RUSSIAN President, Vladimir Putin, who was re-elected last year for a second four-year term, believes he has a mission to perform. This is to win back for Russia its place as a major player on the world stage. Though it inherited the great power status of the Soviet Union after the latter disintegrated in 1991, he is aware that neither its weakened economic state, nor its steadily shrinking influence qualifies it to significantly shape world developments.

The former KGB apparatchik was groomed by Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, to take over the leadership of what is still the world’s largest country. Having seen Russia suffer all-round decline, accompanied by widespread corruption and mismanagement, and with his own health declining, he identified in Putin both a passion to revive Russia’s power, and a commitment to reforms needed to revitalize it.

It may be recalled that while Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to save the Soviet Union through his reforms, Yeltsin had advocated the break-up of the vast multi-ethnic union stretching across 11 time zones in Europe and Asia. He had advocated this solution because his power base lay in Russia. He also ascribed the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War to the failure both of the communist political dictatorship, and the command economy that went with it.

While both were abandoned, the immediate consequences were disastrous. The Russian Federation neither achieved political democracy nor a viable free market economy, in the initial years. The country’s wealth was speedily taken over by an alliance of corrupt bureaucrats and the mafia underworld, while the great majority of the Russian people were pauperized, and reduced to the living standards of a third World country.

The loosening of the ideological controls of the communist system led to insurgencies rearing their head in many areas that had never accepted Russian colonization. The unrest in many Muslim majority regions required tact and accommodation, but the authorities in Moscow turned to repression, with the bloodshed accompanying the insurgency in Chechnya, attracting international attention.

Initially, with the Russian armed forces demoralized by the country’s decline, and failure to maintain them, Chechnya had virtually achieved autonomy, and was demanding an independent status. Putin gained the confidence of Yeltsin, and popular acclaim of the Russian people, by the decisiveness he displayed in asserting Russian authority in Chechnya and other areas agitating for autonomy. He had been named prime minister in 1999, and won the election for president by a decisive majority in 2000. However, he soon realized that apart from the consequences of defeat in the Cold War, the country was also suffering from internal mismanagement and decline of the once powerful state apparatus.

Due to Yeltsin’s weak rule, and cronyism, the writ of the central government in Moscow did not prevail everywhere, and several powerful local governments in distant parts began to assert themselves. In the multi-ethnic federation, insurgencies in favour of autonomy or independence proliferated in many remote parts. The former republics of the Soviet Union, which Moscow considered to be in its sphere of influence, began to break away by seeking closer relations with the West. The Russian elite became increasingly alarmed over the precipitate decline of their homeland.

With its economy in disarray, and the communist dictatorship repudiated, post-Cold War Russia found itself committed to pursuing the path of democracy, and of free market economy in order to qualify for western aid. However, it soon realized that long-term goal of the US as the sole superpower was to reduce its former rival’s influence and world role. Even western Europe, that showed greater concern for the interests of Russia after the demise of the communist system, set certain standards and was critical of violations of human rights during Russian military operations in Chechnya. The election of Putin as president was generally welcomed, with its promise of effective governance, after the chaos of the Yeltsin years.

As the US proceeded to exploit its military presence in Central Asia to corner the oil and gas reserves of the region, mainly at Russia’s expense, Moscow’s attitude underwent a change. Though Washington’s acceptance of Russian suppression of the Chechen insurrection was welcome, in the post-9/11 scenario, US strategic aims of extending its direct influence in what it regarded as its backyard generated resentment in Russia. Taken together with the eastward expansion of Nato, and the candidacy of former satellites for membership of the European Union, this only confirmed suspicions that the marginalization of Russia remained a strategic Western aim.

Putin was concentrating power in his own hands to have full control to achieve his twin goals of internal recovery and greater international influence. The emergence of greater assertiveness among his opponents was viewed almost with the same concern as the spread of Chechen terrorist attacks were to Moscow. This led to increasing concern in the West about the violation of democratic freedoms, and of harsh treatment of political opponents, such as oil billionaire Khodorovsky, for using the media to criticize Putin.

As the Russian leader had been critical of the US war against Iraq, President Bush responded by highlighting Putin’s violation of democratic norms and of the freedom of the media. He also stepped up policies designed to extend US influence into Russia’s backyard.

Russia has definitely come up both politically and economically, since Putin assumed power. The rise in the price of oil and gas, of which Russia is a major exporter, has greatly benefited the Russian balance of payments. The Russian economy, though now reduced to the GDP level of tiny Belgium, is no longer in crisis, and the EU in particular has entered into new agreements to extend assistance. With President Bush facing widespread criticism all over the world for his policies of pre-emption, Putin can be expected to step up efforts to challenge US hegemony.

Putin has raised his sights, and is invoking the memory of Russia’s key role in the allied victory over the axis powers. He used the 60th anniversary of the victory in Europe to organize an impressive military parade, with participants in Soviet uniforms, to remind the world of the enormous contribution of the Soviet Union, which sacrificed 27 million lives in the titanic struggle against Hitler’s legions. Putin also described the break-up of the Soviet Union as the “greatest catastrophe of the century”. He stepped up the pace of Russia’s diplomacy by visiting the Middle East to re-establish Moscow’s credibility as a major player in global affairs.

Recent analyses of Russia’s assets and liabilities for resuming its previous world role have not painted a very promising picture. The assets are its enormous size, and rich natural resources. It also has a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons and missiles, and is the only power with a comprehensive all-round military capability, though its quality has suffered due to poor maintenance.

Yet a careful examination of the elements necessary for regaining the position of a superpower discloses major weaknesses, and raises doubts. We may go over those elements one by one. The first and perhaps a decisive element is the size and quality of Russia’s human resources. Russia’s population that was close to 160 million in 1991 has been declining steeply, and is currently estimated to be below 120 million.

In most years, the reduction in population has been around half a million, owing to a declining birth-rate, and greatly reduced longevity, owing to poor nutrition, increasing alcoholism, and the declining quality of health care. The current life expectancy stands at 53, as against over 70 in the US, Europe, China and Japan. Even in developing countries, including Pakistan and India, life expectancy is around 60. It is estimated that Russia’s total population might decline to below 100 million in 15 years. The percentage of people below 30 will decline even more seriously. Unless there is a dramatic change in these trends, Russia may even lack the manpower to run agriculture, industry and the services in its vast territory.

Putin has not only revived nostalgia for the Soviet period, but has also brought back the vogue for Stalin, for his firm and no-nonsense leadership, even though he carried out some of the bloodiest purges and massacres in history. Here, we have a paradox. While claiming to honour democratic values, Putin is reviving Stalinism, as the recipe for the solution of Russia’s problems.

There is no doubt this has touched a responsive chord among a large number of middle-aged Russians, who believe that they need to revive the harsh discipline, and commitment to national prestige and progress that Stalin stood for, forgetting his excesses and disdain for human suffering. The younger generation sees the need to adopt the political and economic liberalism that has facilitated western advances, and is attracting the former Soviet republics and satellites.

The pace at which states previously in the Russian sphere of influence are breaking away, and seeking association with the European Union suggests that the Stalinist alternative Putin is advocating is not likely to achieve the goal of advancing Russia’s influence. Ukraine and Georgia are both looking to Europe, with US encouragement. It is only a matter of time before others follow suit, though hardliners of the communist past are being patronized by Russia in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

When the itinerary of President Bush, who had been invited to attend the celebration of Victory Day in Moscow on May 9 was made known, Moscow actually lodged a protest with Washington over a move perceived as hostile to Russia’s legitimate interests. However, President Bush is unrelenting in preaching democracy, which he is now pushing everywhere, including China and Russia as well as the Islamic world.

Russia’s diplomacy under Putin has continued the post-Cold War efforts to build countervailing friendships, to balance the US pursuit of hegemony. Relations with China and India are stressed, and economic and political ties with Iran pursued despite Washington’s vendetta against Tehran. However, Russia has to back the non-proliferation agenda of the UN, which the US is pushing. Washington is also focusing increasingly on Russia’s failure to safeguard its stockpiles of nuclear material, and the possibility that some of it may have fallen into the wrong hands.

Putin has three more years to go, if he honours the constitutional provision for two presidential terms. Taking all the factors cited it does not look certain that Russia will rise again to become one of the great powers of the world. The decline in population and polarization between Stalinists and liberals are weakening the country, within which conquered ethnic minorities are becoming restive. Russia’s sphere of influence is shrinking, and the country itself is strongly resisting its integration either with Europe, or Asia.

Will the contraction of human resources be reversed? Will Russia display the flexibility to keep its enormous territory together or will Stalinist style repression deepen divisions? Will its economy become truly competitive, or lag behind on account of continuing contradictions between central control and modern management practices? All these are the imponderables that surround the future role of the world’s largest country.

WAY back in 1983, on a visit to Quetta, I had visited an Afghan refugee camp on the outskirts of the city. At that time the war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan was at its height. The Geneva talks were nowhere on the horizon, and no one in his wildest dreams believed that the Russians would withdraw from Afghanistan.

The refugee camps were rich recruiting ground for the Mujahideen, although Pakistan persistently denied that its soil was in any way being used for training fighters for the Afghan resistance. It claimed that its only role was that of hosting the three million plus refugees who had sought sanctuary on Pakistani territory.

When I spoke to a number of refugees then — more than two decades ago — a very large number of them categorically said that they did not really expect to go back home. Some of them, who were men of resources, made it clear that they planned building up their lives in Pakistan. Others also whispered to me that they knew how much of the aid — arms and money — flowing into the country from the West for the refugees was being diverted to the “Pakistani middlemen” who were growing rich in the process. “We will claim our share one day,” the refugee who appeared to be acting as the spokesman for the others had said.

It had all sounded so bizarre back in 1983. But today it seems so credible. Last Friday, a report was released which gave the findings of a census of Afghan refugees conducted by the federal population census organization with financial and technical assistance from the UNHCR (the UN refugee agency). This was the first time that that such an exercise has ever been carried out. The report made some significant disclosures.

First, it gave the number of Afghan refugees in Pakistan as 3.04 million. That means that the several attempts at repatriation since 1989 when the Russian forces pulled out of the country notwithstanding, there are as many Afghan DPs (displaced persons) in Pakistan today as there were in the eighties in the camps. According to UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, Angelina Jolie, who visited Islamabad recently, at one time there were 4.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.

However, some informed sources say that at the height of the Afghan war Pakistan had given shelter to nearly six million Afghan refugees — three million in the camps and three million scattered in the cities.

Secondly, as the Afghan census report states 82 per cent of the current refugees (that is, 2.5 million) are unwilling to return home by March 2006 when the tripartite agreement between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the UNHCR for the voluntary repatriation of the refugees expires.

Thirdly, 40 per cent of the refugees cited lack of security in Afghanistan as the stumbling block to their return, whereas 80 per cent spoke of absence of livelihood and 60 per cent spoke of lack of shelter. These findings are significant, for they show that normality has still not returned to many parts of Afghanistan after it has been ravaged by war for 25 years. But it is not so much the law and order situation that is a deterrent to the refugees’ return. The economic factors are more important.

What do the results of this survey establish about the Afghan refugees in Pakistan? Now we know that in the absence of a scientifically conducted census, Pakistan has constantly underestimated the strength of the Afghans in this country.

Even if we set aside this number game, which is not unimportant if one is to plan systematically, the present state of the refugees has serious implications for their future in this country. With an overwhelming majority of them today wanting to stay on here, at least 2.5 million refugees will remain in Pakistan at the end of the voluntary repatriation process in 2005. The preponderance of children among the refugees — the UNHCR states that 62 per cent of the returnees in 2003 were under 18 years old — points to the absence of an effective family planning programme among the Afghans. With a higher growth rate, the number of Afghan refugees will multiply rapidly. Are we heading for another human catastrophe?

The UNHCR initially played a positive role in providing shelter, education, health care and food aid to the refugees housed in the camps. The commission has also been a big help in repatriating refugees, especially by virtue of its presence on the other side of the Durand Line. Now that Pakistan and Afghanistan are looking into the matter jointly with the active cooperation of the UNHCR, one hopes that the issue of the remaining refugees is resolved before the UNHCR winds up its operations in this country.

If the security situation in Afghanistan continues to be volatile, many of the DPs would be deterred from returning. But it is the economic reconstruction of Afghanistan that has assumed more importance because the refugees appear to be more concerned about their job prospects.

The Return Commission Working Group in Kabul sent a delegation to Pakistan recently to reassure the refugees that they would be welcome to return and pick up the threats of their lives from where they had left off. President Karzai’s government has set up special courts to address property disputes between the returnees and the Afghans who stayed back and occupied abandoned dwellings and land.

The UNHCR and numerous NGOs have helped provide training in various skills to the refugees to facilitate their return. All this requires funds and the UNHCR has appealed to the international community for aid. If all the refugees cannot be repatriated in the next year or so, they will be inclined to stay on. In that case, it is important that those who remain should not become a burden on this country. This could be done by carrying out a qualitative assessment of those who stay back to determine their economic and educational status to facilitate a plan to decide on a future course of action.

Those who are economically productive here and cannot return right away may be granted work visas for five years and be allowed to pay visits to Afghanistan to assess their prospects so that they are in a position to take a decision on this issue. Others may be expatriated in stages to give time to the Afghan government to absorb them in their home country. Meanwhile, those who are engaged in a profession should be organized in such a way that they can return with their businesses.

Thus one hopes that the refugee problem created by the big powers who fought their cold war battles in Afghanistan will be resolved to the satisfaction of all in the near future. It is the moral responsibility of the world community, especially the US and Russia, to provide funds for the repatriation operation.

True, many in Pakistan attribute many of this country’s troubles to the Afghans — the Kalashnikov culture, heroin addiction, environmental degradation, violence and economic problems. But we should also not forget that the situation was exploited to the hilt by the military government of General Zia for its own political and economic gains. Many landlords and kiln owners also used the refugees as indentured labour. The people of Pakistan are still paying the wages of their leaders’ sins. Can the refugees be blamed for it?

IN our kind of society, the best thing that regular elections can do is to separate the chaff from the grain. Those who do not deserve or cannot hold their own, keep dropping on the way, while those who keep on going may not necessarily be any good but they do have some people to vote for them. Several others are able to win at the hustings because their voters are not able to see through them.

This sounds like a generalization, and is one. That is why it is contested by some pessimists who insist that there is no grain but only chaff in Pakistan’s politics, otherwise the quality of the elected members should have improved after four general elections plus-one (the one being that of October 2002 held under the auspices of General Pervez Musharraf), but they made no difference. That is true, but my answer could be that those elected would have behaved better if the top man or woman had set an example by their good performance.

Our misfortune is that for long years elections took place rarely because of frequent military takeovers. The result was that the grain and the chaff went on mixing till you couldn’t tell them apart. This was unfair to the grain of course, but the chaff managed to have a good time till one of the infrequent elections came up as a separator.

It does not take a high IQ to understand that I am talking of genuine and fake politicians. Perhaps these words are not exactly what I need. The real expressions should be politicians with an appealing programme and a bit of character, and those without either of the two. Even these can be further broken up. A politician may have no set programme but enjoys influence in a certain area. Example: Malik Ghulam Mustafa Khar.

On the other hand, he may have a sound and useful programme and enjoy enviable integrity but possess no personal charm to win votes. Example: Air Marshal Asghar Khan. A few rare ones may have both a programme and charisma. Example: Ms Benazir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif. They would have been great successes indeed if they had only the sense to distinguish between personal interest and the national interest. But alas! that breed is not found in our politics. Another misfortune.

I have not included in these categories the not-so-rare politician who has nothing to offer to the people by way of a programme or a manifesto but manages to win at the polling booths because he has a lot of money and the instincts of a card-sharper. Nobody asks him where his money comes from. Since the answer is never going to be true, why waste time on the question?

The five elections I have referred to were not of a regular series, all of them being circumstantial. A special feature of many of the participants was that they had continued to receive the attention of the press because they had been something in the preceding political era. In Pakistan, if you have ever been the head of a tiny political party (or a party faction), or been a provincial governor or chief minister even for a day, you come to be known as ex-chairman of that party or ex-governor or ex-chief minister for the rest of your life. If nothing else, the appellation “prominent political leader” is always there to give you distinction.

The press can justify its stand by saying that, during the decades I am talking about, it had no means of assessing the political or personal worth and popularity of any politician. Technically that may be correct. But journalists are supposed to be sharp and intelligent and even prescient. Many of them claim to be know-alls, with a reputation for their ability to fathom the uncertain depths of politics and coming up with near-perfect analyses of the political situation at any time.

Given these attributes, how could they not know that a certain politician was now a spent force and was a leader only up to the moment when he was rejected by the people’s ballot? It is a known fact apart from the usual ploy of holding news conferences every now and then, every politician worth the name maintains close and friendly contacts with senior journalists.

Let me tell you about our late friend Mumtaz Malik, though it is not strictly relevant to my topic. For something like 30 years he was an institution in Lahore’s journalistic fraternity. He was not top-notcher in the press corps, but he had a large clientele of second-tier politicians for whom he drafted press statements on a variety of subjects.

His permanent clientele however was among legislators, many of whom he kept supplied with questions they could table in the provincial assembly. These were framed by Mumtaz Malik keeping in mind the areas the members came from and the current local problems, and were supplied to the MPAs. They never asked supplementaries for they hardly ever knew anything about the topics. The object was to remain in the news, and this our friend guaranteed.

With a friendly and obliging press to build up their image, political personalities whom an election sent into oblivion, had, over the decades, begun to believe in their own popularity and invincibility. So, their failure at the hustings must have come as a terrible shock. How to swallow the bitter fact that they were no longer political leaders but nonentities. (“Our family has served the people for three generations and this is what we get for our services.”)

By the way, I have never seen the word “leader” used for any politician in foreign newspapers, except the title “Leader of the Opposition” in the context of parliamentary practice. How do all those countries in Europe and other parts of the world manage to run their day-to-day politics without leaders? With us, every politician is a leader, though nobody bothers to ask whom he leads and where to!

IT IS unlikely that any congressional committee in the United States will ever again invite any British member of parliament to appear before it as a hostile witness. Especially if the MP’s name happens to be George Galloway.

Actually, to be fair, it must be pointed out that the invitation was more or less coerced out the senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, after it regurgitated claims that Galloway was among the politicians who had benefited by illegally exploiting the United Nations’ oil-for-food programme for Iraq.

The charge came less than a week after Galloway was re-elected to the House of Commons from a London seat on an explicitly anti-war platform, narrowly defeating a staunchly pro-war Labour Party candidate. This led to speculation that Republicans in the senate may have been trying to do Tony Blair a favour. If that was the case, the ploy backfired. Badly.

An indignant Galloway said, “The committee has never spoken to me, never written to me and never asked me a single question, and did not even acknowledge last year my offer to go and speak to them.” He demanded the right to give evidence, and the committee acquiesced.

On his arrival in Washington last week, the British MP made it clear that his posture would be that of an accuser rather than the accused. On Capitol Hill, he evoked a none-too-subtle parallel with the notorious hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s by beginning his testimony thus: “Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, and neither has anyone on my behalf.”

Directing his invective at the subcommittee’s chairman, Norm Coleman - a rabid right-winger who has lately devoted considerable energy to the cause of hounding Kofi Annan out of the US - Galloway went on: “Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice.”

The committee, he said, had traduced his name around the world without asking him a single question. Its dossier claimed that he had “many meetings” with Saddam Hussein, whereas in fact he had only met the former Iraqi dictator twice, in 1994 and 2002. That was the same number of times that Donald Rumsfeld had met Saddam, the difference being that “Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.”

Declaring that his record of opposition to Saddam was considerably more consistent than that of the US and British governments, Galloway proceeded to poke holes in the committee’s flimsy evidence against him, pointing out that similar allegations had been made in the past by The Daily Telegraph in Britain and the Christian Science Monitor in the US, and that he had won libel actions against both newspapers.

The Telegraph and the Monitor had based their reports on documents said to have been discovered at the Iraqi foreign ministry after the fall of Baghdad. These documents turned out to be crude forgeries - and it would be extremely interesting to find out at whose behest they were forged: Iraqi collaborators eager to please their new masters, or US and British officials. The senate claimed to be basing its charges on a different set of documents, supposedly dealing with a different time period, reportedly found at the oil ministry - but it has turned out to be wrong on that count, as the Telegraph itself has admitted.

One new element in the Senate’s dossier is a statement from former Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan implicating Galloway - but the MP wondered how much credence could be attached to something reportedly said by a man facing war crimes charges and thought to be incarcerated at Abu Ghraib.

Before concluding his statement with references to the corruption instituted in Iraq by American companies in the aftermath of the invasion as well as emerging evidence that in many cases the US turned a blind eye to violations of the erstwhile sanctions, Galloway mounted an eloquent and impassioned assault on the neo-conservative policies that led to the disaster in Iraq.

“I gave my political life’s blood,” he said, “to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq, which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of [whom] died before they even knew they were Iraqis...

“I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies,” he told Coleman, citing false claims about weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi links with Al Qaeda and Baghdad’s connection with the atrocity of September 11. “I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning.

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong, and 100,000 people paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

During Galloway’s invective, there were gasps and occasional outbursts of laughter from the gallery, as the audience listened in disbelief. Such words are seldom heard in the vicinity of Capitol Hill. It must have appeared to some that the senate had unwittingly imported a one-man opposition from across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, it is likely that the lesson will be lost on the Democrats, the vast majority of whom have a shameful record of acquiescence to the disastrous actions of the Bush administration.

The American media for the most part ignored Galloway’s excoriating diatribe, but among those who witnessed it, there was not the slightest doubt about the result. “Galloway by a knockout - before round five” was the reported verdict of one observer of Capitol Hill politics. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, by no means unsympathetic to the Bush doctrine, headlined its report “Brit fries senators in oil”. Former weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote: “There is at least one politician ... that the citizens of Britain can be proud of, regardless of how one views his politics ... Mr Galloway, please accept from this American three cheers for a job well done.”

In Britain, there were indications of a new respect for Galloway even among his political opponents. As former Private Eye editor Richard Ingrams noted in The Observer last Sunday, “The general satisfaction here perhaps has less to do with whether or not people supported the invasion of Iraq and more simply to do with seeing pompous Americans made to look foolish.” Ingrams relished the teetotal Galloway’s impolite but not particularly inaccurate description of the pro-war British journalist Christopher Hitchens as “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay”.

There were manifestations aplenty of the British media’s deep-seated hostility against Galloway following his electoral success in the Bethnal and Row constituency. The BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, for instance, asked him whether he was “proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in parliament”. Galloway aptly dismissed it as “a preposterous question”. The bias is unlikely to wither away in the wake of his Capitol Hill triumph: Galloway. The largely conservative British press loves nothing better than to bait left-wing mavericks, be it Arthur Scargill or Tony Benn or Tam Dalyell or Ken Livingstone. But even their ideological foes occasionally acknowledge that British politics would be profoundly impoverished by the absence of such figures.

Galloway’s fascination with the politics of the Arab world dates back to a 1975 encounter with a Palestinian student in the Labour Party’s Dundee branch office, in his native Scotland. Two years later, he visited Beirut and decided he would, as he said in court last November during the Telegraph libel case, “devote the rest of my life to the Palestinian and Arab cause, whatever the consequences for my own political future”. In his memoir, I’m Not The Only One, he wrote: “Over time I came to love Iraq like a man loves a woman.” His second wife, incidentally, is a Palestinian scientist, Dr Amineh Abu Zayyad.

Although his belief in God and Judgment Day prevents him from being a Marxist, Galloway told a journalist in 2002: “I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation today about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the world.” On his wall the journalist found pictures of John Lennon (“Imagine is the socialist anthem. I believe in every word of it”), Che Guevara (“Because he sacrificed everything for the revolutionary cause ... and because he was a person with poetry in his soul”) and, somewhat incongruously, Winston Churchill (“without him we would have been overrun by fascism”).

Last year, The Observer’s David Smith concluded a profile of Galloway by saying, “The Commons will be poorer without his oratory” - assuming that his expulsion from the Labour Party had sealed the fate of his parliamentary career. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. But Galloway proved it wrong six months later. Now, within the space of three weeks, as The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman put it, he’s given Tony Blair a bloody nose and Norm Coleman a black eye. The Respect MP could hardly have wished for a more auspicious start to a new parliamentary term, and his performance will henceforth be viewed with greater anticipation than before.

E-mail: mahirali1@gmail.com