The Foreign Office statement came not so much in the context of India as it was in response to a query about the UN secretary-general’s statement on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This long forgotten treaty continues to be on the UN’s agenda. Since 1996 when the CTBT was opened to signature, 176 states have signed it though only 125 have ratified it. But it is still a dead letter because the signatures and ratifications of all the 44 states with nuclear weapons/reactors specified in the treaty for its coming into force have not yet been deposited — the US, Israel, India and Pakistan apart from seven others, are the defaulters. It was to them that Mr Kofi Annan appealed while addressing the fourth conference on facilitating the CTBT’s enforcement. Evidently, by reaffirming its moratorium on nuclear testing, Pakistan has not really promoted the cause of the CTBT’s coming into force. At best it has somewhat allayed Mr Annan’s concerns about nuclear testing.

It is not surprising that the nuclear disarmament accords which were concluded in the Cold War years — the CTBT was preceded by a partial test ban treaty — are at a dead end. Thus, the NPT, which came into force in 1970, is now running out of steam as the failure of its review conference in May this year clearly established. The major factor for this is the major nuclear powers’ refusal to relinquish the hegemony they acquire by virtue of these arms. The five members of the NPT’s nuclear club do not wish to grant that status to any other country. They do not want to relinquish their nuclear weapons either. The US, which signed the CTBT, has refused to ratify it because the Republican Party under the influence of the neocons has controlled the Senate and does not want to accept any self-restraints for the US. As a result, neither Russia nor China have ratified the CTBT. Although India and Pakistan have managed to ease the strains in their relationship and have announced a moratorium on testing, they have not even signed the treaty. Israel’s refusal to sign has kept Iran and Egypt out as well. A concerted effort is needed to persuade all the non-entrants to give up their obduracy. This should not be impossible considering that none of these states has carried out a nuclear test lately.

THERE has been no dearth of electoral exercises this month, offering a disparate range of experiences and raising an intriguing range of questions about the nature of modern democracy. Among the most pertinent issues are those raised by the inconclusive results in Germany and New Zealand, ostensibly attributable in both cases to similar systems of proportional representation.

For a very sharp contrast, look no further than Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak supposedly made a huge concession by allowing competitors into the presidential race as he strolled past the post without breaking a sweat, winning his fifth six-year term with 88.6 per cent of the vote.

It’s a bit of a comedown: the single-candidate “contests”, Mubarak’s official total used to be in the high nineties (a conceit matched by his now imprisoned contemporary, Saddam Hussein). Complaints about irregularities from also-rans such as the Ghad party’s Ayman Nour, who came second with 7.5 per cent, were summarily dismissed. A classic case, arguably, of democratic form with little tangible content. The official turnout of 23 per cent suggests most Egyptians are under no illusion about the value of their votes.

More than twice as many Afghans are believed to have exercised their right to franchise in the first elections for the Wolesi Jirga and provincial councils, a figure not to be scoffed at in view of the prevailing conditions, even though it is reportedly 20 per cent lower than the turnout for last year’s presidential poll.

An interesting aspect of Afghanistan’s experiment has been the eclectic nature of the candidates, including a range of those loosely described as warlords, as well as ex-Taliban such as Maulvi Qalamuddin, who not all that long ago headed the infamous department for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice, and former foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil. Qalamuddin refrains from praising the Taliban era, but claims its excesses were “misunderstood”; and he wouldn’t mind seeing Mullah Omar back in circulation. Mutawakil, meanwhile, has published a book in which he decries Osama bin Laden’s stinginess and laments the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

Such candidacies appear to complement President Hamid Karzai’s recent campaign against further foreign military operations in Afghanistan, hinting at moves towards inclusiveness that could, in the appropriate circumstances, be considered commendable. In lobbying for a new approach to the so-called war on terror, Karzai has implied that efforts ought to be concentrated on the Pakistan side of the border — an insinuation that would have been easier for Islamabad to rebut in the absence of the periodic military campaigns in Waziristan.

Reconciliation among all manner of Afghans is, of course, a worthwhile goal, and permitting marginally reformed Taliban to contest elections could turn out to be a clever means of defanging the militiamen whose insurgency has picked up steam this month. It’s worth remembering, though, that partyless elections in a militarized, feudalistic milieu are likelier to serve as a recipe for chaos than as a panacea.

Might the chaos turn out to be creative? In the Afghan context, that would be as unprecedented as it would be welcome. But there are no solid grounds for optimism just yet, nor are they likely to become obvious once the poll results are announced.

The same could be said about Poland, where the ballots were counted much quicker, and where the electorate has swung sharply from left to right. No post-communist Polish government has survived in office for more than a single term, and the ruling Democratic Left Alliance lost 30 per cent of its support between 2001 and this month, with the Law and Justice Party and the Civic Platform emerging as contenders for power in a right-of-centre coalition.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Polish contest has been the possibility of the two top government positions being held by twin brothers: Jaroslaw Kaczynski, as law and justice chief, is the leading contender for the prime ministerial post, while his brother Lech, the mayor of Warsaw, is running for president. Physically indistinguishable to most people, the Kaczynski twins have been in the public eye since co-starring in a movie as 11-year-olds back in 1962. If ensconced in power, the two of them may be able to swap roles, but that unique ability alone won’t qualify them to tackle Poland’s plethora of problems — a task at which the scandal-prone Left Alliance proved fairly inept.

In recent decades, parties with socialist or social-democratic credentials have been steered rightwards by the supposed neo-liberal “consensus” at the global level, whereby the long-established advantages of the welfare state have steadily been eroded, replaced by a stress on privatization, tax cuts (especially for the wealthy), and labour-market “flexibility” (which in effect deprives workers of many of their rights).

In fact, this “consensus” is anything but global: it is essentially dictated by transnational corporations and conglomerates in their insatiable thirst for profits, and translated into rules by the likes of the WTO and the IMF. What’s surprising and unfortunate is that so few governments are willing to buck this trend.

As a result, most of Europe’s social-democratic parties have increasingly become indistinguishable from their conservative rivals, which helps to explain why so few eyebrows were raised at the prospect of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s SPD forming a coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), after election results placed them neck and neck at around 35 per cent, with the remainder of the vote split between smaller parties further to the Left or Right.

Although Merkel — who models herself on Margaret Thatcher and, in a televised encounter with Schroeder, plagiarized a portion of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter — was projected to win handsomely, a couple of gaffes late in the campaign led to a reversal of fortunes.

The biggest winner in Germany was the Linkspartei — or Left Party — recently formed via a merger between former East German communists and disaffected socialists from SPD ranks. Its explicit rejection of neo-liberal economics evidently struck a chord in the eastern parts of the country, where economic conditions are particularly bleak.

(As a typical voter nostalgic for the pre-capitalist past put it: “I didn’t have to worry whether we had enough to eat. Brotchen [bread rolls] cost five pfennigs. People cared more about children. And if you were ill you didn’t have to wait to see a doctor. It was all free.”) The Linkspartei has won 54 seats (more than the Greens) in the Bundestag, but has thus far rejected the idea of a coalition with the SPD.

Schroeder and Merkel are to meet to thrash out the terms under which a possible coalition may be cobbled together, but most observers suspect any such arrangement won’t last too long. The confusion and potential instability is being blamed on Germany’s system of proportional representation, which accurately reflects the will of voters, but often necessitates tedious negotiations and unwieldy alliances.

Merkel’s CDU, for instance, won exactly the same proportion of the vote as Tony Blair’s Labour Party, but the latter boasts a solid parliamentary majority on the basis of Britain’s first-past-the-post system.

Similar arguments are being aired in the context of New Zealand, where Helen Clark’s Labour Party barely fended off a strong challenge from the National Party (which relied to some extent on borderline racist rhetoric). Clark is likely to continue as prime minister at the head of a minority government, or in coalition with a couple of smaller parties, but will be more vulnerable than before to shifting alliances.

All the same, it’s hardly reasonable to contend that proportional representation should be abandoned in favour of incontestably less democratic electoral methods in the interests of a higher probability of greater stability. Nor would it be fair to blame the electorate — not least those among it who do not bother to vote — for inconclusive results, amid growing evidence of intellectual and ideological bankruptcy among political establishments.

Greater product differentiation between the conservative and social-democratic wings of an establishment may be of some benefit, but increasing distrust of a political elite that kowtows to the neo-liberal creed and can seldom be bothered to contemplate less pernicious alternatives is a fairly widespread phenomenon. Just because its psephological consequences are somewhat less evident under systems designed to favour the more entrenched parties is hardly sufficient cause to step back towards less honest and less representative electoral modes.