FEDERAL tax revenues have been largely static in Pakistan, both in terms of tax:GDP ratio and overall revenues for a country with a population of 140 millions.

The chairman of the Central Board of Revenue, Riaz Ahmad Malik, told the National Tax conference in Karachi last week the tax:GDP ratio was moving between 12 and 14 per cent of the GDP for long. And if the ratio had come down lately that was because of the reduction of the average import duty from 35 per cent to 25 per cent and the rate of economic growth had been low in the second half of the 1990s. And much of that growth has been in the largely non-tax paying agricultural sector and less tax-paying service sector.

Hence the rise in the overall revenues has not been as large as expected despite the several tax surveys and vigorous other efforts to boost the revenues. And this is a drawback which Pakistan suffers along with India, where the tax: GDP ratio has been between 11 and 12 per cent.

When about 40 per cent of the people are living below the poverty line of a dollar a day, and the number of the employed, including partial employment, is below 30 per cent of the population, the tax revenues are bound to be low, while the public expenditure is very high.

It has taken many years for the tax revenues to break out of the Rs 300 billion and above bracket, and after the over Rs 400 billion bracket was reached last year, it remains to be seen when the budget will break out of the Rs 400 billion bracket. An ambitious Rs 460 billion tax revenue target was set for the current year, and unlike in the past a 15.5 per cent revenue increase has been recorded in the first seven months of this financial year ending January, which is also 0.26 per cent above the target and that is to be welcomed.

In the days of Nawaz Sharif as prime minister with Ishaq Dar as his finance minister he was keen on setting a target of Rs 600 billion as revenue collection. But that remained more of a dream than become a reality. He could not touch even the Rs 400 billion mark as the businessmen were not cooperating with him. He told his fellow textile mill owners at a meeting that the 300 textile mills could pay Rs 200 to Rs 300 billion as taxes, but they paid less tax than a multinational company — ICI as it was then. The mill owners shrugged their shoulders and continued paying as little tax as possible.

The country has also large tax-exempt areas, like the vast Tribal Areas and Azad Kashmir, which the CBR chief now wants to be brought under the tax net. And there are many tax exempt goods and services or incomes. Fiftyfive exemptions are to be withdrawn in June when the new budget is presented after 55 others had been withdrawn or allowed to expire, as scheduled.

There are heavy duty drawbacks on exports and large abuse of the system by the exporters in collusion with the taxation officials. There has been a demand for abolition of import duties and other taxes on items meant for use in the manufacture of items for export to eliminate such abuses; but that has yet to come to pass.

The CBR now says duty drawback on 11 textile items are to be halved and there are also reports of more duty drawbacks on other export items. What we have is a mixed picture in this regard.

The service sector as a whole pays very little of taxes though officially it has a 50 per cent share in the GST. The governor of the State Bank, Dr Ishrat Husain has called for proper taxation of the service sector if the tax revenues are to go up. That can be a tough task as the service sector is not standardised. But quite often the people pay, particularly the sales tax of 15 per cent; but the government does not seem to get it, certainly not the full amount. Such abuses must come to an end.

Dr Ishrat wants a fair, just and efficient system of taxation. He suggests the number of taxes be reduced and the rate of taxation also cut. He wants the peak rate of taxation to be reduced from 35 per cent to 25 per cent, a radical suggestion which no other official has publicly put forward. Above all, he wants real return for taxation in terms of public services and utilities.

Three years ago we were told the number of federal taxes in the country was as high as 102. Mr Shaukat Aziz as finance minister wanted a sharp reduction in that with income tax, sales tax and customs duties as principal federal revenues. Wealth tax has gone also the heavily-abused Octroi’s way which is now returning through the new local body system.

How many taxes do we have now after many of the exemptions are gone? We ought to be told year after year how many federal, provincial and local taxes we have and how heavy is the tax burden on the people and how small is the real return to the government at all three levels?

Some of the heavy taxes are not called taxes at all formally. While the finance ministry officials admit they are taxes. The heavy surcharge on petroleum and natural gas is to get Rs 60 billion this year in revenues inclusive of Rs 45 billion from petroleum. But that is not called a tax and included in the tax revenues!

The CBR chief talks of new measures to boost the tax revenues without specifying what they may be. That will include taxation base on utility bills, trade documents, property transactions, mobile phones and new cars. At the same time prime minister Zafarullah Jamali has initiated moves to give smuggled cars in Balochistan tax exemption. Once that is done in one province other provinces will come up with similar demands.

The CBR is happy it has been able to raise the number of income tax payers on the tax register to 2.2 million from 1.7 million — an increase of 5000,000 — though its tax surveys. But the overall revenue collection has not increased correspondingly as many of the new comers are small tax payers. Nevertheless it is a welcome development.

But the number of persons on the taxation rolls has become less significant as the total income tax revenues this year is to be only Rs 143 billion, while the sales tax revenue is to be Rs 206 billion — a rise of Rs 36 billion from last year. Almost everyone is paying the hefty sales tax of 6 to 15 per cent so Shaukat Aziz calls sales tax the tax of the future. If only the sales tax was not as high as 15 per cent there would have been less evasion and more honesty in this area.

Dr Ishrat wants the number of tax payers to be raised to 3 million from 2.2 million. He says that could be achieved if the number of taxes is reduced and the higher rate of taxes cut. But I think the focus should be less on increasing the number of tax-payers and more on making the big tax payers pay full taxes. The Large Tax Payers Unit set up in Karachi is a right move and that should be replicated in other major industrial centres in the country, beginning with Lahore.

The CBR chief says the tax culture is taking root and slowly getting popular. People will begin paying taxes gladly when they see real returns for that in the form of quality schools, hospitals, roads, water supply etc. They would not pay taxes to see senior officials in plush cars and ministers moving in a fleet of limousines or house in posh homes at public expense. Such returns are long in coming. They are promised, not delivered. When the people do not pay enough of taxes the government borrows the money from within the country or form abroad in the name of aid which is loans that add to the national debt. And that adds to the burden of the people, and more and more of the taxes they pay go to service the loans of not repay them.

The people pay the taxes when they buy the goods or use the services. The businessmen and industrialists often do not pay those taxes in full to the government, and so they get very little in return for the taxes they pay in terms of public services. So the people are the losers at both ends. And the poor becomes poorer.

The government at the top needs a radical new approach to taxation. What matters is not only how much to collect, and from whom to collect but also how well that is used and how does the tax-payer gains for the taxes he pays and more demanded of him. He can’t be paying all that to meet the inexorable demands of a fat bureaucracy of diverse stripes.

THE article by “X” which appeared in the American magazine Foreign Affairs in July, 1947, would become the most famous commentary on foreign policy of modern times.

Entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, it argued that communist Russia was a cautious power whose ideology laid down that capitalism would eventually fail because of its own contradictions. The USSR would therefore try to wait the capitalist world out rather than frontally attack it.

The piece further proposed that the Soviet Union’s own weaknesses were far more serious than any on our side and would in time lead to its demise, and that the West’s best policy was one of judicious containment. Events proved George Kennan to have been about as right as any man can hope to be on such matters, and yet, as the former senator, Patrick Moynihan, has written, “The history of American foreign policy in the second half of the 20th century could be written in terms of how this message was lost.”

We do not yet have, or, if we do, we have not yet identified the “X” article on the real nature of the threat which became manifest on September 11, 2000. But we do have reason to reflect on the cautionary tale that is the story of western policy toward the communist powers. In his book “Secrecy”, Moynihan showed how fantastical notions of Soviet military, political and economic strength grew within an institutional culture which preferred bad news to good. The cult of secrecy nourished this growth, because it inhibited rational discussion by sucking more and more information out of the public realm and by trumping what remained public.

Secret information surely had to be more reliable than the ordinary stuff that was just lying around. And so, as the literally visible evidence piled up that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic were muddled, corrupt, and inefficient societies under severe strains, it was ignored in favour of secret calculations that showed them on the way to outmatching western countries in every sphere.

The result was huge military overspending by the US, which drove it deep into debt, a war that might have been avoided in Vietnam, and a series of covert operations that caused much suffering and eventually almost compromised the constitutional order in America itself. Even when a more realistic perception of Russian weakness came to prevail, an assumption that the Soviet Union was a permanent fixture in history continued in some western circles almost to the end.

With the US now spending on defence at rates comparable to, or higher than, those of the Carter and Reagan years, and with the planned military action in Iraq seen by some as presaging more wars around the world, it is an obvious enough thought that the mistakes of the past may be about to be repeated. The military arguments are by now familiar. The critics say the threat of missile attack from rogue states, which accounts for that large portion of spending devoted to missile defence and that contemplated, apparently, for new nuclear weapons to counter chemical and biological weapons, is already adequately deterred by America’s existing weapons.

The spending on conventional military capability, they say, is still skewed to weaponry required for combat with the vanished Soviet Union or a highly unlikely war with China, and is irrelevant to the kinds of conflict in which the United States is most likely to be involved in the future. Undoubtedly, there is threat inflation here.

But a more important argument is the broader one of whether America under George W Bush is in the process of mistaking the nature of Islamist terrorism, misunderstanding the historical phase through which, at different rates and in different ways, Muslim societies are passing and, for good measure, miscalculating a range of other threats, like that represented by North Korea.

Is there, in this respect, a parallel to the inflation of threat that operated during the cold war years ? The first point must be that, considered in terms of intention alone, this seems unlikely. There may be a scrap or two of evidence that Al Qaeda and its allies and emulators might draw the line at using the worst kind of weapons — there was one report that they had rejected the idea of crashing planes into nuclear reactors — but there is more to suggest that they would use any means they came to possess. The intention, then, is potentially genocidal, unless and until there is proof to the contrary.

But capacity and durability are another matter. It is normal, after all, for the capacity of terrorists, saboteurs, and traitors to be exaggerated. Moynihan recalls in his book the blowing up by German saboteurs of the munitions dump on Black Tom Island in New York harbour in the early morning of July 30 1916. It smashed windows and shook people out of bed throughout the city, and although the loss of life was small, it was the September 11 of that era.

This and other German-inspired incidents led to hysteria among the population and to over-reaction by the authorities on a grand scale. The real facts, which were that the Germans had more or less shot their bolt as far as subversion and sabotage went, were for a long time obscured. Supporters and critics of the policies of the Bush administration seem to agree that Al Qaeda, whether regarded as an organisation or a tendency, is formidable. In the sense that it could deliver a formidable blow by means not available to terrorists in the past, that must be true but in the wider sense of ubiquity, skill, and support from Muslim communities, the case is not proven.

Finally, terrorist movements have life spans. They are born in certain circumstances, they change, and die. Counter-terrorist action, whether military or political, is only one factor in this evolution. The reaction of the communities from which they come to their actions, and their own reactions, sometimes of shame and disillusion, to their victories and defeats play a part as well. Apocalyptic terrorism is, in other words, not necessarily with us forever, although it is true that it is almost certain to do some grave damage before it departs the scene.

Richard Powers, in his introduction to Moynihan’s book, argues that one of the baleful effects of secrecy is that it inclines public opinion toward conspiracy theories. Nothing is accepted as stated, politicians always lie, there is always a hidden agenda. Both the Bush administration, the most secretive in America for years, and the Blair government have taken their share of shots from these lockers, particularly from the European side of the Atlantic.

The combination of secretive government, guarding exaggerated or misconceived ideas of the threats facing the nation from rational discussion, and a public opinion distorted by the notion that all secrets are by definition discreditable to government, was an unhappy one during the cold war. It is even less desirable now.—Dawn/Guardian Service

TEN years ago around this time, two close friends and I were flying to Egypt to seek spiritual tranquillity at the great temple of Karnak when we were hijacked by an angry Ethiopian.

I was turning fifty, my friend 49. To assuage our pain, he, his wife and I decided to go to Upper Egypt and seek inner peace on the banks of Mother Nile at Karnak. In mysterious Egypt, one feels time is not linear, but rather circular, flowing in an eternal cycle of birth and rebirth. So off we flew from Toronto to drink deep from the cup of Egypt’s ancient spirituality.

As our Lufthansa A310 jumbo jet was overflying Austria, heading for Cairo, its captain, Herr Goebel, politely announced, “Ladies and gentleman, a young man is holding a pistol to my head and wants to go to Hanover.” Not having slept a wink on the previous night’s transatlantic crossing, I was dozing and thought the announcement was part of an onboard movie.

But it was not. In Frankfurt, where we had changed aircraft, a 20-something Ethiopian hid a pistol under his hat and managed to evade airport security, which foolishly used metal-detecting wands to search passengers. No one had looked under his hat. After takeoff, the youth grabbed one of the flight attendants and threatened to shoot her unless he was admitted to the locked flight deck. In he went, and commandeered the plane.

We changed course and flew to Hanover, in northern Germany. There we sat for six or seven hours while the hijacker negotiated with German authorities, who were in a tizzy, while various local police forces and state agencies argued over who was in charge. The Germans refused to refuel the A310 until our Ethiopian threatened to begin shooting crew members or passengers — and anyone trying to escape. This posed an interesting dilemma, as we were seated forward next to a window emergency exit and were debating escaping. But the long drop down to the ground could have seriously injured us; had we escaped, we might have been charged with causing the deaths of the crew.

While we were debating, the A310 took off. Capt Goebel announced the hijacker wanted to go to New York. “New York!” we groaned, “what rotten luck. Any normal hijacker would pick Libya, or Syria, or Sudan. Why can’t we at least be hijacked to the Mideast, where we’re going. Why New York? We just came from Toronto!” The hijacker, it turned out, had been refused a visa to the US and was determined to get there by hook or crook.

The slow A310 lumbered over the North Atlantic for interminable hours. Terrified passengers held hands and prayed. Women cried and went hysterical. My friend and I were ready to attack the hijacker and stab him in the throat with my Swiss army knife, but he refused to come out of the flight deck. We sat there helplessly, pondering our fate. I finally went to sleep.

My friend’s wife shook me awake after an hour’s sleep. She had discovered that by plugging her Walkman into the entertainment system she could overhear conversations between the hijacker and New York’s Kennedy Airport. The hijacker was negotiating with the FBI and New York City police. Meanwhile, the CIA, German security agencies, ATF, FAA, NY Port Authority, Mayor’s Office and State Department were all competing into the drama.

Our hijacker demanded safe haven and immunity. When refused, he threatened to crash the jumbo jet into lower Manhattan, a sinister portent of what was to occur eight years later, on Sept 2001.

As we neared New York, I prepared for death, believing the hijacker would crash the aircraft since his alternative was a mandatory 20 years in prison for air piracy. Somehow, the FBI managed to talk him down, though we remained convinced until our wheels hit the runway that the hijacker would kill our pilot and crash the aircraft. On landing, the Ethiopian surrendered; a heavily armed FBI SWAT team stormed the plane and held us all at gunpoint, looking for other hijackers. I was taken away by the FBI, which had been informed I was a ‘terrorism expert,’ and debriefed for many hours.

As I stumbled out of the terminal, exhausted and bleary-eyed, I was mobbed by a small army of reporters and TV crews. The hijacking was a worldwide news event. ABC had me by one arm, CBC, by another, CNN grabbed by lapels. I wrote report for the Sun, broadcast on US TV non-stop for 18 hours, slept a little, took an Egyptair flight to Cairo, wrapped in blankets in the cockpit by the kindly Egyptians, connected to a Luxor flight delayed for me, and somehow managed to get to the dock and board our Nile steamer just as it was sailing. My friends, who left New York earlier, were waiting.

We sailed up the Nile, totally exhausted, nerves shattered, nearly mummified by dehydration, and suffering near lethal jet lag. But we finally managed to stand in the mighty temple of Karnak and wish each other a happy birthday.—Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2003.

“If Hitler invaded Hell, I should make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons,” said Winston Churchill in July, 1941, explaining why he was willing to make an alliance with Stalin now that Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union.

“The interests of Muslims and socialists converge in the fight against the Crusaders,” said Osama bin Laden in a taped speech broadcast on al-Jazeera recently, urging good Muslims to fight the American invaders of Iraq despite the “ignorant governments that rule all Arab states, including Iraq.”

And why shouldn’t the Al Qaeda leader try on Churchill’s mantle? Everybody else is doing it, from British Prime Minister Tony Blair (who regularly quotes Churchill on ‘appeasement’) to President George W. Bush (who has Churchill’s picture on the wall in the Oval Office) to US Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld (who seems to think he is the reincarnation of the Great Man). True, comparing Osama bin Laden to Winston Churchill is not an everyday activity, but in this case the analogy is exact.

Osama bin Laden despises the socialist dictator Saddam Hussein but wants to see American troops mired in Iraq, just as Churchill loathed the Communist dictator Joseph Stalin but longed to see German troops bogged down in the Soviet Union. The objective is to win the wider war, and if your enemy can be diverted into doing something stupid like invading Iraq (or the Soviet Union, in Churchill’s case), that is all to the good. Osama bin Laden has been condemning Saddam Hussein’s godless socialist regime for years, calling Saddam an ‘infidel’ and advocating his overthrow, but if the United States wants to wade into Iraq and kill lots of Muslims, by all means let it do so. That would kill two birds with a single stone.

Saddam Hussein and his sons will be killed and the secular Baathist regime in Iraq destroyed, which certainly serves Al Qaeda’s long-term goal of establishing Islamist government similar to that of the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan in every Arab state. The Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq are the Islamists’ most serious opposition in the Arab world, as they still retain some remnant of their original socialist and Arab nationalist credentials. And meanwhile the United States will be killing lots of innocent Arab Muslims in Iraq — the more the better, from Osama bin Laden’s point of view, since every Arab victim should bring in dozens of new recruits for Al Qaeda and its fellow Islamist movements in the Arab countries. That has been Osama’s strategy from the start. The Islamist movements have been unable to persuade enough Arabs to join them in overthrowing the existing secular Arab governments — the ‘ignorant governments’, as he calls them — despite twenty years of terrorism in the Arab countries, so Al Qaeda was created to enlist the unwitting support of the ‘far enemy’ (the West) in the struggle. If the United States could be tricked into committing mayhem in the Arab world, that might finally drive enough Arabs into the Islamist camp to get their long-stalled revolutions off the ground.

That was what the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 were intended to produce: an indiscriminate, massive American retaliation against targets linked with the Islamists throughout the Arab world that would create huge ‘collateral damage’ in the form of innocent Arab deaths.

Osama bin Laden had reason to hope for such a response because that was what President Bill Clinton had done, although on a much smaller scale, after Al Qaeda killed 24 Americans in the attacks on US embassies in East Africa in September 1998. Surely killing many thousands of Americans on home ground would make the US government go berserk and do the same thing again, but on a far greater scale.

The Bush administration did not walk into that trap, and instead focussed its attention, quite sensibly, on dismantling Al Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan. It was nineteen Arabs who hijacked those four airliners on 9/11, but no Arab country has been attacked by the United States from that day to this. Now, however, President Bush has created a similar trap for himself by targeting Iraq, and is about to walk into it. Osama bin Laden is delighted, and is naturally urging all Muslims to resist: the more Arab casualties, the better, from his point of view.

What is stunning is the smug ignorance of the ‘senior White House official’ who told CNN that the tape shows “a terrorist making common cause with a brutal dictator...it demonstrates a burgeoning alliance of terror. This confirms that bad guys swim with the other bad guys. They live in the same pool.” Can senior White House officials really be so ill-informed about bin Laden’s goals and strategy, or do they just assume that the US public hasn’t got a clue? And if they do understand what bin Laden is up to, why are they planning to do what he wants anyway?

We are way past sensible argument here, so perhaps we should just end with the latest joke making the rounds.

Q: Mr President, why are you so certain that Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons?

A: We kept the receipts.

THE opposite of opposition is not government. It is, more logically and more correctly, position. In theory, a government takes a position, and the parties across the dividing aisle in parliament, oppose. Since a government has the executive authority, it is expected to set the agenda for the nation by instruments of legislation and cabinet decision.

When this goes awry, you can be sure that a government is in trouble. If the opposition sets the agenda and the government begins to respond, it is almost axiomatic that the latter has lost the natural advantage that power provides in politics.

Digvijay Singh is in trouble in Madhya Pradesh. There is no other explanation for the curious somersault that politics has taken in his state in this, an election year. Digvijay Singh, keeper of the secular flame, now wants to get re-elected because he insists that he loves Mother Cow more than his BJP opponent Uma Bharati. He also wants the voter of his state to believe that the prime minister, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee, eats beef! The unsaid part of this allegation is that he himself would never indulge in such sacrilege.

This is not the first time that beef has been an election issue. The reasons are obvious. Hindu sentiment is by and large against cow slaughter, because of the reverence accorded to the cow in Hindu scriptures. Most sensible Muslim rulers of India accepted the need to respect such sentiment; and only fools considered an indulgence in beef worth the price of stability. (Aurangzeb, incidentally, for those who might consider this interesting, was a vegetarian, but this did not make him a sensible ruler.)

The Congress government of independent India also recognized this, and banned beef where it could. You can eat beef at five star hotels now, but it is imported. That, by and large, is where the matter rested, except when partisans of the Hindutva family wanted more than this. The Congress never attempted to make beef into an election campaign issue in the past.

Perhaps Digvijay Singh has not heard of a man called Prabhudutt Brahmachari. He was a candidate in the first general elections held in free India, in 1951-52, from a constituency called Phulpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He had the support of all the non-Congress parties, from the socialists to the Jana Sangh (the original name of the BJP). The Congress candidate from Phulpur was a gentleman called Jawaharlal Nehru. No one in his senses expected the unknown Brahmachari to win, but at some point in the campaign he began to pick up steam. He had only one charge to make against India’s first prime minister: that Jawaharlal ate beef.

It was hardly a secret that Nehru had some very English tastes. While Jawaharlal never touched alcohol, his breakfast was more kidney and toast than samosa and puri. (Motilal, his father, incidentally, did drink for most of his life, and, on his deathbed, teasingly accused Mahatma Gandhi of denying him the pleasures of Scotch in the last decade of his life after converting him to the Gandhian ethos during the non-cooperation movement.)

Nehru treated Brahmachari’s accusation with the contempt that it deserved. He refused to come to Phulpur to answer such a question. The UP Congress was not so sanguine, and all the local bigwigs camped at Phulpur to ensure Nehru’s victory. The times were less than secular. Partition had unleashed a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, and Uttar Pradesh was boiling. Nehru had been personally challenged within the Congress by a ‘soft Hindutva’ faction led by Purushottam Das Tandon. (There has always been a ‘soft Hindutva’ lobby in the Congress. That is nothing new in the country’s oldest party.) Nehru’s reply was simple and consistent: he refused to purchase electoral victory at the cost of the soul of the Congress.

What would Jawaharlal Nehru have thought of his heirs? Digvijay Singh, astonishingly, has learnt nothing from the humiliation of his fellow-Madhya Pradeshi Kamal Nath in Gujarat. Kamal Nath should have made governance the central issue. Sonia Gandhi should have started her bid for victory in Gujarat from an earthquake-ravaged village without water and shelter after years of the tragedy, instead of launching her campaign from a temple.

Digvijay Singh is as blind as Kamal Nath. He cannot see the obvious. If the voter has to vote on cow protection, who will he opt for? A party that has made this a part of its agenda from the day it came to life, or a party that has Sonia Gandhi as its president? There is nothing wrong with Sonia Gandhi eating beef. She is a Christian and permitted by her faith to do so. But how can the Congress make this an issue against a party that has as its mentor a Guru Golwalkar? This is a no-brainer. But perhaps you need some brains even to recognize a no-brainer.

When you begin to sink, there is never a depth to which you will not. To accuse Prime Minister Vajpayee of eating beef is absurd. It must be an act of desperation. To accuse him of exporting beef is an utter nonsense. His angry response will only increase his support. It only remains for the BJP to accuse Sonia Gandhi of eating beef, which they will do happily. It is astonishing that the MP Congress never realized that this charge could boomerang. A Narasimha Rao could have fended off that boomerang. Sonia Gandhi cannot. It is not her fault that she cannot, but that does not help much.

The beef campaign has injected a religiosity into the election atmosphere that suits the BJP perfectly. The party has something far bigger than cow protection on its electoral agenda. It is going to offer a solution to the Ayodhya problem, and do so with the full support of all its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) because the solution has been carefully hedged by all the required checks and balances. First, ‘evidence’ will be offered to show that there was a Lord Ram temple at the site where the Babri mosque was constructed.

Second, the supreme court will be involved in the decision-making process. This effectively finesses other parties, since they have all given a public commitment that they will abide by any supreme court ruling. They cannot now refute their previous stand. Third, temple construction will start on undisputed land. This too is intelligent, because you cannot argue too strongly about land that is undisputed. Fourth, a mosque will be constructed nearby, although not at the precise spot on which the Babri mosque stood.

This is the perfect position from where the BJP can launch its bid for re-election, along with its allies, for five more years at the centre. It indicates, if nothing else, that the party has not allowed itself to become complacent after its revival — victory in Gujarat. It has not made the mistake of believing that victory in Gujarat was sufficient to ensure victory in a national general election. Contrast this with the Congress attitude, where the party thought that power in fifteen states of variable sizes would translate automatically into power at the centre in the next general elections.

The beef campaign will not bring Digvijay Singh to power in Madhya Pradesh, but it will help legitimize the infusion of religion into politics by hopeless emulation. The Congress has no answer to emotive issues like Ayodhya, or even cow protection. But it has failed to create an alternative agenda for the electorate. That is its tragic flaw. That is why a Digvijay Singh, who did not need religiosity to win within a year of the destruction of the Babri mosque, is desperately seeking issues which can only become counterproductive for him and his party.

The Congress is uncertain about itself now, and such uncertainty can become a habit. Confidence has eroded on all issues; and false issues can only create a false confidence. Arjun Singh is scoffed at publicly by Kamal Nath for believing in secularism, and is rewarded by Sonia Gandhi for doing so. This is not realism. This is a sell-out.

Jawaharlal Nehru did not want victory if the price was the sale of the party’s soul. Five decades later, that soul has been sold — for no reward. Kindly acknowledge receipt. regards, Elizabeth

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