Those who began counting the number of MPs left inside the Lok Sabha when Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee finished his Budget speech before empty Opposition benches have a weak memory.

They forgot where Pranab Mukherjee and Dr Manmohan Singh, the two men who run this Government, learnt their ABC. Pranab Mukherjee had a headmistress called Indira Gandhi. Manmohan Singh went to the more complicated seminary presided over by P.V. Narasimha Rao.

To clear any residual confusion, the Prime Minister is a politician of the more subtle kind. He was less of a politician when he was Rao's Finance Minister, which is why he would get exasperated and at least once sent in his resignation (which Rao ignored). He has now learnt to make the pace of power an ally rather than an adversary.

For the record, during the last phase of the Budget speech, the Government had only 274 MPs on its side, which is as bare a majority as is possible to have. Mukherjee finished his speech without a tremor, and Singh sat unperturbed on his front bench seat. They had learnt at primary school that Governments do not fall because of numbers, they fall when they become uncertain or indecisive or provocative. Mukherjee was a Cabinet minister when Indira Gandhi ran her Government for over two years without a majority in the House.

Singh was Finance Minister of a minority Government for at least three Budgets; in fact, Rao began to wobble only after he purchased a majority in the House. Perhaps this was the moment when Dr Singh transited from bureaucrat to politician; survival in office became more important than the means by which he and his Prime Minister survived.

The Prime Minister and Finance Minister know that their Government is safe because while the Opposition may threaten it with a sequence of actions, it is not yet ready for the consequence, a general election. Not a single Opposition party, apart perhaps from Mayawati's BSP or possibly Jayalalithaas AIADMK, would gain from an election, and some will certainly be whittled further. It is not just the Government that knows this; Opposition parties do as well.

And yet the walkout by all Opposition parties on Friday was neither insignificant nor meaningless.For starters, it was not spontaneous. It could not have been premeditated since no one knew that the Finance Minister would send out a cordial invitation to a few bulls while sitting in a china shop packed with price-rise cutlery. But the joint action was indicative of an unspoken understanding that has been building among Opposition parties. This has developed out of a pragmatic assessment of predicament.

The last election results were a clear signal that if the Congress is not checked, it will swallow up most of their space, and do so without even an ungainly burp. Ideology, therefore, has to make way for strategy.

The Marxists cannot block the Congress in Madhya Pradesh; and the BJP cannot challenge the Congress in Bengal or Kerala. But it is in their common interest to keep the Congress down to what might be called manageable numbers in Parliament. This thought cannot have escaped some of the allies of the Congress in the Government.

Much as Mamata Banerjee may want to destroy the Marxists, she will not play second fiddle to Congress in the process. Some Congressmen are whispering about a privately commissioned opinion poll that suggests Congress would win if it fought alone in Bengal . If such whispers reach Ms Banerjee, expect a circuitous response.

In politics, the surest way to break your leg is to try and win the Olympic gold in either the long jump or high jump. The only way to move forward is step by gingerly step.

Paradoxically, the absence of a clear horizon might actually help such a gradualist approach; you take the journey one milestone at a time and then wait to see if anything cogent is visible on the horizon.

The first bit is always floor management in Parliament. If the Opposition parties can find some issue that enables them to rise above their differences, then the very act of unity raises that concern into a national issue. Moreover, if there is no unity on prices then Opposition as a concept has collapsed beyond repair.

The second stage will be much harder, of course, because there are more contradictions in Opposition than there are in UPA.

But the next round of Assembly elections will be helpful in clearing Opposition space. We will know, for instance, whether Lalu Yadav can dent Nitish Kumar, or whether the latter's eminence will move up to pre-eminence. Similarly, in Uttar Pradesh either Mayawati or Mulayam Singh Yadav will prevail. Beyond that, events and circumstances will determine who does what.

Long before the end-game, there comes a midpoint.

The numbers that matter are those that count at the end, not at the start or the middle.

It is perfectly understandable. Denied any flexibility in manoeuvring members of his Cabinet, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is doing the best he can by reinventing his personal Cabinet, a collection of personally chosen eminent personae given assignments from the PM's priority list.

Dr Singh can do nothing to Cabinet colleagues because the current law of coalition politics says that once you are seated in a particular chair, only an election defeat can drag you out of it. Competence, performance or even interest in your job has nothing to do with your continuance.

DMK supremo's son Alagiri has around zero interest in his Cabinet job, and does not care who knows this. His real ambition is to succeed his father as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, a legacy currently assigned to his brother Stalin.

A Cabinet member is meant to be part of a team, and implement a collective decision even if he is personally opposed to it. His politicisation of an important pre-Budget decision, to lift a key fertiliser subsidy, would have been sufficient for dismissal in any normal Cabinet system of governance. The Prime Minister could do nothing about it since the DMK functions as an autonomous ally.

Gradually, through a creep-and-collect process, the Prime Minister has used his rights of appointment to his personal office to create a parallel mini-administration that can address those aspects of the national agenda that he is most interested in.

This is not quite the Kitchen Cabinet of the Indira Gandhi days, when a core group of personal favourites functioned as a super Cabinet, arguing the merits and demerits of a particular policy before it was presented to an obedient full Cabinet.

The Prime Minister’s Men do not intervene, or interfere, in ministries outside their domain, as the Kitchen Cabinet would. But if the Prime Minister has made any project his own, then the relevant ministry has to understand that there is a higher authority and it is called the PMO.

The two most high-profile members of Dr Singh's office in his first five years, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan and former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, have both lost their positions because of the Prime Minister's increasingly evident desire for some solution to the Kashmir problem. Shyam Saran was an indirect casualty, but a casualty nevertheless. No one resigns from the PMO unless it has been made apparent that the terms of relationship have changed. Media has been fed the perception that Saran was upset because he was denied the status of a Minister of State. Ministers have become so devalued in the last decade, that this is the least of a Prime Minister’s problems. He can get any status for whoever he likes. The substantive disagreement lay in the fact that Shyam Saran was not made NSA, because the Prime Minister decided that Shivshankar Menon was, intellectually and temperamentally, closer to his line of thinking on Pakistan .

Dr Singh knows he is taking huge risks. He has deliberately underplayed hard evidence from Indian intelligence that Pak-based, anti-Indian terrorist organisations continue to get active support from the Pak military, and that they are not non-state actors.

Pakistan’s Army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has reiterated, in his latest doctrine, that India remains the pre-eminent threat to Pakistan, implicitly justifying the military's support for the second arm of his country’s response to India, the terrorist network.

Elements of Pakistan 's political class have not helped Delhi by immature grandstanding, describing India 's return to the talking table as a victory for Islamabad . This obviously grates on Indians.

The biggest risk is here: Dr Singh has moved far ahead of Indian public opinion in his peace gambit. This is in direct contrast to the Indo-US nuclear deal, when middle class opinion was cheering on the deal at each stage of negotiations. The middle class that wanted a closer relationship with America is not equally eager to buy the American prescription for peace on the subcontinent, of which these talks are the opening move.

It is not certain that Pakistan will buy it either, because the tail at the end of the dog is that Pakistan might have to dilute its deep friendship with China, which does not fit into the US-Pak strategic paradigm.

America would be much happier with a US-Pak-India relationship built on a shared perception of regional threats. Senator John Kerry has described the resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue as "critical to the United States ", and suggested that the Indian initiative is an extension of the new India-US relationship. More specifically, the US believes that India-Pak cooperation is essential to victory against the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan . However, Senator Kerry might have to convince General Kayani first.

Perhaps Dr Singh is depending on the United States to tweak an ear or twist an arm in Islamabad at the appropriate moment as he tries to woo Pakistan by diluting the status of Kashmir 's relationship with India .

An Opposition talks [when it is not dumb].

Government acts [when it is not indolent].

A Government is measured by what it does.

The Government of Maharashtra says that Mumbai belongs to every Indian, but decides that its 24,000 taxi licences belong only to a language-specific group. There is the usual fudge around the decision, typical of a Government which wants to hunt with the Shiv Sena and run with the Bihari vote.

One wonders if each licensee will actually be driving the cab himself. Here is a much more likely scenario: mid-level businessmen ready to deal with the rough and ready side of Mumbai, in cahoots with politicians on both sides of the fence, will pick up the licences and then hire cab drivers at competitive wages.

Since eager Biharis - that term includes people from Uttar Pradesh, signalling the cultural power of Bihar - will be ready to work for lower wages than Mumbaikars, they will be eventually hired. It is a cheaper route to the status quo for both the politician and the businessmen; the first gets cheap votes and the second gets cheap labour.

A taxi driver has an iconic status, a signature presence, in any great city - and Mumbai is one of the great urban centres of the modern world. It must sustain both aspects: it must belong to the world, and remain modern as well.

A city either grows or decays; it cannot stay stagnant. Mumbai cannot grow by becoming isolationist, nor can Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad or Chennai.

Kolkata gave shelter and nourishment to the Sikh taxi driver without demanding he learn Bengali; but he did learn Bengali, and today his children have passed out from schools and got jobs. That is what a great city does; it welcomes the forlorn and lifts them.

Mumbai's extraordinary film industry is the most exciting meeting place of India ; its skyscrapers were built with steel from Jamshedpur ; its markets are full of food and goods from India and the globe. Mumbai does belong to Maharashtra, but it is also the present and future of India .

There is something odd about the controversy.

Common sense suggests that it is in any taxi driver’s interest to pick up the local language: why would he want to lose business by ignorance of the passenger’s language? A taxi driver does not need to be literature doctorate; just know enough language to be cordial and communicative.

The whip-up is more about politics than jobs, which is why it is riddled with inconsistency.

Nationalism always falters against chauvinism, unless nationalism becomes chauvinist. Thus, the Shiv Sena or its antagonist offshoot headed by Raj Thackeray, will demand the return of an Akhand Bharat from the Khyber Pass to the Chittagong Hill Tracts, but deny an impoverished fellow-Indian marginal space in Mumbai.

The sharpest tweak to the Sena froth came not from its foes but from its friend, the BJP, which raised an interesting contradiction.

How could the Sena, which opposed Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir , demand protective restrictions for Mumbai? There was no answer, of course, because there isn’t one. My regret is that the question has not been asked more often.

But it was a relief to witness all national parties taking on the Senas not only on Mumbai but also on their menacing and communal threats to Shah Rukh Khan. The BJP’s support to Shah Rukh was important not only for the actor but also for the Party. It was an opportunity for the BJP to move a step or two away from its image, and it did so.

Is it compulsory to hate Pakistan and Pakistanis in order to live in Mumbai? Is that the new oath you have to take before Bal Thackeray? Will the Senas send squads to drive the Prime Minister out of Delhi because he has agreed to restart talks with Pakistan ?

There was a time when investment in conflict offered regular returns. The Senas have not understood a basic message from a series of humiliating electoral defeats:

Significant sections of the Indian electorate, and increasing numbers of the urban young, have decided that this is arid yield from a low-return idea.

They understand something that seems to have escaped politicians at the apex:

Economic growth cannot co-exist with a culture of intimidation and violence.

Indians have not fallen in love with their neighbour.

Emotion, in any case, is unnecessary baggage.

Those who want to reverse the reality of 1947 are either fanatics or fools. [Terrible as they are, the former could be less troublesome than the latter.]

India and Pakistan are separate nations, and may they retain their present borders for eternity.

Those Pakistanis dreaming of breaking India should be sent to a mental asylum, where they can befriend those Indians who want to capture Islamabad .

There is a duality but not a contradiction running through the complexities of the India-Pakistan relationship. Friday's newspapers, for instance, reported a confrontation between Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani: the former is convinced that Islamabad is protecting the widely-acknowledged principal architect of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Hafiz Saeed, chief of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Gilani thinks India has not supplied sufficient evidence against Saeed. Chidambaram counters this with, "What can I do if a Government closes its eyes to the evidence?"

Outside the squat offices of power, a virtual festival of Indo-Pak peace is being celebrated in major Indian cities, with full participation by Pakistani writers, musicians and its cultural elite. Why isn’t this a contradiction?

There has always been a peace constituency in both India and Pakistan , but it consisted of idealists, regional-romantics and do-gooders. It used to be drowned out by a coalition of viewpoints and ideologies ranging from indifference to hostility to blood-thirst. Change has come in most categories of opinion, on both sides of the border, though not on a mirror-track.

The bloodthirsty lobby in India began to lose its appetite after Bangladesh , an outcome beyond its imagination. For a while it compensated by continuing to target Indian Muslims as a surrogate enemy, but that too has waned since there is no longer any electoral reward in domestic conflict, an important consideration in a democracy.

Pakistan 's fanatics flourish because they have lifted elements of their multi-level agenda above the compulsions of domestic power. We should not waste newsprint on their fantasies, except to note that their terrorism remains the single greatest provocation for a fourth, and potentially devastating, war between India and Pakistan .

Perhaps it is just such a prospect that has driven the most useful lobby on the subcontinent, that of realists, towards peace. Realists have clearly strengthened Pakistan ’s variable and possibly fragile peace constituency immeasurably. You don't have to fall in love to be a good neighbour; in fact romance can have harmful side-effects. But good neighbours do not pelt each other with stones [through media] or test nerves with sniper fire during their waking hours.

Peace has to be defined, or it will remain elusive. It has to be a specific, objective, negotiated condition, neither too ambitious nor too insignificant. If it is mere absence of formal war, then we have found it already. The search continues because we know that the present uncertainty is inherently volatile, prone to exploitation by anarchists and terrorists. If we want a mutually fruitful peace, we need to diagnose the causes of war.

There are two defining dates in the Indo-Pak relationship, only one of which is recognised for its spawn of consequences. There have been, in effect, two partitions of India : the one in 1947 is in every child's history book; the one in 1965 has not been adequately understood. 1947 divided the land; 1965 divided the people.

Till Pakistan launched, in 1965, its second effort to seize our part of Jammu and Kashmir through a formal military offensive, people travelled freely on easily-available documents, the rail border at Wagah bustled with business even if the occasional customs officer bristled with pompousness in an effort to disguise harassment and petty corruption, the border on both wings was so porous that humans and goods were easily smuggled in both directions, businessmen retained cross-border investments, media was freely available and conflict was the prerogative of politicians and military brass.

In 1965, we built a wall between neighbours that the Cold War architects of the Berlin rampart could have envied.

Sanity demands a return to the summer of 1965 [war began in September] and not a return to the summer of 1947 [partition came in August]. This objective has the merit of being possible.

If we link Indo-Pak harmony to a solution of the Kashmir problem, we will remain frozen in a subcontinent-wide Siachen. Harmony will induce steps towards a solution; not the other way around, because there are impenetrable barriers on the way around.

A road with dual carriageways is logical; a road with contradictions is an invitation to deathly accidents.

As they say, it's a no-brainer.

Trust and loyalty rank much higher on Delhi 's power graph than integrity.

The working definition of loyalty is discretion. The system works on silence. This holds true for both politician and bureaucrat, although the public image of the former is synonymous with a gabfest and the bureaucrat is increasingly becoming prey to the siren call of the camera. In any case, it is extremely rare when a veteran with a career stretching across five decades achieves an indisputable reputation for discretion and integrity.

M.K. Narayanan did not set out to win any popularity contest when he joined the Intelligence Bureau in 1961, although his understated sense of humour won him more friends than you might imagine. From virtually the start he occupied a room in the sanctum sanctorum of India 's power pyramid, the South Block on Delhi 's Raisina Hill.

MK's career coincides, almost exactly, with the maturing of the Indian state through a series of existential crises. Till 1961, the worst problem was communal riots, interspersed with troubles over state formation: difficult, certainly, but hardly formidable.

Within a year of joining IB, MK was working with his legendary boss B.N. Mullick to find out how the Chinese had blown massive holes in our security across the Himalayas . Communists were part of his brief and he sent the topmost leaders to jail because their ideology took precedence over their nationalism. It is ironic that he should now be sent as governor to a state run by Marxists.

He might equally easily have been sent as governor of Jammu and Kashmir .

In fact, it would have been more relevant to do so, for this state began to blip loudly on his professional radar in 1963, with the disappearance of the Mo-e-Muqaddas, the holy hair from the Prophet's beard preserved in Srinagar .

Mullick was the first IB chief to write a memoir, so we know that the recovery of the holy relic was an IB triumph. But we have not been told how precisely this happened. MK knows. And he has kept quiet.

Move from 1963 to 1965:

The war launched by Pakistan to seize the Kashmir valley was a major challenge to IB. Kashmir, Punjab, Bluestar, Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination, the conflagration in the Northeast, the Lanka catastrophe, Rajiv Gandhi's tragic death: MK's experiences constitute what might be called a covert history of India. He was extremely close to Rajiv Gandhi and maintained the relationship with the family. Every Prime Minister after Rajiv sought and got his advice. His appointment to PMO on the return of Congress was inevitable.

What was certainly not inevitable was his sudden departure from PMO to the senior citizens' rest home, a Raj Bhavan. No one has offered an explanation. A year ago there was a reason. There was a demand for his resignation after the terrorist onslaught on Mumbai. But neither Mrs Sonia Gandhi nor Dr Manmohan Singh would even consider this. MK had, more than anyone else, shepherded the nuclear deal through domestic and international minefields. There was visible harmony between the PM and him.

How and why has this harmony been suddenly ruptured?

Home Minister Chidambaram's discomfort with him is not an explanation. Power equations are not a love affair. A high table always needs different voices, and MK would always add high value to any discourse. In any case, this was a Prime Minister's decision, not a Home Minister’s. Nor do seasoned Prime Ministers suffer from mercurial likes and dislikes.

The last five years have shown a pattern.

While Dr Singh keeps an eye on the wide spectrum of governance, to the extent that is humanly possible, he reserves his core energy for a single policy focus.

In his first term this was the nuclear deal. MK was an eminently suitable partner in that enterprise.

The second term is clearly going to survive on a separate heartbeat. The PM seems to have put peace with Pakistan at the heart of his new agenda. The nuclear deal will seem a picnic compared to a Pakistan and it requires courage to even attempt it.

MK has spent five decades protecting his nation from the intricacies and duplicity of an often-hostile neighbour. Perhaps the PM wants someone with less memory. That is a mistake.

Vision without a reality check is an incomplete construct.

Was General Deepak Kapoor's two-front statement part of the smoke or the smokescreen? 

One of the more curious episodes in recent weeks is the indignation with which Indian Army chief General Deepak Kapoor's statement that India 's forces were ready to face war on two fronts simultaneously, against China and Pakistan , was received.

The Islamabad establishment has treated this as a virtual declaration of war. It is possible that the politicians of Pakistan have begun to confuse Islamabad with Delhi .

Generals in Delhi do not declare war. The Prime Minister and his Cabinet do that.

Generals have only one duty. They have to reassure the government and the nation that they will be able to protect the country even in the worst possible circumstances, and deliver on the assurance.

The nightmare scenario for India is a concerted, coordinated offensive by China across the main Himalayas , and by Pakistan on its Kashmir wedge. This is, conversely, the dream scenario of General Headquarters in Pakistan .

General Kapoor was doing his job when he made that statement.

There was a time when, to put it in the language of the Fifties, war-war was the business of generals and jaw-jaw was the responsibility of politicians.

The taciturn warrior began to disappear with the British Empire and Soviet Union ; and as American military power began to fill the strategic vacuum the greater individual freedoms of America began to permeate the Pentagon and its equivalents.

American officers took their final orders from the White House, but they had plenty to say in-between. The most recent case was last year's debate on a troop surge in Afghanistan . The Pentagon not only told the White House, which was dithering, what it wanted, but made sure the American voter and the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan got the message as well.

The infection has reached the stiff upper lips of Britain : generals there make demands for equipment through the media. Discipline cannot completely sanitize the military brass from the influences of the democratic spirit, and its institutions.

China did not react sharply to General Kapoor's comment, although it can hold its own in any sparring match. It may be argued that it did not need to do anything but laugh.

A little after General Kapoor's claim, the Government of India admitted, formally, that China had eaten away vast amounts of [presumably unpatrolled, or sparsely visited] border territory. Even more interesting than the government's admission was the fact that Indians seemed beyond caring.

The Opposition parties shrugged and concentrated on screaming at one another; television, which gets hysterical when a leaf flutters, had other things to do. Clearly, media reserves its visceral reactions only for its western rather than its northern border. This is maybe because the occupation of distant, barren land cannot compare, in televisual terms, with the throbbing drama of the heights and valleys of Kashmir .

Islamabad 's reaction has nothing to do with any threat from India , because there is no threat from India . India does not desire an inch of land beyond the Ceasefire Line or the international border. Equally, it will not surrender an inch of what is under its control. Pakistan, however, has built a layered case before America which boils down to this: it cannot fight all of America's enemies on the Frontier, or those who treat the Frontier as sanctuary for the conflict in Afghanistan, as long as Indian guns are pointed at its back. It needs relief in the east to fight in the west. Washington has bought this argument and Delhi has obliged as unobtrusively as possible.

Our two-front General Kapoor has quietly presided over the withdrawal of over 40,000 troops from the Kashmir valley, and their transfer to the eastern Himalayas under the cover of rising worry about China . It's very neat actually: we use China , possibly with Beijing ’s knowledge, to help out America in its Pakistan war.

As long as there is no change in ground realities, this game can be played to triangular, or even quadrangular, satisfaction. Alas, everyone is not playing the same game. The spurt in terrorist violence in Srinagar during the last fortnight could be aimed at disturbing this dainty strategic daisy chain. Specialists are warning of an impending attack on the Indian mainland.

The delicate diplomatic balance could crumble if Pakistan and America push too hard, and believe that they can maneuver Delhi into a final settlement on Kashmir . There is very little space for negotiations on Kashmir itself, given that Pakistan is searching a major dilution of the status quo and India , at least at the moment, will agree on only the Ceasefire Line as the solution.

Is the sudden talk of National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan being shifted to a powerless Governor's bungalow indicative of a major change in Delhi 's Kashmir policy? He was a status quoist.

Dr Manmohan Singh thinks, perhaps, that he can remobilise the constituency that cheered the nuclear deal with the United States .

That may be easier in theory than practice.

Does it matter that there was no tribal or Muslim on the dais when the Congress celebrated its 125th anniversary?

Or that the history of the party has now been co-opted into the history of the Nehru-Gandhi family, with token homage to Mahatma Gandhi and throwaway references to titans of the first two decades of our nation-building process?

The second has become, in truth, an irritation to commentators rather than voters. Those who support the Congress have already conflated the party with the family, a process that began during Mrs Indira Gandhi's time and has matured during Mrs Sonia Gandhi's leadership. So has the party structure. The Congress voter believes that the two Mrs Gandhis do the best that they can for the poor, which is at least better than the rest. And the party identifies the family with something other leaders have not been able to provide: electoral success.

Lal Bahadur Shastri did not live long enough to translate his sturdy promise into Lok Sabha seats. And while Narasimha Rao may have, in his own estimation, saved the nation from economic ruin he could not save the Congress from political ruin. The family is safe anchor for those Congressmen who want to be in power for twenty years or the end of their lives, whichever comes quicker.

But the first has to be a problem. There is of course always an element of tokenism in any high-table seating arrangement, but those tokens have value, which is why they are preserved.

Sonia Gandhi, Dr Manmohan Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, Mrs Sheila Dikshit and Motilal Vora were natural claimants. The presence of A.K. Antony had nothing to do with either Kerala or his Christian faith; it was proof that Mrs Gandhi holds him in high esteem. J.P. Aggarwal sat there as host, but Mukul Wasnik was given space because of his community, as the Dalit face.

Rahul Gandhi did not sit on the dais, presumably because he was away on holiday. It was a politically sensible holiday, for he still has a slightly nebulous status, party-wise: he is certainly not a member of the audience, but not quite the equal of Manmohan-Pranab-Dikshit-Antony group. Absence can have its uses.

But not every time. The absence of a tribal or a Muslim was not out of choice.

The ranking Muslim Cabinet minister is Ghulam Nabi Azad, a Kashmiri. Muslims of the Gangetic belt, from Hardwar and Saharanpur to Kolkata via Patna do not identify with him; and this is where the bulk of the faithful live.

The absence of tribals is an even bigger problem, for one of the main reasons for the growth of Naxalites in the tribal belt is their conviction that they have been marginalized by the larger political formations. Unable to offer a face of its own, the Congress was forced to co-opt Babulal Marandi in the Jharkhand elections. It did well, but would have done better if it had built its indigenous tribal leadership.

While the home ministry might launch its armed offensive against Naxalites, sensible politics demands a parallel dialogue with the communities that constitute the strength of this opposition. There are no Congress leaders who can play this role.

Muslims are quiet now, but if passions do rise over job quotas Congress will face the same difficulty with its strongest vote base.

Complacency is never a good idea, and the BJP has sent a signal that it just might be getting its act together. Its new leader Nitin Gadkari has sent two interesting signals. He invoked Deen Dayal Upadhyay's concern for the last man in the queue, a reversal of the impression that the party could not look beyond the first man in the queue. The second is a collage: he served chicken at a reception at party headquarters; he used a line from a Hindi film song at a press conference; and, in his individual capacity, he is a bit overweight. While weight and temperament are not necessarily correlated, it is generally true that men who eat more than they should are also tolerant of human indulgence.

Think the laughing Buddha. Think Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who wanted men about him who were fat and was wary of yon Cassius with his lean and hungry look. A chap who can chow down with the best, and listens to film music is unlikely to be rigid, although the jury must remain out on this question till the end of this year.

There will be many battles in the decade ahead, some fierce, others lukewarm. But while we are engrossed in the high drama of the Naxalite revolt, economic upturn-downturn, minority-poverty definitions, watch out for the subliminal conflict between Rahul Gandhi's fashionable stubble and Gadkari's film song quotations.

Chorhon kal ki baatein [forget yesterday], said Nitin Gadkari at the BJP Press Conference, which was fine: but does Nitin Gadkari have a nai kahani [new story] for the naya daur [new age]?

Teflon may be synthetic but it is not a negative: it is in great demand among both cooking utensils and politicians. It might even be called history's finest non-violent  armour, for it protects your reputation from stain.   If everything greasy simply rolls off the skin, leaving neither scar nor wound, then you become impervious to criticism. For politicians it becomes a near-magical coat, since they need a double-defence mechanism: safety not only from the Opposition’s barbs but also from their own mistakes. Even when Teflon cracks it does so without a sound. The world gets to know of the breach long after it has occurred, leaving you time for repair.

Ronald Reagan used to delight in being called the Teflon politician. Even the Iran-contra scandal bypassed him, while frying half the White House that reported to him – or maybe he bypassed the scandal. The net result was the same. He kept on smiling till his last day in office, his only regret being that he could not get a better successor. But then, no American President has been overwhelmed by his Vice President, so that is not valid evidence in  the evaluation of George Bush the Elder.

Two members of the present Union government have been blessed with Teflon: Dr Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram. Dr Singh was born with it; Chidambaram ordered it at wholesale rates for use in his public persona.

As finance minister Chidambaram concentrated on spreading the good news and left the bad news to lesser mortals like bureaucrats or even a permanent demi-god like Montek Singh Ahluwalia. He made all announcements about recovery and growth. It was brilliant political strategy.

Since the Home Minister is the de facto chief policeman of the country, and the police are rarely blessed with good news, Chidambaram refashioned himself as the homeland security minister, raising his challenge to terrorism rather than mere crime.

This clearly affected his mindset. He began to see every problem as an existential threat to the nation, treating Naxalites, for instance, as terrorists rather than a violent political movement born out of hunger and the state’s neglect of the poor. Even when he did not express say so, there always seemed to an "or else!" tagged to every statement he made.

There was always an undercurrent suggestion in his demeanor that the home minister was not quite at home in his ministry, but Teflon was the great veneer that never let any uncomfortable thought emerge.

Telengana is the first crack in this Teflon, but of course we have not yet heard the sound of any crack since, as noted, the rupture is noiseless.

The phrase "flip-flop" has been well imagined. The first flip may be necessary for purposes of either display or convenience, but a second flip is always a flop, leaving you open to ridicule.

The home minister was handed his moment when he announced the formation of a separate Telengana state on 9 December. It was the kind of opportunity that Prime Ministers reserve for themselves, for new states are not born each day.

But Dr Manmohan Singh let his junior change the internal map of India . He might have been too busy: after all, he has been rushing from one country to another, with nary a day even for Parliament. Or, more likely, the Prime Minister might have been a better politician than others think he is.

Dr Singh can measure the heat of a hot potato from a long distance, and Telengana was the hottest potato in a decade. He left this potato in the mouth of Chidambaram, and its heat melted the Teflon.

Close observers of Delhi 's power plays might have noticed a press release that suggested that the statement on the reversal of the Telengana decision would be made jointly by Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh. They did not do anything so rash.

The hot potato went back to Chidambaram. All he could do, once again, was juggle it on his tongue. Justifications for the second tongue-twister fell flat.

Some over-clever types in Delhi tried to make a scapegoat of the new Andhra Chief Minister Rosaiah, even though the latter had warned his high command not to divide the state. All they managed was to weaken yet another branch on which their authority rested.

The union government has sent a message to Andhra Pradesh: pile on the pressure, and Delhi will buckle.

Chandrashekhar Rao went on a fast and got his wish in rather quick time; the rest of Andhra picked up the hint and tweaked its own pressure points, inducing a back-breaking somersault. It is Telengana's turn once again to indulge in rampage-politics.

A question needs to be raised: why is coastal Andhra Pradesh so insistent on keeping a region that is so adamant on divorce?

It cannot be a territorial matter since Telengana is not seceding from the Indian union, and there is no law which says that an Andhra businessman cannot own a Telengana company or, for that matter, property in Hyderabad. Language is clearly no longer the most important glue for states, and if people get convinced that there is imbalance in development they will demand a better option – and seek it in their own lifetimes. There is no point offering them gold in 2020 and coal today. It won't work.

This volcano could have smoldered for many more years without exploding, and perhaps this period could have been used to redress the economic imbalance.

At long last there is a foreign minister on the international scene with ice- cold blood in his veins and an uncomplicated, unemotional comprehension of national interest. His name is Kieren Keke. He carries the flag for Nauru , an eight-square-mile island-nation of 11,000 inhabitants in the South Pacific famous on two counts. It is the smallest republic in the world, and its principal source of revenue was through the export of phosphates formed by bird droppings. That was undoubtedly the most valuable bird waste in history, but the republic killed the local version of the golden egg by selling more phosphate than the birds could drop.

When the money ran out, Nauru 's imagination blossomed. It invested millions of dollars from its national saving in a London musical. The musical flopped, wrecking the country's bank balance. It then tried to solve Australia 's troublesome problem by providing a base for immigrants en route to the Pacific El Dorado , in return for suitable compensation. Regrettably, the refugees wanted refuge in Australia rather than amidst lost bird droppings.

But Nauru 's imagination remained fertile. In 2002 Nauru took $130 million from China to break relations with Taiwan . In 2006, presumably after this sweetener was exhausted, it reopened links with Taiwan . It is not known whether there was a financial angle to this decision, but the track record tells its own story. This year Nauru recognised Abkhazia [population: 215,000], one of two "nations" that Russia "liberated" from Georgia in 2008. The price: $50 million. Mr Keke has also paid a visit to the second region, South Ossetia, possibly with an accountant as travelling companion. The message has gone to every chancery: if the price is right, Nauru , a full member of the United Nations, will oblige.

There might even be a touch of High Marx about Nauru 's foreign policy: to Nauru according to its need, from China and Russia according to their ability.

Regrettably, international relations are rarely conducted with such Nauruvian clarity. Big powers tend to offer middle-class nations either a promissory note, if they have been good, or a demand notice, if they have strayed off the indicated path; there is never a clean transaction, let alone a gift voucher.

Transparency may indeed be harmful to bilateral relations, because governments may have to script one narrative for their domestic audience and quite another for the international one.

This was Barack Obama's dilemma in Copenhagen . He could not summon his predecessor's less-than-sublime indifference to Kyoto , which played well with an electorate that has been trained to believe that the world owes it the luxury Americans have become accustomed to. Neither could he open himself up to a cavalry charge by his opposition. Republicans, led by Don Sarah Palin Quixote, might be racing towards every windmill in sight, but the careful politician knows that even an insane spear can draw blood from a weak spot.

Clever Obama bought peace at home by a hard-line text, and deflected criticism abroad by creating a sort of B-Grade Security Council on climate change along with four well-behaved nations, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

This is one of those Christmas presents with packaging from Tiffany's and a gift from the sale at Woolworth's, but it does have the advantage of sparkling impressively at the Christmas party. It is only when you open the package in the silence of your room that you discover that this is just another off-the-peg necktie.

Pakistan 's gift from Washington is the usual: food coupons wrapped in a set of demands. Rarely has a wartime alliance been as fraught with tension as the US-Pak war against terror.

Roosevelt and Stalin were more compatible. This had nothing to do with personality. They had no confusion about the identity or nature of the enemy.

When last reports came in, America was sending Drones to kill Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani in their suspected hideouts in North Waziristan . The Pakistan establishment considers them past and future assets, and potential rulers of Afghanistan once American troops begin to depart in 18 months, leaving a crumbling Karzai regime in their wake. A second Drone target was Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who has a truce with the Pak army.

The short-term Washington interest is now in open confrontation with the long-term Islamabad perspective. America is engaged in one battle from the air, Pakistan in a separate one on the ground.

Such divergence may be sustainable on the surface since it would be foolish to fracture the alliance, but there will be turmoil below surface calm. Pakistan is already placing curbs on the movement of American personnel, including civilians. One wonders if Richard Holbrooke, who has been placed in cloister for a while, will soon be brought back to show his customary heavy hand. Of course the left hand will never know, or seek to know, what Holbrooke's right hand is doing.

Eighteen months takes us into the middle of 2011. There is, in the meantime, 2010 to get through.

Can a stable government be a weak government?

Yes. There is no compulsory correlation.

Strength comes from concern, purpose and commitment, while fragility is the first manifestation of complacence - and sometimes the popular mood kicks in, turning the first into the second.

Defeat in the China war punctured the strongest government we have had, Jawaharlal Nehru's.

Mrs Indira Gandhi's tenure can be divided into three phases: January 1966 to the 1971 general elections; then up to the Emergency and the elections of 1977; and the final, tragic term between January 1980 and October 1984. She inherited a government with the lowest ever majority, and then proceeded to turn it into a minority by splitting the Congress. Bangladesh apart, the most decisive period was when she was in a minority. She reshaped the domestic agenda, breaking almost as many moulds as had been nurtured in the previous two decades. Ironically, it was when she became a near demi-god, after Bangladesh in December 1971, that she lost control of the tides of public opinion. By 1973 India was in ferment; by 1974, in revolt.

Opposition parties have rarely been the principal architects of challenge to government, even if they do end up the principal beneficiaries. In 1972, the Left was defeated and sulking in Bengal ; the Socialists were bickering and split [that has not changed] and the Jan Sangh was a flickering lamp in pockets of Hindu-Muslim antagonism without much oil.

Mrs Indira Gandhi returned to power in January 1980 with an astonishing majority, but her government never got into second gear and finally stalled over Punjab and Assam . In this phase too, the traditional Opposition parties had little to do with the establishment's disarray.

Rajiv Gandhi led the most powerful majority in Parliament's history but in three years his government was defensive, and by the fourth year, immobile. Each time, the people mobilized, in one way or the other, while the regular Opposition leaders spent time in self-important confabulations.

Narasimha Rao, in contrast, never had a majority, even after he purchased one. He stumbled from crisis to calamity, propelled largely by cynicism. But despite instability in both Parliament as well as on the street, he managed to navigate economic reforms through turbulence, leaving an important legacy.

An election victory does not necessarily breed complacency in the sinews of authority, but re-election almost certainly does. The high-five of a renewed mandate persuades politicians to believe that they are sitting on a peak from which they cannot be moved for twenty years. I have no idea why they believe they have been given twenty years of eternity; maybe the human imagination, restricted by the limitations of lifespans, cannot be self-delusional beyond that. But the moment you step into that self-satisfied zone, your descent begins.

The Andhra crisis is a self-inflicted wound.

When Telangana leader K. Chandrashekhar Rao began his fast unto death, or at least unto partition, he was treated with such supreme indifference that no minister in Delhi even bothered to treat it as a problem. The earth was warming in Hyderabad , but the statements and newspaper headlines were only about climate change in Copenhagen . Rao was dismissed as an irritant without a cause. After all, the Congress had just triumphed for a second time in the state.

I suspect that the complete disconnect with Delhi multiplied the anger and brought Osmania University 's students out. Youth provide critical mass to any momentum and, as we have seen in the past, there is enough volatility in the state to induce the ultimate sacrifice of suicide.

Rao himself could no more have ended his fast than he could have abandoned his dream of a separate state; it would have been political suicide.

Those with a memory know that the Telugu speaking areas of Madras Presidency were merged into the Nizam's Telugu domain as a result of a fast, by a Gandhian called Potti Sriramulu. Nehru allowed him to die, by 15 December; but even the enormous credibility of Nehru and Congress in 1953 could not stop the realisation of the demand. Sriramulu achieved in death what he could not in life, and forced Nehru to accept the principle of linguistic states.

Rao has achieved what he may never have obtained without a Russian roulette gamble.

The Congress of 2009 had neither the wisdom to negotiate on the first day of the fast, nor the strength to let the fast continue. The Congress Party high command succumbed with startling speed, signalling to Gorkhaland, Vidarbha, Harit Pradesh and Bundelkhand that if they keep their eyes open and focused the government will blink.

Is this the point at which the Manmohan Singh government begins to bleed from an Achilles heel?

Much depends on how well the Prime Minister and Mrs Sonia Gandhi bandage the breach, but the Andhra story is going to be in play for a while and will expose the contradictions inherent in a unitary national party that was unable to manage an epochal change. If the Andhra Congress bleeds from a local civil war the stain will spread.

Tension is good for governance; taut nerves keep your body on its toes, and the mind alert. After this year's general election, the tension fizzled out from government, and rushed directly into the Opposition. Tension, by the way, is not good for Opposition, as is pretty obvious, isn't it?

Barack Obama is clearly a post-modernist Commander-in-Chief. He announced the date of defeat in the Afghan war on the day he sent more troops in the hope of victory. The day American forces begin to leave Afghanistan in 2011, as promised by President Obama, the Taliban will begin its countdown to Kabul .

It is now clear to the Taliban what has been obvious to many observers. Obama is not interested in an American victory in Afghanistan by 2011. He is interested in an Obama victory in America in 2012. He wants to campaign as the President who brought the boys home without giving the impression that he has been weak in the process. He inherited an Afghan war with some 10,000 American soldiers in combat. That figure has been short-tracked upwards to 100,000, partly because Obama purchased his way into the muscular pro-war segment of the American vote by criticising Iraq and upgrading Afghanistan into the war of necessity. He is paying his dues to that section of American opinion by fighting a cosmetic war. The Taliban have often said that while NATO has a clock, they have time. In 2011, irrespective of ground conditions, the NATO clock will go into reverse sweep.

The enigma of this Afghan war, the fifth against a Western power since 1840, is located exactly where it was in the other four. It lies in the meaning of victory and defeat.

For the occupier, victory means subjugation of the ruling authority to its will. For the defenders, it means the departure of foreign troops from Afghan foreign soil.

Afghan fighters in the 19th century did not want to shape the way the British Raj should be run, and they resented the idea that they should be told how Afghanistan should be run. In the 20th century, the jihadis did not want to destroy Communism in Moscow [that they played a great role in actually doing so is incidental]. They simply did not want Communist soldiers in Kabul and Kandahar and Mazaar-i-Sharif.

The Afghan war of the 21st century could have been, and should have been, different, because a terrorist group with sanctuary from Taliban provoked America . Eight years later, roles are getting reversed for the Taliban and its allies have, increasingly, in the Afghan mind, begun to occupy nationalist space.

Washington made a basic error at the outset, when it confused Al Qaeda with the whole of Afghanistan, gradually shifting the focal point of the war. This was understandable in the heat of 2001, but less so with the passage of time. Privately, Pervez Musharraf would surely have suggested this but subtleties were lost on the Bush White House.

Obama may be erring in the other direction. He has announced the three pillars of his Afghan policy:

a strategic partnership with Pakistan empowered by finance and weapons;

the creation of a "military condition" within 18 months that will enable "transition"; and "a civilian surge that reinforces positive action".

The third is the kind of gobbledygook that bemuses friends and consoles office-bearers of the speechwriters' union.

Does Obama expect Hamid Karzai to surge towards Kandahar in 2011, wafting on doves of peace?

The biggest problem may lie in the first proposition. Pakistan does not have the good fortune of being 8,000 miles from Afghanistan . Islamabad's ruling elite, including the armed forces, will display full commitment in the war against Al Qaeda, where and when it can be found, and against the Pak Taliban, because both are serious threats to the Pakistan state and system. But it will have unexpressed reservations about America 's war against the Afghan Taliban, since the latter have been and will continue to be Pakistan 's ally in the geopolitics of South Asia .

Pakistan's war within its own country has become, willy-nilly, America's war, but America 's war in Afghanistan has not become Pakistan 's war. Washington , for reasons unknown and incomprehensible, does not get this.

In fact, America 's primary partner in the war against the Afghan Taliban should be India , not Pakistan , since both nations have an ideological commitment against the forces of theocracy, as well as a strategic interest in keeping Taliban out of Kabul . Pakistan has no such motivation. The best period in the troubled history of Pak-Afghan relations was when Taliban was in power, since the Taliban looked at foreign policy through the prism of Islamic brotherhood rather than just the compulsions of national interest.

The real war in Afghanistan is between modernity and theocracy, but the wrong side is winning that battle. In the last eight years, for many Afghans, modernity has become synonymous with corruption, cronyism and non-Pakhtun warlords - the three hallmarks of the Karzai regime - while the Taliban has revived its image as God-fearing, honest, clean and able to offer stability and security in the villages.

Going by the dubious precedence set by Justice M.S. Liberhan, a half-truth about the catastrophic events of Mumbai 26/11 should become available to Parliament and the Indian public by 2025.

Bad luck if you want the full truth, or you want it within your lifetime; you can never hurry a judge determined to be slow.

A fate worse than death awaits the judge whose conscience cannot be purchased at the going rate of a Government bungalow in Delhi.

In Mumbai, Justice Srikrishna delivered his findings on the violent consequences of the Babri demolition, a far more difficult and sensitive assignment, well in time. His report has not been allowed formally into the public domain, since it tells the truth, and truth is injurious to the health of a Government that was complicit in the mismanagement of the riots.

The duty of an enquiry is not to restate the obvious. But to repair any faults in the system through a thorough diagnosis of the malady, to lay out the findings fearlessly, and hold the powerful accountable where there has been a violation of trust or a betrayal of the responsibilities of office.

A judicial enquiry is much more than a police investigation into guilt. It invokes the highest sense of justice, which is far more than legality.

We have become indifferent to the corruption at the lower levels of the criminal-justice system. Are we now being trained to accept partiality and collusion in a judicial enquiry? If nothing is sacrosanct, we will be subject to the dictatorship of the profane.

We did not need 17 years of casuistry to reveal something that was visibly evident within 17 minutes of the first assault on the dome and structure of the Babri mosque on 6 December 1992 - that the BJP, RSS and Shiv Sena were involved. They had led the emotional movement that climaxed on 6 December.

BJP leaders like Vinay Katiyar, the alleged mastermind, wear it as a badge of pride.

Justice Liberhan has done us no favours by "concluding" what was reported in every newspaper the next day. But he has done the nation and the people a huge disfavour by twisting and contorting elements of the truth in order to hide the conscious collusion of Prime P.V. Narasimha Rao, his home minister S.B. Chavan and eventually, through a conspiracy of silence, the whole Cabinet.

It requires a tremendous backward leap of logic to find Rao innocent and hold those who were working to protect the Babri mosque, like leaders of the Babri Masjid Protection Committee, guilty. It is true that a few Muslim leaders were shrill in some speeches, but so what? Emotions were high, and their tenor was nothing compared to the rhetoric of others. Incredible as it might seem, this is one of the findings of the Liberhan report.

With the credibility of enquiry commissions in tatters, it is hardly surprising that the protagonists and victims of the barbarous terrorist invasion of Mumbai a year are not waiting for any Government-sponsored investigation to run its course. They do not, for starters, want to wait for 17 years.

Officers at the very top of the hierarchy, like former police commissioner Hassan Gafoor, have begun to tell their versions to a hungry media. This is not the whole of it. Leaking by police officers on an off-the-record basis has reached monsoon proportions in Mumbai. This constitutes, in theory, an astonishing collapse of discipline; in practice, the Government is utterly incapable of taking any action because anything it does will also expose its own sins of omission and commission.

Widows of martyred police officers have no faith in the Government's ability or desire to establish a credible narrative of what actually transpired, and why. They are publishing their impression of events, backed up by their individual research, like Vinita Kamte, wife of Assistant Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte, who died doing his duty while others chose survival over challenge. They are filling a black hole into which the Government has sought to consign that terrible memory. In the process, allegations have been made against serving police officers that cannot be ignored; they must be investigated, and the officers either exonerated or punished.

The reluctance of the politician to pursue the past can be easily understood. Much drama surrounded the resignation of the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Where is he now? Why, in the Union Cabinet, of course, a loyal colleague of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, responsible for managing the whole nation rather than just one State. The resignation drama of 2009 was highly effective, since it staved off any punishment at the polls in 2010.

Politicians are certain of one thing if they are certain of anything at all: the voter has a short memory.

Ruling party politicians might find it useful to recall, however, a well-known rule of democracy. When Opposition parties fail to play their role, the people become the Opposition. This takes a long time, and people give their Government a very long rope. But every rope is finite.

And a rope can so easily become a noose.

Dr Manmohan Singh's American month began with a warm lunch for George Bush in Delhi and will end with a more constrained dinner with Barack Obama in Washington .

Always happy to oblige on cosmetics, the White House has awarded this meeting the status of a state visit, although in India 's parliamentary system the Prime Minister is not head of state. But there is a hard question behind the glitter. s

Dr Singh signed a landmark nuclear deal with Bush last year. Was that a mere sentimental knot with a "best friend" or was it a substantive document capable of survival beyond the predilections of a President?

The value of the nuclear deal, which was about much more than peaceful nuclear energy, lies in its tactile strength, but Delhi and Washington have begun stretching in different ways. Dr Singh expected it to be the launchpad of strategic and economic privileges. Condoleezza Rice did, a trifle gratuitously, promise to make India a superpower. But that was so last year.

This year, the broad Democrat view is that Bush surrendered too much on core issues like proliferation for too little, and this is payback time for India . This is compounded, in Delhi , by the apprehension that India does not occupy primary space on the specific Obama agenda.

The cynical interpretation is that India has been allotted 1.5 billion words a year and Pakistan 1.5 billion dollars.

Behind the smiles demanded by "teleview" international relations, Singh and Obama will find their flexibility hedged by compulsions. Obama inherited an economic catastrophe and a military crisis. He took advantage of both to win his election, but his victory was someone else's punishment. Answers are more difficult to get than votes.

It is evident from the time invested during ten months in office that Obama's axis of interest is a direct line between Beijing and Islamabad . He has been forced into a tightrope walk between his banker and his security subcontractor. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that while Obama was walking the talk on the Great Wall, his national security adviser General James L. Jones dropped in to scold Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari. The Pakistani armed forces, it seems, are so busy eliminating the extremist threat to Islamabad that they seem to have forgotten that American money is meant to solve America 's problems. Jones carried a letter asking Zardari to broaden the war to those elements of the Afghan Taliban who were using Pak territory as sanctuary.

America is discovering what India has known for a while: all terrorists are not equal. Those who serve Islamabad 's interests are kept in play through screens. It is common knowledge that Obama is increasing troop levels reluctantly, and wants to leave the Afghan battlefield as soon as possible.

Hillary Clinton was candid recently on ABC's This Week programme: "We are not interested in staying in Afghanistan . We have no long-term stake there. We want that to be made very clear."

Pakistan, conversely, does have a long-term stake in Kabul, and America's current foe, the Afghan Taliban, was its most useful regional ally till 9/11.

It can hardly be lost on either Dr Singh or Obama that they will be meeting exactly one year after India 's 9/11: a year ago Pak-based terrorists launched an audacious and bloody attack on Mumbai. Doubtless there will be some variation of the two-minute silence in their talks, but tokenism has long past its sell-by date on the subcontinent. When American officials like the Ambassador Timothy Roemer in Delhi urge Islamabad to get serious about the masterminds in Lahore , it sounds worse than tokenism. America, which launched two wars in search of the perpetrators of 9/11, displays fleeting concern for accountability when India demands some from Pakistan .

Pakistan treats terrorists who attack India as "freedom fighters": Islamabad may need the Afghan Taliban for strategic reasons; it supports anti-Indian terrorists for ideological reasons. China has a vested interest in the Kashmir dispute, since its own border disputes with India extend across the Himalayas . China has even tried to block efforts in the sanctions committee of the United Nations Security Council to name known terrorist organisations like Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Obama seems to have little interest in the complex regional conflicts in the nations south and north of the Himalayas, apart from what is necessary to pursue the American agenda as he has written.

You do not have to be psychic to read Obama's mind: he needs China on-side to prevent a collapse of the dollar; and his ideal end-game in Afpak would be to outsource the fighting completely to Pakistan so that American soldiers could return home.

He was happy to project China as a benevolent partner in the effort to resolve disputes in South Asia , including Kashmir . Islamabad has not heard any music above the gunfire recently, so this particular area must have sounded particularly mellifluous.

But Obama's next Asian engagement is with the Prime Minister of India . Delhi has already asked America and China to stay out of the Kashmir dispute.

For the last decade, since Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister, each bilateral between India and America has been preceded by high expectations and succeeded by an expanding comfort zone.

At 11 a.m. on 11.11 a cannon boomed in London . For the uninitiated it was a puzzle edged with apprehension. For the British the moment was 91 years old. It marked the end of the bloodiest - till then - conflict in history. The last soldier died only seconds before truce as officers continued to waste "inferior" lives till the last gasp. War can become an addiction.

Enemies change; war never seems to end. The British this week mourned past and present, as coffins arrived from the opium fields of Afghanistan . This Afghan war had nothing to do with the British Raj. Empire had dribbled away after 1945, for the Second World War exhausted victor as surely as it obliterated the vanquished. But the victors barely paused before investing blood and treasure on a cold war which also ended in November, the 9th, two decades ago, when a popular uprising brought down the hated Berlin Wall.

The Afghan war of 2001 has been a war in search of an enemy. It began as a legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden. When the combined skills of the Pentagon, the CIA and satellite science failed to find a six-foot-plus terrorist with a two-foot beard, the focus moved a few degrees. The Taliban, who had spread into nationalist space by challenging the foreign military presence, became the new reason for the military occupation of a rugged nation. Since the Taliban has refused to keel over, a supplementary logic is being disseminated in a bid to shore up ebbing public support: Pakistan 's nuclear arsenal [estimated at between 80 to 100 bombs] must be protected from capture by "Islamists". The proposition begs an obvious question: can a state which cannot protect its nuclear weapons be trusted to keep them?

The fog of war is being compounded by a mist of confusion over its rationale and finale. The Guardian warns, in a page-wide headline, that it could degenerate into a fiasco of Suez 1956 proportions. President Barack Obama seems keener on an exit strategy than an arrival plan. He dithers about whether to send 36,000 more troops or 40,000, as if 4,000 will convert potential humiliation into a historic victory.

The US ambassador to Afghanistan , General Karl Eikenberry, cables the State Department that he wants no extra troops until Hamid Karzai has ended corruption. The officer-diplomat has a powerful friend in Washington , for his secret missive is leaked to the Washington Post. We soon know who the friend is, for a jet-lagged Hillary Clinton echoes this view during an ASEAN summit in Singapore .

If America is waiting for corruption to end, these troops will arrive in 2109 or Judgement Day, whichever comes first.

I have no idea whether Obama and Hillary have managed to instil some fresh fighting spirit into the Afghan armed forces, but they have certainly aroused the warrior in Hamid Karzai, who seems to have launched a vigorous offensive against Washington . Karzai publicly accused Britain of ferrying Taliban elements by helicopter from their base in the south to the northern provinces of Baghlan, Kunduz and Samangan, attributing this knowledge to his intelligence agencies. The fecund tribe of conspiracy theorists in Kabul , and elsewhere, eagerly linked this to the good-Taliban-bad-Taliban manoeuvre floated by no less a personage than Obama, near the start of his presidency. Obama refuses to fight a war which George Bush knew how to begin but no one knows how to end.

The perfect end from the Pakistani perspective is the replacement of Karzai by a non-Mullah Omar Taliban, which could declare peace through a bearded mutter and let America leave Kabul at a stately pace rather than via the rooftop helicopters of Saigon . In the absence of any other proposal, this must seem to have some merit.

The "good Taliban" would send Afghan women back centuries and the country into puritan coma, but they would be allies of Islamabad and, by implication, its mentors in Washington and London . At least, that would be the theory. Of course Islamabad might have sounded more persuasive if a domestic Taliban had not been detonating its backyard.

Let us leave the last word to a warlord who has never been disturbed by sentiment. Uzbeg General Abdul Rashid Dostum once, in Mazar-e-Sharif; his views are always forthright even if they are not necessarily right.

But he had valid points to make in an interview with Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer of the Daily Telegraph [published on 13 November]:

* Not one Afghan officer of the rank of captain or major has been killed in battle in six years, since Afghans do not consider this their war;

* Western leaders are mistaken if they believe that Taliban soldiers will defect, or betray Osama;

* Western aid has not touched poverty, but only killed local initiative and enriched the political elite;

* Taliban can only be defeated by a pragmatic military strategy that avoids categories like "good" and "bad" and involves local communities.

Dostum dismissed the anti-corruption sanctimoniousness in a classic sentence: "They are demanding unicorns in Kabul ." Touche.

If so many male members of the Delhi establishment were not irredeemably bald, the loudest sound in the capital would be that of hair being torn in frustration. Those who have rescued their pates with American wigs [probably made with recycled hair from Tirupati] or artificial implants are not going to risk their camouflage by an injudicious display of temperament. So the prevailing noise in Delhi is the sound of gnashing teeth. The despair is over the upsurge of Naxalite violence.

While it is understandable that successful India should get antsy over subaltern anger, perhaps we should pause to consider what the Naxalites have not done; this would shade the focus, which is at the moment concentrated on what they have done. They did not kill the police officer they picked up in Bengal . They released him in exchange for tribal women in Government custody. They did not bargain for the release of their leaders, sending a message to a vast constituency that tribal women were equal, on their scale of values, to the top brass. You can appreciate the electrifying impact on their support base.

And while relief will be the overwhelming sentiment among the passengers of Rajdhani, who were unharmed after five hours as captives, they will, on reaching home, search in the debris of memory for some answers. The Governments of Bengal and India were helpless when the train was brought to a halt, and impotent during the hours in captivity. The authorities did not rescue the passengers. The abductors freed them. These Naxalites have decided that their war is against authority and its structures and symbols, and not against the people of India .

This is a significant shift from Naxalite thinking in its first phase, the decade between 1965 and 1975, when the leadership was with Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal [a tribal leader] and their intelligent, if apoplectic, student comrades like Ashim Chatterjee, hero and scourge of Kolkata's Presidency College campus. Then they targeted civilians, whether clerks or kulaks, and semi-civilians like constables. For the first time, traffic policemen in Bengal were forced to wear firearms, and all traffic points had to have at two least two men on duty- one to direct the city's horrendous traffic and the other to guard his partner. This should have led, at least in my view, to learned internal dialectic debate on "Is the constable a class enemy?"

I do not know if it did. What I do know is that when dread of Naxalites seeped down from those at the top of the power-pyramid to those in the middle and the base, it fomented a government-people-political parties partnership that destroyed the Naxalites. The state provided ruthless determination; the people gave information; the Congress and the CPI[M] used their cadres in the counter-offensive.

The Naxalites made a second serious ideological mistake, which they have consciously avoided this time around. The walls of Bengal were daubed with the slogan "Chairman Mao is our Chairman". The Chairman of Beijing may not have been consulted on this honour, but he was not one to kick away a garland strewn in his path. Those were turbulent times in China as well; the Mao-inspired Cultural Revolution was an exercise in havoc, and mesmerised young Chinese waved Mao's "Little Red Book" as the magical panacea for their myriad problems. No one wanted any little red book in India .

Mrs Indira Gandhi, who was martyred a quarter century ago, was Prime Minister for most of that long decade of insurrection. She did not waste any sentiment while dealing with the Naxalite threat. She gave carte blanche to Bengal 's political leadership [first, the United Front and then Congress Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray], police chiefs like Ranjit Gupta and finally the armed forces who, under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Jacob, played a decisive role in the state response to urban insurgency.

But Mrs Indira Gandhi addressed the fundamental cause of the revolt through a brilliant, almost instinctive manoeuvre. She realised that you could kill Naxalites, but you could not meet the challenge of Naxalism, unless the government brought the corroding problem of poverty to the top of its concerns. The theme of her re-election and government became "Garibi hatao [Remove poverty]". She held out the hope that poverty could be eliminated through the democratic process, and was thereby able to convince the base that violence was not an answer.

In the event, Mrs Gandhi was unable to do very much to eliminate poverty - she was partly misled by the "Congress Left", which was neither Congress nor the Left. But the special place she still retains in the hearts of India 's poor is evidence of her powerful political achievement. The state would not have succeeded as effectively without the parallel political mobilisation by Indira Gandhi.

In 2009, we are not short of Hurray-Henrys who would be happy to mow down Naxalites with blazing submachine guns in order to make India safe for themselves and their self-serving economic policies. They do not realise it yet, but they are going to miss Indira Gandhi.

When the ageing but still incomparable Groucho Marx, now trundling into his eighties, was asked what he most wanted as a birthday gift, his reply was succinct: "Last year."

Which is the year from their past that the BJP and Shiv Sena would most like as a gift? 2001. Since then it has been a steady trot downhill.

The Shiv Sena's stagnation is easily comprehensible. After a lifetime of leadership by a dominant patriarch it confused the man with the mission.

The Shiv Sena has two dimensions.

In rural Maharashtra it is the regional, Marathi-centric alternative to the Congress, playing the democratic game with a slant but within the framework of conventional politics.

Its urban manifestation is different. In Mumbai, particularly, and in Pune, to a lesser degree, the Shiv Sena's success has been through the sharp articulation of grievance and local pride, through a sensational rhetoric and, when required, violent agitation.

Balasaheb Thackeray has been, for some years now, unable to either breathe such fire or turn his rather mild heir Uddhav into a fire-breather. His nephew Raj Thackeray walked into vacant space; the sound of broken windows was sufficient to persuade the young unemployed that they had found their voice.

Raj Thackeray picked up 23.35% of the vote in Mumbai. Translate that figure into ground reality and it becomes more comprehensible. If roughly half the vote of Mumbai is Marathi, then the nephew took around half the Marathi votes cast. This is a huge swing, with an impact extending far beyond the 13 seats that he won.

The Shiv Sena, already down by three per cent in the Lok Sabha elections from its support in 2004, dropped a further three percentage points. Balasaheb still gets respect, but that is really a homage to his past. The mission has passed on to Raj Thackeray.

The BJP has a larger dilemma. It is simply out of focus. It has nothing by way of a new narrative to offer, and its old one is so tired that it can't get out of bed. The party has gone through an identity crisis before.

Its first incarnation, the Bhartiya Jana Sangh, submerged itself into the Janata, under popular pressure, in 1977. The Janata never functioned as the sum of its parts, and proved so incapable to understanding the compulsions of power that it collapsed and split. The bruised Sangh resurrected as the Bhartiya Janata Party, preaching some strange form of pretend-Gandhism, and was promptly battered in the 1984 elections. It reinvented itself through the street politics of the Ayodhya temple movement, consolidated its gains with patience during the Narasimha Rao years and won unprecedented rewards in Delhi .

The Atal Behari Vajpayee years can be summed up quite succinctly. As long as the party followed Vajpayee's advice, it maintained a keel that was acceptable to the country. When the party imposed itself on Vajpayee, the balance went awry. It was only a question of time before the keel broke.

Since then the BJP has been struggling to find the balance between regional demands and a national presence, emotionalism and shrill invective, communal rhetoric and the compulsion of social peace as the necessary bedrock of economic development - and, finally, an image that reflects concern for the future rather than the conflicts of the past.

Such contradictions had a direct impact on the Maharashtra elections. When it joined the me-too Marathi manoos agenda of the Shiv Sena, which is essentially anti-Bihari migrant labour, its Bihar unit publicly disassociated itself from the decision.

And so, typically, the BJP fell between the traditional two stools. The Marathi shrugged and moved to Raj Thackeray; and one can safely assume that not a single Mumbai Bihari voted for the BJP. BJP leaders have neither understood the reasons for their now prolonged stagnation or decline, which is why they embarrass themselves and their party with silly excuses on the day results are declared. Some bright spark blamed the electronic voting machines the moment the trend in Maharashtra pointed towards defeat. That leader had not lost an election, he had lost his mind.

The BJP's real problem is a sense that it has got lost in a time warp at a moment when young Indians, the decisive element in the vote, are either looking ahead or bursting with anger and frustration. The BJP has been unable to offer a road map for the next years, or - unlike say Om Prakash Chautala - become an effective mobiliser of voter resentment.

This has been a poor election for all major parties. The Congress actually lost one per cent of its vote from five years ago in Maharashtra ; while its embarrassment in Haryana was plainly evident. The NCP vote dropped 2.4% from 2004. The ruling alliance won not because it was better but simply because it was less worse.

Depression engenders an enervating lethargy. Government is of course recognised as a full-time activity, but Opposition has become election season frenzy punctuated by a few forgettable speeches during Parliament sessions.

Opposition is the time parties use to expand their base; the BJP can barely protect what it had two decades ago in a volatile state like Haryana.

You can only dream of the gift of a past year. To survive in electoral politics you need to create a future.

Is poverty boring? Or is it merely inappropriate, just too in-your-face during the holiday week that precedes Diwali?

It doesn't seem right to behave like a sourpuss when the national mood is celebratory, when traffic and shopping are indistinguishable from each other in Delhi and Mumbai, when those of us who can afford to be happy are happy with a bang, and when a strange form of cricket full of hugely unknown players dominates the television set.

This week a Newspaper carried a front page report quoting a study done by worthies in the highest echelons of government, which showed that the number of Indians living below the poverty line had actually increased by ten per cent, taking the figure up to 38%. Add the marginals and more than half of India exists at subsistence levels. That sounds too polite actually. More than half of India does not sleep with a full stomach.

There are two categories growing in the Rising India of elephants, tigers and various Maharajah animals that grace the covers of silly books: the super rich, and the abysmally poor. At the top of the wealth peak are both legitimate businessman who have the skill, entrepreneurship and financial genius to turn enterprise into a pot of gold. Alongside them are the creators of illegitimate riches, the well-dressed, greasy scumbags who make deals with banks and politicians, loot the country and stash billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts that, naturally, our authorities will never access.

Since it is the commonly acknowledged dream of newspaper-reading Indians to turn our nation into a superpower within the foreseeable future, an objective question needs to be answered. Is poverty a hindrance to superpower status?

Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep, Micawber and Scrooge lived in the world of Dickens and Charles Lamb wrote on chimney sweeps, young boys who climbed up chimneys to clean the soot.

This did not prevent Britain from becoming a world power under the watchful eye of Queen Victoria and her successors. Did the British nabobs mope about the wretched beggars and prostitutes on the streets of London , or did they simply get on with conquering the world?

An impoverished population can actually be quite useful for such an enterprise. You need foot soldiers and cannon fodder for imperial armies: what would Britain's generals have done in World War I without their local poor, or the million Indians ready to put on a uniform for a soldier's pittance?

The rich are not easy to turn into a battlefield statistic. A thrusting economy also needs cheap labour to keep prices competitive [owners never, of course, reduce the size of their profits and bonuses, they merely skim the wages of the lowest in the ranks].

China's story is heavily dependent on the virtual slave labour on assembly lines; equally, Indian businessmen need sweatshops, just as Americans once did when they were in a comparable stage of economic growth.

Face it: those who invested in the poor for their political survival have been marginalised in the last two decades, and those who invested in growth have flourished. The latter had a ready answer, of course: only growth could eliminate poverty.

The latest statistics show that it has not. Charity is alien to the culture of wealth, so the private sector is more interested in profit than welfare. The state, which should ensure that welfare gets priority, is more concerned with the glamour of growth. So, after nearly two decades of economic reform the poverty levels have increased at an astonishing pace, taking us back to the Seventies, at least on this count.

We began our exercise in nation-building with Gandhi's talisman: whenever in doubt, think about the poorest amongst us and consider whether what we are doing would benefit him. Every socialist, whether inside Congress or outside, carried it around as a badge of honour. Look where the socialists have ended up, including of the tricolour variety. Socialists have become the lost tribe of India .

Communists had no time for Gandhi. They opted for either two beards or a moustache: the fulsome growth of Marx, or the pointy triangle of Lenin, or the Ottomanesque upper lip of Stalin. All three have been shaved clean in Kerala and Bengal . They might soon have to rename themselves the Communist Party of Tripura.

Trade unions have become the spoilt brats of our system, limited only to their constituency interests, contemptuous of the unorganised poor.

Why have the poor turned away from povertywallahs?

They have not. The povertywallahs have abandoned the poor.

The Naxalites, who had been virtually eliminated from politics by the mid-Seventies, have expanded into space vacated by the socialists and communists. Between them, they would have most of the seats in over 150 districts, which would probably have made them the largest bloc in Parliament.

The true Opposition in India has moved away from Parliament, which is not good news for either democracy or India .

The Naxalite vote does not get translated into seats, because Naxalites do not offer candidates, or indeed play the artful game of electoral manipulation along seams of caste or community or faith. It is perfectly understandable that the two principal parties in Parliament, Congress and BJP, are outdoing each other in schemes for massive state aggression towards Naxalites.

It is in everyone's vested interest that Naxalites are crushed, physically. The government throws around palliatives in time-honoured fashion, promising development the moment Naxalites are killed.

Why did it need Naxalites to remind the government that these districts required development? That is not the only question. Rajiv Gandhi was right, that only 16 paise in the development rupee actually reaches the target.

Sorry for being a party-pooper, or at least trying to be one. Remember Queen Victoria , and have a happy Diwali!

The only serious danger in Barack Obama's Nobel Prize for Peace is that he might take it seriously. The early indications are that he will. Obama might have saved himself a great deal of trouble by saying thanks, but no thanks. But he could not resist an award whose credibility collapsed the moment he got it.

After the obligatory reference to humility, he added, a little more grandly, "I will accept this award as a call to action." At least he admitted that there had been no action so far. What on earth did the fatuous Nobel Committee see when they surveyed the map of the world in the last six months?

Did they find that Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu and Obama had created an independent Palestine while Hamas was engrossed in playing Patience and Hezbollah had gone for a conference in Tehran? Or that India and Pakistan had signed a treaty solving Kashmir while benign Barack hovered gently in the background, always within camera range?

The only substantive decision that Obama has taken in terms of war and peace is to ramp up the war in Afghanistan far above George Bush's scale of intervention. He is on the point of sending upwards of 50,000 more American troops so that Viceroy-Lord Dick Holbrooke, and his bevy of Pentagon generals, can fight for another decade on the killing rocks of a battlefield that saw serious action during Alexander the Great's time and has not paused since. If outsiders do not turn up, Afghans simply go to war against one another. Alfred Nobel thought that his Peace Prize should go to leaders who disband standing armies.

Obama may be perfectly justified in upgrading the still largely somnolent American presence in Afghanistan into a full-scale fighting force, but the chaps in Oslo might have waited till the shooting stopped. They waited for Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa to grow old. Why couldn't they have waited for Obama to become middle-aged?

Their official excuse is that Obama symbolises hope. That's nice. It broadens the scope for future winners. All you have to do is hope, and possibly pray, that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba have reinvented themselves into vegetarian Gandhians and your post box might have a nice letter from Oslo in October 2010.

The big ticket hope is non-proliferation. If you think about it coolly - very coolly - one chap who has done far more than Obama for non-proliferation in the recent past is Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. He actually dismantled a nuclear weapons facility. He may have done so under pressure, but he has done something. Obama has given a few pretty speeches and knocked on the table at the United Nations. Obama has made no effort to rein in the most powerful nuclear weapons power in history, a nation that refused to accept any international control or convention and continues to develop the most sophisticated nuclear weapons technology. That country is, of course, the United States of America. I suppose Oslo did not think of a Peace Prize for Gaddafi for fear of ridicule. Gaddafi does not belong, as it were, to the right sort of country, plus his acceptance speech might have taken a full day. But does anyone have any idea when the ridicule for the Obama decision will begin to ebb?

Obama is too sharp not to understand this, and it will further whet the temptation to lend some substance to the hype. He is not going to withdraw from Afghanistan because of this medal; and climate change is Al Gore's parish. So his big push is likely to be on non proliferation. He dare not do anything about America's nuclear muscle; and he has assured Tel Aviv that he will continue the policy of ignoring Israel's secret cache. There is little he can do about the Big Five, and North Korea is Hillary Clinton's show. Pakistan is too much of a military pal at a time of dire need, and Pakistan has a good excuse as well, India. So his options boil down to just this: abort Iran's programme and bully India into as much compliance as possible. If warrior Bush was dangerous for the region between the Nile and the Indus, peacenik Obama could be troublesome for the land of the Ganges.

Is it possible that the Oslo peace mafia had run out of people to hand this prize to? Not every recipient is going to get a chapter in the history books, even though they might be worthy enough. It is not easy to recall the name of the winner in 2008. But the range of the prize has been expanded from reformed warriors to humanitarians. We all know of course that Mahatma Gandhi was never found worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, but then they would have probably considered Jesus Christ too good to be true as well. [Jesus was a non-violent opponent of European colonisation as well, in his case, Roman.]

But we have not completely run out of worthy individuals or institutions. The doctors who do selfless work in conditions of utmost misery, like Darfur or other conflict zones in Africa, deserve both the applause and the money. The Aga Khan might not need the money, but there should be some recognition of the extraordinary restoration work his foundation has done to preserve the great monuments of human civilisation - that too is a commitment to peace.

But there is one good, even great, reason for giving Barack Obama the 2009 prize, although it was omitted from the citation. Barack Obama threw out Bush Republicans, the biggest band of warmongers in recent American history, from power in Washington. This must surely count as a signal contribution to world peace.

China's celebratory ascent into the top echelons of the modern world owes to a course correction by Deng Xiaoping, who recognised that Communism was injurious to China 's health. He replaced ideology with idealism and gave it pragmatic legs. The shift from pomposity to practical was based on an old Chinese principle: search for truth among facts.

The only thing Maoist about China now is the portrait in Tiananmen Square and the mug shot on the currency notes.

China 's foreign policy is shaped by the same principle. It has looked long and hard at the facts of India , in particular at its defence. Thanks to the self-castration of a post-Bofors mentality, the hypocrisy of a system thirsty for bribes behind the burqa of bureaucratic-political piety, and the pseudo-morality of a defence minister who equates procrastination with self-protection, India 's defence capability is now at least a generation behind China 's in both conventional and nuclear warfare.

When an Indian air chief promises to bring his capability up to speed in a potential war zone like Arunachal Pradesh he is talking of what might happen by 2018 if all goes well. Make that a very big if.

The Indian Air Force has been whittled down to a statistical accident. Our artillery has a goodwill-inventory. The communication infrastructure necessary to back up a fighting unit is waiting for the dust to be cleaned from the cover of the files.

China assessed Indian vulnerability years ago, and signaled its mood on the eve of President Hu Jintao's last state visit, generally a time when states seek to stress points of mutual agreement. Instead, the then Chinese ambassador in Delhi chose to dwell on Chinese claims on Arunachal Pradesh, called Southern Tibet by Beijing . It was deliberate, calculated provocation to which Delhi responded with its familiar waffle.

The border provocations of 2009 have evoked a very queer reaction from National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan. He said, in defence of the Chinese, that the infringements had not increased beyond the normal. This begs a question: what is the normal level of infringements? A couple of hundred yards here or there – or, perhaps, there rather than here.

Jawaharlal Nehru once made the mistake of telling Parliament that the disputed territory on the China border was all rock and wasteland. In 1962 China proved how much it valued wasteland. Has China begun another " Mission Creep" which seeks to change facts on the ground so that the truth can be refashioned in fertile Delhi ?

I do not believe that China wants war with India . The raison d'être of the post-Communist Communist Party is the promise, to its people, of stability. Stability is the cocoon in which economic growth can be spun. War would destabilise the Chinese stock exchange, if nothing else.

China also wants trade with India, now close to $60 billion. It is a useful hedge at a time of recession in the West.

Moreover, the Indian market is undemanding. Wal-Mart will not accept toxic lead in toys, and American media do raise a typhoon if Chinese cat food ends up killing the cat. But the Delhi trader does not really care if the rows of Chinese Ganesh idols have been spray painted with death-dealing gamma rays as long as he can sell them for twice the price he paid. They must be laughing all the way from Shanghai to Lhasa .

The laughter in Beijing is probably restricted to the great debate on India 's nuclear tests. It takes courage, more than freedom, to pursue an argument on the most serious element of our defence spread through press conferences, the preferred methodology of both the plaintiff and the accused. If the eminent scientists who believe that the yield in 1998 was too low and India needs to test further are getting a hearing it is only because of their eminence, their knowledge [they are the hands-on people who actually created the nuclear deterrent] and their transparent sincerity.

If they have no case, as a belligerent government [denied the right to test by the Indo-US nuclear deal] believes, then they have been utterly irresponsible. Why doesn't the government accuse them of treason and bring them before the courts? They have shaken the nation's conviction in its core assets and given comfort to the enemy. The government cannot clear doubts by a show of hands from within the establishment. It needs, at the very least, an independent enquiry.

There is a rational reason why China has decided to exploit Indian weaknesses and contradictions through rhetoric and provocative gestures on the border and in its Delhi embassy. It seeks to keep India off-balance, to the extent it can, at a time of great existential discomfort for its ally Pakistan .

Pakistan has always sought Chinese help in its confrontation with India . China has given it, although never to the point where it becomes counter-productive. The games theory in Islamabad and Beijing surely is that if Pakistan has to worry about two fronts, then, at the very least, so should India. Our weakness becomes an opportunity for China and an invitation to Pakistan .

Witness the latter's supreme indifference to concerns about the Lashkar e Tayyaba.

A New York Times report published on 30 September could not be more categorical: "Ten months after the devastating attacks in Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, the group behind the assault remains largely intact and determined to strike India again, according to current and former members of the group, Lashkar e Tayyaba, and intelligence officials. Despite pledges from Pakistan to dismantle groups operating on its soil, and the arrest of a handful of operatives, Lashkar has persisted, even flourished.."

Pakistan cannot find Lashkar operatives planning another attack, but the New York Times can.

Is there anything in common between an India-Pak cricket match in South Africa and China 's decision to give disputed status to Indian Kashmiris through disingenuous separate-sheet visas? Yes. Neither is a game.

Nothing in the equation between India and Pakistan is a game, unless you include war in the list of games. Even cricket has become a war by other means. But that is another story, suitable for some future column.

Rio de Janeiro or Munich might enjoy a reputation wrapped in an advertising package, but there is no country in the world that can compete with India when it comes to celebration.

Others might turn a weekend into a party and pat themselves on the back, but when an Indian gets into a festive mood, time goes to sleep for ten days, and then wakes up most reluctantly.

Who knows when Diwali begins, although we do have a reasonable idea of when it ends. It ends the day you stop losing money.

Of course we Indians celebrate in the name of religion, but then there is very little in India that remains untouched by faith. We even gamble in honour of the gods. Our holidays are an extension of religious tourism. Religion works in India because we make it so much fun, whether it be the worship of Ganapati Bappa Moriya in the west or Ma Durga in the east.

The rest of the world may have forgotten that "holiday" is a combination of "holy" and "day", but not Bengal - except that Bengalis do not believe in the singular. Celebration is plural in every sense: spread over days, and enjoyed in the togetherness of family, friends and that special kinship which makes a metropolis like Kolkata a swirling city of community affections.

London and New York might also claim that they do not pause between Christmas and New Year's Day, but there is a great difference. In the West, every home comes alive but the city falls silent.

In Kolkata the city becomes home and home becomes the city. If you have not experienced Durga Puja in Bengal, you have missed a true human wonder. There is no way that Pranab Mukherjee or Mamata Banerjee would be anywhere except at home during "Pujo". I hope I am not accused of exaggeration and excess, but I daresay that even a Marxist atheist like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee smiles during Durga Puja. And if this mood is burnished with special effects, all the better.

Rome might boast that it is the ultimate destination in religious tourism, but Rome offers the visitor the political and cultural history of the West in its stones.

Kolkata, in comparison, is a young city with less-than-impressive British buildings, many of them seemingly unpainted since the British left. The art of Rome is a magical explosion of individual genius. The art of Durga Puja is a magical explosion of anonymous genius. Each image is beautifully crafted with the commitment of adoration, but the Kumartuli craftsman knows that the Goddess will go away, along the river, just as we all will one day. Rome preserves marble; Kolkata preserves the moment.

Why then has the Election Commission, a body of intelligent, experienced and utterly reasonable men, become such a party pooper?

We may no longer have the highest opinion of our politicians, but, as full-fledged Indian citizens, Arunachal, Haryana and Maharashtra's politicians have as much right to a happy Diwali as the rest of us. Instead, they have been condemned to the misery of a campaign. For half the lot the anguish will end in a death pang when they get the results and learn that they have lost. They also know that only the very stupid or the very arrogant are confident of victory.

This is why all political parties were happy when the Election Commission decided to declare the results on 22 October, nine days after polling on 13 October. When a suggestion was floated that the results could be announced earlier, politicians pleaded with the commissioners to announce their fate only after Diwali - no one wanted bad news during the festival. This is what is known as a perfect Indian solution.

Many reasons have been offered for the sharp paucity of women candidates in the lists of all parties, the most frequent being gender bias. This is true. If you removed women who became candidates because they are children or wives of Big Shots, their percentage would shrink further. Men still cannot get over the fact that theoretical rights have to be converted into practical numbers. But one would not be surprised if some women with the potential to become candidates decided, sensibly, that this was too much of a mug's game in any event, so why waste a Diwali on such a barren objective?

Moreover, women are not very good at distributing liquor. The Mumbai excise department has passed an order that all bars in the city must report their daily sales till election time, so that it can judge, from any sharp hike, whether a candidate has been especially hospitable. I don't know what kind of bureaucracy the excise department has, but it is obvious that it has absolutely no clue about how elections are managed.

There are two ways in which happiness is spread prior to an election. The first is through the distribution of cash to the straggle of sycophants charmingly described as "party workers". These chaps start getting their handouts from the moment a candidate files his nomination. The "party worker" spends about a quarter of this cash for the benefit of the voter, and the rest on numerous benefits for himself. This might or might not include an investment in the joys of liquor. The more conscientious family types might, for instance, buy better furniture for their homes, or a larger refrigerator to keep the wife happy.

But it is safe to assume that business at Mumbai's bars will show a sharp rise from Friday the 25th of September and maintain a steady upward incline till 12 October. If the excise department asks the bar owner for an explanation the latter will attribute it to the Diwali spirit.

The disbursal of alcohol to the masses, a well-recognised facet of Indian democracy, does not happen through bars. Bars charge a huge premium. No candidate, however well-heeled, has money to waste. Bottles are purchased wholesale and distributed in the camouflage of dusk. The excise department should check out wholesale merchants, not retailers.

The spirit of Diwali will demand an extra supply of benevolence in this election season. For the political class in Maharashtra and Haryana, Diwali will come early. Many of you have probably become cynical enough to describe our system as Diwala [the Hindi word for bankrupt] Democracy, but I remain faithful to the system.

Happy Diwali Democracy!

A simulated debate has been whisked up about the takeover of the BJP by the RSS: the two were never apart. The issue is not whether BJP will shift gear towards a philosophy of conciliation, but whether the RSS will do so. They could not hope for a better starting point: the Mahabharata.

Wisdom has a great advantage over philosophy. It is simple. Philosophy is so often tortured by the human mind that its meditations become a maze. We become so enraptured by the complexities of the maze, so fascinated by its labyrinths that we forget that we once had a destination. Wisdom is a straight line: it is the shortest distance between question and answer.

Such thoughts were prompted by an email from a friend at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore , who sent a verse from the Mahabharata:

"Dharmam yo badhate dharmo na sa dharmah kudharmkah;

avirodhattu yo dharmah, sa dharmah Satyavikrama.

Any dharma [way of life, or religion], that violates another's dharma is not true dharma. It is kudharma, or bad dharma. That dharma which flourishes without harming the interest of others is indeed the true dharma, O Satyavikrama!"

Why has this fundamental principle of Mahabharata, an essential text of Hinduism, been ignored by those organisations who seek a political philosophy for the nation in the name of Hinduism?

It is possible that politicians are so busy doing their politics that they remain ignorant of the faith that they so readily profess. But that would be a kind interpretation. Most politicians ignore morality because cynicism has made them amoral.

As the swirl continues over ideological and personality clashes among the titans who were born in a colonised India divided into some six hundred pieces, and won freedom with just one division, new questions are emerging from previously silent corners of memory. Incidentally, it is important for our perspective to remember that India was not a single political entity under the British, and even the creation of a federal polity after the Government of India Act of 1935, by which the Princely States sent representatives (nominated rather than elected) to the same legislature in Delhi as British India, did not make them part of a single political unit.

An old query has crept out of the historic woodwork. Mahatma Gandhi framed his concept of freedom around the dream of a Rama Rajya. How could he expect Muslims, who did not believe in Lord Rama, to relate to a Rama Rajya? Was Gandhi communal as well?

It may seem anachronistic now but Gandhi was convinced that politics without religion was immoral. He believed that faith provided the moral compass essential for a lifetime's journey through public service. Gandhi demanded the highest virtues from his disciples, extending not only to non-violence and financial honesty but also celibacy. There were not many takers for the last; and you might have reason to ask whether he had not confused an ashram with a freedom movement. But Gandhi's commitment to religion did not mean commitment to a single religion.

In his Rama Rajya, every faith had full freedom and complete equality. His prayer meetings were not just about his beloved Gita; there was space for the Holy Quran, the Bible and the Guru Granth Saheb as well. He could never understand why anyone should misunderstand this; and it pained him when opponents misrepresented him, sneered at his gentle idealism and challenged his pacifism with the undisguised threat of violence. Lord Rama was an ideal, an image that communicated easily with the majority of India . But there was no aggression in his concept of divinity, and there was always equal space for the other. The Mahabharata was his favourite text, from which he learnt the true meaning of dharma. Gandhi's Rama Rajya was a realm of harmony, not a continual battlefield.

The post-Gandhi Congress abandoned "Rama Rajya" for at least three reasons: the term had become a negative with Muslims; Nehru was uncomfortable with a religious idiom; and you needed to be as morally secure as Gandhi to promise a "Rama Rajya".

But why did the RSS and the BJP, who wanted a "Hindu India ", shy away from Gandhi's formulation?

Because their ideal was different from Gandhi's. Paradoxically, the "Hindutva" forces had modelled themselves on Pakistan : they wanted to treat Indian Muslims and Christians in precisely the same way that Pakistan was treating its Hindus and Christians, as second-class citizens.

Whether such politics gets you votes or not is beside the point. The relevant factor is that such thinking is antagonistic to the idea of India as a modern democracy. Discrimination on the basis of faith is what happens in a theocracy, not a democracy. You have to be extremely stupid to imitate any neighbour with suicidal tendencies.

What Gandhi understood in 1919, when he launched his first major political onslaught against the British Empire , is as valid nine decades later. The young are far more clear-sighted about this than the middle aged or the old, for the young have learnt from the mistakes of their fathers.

Has the BJP lost the plot or has a plot lost the BJP?

Curiously, both might have happened, though successively, rather than simultaneously.

The BJP missed the central point of this year's general elections.

Its miscalculations began after the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November last year, when it misread the impact the carnage had upon people. Every section of India may have wanted Pakistan punished for that outrage, but that did not translate into an excuse for confrontations within India .

A decisive section of the electorate did not want Indian Muslims punished for what some Pakistani Muslims had done. Obviously, the Indian Muslim voter did not want to be tried for a crime he had not committed and so mobilised against a BJP which began to get more strident by the month. But a decisive section of youth had no appetite for the politics of conflict creation; it wants conflict elimination, or at least conflict resolution.

The BJP, judging by the promotion of Narendra Modi as a future Prime Minister and Varun Gandhi as a rising superstar, was still investing in conflict, not resolution. That switched enough seats to leave the BJP far short of its intended tally. The Congress, abetted by some amazing foolishness on the part of the Third Front, went far ahead of its expected numbers.

It is a rare leader, and an even rarer party, that can avoid rebellion in decline and defeat. This of course is only true of parliamentary democracy. In a presidential system the leader swims until he sinks; there are no real midterm gasps for breath.

Britain's Gordon Brown was showered with adulation in his first three months; got carried away; turned too clever by half; and has faced nothing but rebellion and disdain ever since. Indian party politics is far more stable than its British mother-version.

Rebels come in three categories after a defeat.

There are those who believe that their political careers are over, and therefore there is nothing much to lose. Age could be a reason, or simply the accident of personal proximity to the defeated leader.

Who remembers a Congress politician called Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi? The political class barely knew who he was when P.V. Narasimha Rao made him one of the most powerful men in Delhi . The meteor disappeared into a black hole the instant Narasimha Rao was defeated.

But the BJP is also passing through a generational transition. It is not just Mr Advani who will not contest the next general elections; his peers will be too old as well. Since he has not been able to ensure that his peers spend their last years in politics in ministerial offices, they can risk the frisson of some controversy.

I imagine Dr Murli Manohar Joshi might discover he has a few things to say if all the temptations that could keep him silent and patient get exhausted by December.

The second reason is less subtle. There are rebels who are, in effect, cheerleaders of an alternative leader. This is normal politics, and you can hardly grudge such activity. Those who feel they have been sidelined by any leadership will exploit the opportunity offered by change. It is obvious that some of those who were unhappy with loss, vented their spleen on Advani.

Jaswant Singh's detractors [whose numbers must have multiplied since his expulsion; that is the culture of Delhi ] will put both reasons in the charge-sheet against him, but they will be wrong. Obviously, he would have preferred to spend this term as MP in high office, rather than in a publisher's office.

But the reason he published his book on Jinnah was passion, not ideology. He is a liberal of the old school, and proud of both, liberalism and the old school. Values and honour mean much more to him than a mere dictionary can convey.

Pakistan is both physically and emotionally close to him, and the many contradictions of partition have affected him deeply, as they have so many others. He has relatives in Pakistan . The ruling clan of Umarkot, in whose custody the Emperor Akbar was born, is his kin.

He has spent many years, in the silence of his impressive library, examining the depth, trajectory and implications of his roots. He may not have admitted it, but in his personal scheme of things books overtook politics as his principal priority. The evolution may even have been unconscious, for one does not measure change on a periodic basis.

Jinnah was an obvious attraction, for he wanted to know how myth had overtaken facts in Pakistan, and demonology had diminished Jinnah in India . It is not possible to invest many years of one's life in a biography without being fascinated by the subject. On a few occasions, this fascination is akin to being entranced by the venomous power of a snake, as Hitler's biographers were.

But Jaswant Singh discovered, as many others have done, that Jinnah was in the hero-mould, and deserved admiration despite his mistakes, no matter how awesomely expensive those mistakes proved to be.

In his personal preferences, Jinnah was a liberal-intellectual that a fellow liberal-intellectual could empathize with. It may not be entirely accidental that Jinnah's Indian grandson is a friend of Jaswant Singh. Any biographer fond of his subject will give him the benefit of any doubt, and the road to freedom in 1947 was cluttered with doubt, misdirection, accidents and betrayal as much as it was resplendent with vision, courage and sacrifice.

Jaswant Singh did not set out to change his party through his book. Neither did he expect his party to change him because of this book. He thought he had served his party with honesty and commitment; and the party would show the grace to give him his space as an author.

It did not. Perhaps it could not. You could not survive in the Shiv Sena after claiming that Shivaji had any flaw. And life would not be happy in the Congress if you carped against Nehru.

Politics needs its certainties even when those certainties are historically uncertain. Politicians are wary of books, because they are aware that knowledge can be injurious to their health.

The world of books welcomes Jaswant Singh's release from politics.

Take a guess. What would be the answer to this question in an India-wide opinion poll: which has upset you more, India's early departure from the T20 world championship or the toxic wars against Maoists raging across the heartland of the nation?No prizes for getting the answer right.

The spoilt brat of Indian cricket used to be an individual who had better be left nameless since he has finally departed from the team. He has been replaced by a collective noun.

The utterly spoilt brat of Indian cricket is the cricket fan. This silly idiot has come to believe, for no worthwhile reason, that cricket is a game with only one result, a victory for India.

All of us want our team to win more than it loses. But the fun of sports lies in unpredictability. No one can be sure what the particular chemistry of a set of men will be on any given day, or when luck will bend its momentum in one direction or the other.

The part that media plays in publicising stupid tantrums following a defeat convinces me that this is not the work of genuine sports fans. They are publicity-seekers. If television cameras did not hover around their stupid protests, there would be no protests.

No one expects a captain to celebrate after his team loses, but the grovelling apology by Captain-Commander-General-Admiral-Marshal-President Dhoni strikes me as well-planned humbug of the sort encouraged by PR agencies. If you depend on the fans to buy all the products you advertise, then it makes sense to pamper even the most petulant with a pre-emptive apology. An apology costs nothing. Ads bring big bucks.

Media is clearly desperate for anything to fill the page or occupy the screen. We do want to know why Ravindra Jadeja was sent up the batting order when the tic in his eye is sufficient evidence to prove that he will not be able to see a rising ball, but do we want the answer from Aamir Khan or John Abraham? Their terribly inane reactions were turned into news stories. I just hope we do not see the day when Dhoni and Virender Sehwag are expected to double up as literary critics.

A panoramic sports championship has one undisputable merit: it reveals a great deal about any national frame of mind. The churning point of the cricket fiesta in England, at least for me, was when a British master-of-ceremonies (face unseen on television, but accent unmistakable) asked everyone to stand up for the national anthems that were played before the start of the match. "Be upstanding!" he boomed. That the English language is subject to various forms of torture, many of them unknown even to Dick Cheney, is a recognised fact. But this was murder of the language at home, matricide at its worst.

What the chap meant was "Please stand up". "Upstanding" means something else altogether. It is a synonym of honesty and virtue, a definition of morals. To deepen my anguish, an advertisement followed, trying to persuade me to buy a cellphone in "deep black". What on earth is deep black? Have you ever seen "shallow black"? Blue or green or red lend themselves to variations of deep and light, but black is black. A paler shade of black is grey, not light black. This may not be on the scale of matricide, but it is a wound nevertheless.

In an effort to make the 20-over form of the game more American, the organisers have decided to change the language of commentary into American English. Hence the prolific and nonsensical use, in reportage, of "batter" for "batsman". To begin with, "batsman" is perfectly adequate. The change does not add anything to meaning. A clever lawyer might argue that a change was needed to make the term gender-neutral, particularly with the growing popularity of women's cricket. That would not be the truth, but it is an argument. If change is essential then you cannot usurp a word that already means something else.

"Batter" is an existing term. It can be a verb, meaning "to hit repeatedly with hard blows", derived from the French batre. Or it could be a noun, "a mixture of flour, egg, and milk or water, used for making pancakes or coating food before frying". The Pocket Oxford English Dictionary does not recognise, as yet, a third meaning for "batter", but it is possibly only a matter of time.

If it were elegant, there might be some aesthetic justification for murder. But all that is happening is that English is being battered to death. Can't the Americans be content with taking over the world? Must they take over the English so completely? Or is it a case of mere subservience? Americans do not play cricket, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future, so why should they care one way or another?

I had planned to end this column with a handsome flourish, a grand solution to the problem of finding someone to play in place of Ravindra Jadeja. Judging by the manner in which most Indian batsmen were getting battered by the rising ball, the coach, Gary Kirsten, could have summoned someone from the Indian women's team to bat for the men.

Alas, the women's team also lost in the semi-finals. But at least its captain did not apologise.