A new political structure

MY argument that the important business of bringing democracy back to Pakistan cannot — in fact, should not — end with another general election was presented at some length in the two articles published in this newspaper last week. The elections promised for October 2002 will leave unresolved a number of issues about Pakistan’s political future. They will have to be settled to give the country a political structure that can endure.

This assertion leads to an obvious question: why can’t this task be left to the parliament? Given some of the changes the administration of General Pervez Musharraf is contemplating in the electoral system, the national and provincial assemblies to be elected in October 2002 will be more representative of the Pakistani citizenry than any other legislature in the country’s history. They will have more members. There will be more women present in the chambers. There will be a large number of technocrats in the national assembly. Wouldn’t such a body, representing the interests that the old political system had quite deliberately disenfranchised, be in a good position to cleanse the political house on its own?

This is a legitimate question and it needs to be answered. What I am proposing is the beginning of a process that may give Pakistan a political structure totally different from the one embedded in the Constitution of 1973. A parliament elected on the basis of the Constitution of 1973 will not be inclined to bring about radical changes. At best, it will tinker at the margin but such tinkering will not produce a structure that will be able to withstand the stresses and strains passage of time will inevitably produce. What we need is a body of people sitting outside the national assembly reflecting openly on a number of issues that have not been put to the test of public opinion. What are these issues?

Before answering this question there is another one I should ask. Why has the Constitution of 1973 come to be so loved that even the military, while assuming political power — once in 1977 and again twelve years later in 1999 — felt it would be imprudent to set it aside? A myth has been successfully created around the Constitution according to which the system it put in place is the only one that would be acceptable to Pakistan’s diverse citizenry.

It is said that it was only the trauma of 1971 when Pakistan broke into two that energized the people to agree on a constitutional structure. It is also said that without a charismatic leader such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, prodding along his fellow politicians, no agreement would have been concluded. There is no doubt that the shock of East Pakistan’s separation and Bhutto’s powerful personality certainly helped. But what Pakistan got was a political system that did not satisfy all segments of the population.

From the perspective of economics, a successful political system must be able to better the lives of the people. There were two periods during which the 1973 Constitution held sway — in 1973-1977 and in 1988-99. On these two occasions the economy performed poorly, income per head of the population barely increased and there was a significant growth in the number of poor. During both periods, people in power were able to take economic decisions that were not in the interest of the country. Bhutto’s drastic nationalization of industry, finance and commerce took the air out of the economy’s lungs. The country is still reeling from the after-effects of those misguided series of steps. A fully representative political system would not have allowed such steps to be taken.

The same is true of the 1988-99 period when elected prime ministers were able to work on the basis of whims to take decisions that wrecked the economy. It was also during this “democratic” period that the quality of governance deteriorated to the point that Pakistan won the dubious title of the world’s most corrupt country.

Strip the constitution of the myths that surrounds its making and what do we see? We see a document that was hammered out in the backrooms of the parliament by a small group of self-serving politicians. We see a document whose sanctity was violated by the man who was its principal author. The 1973 promised a working federation among four fairly autonomous provinces. What Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gave to the country instead was a highly centralized and authoritarian state that was able to trample at will on the rights of all provinces, not just the smaller one.

I could go on recounting what the Constitution of 1973 brought to Pakistan that was neither anticipated nor desirable. It is clearly a defective document that does not need to be treated as divine revelation. It is something that we need to take a careful look at and see whether the political structure it has erected will ever serve the country’s people.

Let this work be done by a group of wise men and women who would be given a clear mandate, a firm timetable, the opportunity to react with all segments of the population, and a staff that would do research and analysis. There are some happy precedents that suggest that a Constitutional Convention approach is the one Pakistan should adopt at this critical juncture in its history. The words “constitution” and “convention” quickly bring to mind the 1787 Philadelphia Convention that drew up the federal constitution of the United States. What that convention produced is the world’s longest surviving constitution.

But we don’t have to go back 215 years to find an example of this approach. More recently, the 15 states of the European Union created a constitutional convention to work out the political shape for the continent as it begins the process of bringing in more members into the union. The decision to go this route was taken last December in a meeting of 15 European prime ministers held at Laeken, Belgium. The prime ministers were unable to reach a consensus among themselves and decided to call in a broadly representative convention to recommend a system that would “bring citizens, primarily the young, closer to the European design and European institutions.”

The convention of 105 members from 28 countries — 15 represented in today’s European Union and 13 countries that have been lined up to gain admission — will run for at least a year. It is being chaired by Giscard d’Estaing, 76-year-old and once the president of France.

The European convention is made up almost entirely of politicians drawn from the European parliament, the parliaments of the member states and from the assemblies of the countries waiting to enter Europe. The only non-politicians in the convention are two members drawn from the European constitution.

Pakistan should follow a different formula. I would suggest a council of 100 members, one half of whom should be named by General Pervez Musharraf before the country is called back to elect another parliament in October 2002. The other half should be nominated by the assemblies to be elected in a few months’ time. The contingent to be nominated by President Musharraf should be drawn from among the segments of society who have been poorly represented in the political system given by the 1973 Constitution.

Women should have a large representation. Professionals such as economists, bankers, teachers, doctors and engineers should be included. The minorities should be represented. There should be a stipulation that no one from the group of 50 people will ever hold elected office. This group should have at least 15 women.

Of the remaining 50 people, the national parliament should nominate 22 and each of the four provincial assemblies should send a delegation of seven persons. This group of 50 politicians should also have 15 women. People sent to the convention by the assemblies should be free to contest elections in the future and hold public office.

Who should lead the convention? The leadership should be made up of a chairperson and two vice-chairs. The chairperson would not be allowed to hold public office and should be appointed by the present government. The two vice chairs should be elected by the two 50-member contingents, one to be nominated by the government in power today and the other to be elected by the assemblies.

The constitutional convention’s brief should not be very broad. In fact, it should be quite narrow. It should be spelled out by the Musharraf government with the right given to the national assembly to amend it by two-third’s majority. The brief could be built around the following six sets of questions.

One, what is the most appropriate form of government for Pakistan? Is it a Westminster type of parliamentary system, a presidential system patterned on American lines, a combination of the two adopted by France a few decades ago?

Two, how many provinces should make up the Pakistani federation and how should their boundaries be drawn?

Three, should the government function at three different levels — the federal, the provincial and the district — and if so, what should be the powers and responsibilities at these three levels?

Four, what should be the military’s role? Should it be limited to a few years while the new political structure settles down on its new foundations or should the military be involved for an indefinite period as in Turkey?

Five, what should be the role of Islam in the country’s political system? Should the mosque be clearly separate from the state? Should an individual have the right to practise any religion he or she pleases and, consequently, have the right to profess any faith?

Six, what kind of legal system should underpin the Pakistani state? Should we go back to the common law system inherited from the British by eliminating all the other systems that have gradually encroached upon it? How should the members of the judiciary be appointed and who should hold them accountable to a well defined rule of conduct?

The constitutional convention should be assisted by a panel of experts drawn from different fields. Its proceedings should be televised. It should invite the representatives of all segments of the population to present their views in writing or in oral testimonies. And, the convention should conclude its work within one year of being convened.

The convention should submit its report to the national assembly in the form of a new constitution or as an elaborate amendment to the one promulgated in 1973. A simple majority vote would enshrine the amendment to the Constitution or promulgate the new constitution as the case may be. In case a majority fails to approve the convention’s recommendations, the national assembly would stand dissolved and another election should be ordered within a period of six months of dissolution. The new assembly’s decision in favour of or against the convention’s recommendations would be binding for the reason that it would reflect the will of the people. In this way Pakistan could really make a new start.

Sense of adventure

WHY is it that our young men don’t feel inspired when they read newspaper stories of derring-do and real life adventure?

Every now and then there is something in the press about young people going into the awesome Amazon rain forest or climbing the Himalayas or crossing the Atlantic in a small boat or in a hot air balloon. Is it because our boys are different from those of Europe and America and Japan?

The answer is not difficult to give. Yes, they are different. They are more protected, even coddled and made much of by their parents. A person of 25 here calls himself a boy, not a man. He has to be married off by his parents because they expect him to make a hash of it if he does it himself. They educate him, bring him up to his twenties, then decide what is to be his vocation, get him a job and then (as I’ve just said) find a wife for him.

Being accustomed to a sheltered life, our young man can’t even dream of adventure. Who is going to walk miles, sleep on the ground, suffer heat, bear extreme cold and go without mother’s cooking? Home is much more comfortable. The only exceptions I can recall, and even these are hardly worth a mention really, are the stray cyclists who decide to wheel from Quetta to Islamabad or from Karachi to Peshawar. That’s all the sense of adventure that we get to see in our young men.

There was a news report the other day that a party of young men in Europe is walking 500 miles to the North Pole, with the temperature at 70 degrees below zero. They’ll pull their equipment and food sleds themselves instead of employing dogs for the purpose.

This must be a superb test of human endurance, rarely witnessed even in the West. Our boys, on reading the report, must be thinking: don’t these chaps value their lives? How can their mothers let them do such a foolhardy thing? There is an Adventure Foundation of Pakistan in Islamabad, but if it were to plan something like this polar trip, it would be sued by parents.

Love of security is a national trait with us. We’ll never give up a job once we’ve got it, howsoever we may dislike it. We’ll never do anything unusual, anything that deviates from the normal routine of life, howsoever boring life may be. So much so that we hardly ever go on a proper holiday. Trekking and hitch-hiking are of course out of the question. Too risky. And too much of a bother. Better sit at home and watch an exciting video film about adventure. Security is such an obsession that it has become like fear of the unknown. Among the well-to-do you see young couples who have managed to obtain a car but on the verge of despair that they don’t possess a house of their own. As if owning a house is going to protect them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

You see them using all the means at their disposal — pull, push, sifarish, parents’ money, political clout, VIP pressure — to get a plot and buy or build a house. They feel threatened without it. The common expression is to have a roof over one’s head. Without a roof, anything might happen, God forbid!

I am not an adventure man myself. I’ve never done anything odd or out of the ordinary to distinguish myself from the common herd. But when I tell young people that even after retirement from government service, though a family man, I was not the owner of a house till the age of 64, they are dumbfounded. They don’t want to believe me. They ask, how is that possible? Didn’t you feel insecure? Where did you think you would go when you were unable to work and had to live on your pension? For them the situation was simply incomprehensible.

This feeling of insecurity is almost a malady. I wrote in this space some time ago about the craze for building high walls around houses. There are people who can’t even imagine living in a house without iron grills on the doors and windows. No, I am not stupid enough to forget conditions in Karachi, and even Lahore. They are exceptions, like cities in siege. But the whole country is not like that? Or is it?

People’s gates are always closed, day and night. Against what? Nobody knows. There are no stray animals who will drop in for a chat. Those who can afford it have a sort of telephone at the gate through which you have to disclose your identity before someone comes out and opens it for you. Beggars, of course, do not figure in our lives except when we go out shopping. Even so they nowadays ring the door-bell to get a hearing.

Coming back to young people, with this psyche of fear and insecurity, and extreme dependence on parents’ shelter, and with these young people being petted, spoiled and bottle-fed, how can you expect a sense of adventure to prevail? Some years ago a nephew of mine wanted to go up the Kaghan Valley on his motorcycle along with other friends. He was not allowed by his mother. The father was willing but was duly snubbed by his wife for being so careless about the boy’s safety and welfare.

I liked the view expressed by a black American member of the polar expedition I’ve talked about. He said, “I want to be an example to the youth of this city who don’t have very much hope because of the places they live in and the things they see every day and the drugs, dilapidated buildings and poverty.” He might have been talking of conditions in Pakistan, where the circumstances of the poor are even worse.

But I know I can’t ask the poor boys of my country to undertake adventure. The uncertainty of their daily lives is an adventure in itself. In any case, who will feed the family if they go away? My views are aimed at the rich and the privileged. Yes, my grouse is against the indolent rich, the smug middle class, whose boys are too accustomed to creature comforts and the status quo to do anything exciting. All they can think of by way of adventure is stealing a car now and then and firing a few shots in the air, with a mobile phone glued to the ear.

In America the slogan once used to be, “God West, young man!” My call to our youth is, “Go out, young man. For God’s sake do something different!

Price of tolerating intolerance

OUT of evil, they say, cometh good. Out of the terrible episode at the International Protestant Church in Islamabad the other day, some good may after all be expected. President Pervez Musharraf has given more than a bit of his evidently uneasy mind to the services, civil and others, that are expected to maintain order and enforce law. His warning is clear and loud: “If they do not perform, they will not be excused.”

By all standards, President Musharraf is a mild-mannered person. He is seldom out of sorts with anyone. When he finds himself prevailed upon to say that “if it happened in future the concerned officials will be taken to task,” there can be no doubt that he finds the situation profoundly disconcerting. This is a warning uncharacteristically stern from one who is the head of the government as well as state.

He was even more specific in the expression of his displeasure. He went on to say, “if the personnel of the police, the Rangers and other para-military forces do not perform well, they will be sacked from their services.” That is truly the ultimate. There can be no two opinions about the utterly shocking nature of the incident at the Islamabad church. If the President is outraged, he has all the reason in the world to feel that way.

Quite obviously even the elementary precaution had not been taken. One wonders how the management of an international church, standing in the heart of the most sensitive spot in the capital, could be without the metal-detectors at its doors. That’s absolutely elementary. This is not intended to shield the security agencies of their oversight.

If the church management had not thought of it, Islamabad police ought to have. This must be emphasized because not very long ago, a church had been under terrorist attack in Bahawalpur. That should have set in motion a process to set up special security at all churches, surely at the one in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave. That is a high security area, anyway.

Because the Islamabad outrage is so close, and has such deeply disquieting implications and fall-out, one may be led to be overly agitated. It should not be allowed to divert attention from the overall security situation in the country. The good that may ensue from the IPC tragedy would be to occasion a meticulous reassessment of the law and order situation in the entire country.

What has happened is not a bolt from the blue. Let it be admitted by all concerned that what has burst upon our consciousness has been brewing over a long time. If the police today appear to have been inadequate, it is not an overnight bust up. Over the years, government after government has played ducks and drakes with the police. Self-promoting administrations have been mistreating and misusing the police and in the process gravely degrading the force.

General Zia abused police in his own “Islamic’ style. The two political prime ministers in their four wobbly governments systematically polluted the professional efficiency and integrity of this force. Many have been the wrongs perpetrated upon the police during the past at least two decades. The worst among these has been the perversion of the recruitment disciplines. Nawaz Sharif started it, Benazir exploited it.

The procedure of induction in the police forces of all provinces were contaminated by gross political interference. Favourites and lackeys of the local political bosses were put in uniform and given weapons without even a smattering of training. The injection of his undesirable element, and the special political position it was given, ruined whatever of moral integrity and sense of duty there was.

We have been living through an ‘accountability’ culture for quite a number of years. Some high and mighty have been subjected to the ‘accountability’ tests and trials. When under the stress of audacious incidents of lawlessness, both ‘elected’ prime ministers used to talk glibly of stern action against police officers of the area where major crimes were committed. Nawaz Sharif promised to hold the area police officer personally responsible for serious crimes in his jurisdiction. These were empty words. And the erring officers knew it. They couldn’t care less.

For more than three years, an average of more than a dozen cars and motor-cycles are stolen/ snatched/ taken away in Karachi every day — repeat every day. The incidence of this crime is higher in some districts of Karachi than in others. Of late, an Anti-Car Lifting Cells has been set up. This step has been taken some years after this brazen crime had become an integral part of life in the country’s largest city. Some highly sophisticated devices are now available to police to track down stolen cars. All this — and car lifting, too!

Sectarian killing is by now a deeply rooted practice. Targeting of doctors is a relatively recent aberration but it is already a frequent affair. This may be more notable in Karachi, but sectarian violence keeps erupting all over the country. Recall the carnage in a Rawalpindi mosque only some weeks ago. Highway crime has been on the increase everywhere. Slightly more so in the interior of Sindh. Karo Kari killings may be more frequent in Sindh but by no means exclusive to Sindh. These crimes are a direct fall-out of the intensely misguided religious extremism. Governments in Pakistan not only connived at this tendency for years, they actively patronized it. Sufi Mohammad of the FATA, is not a recent phenomenon. He has been openly in the field for many years, making no bones, mincing no words. The same has to be said for the so many Sipah, Jaish, Lashkar. Government after government in Islamabad lived happily with these professional exploiters of rank superstition in the fair name of Islam. These maulanas were not individuals. They symbolized a whole movement, committed to uninhibited religious bigotry, extremism, fanaticism and raw violence.

Tribal rivalries in many parts of the country present an unlovely face. No government to date has given any thought to the horrendous threat these inter-tribe feuds pose to the law and order situation in general. Trouble frequently erupts in the areas that lie in the wake of these feuds. Almost invariably, crimes of this nature have a disastrous effect on investment climate in the country. Balochistan is full of mineral wealth. Whatever projects there constantly remain under shadows of uncertain law and order situation. Tribal chiefs blackmail insensitive government at will and extort huge sums of money.

There is no doubt that the police and the supporting forces leave a vast deal to be desired. The president’s consternation is justified every bit. The defects that have come to light are not of recent origin. One can say with some justification that the evils that afflict law and order forces are traceable and a reasonable and practical way to top officers of the police during the decade of elected governments of Ms Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Both of them brazenly exploited and abused police for their utterly unacceptable ends.

Now that the president has set in motion a process to improve the quality of policing, it will be well worth his while to institute a parallel process of inquiry backwards to spot the mistakes made in police administration — the profoundly flawed recruitment to the police force, improper promotions and vindictive action against clean officers. So much of muck has accumulated in these forces. This lies at the root of all that is wrong and incorrect in the chemistry of forces of law and order.

Milosevic’s legacy

A US Embassy staffer was arrested by military police In Belgrade as he allegedly accepted secret documents from a senior official in the Serb government, then was illegally held incommunicado for 15 hours and physically assaulted.

Western officials said some secret documents were planted on the official; but even more revealing are the reports that the information allegedly being transferred was evidence against former Serb ruler Slobodan Milosevic, who is now on trial before an international tribunal.

The Yugoslav federal government under President Vojislav Kostunica is already guilty of an almost complete failure to cooperate with the tribunal. Now, the indication is that it was ready to arrest and rough up a US diplomat who may have tried to obtain evidence the government has withheld in violation of a United Nations resolution.

The episode should greatly simplify an administration decision due by the end of the month on whether to certify that Yugoslavia has met congressionally mandated conditions for receiving further US aid.

Quite simply, it has not. Not only has it not cooperated with the tribunal, it has also failed to meet other conditions requiring it to release ethnic Albanian political prisoners and stop funding the Serb army in neighboring Bosnia.

Mr. Kostunica has willfully blocked action against the 20 indicted war criminals who live in his country, and he has continued to allow the military and police establishments created by Mr. Milosevic to operate with impunity, led by the same commanders who practiced genocide in Kosovo.—The Washington Post

There is no space now for nothing

IT is hardly a state secret that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee considers foreign travel one of the redeeming features of his job. It is not simply the joys of exotic locales that are the preferred destinations of the VIPs; Vajpayee also enjoys the pleasures of shaping international relations.

The hangover of those nineteen dizzying months a quarter of a century ago when he was foreign minister in the Morarji Desai government of 1977 has not quite gone. He learnt the subtle flavours of foreign policy initiatives then. As Vajpayee reminded his distinguished visitor of the month, Hamid Karzai, he went to Kabul more often as foreign minister than anywhere else; and Kabul was not, even before the Taliban dispensation, Bali.

And so when the prime minister of India cancels an important foreign tour scheduled for the first week of April without attributing any reason, we must sit up and take notice. The cancellation of the tour to Australia was understandable; the violence in Godhra and the subsequent carnage in Gujarat would have forced the prime minister to return without landing if it had happened when he was in mid-air.

But there is no reason proffered whatsoever for the premeditated abortion of a visit to Cambodia and Singapore with a substantive foreign policy objective — to take India one step closer to full membership of ASEAN. The last time Vajpayee cancelled a foreign trip was in the early days of his prime ministership, when he scrubbed a visit to Cairo without explanation. A short while later India changed the climate of the world by announcing that it had become a nuclear power. There cannot be anything quite as dramatic this time, but the market is open for intelligent guesses.

The options are not that numerous. Ayodhya. Kashmir. Pakistan. Nothing. Solution seems too brazenly optimistic a word to use in the context of any of the three great problems of our time. But each of them has a far greater impact on the life of ordinary Indians than the formal transformation of our country into a nuclear power.

At some level of our subconscious we have stopped believing that there can ever be a solution to the Ayodhya confrontation. The record of fudge, prevarication, lies and deceit is not encouraging. But through the drama of last week, most of it artificial, one vital point was established. The prime minister took a line that had often been drawn in sand and stood firmly on it. He made courts, institutions of law and justice, the non-negotiable heart of any decision pertaining to March 15. He did this at the cost of severely upsetting the constituency that had brought his party to power.

He used an opportunity provided, paradoxically, by the seers and hardliners when they picked March 15 as their cut-off point for temple construction. The Prime Minister neatly placed the courts in between the government and the demand, and then placed the full weight of authority behind the decision of the court. If P.V. Narasimha had done exactly the same thing, the events of December 6, 1992 would never have taken place.

The BJP’s official position remains that it would prefer a settlement by negotiation, but that is an euphemism for nothing since everyone knows that an out-of-court settlement is impossible as there will never be agreement between the antagonists. The temple builders are also apprehensive that a court judgment might never give them the kind of victory they fervently await, if there is any judgment at all: the wait so far has been long enough.

The courts came into the picture in this dispute from the very beginning. But if there is empty space today where the Babri mosque once stood, it is because successive governments placed themselves above the courts, and betrayed principle under pressure. There is much hot air being spouted about puja and a shilanyas, quite forgetting that the first shilanyas was permitted by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, home minister Buta Singh, adviser-in-chief on all matters of compromise, R.K. Dhawan and then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Narayan Dutt Tewari in the middle of the general election from which the Congress has never quite recovered, the one in 1989.

Buta Singh is a learned leader of the Congress in parliament, headed for one of the key positions in parliament; Dhawan is an honourable member of the party’s working committee and of course Tewari is now chief minister of Uttaranchal, placed there by his leader Sonia Gandhi.

If Mahant Paramhans was shocked to the point of threatening suicide, whether he meant it or not, who can blame him? The whole experience of the temple movement is that governments have surrendered under pressure. The seers and activists were convinced that the authorities, now consisting of their own people, might pay lip service to the “secularists” but would permit ground conditions to reach a point where it would be impossible to stop temple construction.

After all, this is what Narasimha Rao did. Rao deliberately and consciously allowed a situation to arise in which the mosque was destroyed, sleeping while that happened; then he turned around and pleaded helplessness and pretended to be as injured as the next man. The next man, at that time, was Ghulam Nabi Azad, and the man next to him Salman Khurshid, both now ranking members of Sonia Gandhi’s “secular” brigade.

The shoulders of Azad and Khan were essential for Rao’s crocodile tears. He had to weep before Muslims, you see. In return a grateful Rao gave them better jobs in his next reshuffle. Careful man, Rao. He always rewarded sycophants quickly, before they could take their sycophancy elsewhere. The only prime minister who stuck to principle on this tempestuous issue was Vishwanath Pratap Singh. It cost him his chair. He paid the price without demur.

The least that the leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the mahants were expecting was the shuffle-and-disappear treatment that they got from Narasimha Rao and his secular Cabinet colleagues like home minister S.B. Chavan, last seen in public sitting beside Sonia Gandhi in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in defence of secularism.

What utter fraud is going on! Congress governments have been far more generous to the first vital stages of this movement than the Vajpayee government proved to be on March 15. L.K. Advani led the movement for the destruction of the mosque as BJP leader; he stood at Ayodhya and watched, doubtless with satisfaction, when the mosque came down. And yet when he was home minister of India on March 15 he did not run to his bedroom and forget to take telephone calls, as Rao and Chavan did on December 6.

I am absolutely certain that Advani does not agree in his heart with the decision to stand by the court decision for March 15 but as home minister of India, he ordered what forces were required to move to Ayodhya and prevent the law from being violated. A government is elected to protect the law, not go to sleep as Rao and Chavan did; or to wheedle and lie as Ghulam Nabi Azad did after the event. Is it any wonder that there was a sense of genuine bewilderment and hurt on the face of Mahant Paramhans when he was not allowed by the authorities to cross what might be called Vajpayee’s Ram Rekha? Some of the less polite Hindutva leaders accused the Vajpayee government of being worse than the Congress, and they were quite right too.

Will Prime Minister Vajpayee have the courage to keep the law above the authority of the government, or will he succumb before the backlash that must inevitably follow in his own ranks? It would require more conviction than I have to make a prediction. I can only hope he does. There has been criticism, and justified criticism, of his compromise in sending an officer on his staff as a sop to Mahant Paramhans. It was his first sign of weakness but not one that made any fundamental difference. A second sign of weakness could make that difference.

The Vajpayee formula is to make the courts proactive in this dispute. By waiting for the Supreme Court to decide what would happen on March 15, he reestablished the court’s credibility. This is critical. If the court is not believed to be impartial, then its judgment will not be respected; and if it is not respected then it will not find the support so necessary to carry the decision through, whatever it may be.

Vajpayee also began the difficult process of lifting the problem out of the grasp of those who have made the temple movement their single priority. This was particularly difficult for him since the temple movement had been handed over to the seers and organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad by the BJP itself. L.K. Advani gave life to a dormant demand in the last few years of the 1980s and watched, certainly with pleasure, as governments squirmed and shifted and wormed past their own positions in order to pick up leaves shed by the Advani storm.

After the frenzied demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 the BJP changed its strategy. It handed the flag of temple construction to the children it had spawned during the Advani movement, and using Vajpayee as its next mascot gradually created space between the party and its past. That space was reserved for the allies that the BJP knew it needed. The allies were slow in coming.

One reason why George Fernandes is a favourite of the BJP is because he was the earliest of the big birds (sparrows flock around, chirp and are useful for soundbites, but they don’t have body weight). But once Sonia Gandhi took over the Congress, she made the decision for the parties floating in between the Congress and the BJP - they went over to Vajpayee.

The writer is editor-in-chief of Asian Age,New Delhi.