened agreements reached, the latest in this series being its failure to honour its earlier commitment that for abolishing the octroi and zilla tax at its insistence the local governments would be compensated through an increase of 2.5% in the GST, the additional revenues from which were programmed to flow to these governments.

Another example that illustrates this issue is the treatment meted out to the provinces by the federal government on the implementation of the GST on services. Under the Constitution revenues from this source should accrue entirely to the provincial governments and not shared with the federal government. However, activities that under any internationally and rationally accepted definition of the term “services” were, through the use of convoluted, if not bizarre explanations, twisted and stretched beyond the realm of possible meanings to suit Islamabad’s objective, to forcibly appropriate for itself a 65.5% share (62.5% share under the divisible pool arrangement plus an additional 3% as collection charges). In federations run in a fairer and more equitable manner it would be difficult to imagine that activities such as provision of electricity, telecommunications and air travel would be classified as anything other than services. However, such is not the case, when it comes to Islamabad.

It is interesting that such modus operandi were not just employed by the federal government when there were different political parties in power in Islamabad and in the provincial capitals they were also used when the same political party ruled the roost at both levels of government. However, by trying to be clever the federal government may have, through accounting manipulation and window dressing, got its own house in order, albeit temporarily. It only succeeded in handing down the problem to a lower formation.

Its accomplice, if not its key adviser on different instruments to be wielded and mechanisms to be adopted in the operationalization of such a structure, the related fiscal sharing arrangements and its manipulation to favour Islamabad so that fiscal deficit targets can be met, is the IMF. As far as the Fund is concerned the books of the federal government should balance, the provinces be damned.

In this scheme of things the provinces are a bit of nuisance, unnecessary appendages more than 80% of whose needs are met from the federal largesse. They cannot be trusted with additional resources because they are likely to spend them, being more profligate than Islamabad! It is another matter that all lucrative taxes under the installed fiscal structure fall exclusively within the domain of the federal government. Even sales tax, which, in practically all other federations, is the principal source of revenue for the provincial governments, is, thanks to the IMF, a purely federal levy. Although the dice is loaded against them and their hands and feet are tied, the provinces are lectured, ad nauseum, for not doing enough to mobilize resources. And, since they are not raising more revenues to meet their expenditure obligations, they should be kept on a tight leash and starved of funds so that they start realizing that they have to fend for themselves. Such are the outcomes of dispensations of the Pakistani variety.

Allow me to illustrate my point with three very recent rather simple examples:

a) Almost nothing from the $ 600 million (Rs. 36 billion) provided by the US government as a grant for this financial year, ostensibly for education, has been shared with the provincial governments, although education is a provincial subject and all related activities are carried out in the provinces. This move had the express blessings of the Fund.

b) The IMF has proposed that the federal government should meet the fiscal deficit targets by enhancing the petroleum surcharge, because revenues raised from this levy do not form part of the divisible pool of the resources that are shared with the provinces.

c) Instead of levying a 15% GST on services rendered by lawyers, accountants, engineers, transporters, etc., 98% of the collections from which would flow to the provinces (GST on services being a provincial subject under the Constitution) a massive 15% GST was imposed on medicines, 67.5% of the collections from which would be retained by Islamabad.

In any case, who could have instituted such a tax on health? Taking the proposed levy to its logical conclusion the higher the proportion of the population becoming ill the better off the government (and, of course, the IMF would be happier still) since tax revenues would go up. Only the comedians from the Fund could have dreamt up such a measure whereby the government would profit if the ill-health and attendant misery of the people were to grow, and preferably at an accelerated pace.

An ‘obvious’ implication of such a strategy would be that if any year revenues from GST on medicines decline this unacceptable situation to the Fund would have to be corrected by the government ensuring that more people fall sick and more frequently. Better still the unhealthy should not recover fully and consume even larger quantities of medicines (with doctors of government hospitals under strict orders to prescribe the more expensive medicines). However, they should not die, since their doing so would be disastrous for the fiscal deficit and hence objectionable to the Fund!

BY and large, we write English like a dead language. Every piece of writing reads like every other piece of writing. Phrases and idioms long dead and buried are used with predictable regularity. It is automatic writing, lacking in freshness, verve and a sense of life. What we write gives no delight and springs no surprises.

For instance, if someone is doing his best, he will be doing not just his best but his ‘level best’. If someone is saying something of which he is utterly certain, he has to precede it with ‘without fear of contradiction.’ It is as if the entire world was waiting to contradict this person, the moment certain words left his mouth. A crime is not a crime unless it is ‘dastardly’ or ‘heinous’ and, preferably both. Commitment by itself is not enough. It has to be ‘selfless’ as well.

Simple duty won’t do, unless it was turned into ‘bounden duty’, nor can a tribute be paid without it being ‘warm’. And, yes, it always has to be paid in the plural, not singular, which would be the correct form. An honour has to be ‘coveted’ and a privilege must be qualified by ‘great.’ Designs always have to be ‘nefarious’ and no matter what time of the year it is, one of the ugliest-sounding words in the English language — ‘eschew’ — is in season. A simpler word, easy on the tongue and understood by everyone, won’t be used.

During the 1965 war, Hamid Jalal said, “If Shastri’s mother were to die suddenly, the story would be reported in the English language press in these words: ‘The hand that rocked the cradle of the man who launched naked aggression against the sacred soil of Pakistan, kicked the bucket last night.’

It is not that we think in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashtu or Sindhi and then say or write it in English. Were that true, our English would have both bite and colour, freshness and music, vigour and joy. It would have the tang of our earth and the smell of our air. But what do we have? Cliches and metaphors that lumber thorough our prose like the living dead. We use idioms and proverbs that were archaic when the steam engine was invented.

Just pick up a newspaper and read it at random. So and so is calling for such and such to be done on a “war footing.” So and so is “exhorting” (another ugly word we can’t seem to banish from our lives) the nation to “eschew” this and that. So and so has issued a “dire warning” (always dire like consequences, not jut warning or consequences) to such and such. Miscreants are asked to “cease and desist”, a phrase that belongs to the Pakistan Criminal Procedure Code not normal speech or writing. By the way, ‘miscreants’ began to be used during the 1971 civil war in East Pakistan and has been with us since and is employed about anyone who has to be bumped off or put away. We are also always ‘hearkening back’ to the nation’s ‘glorious past’ (past has to be glorious, not just past).

Service always has to be yeoman’s service, although yeomen disappeared a couple of hundred years before the British departed these shores. They only now exist in the Tower of London or in the Royal Navy, assigned in the latter to perform visual signalling. And, of course, they are alive and well from Landi Kotal to Karachi. We revel in nouns and adjectives. Consider these evergreen national Pakistani favourites: utmost importance, strict adherence, crucial need, exemplary courage, gallant struggle, diabolical designs/machinations (the latter word another monstrosity we love), Spartan spirit, dedicated service, inspiring example, tireless efforts and so on and so forth, day after tiresome day. It never occurs to us that the adjective can be dropped quite easily without any serious damage to, or diminution in, the meaning. The same goes for adverbs.

Where else but in Pakistan — and India, of course — will you find such horrors on the printed page and in ordinary conversation as these: Achilles’ heel (only to be found, apart from the subcontinent, in the pages of Homer’s ‘Iliad’), Herculean strength (poor Hercules has been dead a couple of thousand years, assuming he ever lived, but he is unforgotten in the subcontinent), pioneering role (an essentially military term, a pioneer being the member of an infantry group serving to prepare a road for the main body of troops), onerous responsibility (never just simple responsibility), espousing a cause (not supporting or favouring but espousing; one would think that the person so doing was running away form his or her spouse), beacon light (fine if you are standing on top of a hill and signalling to a ship or a spy aircraft, but not otherwise), guiding spirit/light, flying colours (all right if you are marching or sailing), befitting manner, zealous attempt (no attempt in the subcontinent is without zeal which may be why so little gets done), pillar of strength (makes one think of Samson of Delilah fame), foreseeable future (though very little of future can be foreseen anyway) etc.

Friend Ahsan Khwaja had a most colourful uncle who served the better part of his life as a railway guard during the Raj. Once a memasahib gave him a cake for safekeeping in the brake, to be collected when she left the train. Old Khwaja, a big man who always went around in khakis and a solar hat narrated this story in the following words. “My mouth watered and taking my courage in both hands and girding up my loins, I took the lion’s share out of that cake.” Once when he was sick, he told the doctor who had come to take a look at him, “Doctor, mend me or end me.”

Nobody has given better advice on cliches than George Orwell. He wrote that the moment you suspect a word, phrase or expression to be a cliche, it is. Drop it like a hot potato (which, I concede, is also a cliche because you can drop a word without turning it into a potato which should be on your plate, not your hand). What is it about idioms and proverbs that we can’t get rid of in favour of simple, day-to-day expressions? perhaps there should be a law forbidding the use of the following: carrying coal to Newcastle, setting the Thames on fire, a Daniel come to justice, by hook or by crook, fishing in troubled waters (which makes no sense because if the waters are troubled, no fish in its right mind would bite), between the devil and the deep (blue) sea, adding insult to injury, qualities of head and heart, brains and brawn, plucking up courage, in the thick of battle etc.

Also externed from Pakistan’s sovereign territories should be the following living insults to the English language: in respect of, insofar as, notwithstanding the fact that, as a matter of fact, the fact of the matter, as far as this is concerned, in the case of, without the shadow of a doubt and that all-time Pakistani favourite: proud privilege.

I am aware of the political fallout of my proposals. Ministers of the government, leaders of political parties, both living and defunct, editorial writers, reporters on the run, supercat bureaucrats, members of the higher judiciary given to slicing ribbons to mark the opening of gasoline outlets and the like, will no longer have a leg to stand on, which I confess is as good a cliche as any.

Obviously, the thing is more infectious than the flu.

THE recent powerful car bomb explosion near the US embassy in Lima, killing nine and wounding 30, was a disturbing prelude to the visit to Peru of President George Bush, who has vowed to ‘fight ‘terrorism around the world.’

Bush declared he wouldn’t be put off by ‘two-bit terrorists.’ But the suspected bombers, the notorious Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, are anything but ‘two-bit’ terrorists. The Sendero has battled fiercely for three decades to impose a Marxist dictatorship on Peru patterned on Enver Hoxah’s Stalinist Albania and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

In 1985, I was the first North American journalist to interview Peru’s then newly elected president, Alan Garcia. I asked Garcia how his government was coping with the Sendero Luminoso, whose guerillas were terrorizing the Andes, waging urban guerilla warfare, and had almost brought the government to its knees. ‘I can assure you,’ Garcia said, ‘the security situation is completely under control.’ Moments later, two mortar shells exploded outside the presidential palace. Garcia shrugged and gave a sheepish smile.

Peru’s last president, the tough authoritarian Alberto Fujimori, now in exile in Japan plotting a return, had nearly crushed the Sendero and another dangerous Marxist guerilla group, the pro-Cuban Tupac Amaru. But after Fujimori was replaced by the softer, more leftward leaning President Alejandro Toledo, Sendero regrouped and appears to be renewing its war against the US-backed Lima government.

This time, the Sendero is being fuelled by a steady inflow of drug money. Following the example of Colombia’s Marxist FARC and ELN narco-guerilla armies, the Sendero earns tens of millions annually protecting Peru’s expanding cocaine industry. The Bush Administration’s efforts to combat the drug trade in Colombia through spraying toxic pesticides and attacking processing labs has merely pushed the underground drug industry across the jungled borders into Ecuador and Peru.

The much vaunted US war on drugs has proven a total failure in Latin America. The flow of cocaine and heroin into the US has not been reduced, in spite of billions spent to block the flood of narcotics.

Ironically, the only nation where the US war on drugs did work was in Afghanistan — thanks to its former Taliban regime. According to the UN drug control agency, the Taliban virtually halted the cultivation and the trade of heroin-producing opium poppies.

Afghanistan supplied 80% of Europe’s heroin and about 60% of America’s heroin. The American invasion and the overthrow of Taliban handed power to the Russian-backed Northern Alliance, which fully revived the Afghan heroin trade and now controls 90% of drug exports.

In Afghanistan, Bush’s so-called war against terrorism collided head on with his war against drugs.

The latter lost. The Northern Alliance, the real power behind the US-installed Karzai regime in Kabul, pays its fighters and buys its arms from the Russians with heroin money. The US simply turned a blind eye to large-scale drug dealing by its new Afghan allies, just as it did in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central America, and, for years, with Mexico.

The White House is now under increasing pressure to increase the $1 billion in US aid to Colombia and switch from assisting a campaign against coca producers to all-out combat operations against FARC and ELN guerillas. The Colombian government’s inept 136,000-man army has been unable to defeat the FARC’s and ELF’s roughly 20,000 Marxist guerillas, so the US is now being asked by Bogota for combat troops and fleets of helicopters. An expanded war in Colombia would quickly spill over into Ecuador, Peru, and, possibly into Panama and Venezuela, all economically stressed and politically shaky nations.

Growing instability and violence in northern Latin America will challenge the Bush Administration’s plans to launch a large crusade against Iraq, and smaller ones against the diverse Muslim groups opposed to American influence, or those fighting for independence from oppressive rule — all simplistically lumped together by Bush as ‘terrorists.’ Just last week in Afghanistan, the US lost eight soldiers and dropped 3,300 expensive precision bombs against willow-the-wisp opponents in a failed battle in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that the Pentagon claimed was a big victory .

America’s arsenals are depleted; its military forces stretched thin — and the crusade against the nefarious ‘axis of evil’ hasn’t even been launched yet.

The 19th-century American cynic Ambrose Bierce observed that Americans learn their geography from wars. Six months before becoming president, George Bush couldn’t name the leader of Pakistan — whom he today hails as a champion of democracy and America’s new best friend.

In Peru, the non-geographic president will begin to discover the complexities of long-neglected Latin America. He will no doubt discover the continent is rich in new ‘terrorists,’ as the Lima bombing amply demonstrated. Terrorists in Peru and Colombia. Plotting Cubans. Islamic fanatics in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, West Bank and Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Central Asia, Chechnya, Georgia, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt, Paraguay. America’s enemies are everywhere. Even in Detroit and Brooklyn.

Bush says he will defend America by fighting them all. But, as Frederick the Great rightly noted, ‘he who defends everything, defends nothing.’—Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2002

THE National Reconstruction Bureau (NRB) in its proposals made public to restructure the political system of the country has not addressed the crucial issue of how the election campaigns by political parties and candidates are to be financed.

That there should be state funding of elections may appear bizarre in this part of the world but it does exist in some developed countries. However to put this provision in place is like walking on a thin line between strengthening and corrupting the electoral system.

Leaving this important aspect of the new political roadmap in the melting pot will benefit the rich classes of the country mostly scions of the feudals.

Without this provision all other electoral reforms may only symbolically impact the political facade of the country.

Our electoral laws and economic divide hardly provide a level playing field to all candidates. According to an estimate a number of candidates end up spending something between Rs.1.5 and Rs.3 million on provincial and national assembly elections. Besides circumventing election laws on campaign expenses, excess amounts spent on elections also put a heavy financial burden on the candidates forcing some of them to take to illegal practices afterwards to meet the election expenditure. This aspect is crying for reform for a long time now.

The proposed condition of college degree for candidates may keep some of the old politicians out of the ring but it holds little promise for the prospective graduate aspirants for political career hailing from the middle and lower middle segments of society. Elections being an expensive option continue to be beyond the means of the middle class.

Because of their wealth and influence, the feudal families have maintained largely their overwhelming presence in the assemblies in the past and sans substantive reforms appear poised to retain the position in future also.

While the country has still to get ready for the final round of political reforms a profile study of district nazims distilled through the devolution system might prove the point. Their majority is reported to belong to the feudal class. If political wisdom is any guide these nazims once firmly saddled in seats of power will try to buttress their flanks by sharing political spoils with members of their own class.

In this context an interview with the then governor of Balochistan in the wake of the abolition of the Sardari system in that province by the late Z.A. Bhutto may be recalled. The governor said ninety per cent of the sardari system stood dismantled at that moment of time and the remaining ten per cent was on its last legs.

Talking informally after the interview the governor revealed the hollowness of this measure when he said, “This system will stay put and the same sardars will succeed in the next elections”. By the same token without the provision of an appropriate recipe the feudal class will continue to be the main component of power structure.

However the situation is not beyond redemption. It is possible to inject some balancing elements in the political system by improving the electoral laws and providing some kind of funding to political campaigns of the candidates. This is possible in part by providing public funds to political parties or through a uniform treatment of all candidates. It may sound more reasonable to provide funds to political parties as in the present day world democracy and political parties go together.

Public financing to political parties is made available in Spain. The law of political parties (1978) in Spain provided them with public funding on the basis of seats they held in the parliament and the number of votes they received. In India although there is no provision for state funding to electoral campaigns, a person attracts disqualification from being a member of the parliament if he fails to submit account of election expenses in the prescribed manner in a given timeframe after elections.

Britain devised its own method of restricting election expenses by limiting the duration of the election campaigns. It provides the shortest period as run up to the elections that helps rein in the election expenses. Only three weeks notice need be given of an election and generally this is followed.

The expenses of parliamentary candidates are strictly limited. These provisions and uncertainty about the time of an election produce inexpensive campaigns of unusual short durations.

Pakistan could bring in fresh blood in the assemblies by providing funds for election campaigns and improving electoral laws and practices. The government may set apart some funds to be put at the disposal of the election commission for distribution to political parties on the basis of their seats in the legislatures and the ratio of votes polled by them. A two-way free transport for female voters on the Election Day may also be arranged.

Like Britain, election campaign in the country may be limited to about three weeks. Candidates may be restrained from organizing election and victory processions.

Instead they may hold corner meetings and make door-to-door contacts for canvassing. Display of huge banners and multi-coloured posters should be disallowed.

Our political parties charge money from the prospective candidates at the time of granting party tickets to contest elections to assemblies. Such fee being non-refundable in most instances ends up in hiking the reserves of the parties. Political parties should be persuaded to finance campaigns by its not too rich candidates from its own funds.

Election Commission also collects sizable funds in the shape of security deposits made by the candidates at the time of filing of their nomination papers. At present security deposits of candidates getting votes less than a certain ratio of the total polled votes are forfeited.

The election commission need make all security deposits non- refundable and set apart this amount for distribution among political parties according to the number of seats and the percentage of votes secured by them. Independent candidates getting a certain fixed percentage of votes may also qualify for some share of these funds from the Election Commission.

THE prime minister is ashamed, but not ashamed enough to remove a man who shamed him, shamed Gujarat, and shamed India. Would the prime minister like the illusory comfort of precedence? I am not going to discuss communal riots, wretched and inhuman as they are. I am going to discuss previous Gujarats, seared on the memory like imperishable scars that need but a scratch to bleed again.

The skies of Assam were heavy and rain sent a trickle of chill through the windcheater. We had to walk for slightly less than an hour through paddy fields that had become rectangular pools, treading warily on the raised mud boundaries that marked a farmer’s possession, accompanied by our reflections, floating, horizontal on the water alongside.

Nellie was silent when we arrived, and it was a dreadful silence. The image of babies speared by sharp bamboos will not leave me; India Today had the courage to show those innocent deaths on its startling cover. Nothing happened to the Congress chief minister of Assam in 1983. The Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was more worried that the coverage of Nellie would damage her image at the non-aligned summit that was taking place around that time in Delhi: what would her good friend Yasser Arafat, a special invitee in those days when he was a refugee abroad instead of a refugee at home, say? What would all the Muslim countries say?

In the event no one said anything, but there was sufficient concern in Delhi for a plea to be sent out that we self-censor the stories “in the national interest”. Television was a boring state monopoly then, and the daily newspapers were terribly discreet about such horror, so the newsmagazines were the only serious source of bother for the government. Both India Today and Sunday felt that the national interest was better served by telling the nation the truth about itself. Naturally, no Congress leader in Assam or Delhi could be made accountable for Nellie, for that would be admission of guilt. Lese majeste was more important than human life.

I forget the precise year, but Vir Bahadur Singh was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when a familiar pall fell over Meerut. I just drove through the curfew lines in a white Ambassador; the police assumed that I must be some official, for who would be so foolish as to enter a zone of fear for any reason other than work? The same gall took us into the frozen mohallas of the empty city, and amidst the blur one face and one sentence stands out: a mother, with trembling eyes, telling me that “they” had taken away her son. There was something in her eyes, in her voice, that convinced me that this was not just another arrest. The truth lay on the banks of a canal outside the city where a handful of detainees was shot dead by the police in cold blood. Someone in the home ministry in Delhi had muttered that Muslims had become terrorists, and that they should be taught the same lesson that Sikh terrorists were being taught in Punjab. Lucknow was obedient.

The Telegraph broke the story. Nothing happened. Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister. Suddenly the argument was no longer about good governance, about the accountability of the chief minister, about a government’s responsibility towards the Constitution of India, about morality, about values, about brutality. The argument changed to the impact on the “Thakur vote” if Vir Bahadur Singh was shifted. To the effect that the presence or absence of Singh would have on a general election whose contours were already becoming visible to a government under fire from Bofors artillery. Nothing happened. Vir Bahadur Singh was eventually removed by Rajiv Gandhi but not because a mother’s eyes had trembled for her son.

Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure started when the price of Indira Gandhi’s terrible assassination was paid by the horrific massacre of Sikhs. That was the first time I saw, and reported, a man being thrown to his death by fire: a Sikh, being burnt outside Gurdwara Rakabganj. P.V. Narasimha Rao was home minister of India then. Nothing could possibly happen to him, because his only contribution to the play of events was studied indifference. The puppeteers were elsewhere and in no mood to blame themselves. After his election Rajiv Gandhi sought and won over a young constituency by promising a different dream. That promise would have been cleaner without H.K.L. Bhagat and Buta Singh lurking around behind him, but the power of the moment carried many tides along. The dream was killed not just by Bofors; it was also torched by the fires of communalism that Rajiv Gandhi, consistently a victim of manipulative advice on this problem, lit, advertently or inadvertently.

Buta Singh was home minister through the passions of Ayodhya, as city after city screamed with pain. Nothing happened to Buta Singh. The worst nightmare was Bhagalpur in 1989, when ghastly massacres took place just before the fateful general elections. Rajiv Gandhi, Buta Singh and Bihar’s chief minister Satyendra Singh went to Bhagalpur. Rajiv Gandhi was so incensed that he ordered the immediate transfer of the police officer in charge. But on the plane back to Delhi, the arguments began: the police officer was a thakur, and what would happen to the thakur vote in the elections... The police officer was reinstated.

This time however something did happen. The voters happened to Rajiv Gandhi in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Nearly fifteen years later those voters still have not gone back to the Congress. Nothing happened again when Narasimha Rao slept through havoc. Nothing ever happens when the political class washes its hands in blood. The only hope is that one day the people will happen to them.

Politicians have become too cynical to see even an obvious truth. The Indian vote bank has a clear law. To play with violence is to buy short and lend long. The politics of death is the short route to bankruptcy. There are no votes in death. Those who are protecting Narendra Modi for the single reason that he will be rewarded with a Hindu sweep in the next Assembly elections have learnt nothing from their own experience even, albeit in a less corrosive way, in Uttar Pradesh.

The monstrous madness that Narendra Modi let loose might have got some immediate response, because anger can blind anyone briefly; but hatred is too debilitating to last. Support for the temple did widen the BJP base; dalliance and compromise with the hysterical leaders of the VHP has now narrowed it. The crimes of Narendra Modi have already cost the BJP its credibility; they could now send it back to isolation. The prime minister is not ashamed today because of the misrule of a Congress government; he is ashamed of the behaviour of his own party chief minister, a man he selected himself. VHP leaders have responded by saying that they are ashamed of the prime minister. The distance is perhaps too great now to be bridged.

This trauma has turned an old belief of mine into a conviction: the one party that understands India’s Hindus the least is the BJP. India is not secular because India’s Muslims want it to be secular. Muslims at best are 15 per cent of the population; 15 per cent cannot determine the culture of 80 per cent. India is secular because the overwhelming majority of Hindus want it to be secular. Historically the BJP has been fighting a battle with this truth in order to change it. But in the last four years, its experience of power had begun to alter its perspective, a shift that was carefully calibrated by the prime minister himself. After four years, the hardliners who kept the party in isolation ward have reasserted themselves and have begun to use the state machinery to divide and redivide Indians.

The cynicism of the political class has made their task easier. After all, who cares? The Congress is stained with its own sins, and the response of its leader to a crisis of this magnitude is from a prepared text rather than from the heart. It has offered some token relief in the camps and shown no ability to understand the nature of the crisis or offered any way forward. Both the BJP and the Congress are playing the politics of vote banks quite unaware that the banks they are searching for may be bankrupt.

The best job that Sonia Gandhi can find for the Muslim leader she promoted to pre-eminence at this hour of national despair is to play an especially cruel joke on him. What could be more sadistic than sending a Kashmiri Congressman to Kashmir? One gathers that Mr Azad has been told that Sonia Gandhi wants to see him as chief minister of the state after the elections. We all know that Kashmir is a paradise. Sonia Gandhi obviously thinks it is a fool’s paradise.

Sonia Gandhi runs the Congress with the soul of a mannequin. But maybe that is what is needed these days. Maybe it is the arid soul of a mannequin that will make her the first Italian Prime Minister of India.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age, New Delhi.