| 25 October 2004 | Monday | 10 Ramazan 1425 |
Gujral Doctrine revisited
To shed or not to shed
The great American race for power
The past several months have been a remarkable time for an observer of politics in America. There has been much, much, on which to comment, much to analyse. A war in Iraq has become a swamp from which there is no exit and only bottomless muck ahead; new tax breaks for multinational corporations are passed at the very moment when Americans are deeply worried about the loss of a huge number of jobs through offshoring; an economy that was once the world's "locomotive" is stuck with flat growth rates and huge pitfalls ahead. Meanwhile, each of the two candidates for president is insisting that he is the best choice to lead the American nation forward.
Let us start with a stark fact, although political situations being what they are, there may be those who insist it is not fact but opinion.
President George W. Bush has brought disaster to both his nation and the world, and a second term for his presidency would extend and reaffirm those disasters.
At no time since the Second World War, when the megalomania of Hitler was let loose on Europe, has a single powerful individual so committed to imperial high-handedness as has President Bush. Whatever reasons may have impelled the decision to go to war against Iraq - and there were many, ranging from a desire to own and control huge oil reserves, to settling old scores, to a puerile need to "outdo" his father, to a unrealizable utopian vision of democratizing the Middle East by establishing a "model democracy" in Iraq - it is clear that one reason was overriding.
President Bush, and his closest advisers, wanted to prove to the world that the United States was powerful enough to do what it wanted, to whom it wanted, when it wanted. The invasion of Iraq was a naked assertion of power.
That assertion, of course, turned out to be otherwise than intended. Instead of a universal concession that America was the world's superpower (which everyone knew already), what the occupation of Iraq has proved is that America has neither the troops, nor the sophisticated weaponry, nor the international support, to make indigenous peoples do what it wants them to do.
(President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, were so enamoured of the vision of American omnipotence that they forgot to read the history of the French in Algeria of the Americans in Vietnam, of the Soviets in Afghanistan, of the Russians in Chechnya: guerilla wars are stubborn and, even in the face of overwhelming force and weaponry, guerillas are remarkably successful.)
President Bush's opponent in the current presidential election, Senator John Kerry, has recognized that the single largest issue mobilizing the American electorate is the ill-fated, ill-conceived and megalomaniac adventurism in Iraq. But two years ago, he did not have the courage to firmly oppose American intervention when it was proposed, and so he is stuck with saying, now, that what he will do is finish the war by mobilizing the international support Mr Bush so sorely lacks.
Senator Kerry is, of course, right to foreground the disrepute in which America is currently held throughout the globe. No nation can ignore the will of other nations, insisting only on its own prerogatives and not those of other sovereign nations and forging all policies and actions unilaterally, and still maintain respect among those nations it has snubbed and ignored.
The damage President Bush has done to America is immense. It is not just that a war has left Iraq in anarchy and the lives of its citizens in a shambles. It is not merely that he has taken the United States, the world's largest and most wasteful consumer of fossil fuel, out of the Kyoto Protocol. What matters most damagingly is that he has shown the world just how self-absorbed and all-consuming are America's imperial ambitions.
Were the American people to reject President Bush by electing Mr Kerry, their plebiscite would be a sign to the citizens of the world that a majority of the Americans do not approve of the mad adventurism instigated by Mr Bush.
If a guest drops a teacup and it falls and breaks, his host is discomfited. If that guest goes out and purchases a different teacup to replace the one which has been broken, his host will see the breakage was an accident, an aberration, and that his guest has good intentions. But if the guest looks at the broken teacup, shrugs his shoulders, and drops the saucer on the floor so its broken pieces can mingle with those of the teacup, the host will never invite that guest into his home again. So with America: Mr Bush is a broken teacup. Will the American nation replace him, or affirm that breakage is of no consequence, regardless of what others think?
In this sense, the Bush-Kerry contest is the most momentous election, in international terms, that America has seen in the lifetime of any living American. The presidential contest is also the most momentous, in domestic terms, of any election in the past 70 years.
President Bush has undermined the vitality of the American economy in order that his wealthy friends and campaign contributors might become even wealthier. When he was elected, he inherited a $230 billion budgetary surplus. This year, the budgetary deficit is slated for $340 billion. Though a recession, a sharp drop in the stock market caused in large measure by the implosion of the dot.com boom, and an economic aftermath to the events of 9/11 are all contributory to diminished government revenues, the main reason for the deficit is that Mr Bush gave away tax cut after tax cut to wealthy Americans and to large corporations.
In addition, he never vetoed a single spending bill, not one. As well, he started a very costly an ongoing war, and has not had the courage to ask a single citizen to pay for its costs. His policies are a stunning triumph of the provincial politics of re-election over fiscal probity.
There is even worse news than the budget deficit, although it is in the more technical and therefore abstruse arena of international finance. The current accounts deficit in the United States - the value of goods and services imported versus those exported, the flow of money out of the United States - was $166 billion in the last reported quarter, for a rate of over $650 billion a year. (India is in much better shape, with a current accounts surplus of $1.9 billion at the end of April-June 2004, although that is a decline compared with $3.44 billion in the previous quarter.) To enable corporations to reap quick profits, to keep prices down for American consumers, the long-term prospects of the American domestic economy are being ravaged.
One can even see immediate effects of the wilful inattention to current accounts. Over 16 per cent of the nation's manufacturing jobs were lost to offshoring during the three-and-a-half years of Mr. Bush's presidency. He is the first president in over 70 years - years marked by depression, war, recession, international crisis - to have overseen a job loss, not a job gain, during the years of his presidency. Poverty has increased, and the middle class shrank: for all three years of the Bush term, measurable living standards deteriorated, with the ranks of poor families increasing, the number of those without medical insurance climbing by 10 per cent, and the income of the typical household stagnating.
The longer term effects have yet to be felt. The vast economic power of the United States is eroding. The US is the world's largest debtor nation: at some future point, the bitter medicine that the IMF enforces on developing nations - massive cuts in social spending, an end to wealth transfer programmes that benefit the poor and economically disadvantaged, a priority to debt repayment over any and all government initiatives, a financier's veto power over democratic decision making - will be forced upon the United States. Not by the IMF, which the US in good measure controls, but by the international banks and by the treasuries of other nations - including India's - which hold US treasury notes.
Four more years of Mr Bush and the US economy will be so mortgaged, so bereft of resources, that it could implode. Not that Mr Bush seems to care. The security and hopes of the middle class, and the lower classes, are not on his agenda. His policies are all about further enriching America's wealthiest families and the multinational corporations they control, right now, right away. The future be damned. Three weeks before the election Mr. Bush's party, with the support of the president, pushed through massive new tax cuts for corporations, including clauses which make it advantageous for corporations to offshore jobs and reduce the number of their American workers.
One could go on at length about what Mr Bush has done, and what four more years of his presidency will mean. Draconian new legal curtailments, inscribed in legislation euphemistically called the Patriot Act, have been an American equivalent to the state of emergency which Indira Gandhi declared in 1975. Environmental safeguards have been routinely discarded or their enforcement postponed.
But it becomes difficult to go on enumerating the domestic disasters behind Mr Bush and those that loom ahead. The sheer magnitude of the Bush administration's wrong-headedness - it is not mere ineptitude, it is an agenda of narrow self-interest, imperial ambition, and oligarchic consolidation - saps one's will. As Bertholt Brecht once wrote, "When evil-doing comes like falling rain, who will cry out?"
Almost half of America has been lulled into accepting the rule of the oligarchs. Ignoring class interest, politically blind to their own economic distresses, millions will vote on who looks tough or who hates homosexuals or who will end a woman's right to an abortion.
The good news is that there is another half, more than half, who see President Bush as a bully who lacks both vision and compassion, who speaks of leadership but leads the American nation nowhere but towards its own demise, and who is pushing the international sphere into increased instability and mistrust. Will this majority of Americans see John Kerry as a suitable alternative? Or will they be so enervated by the magnitude of Mr Bush's misguided and awful designs on America that they stay away from the polls, beaten into hopelessness?
The next few days will tell. Either America will take a new course, or it will continue on a downward spiral into crude imperialism, smug self-centredness, and economic weakness.
The writer teaches at the University of Vermont, USA
Gujral Doctrine revisited
The history of relations between Pakistan and India should never be read from cover to cover; it is better comprehended by skipping pages. By overlooking events such as the 1965 and 1971 wars, Kargil and the Agra summit, one can, in the words of a popular song of the 1950s, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. That would appear to have been the continuous endeavour of Inder K. Gujral, whether in his capacity as India's foreign minister or subsequently as its 12th prime minister.
Born in the town of Jhelum, Mr Gujral is not alone among Indian prime ministers for having left his birthplace on the Pakistani side of the Wagah border. His predecessor Gulzari Lal Nanda - twice interim prime minister following the deaths of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in May 1964 and of Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966 - was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan. Amongst Indian prime ministers, I. K.Gujral is unique though for having visited Pakistan on a number of occasions both privately and officially, his latest visit being a brief trip to Lahore recently (October 14-17).
He is famous for another attribute - for a speech he made when foreign minister in January 1997 at Colombo, during which he delineated a new direction that Indian foreign policy could and should take in its relations with its South Asian neighbours. The ideas embodied in that speech he named after himself, as the Gujral Doctrine.
The Gujral Doctrine enunciated five principles that were borrowed from the earlier "Panchsheel" agreement, signed between China and India on April 9, 1954, that in turn derived its provisions from clauses in the UN Charter. Although the overt purpose of the 1954 agreement was to facilitate Sino-Indian trade through Tibet, it reflected wider aspirations - the desire to establish a "solid foundation for peace and security", so that "the fears and apprehensions that exist today would give place to a feeling of confidence". Jawaharlal Nehru's apprehension was obvious: he feared China's hegemony, and therefore sought reassurance.
Under the Gujral Doctrine 43 years later, India in turn aimed at placating the fears and apprehensions amongst its smaller neighbours - Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal. From them, India did not ask for "reciprocity", only 'good faith and trust'. India did, however, expect that no South Asian country would "allow its territory to be used against the interests of another country in the region", or "interfere in the internal affairs of another."
Further, all South Asian countries would "respect each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty," and would "settle their disputes through peaceful bilateral negotiations". Implicitly, relations between India and Pakistan fell outside the Gujral Doctrine because they were already covered most notably by the Shimla Agreement of 1972.
Over the past 57 years since 1947, India's attitude towards its South Asian neighbours has been characterized in four phases - the first, a period of "benign neglect" (1947-1960) while India jostled for recognition by the international community; the second, a phase during the 1970s when India feared containment and encirclement by "foreign powers" and forcibly buttressed its immediate flanks (Bangladesh, Sikkim, and Bhutan); the third, with the emergence in the 1980s of the Gujral Doctrine that acknowledged South Asian countries not only as neighbours but as partners in progress; and the fourth, since the 1990s during which there has been a greater emphasis on Saarc as a forum of conciliation rather than of confrontation.
Mr Gujral's ideas may have been seeded before his time, and begun to blossom only after his, but he can take justifiable credit for nurturing them with a gardener's patience and persistence until they took root.
On the day of Mr Gujral's swearing-in as India's 12th prime minister, a Vedic astrologer called Jai Maharaj Jyotish cast a horoscope of the new PM. His published predictions were that during Mr Gujral's tenure there would be "more interaction with foreign governments, leaders, representatives" and "important agreements and treaties with neighboring countries."
During the period of less than a year that he remained prime minister, I. K. Gujral met his Pakistani counterpart Mian Nawaz Sharif no less than four times - in Male in May 1997, in New York in September, in Edinburgh in October, and in Dhaka in January the following year. The chemistry between the two leaders led many to believe a special relationship between the two adversaries might well be in the offing. Criticism at home made Gujral sensitive to allegations of being "soft on Pakistan". According to one Indian correspondent, Gujral retreated, stating unequivocally that the "Gujral Doctrine did not cover Pakistan".
Jai Maharaj Jyotish had also predicted that there would be a change in the prime minister spot "soon". Mr Gujral resigned on March 19, 1998, 11 months after being sworn in. Since leaving office, Mr Gujral has advocated an extension of his doctrine to include Pakistan. He has fostered a rapprochement between the two countries, reminding both of the benefits to be gained from cooperation in the South Asian region.
He has described the high and the low roads taken by India and Pakistan to achieve independence. "Ours was a freedom struggle," he said during his visit to Lahore, "Yours, a separatist movement. And all our subsequent development bears that stamp."
He questioned the single-track agenda in the conduct of twin-track diplomacy, wondering whether the resolution of the Kashmir question would lead ipso facto to the resolution of Pakistan's other problems. He summed up the dilemma of Kashmir in one sentence, a succinct phrase Nawaz Sharif had used during their private discussions together: "The reality is that Pakistan cannot take Kashmir, and India will not give it."
"Let us focus therefore on other matters," Gujral advised his Lahori audiences, and urged them to expand contact with their Indian and other South Asian counterparts. On December 4, 2004, Gujral will celebrate his 85th birthday. He may not live to see the sort of smokeless accommodation between his own country and other countries in the South Asian region that he had envisaged in Colombo in 1997.
Come to think of it, at the present pace of Indo-Pak negotiations, many of us on both sides of the border may not live to see that ideal come to fruition either. But visits like Mr Gujral's serve to elevate hope, to encourage the spirit to seek moksha or release from a never-ending cycle of repetitive platitudes and stale diplomatic mantras.
On the morning after Mr Gujral was sworn in as prime minister in April 1997, I phoned a common friend in New Delhi and asked him to convey my congratulations to Mr Gujral. My friend was just then leaving for Kolkata and so he advised me to call the PM's office and leave a message. I dialled the number, and a secretary came on the line.
When I identified myself and mentioned that I was speaking from Lahore, he asked me to hold. Within 15 seconds, Gujral sahib himself came on the line. He accepted my congratulations, asked me whether I was coming to New Delhi and told me to contact him whenever I came. After I had rung off, my wife who had been reading the morning paper asked me: "And who was that?"
"The prime minister of India," I told her.
"Oh," was her nonchalant reply, and she continued reading her paper.
This act of undeserved courtesy on Mr Gujral's part demonstrated the truism that in the topsy-turvy politics of this subcontinent, it is often easier to get through to the prime minister of another country than to one's own. Hopefully, when the history of Indo-Pak relations is written, it will be such vignettes of human response that will find mention in the pages that are read, and not skipped over.
To shed or not to shed
From the United States, where he starred amongst heads of state in the limelight at the United Nations and received much coverage from the international media, President Musharraf admitted to some personal confusion about retaining his COAS uniform.
The US secretary of state subsequently offered his own comment on the subject, saying that America viewed the issue of uniform as a complex one. Britain's defence secretary, Mr Hoon, shuttling between India and Pakistan, also had a similar view. Now that parliament is coming to grips with acting appropriately, how do Pakistanis themselves view the issue?
That is of little relevance, and rightly so, for the essence of the "uniform issue" is that it can only confront a military dictator. The decision to wear or not to wear is taken in the supreme national interest, as defined by the man in uniform. Is that the reason he hesitates to step out of khaki? Does he merely command support rather than obtain it freely because his definitions are shared by the people?
The issue behind the uniform is really one of writ. It is the COAS's job to command the army; but does he by virtue of its firepower also override the civil political process, so that the very same president ceases to be sure of his ability to implement the decisions he supposedly takes in the supreme national interest and the cause of good governance should someone else wear the COAS's uniform? If that is so then Gen Musharraf and all his countrymen must immediately see why those reviled civil prime ministers were doomed to failure.
However far the US as a democratic Galahad in Islamist realms designates Musharraf's Pakistan as having travelled down the chartered democratic roadmap, there can be no doubt that Pakistan's government is a military dominated government. We just have to watch the way its prime ministers come and go to establish that. Should he surrender his uniformed colour, the only reality the president has behind him is that of his own popular credibility and standing. And he is reluctant to demonstrate it in a free civil polity.
There could also be another explanation of General Musharraf's uniform dependency, for the external policy aspect has become primary in recent year. Perhaps he and his towering friends feel that the policy Pakistan adopted in line with the requirements of the sole superpower could not survive without the chief who effected the institutional U-turn? That is a sobering thought and one that the man who leads in khaki is himself the first to contradict. So let us take his word for it. It follows then that the "uniform issue" has more of a civil internal application.
President Musharraf has exercised the executive powers of the prime minister for a full five years. There is no doubt the ouster of Mr Nawaz Sharif in October 1994 was welcomed, and the primary reason was the constitutional amendment Mr Sharif was seeking (and which politicos like Mr Kasuri and Syeda Abida Hussain had endorsed) that united civil and moral legislative and executive inquisitorial powers in the prime minister's office, in what was touted as the paradigm of a true amir.
The common Pakistani, as distinct from those gracing the treasury benches, had no truck with twisting religion into justifying totalitarianism. They could see the way elected parliament was leaning and the military takeover was a happy release from Mian Nawaz Sharif's emerging fascistic theocracy.
That reaction establishes the predominant popular orientation then was what the West would call politically secular. Military wisdom did not allow civil society to activize this attitude in parliament through fresh national elections, and General Musharraf was the determinant in civil and military interaction in reconstructing a warped system.
He himself bears testimony to the fact that he did a bad job. For the essence of his argument for retaining the fullness of his powers is that the country would be left rudderless without him in critical straits. Obviously he has not reconstructed society or led it in the direction of responsible self-government and stability.
The kindest thing that General Musharraf has done for Benazir Bhutto and Mr Sharif is to have debarred them from political practice. He made it impossible for them to disprove themselves through electoral participation. The more he hopes they are forgotten, the easier it becomes for them to reinvent themselves. The whole political process in Pakistan is being held hostage to keeping these two otherwise mediocre leaders away and wresting their parties from them. Democratic mandates - which those two once enjoyed and may yet enjoy - can only be revoked democratically.
Dictatorships can neither take away nor create such mandates. If the people are ready to give their delinquent former prime ministers a third chance at leading an elected house and an elected opposition, the abominable folly of precluding the possibility is what we are living with in Pakistan. Substantial democratic leadership will not emerge until the old leadership passes or fails the litmus test of political re-engagement.
Meanwhile, parliamentary turncoats and opportunists continue to thrive. Truly new faces like Mr Shaukat Aziz's are apolitical and neutered by the imprimatur of externality. He may provide good governance but he cannot provide political vitality. All this means there really is something left rudderless in the country: a floundering mass of political pluralities and dissent. The only political platform General Musharraf left functionally intact is that of the clerically inclined parties. They never were mainstream and so they never posed a threat to military political empowerment internally.
Colin Powell termed the issue of uniform complex. Enlightened Pakistanis could say the same regarding the issue of anti-Americanism. Many are critical of America's global terrorism doctrine without being against the western world's democratic secular values.
The question then is: do Pakistani and American authorities really believe that the public mood in Pakistan is not anti-terrorism? Or that Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif would be more sympathetic to, or less capable of controlling, terroristically-inclined extremes in the country than General Musharraf? Is any change in the status quo dangerous because the present policy is against majority sentiment and needs military politics? Do democratically-minded Pakistanis have to accept their military dictator in the supreme national interest?
They might even do that if they felt he could win any war on terror, which has become Pakistan's do or die task, without a democratic national political consensus. He patently cannot. No matter how positive financial statistics are and how pleasant life is for the elite in secure luxury pens, the Pakistan where General Musharraf has been defining the supreme national interest for five years now faces anarchy. It is weaker internally than it has ever been.
Military glue may hold up political fantasizing and keep this from becoming apparent for a while, but that prophylactic anodyne is itself the malady.
Whether Gen Musharraf sets about seeking political reconciliation in or out of uniform is really irrelevant. The relevant thing is returning the country to true consensual constitutional norms, and he cannot do that in political isolation whether he is clad in khaki, Armani or achkan.
The great American race for power
Since the only functional law of democracy places perception above facts, logic can only be a secondary guide to the fate of fortune hunters in an election. Let us attempt a new methodology. Why not throw random facts, picked arbitrarily from a day's reading of newspapers and a special issue on politics of the New Yorker, into a kaleidoscope and see if any pattern emerges about the Great American Race.
In the days of studio domination of Hollywood, when stars were given weekly wages, Warner Brothers used a scientific audit to rate the popularity of the stars on its payroll. The winner in 1941-42 had more support among girls of 17 than women of 30 or more; received more applause from moviegoers who earned $25 or less a week than those taking home $60 or more; and sold more tickets in towns with a population of 10,000 or less than in the big cities. His name? You guessed it. Ronald Reagan.
At the time he was still surging ahead in the primaries, the Democratic meteor Howard Dean permitted an enthusiast to pour a milkshake into a glass perched on his head. Dean retained his physical balance, but the first doubts began to creep in about his mental balance.
The Democrats cut short their primary process, gave John Kerry the nomination and then watched him cool down on the electoral thermometer even as George Bush warmed up by stoking up a fear psychosis. A guest on the Jay Leno show, a bitter sort of comic, told Leno, "Jay, the poop I made in your dressing room has more heat than John Kerry". Kerry was sitting onstage at the time. He kept his cool.
The 20 electoral votes of the Midwest, and therefore currently conservative, state of Ohio will make the difference between victory and defeat as the contest goes to the wire. An executive of a company called Diebold proudly claimed that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to President (Bush)". Diebold is a maker of the voting machines that will be used in the United States on November 2.
When Bush's daughter Jenna got stuck in the elevator of a nightclub while on the campaign trail, she opened the door with a chopstick and later calmed herself with a tequila. Jenna is now so popular that she introduces her dad in the Republican heartland before he delivers his stump speech. In the first of the three debates Bush attacked the "moolah" of Iraq. He didn't mean the moolah paid out to Cheney-crony companies like Halliburton. It was his preferred pronunciation of "mullah".
Last year, he ended the nuanced Clinton policy towards Iran, in which the elected Mohammad Khatami was the good guy and leader of the clergy Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was the bad guy. Iran was placed unambiguously on the axis of evil. The word from the neocons around Bush is that once Bush is elected Iran will be punished with a military attack on its nuclear facilities, since moolahs are not going to be permitted the luxury of a nuclear arsenal. The military operation could be outsourced to Israel.
Nicolas Lemann notes in the New Yorker: "If voters give Bush a second term ... he would pursue ends that are now outside what most people conceive of as the compass points of the debate, by means that are more aggressive than we are accustomed to. And he couldn't possibly win by a smaller margin than last time, so he couldn't possibly avoid the conclusion that he had been given a more expansive mandate." Lemann also recalls what Bush told Bob Woodward in December 2001: "I have no outside advice... First of all, in the initial phase of this war, I never left the compound. Nor did anyone come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble."
On August 6 this year, five billionaires and six liberals met at the Aspen Institute in Colorado's Rocky Mountains and swore themselves to secrecy.
They then concentrated on a single purpose: how to defeat Bush. The moneybags were Peter Shore, chairman of an insurance company called Progressive Corporation and owner of a 250-foot yacht, Lone Ranger, that is often his home; John Sperling from Arizona; Herb and Marion Sandler from California; and George Soros, king of Wall Street.
Soros, who started with $6 million in 1969 and turned it into $7 billion, is the most public face of this alliance. He donates some $400 million a year to causes he likes. He believes Bush is terrible for the world, America and him, in that order. Officially the Kerry campaign keeps him at arm's length, worried about any radical outburst. Former president, Bill Clinton, once kept him waiting so long that he had to send officials after him when he walked out.
Soros was convinced in May that Bush could be defeated although the opinion polls put him so far ahead Kerry couldn't see where the frontrunner had gone. Since George Soros is a Jew, rightwing attacks on him include more than a hint of racism. He says he is too old to care. His philosophy is simple. "If I want it, I own it." He is convinced that the Iraq invasion was a disaster, and America should pull out as soon as is decently compatible with national interest.
Kerry relaunched himself on September 16 in Las Vegas at the annual convention of the National Guard Association which, two days before, had cheered Bush to the rafters. Senator John Kerry said, "I believe he (Bush) failed the fundamental test of leadership. He failed to tell you the truth. (He) did not even acknowledge that more than a 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq.
He did not tell you that with each passing day we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings. He did not tell you that with each passing day our enemies are getting bolder - that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists... You deserve a president who will not play politics with national security, who will not ignore his own intelligence, while living in a fantasy world of spin."
Stanley Presser, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, believes that opinion polls should not be trusted if they merely ask whether respondents are for or against X or Y. There is no certain answer to "How are you?" There is a far better answer to "How are you compared to yesterday, or compared to someone?"
A Gallup poll released on September 17 showed a 13-point lead for Bush. A Pew poll a day earlier found the candidates to be almost tied.
The first polling was done by a magazine called Literary Digest. It would send around 20 million postcards and receive an average of five million answers. It correctly named the winners of the 1924, 1928 and 1932 American presidential elections, and predicted in 1936 that Alf Landon would defeat incumbent Roosevelt by five percentage points. A young pollster who sampled only thousands, but went door to door, made a public bet that the Digest would be wrong. Roosevelt won. George Gallup went on a roll, and is still rolling.
Have you heard of the Push Poll? It is designed to push the respondent towards the answer the client wants. When Zogby did a poll for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) it asked Americans whether they would give up eating meat if they knew that chicken, only days old, get their beaks seared off with hot blades to prevent them from pecking one another in jam-packed cages. Or that bulls and pigs are castrated without painkillers. Politicians who find they have won in the polls but lost in the ballot box may want to check if they have been flattered to deceive.
Incidentally, when you read that a particular poll has been conducted on the telephone, remember a few facts: women answer the phone more than men, and young people don't hang around at home.
Zogby got the Bush-Gore election right with an unusual question. "You live in the Land of Oz, and the candidates are the Tin Man, who's all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who's all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?" The response was a dead heat: 46.2 per cent per cent for each. He asked the question again in the last week of September. The Tin Man was ahead this time by 10 points.
The share price of Halliburton, the Cheney-propped American multinational that received a multi-billion dollar grace-and-favour contract in Iraq, has shed sharply on the New York Stock Exchange, from $50 to around $30.
The day after Bush lost the third straight debate a news report from Baghdad said: "Prime Minister Ayad Allawi threatened Wednesday that a military assault would be mounted against Fallujah if the rebel bastion did not surrender Iraq's most wanted man, the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Translation: Musharraf can't deliver Osama bin Laden before November 2. Hamid Karzai hasn't been asked to pick up Mullah Omar. So it's Allawi's turn to deliver an also-ran. Does it matter that the CIA says that Zarqawi had no links with Saddam Hussein, and that official investigations confirm that Saddam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor any connections with Al Qaeda? No.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.