The advantages of irrelevance

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar,

Having won over the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Manmohan Singh government can push ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal, and hope to complete its full five-year term. If the government survives the trust vote, Congressmen will be delighted, since they are terrified of an early election, given that inflation is running at 12%.

Their delight will be tempered by the bitter knowledge that the once-mighty Congress is steadily decreasing in political relevance, in state after state. Yet, ironically, its growing irrelevance in the states has actually helped it survive in New Delhi. Even dark clouds have silver linings, sometimes very broad ones.

When the Congress won more seats than the BJP in the 2004 general election, it was far short of an absolute majority, and sought the assistance of every possible party to cobble together a ruling coalition. It sought the support of the SP too. But Mulayam Singh Yadav said absolutely no. He feared that a Congress government in New Delhi might find ways to cut him to size in Uttar Pradesh or even oust him, and then stage a comeback in India's largest state. Mulayam feared that the Congress might win back the support of UP Muslims, who had defected to him in droves after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. So, he declined firmly to support the Manmohan Singh government.

Why then has he suddenly changed tack, and saved Manmohan Singh's bacon? Because he is finally convinced that the Congress has become irreversibly irrelevant in UP, and should no longer be viewed as a threat. In the 2007 state assembly election, Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent of the Congress, himself spearheaded the party's state campaign, and aimed to win back lost ground. Alas, the Congress came a pathetic fourth in the state election, far behind the BSP, SP and BJP. Despite Rahul's efforts, the Congress tally of seats actually fell from 25 to 22. The party won just 8.4% of the popular vote, down from 12% in 2004.

Its decline in the state worsened in the five by-elections in the state in April this year. The BSP swept all five seats, and the Congress lost its deposit in four of the five. The once-hegemonic party of India had become a pathetic also-ran.

This, above all, explains why the SP has decided to support the Manmohan Singh government. It can afford to do so because the Congress has become irrelevant in UP. It is now a party to be used, not feared. The only parties that matter now in the state are Mayawati's BSP and Mulayam's SP, with the BJP and Congress playing minor roles. In this scenario, Mulayam can use the Congress to harass Mayawati, by pursuing corruption and income tax cases against her more vigorously. And he can hope to come back to power in UP in the next state election by having the Congress as a very junior ally.

This drives home the point that, in a highly fractured polity, weakness in some regions can translate into an advantage in New Delhi. In the 1990s, this factor played to the advantage of the BJP. It had some strength in the Hindi-speaking heartland, and in Gujarat. But in other parts of the country it had little or no strength. Yet, it managed to come to power in 1998 with the assistance of sundry regional parties.

For most regional parties, their main local foe was the Congress party. Hence, they were willing to support the BJP simply as their enemy's enemy. The TDP, AIADMK, BLD, Samata Party, and others joined Vajpayee's NDA government. The very fact that the BJP was so weak in their respective states meant they faced no threat from it locally, and that made it a more attractive partner in New Delhi.

The Congress was upset to see professedly secular parties like the TDP and Samata Party joining hands with the BJP. It made strong declarations at its Pachmarhi summit about spurning opportunistic regional parties, and seeking to return to power on its own. Yet, this had the practical effect of pushing regional parties further into the BJP camp.

Those delusions of grandeur have gone now. The Congress has declined in one state after another, and knows that it cannot rule without allies. It has submitted to constant humiliation by the Left Front for four years in New Delhi, knowing that this is the price for survival.

Yet, this humiliating decline is now proving to be an advantage. Lalu Yadav, who for most of his political career had viewed the Congress as his main foe in Bihar, realised in 2004 that the Congress had become so irrelevant in the state that he could afford to ally with it. That realisation was what made the current UPA government possible: Lalu could join it without jeopardising his own position in Bihar.

The same thing has now happened in UP. There, too, the Congress has become irrelevant. And so Mulayam can afford to support the Manmohan Singh government in New Delhi. Rahul Gandhi may be a pale shadow of what was once an all-powerful Gandhi family. But that actually enhances his attractions.


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Right for good governance

A day after I wrote on the SP’s ulterior objective, I was pleasantly surprised to see an article (Let us not lose sight of good governance ) that raised this issue in the newsprint. Surprising because it’s rare to see such open opinions in my usual read The ToI. But this was from The Hindu, who I feel are usually more outspoken about their political opinions (though sometimes criticised as one-sided).

Here the writer (Harish Khare) has been able to put a better perspective to the issue of the murky Ambanis’ feud getting into Governmental issues. The article gives more data and history to the story. But at one place the article fails. Towards the end of his argument Khare goes on to state “If the ruling alliance’s new ally wants to use its status to correct a perceived tilt, we would all be better off. Even in this age of market reforms, the corporate houses are totally beyond the government’s reach; nor are they above wanting to suborn the law and the loyalties; therefore, if the new political alignments in New Delhi are used to bring about a healthy balance, so be it. Irrespective of the dramatis personae, it would provide the much-needed corrective to our public discourse if we are able to debate on the economics and ethics of allowing windfall profits in a country of vast poverty.”

Well, after all this argument he simply states that “two wrongs make a right” or rather “it is the end and not the means”. I do not subscribe to that policy. If we are letting the Government run according to the individual agendas of its coalition parties who walk in and out like people in a mall, then where is the reason for a political manifesto. In the future elections let’s not invest in anyway-a-farce-statement called Manifesto or now the Common Minimum Programme. Next time on we are into a two party system like the US, albeit with a difference. The political parties will state whether their mandate is to protect Anil or Mukesh. The rest will fall in line. Given that the Ambanis’ are increasingly getting into the nerve of every Indian, this policy should suffice. So if your worry today is that the communication industry is not functioning properly, then vote for the Anil party. The ensuing Government will roll out subsidies for upgrading the CDMA services, slap hefty licenses on GSM providers and bingo.

We have a right to demand ideal political conditions. Mr. Khare, I agree that sometimes these cannot be helped. But as a think tank on a leading newsreel, your duty bound to suggest, to fight for the better and not succumb to the present.

Last head: PM, govt top guns may broker Ambani peace deal. That's nice job for a change.

The new wars of religion

A RELIGIOUS fanatic feels persecuted, goes overseas to fight for his God and then returns home to attempt a bloody act of terrorism. Next week as Britons celebrate the capture of Guy Fawkes, a Catholic jihadist, under the Houses of Parliament in 1605, they might reflect how dismally modern the Gunpowder Plot and Europe's wars of religion now seem.

Back in the 20th century, most Western politicians and intellectuals (and even some clerics) assumed religion was becoming marginal to public life; faith was largely treated as an irrelevance in foreign policy. Symptomatically, State Department diaries ignored Muslim holidays until the 1990s. In the 21st century, by contrast, religion is playing a central role. From Nigeria to Sri Lanka, from Chechnya to Baghdad, people have been slain in God's name; and money and volunteers have poured into these regions. Once again, one of the world's great religions has a bloody divide (this time it is Sunnis and Shias, not Catholics and Protestants). And once again zealotry seems all too relevant to foreign policy: America would surely not have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (and be thinking so actively of striking Iran) had 19 young Muslims not attacked New York and Washington.

It does not stop there. Outside Western Europe, religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square. In 1960 John Kennedy pleaded with Americans to treat his Catholicism as irrelevant; now a born-again Christian sits in the White House and his most likely Democrat replacement wants voters to know she prays. An Islamist party rules once-secular Turkey; Hindu nationalists may return to power in India's next election; ever more children in Israel and Palestine are attending religious schools that tell them that God granted them the whole Holy Land. On present trends, China will become the world's biggest Christian country—and perhaps its biggest Muslim one too. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, not usually a reliable authority on current affairs, got it right in an open letter to George Bush: “Whether we like it or not,” he wrote, “the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty.”
Gunpowder, treason and plot

How frightening (or inspiring) is this prospect? As our special report explains, the idea that religion has re-emerged in public life is to some extent an illusion. It never really went away—certainly not to the extent that French politicians and American college professors imagined. Its new power is mostly the consequence of two changes. The first is the failure of secular creeds: religion's political comeback started during the 1970s, when faith in government everywhere was crumbling. Second, although some theocracies survive in the Islamic world, religion has returned to the stage as a much more democratic, individualistic affair: a bottom-up marketing success, surprisingly in tune with globalisation. Secularism was not as modern as many intellectuals imagined, but pluralism is. Free up religion and ardent believers and ardent atheists both do well.

From a classical liberal point of view, this multiplicity of sects is a good thing. Freedom of conscience is an axiom of liberal thought. If man is a theotropic beast, inclined to believe in a hereafter, it is surely better that he chooses his faith, rather than follows the one his government orders. But that makes religion a complicated force to deal with. In domestic policy, adults who choose to become Pentecostals, Orthodox Jews or Muslim fundamentalists are far less likely to forget those beliefs when it comes to the ballot box. The culture wars that America has grown used to may become a global phenomenon; expect fierce battles about science, in particular.

Abroad, yes, there is a chance of full-blown war of religion between states. A conflagration between Iran and Israel would, alas, be seen as a faith-based conflict by millions; so would war between India and Pakistan. But compared with Guy Fawkes's time, when wars sprang from monarchs throwing their military might at others of different faiths, religious conflict today is the result as much of popular will as of state sponsorship: it is bottom-up, driven by volunteers not conscripts, their activities blessed by rogue preachers not popes, their fury mostly directed at apostates not competing civilisations. Ironically, America, the model for much choice-based religion, has often seemed stuck in the secular era, declaring war on state-sponsored terror, only to discover the main weapon of militant Islamism is often the ballot box.
Start praying now

For politicians doomed to deal with religion, two lessons stand out—one principled, the other pragmatic. The principle is that church and state are best kept separate. Subsidised religion has seldom made sense for either state or church: witness Europe's empty pews. In some cases, separating the two is easy. In private, people can choose to believe that the world was created exactly 6,003 years ago, but teachers should not be allowed to teach children creationism as science. The state should not tell people whether they can wear headscarves, let alone ban “unauthorised” reincarnation (as China did recently in Tibet). But the line is not always easy to draw: this paper disapproves of publicly financed faith schools, especially ones that discriminate against non-believers, but it also believes in giving poor parents more choice—and in American cities the main alternative to public schools is Catholic ones.

The religion that invades the public square most overtly is Islam: it affords secular power the least respect, teaching that the primary unit of society is the umma, the international brotherhood of believers. At its most theocratic, it forces people to follow sharia laws, sometimes with barbaric penalties. Yet Islam can clearly co-exist with a modern liberal state. For all its failures in the Arab world, democracy has taken root in Malaysia and Indonesia. America's Muslims worship freely and respect its secular constitution—a success the United States should make more of in its foreign policy. But the test case will be Turkey, a secular state currently ruled by Islamists whose progress is being watched with nervous attention.

The pragmatic lesson concerns those wars of religion. Partly because of their obsession with keeping church and state separate, Western powers (and religious leaders) have been too reluctant to look for faith-driven solutions to religious conflicts. Many of those struggles, notably the Middle East, began as secular tribal disputes. Now that they have a religious component they are much harder to solve: if God granted you the West Bank, you are less likely to trade it. “Inter-faith dialogue” may sound a wishy-washy concept; but it is a more realistic idea than presenting a secular peace to competing faiths without the backing of religious leaders. Priests and pastors condemned violence from both sides in Northern Ireland; that has not really happened in the Holy Land.

Atheists and agnostics hate the fact, but these days religion is an inescapable part of politics. Although it is not the state's business “to make windows into men's souls”, it is part of the government's job to prevent grievances from stirring into bloodshed, and fanatics from guiding policy. But it isn't easy. Catholics did not get back into Parliament for 224 years after the Gunpowder Plot. Unless politicians learn to take account of religious feelings and to draw a firm line between church and state, the new wars of religion may prove as intractable.