Judgment by Allah

Man has been appointed the vicegerent of Allah on earth. One of the four principal attributes of Allah mentioned in the very first Chapter of the Quran, Al-Fatehah is Master of the Day of Judgment.

The realization of the way Allah will decide on the Day of Judgment should caution human beings about their behaviour before death. This should also serve as a role model for them when they may have to take up that function in the worldly life.

It is in the Quran: "On that day will men come forth in scattered groups that they may be shown the results of their works. Then whoso does an atom's weight of good will see it.

And whoso does an atom's weight of evil will see it." (99:7-9) "Woe, on that day, unto those who reject, who deny the Day of Judgment. And none denies it save every sinful transgressor." (83: 11-3) "Nay, you deny the Day of Judgment. But there are guardians over you, Honoured recorders, who know all that you do." (82: 10-3).

Allah is Omnipresent and Omniscient. The Quran tells us; "My Lord comprehends all things in His knowledge." (6:81) "Surely, nothing in the earth and the heaven is hidden from Allah." (3:6) "He is the Knower of the unseen and the seen, the Incomparably Great, the Most High."

(13:10) "Verily, He knows what is open in speech, and He knows that which you conceal. (21: 111)". With such an intimate and comprehensive knowledge, Allah is ideally placed to pass the best judgment on human conduct. However, He has laid down a definite procedure for this and that should be a guide for human beings.

Allah has arranged to maintain a minute record of human acts. "And thou wilt see every people on their knees. Every people will be summoned to their record, and it shall be said to them, 'This day shall you be requited for what you did.

This is Our Book; it speaks against you with truth. We caused all that to be fully recorded." (45: 29-30) " On the day when Allah will raise them all together, He will inform them of what they did. Allah has kept account of it, while they forgot it. Allah is Witness over all things." (58: 7).

There is no concept of atonement in Islam and everyone must carry his own cross. "The day when a soul shall have no power to do aught for another soul! And the command on that day will be Allah's." (82: 20) "And no soul acts but only against itself; nor does any bearer of burden bear the burden of another."

(6: 165) "Fear the day when no soul shall serve as a substitute for another soul at all, nor shall intercession be accepted for it; nor shall ransom be taken from it; nor shall they be helped." (2: 49) "O ye who believe! spend out of what We have bestowed on you before the day comes wherein there shall be no buying and selling, or friendship, or intercession; " (2: 255).

Allah has promised benign dealings. He says, "Who so does evil will be requited only with like of it; but whoso does good, whether male or female, and is a believer - they will enter the Garden; they will be provided therein without measure." (40: 41) "Then as for those who believed and did good works, He will give them their reward in full and will give them more out of His bounty." (4: 174).

The concept whether human life ends with death or continues thereafter is of crucial importance and the basic determinant of human behaviour during life. If life comes to an end with death and there is nothing beyond, then there is every justification to "eat, drink and make merry" and all means to that end would be perfectly fair. If it is not so, how are the two phases related and what is their relative importance?

There are many who believe that the worldly life is the be-all and end-all. This is how the Quran answers: " And they say 'there is nothing but this our present life; we die and live here; and nothing but Time destroys us.' but they have no knowledge of that; they do but conjecture. When Our clear Signs are recited to them, their only contention is that they say, ' Bring back our fathers if you are truthful.' Say, 'It is Allah Who gives you life, then cause you to die; then

He will gather you together unto the Day of Resurrection about which there is no doubt. But most men know not." (45: 25-7).

Deja vu all over again

Has anybody else noticed that there is a plot afoot to turn economics into an exact science? Since we are all part of the experiment, I think we should be told.

Economics is about the behaviour of human beings, so it has the same drawback as other social 'sciences': you are not allowed to confirm your hypothesis by running repeated experiments on live human beings.

Somehow, though, an undercover team of experimental economists has managed to trick the Bush administration into re-running the great Reagan adventure in 'voodoo economics' of the 1980s.

They can't tell us which theory they are testing for fear of influencing the results, but it looks like it's about the relationship between the size of budget deficits and the severity of the subsequent recession.

Ronald Reagan set a peacetime record for budget deficits in 1984, the year that he was seeking a second term: 6.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. He justified it by grossly inflating the threat from the decrepit Soviet Union, which was actually teetering on the brink of collapse (the intelligence agencies were as eager to please the administration then as now), and pumping up the defence budget to fight the 'evil empire'.

The short-term result of this extra spending, no doubt by purest coincidence, was to make the US economy grow by 7 percent in 1984, guaranteeing Mr Reagan's sweeping re-election victory.

The longer-term effect, of course, was force up interest rates as government borrowing competed with private borrowers for credit, and to kill the boom in a particularly savage way: the recession at the end of the 80s was the grimmest since the 50s.

Small wonder that the father of the current president, a real conservative (as opposed to a neo-conservative), dubbed the Reagan budgets 'voodoo economics' when he was seeking the Republican nomination in 1988. It didn't save President George H.W. Bush from the recession that followed, however, and the voters punished him by electing Bill Clinton in 1992.

So along comes President George W. Bush in 2001, and in only three years he has turned the 2 percent surplus he inherited from Clinton into a deficit that is now nearing 5 percent of GDP. Since the defence budget is already stuffed to bursting, he did most of it by pushing through unfunded tax cuts targeted on his core supporters.

At one point, according to the recent tell-all book written by Ron Suskind in collaboration with former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Mr Bush appears to have had doubts about the beneficiaries if not the scale of his largesse, asking "Haven't we already given money to rich people? Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" But his political adviser Karl Rove told him to "Stick to principle" and he meekly obeyed.

The massive deficit - $520 billion this year, and the final bill for Iraq could drive it still higher - is already producing the desired short-term economic boom.

If it starts to create jobs as well as profits by the middle of the year, then only a drastic deterioration in the security situation in Iraq could stop Mr Bush from winning in November.

But that's not what interests the economists-in-disguise who tricked him into this repeat of the Reagan experiment. They just want to see how bad the subsequent recession will be.

Recessions are bound to occur from time to time, but they vary wildly in severity. Many people expected a particularly bad one after the exceptionally long nine-year Clinton boom, mainly due to a superstitious belief that the universe will always get even, but in fact the recession we have just come through was one of the mildest on record.

So you can see the cutting-edge economic theorists getting together and coming up with a brilliant new theory: budget surpluses are followed by gentle recessions; huge deficits lead to brutal recessions.

But if you want your discipline to be recognised as a proper science, then you have to reproduce the results under properly controlled experimental conditions. How could we ever get another administration to repeat Reagan's folly? It's not just Americans who would suffer, either: the whole world would face a long, bitter recession in a few years if America went down that road again. Have we the right to do that to people in the name of science?

Of course we do; science is important, and besides we'll probably get the Nobel Prize in economics. So the whole massive operation went ahead: the kidnapping of Vice-President Dick Cheney at his secret 'secure location' and the substitution of a surgically altered look-alike experimental economist who goes around spouting lines like "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." It is certainly a daring experiment, though one has reservations about how responsible it is.

It's hard to create conditions that exactly duplicate those of the Reagan era. This time, for example, there is no opposition-controlled Congress trying to cut the deficits and mandate a balanced budget, so the swings may be more extreme than first time round. But if you want to test a theory to destruction, this should work just fine. -Copyright

Elections: Indian outlook

The lower house of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, has been dissolved and national elections are expected to be held around April. Not unexpectedly, the popularity polls generally indicate a sure return to power of Atal Behari Vajpayee as the head of another right-wing government.

However, what has not been indicated by the polls is that the Bharatiya Janata Party claimed to secure a clear parliamentary majority by itself. It appears that the BJP will need to put together a coalition of a number of parties, not all of them unite in harmony with what most Indians perceive as a comparatively a moderate approach to questions of caste, community and regional bias.

One of the opinion polls conducted by a leading Indian news weekly forecasts that the next coalition government - the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) - would secure 335 seats while its closest rival, the Congress led by Ms Sonia Gandhi, which was until recently seen as being in a position to oust the NDA, was in fact found to be "unfit to govern".

However, surprisingly, the polls conducted by the Indian news weekly do not appear to recognize that an important factor contributing to Vajpayee's gain could be his crucial contribution to the effort for mending the fences with Pakistan. Among the possible reasons for the strengthening of his party has surely been the part that he has chosen to play (besides the Pakistani president) in transforming the image of the Saarc as an inconsequential regional body.

The clear change in Vajpayee's approach which has generated the prospects of a possible positive turn in India-Pakistan relations is also directly relevant. Indian statements since Vajpayee's meeting with the President of Pakistan following the Islamabad summit have noticeably lacked the sting which was invariably there in the past.

Incidentally, Vajpayee's role as an "artful navigator" in the context of India-Pakistan relations has had its detractors in India.

However, there is little doubt that Vajpayee is perceived as riding the crest of his popularity and should be able to secure the mandate for governance for another five-year term. Despite the setbacks that it has suffered, in two of the most populated states - Bihar and Uttar Pradesh - there seems to be nothing to block the way of the BJP.

Even the age factor which is widely recognized as an important component of the political game in the case of a BJP seems to be of no serious consequences. With Vajpayee set to head the next government at age 79, with his deputy Lal Krishna Advani at 77, will in the words of a veteran Indian newspaper editor, Prabhu Chawla, create history by defeating their younger rivals at the hustings even though 60 per cent of the voters would be half their age.

To quote Chawla: Normally politicians suffer from the law of diminishing returns. But in the case of Vajpayee the BJP has discovered an asset that yields higher returns now. After Indira Gandhi no other politician has achieved such an aura and in such a short time and that too without the benefit of a dynasty.

To a significant extent, however, BJP's gain has been due to the inability of the rival Congress to build on a fairly substantial base it once had.

The implication is that the BJP has freely subscribed to the concepts of modernity and nationalism, in the tradition of 'Nehruvian concepts', which once were the monopoly of the Congress.

Perhaps to dilute its image of a strong supporter of Hindutva fanaticism as much as to try to create some support for its pro-Hindutva manifesto in Pakistan, on the eve of the composite dialogue, the hardline BJP leader L.K. Advani has started a dialogue with a section of The All Parties Hurriyat Conference (or the moderate faction of the APHC as it is sometimes called).

An Indian correspondent, Praveen Swami, reporting from Srinagar, says, in some senses the ongoing dialogue on Jammu and Kashmir is a "little like a bargain between a shopkeeper with no goods to sell and a client who has no cash in his pocket." However, Swami concedes that the moderate faction of APHC and the Union government do have an outside chance of "haggling their way into history." It seems relevant to quote from a report of a dialogue held by Maulana Abbas Ansari with the weekly "India Today" editor Pranbhu Chawla:

Q: The Hurriyat always looked towards Pakistan. Now you are looking towards Delhi?

A: We never looked towards either of them. Kashmiris were given a certain right and we only champion that cause. It involves both sides of Kashmir.

Q: It means you don't consider India as your own.

A: We say we belong to the whole country so Kashmir is ours. Nehru had promised that we would be allowed to decide our own future.

Q: Are you firm on holding a plebiscite in Kashmir?

A: No. I don't say that. Times have changed. We only want both countries to keep their promises. When they begin to talk we expect them to take us Kashmiris into confidence.

Q: Do the one lakh Kashmiri Pandit families who have been uprooted figure in your scheme of things?

A: Yes, very much. When I became chairman of the APHC I called back some of the Hindu families who had left the valley and assured them that I would face the bullets first if they are fired at them.

Another widely circulated Indian news-weekly "Frontline" in its latest issue also carries a report about the BJP-APHC dialogue. The reports say how the peace process might actually unfold no one seems certain.

However, APHC sources told the weekly that the APHC leaders will be allowed to travel to Pakistan later this year to meet the leaders of the (so-called) terrorist groups and their front organizations.

The APHC leaders are expected to engage some Hizbul Mujahideen field commanders in Jammu and Kashmir itself. Again, the objections of such a dialogue are not well defined.