It was here that the ruling Congress was to inform the Left whether it was going ahead with the nuclear deal with the US or not. They were also to be shown the safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Instead, talking to the media on board the plane in which he was flying to Tokyo to attend the G-8 meeting, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a cryptic statement about India’s decision to approach the IAEA. The Left came to know of this from a news agency which rang up to seek the reaction of CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat. Being a hardliner, he was furious.

The Left parties had not been shown the safeguards agreement as promised. However, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee claims that the summary was shown to them. The anger of the Left parties is understandable because they were so considerate that they had announced not to withdraw their support to the government until the prime minister returned from abroad. Indeed, the 59-member Left has sustained the government in office from its inception some four and a half years ago.

For the Left, it is a let-down because one assurance or the other came from the Congress, even from its president Sonia Gandhi, that some way would be found to allay the Left’s fears. It was confident that the parting of ways would come in a manner where the clash of ideologies was seen not as a spat between the Congress and the Left. It had also prepared a white paper, listing the government’s failures, for release at the time of its formal rejection of the nuclear deal.

In the end it turned out to be an anticlimax. There was no opportunity of telling the Congress leaders to their face that the Left felt betrayed. The Left was reduced to a position where it merely gave a letter to President Pratibha Patil, informing her that it had withdrawn support and suggesting an early session of parliament to prove whether the Congress had a majority. However, the moment the Left had handed over the letter to the president, the government was reduced to a minority and, technically, not in a position to go ahead with the deal.

How soon the president convenes the parliament session is her decision. The BJP and the Left put together do not constitute a majority, and as such she is not constitutionally bound to summon parliament immediately. It goes without saying that her discretion is bound to be in favour of the Congress because she has come to occupy her position entirely on Sonia Gandhi’s initiative.

The other factor helping the Congress is the support that the Samajwadi Party (SP) of Mulayam Singh Yadav from UP has announced. The party, constituted as today, has 38 members in the Lok Sabha. This is enough to help the Congress cross the magic figure of 272 for a simple majority. The SP has also sent a letter of support to the president. It has demanded certain steps in the fields of telecommunications and petroleum. Does this mean that the SP’s support is conditional?

The Manmohan Singh government had two options: one, to have the Lok Sabha session and prove its majority or, two, submit its resignation and hold elections. The second option gave the Congress less time for preparation because the constitution has laid down that there should be at least one session of parliament convened within 180 days. If there is no further session of the present Lok Sabha, elections must take place by November to elect a new Lok Sabha, since the last session was in May.

The government has chosen the first option and wants to prove its majority on the floor of the Lok Sabha. If it succeeds, elections will be held in March-April as scheduled. It is apparent that the government wants time for the spiralling inflation — now hovering around 10 per cent — to come down.

The Congress has a strength of 153 and the SP’s support makes the total 191. This means it will need the support of another 81 members to arrive at a simple majority. This is not difficult because the DMK has 40 members and it is already in the Congress’s kitty because the DMK is part of the ruling coalition.

However, there are rumours that the SP is not a united house. Twelve of its members may be enticed away by Mayawati, the UP chief minister who is Mulayam Singh’s rival. If this happens, the Congress will fall short by five members. Obviously there will be horse-trading and many houses from the corporate sector are already in the arena. The quoted rate for a member is reportedly Rs10m.

Manmohan Singh can sign the nuclear deal straight away. There is no legal bar on him because the constitution does not say that an international treaty has to be approved by parliament. Yet, Mukherjee has announced that the government will go to the IAEA only after getting the vote of confidence.

In the entire process, the Left has lost the most. It has withdrawn support when the Congress does not need it. If the Manmohan Singh government wins the vote of confidence, it will have proved that the Left’s threat, repeated many a time in the last one year, did not matter even in the first instance. If the government were to fall, the Left would be seen siding with the BJP to pull down a secular set-up. It would look as if the target of the Left was not the deal but the Congress.

I personally think that the Left ought to have put all the pressure, as it did, but should not have been a party to a position where a secular government could fall. The party to pick up the pieces is the BJP which is an out-and-out communal set-up. What an irony that the Left has helped the BJP unwittingly. History is a mute witness to the election of Hitler by the social democratic elements in Germany.

The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.

DR A.Q. Khan recently spoke about the great American ‘conspiracy’ to destroy Pakistan. He was of the view, aired in a television programme, that an American think tank had predicted the break-up of the country by 2015.

Furthermore, the frontier province will join Afghanistan, Sindh will find its own way and Balochistan will opt out as well.

This will leave Punjab which according to the great scientist represents about 60 per cent of Pakistan and has the nuclear weapons as well. Since Punjab does not have any animosity with India or Afghanistan, it will be forced to sign the NPT and thus surrender the nuclear weapons. Interestingly, Dr Samar Mubarakmand, who is another shining star of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment, also subscribed to the theory that there is a conspiracy to destroy the country.

Although there are some who do not believe in such a conspiracy theory, there are many who are convinced of the presence of a serious threat to the country. The war and conflict that has engulfed major parts of the country might not just be a case of inept policies. External forces always provide an impetus to an internal conflict. In fact, as is obvious in India’s case as well, the involvement of external forces deepen conflicts which survive due to mismanagement by the state’s bureaucracy.

The problem in Pakistan’s case is that it does not take a lot to deepen the conflict in a situation where the internal forces, such as the ruling elite, are completely blinded by greed. The ruling classes are so focused on their interests that they fail to make long-term policies or provide direction to the people. It does not take a nuclear physicist to see that the politicians will fail to push back the military which might return in the days to come.

Such an eventuality would further weaken the already fragile fabric of the state. Pakistan’s ruling elite is mercenary and depends on foreign capital inflows. Therefore it has failed to plan for the country’s political, economic and social progress. The internal friction will intensify the confusion and conflict which already exists.

The policymakers appear divided between their inability to curb their own greed and fighting the external forces through supporting elements. This will further drag the country towards chaos and conflict. We cannot support foreign forces to attract their capital and at the same time try to curb their influence by producing other violent elements. Mir Jaffar and Mir Sadiq are not just names of individuals but convoluted policies as well.

But referring to Dr Khan’s prediction, there are a few points in his claims which are highly interesting such as his belief that the nuclear weapons will eventually be retained by Punjab in the new dispensation. To reiterate his opinion, Punjab will be forced to sign the NPT and give up its nuclear weapons once it is all that remains of Pakistan. Logically speaking, the concentration of 60-70 nuclear warheads (supposing this is what Pakistan has now) in such a small territory will be dangerous and the international community will feel nervous about it.

Dr Khan believes that since Punjab does not have any animosity with India or Afghanistan, it will have no reason to retain the nuclear weapons. One would like to remind the great doctor of a couple of things.

First, in this scenario, Punjab will feel more insecure and thus will have a greater reason to retain its weapons. A Pakistan concentrated in Punjab will be a landlocked territory with no access to a seaport or source of water. If one is to believe that the other parts of the federating unit will break away, it is hard to imagine that these units will be friendly enough to negotiate facilities like access to seaports, water, gas, oil and other resources. If the military and nuclear weapons are concentrated in just one territory, then whoever has the military might will try to hold on to it to force the breakaway units to cooperate.

Second, Dr Khan’s statement does not reflect any understanding of our national history. For instance, he has completely forgotten that bad relations and friction with India is a fetish of the Urdu-speaking and Punjabi elite. The fact that Altaf Hussain has gone and made statements in India or that the two Punjabs are trying to improve trade relations does not hide the fact that the obsession with 1947 is limited to Punjabis and Pakistanis of North Indian origin.

Historically, these two ethnic groups have dominated the Pakistani state and its policymaking. These are also the two groups most affected by the partition of the Indian subcontinent. So it is a fallacious assumption that Punjab does not have problems with India and Afghanistan. The policy of strategic depth, which was meant to create a friendly government in Afghanistan during the 1990s, was partly conceived by a GHQ dominated for many years by officers from Punjab.

The institutional memory of the military and civil bureaucracies does not look at its traditional rivals sympathetically. The belief is that India will never leave any stone unturned to destroy Pakistan. Furthermore, the belief is that it has now paired up with the US to harm Pakistan.

But the more important issue is the ease with which Dr Khan has assumed that the other federating units will secede from the union. Is this just an individual thought or the thinking of the deeper establishment as well? The statement reflects an utter lack of trust in the smaller provinces. The message between the lines is that since these people are lesser Pakistanis they will leave the federation at the first opportunity. Such thinking is problematic because it does not address the problems faced by the people of the smaller provinces.

It may be a fact that external forces are involved in pinpricking in Balochistan but this does not address the larger issue of the disenchantment felt by the Baloch people. For so many years the state has ignored its own people and partnered with tribal leaders who are now being blamed for the lack of development in the province. The same applies to Sindh and the Frontier. Despite the fact that a lot of Sindhi landowners have always remained part of the government, the people were punished severely during the 1980s and the 1990s.

If Dr Khan and the rest of the establishment look hard they will see that the federation and its nuclear weapons can be saved if the powers that be were to show lesser callousness and greed.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

ayesha.ibd@gmail.com

AT a time of an economic downturn and the requisite accompanying fiscal tightening, our politicians’ appearance matters to bring home the point of empathising with the classes impacted by spiralling food and fuel prices.

In the larger scheme of things, the sartorial choices politicians make act as signifiers of their communion with their people, forging a spirited sense of nationalism.

Anthropologist Emma Tarlo presents the case of Mohandas Gandhi in Clothing Matters (Chicago, 1996) who successfully differentiated himself from his own past, his comrades, and the coloniser by adopting his trademark white, homespun khadi. His sartorial style became integral to advancing his Hindswaraj. In choosing to adopt a vernacular mode of dress, Tarlo contends, Gandhi captured the imagination of millions, flaming the movement he spurred towards the 1947 decolonisation of India.

Such is the power of symbolism. The spinning wheel and loincloth became the rudiments of the Gandhian architecture. These successfully countered the British Raj’s heavy-handed weaponry and tactics by unfastening the Raj’s grip on a dejected, disempowered populace. The power of clothes is potent in Tarlo’s narrative.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, despite his western proclivities, also realised the appeal of the native dress code. His signature ensemble consisting of the Jinnah cap (the Karakul hat was named after him for having made it popular), sherwani and white churidar pyjama closely resonated with the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh. Even though this attire wasn’t as generic as Gandhi’s and it certainly wasn’t the uniform dress of subcontinental Muslims, Jinnah’s transition, albeit merely symbolic, from Savile Row to Lucknow’s labyrinth nonetheless fortified Muslim nationalism in united India.

It will, however, be an exaggerated claim that in case Gandhi and Jinnah hadn’t embraced these powerful sartorial symbols, their visions for self-rule and two states may not have been realised. But it is true to claim that their oratory and struggle gained a new meaning through the embrace of native garb. Even though Jinnah may not have had a command of Urdu or Gujarati, it can be said without diminishing the power of translation that his listeners derived meaning from his dress and demeanour.

Democrats in India have proudly, not necessarily out of jingoism but inhered cultural practice, worn clothes that belong to their land. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi to Manmohan Singh, the dress has been decidedly vernacular even though the cuts and styles reflected the zeitgeist.

Rulers in Pakistan have, however, oscillated between indigenous and foreign garb. The first democratically elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, popularised the shalwar kameez across the country’s class, ethnic and racial lines. That did not restrict Bhutto to the dress he electioneered in during 1970. He every now and then reverted to his meticulously tailored suits, continuing the tradition espoused by the post-independence Pakistani leadership.

Still, sartorial iconography remained powerful during the Bhutto years, arguably distinguishing Bhutto from Gen Ayub and symbolising their divergent ideologies. Marking Bhutto’s socialist leanings, he brought to Pakistan fusion dressing not seen among its politicians before, with his Nehru jackets and Mao caps. He bridged his Sindhi and worldly moorings, building at the time a socialist political party that remains Pakistan’s single largest political force with grassroots representation across the federation. Clearly, the western-dressed Gen Ayub couldn’t cobble together a sustainable political party, largely because he was an unelected leader and that coupled with his departure from traditional dressing made him appear wooden.

Another telling case is of former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s penchant for persisting with his hard-to-shed banking cast. His suits, immaculate though they were, made him removed from the shalwar kameez-clad masses. Compounding his failure to root himself were his apolitical past and parasitic premiership subsisting off of the presidency. His attempts at bespoke shalwar kameez, distinctly Aziz’s, failed to conform to local tastes and preferences. With his departure, his brand of shalwar kameez fizzled out as well.

The reason why Indian leaders and politicians have consistently stayed native sartorially is because of nationalism, which is not as acute in our country. Gandhi remained loyal to his transformation upon his return to India, not somersaulting between the loincloth and English-tailored suiting. The straddling of western and regional sartorial idioms by Pakistani politicians, on the other hand, has exacerbated our collective national identities and agendas.

Perhaps the post-independence Pakistani leadership’s wholehearted acceptance of western clothing may have been a counter-reaction to Indian expression of nationalism through native garb. The implicit logic of western suiting in the Pakistani mindset seems one of upward social mobility and aristocratic distinction. But if Jinnah and Bhutto could popularise their variants of the national dress, the present leaders of the PPP and PML-N must try at least to re-establish that missing link in this increasingly Manichean world between the political elites and the toiling masses.

SCHOLARS of the 20th-century writer Franz Kafka were in a state of suspense Tuesday night at the news that the remains of his estate, which have been hoarded in a Tel Aviv flat for decades, may soon be revealed.

Previously unseen documents, postcards, sketches and personal belongings of the Czech-Jewish writer, who wrote in German, have been gathering dust in the home of Esther Hoffe, the former secretary of Kafka’s friend and executor Max Brod since his death in 1968. Hoffe’s refusal to relinquish the documents led to a literary game of cat and mouse between her and the state of Israel, under pressure from the country’s cultural elite, which on one occasion even led to her arrest on suspicion of smuggling Kafka’s writings out of the country.

Now, following her death at the age of 101, Kafka lovers hope the row may have come to an end. Researchers are ready to pounce on the contents of Hoffe’s flat, fully expecting the items will throw new light on the mysterious writer who died at the age of 41, as well as his friendship with Brod, his greatest champion.

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe’s damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

The items have a complex provenance reaching back to 1924, when Kafka died of tuberculosis in Vienna. Brod took over Kafka’s estate, including several unpublished manuscripts, and famously defied his friend’s instructions to burn them. In 1939, the night before the Nazis entered Prague, Brod fled the city with two suitcases containing what he could of the estate. He escaped via Romania to Palestine, later moving the archive to the safety of Switzerland during the Suez crisis in 1956.

In 1961 he gave most of the manuscripts to the Bodleian library at Oxford University at the request of Kafka’s heirs, but kept hold of The Trial because he said it had been a gift to him from Kafka. Nearly 30 years later, Hoffe sold the manuscript of Kafka’s novel for a record GBP1m at Sotheby’s.

Few doubt that there are other treasures waiting to be found, due to tantalising utterances Hoffe made over the years about Brod’s estate .

On one occasion, at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion airport, Hoffe was arrested on suspicion of illegally smuggling valuable archive material out of the country. Police found letters by Kafka as well as his travel journal in her luggage. Following that incident she allowed employees from Israel’s state archive to catalogue the items she had, but was accused of holding back key documents.

Repeated attempts by academics to persuade her to give the items in her possession to the national library in Jerusalem failed.

The German publisher Artemis and Winkler paid Hoffe a five-figure advance for Brod’s diaries in the 1980s, but has still to receive them. Hoffe let it be known in 1993 that she had transferred them to a bank vault in Tel Aviv to which she is still believed to have had access when she died. The legal battle between the publisher and her heirs is still in progress.

“Esther was always afraid that someone would steal these materials from her,” Avital Ben Horin, a close friend of Brod’s, told Ha’aretz, the Tel Aviv daily. Describing Hoffe’s flat as an “unsuitable” location for the estate because of Tel Aviv’s humidity, she added: “But it was impossible to convince her.”

Commentators have remarked that the story could have stemmed from Kafka’s own pen. Kafka, the man still considered a literary puzzle 84 years after his death, “is causing the world to hold its breath,” Germany’s Die Welt newspaper wrote. Ha’aretz, which broke the story, called it “Kafkaesque”, turning to the very phrase inspired by Kafka’s own writings to describe something which is elusive and menacingly complex.

Much to the frustration of academics, archivists and the Israeli government, Hoffe, who became Brod’s lover following the death of his wife, was said to have jealously clung to the papers which Brod left to her in his will because of her wish to protect intimate details of Brod’s life. It will now be up to her septuagenarian daughters, Ruth and Hava, to decide on the estate’s fate. But according to reports, Israeli authorities have indicated their willingness to intervene to save what is considered an invaluable piece of Jewish cultural heritage.

“This is really very exciting, particularly if there are documents left that have not yet been published,” said Professor Freddie Rokem, a lecturer in theatre arts at Tel Aviv University, who organised a conference to honour Brod on his 100th anniversary in 1984. “Hoffe more or less inherited the suitcase of Kafka papers from Brod. The question is whether she knew how much it was worth from the beginning, or did she really only learn its true value later on?”

Josef Cermak, author of several books on Kafka, said he hoped the release of the items might help clear up quarrels in the literary world in this, the 125th anniversary of his birth, which is being marked with events around the globe.

“There are so many mistruths which have been written about Kafka. For academic purposes it is crucial that we get to see what the unpredictable Miss Hoffe has kept from us for so long.”

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish family. His most famous novel, The Trial, published in 1925, became a symbol of 20th-century totalitarianism and gave birth to the word “Kafkaesque,” used to describe everything from entrapment in bureaucracy to the absurdity of life. His other works included The Metamorphosis (1915) and The Castle (1926). The themes of alienation, persecution, and hopelessness run through his writing, which attracted little attention until after his death in 1924 from tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna, aged 41.

— The Guardian, London