The 'third eye' view

So the BJP did bite off more than it could chew, and I have had to buy a vacuum cleaner to wipe egg off my face. Alas, God gave me only two eyes: to get this election right you needed Shiva's third eye.

But a mere hack, or even a psephologist, getting it wrong is as nothing compared to the bookies getting it wrong. A journalist only puts a laptop where his mouth is. A bookie puts his money where his mouth is. Their mouths must still be open.

The principal reason for being blindsided is apparent: Atal Behari Vajpayee was an excellent prime minister. Let us leave his personal qualities of charm, generosity and grace aside; that is for those who knew him personally. The political calculus has to be done on the less sentimental terrain of performance.

An under-appreciated achievement needs immediate mention: he gave legitimacy to coalitions, an idea that had never worked in Delhi among India's fractious politicians.

It gets more evident in every election that two forces are at work in the Indian polity: even as centripetal forces strengthen the unity of India, centrifugal urges increase the autonomous political space of its various regions.

A federal system can be governed either through coalitions or a directly elected president. Since we do not have a presidential system, it is vital that there should be confidence in the idea of coalitions, or authority would become so fragmented as to break down.

The stability of the NDA is now the model against which future experiments will be measured. Ironically, Vajpayee's success convinced the voter that any coalition could be stable, and persuaded him to change one for another.

Vajpayee's second substantive achievement was in neighbourhood policy. His initiatives towards China and Pakistan were built on his oft-repeated view that you can change friends but not neighbours, and conviction that peace with neighbours is a prerequisite for progress. Every prime minister intones such sentiments with suitable solemnity. Theory is not always matched by practice.

Prime ministers begin to treat national military strength as an extension of their ego; soon, the correctly-named defence ministry morphs into an offence ministry. Vajpayee understood both the strength and limitations of muscle.

Pakistan learnt to respect this to the point where Vajpayee could aver that cross-border terrorism had come to its lowest point. This became the basis of a hope that a settlement of our most debilitating problem, the Kashmir dispute, was possible.

Failure may be an orphan but it gets a hundred times more news space than success. Vajpayee achieved a breakthrough with China on Sikkim last year, now recognized in Chinese maps that show Sikkim as part of India, but this fact has faded from public memory. Peace with Pakistan is a work in progress. After Agra, foundations had to be re-laid, and confidence rebuilt. That was achieved by January this year.

The critical part lies ahead, and much will hinge on the foreign minister-level talks scheduled for August. It would be foolish to sabotage the momentum that has been created.

A successor government always has problems with inheritance, not least because the culture of opposition demands criticism. Hawks (and they nest everywhere) will try to dismiss the peace initiative as either naive or "soft". That would be counter-productive.

His significant weakness lay in his rudimentary understanding of economics. He knew what he wanted: privatization that would lead to efficiency, and a modern infrastructure for the country.

But he left implementation to those who could not see beyond middle class India. Reform without employment is an absurdity in a developing country. When profit becomes king, the economy becomes captive to a limited company (pun intended). But when all equations are done, a prime minister has to be much more than a sum of the parts.

Vajpayee's mission, in a phrase, was to put his generation's problems to rest so that the next generation could take India forward to the destiny that Jawaharlal Nehru had promised. This vision often put him at odds with his own party. Vajpayee and the BJP interpreted the same historical facts differently.

The idea that Jawaharlal Nehru could be a hero was anathema to the hardliners in the Hindutva family. They could, at a pinch, find space for Mahatma Gandhi, whose religiosity and asceticism had an obvious appeal to the RSS. But Nehru was the very opposite, intellectually, culturally, emotionally, to all that they stood for.

Vajpayee did not treat nationalism as the exclusive preserve of the Sangh philosophy; he recognized the nationalist in Nehru, and made no secret of his admiration. He was not converted to Nehru suddenly on the road to Delhi. He could not control his tears when Jawaharlal died in 1964.

When Vajpayee became foreign minister in 1977, some sycophant tried to curry favour with him by removing Jawaharlal's picture from the foreign office. He was furious. The picture returned. He was equally ready to admire the nationalist in Indira Gandhi.

Or in the man who is today our president, and a much loved one too. Only Vajpayee in this government could have made Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam president of India.

The biggest problem of his generation was, obviously, partition and its consequences: an armed confrontation between India and Pakistan, and the volatile state of Hindu-Muslim relations.

He admitted, privately if not publicly, that part of the problem was the BJP's investment in this tension in order to reap votes. His response was to try and reinvent the BJP. This is why the party's dialectic for this general election has been radically different, and it has attempted to become inclusive towards Muslims.

The contradiction lay in the Gujarat riots. He placed his own reaction in the public purview. He told parliament that when he went to the BJP conference in Goa, he had decided that Narendra Modi must take responsibility and resign. He added, ruefully, that his party over-ruled him. He apologized. Was this enough?

No. Voters are not idiots. They do not expect a prime minister's pocket to be stuffed with resignation letters. But there occasionally comes an event that demands moral clarity.

Gujarat was one such. Vajpayee stayed on and reaped, like the rest of his party, the benefits of the Modi victory. Two years later, in a fascinating turn, the voter of Narendra Modi's Gujarat punished Vajpayee and helped defeat his government.

But Vajpayee did remould the politics of the BJP, although it would be excessive to say that he changed its philosophy. Will the Vajpayee swerve survive defeat? Hindutva hardliners are already on television with a single-point post mortem: Vajpayee tried to turn the BJP into the Congress, and was therefore rejected by his own.

But if enough BJP leaders have begun to appreciate his view that in order to become a mainstream party the BJP cannot isolate and demonize one vital tide of India, the Muslims, then it will have been a major achievement. The jury is out.

There is no murder in politics; death is always by suicide. The NDA's suicide note was prepared by the finance ministry last year and signed "India Shining". The message alienated the poor and woke them up from indifference, for it showed them the world that existed outside their reach. The alienation was as strong as the ad-blitz; every ad created a fresh pool of resentment. The agency, in any case, was not very original.

The campaign was a rehash of Rajiv Gandhi's Mera Bharat Mahaan, with mobiles and motorbikes instead of spiders and snakes. The end result was the same. An election that could have been won was lost.

We thought that Vajpayee's personal popularity and credibility would cover the gaps that were becoming visible in BJP territory. The gaps became too large in the course of a long and fatiguing election process.

There will certainly be consequences. When Jyoti Basu, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Bal Thackeray speak the same language on economic reform, it means that a spectrum of opposition looms over the bulls of the stock market. The principle of reforms is that if wealth is created at the top it will trickle down eventually.

In a democracy, elections interfere with "eventually". Deng got away with this policy in China because he did not have to check with the ballot box. The Indian model must be balanced: you can afford "trickle down" only if you simultaneously invest in "trickle up".

Amul is a classic example of the latter model, where milk, a product from the poorest section of India, has been converted into a great manufacturing and marketing success story through a cooperative movement.

Sonia Gandhi is where she is today for three reasons, one of which has been noted above. But, equally, she believed in herself when very few others believed in her. The third and most important reason is an ageing Marxist tactician called Harkishen Singh Surjeet, who realized that this general election was going to be won or lost not by the principals but by the partners.

Ironically, both the BJP and the Congress have lost two per cent of their vote in this election, but the Congress chose the right allies. The BJP got complacent. The reward for Surjeet's wisdom is control of the route map through which he will steer Indian politics. How have I suddenly become so wise? Because I acquired Shiva's 'third eye' after the elections. It's called hindsight.

Getting into the global village

"The world was indeed learning to deal with regions, instead of individual countries; and states were comfortable to be referred to as Saarc countries, Asean states and European Union members.

We have to learn to exist and prosper first as a region and then integrate ourselves in the global village," said Naval Chief Admiral Shahid Karimullah in one of two recent statements.

The admiral went on to speak of globalization and internationalism and said they were 'here to stay'. Boundaries were changing their meaning and the days of 'barbed wires, iron curtains and trenched armies' were gone. Like land, boundary spaces changed to 'cyber space' which is the 'fourth dimension' of information.

It's seldom we hear a service chief speak on geo-strategic issues relating to the world, the region and the country. Generally, their statements carry a strong PR orientation addressed to their own command for morale-boosting or the general public to tell us that all is well with the armed forces. The admiral thus departed not only from the traditional image of the navy as the 'Silent Service' but also from the customary pep-talk pattern of his peers.

In a refreshing contrast to the euphoric theme of describing his service as the sentinel of the Arabian Sea and the 'ruler of waves', the naval chief stressed that there was 'no need of power projection'. And this is how it ought to be rather than the usual projection and image-building of the armed forces as 'impregnable'.

Away on the high seas, the navy stays out of sight unlike the army and the air force - one with an enduring high profile on land and the other with its visibility up in the air. In his statements, the admiral also made an excellent appraisal of the PN's strategic role in the light of the rapidly changing and volatile scenario.

The PN's role through the wars of 1965 and 1971 was largely peripheral and on call to the army and the air force. This was as much because of the overwhelmingly land-air orientation of the operation as for lack of intra-services coordination.

Naval chiefs in both wars were the last to know of D-day and the fateful H-hour of the war machine coming into action. GHQ in Rawalpindi had little information about the operational planning of the PN's Dawarka strike (1965) and even less about its actual course.

Similarly, information about the sinking of the ill-fated submarine Ghazi (1971) around the Bay of Bengal reached Rawalpindi after the news was broken by foreign electronic media.

I recollect painfully that as the military spokesman, I together with my foreign office, air force and naval colleagues, would not quite know how to break the news during our daily briefings. It was because we were not quite certain about the veracity of the available version in the absence of an authentic source report.

It is to be hoped that those glaring lapses of the past are behind us once and for all. However, this is not to hold out a guarantee against an error of judgment committed through the heat and the fog of a war.

What must be ensured at all events, nonetheless, is full inter-active 'joint services co-ordination'. It is high time a three-dimensional training exercise was planned and conducted as a part of the effort to fuse the three services into a unified organic whole.

India's military exercise Purno Vijay (Complete Victory 2000) was one such exercise with a full naval component together with the army and the air force. Goa's seaboard was used for the simulation of an attack on Karachi.

In view of India's incremental naval build-up in the southern Arabian Sea and presence in the Indian Ocean, the PN can ill afford to stay in the naval backyard. This is not so much to match or catch up with India ship-for-ship and weapon-for-weapon as to ensure a strategic balance within our operational environment.

As a part of Pakistan's pro-active role in the global war on terrorism, the Pakistan Navy would join the US-led coalition maritime campaign plan (CMCP). This would also augment the navy's combat potential, operational readiness and role in international peace-keeping under the UN.

Joining the CMCP under a UN resolution would involve no change in routine operations. Besides enhancing the navy's 'quick response' capacity, it would equip it with the wherewithal of 'deterring' terrorists and checking illicit arms smuggling and trafficking in drugs and humans.

The move is linked with the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) to stop trafficking in nuclear materials and weapons of mass destruction and their components.

The crux of the naval chief's message is that without a free flow of information and exchange of ideas, we can hardly achieve our national goals in the prevailing regional and global environment. "Isolation, lack of information and shut doors can only lead to our doom."

- The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army.

Concern over move to slap sales tax

A number of senior lawyers, including the sitting and former presidents of the Bahawalpur High Court Bar and district bar associations, recently voiced a demand for the inclusion of Lodhran sessions court in the jurisdiction of the Lahore High Court's Bahawalpur Bench for providing what they termed justice to the litigants of Lodhran district at their doorstep.

The lawyers argued that such a move would be in accordance with the government's policy of providing speedy and cheap justice to the people. Lodhran district, which is only about 15km from Bahawalpur, is attached to the LHC's Multan Bench which is about 90km from Lodhran.

Lodhran district bar association president Rana Naseem Ahmed said it was the right of the people that they should be provided justice at their doorstep.

The local bar president opined that if Lodhran was attached to the Bahawalpur Bench, it would be a just administrative decision which would benefit a large number of litigants of that district.

It was further observed by the lawyers community that the issue should not be politicized as it only concerned the provision of a legal facility to the people of Lodhran.

In fact, they said, none of the politicians had so far opposed this demand, which was being made since the upgradation of Lodhran tehsil to the level of a district in 1992.

The lawyers' representatives hoped the issue would be sympathetically considered by the chief justice and the Punjab government keeping in view the larger interests of the people of Lodhran.

* * * * *

During a recent visit here of CBR chairman Mohammad Abdullah Yousaf, the local industrialists and the business community enumerated the problems being faced by them.

Bahawalpur Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Shaikh Abbas Raza expressed concern over reports that the federal government intended to propose 15 per cent sales tax on oil, cotton seed and cotton seed oil cakes in the coming budget.

He said the government on the protest of ginners had earlier withdrawn this tax from cotton seed oil cakes. He feared if sales tax was revived, it would raise the prices of fodder which could have adverse effects on the farming community and milk sellers, causing shortage of milk and an increase in its price. He told the chairman that the government should refrain from levying ST on these articles.

Teh chamber chief also apprised the chairman of the negative effects of the sales tax on the cotton ginning industry in the three districts of Bahawalpur, Bahawalnagar and Rahimyar Khan, which had now been declared as contamination-free, producing about 34 per cent of the total cotton of the country.

He said since the levy of sales tax on cotton, the ginning industry was running in loss and was now on the brink of a disaster. He proposed that the ST should be withdrawn from cotton and instead be levied at the spinning or weaving stage to save the ginning industry.

He also demanded that the sales tax should be waived on the consumption of electricity by flour mills. he demanded special incentives and privileges to upgrade the ginning industry, and for this purpose called for free import of the cotton-ginning machinery.

* * * * *

Yazman in respect of area is one of the biggest tehsils of the province. The town has a girls higher secondary school. The Punjab chief minister during his visit here some time ago had assured that it would be upgraded to the level of a college. But so far this dream of the local residents has not been realized.

The number of girl students exceeds the institution's capacity and six classes are forced to sit in the open during the summer season. Similarly the Government Commerce College is housed in a rented building.

A seven-kanal piece of state land was reserved for it, but it is in the possession of land grabbers. They should be dislodged by the tehsil administration so that the college building could be constructed.