Every detail of the spectrum sale bazaar was public knowledge and raged in epileptic spasms across the media. Four years ago this month, police taped conversations between lobbyist Nira Radia and other middlemen, and indeed middlewomen, to force Ms Sonia Gandhi and Dr Manmohan Singh to keep A. Raja as telecom minister.
They succeeded.

The system knew why Santosh Bagrodia, a minor Calcutta businessman with a major genius for dipping 10 fingers in the till, was made coal minister in UPA1 (United Progressive Alliance); to set up the coal scam. There are two reasons why mortals became ministers: political clout and personal utility. Bagrodia’s talent was distinctly fiscal.

Similarly, everyone involved in T-20 knew that a serious stench was emanating from the underbelly from inception. Some punters were attracted by precisely that, the stink. One top honcho, now out of his depth as well as his league, used to brag before freeloaders that whenever his preferred team lost, he won — through bookies. Such party talk elicited the usual ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the priests of this religion called wealth.

Everyone in the Indian Premier League (IPL) is not corrupt; most owners and managers came for the novelty, for the fun and for the possibility that legitimate money could be made in a new form of entertainment.

By far the majority of cricketers still cannot believe their luck as they check their bank balances; their wildest dreams never foresaw such lottery-level riches for four overs of work and 20 of vigilance. But there was a price. Silence. Any leak about the underbelly would contaminate the whole tamasha.

Now that the police investigation has gone public, reports are tumbling out about parties hosted by slurping bookies, and how so many manful, morality-intense cricketers refused to go.

Why did some cricketers stay away from bookie Chandresh Patel’s party at the Country Club in Gurgaon on April 6, when general standing orders are to spread fun in all directions? The absentees knew this would be a gathering of crooks, and that some of their playing brethren were very happy indeed to sup with thieves.

What did they do next?

Kept quiet. Did they tell their captain, or their coach? Cheating changes a result. We do not know. Did the superiors add to the growing silence? Was everyone instructed to stop squealing for the larger good of the circus? Were owners told?

They keep in close touch with the team, as everyone who watches them prance across the playing fields of Cheaton for the glory of television coverage is aware.
(Apologies for the pun, but it was irresistible. If the playing fields of Eton were the epitome of character for the long-departed Duke of Wellington, then surely a scribe can coin a rotten pun when irritated.)

Was the field marshal of this glitter, sex-and-six gala, Rajiv Shukla, aware and kept quiet, for which silly fool is going to decapitate the goose that lays golden eggs every night, and often twice a night? We do not know, and you can bet your non-IPL fortune that we are unlikely to be told. The principal culprit — at least till the moment more names are revealed — Sreesanth, a ranking idiot, might break down and admit his mistakes, but he is a wobbly child compared to steel-faced tycoons at the top.

As the public mood shifts from popcorn exhilaration to cynicism and anger, there is a growing feeling that even this post-exposé clamour is merely dust in the consumer’s face: dust that will cloud the truth, buy time, and finally settle after scapegoats have been sacrificed, in the hope that there is nothing shorter than an ass’s tail or the public’s memory.

Delhi police commissioner Neeraj Kumar has lived through torment since his appointment. He deserves our congratulations now, not just for the physical dissection of a public cancer, but for the courage in challenging the collective silence that protected this racket. That required guts.

It might be easier to take on a tottering government than a towering cricket establishment these days. Kumar knows that he has only scratched the surface. But once the police begin scratching you never know which suppurating sore will begin to bleed.

This disease is not limited to 20 overs. It spreads into the national game. Test cricketers have been photographed in the obedient company of bookies, and they have kept their place with the help of an obliging captain and selectors. There is more to investigate than Neeraj Kumar has time for.

In the meanwhile, keep a beady eye open for the deluge of cosmetics that will drench the underbelly in the hope that you confuse malevolent odour with perfume.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

It is possible, for instance, to see faint ghosts of 1970 and 1971, albeit in a reverse mirror image: a new West and East Pakistan emerging, with Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa gravitating towards dissension and bulwark Punjab holding up central space.

In this scenario the Pakistan of 1947, halved in 1971, is being reduced to a mere Punjab in the teens of the 21st century. Elections can trigger, or accentuate, seismic faults if passions find a correlation with geography. The decisive phase of the Bangladesh liberation movement began with a general election that confirmed that East and West Pakistan were politically split.

PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto argued forcefully after the verdict that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League had no moral right to rule the West because its mandate had come solely from the East. The Awami League had an arithmetical majority in the national legislature, not a political one.

Bhutto was right. By the same token, his PPP had no claim over what is now Bangladesh since his party was not even in the contest in the East.

Of course Bhutto could never extend, publicly, the logic of his assertion. But two contemporary realities make disintegration virtually impossible. Pakistan has a strong nationalist institution in the armed forces. Even in 1971, Bangladesh could not have been born without the defeat of Pakistan’s armed forces in a war against India. East and West would have had to find a different solution, but that is another story.

Second, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and its allies do not represent a threat to the geography of Pakistan. They are challenging what they believe is a wishy-washy compromise that currently passes as the ideology of the state.

They want a hardline Islamic Pakistan, not a divided Pakistan. They believe a Sharia-driven Islam can check sub-nationalism. They do not want to drive the Baloch or the Pathan away; if anything, their dreams are expansionist, seeking ideological territory in Afghanistan and then an alliance with compatible Sunni movements and militias further west. If they have an enemy within the folds of believers, it is the Shia, who they condemn.

The Taliban has begun military operations against two regional parties: the MQM, the front of North Indian refugees, and the Awami National Party of the Frontier. The third enemy is the PPP, which is likely to become a Sindh party after this poll.

The Taliban are not talking about defeating them in elections. They are seeking to eliminate them physically. Over 100 died, and more than 300 were wounded, during April alone, when campaign season began. At its end, former PPP Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani’s son, Ali Haider Gilani, was kidnapped in Multan.

As Ahmad Rashid, the renowned author and journalist, put it, the “polarisation, murder and mayhem” are unprecedented. In a land where peace is news, a large island of calm will inevitably invite questions.

Strangely, or perhaps logically, there is little violence in Punjab. Observers attribute this to an implicit understanding between the principal adversaries for power in Punjab, Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf. Even if this were true, this is only a very small part of the story. The Taliban and their friends are wiser than we imagine. This is so obviously a tactical decision, not a strategic one.

The Taliban & Company believe they can seize the surround, providing them with a larger operating base for the final phase in their war for the control of Pakistan, which will take place in Punjab.

Neither Imran nor Nawaz is a Taliban ally. For this election, the democrats [Nawaz and Imran] and the Taliban are using each other as a cat’s paw. Their turn will come after the elections.

The extremists have also sharpened their appeal by exploiting a fundamental weakness of Pakistan’s democratic parties, their collective capitulation to feudalism.
Pakistan has never had genuine land reform. Bhutto, who flirted with socialism, tried, failed and abandoned the thought. Islam plus land is a powerful slogan for the peasant.

The New York Times quotes Maulana Abdul Khaliq Rehmani, a candidate of the Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat, a legal offshoot of Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan, telling a rural rally: “Feudalism has paralysed Pakistan.” He also adds, for good measure, that “Islamabad is a colony of America.”

The party has put up 130 candidates, and less than 10 might win; but they are sowing seeds for conflicts within the near future.

The most ominous result for Pakistan would be a confused legislature. It would encourage the worst instincts of the army and inspire hopes among extremists that their gun-stoked theocracy is the only option that can bring order to the country. This is what makes results more important than the polls. Whoever wins, should win big.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

I write this on the eve of what could be Malaysia’s most breathtaking election result in 56 years of history as an independent republic.

Better men than me have tempted fate by making unnecessary predictions. So let me just quote that ubiquitous taxi driver, the first and last resort of any hack in search of an election forecast.

There are two remarkable things about Kuala Lumpur, he said, as I settled down in his vehicle outside the Mandarin hotel and nudged forward a conversation: the city’s infrastructure and the taxi drivers’ brain. I bowed in homage.

The government, he continued without much need of a further prod, had an overwhelming majority in the number of flags and buntings that pockmarked the capital.
Anwar had the votes. He laughed with some gusto at his own joke, doubtless not for the first time.

There were 30 taxis in his pool, he explained; only five or six drivers were with the ruling party. The rest were with Anwar. How did they express their solidarity? They could not refuse a passenger at the hotel, but if they saw one flagging a taxi outside one of those sparse government public gatherings they just drove on. Let the chap walk. More laughter.

What about the growing talk that government agents were offering 500 ringgit [about $164] per vote? “I will take the money,” he chortled. “After all, it is my money.
They took it from the public. But voting is private.” The laugh lowered to a meaningful chuckle.

Then he added a caveat. He was only talking about Kuala Lumpur and adjacent provinces. He did not know what was happening elsewhere.

Anecdotal evidence is in favour of Anwar Ibrahim. International television channels like CNN and BBC, which prefer to be circumspect, are beginning to broadcast that this election could lead to the first-ever change in government. Anwar’s theme is precisely that: change. He has tapped into many levels of discontent, not the least of them being anger against perceived corruption.

There is a palpable sense that enough voters are simply tired of the establishment, even when they are not particularly angry over any specific issue. The establishment will not surrender without a last-ditch stand, in which every weapon from its well-stocked political arsenal will be brought into play.

The air is rife with talk of desperate measures. Planes, say some, have been chartered to bring voters loyal to the government to hop and jump through marginal constituencies, to cast bogus votes.

There are substantive rumours that mercenaries from Bangladesh have been mobilised to add to their numbers. Each whisper builds resistance among genuine voters.

It is not as if the government is bereft of genuine support. The country’s ethnic divisions are sharp: Malay, Chinese and Indians who were brought in by the British as labour for plantations. In a quaint move, these Indians recently petitioned the British monarch for compensation to atone for the sins of her ancestors.

Queen Elizabeth maintained her stiff upper lip, but you get the point. Indians, exceptions apart, remain at the bottom of the economic pile, but have still not been persuaded that they need to challenge the establishment. They will decide, said a wealthy entrepreneur, in a typically Indian fashion: on Saturday night.

Voting starts on Sunday morning. By Sunday night the election commission will announce which of the two antagonists needs prescription drugs for deep depression. If the opposition is optimistic it is largely because a new demographic is going to play a crucial role, the first-time voter.

Add this lot to the second-time voter and you get the powerful vanguard that is building momentum for Anwar Ibrahim’s call for change. Its enthusiasm has become infectious in the cities; and there is reason to believe that it is seeping into rural areas as well.

This identity operates outside traditional ethnic constituencies. Its momentum is aspirational. Malaysia is not alone; a similar phenomenon is at play in elections that will sweep across from southeast Asia to Iran in the next 15 months.

Youth power is rarely good news for the establishment. Imran Khan’s success in Pakistan will be properly measured only after the results are in, but if he is going somewhere it is only because the young are travelling with him.

When India votes, the young will make the difference. It is a fallacy to suggest that the young vote only for the young. They vote for whoever can promise a better future. That is the only meaning of change.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

One sign of the march of Indian democracy is creative progress in the science of corruption. In the shoddy old days, someone took a bag stuffed with cash, a flunky counted the rupees and took it to the master’s bedroom.

A high dignitary like a prime minister would get more respect; his cash came in a proper suitcase. A bull operator on the Mumbai stock exchange claimed in the early 1990s that he had gifted P.V. Narasimha Rao with a suitcase packed with Rs10 million in neat bundles.

These days, of course, such a pittance would be below the dignity of even junior cabinet ministers. You will recall that last year Beni Prasad Verma, a proud member of Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, laughed when his colleague was accused of skimming Rs7m. Too small a figure to be credible, Verma chortled. Did Dr Manmohan Singh frown? Not at all. Verma is still a cabinet minister.

Perhaps suitcases are passé, perhaps not. More sophisticated politicians use a brilliant variation. They pick up loot through a relative, as payment for services rendered.
And so a minister’s wife gets crores in legal fees for a transaction worth possibly lakhs, if worth anything at all.

How can you argue with that? Value, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. If a chit-fund businessman treats your wife’s legal acumen at such worth, who are we to argue? Has Dr Singh done anything? Silence remains his only answer.

One great illusion of the last decade has been our belief that Dr Manmohan Singh would ensure corruption-free governance since he himself was above board. The latest exposé in the spectrum and coal mine scams proves beyond any argument that his personal reputation provided cover for massive theft by his ministers. He knew, and did nothing about it, because his own survival as prime minister was at stake.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) affidavit to the Supreme Court in the coal scam is a devastating indictment of his government. It proves that CBI and law officers lied to the court earlier to protect the government.

It admits that its affidavit was vetted by the Prime Minister’s Office and the law minister, Ashwani Kumar. The explanation that Kumar was making only grammatical corrections is not only stupid, but also arrogant. It assumes that the rest of us, including justices of the Supreme Court, are fools.

The joint secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, who got in touch with the CBI, reports directly to the prime minister. Dr Singh made Ashwani Kumar law minister not because he delivers zillions of votes to the Congress, but because of his proximity to the prime minister.

Mrs Indira Gandhi once dismissed corruption as an international phenomenon. She was right. The nexus between politicians, big business and a few useful friends in media is also an old story.

Witness this report, datelined Berlin, first published 100 years ago and reproduced in the International Herald Tribune of April 22, 2013: “The charges of bribery of government officials by members of the Krupp firm have momentarily sunk into insignificance compared with new charges launched against German armament interests of fomenting international rivalries and ill-feeling.

“Selecting France as a fertile field for these machinations, the armament interests endeavoured to circulate false reports in the French press with a view to frightening Germany into buying large supplies of arms. The false announcement that the French army intends to double its supply of machine guns was evidently intended to spur the Germans on to double their own supply.”

But neither age nor global expanse makes corruption a virtue. The difference between Europe and India a century later is that Europe reveals names of those who hold secret accounts in Swiss banks. In India, we specialise in creating escape routes for the unlucky few who are discovered with their hands in the nation’s treasury.

There is a saving grace. India is a democracy. When Indians get angry on an epic scale, they rise with a fury that ravages the ruling party.

Whenever corruption tops the voters’ agenda, the establishment is reduced to roughly half its previous strength in the Lok Sabha. In 1974, the late Jayaprakash Narayan led an unprecedented stir against corruption. A desperate Mrs Gandhi was forced to declare an emergency in 1975.

In 1977, Congress lost over 200 seats, ending up with only 150 MPs. In 1989, Bofors allegations slashed Congress from 420 MPs to less than 200. Narasimha Rao, who had more than corruption to worry about, was similarly mauled in 1996. If the pattern persists, Congress could drop to around 100 after the next general elections.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

Every government in Bengal is equally certain of survival till the Muslim vote begins to move against its citadel. The largest Muslim concentration in India is in Bengal; they constitute 28 per cent of the population, or twice the national average.

The effective percentage is higher. Muslims, conscious of the strategic value of their vote, poll in higher numbers. Second, geography is on their side. They are concentrated in an eastern arc that rises from South 24 Parganas and develops demographic momentum in districts like Murshidabad, Malda and Dinajpur. They make the difference in at least half of Bengal’s seats, if not more.

Quiz question: what is the Muslim vote in President Pranab Mukherjee’s former constituency? Above 65pc. Rub your eyes again at the next fact. Barring one instance in the 1950s, neither the Congress nor the Marxists have put up a Muslim candidate from this constituency, until the left did so in last year’s by-election.

Being a forest, this vote moves slowly, almost imperceptibly, but when it shifts the impact is decisive in Bengal. Till 1967, it supported the Congress. When the mood changed, United Front governments came to power. In 1971, it went back to Congress because of Mrs Indira Gandhi, but from 1977 it veered towards the left and kept Marxists in power for over three decades. It now forms the vanguard of the Mamata Banerjee insurrection.

The decline in Mamata Banerjee’s urban popularity is evident to anyone who lives in or visits Calcutta. Calcutta has not returned to red yet, but the mood is belligerent.
There is incipient nostalgia among the genteel bhadralok in particular for the last Marxist chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, who had the kind of soft public style that is considered good manners.

Mamata Banerjee is too interventionist, a one-woman occupation force rather than a government. She has not understood the art of surrendering space to colleagues, if for no other reason but to share the blame when things go wrong, as they always will. If you hog the spotlight, warts from elsewhere will drift onto your face.

Her nature is confrontational. This wins applause when she dares a Goliath called Delhi. It seems shabby when her ire descends upon little men from Lilliput who crowd the media.

But slip outside the metropolis and you can smell and see the change in mood along with the environment. Rural Bengal, on either bank of the Hooghly river, is as serene as urban Bengal is squalid.

As we drive up towards Shantiniketan, where Bengal pays homage to the memory of Rabindranath Tagore, there are only a few patches of the potholed past.

On one short stretch, a 20th-century road was still being laid over a 19th-century surface through 18th-century methods. But these villages and small towns that echo through the early phase of East India Company history, remain Mamata territory.

The devastation of famine, which came with the British, may have become a nightmare of the past but poverty remains pervasive, visible in the low wages and darned lungis of labour.

It is this constituency of the poor that gives Mamata her political strength. A recent opinion poll by the TV channel Times Now gave her 27 seats out of 42. Calcutta sneers at such projections, and believes that Mamata Banerjee will be, or should be, defeated. But these voters still trust her.

She has raised minimum wages. This may not have had a radical impact on the largest employer of the poor, the domestic sector, but it has raised the poor’s bargaining power. The numbers are not ecstatic yet, but the percentage of Muslims in police recruitment is rising. Mamata Banerjee is also sensitive to any problem in Bengali madressahs or Urdu institutions.

But her true opportunity lies in an area of decision-making which is rarely discussed. Both Congress and the communists never lose a chance to claim secularism as their bread-and-butter creed, but neither has ever empowered Muslims when in government.

In any other state a community with a minimum 30pc vote would have claimed the chief ministership. Forget that thought in Bengal. Neither Congress nor the communists have even given a Muslim an economic portfolio like finance.

As a senior Marxist once told me, Bengali Muslims are considered good enough for only livestock (he was referring to animal husbandry, and in any case the remark sounds far more interesting in Bengali with a rural cadence).

So far Mamata Banerjee has remained within the conventional pattern. She has raised the political profile of some Muslim colleagues but that is not going to be enough for a community that is beginning to understand its power.

If it continues to be taken for granted, fed with occasional tokenism, the forest will move much faster than before. Mamata Banerjee still has time. And time shall tell if she also has the will to be different.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

Many of those who instigated mobs in the anti-Sikhs riots of 1984 are dead; some have slipped, with age, into decrepitude. Legal justice has been tawdry, because the establishment has protected the guilty.

But there are at least two VIPs who cannot shake off their ghosts despite 29 years of protection and promotion, offered by Congress, which has been in power for 21 of these years. Sajjan Kumar was an MP and would have remained one till now but for an accidental burst of anger by a Sikh journalist in 2009. Jagdish Tytler is a senior Congress leader, with a seat in its highest committee.

The ghost chasing Tytler is relentless. Each time Tytler becomes complacent, it pops up. Tytler has reason to be complacent. It took Indias premier police unit, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) 23 long years to produce its final report for the courts; it concluded that there was no case against Tytler. The court was sceptical.

Two years later, in 2009, CBI repeated its charade, despite the fact that the Nanavati Commission had held Tytler culpable. India, thankfully, is not a police state. A sessions court has again thrown Tytler back into the public limelight.

Tytler behaves likes a split personality when he appears on television to defend himself, half anxious, half smug. His central argument is equivocal: he does not challenge the Nanavati verdict, but adds with a shrug that it is hardly his fault if CBI did not find any evidence. The smirk is almost too much to bear.

What Tytler, his guardians and acolytes do not quite understand is how much India has changed. There are many reasons obviously, but it can be said that one of the catalysts was the Gujarat riots. A cover-up is no longer possible.

In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi read out a speech written by an over-smart bureaucrat justifying the violence with the metaphor that when the earth shakes, a banyan or two is bound to tremble. No one would suggest this today.

The Gujarat riots have been followed by unprecedented media investigation, and judicial scrutiny supervised by the Supreme Court. VIP politicians are in jail. The process is exhausting and exhaustive, but it will separate the guilty from those who were not directly responsible.

No politician ever went to jail for riots before Gujarat; in fact, hardly anyone went to jail at all. Take a count of major incidents in the last five decades: Jamshedpur in 1964, Ranchi in 1967; Ahmedabad in 1969, when some 2,000 died; Nellie in Assam in 1983, where 5,000 Muslims were estimated to have been killed (I shall never forget the rows of dead babies I saw when I went to report that story).

Hiteshwar Saikia of Congress was chief minister of Assam then, and Mrs Indira Gandhi prime minister. No one demanded his resignation. Instead, Saikia was often lauded as an astute political craftsman.

In 1989 came Bhagalpur, when over a thousand died. Let alone Congress chief minister Bhagwat Jha Azad being held responsible, even the police chief was not shifted.
Sudhakar Rao Naik was chief minister of Maharashtra during the three months of riots in Mumbai following Babri in 1992-93; the guilty named in the Srikrishna report have been left free. Narasimha Rao was prime minister then. It is a depressing list.

Public accountability, spurred by popular will, is principally responsible for the reduction in the scale and frequency of riots. Politicians may be worried about courts, but they are terrified by voters. The mood of the country has changed visibly. The young, who are in the forefront of this change, want to leave the past behind; for them governance is measured in economic growth and jobs.

It is self-evident that violence and development cannot coexist. Investment in Gujarat will shrink if there is another riot. The young want to vote for jobs, not for the problems of 1947.

If you want to predict election results, an astrologer may still be of some use; but it is far more useful to look at unemployment figures, followed closely by an examination of corruption levels. Voters resent corruption because it is theft; what makes them apoplectic is that it is theft of their money, or the nation’s resources. A nation belongs to the voter, not to a government. Governments are only temporary custodians.

There is no truth about politics, which is totally true. But that which is largely true determines the fate of elections. Caste and creed have not disappeared, but pillars of the old life are fading as another new age begins to rise on the Indian landscape. And when they are finally buried, they will not beget any ghosts.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

It was a public pledge, made through a press conference; since then he has repeated the offer whenever asked. Five years later, it is Rahul Gandhi who is ducking the question even as Dr Singh has begun to philosophise about a third term.

As we enter another election season, the Congress, with its discordant chorus over a prospective prime minister, has made one significant opposition weakness irrelevant. Both camps will now leave the answer to circumstance rather than intention.

The much-awaited contest between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi, hyped by TV news stations anxious for ratings, could well be the non-event of this teenage century. Rahul Gandhi is uncertain in his mind. Modi is uncertain about the partners the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) needs to form a possible government.

Nitish Kumar has made it clear that he wants a BJP without Modi at the top; indeed, if he was going to part with the BJP there would be no need to harp on this subject. Naveen Patnaik in Orissa or Mamata Banerjee in Bengal or Jagan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh do not make a statement a week on Modi.

The Congress has not given up on Rahul Gandhi; it cannot, but he seems to have evolved into a long-term project. All his sympathisers point out that he has time; in 10 years the latest Gandhi will be only 53. Does this leave Congress with a short-term problem?

The party has reconciled itself to the fact that the interim will be fluid. Its fondest hope is that the worst-case scenario, defeat in the next general elections, will blossom into a best-case opportunity if the next non-Congress alliance flounders in the manner that the V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar governments did between 1989 and 1991.

In the meanwhile, it is the job of party spin doctors to maximise the positive side of whatever Rahul Gandhi chooses to do. But spin has a problem when it meets reality television.

The audience of industrialists at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) convention, where Rahul Gandhi projected India as a beehive — possibly with a queen bee at the helm and drones alongside — was far less important than the audience outside watching this performance live on television.

Industrialists come to such events pre-programmed. They have learnt that the best insurance is to praise the powerful in public; it may not help, but it cannot hurt. It does not matter who is in power. If L.K. Advani becomes prime minister they will sing paeans to the wisdom of grey hair.

If Modi becomes prime minister, they will turn Gujarat into an economic model for every nation. And if Rahul Gandhi is prime minister during the next CII convention, all those who rooted for Modi in the elections will wear a badge saying ‘India is safe under Rahul for 50 years’. Don’t blame industrialists. They lead a tough life.

The popular reaction is what matters. A daily newspaper which is reasonably sympathetic to Rahul Gandhi polled its readers on the impact of his CII speech. An astonishing 85 per cent thought he had not addressed concerns about his leadership abilities; only 10pc were positive.

This probably reflects, in part, the widespread middle class anger against Congress, but even if that were so what is evident is that Rahul Gandhi is not yet the answer to this seething rage. He could be tomorrow, but he is not so today.

Perhaps the great dilemma of Rahul Gandhi is that he is less interested in political glory than his supporters are. Leadership in politics is a compelling, consuming profession which demands 18-hour days. Most of these hours are spent in that difficult art of being nice to strangers, and leaving them with some hope that there is something better on the horizon.

The rest of the time is taken by implementing policy if you are in government, or offering alternatives if you are not. Politics is a business of detail. Short cuts are an invitation to accidents, and you cannot drive on both sides of the street.

If you have been in power for nine years, you cannot give a lecture on systems failure. You have to explain why you did nothing about the system. Curiously, this is one job which does not become less demanding during the fallow phase. Whether you win or lose an election, you have to grind away if you are a serious player.

Rahul Gandhi’s CII speech was heard on TV by precisely those young voters who, buoyed by high expectations, supported Dr Manmohan Singh hugely in 2009. Perhaps such expectations had nowhere to go but down. Rahul Gandhi was perfectly placed to inherit their affections, but they are searching for other heroes in 2013.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

Dr Manmohan Singh has the requisite experience, for he was P.V. Narasimha Rao’s finance minister between 1991 and 1996. Rao never had the numbers but survived five years on the trot. He stumbled just once, on Dec 6, 1992, the day Rao deliberately sleepwalked through the destruction of the Babri mosque, inducing a minor Congress revolt.

Rao understood Congress far better than Congress understood him. He purchased Congressmen in the only currency they recognised: power. The pseudo-rebels happily clambered over Babri’s stones and into ministerial office.

The broad rule has not changed. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has held on to numbers in Karnataka, but poor governance has left the party broken and aimless in Bangalore. It will pay a price in the next assembly elections.

The present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition did not spring a leak when Mamata Banerjee punctured its hull a year ago, or when Karunanidhi punched a hole a fortnight ago, or Mulayam Singh Yadav began to sneer a week ago. This ship of state was lost when corruption drove it off course, beginning with the inflated Commonwealth Games’ bills and then onto telecom handouts on a spectrum scale, Robert Vadra’s cosy land deals, sleazy coalmine allocations and Italian helicopter bribes. Karunanidhi used alleged war crimes in Sri Lanka to distance himself from Congress, but the real reason is that he believes Congress has become an electoral liability.

Mulayam Singh Yadav has shifted from proximity to uncertainty for similar reasons. Veterans like Yadav and Karunanidhi are graduates of the old school of demand, barter and concession. You never quite know which of the three is in the air.

They can drag out a decision, maximising space for manoeuvre in marriage and insisting on heavy alimony in divorce. Even when you think you have heard the final word, they leave a little wiggle room for a flexible narrative. They can make the process acrimonious.

Karunanidhi’s intentions were clear when former telecom minister A. Raja publicly sought to give evidence before the joint parliamentary committee investigating the 2G case in which he is principal accused. Congress stopped Raja because it knew Raja would accuse the prime minister and then Finance Minister Chidambaram of being party to his decisions, generating unwelcome headlines. Raja had clearance from Karunanidhi.

Congress policy towards allies has so far been cool. It acts on the assumption that since they cannot ally with the BJP, they have nowhere else to go, and will therefore accept any terms set by Congress. This increases their options, without raising their liability. If Mamata leaves, Mulayam arrives; when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) creates trouble, Nitish Kumar can be brought into play.

But polygamy can save you only up to a point. The problem is that partnership has lost credibility, even as a clock reminds you that the countdown has started and risk has begun to outweigh reward.

Dr Manmohan Singh, an astute reader of moods within the Lok Sabha, may well be right when he says that his government will last till its appointed hour. What is more to the point is that it is 11 o’clock already. As Yadav remarked, “Why withdraw [support to UPA] and make the government fall when it is just a matter of eight or nine months?”

He is right. If UPA is defeated in Lok Sabha, the elections will be held in December; if this dead government is permitted to continue walking, elections will be held in March. Not that big a deal. Withdrawing support only adds an unnecessary controversy to an election which will be fought on corruption, inflation and poor governance. Bringing the UPA down now is tantamount to doing Congress a favour.

Congress has no reason to worry about a vote in the house. It should, however, be worried about the war of attrition that has already begun. Congress cannot dismiss Trinamool, the Samajwadi Party and DMK as generically hostile, like the BJP; Mamata Banerjee, Yadav and Karunanidhi had inside seats in this circus.

The Congress problem in the run-up to 2014 will not be the BJP, but allies who have drifted into negative territory. Congress spokespersons have developed a well-honed combination of loud counterattack and sneers whenever they are attacked. This will not be effective against parties which kept Congress in power through the trauma of corruption charges and the rough passage of decisions like FDI.

The story of the past year has been the isolation of Congress, a dramatic reversal from the situation in 2009, when parties were offering support without getting their ratio of office space in government.

However, it is not very difficult to diagnose what is happening in Delhi now. Congress is engrossed in how to survive till March 2014; its allies are worried about how to survive after the next general elections. Very simple, really.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

Jaundiced Arab eyes are asking a cynical question: if Camilla and Prince Charles drop by to see war refugee Syrian children at a camp in Jordan, as they did on March 13, can Nato troops be far behind?

Observers are adding two plus two, and perhaps getting five. But they note that when Republican Senator John McCain puts on his best stentorian manner and claims Bashar Assad is committing genocide against his own people, something is beginning to cook in Washington. Across the Atlantic, Britain and France have urged the European Union to lift a ban on weapons for Syrian rebels.

Little flakes point towards a storm. This clamour, half official and half unofficial, seeks to suggest that only Nato can rescue a crucial nation on the geo-strategic map from the despotic and dynastic rule of the Assad family. So far, the war in Syria has been an uneven contest between a Russian-backed authoritarian regime and disparate rebel groups.

International intervention means nothing without American involvement. Britain and France have neither the stomach nor the wherewithal for unilateral action.

Barack Obama is not a pacifist, as evidence from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen proves. But he is too smart to repeat the foolishness of George Bush the Younger. He will not use lies as justification for war. He has laid down a “red line”: the use of chemical weapons, which the Assad regime possesses.

A flutter went up this week when both government and rebels accused each other of using chemical weapons. Washington reacted calmly, ordering its intelligence analysts to check the allegations. At the moment of writing this is still in progress. If Obama does go to the United Nations it will be with solid evidence, not hearsay manufactured in the neocon imagination, as Bush did.

Bush made unforgivable errors. His target was Saddam Hussein, and he went to war against the whole of Iraq. Obama will choose his enemy more carefully. He will more probably concentrate his military attention on the elite that controls Damascus, and avoid battle to the extent he can with the Syrian army.

This would mean maximum use of missiles and warplanes, and minimal use of infantry. The official Assad palace in Damascus is atop a high hill and very vulnerable to air assault, but the Assads understand that and have moved out. But dominant air cover will be invaluable to rebels who have already reached the edge of Damascus.

Obama is unlikely to risk American boots on the battlefield. The heavy lifting on the field would probably be left to Turkish troops; Turkey is a member of Nato, and has provided refuge and sanctuary to both civilians and fighters. It has an important national interest in the outcome of this conflict.

Nor can Assad hope for popular support in his own country. His sect, the Alawites, who form only 10 per cent of the population, have alienated the Sunnis. Foreign intervention will get just that touch of local support that makes its efforts credible.

The tough part may not be the big war in the beginning, but the small wars of succession that will plague Syria in the aftermath. The rebels do not ride under a single flag.
Their motivation varies. Some of them are Islamists; others dream of becoming regional warlords. They could turn Syria into another Lebanon.

Afghanistan may be an extreme case, but it is always worth noting that three decades after the Soviet troops were driven out the wars of succession are not over. It is easier to end a war between nations than calm the consequences of an insurrection.

Whatever the eventual price, it is obvious that the present order in Damascus is no longer sustainable. When the conflict was still in its incipient stage, Turkey advised Assad to accept a compromise and lead the change rather than defy it and invite bloodshed.

Bashar Assad had seen his father Hafez contain and defeat one challenge after another, and thought he could do so as well. But Hafez Assad lived in an age of dictators and comparatively settled internal and external relations.

Bashar Assad rules at a time of turbulence on the Arab street and massive flux in the neighbourhood. He could have been an exemplar of transition. He chose a worse fate. Russia, and China to a lesser degree, will continue to back Assad, if for no other reason than to rebuff America, but not at the cost of their self-interest.

Iran is a far more reliable ally, but its ability to protect Assad against a carefully constructed, UN-authorised American-Turkish operation must be in question.

This is a war whose opening stages have become a prolonged prologue. Every war is unpredictable, and no one can say how it will end. But once they start, the middle and end games will be quicker.

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.

The central purpose of his papacy was not advertised when he became John Paul II, but has become a proud part of the official narrative today.

He rose to prominence in 1964, when he was named archbishop of Krakow: three years after the Berlin Wall cemented the partition of Germany and two years after the Cuban missile crisis brought the world as close as it has come, before or after, to nuclear devastation.

It was the coldest period of the Cold War, and John Paul II was assigned the most difficult job of his era; as shepherd to his Catholic country, Poland, through the dictatorship and depression of communist rule. His mission was upgraded when he reached Rome: to destroy the Soviet Union from within, through the subversive influence of the church and its allies.

Through an exquisite paradox, the workers’ paradise of Lenin and Stalin was blown apart by men like Lech Walesa and their trade unions. Even the normally discreet CIA has let it be known through friendly authors that it worked in partnership with the papacy against the Soviet empire.

John Paul lived on till April 2005 but his principal mission was complete when the Soviet Union lay in smithereens by 1992.

The Vatican did not wait for the minimum five years to begin the process of his beatification, which took only a fast four years.

One requirement is performing a miracle. Officially, John Paul is said to have cured a French nun of Parkinson’s disease. This does seem a bit far-fetched given that the saintly pope could not cure his own Parkinson’s; but John Paul’s real miracle was to help bring down the seemingly impregnable Soviet dispensation.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina has not become the first non-European pope in 12 centuries through accident either; or indeed because his genetic origins are Italian. The most powerful religious order in the world has not survived by being sentimental. The 115 cardinals of this year’s electoral college displayed a sharp understanding of geopolitics and assessment of where they believe lies their true challenge in the foreseeable future.

Observers, including sympathetic ones, tend to transfer their own concerns to the Vatican. It was thus widely inferred by the commentariat after the sudden abdication of Benedict that the new pope would be chosen on the basis of his ability to address contemporary concerns like the ban on abortion, or gender equality in the clergy, or the horrifying abuse of children by priests who are required to be celibate.

Instead, we have a pope who is deeply conservative on such social issues. The Vatican views child abuse as a problem, not a plague. As defenders of the status quo point out, this crime is limited at best to just four per cent of the priesthood. It is therefore something that the church can deal with without upgrading a dilemma to a crisis.

The Vatican, in my view, sees the coming decade as a historic opportunity to negate a far greater threat.

Latin America is home not only to the largest bloc of Roman Catholics, but has also seen the rise of a radical new left. The old left has been in retreat after the Soviet Union’s collapse. China has preserved some important elements of traditional doctrine, principally atheism, but has escaped economic implosion by converting state socialism into state capitalism. China is a story that awaits denouement.

But, quite surprisingly, Cuba defies the odds, and shows no signs of changing its colour. It has discovered strong allies like Venezuela, whose pugnacious Hugo Chavez has been transformed into some sort of secular saint after his recent death.

A subcontinent tortured by vicious military dictatorships continues to nourish leftists through democracy. Would it be a stretch to assume that the first Latin American pope’s true calling is to destabilise Cuba and challenge the left in Latin America?

The Vatican does not camouflage antagonism. When critics questioned the new pope’s record during the junta days in Argentina, Federico Lombardi, its spokesman, said, “There has never been a credible, concrete accusation against [Francis I.

His accusers are] anti-clerical left-wing elements that are used to attack the church.” The church has fashioned its response. If Cuba crumbles, then the barricades are breached.

Pope Francis is being promoted as “pro-poor”; this is obviously essential if he wants to wean the Latin poor away from the left.

John Paul used trade unions; Francis could use slums. Barack Obama has done his bit by describing Francis as “a champion of the poor and the most vulnerable among us”.

The first stories about him talk of simplicity. This is not to suggest that the stories are untrue; merely that this is the ideal profile in the church’s coming confrontation.

What odds that the first Asian pope, perhaps in the 2020s, will be from China?

The writer is editor of The Sunday Guardian, published from Delhi, India on Sunday, published from London and editorial director, India Today and Headlines Today.