What Congress lacks is leadership
The real answers will come next week; this week we must console ourselves with real questions. Top of the list: Has the BJP bitten off more than it can chew?
Every election is an opportunity for a political party to increase its political space. The BJP targeted three states where its partners were unreliable, weak or non-existent: Karnataka, Assam, Jharkhand and Haryana.
The BJP had once paid a heavy price in Karnataka for its equation with the JD(U); this time it positioned itself as the central element and left a satellite corner for its old ally. The strategy has paid dividends. The switch of seats in Karnataka could mean the difference between stable ground and a swamp for the NDA.
In Assam, Jharkhand and Haryana the party decided to live alone. Hermits are not fetching any returns in this election. In these states the Congress has gained from fissures.
The BJP can console itself that it now has a base and an organisation in constituencies where it did not exist before.
Purchasing the future at the cost of the present is a luxury that you can afford when you have excess seats in your baggage. It looks wasteful in a tight race. The BJP became a victim of early optimism. It lost touch with the ground in the glare of its self-generated shine.
Question 2: Why did the race tighten up?
Any alliance is only as strong as its weakest links. The centre of the NDA is safe. The BJP has increased its own share of the vote, and its seats will also rise from 182 to perhaps 195 or even 200.
The props have tottered. The perceptible NDA drop is in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where Chandrababu Naidu has taken losses and Jayalalitha is facing formidable foes. The one visible compensation is in the Punjab harvest that the Akalis will reap: the NDA is likely to take 12 or even 13 of the 14 seats in Punjab and Chandigarh.
The BJP thrives because the Hindi heartland has returned to the party courtesy Atal Behari Vajpayee: the Congress could end up with less than 10 seats in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh together. Add another 15 or so for the Congress from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab and Haryana and you have a pretty dismal northern tricolour.
Question 3: Why hasn't the Congress revived after five years of BJP rule?
An opposition party should normally be healthy after feeding off the mistakes of government for five years. But by January this year the Congress had lost all confidence in itself.
The Congress strategy for this election was the inverse of the BJP gameplan. If the BJP purchased a headache by increasing its political space, then the Congress sought survival by deliberately ceding territory.
In Bihar Laloo Yadav insulted the Congress by leaving only four seats for the party, and in Tamil Nadu Karunanidhi gave it 10 fragile constituencies. The Congress said nothing.
Perhaps that was the wise thing to do, because, apart from Assam and Haryana, the Congress is either losing or being wiped out wherever it is contesting alone: Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Bengal, Karnataka.
It cannot walk today without a crutch. It is not the enemies of the Congress but its friends who stress how lame the party has become. In Maharashtra "traitor" Sharad Pawar has bailed out the Congress; it would have won less than five seats without an alliance with a man Sonia Gandhi expelled for six years. The Congress got five irreplaceable years to rebuild itself at the expense of the BJP. Instead the party has debilitated.
Question 4: Why?
A one-word question gets a one-word answer. Leadership. This is the critical difference that has defined this general election. The NDA is a weakening alliance that is being saved by the popularity of its leader.
Even those opinion polls that are most hostile to the NDA admit that between 70 to 80 per cent of the voters want Atal Behari Vajpayee to remain prime minister. This is significantly higher than the BJP or the NDA vote.
In contrast, acceptance for Sonia Gandhi is low. Uttar Pradesh is the political 'home state' of the Nehru-Gandhi Family. In UP even Mulayam Singh Yadav is ahead of Sonia Gandhi in all PM-preference polls.
Her foreign origin is part of the problem, but not the whole of it. More important is the fact that her communication skills are ordinary. Nor does she have any strong ideological convictions. Claiming to be secular is quite different from proving to be secular, as the Congress tactics of me-too Hindutva in Gujarat proved.
Much of the Congress campaign consisted of calling the BJP communal and Vajpayee unfit. The personal attacks on Vajpayee were counter-productive. Five years in power can leave any political outfit drained, for power is not an easy horse to ride: it buckles too much.
The BJP was vulnerable. The Congress, in contrast, is a potentially strong party weakened by its leadership. Hence, irrespective of the fate of alliances, the BJP is rising above 182, while the Congress dips towards another nadir.
Question 5: What about the glamour of the Nehru-Gandhi family?Glamour always gets a crowd, but I am not personally persuaded that glamour is equally effective in getting votes.
If you are on the right side of the prevailing political view, glamour helps; if you are on the wrong side, it rarely rescues you. Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi understood this election once they entered the lanes of UP, and so they stuck, by and large, to their family estate in Amethi and Rae Bareli.
Rahul did tour a few other constituencies, but the much-awaited national blitz by the two never materialised. Congressmen, always energised by the thought of Family intervention in their destinies, waited, but in vain. Instead of a blitz they got a sprinkle.
There is a very good reason for this. The Family was intelligent enough to protect the two children from failure. If they had campaigned in Gujarat, Rajasthan and MP and been unable to swing the voter, they would have been dismissed as ineffective. Glamour, as noted, adds to success, but can't change defeat.
Question 6: But if the NDA does not reach 272, what stops the Congress from collecting everyone else and forming a government?
Theoretically, nothing. Reality might be a different matter. The politics of elections is quite different from the politics of power. In theory, any alliance should be easy, because there is very little ideology left in politics.
An alliance is a compromise and excludes strong ideological commitments; it is always built on a common minimum programme rather than a common maximum programme. The drawback is an ideological vacuum, individuals rather than ideas become the dominant influences of political behaviour.
The parties outside the NDA are deeply divided by individual likes and dislikes. Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati, for instance, cannot sit at the same table, irrespective of their differences with the BJP.
If the NDA falls short by say 10 seats, Mayawati will happily make up the difference, if only to prevent Mulayam Singh Yadav from doing so. Similarly, the DMK's problem is Jayalalitha, not the BJP or Vajpayee. The scars of electoral battles are easily put aside if options open up in Delhi.
Since Karunanidhi is not going to become prime minister of India irrespective of which alliance he joins, he would be tempted by the familiar. I have no idea who has been appointed general manager of the Venkaiah Naidu Fractured English Joke Factory, but he came up with a relevant one recently when, speaking of prime ministers, he said that the TINA factor (There Is No Alternative) was backed up by the TITA factor (There Is Terrible Alternative).
The NDA would find matters difficult only if it dropped below the 250 mark. I have no idea what lies hidden inside those electronic voting machines, but this seems unlikely.
Question 7: So what seems likely?
The trouble is that what we call one general election is a whirlpool consisting of at 20 general elections. Different states vote upon different impulses; and very often, regions within a state can offer separate trends. Even the most seasoned politicians make critical mistakes.
Loyalty to the DMK for instance might have served the BJP far better. The BJP must also be assessing the damage that its allies like the Janata Dal(U) have done in stray seats of Jharkhand and Rajasthan.
Similarly, if the Congress had been more accommodating towards Mulayam Singh Yadav, the results could have changed significantly in Uttar Pradesh - ensuring a new government in Delhi.
The broad picture is this: the voters of Andhra and Tamil Nadu in the south, and UP and Bihar in the north are going to be decisive. And when every plus has been silenced by every minus, the mathematics of Uttar Pradesh will control the calculus of Delhi.
The writer is editor-in-chief, Asian Age, New Delhi.
Massacre in mosque
Lamenting the Friday carnage in Karachi, Hilal-i-Pakistan says that it was not an isolated incident but a continuation of an attack on a Muharram procession in Quetta and on an imambargah in the same city, an attack on Suparco employees and other assaults on members of a particular sect.
The daily writes that sectarian bloodshed emanated from government's encouragement of religious extremism under the slogan of jihad in the past. In the changed international scenario, Islamabad abandoned the policy and banned militant organizations but the country continues to be menaced by religious militancy because of government's weak policy and political expediencies.
The situation has now reached a point where the government must act not only to ensure that elements responsible for the wanton killings are brought to book but also to prepare a long-term strategy to root out the factors contributing to religious extremism and sectarian terrorism.
Referring to a high-level meeting on water and power projects, Kawish writes that President Gen Pervez Musharraf has issued a directive for allocating funds for a dam project during the current fiscal year.
Presiding over last Saturday's meeting, he insisted that a dam would have to be built at any cost to meet water requirements of the country. Speaking on the occasion, Federal Water and Power Minister Aftab Sherpao said that the Kalabagh dam was being opposed by Sindh and the NWFP and Balochistan also did not clearly support it. Therefore, if it is undertaken, it will intensify opposition to the government.
The paper says that opposition to the Bhasha dam is not as severe as in the case of Kalabagh. Nevertheless, the lobby insisting on the construction of the Kalabagh dam has been arguing that a feasibility report for the project has already been prepared whereas that for the Bhasha dam will take time; therefore the former should be given priority.
The Saturday meeting was told that work on the feasibility report for the Bhasha dam had been undertaken and it would be ready in June. This nullifies the contention of the advocates of the Kalabagh dam. The paper says the government should announce that it is abandoning the disputed project and taking up the Bhasha dam instead.
Awami Awaz takes up the issue of the Gwadar explosion and writes that it has highlighted the need for a public debate on the Gwadar deep-sea port. The daily argues that the approach of handling every issue by administrative methods instead of adopting democratic ways to resolve a dispute has already failed.
Therefore, the federal government should pay heed to objections raised by local people as well the MPAs and MNAs from Balochistan to the port project and allay their apprehensions.
Commenting on the derailment of the Taizrao Express near Tando Adam, Ibrat says that successive governments have failed to properly maintain the rail network laid by the British, what to speak of improving it.
The consequence is an obsolete signal system, wornout tracks, ill-trained railway staff and frequent train accidents. The latest accident again gives a wake-up call to the government and the Railways department to rehabilitate the rail network on a war footing, otherwise a train journey would remain a frightening option for commuters.
Dialogue for nuclear CBMs in S. Asia
The agreement conveyed by New Delhi on April 21 on dates proposed by Pakistan (May 25-26) for taking up nuclear CBMs came on the day when the second of two seminars organized by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute (IPRI) with the support of the Hanns Scidel Foundation of Germany to prepare for a strategic dialogue concluded its deliberations. The latest one, coming after the historic agreement reached on January 6, between President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee at the conclusion of the 12th Saarc Summit in Islamabad, took up the topic "Arms Control and Nuclear Developments in South Asia", which needs to be given priority to facilitate the peace process.
Earlier, the two organizations had organized a seminar on "Conflict Resolution and Regional Cooperation in South Asia" in early December last year. That had helped to lay the groundwork for a successful Saarc summit in early January that would stress the need for economic cooperation and for revival of moves to address political disputes that had been behind the history of conflict between India and Pakistan.
Both seminars were attended by reputable scholars from India and Pakistan with inputs from other international experts on South Asia. The latest seminar concentrated on the most serious threat to peace in South Asia, resulting from the absence of adequate safeguards against the threat of nuclear war, considering that India and Pakistan have yet to take effective steps to guard against a resort to nuclear weapons by accident or by misunderstanding.
Following the nuclear tests carried out by the two countries in 1998, fundamental measures for nuclear risk reduction, to which the superpowers had attached great importance during the cold war, had still not been taken. This was causing concern to the global community.
Gen Jahangir Karamat, former Chief of Army Staff, who chairs the board of governors of IPRI, inaugurated the seminar on April 20. He underlined the dangers arising from nuclear brinkmanship in a region where there was no space for accident or error, as India and Pakistan were contiguous.
While the resumption of dialogue would hopefully lead to normalization of relations, there was an urgent need to agree on confidence-building measures to ensure stability in this high-risk region.
The first session, devoted to the conventional arms race, established that India had achieved clear superiority and was still engaged in acquisition of sophisticated weapons.
Pakistan's nuclear capability had restored strategic parity, but with so many disputes, notably over Kashmir, as well as new demands arising from the war against terror, the possession of adequate conventional capability was essential.
Gen. Kamal Matinuddin, speaking for Pakistan, also stressed that conventional deterrence was also needed to prevent early escalation in the use of nuclear weapons. Dr Raja Mohan, who spoke for India, rejected the possibility of preemptive attack by India, since Pakistan was a large and powerful country.
The next two sessions were devoted to nuclear developments, and nuclear doctrines and command and control systems in the two countries. A great deal of useful information was provided on the development of nuclear technology over the years, with both countries pursuing a clandestine route owing to restrictions imposed by the nuclear "haves".
Pakistan had shared the non- proliferation goals of the international community but was forced to keep its options open after India refused to sign the NPT. Dr Christian Wagner, from Germany, expressed the view that Pakistan's programme was defensive, and did not constitute a threat to India.
Speaking on India's nuclear doctrine, in the drafting of which he had participated, Bharat Karnad removed any impression of minimal deterrence and stated that India would eventually acquire the capability even to hit the United States. He stated that the disparity between India and Pakistan would grow, but India was committed to developing a good neighbourly relationship with Pakistan.
Dr Shirin Mazari, speaking on Pakistan's nuclear doctrine, stated that it was genuinely meant as a deterrent against all-out conventional war by India as well as a nuclear one.
Pakistan was ready to discuss deterrence with India and to deal with arms control and disarmament at the regional level, if India was ready to do likewise. In the discussion, there was agreement that in the NPT review in 2005.
India and Pakistan need to work together to have the NPT amended by adding a protocol allowing them to join as nuclear-weapon states.
The fourth session took up missile developments in South Asia with two military experts from India and Pakistan spelling out the status of the respective missile programmes.
Maj-Gen Dipankar Banerjee underlined that India's missile programme was not country-specific and was now focusing on ABMs, which it could develop without financial constraints. Pakistan was not seen to be in competition but was aiming at compensating for conventional asymmetry.
Missile capabilities of the two were here to stay, with the objective of maintaining strategic stability. He recommended transparency in the developments in the field, with sharing of information that would follow a relationship of confidence and trust through CBMs.
Brig. Naeem A. Salik, a serving officer in the Joint Staff headquarters of the Pakistan Army, traced the evolution of Pakistan's missile programme that was driven by considerations of security.
He felt it was unfair to single out Pakistan for relying on imported technology. Except for Germany, all countries had relied on outside assistance or inputs. The MTCR regime was violated by the US in the case of Israel and by Russia in the case of India. India's current focus on ABMs would only trigger a missile race, without providing assured security.
He stressed the need to take up the CBMs suggested in the MoU signed at Lahore in 1999. The next two sessions took up stability-instability paradox and Arms Control and CTBT regime in South Asia, with highly constructive presentations by experts from India and Pakistan, and third country perspectives outlined by scholars from China and Japan.
Both P.R. Chari and Dr Noman Sattar recommended that in the post 9/11 environment, the two countries had to proceed patiently and resolutely to consolidate peace, particularly by proceeding systematically on CBMs.
The US had become increasingly involved with conflict resolution, as evident from its role in the Kargil conflict, and especially during the 2001-2002 stand off. Lack of agreement on contentious issues such as Kashmir should not be allowed to impede progress on CBMs or on arms control.
Ambassador Takaya Suto of Japan stressed that both Pakistan and India were wasting precious resources on their nuclear and missile programmes, which was a cause for deep concern to Japan. He urged that they, as well as Israel, should participate in the global regime on non-proliferation by signing the NPT and CTBT.
The concluding session featured the keynote speech of Dr John E. Endicott, who has a 45-year long association with nuclear restraint and non-proliferation issues. He was involved in the management of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, though since then, most of his time had been spent dealing with North-East Asia (China, Japan and the two Koreas).
Prof. Endicott highlighted Paul Bracken's concept of the evolution of nuclear weapons and their management after the Second World War. Bracken called the period from 1947 to 1991 as the "First Nuclear Age" that was dominated by the superpowers, which built up enormous arsenals of nuclear warheads, with the US acquiring 75,000 out of a global total of 150,000.
However, major efforts were made to reduce the risk of nuclear war by accident, and the age ended with the US in a dominant position. US nuclear doctrine was again evolving to advance the Bush agenda, but the 9/11 events had led President Bush to propose the abolition of weapons of mass destruction in his address to the National Defence University on February 11, 2004.
The second nuclear age began with the rise of military power in Asia, Endicott expressed the view that the security concerns of all the countries of Asia had to be addressed, notably in South Asia.
He felt that the time had come to take into account the capabilities acquired by India and Pakistan, and to stress regional arrangements for nuclear restraint regimes. There should be regional nuclear free zones that should interact with IAEA, and eventually with the Security Council of the UN.
Prof Endicott welcomed the progress made in South Asia since January 2004, and felt that the five permanent members of the Security Council need to overhaul NPT, while the UN itself had to undergo reform. The sum total of the keynote speech was a call for a new non-proliferation regime, and for increased transparency between Pakistan and India on CBMs.
The discussions at the seminar reflected an awareness that the landmark agreement in January to start a dialogue had to be followed up by concrete measures. CBMs and nuclear risk reduction was an essential prerequisite to the establishment of durable peace.
The writer is a former ambassador.