The Fortune Coookie School of Political Analysis

The Fortune Cookie School of Political Analysis


A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested

Bonfire of the Vanities ~Tom Wolfe (1988).



It’s incredible how many there are and how full of it. It, being what the Americans call baloney and the Irish blarney and others certain stronger epithets. The elated adherents of the Congress Party post-election can’t seem to gush enough about their dazzling wisdom in the fray with a comic genuflection to the leader of the party, the prime minister, and the youth icon, in that order, at the beginning and end of each of their pronouncements, in a parody of an invocation of the Catholic Holy Trinity.

Likewise we are treated to the pathetic spectacle of the BJP backers, back-pedalling away from all the hard right-wing edges to their rhetoric as they contemplate 10 or 15 years without the rejuvenating balm of power.

Its shibboleth time from every tired hack and time-serving loyalist with unctuous calls for centrist, moderate politics, implying the electorate fights shy of any kind of stridency and would like to sacrifice whatever it takes, including its self respect, on the altar of stability.

All well and good, but perspective, let alone vision, is not evident amongst all this righteous, or is it relieved, babble. It represents the kind of weakness that extremists of every hue exploit. It lets them strengthen their sleeper cells and tentacles and emboldens them to strike. And it turns our law enforcement and security agencies into right-siding politicians.

But that, as they say, will turn out to be the story of another day. A day when India is stripped of its dignity and shown up for the soft state it is, having to content itself with platitudinous expressions of sympathy from the world when attacked, from within and without, and not a jot more.

But, in the meantime, there is much smug I-told-you-so crowing after the fact of the elections, when all is hind-sight, including the saw that nothing succeeds like success; at least till the wind turns…

It stands to reason, say a majority of these Fortune Cookie analysts, that the Congress Party is fixing to secure a majority for itself, on its own, in 2014. And the architect of this resurgence is the scion of the Gandhi family, the heretofore young man modestly hiding his light under a bushel, transformed with the win of 20 odd seats in Uttar Pradesh.

He is now reborn as the blindingly prescient and long-term player. He is the youth icon Mr. Rahul Gandhi with a back-to-the-villagism first conceived by the shrewd operator in one other Gandhi, out to upstage all the three-piece suits.

But of course, first the Congress Party might just need to deliver the kind of performance their own analysis demands. And verily, if that is what they end up doing, this country will certainly not be complaining.

But the problems might well lie in the very model of moderation and vote bank appeasement that is seen to be the winning formula. It tends to leave very little room to manoeuvre, particularly when confronted with crisis situations that call for action without partisan and sometimes cynical political calculation.

Nobody today in the first flush euphoria of victory thinks anything of so much ambition built around a 2 per cent increase in vote share for Congress over 2004 in the verdict of 2009. But sometimes it really isn’t about how good or popular one is. It is about how badly disorganised the opposition might be.

At present there is no percentage being apportioned, no consideration whatsoever being given to being the beneficiary of the misfortunes that have befallen an arrogant and cocksure Left. Nor is any tear being shed for the punishment meted out to a sometimes corrupt, grandiose, much posture and little work, set of regional parties. It should be remembered however, that they too have seen far grander days even if they are all but decimated today.

But much is being read, in a decidedly triumphalist manner, into the failure of the “communal” and “divisive” BJP to wrest the advantage from Congress in this election and indeed in failing to improve its seat tally over 2004.

It is further assumed that the BJP can only hope to return to power someday if it drops its core agenda, inclusive of Article 370, the Uniform Civil Code, its philosophy of Hindutva and the promise to build a grand temple at Ayodhya.

It does not trouble the Fortune Cookie Analysts that perhaps it is not these issues, and not even the strident denunciation of Islamic terrorism by Mr. Varun Gandhi , the introduction of Mr. Narendra Modi as a star campaigner, or the hooliganism of the Ram Sene; that has led to the decline in BJP fortunes.



Perhaps it is the just desserts of a party riddled with infighting and multiple centres of power, its leadership at various levels at loggerheads with each other. This should actually be clear to the Congress because it was this precise dispiriting scenario that kept it out of power between 1996 and 2004 also.

A party divided against itself is not credible to the voter. A party president from the provincial diaspora unable to make an impact on the national stage, and a supreme leader hamstrung by battling jealous colleagues and jostling generation next contenders, cannot win. Neither is the disintegration of the cadre based support of the RSS, torn between factionalised narrow focus assertion and non-interference, and peculiarly antiquated in its world view. After all, why should Hindu Nationalism have to be obscurantist?

But, at the same time, it is facile to call for a jettisoning of core values in order to become a sort of B team of the Congress. This will not suffice, unless the Congress Party disappoints the electorate so thoroughly that it invites an anti-incumbency backlash of the kind that has reduced some of the once influential regional parties to their present state of rout.

History shows us that an electoral defeat is a call to arms as much as a victory. The essence lies in reorganising to fight another day, modernised certainly, but without abandoning one’s principles. And it calls for strong and clear-headed leadership that is not undercut by factionalism. In this, the Trinity in the Congress clearly has an upper hand, and will be a hard act to follow.


(1,056 words)

28th May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Published as "Misplaced triumphalism" in The Pioneer on June 1st, 2009. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under Columnists.

Governance or Oblivion

Governance or Oblivion

The election to the 15th Lok Sabha has rewarded performance wherever it was perceived to have occurred. Regional parties, the BJP, the Congress, have all won, in a clearly non-doctrinaire manner, in every location where the voter thinks they have provided good governance. By the same token, the Left, ensconced in their former citadels of Kerala and West Bengal, has lost power, or their firm grip on it, because of an abject lack of performance.

Incumbency has not mattered. Ideology has not mattered. Unity of organisational effort probably has, in so far as it prevents the same party working at cross-purposes against itself, but not enough to elevate “Identity” politics, however emphatically described, refusing to let it gain traction in a vacuum made up of empty sloganeering.

This new phenomenon of merit-based rewards in electoral politics has also seen a number of multi-term winning criminals losing at the hustings. And this spontaneous de-criminalisation of the Lok Sabha appears to have made an electoral beginning, cutting across party lines. This is not to say some history-sheeters and jail-birds have not won, but, much reduced in number, they must be criminals that have succeeded in delivering good governance!

All in all, the new buzz about “performance politics” has set the bar a lot higher for the new Government, beginning its work with a windfall of 206 seats of its own, and vastly reduced dependence on its allies.

However, the craven sense of entitlement on the part of the DMK, an important pre-poll ally, not above threatening to provide outside support if its bluff was called, which it emphatically was, are oblivious to the voter’s message. Likewise, smaller allies, with even three or four MPs, are giving vent to muted murmurings and sulking, as they are unable to force compliance to their demands.

The victorious politicians from allied parties are busy, as usual, scrambling after the loaves and fishes of office, attendant on the process of government formation and allocation of portfolios. Nothing has changed in their minds as yet and the verdict of the people is firmly behind them. They have not even registered the irrefutable arithmetic that has reduced their influence and it may take some more time for this fact to sink in.

The Government, on its part, seems to realise the changed reality—both of its dramatic increase in strength, and the imperative to deliver performance to the electorate, preferably with a minimum of corruption. The implication is that there will be no excuses accepted and non-performance will lead to ejection. This is cramping the style and ambitions of many Congressmen too, constrained as they are to accept any responsibility or portfolio that comes their way. They may have preferred to bargain too, but this time, the Prime Minister has strong hands, and no challengers, as he has undoubtedly contributed to the electoral success.

On his part, he must appoint a much more competent council of ministers. But it remains to be seen whether this government will judge itself eventually against an objective yardstick of performance, or merely in relative terms, satisfied to keep one jump ahead of itself. Relatively speaking, as in when a tiger is running after you and some others, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, merely the next man running.

If this is the self-serving judgement call, the electorate should, based on present experience, throw out the incumbent. And it may begin to do so in the next round of assembly elections itself. But if the performance is good in absolute terms, another term will, most likely, be assured. The stakes this time are therefore a lot higher.

Some commentators have been citing this new phenomenon as a permanent shift in voter behaviour. They call it the “politics of aspiration”, well on its way to replace the “politics of grievance” inclusive of victim-hood, even identity that has been endemic to the post-independence discourse.

It is the new politics, as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman puts it, of, “dreams” rather than “memory”. Under this formulation, no more will yanking the chains of caste, religion, name-calling or indeed name-dropping, dynasty, entitlement, and so on, move the electorate to vote in favour.

If this is true, it needs to bear itself out over several elections, to be sure, both at the state assembly level and nationally. But assuming for a moment that it is; we are likely to finally begin to get money’s worth out of our democracy.

More so, if the “performance politics” is inclusive, and addresses the needs of various sections of the people. And, of course, it will have a profound, civilising, constructive effect on the politics of opposition, on agitational and disruptive politics in general, and the tone of parliamentary and legislative assembly goings-on across the board.

But it may be too much to expect such a radical changing of spots in such a hurry. Evolution is rarely so drastic. So if the merit-based direction that is being set today, stumbles, it may still get us there in the medium term. So, even with a few swings and roundabouts thrown in, we have no reason to be disillusioned.

The desi take on faltering “Governance” may not lead to immediate punishment. It may not take us to a Nixonian pass when he said, “Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.” Nixon was unnecessarily harsh on himself because when he lost an election he always over-reacted. And when he was finally impeached, half way through his second term as president, he lost power and was disgraced; but not, as he realised subsequently, his significance, or his place in history, particularly for opening up to China.

Marcus Aurelius, the 2nd century Roman Emperor, had a rather more irrefutable take on oblivion when he said, “Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion”. Stoic that he was, it’s strange how he saw things the Indian way. In terms, that is, of the ultimate meaningless of all worldly achievement, of the concept of maya. But perhaps it was a little unfair of him to talk of a thing so clearly beyond the realm of mere “performance politics” and its very tangible benefits. And the hopes it arouses.


(1,044 words)

22nd May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee

What to expect from an Aam Aadmi Mandate

What to expect from an Aam Aadmi Mandate



The fastest counting of millions of electoral votes in the world commenced in the early morning of 16th May. By the forenoon, the battle for the 15th Lok Sabha was all but won.

The great Indian electorate, in its wisdom, has decided to gift the country a stable government, strongly anchored by the Congress Party and run by the UPA. This is all the more remarkable because the pre-poll commentary predicted a much more complicated result with a range of powerful regional satrapies and a close contest between the Congress and BJP nationally.

The surprise results however show that not only will the UPA form the central government with economist Dr. Manmohan Singh embarking on his second consecutive term as Prime Minister, but it will do so without needing to lean on a badly mauled Left.

For the Indian economy, even viewed from an international perspective, a stable government with built-in continuity is indeed a great boon. While this, in itself will not guarantee policies that promote fast-forward double-digit growth, given the Congress Party’s own left-off-centre orientation and its sometimes populist aam aadmi policies; it does provide it considerable elbow room.

Including an opportunity, over the next five years, to truly do something for the very people who have put the UPA in power once again.

The UPA can do so by pursuing constructive and well implemented rural upliftment policies, such as massive food processing and value-addition projects, all round modernisation and automation, better preservation, distribution and marketing facilities -- resulting in infinitely better rural incomes.

And in the building of multifarious and quality rural infrastructure, so that the gap between “Bharat” and “India” is reduced once and for all with a view to its eventual elimination. All this, and not more budget draining, if traditional, populist soppery.

Urban India too should see the various initiatives of the outgoing UPA Government blocked by a rigidly ideological Left and dependence on a number of other allies, being fast-tracked now. These include the part-privatisation of leading PSUs via fairly rapid stock market divestment. This will go some way to unlock value and free up significant funds both for infrastructure development and tackling the huge fiscal deficit.

It is a fiscal deficit in double digits with state incurred red-ink included; that is adversely impacting India’s Sovereign Ratings, its ability to borrow, and its attractiveness as an investment destination.

Infrastructure development itself has been at a near stand-still throughout the UPA first term, including crucial but long-gestation power projects, and hopefully will now receive the policy fillip and administrative will it deserves. Its subset, the construction industry is practically moribund at present.

Reviving infrastructure development is crucial in order to unclog bottle-necks, free us from badly antiquated facilities, and sustain medium to long term GDP growth. It needs to be treated as a national priority.

The stock markets are widely expected to react with jubilation at first. But expectations of a galloping bull run will need to be tempered by the hard facts of a global recession in general, and in the US, a major buyer of our software and other exports, in particular.

And the actual revival of our own economy, greatly slowed, because of unfavourable domestic policies too. In addition, there is the looming national budget 2009, which needs to indicate clear-cut and bold reform initiatives to kick start the process.

The stability of this government, in addition, should afford the ideal opportunity to upgrade and modernise our armed forces, the state of our ill-equipped para-military and police forces, the recruitment and training of new ranks of counter-insurgency and other specialised forces and a total overhaul of our intelligence operations. Our security upgrade will, because of the massive spends involved, become a significant booster and stimulant for the economy in general.

India is viewed internationally as a soft state; a sitting duck for the next 26/11 strike and we have been warned to expect it soon. This soft-statism is very bad for business as foreign direct investment (FDI), finds it uncomfortable to do business in an unsafe environment, however potentially lucrative. And even sportsmen, such as cricketers and those scheduled to attend the Commonwealth Games, have marked their concern.

And liquid foreign institutional investment (FII), expected to flow into our bourses now that the elections have thrown up a favourable result, tends to be skittish if we continue to be a frequent terrorist target and subject to domestic insurgencies as well.

There are many other items on the economic laundry list including insurance and pension fund reform, retail liberalisation, education reform including permission to foreign universities to set up shop here, financial sector reforms including pressing requirements in our antiquated and illiquid debt markets and so on. And after May 16th, the Government cannot, at any rate, blame the fractured mandate for its inability to act.

In this electoral verdict, we are probably demonstrating a level of political maturity not expected of us, given our illiterate but voting masses, and the sheer youth of our democracy. The challenge that lies before the new UPA Government is to show the same coming-of-age economically.

(850 words)

16th May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee

Appeared as Leader Edit in The Pioneer on Wednesday, May 20, 2009 entitled "Can Congress hold this smile?" and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived online under Columnists at www.dailypioneer.com

Raat Chaandni Main Aur Tu: Hello Mister How Do You Do?

Close-up of Russian/South African artist Vladimir Tretchikoff's 1950 portrait "Chinese Lady".

Raat Chaandni Main aur Tu: Hello Mister How Do You Do?


Mera naam chin-chin-chu
Chin-chin-chu baba chin-chin-chu
Raat chaandni main aur tu
Hello, mister, how do you do?
Baaba..baaba

From Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo in film Howrah Bridge (1958).



It is mid-summer hot and coincidentally at the apogee of the political mating season. If anything goes, one knows not where, just blame it on the Bossa Nova, even if it is a South American dance little known in these parts outside of the Brazilian Embassy. But there is a further condition. For uninhibited goings on without regret, it must be danced in the moonlight. Moonlight is the magic ingredient; no matter what -- from the crescent of a sharp new moon or the maddening yellow orb of the enormous Harvest Moon. Or even in the less demanding generic of the delectable Chin Chin Chu’s Chaandni Raat.

It’s all in the universal need to requisition a bit of the intoxicating “light of the silvery moon” to enable our tries. Moonlight is the soft eiderdown of romance, the inducement to the intended mingling, of the resulting “loctite connexion” as much as that of the fabulous chance encounter. Yes, despite the risk in these times of deadly social diseases, the pitfalls of power, money, infamy and oblivion.

So Fear can go sit in its place on the bench alongside Timidity and God Bless them both but Instinct will out. But let us be ready to throw out the sacks, stun-worthy with manna, like a Great Train Robbery for the Gods, not at thieves however masterful, but at the oracular geeks with the temerity to figure out the tipping point. And the tipping point now clearly indicates an NDA formulation. There are more Congress haters than Sri Ram baiters. The dam of pseudo-secularism is breached and there is nothing to salvage except tattered half-truths and orphaned sycophants still mumbling their lines like so many distraught automatons.

Yes really! But when exactly did the little statements turn credible, preference turn to inclination, inclination turn into trend that’s trendy enough to juggernaut into conquest, rout and triumph!

Fact is, it takes a bit of lunacy to turn the tide, crack the lie, and gradually, the walls come tumbling down. Get these things right and you can bridge chasms no matter how many cases are filed against you, the jails you may have to visit, and the plethora of names you may be called.

What you have to do is take those cantilevered inductive leaps across unlikely conjunctions. Do it fearlessly and you can land on the side of victory. And not just in order to win but to bring great beneficent outcomes to all who follow your lead. They will all gain safe passage, free of threat and constant bullying, on the side of the righteous, of people comfortable in their skins and proud of their country. And safe from harm, from the tooth and claw of roiling monsters frothing poisonous with the bile of defeat.

Something, in fact, like the iconic Howrah Bridge, that spans the foaming Hooghly with 705 meters of cantilever without once resorting to an intermediate support. It might seem to some, despite its solid reality, like a bridge too far, but there it is, standing firm over the grand swell since it was opened to traffic in 1943.

But over the month of voting in phases, there has been too much facile talk of “secularism” and “communalism” bandying back and forth like unbridgeable divides. These have been formulaic and partisan propagandising in the name of analysis.

But despite everything, including the apathetic showing of the chatterati at the voting booths, precious little is being said about the needs of a country in great need of a paradigm shift away from the old smoke and mirrors. The apparent impracticality of the thinking classes is astounding. They seem satisfied to vent, however irresponsibly, and leave it at that. Where is the great glue of national resolve to take us to our salvation? Or indeed protect us from the machinations of a hostile environment? Or allow us to meet our undoubtedly great potential? Who will forge a strong new steel out of this tumult? And who will forgive the abdication of the elite?

But patriotism has seemingly been allocated to the armed forces who are required to do the needful on our behalf. As for anyone else trying to talk plainly of the national as opposed to factional interest, it is as if a great wave of environmental doubt sweeps over him. The air is certainly thicker with cynicism and the chatter of blind men than it is with pollution.

So the blessed Indian electorate, the actual voting poor, some half of the eligible, will, willy-nilly be the arbiter. It will cause the formation of the next government through the bypass of urban unreason. But the blessed public deserves better for their effort through heat and threat and will therefore get its due.

Will it do so by mutely compelling their elected representatives to leap over their present constraints, involuntarily forced to come together as the very bridges they stand on burn-out below them. Could be. Could well be. In this play of apparently unintended consequences that is how it works out sometimes.

And because the players are numerous, in parties and independents both, the government that goes to the 15th Lok Sabha is now grown typical to form.

Like the several governments before it, this one too will spawn the future of this country, labelled meaninglessly as wobbly or stable, but begat polygamously in the Biblical sense, not by neat sets of modest parents copulating in their private darkness, but fathered out in the open, in the soft allure and shadows of the chaandni raat, perhaps as in the courtyards and temple verandahs of old.

It is not a barren exercise of group lust. This government, like the ones in recent memory, will be put together very democratically, by the many, for the indubitable benefit of the many. One can’t fault that.

Robert D Kaplan, a Senior Fellow at the Center for a new American Security in Washington DC wrote in the April issue of The Atlantic, “Indeed the very Hindu pantheon, with its many gods rather than one works towards the realisation that compelling truths are what enable freedom”. As in religion, so in politics. Satyamev Jayate!


(1,055 words)

12th May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Toned-down version in The Pioneer on 15th May 2009 as the OP-Ed Leader named "Tipping towards NDA", online at www.dailypioneer.com and is archived under Columnists

Evil Eye on Islam Light

Evil Eye on Islam Light


The perpetual internal battle in Islam is not just between the various sects of Sunnis and Shiites. This is, of course, an age-old animosity traceable to the very dawn of Islam. But even within the two main streams of the “true faith”, there is persistent conflict between what Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk calls “Islam Light,” and its hard-core adherents.

All progress, as it is generally understood, is made under the relatively liberal rule of Islam Light, but its votaries are under constant threat from the Mullah-led orthodox and their “God’s Warriors”.

The only way Islam Light sustains itself is by ruthless repression and periodic purges of the hard-core. This is true of every single Islamic country in the world dealing with its existential realities. And there is also a sharp rich/poor divide amongst Islamic monarchies, oligarchies, military and “benevolent” dictatorships, the uneasy republics, the jamahiriyas, the Loya jirgas, the pseudo-republics, the socialist Islamic republics, the rare and uneasy democracy. And this, notwithstanding traditional welfarism and charity.

The poor and illiterate in all these countries are generally prey to the radical element motivated by mullahs of a medieval bent of mind. And the rich, the educated elite, the powerful, do themselves no good with their corruption, debauchery, hypocrisy; their apostate western/dissolute/cynical ways; unashamedly thinking up ways to use the poor for their own political and strategic ends.

This is precisely the battle that is currently consuming Pakistan. Quite apart, that is, from fissiparous tensions between its dominant feudal Punjabi culture and its other, lesser, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pathan and Mohajir constituents. But even as the Pakistani elite live in denial of their fractured, fissured, failed and bankrupt nation; they continue to mine the internal conflict for all the money they can get from America.

This is an old habit now, maybe turned into an irresistible addiction. It has come down from the early days of Nixon and Kissinger’s anti-Soviet/India, pro-Pakistan/China tilt in the Seventies. It was widened and deepened by Zia Ul Haq’s US sponsored Mujahideen creating regime. It has continued through Benazir Bhutto’s time of smoke and mirrors; and that of Nawaz Sharif; and that of Pervez Musharraf. And now, it is floundering under the weak and awkward helmsmanship of Zardari/Gilani/Kayani.

The Pakistani establishment assures itself it is in full control of the situation. It refuses to see that a radical, impoverished, numerous, madrassa-bred horde, nurtured over fifty years, cannot be taken out of the box to use for monetary shake-downs and put back in forever. Not, that is, without both the serum and its antidote developing mutant side-effects of their own.

Right now, as US Congress prepares to vote on the Obama Administration’s proposals to generously fund Pakistan afresh; Pakistan is playing the picture-book vassal state, all obedience and attentive comprehension. It has demonstrated no hesitation in using some of those American supplied helicopter gun-ships to shoot up some fifty home-grown Taliban. Nor in nodding sudden agreement at US interlocutors when it came to agreeing that “internal threats,” and not “India” is Pakistan’s current Enemy No. 1.

But this sort of cooperation tends to fluctuate in line with pay-day. And, because of the embedded clash between Islam Light and the hordes of “true” believers outside the palace gates; this fancy fandango is turning increasingly precarious.

The fandango is a difficult dance to dance in an Islamic state, even in a somewhat Europeanised Turkey. The hard-core Islamist always holds the “light brigade” apostate, infidel, and as much the enemy as any other kind of non-believer. And the struggles of power politics tend to have some very hard, steel-tipped, bully-boy edges. An old Kashmiri proverb: “One man’s beard is on fire, and another warms his hands on it,” sums it up nicely.

The Turks, from the times of their Graeco-Roman past, have been entrenched in their rather pagan belief in the malefic effects of the “Evil Eye”. They’ve developed an elliptical talisman against it, and it is ubiquitous; embedded on walls and floors, in pendants, key chains, ear-rings.

And maybe it is this Evil Eye that has cast its baleful gaze upon the conflict engendered by the medievalism trapped in Islam struggling for its identity in a modern, westernised world.

Turkey, eternally astraddle Asia and Europe is literally hybridised. It is both Kamal Ataturk’s Europeanised finessing: no burkhas, no jubbas, no Ottoman Fezzes; but also, now, revisionist, ambivalent: Pamuk’s vision of a return-to-the-veilism battling with “universal ideas”. That is why populous Turkey waits interminably to clear continuous objections in its bid to join the European Union.

In India we call it the “bura nazar” that the back of any Indian truck will tell you, deserves to have its own face blackened. But who will erase the Evil Eye that has bedevilled our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Kashmir?

Perhaps the time has come to accept that we will never succeed in trying to democratise the Islamic majority in the Valley--no matter how many elections they participate in. Touch a raw nerve and the place will burn, going from a blessed “Paradise on Earth” to Hell—even by the fire of a single beard set alight.

We will eventually have to save Kashmir from itself by the very means we reject today as anathema. We will have to revoke Article 370 without expending any more vacuous sentimentality on the issue and fully integrate “paradise” with the rest of India --rather like China has seen to Tibet.

There will undoubtedly be howls of protest but it is better than the Pakistani prescription of death by a thousand cuts for Hindustan. Pakistan is busy with itself and America is unwilling, for the moment, to let it play its Kashmir card. Perhaps we should use this time to take a Muslim majority Kashmir out of its reach. This clear-headed action may, eventually, stop the blood-bath which has cost modern India more military and civilian casualties than all our other insurgencies and wars combined.

Meanwhile the Islamic paradox continues. Kamal Ataturk promulgated his law against the multiple marriages and divorces permitted by Islam in favour of one-at-a-time civil marriage and its due-process dissolution. But he took care to do so, just after divorcing his wife of many years, giving her a swift, traditional, and maintenance-free talaq; in order to marry a young and nubile replacement…

(1,053 words)

1st May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee