AMBLING down the aisle during a Delhi-Karachi flight recently I came across an East Asian man rivetted to his laptop. He was glued to what could be a championship series of cockfights in which pairs of roosters, a sharp knife attached to their talons, were let loose on each other. The lacerating duels ended in a bloody mess with one or both birds collapsing into a mangled heap. Popular TV ‘debates’ have stolen a leaf from the cockfights.

As India’s scandalously opaque nuclear deal turned into political wheeling dealing last week, the assistant of a popular female anchor rang me up. Like a seasoned rooster expert she sized me up. How long could I hold out in the ring on the inane issue of whether the proposed India-US nuclear deal was anti-Muslim? I said that was bilge and typical of TV cockfights. The entire Left Front was opposed to the deal and its constituents were 90 per cent Hindu, secular Hindus. I said Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Zoroastrians, whoever sympathised with the Left everyone of them was opposed to the deal. Other members of the same communities would be ranged against the deal too. Who knows who was in majority?

But the point about Muslims having a single collective view on the nuclear deal was typical media tripe. For if Muslims by some quirk were united on the issue if they ever were on any other, then there should be an outburst of communal harmony in India. After all the BJP was also professing opposition to the move and the party is perceived as representing the Hindu voice, so what if the notion is largely manufactured to portray the saffron party as being more influential than it really is. Moreover, there are Muslim mullahs who take money from Saudi Arabia and there are mullahs who are on the take from Iran.

The two have a different worldview on international issues. Then there is the fringe that has sympathies with the Taliban. There are those on the payroll of the Congress. And the BJP too, on its day, could rent a Muslim prayer leader or two.

I think the question has been deliberately raised to digress from the issue, not too different in its electoral calculations as the deliberately provoked polarisation over the Amarnath shrine issue in Kashmir. It came up first after a politburo member of the CPI-M expressed the foolish view there would be a backlash from the community if the deal were pushed. His embarrassed party promptly disowned the bizarre thesis. Then the Dalit chief minister of Uttar Pradesh followed suit. She claimed that the pact that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had staked everything for was aimed against India’s largest minority community. This was Ms Mayawati’s way of wooing Muslim support in the arriving elections. Why she did not say the deal was also anti-Dalit remains a puzzle for it would have carried more credibility coming from her. Then there is former defence minister Mulayam Singh Yadav. His Samajwadi Party had gone to town against the Delhi visit by President George W. Bush. Mr Yadav has the support of an influential Muslim coterie. Yet he was careful enough to slip in a Muslim MP to pay obeisance to Mr Bush at the official banquet. It’s a typical ploy Indian politicians use with communal politics. Sheikh bhi kush rahe, shaitan bhi naaraaz na ho. The Urdu saying fits them well. Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds would be a rough translation. If you look carefully you might even find the odd Muslim leader praising President Bush or even his vice-president. Aren’t they there in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh as also in the Arab world?

Anyway, the TV programme was fixed for a Sunday shoot. It was not clear what others would be saying. I told the woman on the phone that she needed to change the cockfight format of the programme to make it meaningful. But that was not going to be, so here I am writing a column instead. In some ways raising the issue of Muslims, whether they were really involved in the given debate or not, has been a feature of Dr Singh’s two tenures as finance minister and now as PM.

Every time he faced a crisis a perpetual affair with any neo-con regime since 1991, a parochial issue would be whipped up, either by his Congress party or by the opposition BJP, as a digression from the economic mess that he has left more than 70 per cent Indians in. This is assuming that the remaining 30 per cent, supposed to be savouring the fruit of free market reforms, are singing paeans to him. No. It may not be a coincidence that the Ayodhya movement of L.K. Advani began with Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms. One presented his first budget in July 1991, the other boarded his chariot for Ayodhya. By December 1992 a 16th Century mosque stood destroyed and everyone’s gaze shifted to the bloodbath, away from the economic perfidy.

The BJP, when it got its hands at governance, followed exactly the same prescriptions and the pattern of masking the economic plunder reached its denouement on Feb 28, 2002, when Gujarat was ablaze and the BJP’s finance minister was presenting his budget, with Manmohan Singh listening from the galleries with rapt attention. No one spoke about Gujarat for one whole day. Commiserations followed only after the budget speech was over in the afternoon. How orchestrated can we get in our bloody-mindedness? BJP leaders used to describe Manmohan Singh as the right finance minister in the wrong party! The result is that both have got egg on their faces at the hustings. Ever since the 1996 elections, when Dr Manmohan Singh’s policies led the Congress to a record eight years in exile, neither the BJP nor his own party has managed to cross even the 150-seat mark in any election, way short of the 272 required for majority.

In the last polls in 2004, the Congress was ahead of the BJP by a whisker and claimed victory, mainly because the smaller parties tilted the crucial balance. The Left Front stepped in to ensure the BJP stayed out. So what went wrong? The Left is accusing Dr Singh of displaying excessive proximity towards the United States. But this was not the first time the prime minister had shown where his heart was. What has caused the two to come to a rupture several months ahead of the polls to allow the BJP to take advantage?

Let me pose to help frame some real issues involved in the nuclear deal and its countless political and economic fallouts. First of all someone should ask the prime minister to explain with hindsight whether it was a good idea for him to push the Enron-Dhabol power project when he was finance minister. That project is gathering rust as efforts are made to somehow revive the multi-billion dollar failure. Who benefited from the multi-billion dollar loot apart from the discredited Enron? We know that for ‘educating’ the deeply suspicious masses Enron had earmarked $60 million? What happened to it? Why should we continue to observe secrecy about the Enron deal and whom are we keeping it secret from? And given this history why should we not smell a rat when the prime minister is again planning to sign a secret agreement, this time with the IAEA?The question for the BJP is simpler. What was the need for it to sign sovereign counter guarantees for the American project in Dhabol during its 13-day government, which had to quit for want of majority? Why is the BJP making pretence of opposing the current nuclear deal when it has done far worse in offering strange terms to Washington? What leg do they have to stand on, protesting as they are on the looming loss of Indian sovereignty? And who are they to insist on a parliamentary debate when they conducted the entire Kargil war as a government that had been booted out in a trust vote? They could have called the Rajya Sabha to discuss the emergency but didn’t. Also, what is the basis to believe the former defence minister Mulayam Singh’s fulminations that Bush is worse than Advani? It doesn’t hold because Mr Yadav has not denied his cozy meetings with Mr Advani that the latter has claimed in his book, to plot the overthrow of the Congress government. It is election time in India, time for political parties to conjure new illusions, as opposed to a new vision, to woo the electorate. The roosters are bracing to have a field day.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com