Congress Suffers in North-East

Editorial published in the Economic and Political Weekly

The Congress is the clear loser in the three states that went to the polls.

The elections in the north-eastern states of Tripura,Meghalaya and Nagaland have thrown up few surprises. In Tripura, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front (LF) has retained power with an increased majority. With no single party gaining an absolute majority in Meghalaya and Nagaland, the two states have produced hung assemblies. Mixed the outcome appears to be, but there were presumptive winners and losers in the elections. The Congress Party must be considered the biggest loser though it did emerge as the single largest party in Meghalaya.



The comfortable victory (49 out of 60 seats) of the LF (minus the Forward Bloc this time) led by chief minister Manik Sarkar was achieved in an election that saw a record turnout (92 percent) and the Congress-Indigenous National Party of Tripura (INPT) alliance winning only 11 seats. The victory of the LF could be attributed to the superior mobilising abilities of the ruling coalition, which pitched socio-economic development and its handling of militancy in the state as the major election issues. The INPT, led by former insurgent Bijoy Hrangkhawl, was able to win only one seat, signalling a disaffection with the former militants among the tribal populace of the state, even as many Congress leaders bit the dust at the hustings. Questions were raised about the possibility of an upset, because of the withdrawal of the Forward Bloc – which is a constituent partner of the front in the panchayats and in the autonomous council – from the LF for this election. The party, however, lost heavily in all of the 12 constituencies where its candidates contested on their own.

Secessionist forces in Tripura have been dealt with firmly by the LF government, which has also addressed issues faced by the tribal populace by devoting resources to people’s welfare in coordination with the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council. This resulted in an increased seat share in tribal areas for the left parties (19 out of 20 constituencies reserved for the scheduled tribes). Tripura under left rule for the past 15 years has shown progress in indicators such as literacy, in improving livelihoods, especially in rural areas, and in extending education and health facilities. The high degree of political participation among all sections and the LF’s high vote share are testimony to the positive reception for the alliance among the voters.

In Meghalaya, however, a familiar drama is taking place. As has been the disturbing norm in recent cases of a hung assembly, the governor, using the logic of inviting the single largest party, controversially called upon D D Lapang of the Congress to form the government despite the party winning only 25 of the 59 seats to which results were announced. The day before, 30 legislators were paraded under the leadership of former Lok Sabha speaker P A Sangma in front of the governor; the legislators were part of a post-poll alliance, the Meghalaya Progressive Alliance (MPA) with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) taking the lead in its formation.

Meghalaya has had a history of unstable coalitions and governments (18 in the last 35 years) and this decision by the governor not to honour the existing arithmetic is only bound to recreate the familiar tactics of buying support to prove a majority on the floor of the assembly. Having said that, opportunism has characterised the various parties in opposition to the Congress. Other than the NCP, which won only 14 seats and the BJP one seat, the other regional parties in the MPA were all part of the Congress-led coalition before quitting on the eve of the polls. The NCP, which led a furious campaign against the Congress, could not manage to win outside its traditionally strong areas in the Garo Hills. There are 25 newly elected members in the assembly, a sign of dissatisfaction with the performance of the sitting legislators in the state.

In Nagaland, a pre-poll coalition, the Democratic Alliance of Nagaland (DAN), consisting of the Naga Peoples’ Front (NPF) with 26 seats, the BJP with two seats and the NCP with two seats, along with four independents, was able to win a majority of the 59 seats in the assembly and has formed the new government. The Congress won 23 seats and accepted defeat in the insurgency-affected state. The erstwhile DAN government was removed from power and president’s rule was imposed in January this year following a bout of defections and squabbling. This was made a campaign issue by the NPF and its allies.

The question of statehood (greater Nagaland or “Nagalim”) still predominates in Nagaland and as a dominant issue, this election was no exception. The Congress Party in the state had promised in its manifesto to press for “Greater Nagaland”, quoting certain unimplemented clauses in the 16 point agreement between Jawaharlal Nehru and the Naga People’s Convention in 1960. The response of the major insurgent outfits in the state was negative to this poll promise by the Congress, while the NPF, which promised a continuation of its “equi-closeness” policy with the insurgent outfits engaged in internecine fighting, was able to reap support by indicating to go beyond the 1960 agreement in evolving a political solution. The new DAN government has now appointed a political affairs committee to talk to the underground insurgent outfits to resolve the long-standing statehood problem. There is no guarantee, however, of a stable government because most of the parties in Nagaland have used tribal loyalties and the politics of pork and pelf to come to power.

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Indian media -- beyond bias

Article written for The Post

More than a week ago, the Indian finance minister released a much talked about annual budget. The budget included a loan waiver of about Rs 65,000 crore for farmers in the country, reeling from a tremendous agrarian crisis. The waiver was made the talking point in the predominantly corporate-owned print and mass media in the country, most of whom were critical of the ‘dole’, calling it a gimmick meant for the upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for next year.



As such, after the details of the waiver scheme were released, it was established by agrarian experts and rural India watchers to be some form of a breather for the much traumatised farmers in the country. Agrarian India is in the throes of a severe crisis that has forced thousands of farmers across the country to commit suicide owing to a variety of reasons. Agriculture as a profession has virtually become non-viable because of high input costs and a quirky globalised market. Farmers, running out of clear cut financial options, have depended upon credit from unscrupulous money lenders and the debt trap has only made their situation worse. The worst sufferers of the agrarian crisis, farmers who have committed suicide, have an amazing geographical spread: from Punjab in the north to Chattisgarh in central India to Vidharbha in the west to Kerala and Andhra Pradesh in the south of the country. This full-fledged crisis situation has dragged on for nearly a decade now in the country.

Yet the response to the one-time measure of a credit waiver from public sector banks for farmers has been treated with scorn by the media, be it ‘pink paper’ business press or broadsheets or the ubiquitous mass media news channels. No such angst or derision was witnessed when similar waivers were given to large private-owned corporations and debt written off as ‘non-performing assets’. Estimates of such written off bad loans are in the range of staggering number of lakhs and crores, but not even a crocodile tear came out from the press on the burden over financial institutions of the state, which had to bear the waiver loss in these cases. The obvious question one would raise is: if fiscal health is indeed the concern, why is there a selective angst among the so-called ‘fourth estate of Indian democracy’, the media? The answer is very simple, the Indian media as much as any other elsewhere, suffers from class biases. The only trouble is that the coverage of events in the Indian media goes beyond class biases and suffers from an acute form of status quoism, elitism and pro-establishment opinionating. The fact that the agrarian crisis has virtually been given a short shrift with neither the farmer suicides nor the agrarian distress being given any sort of priority coverage is galling.

Ever since substantial economic liberalisation in the country, the media has taken a sharp turn toward uninhibited commercialisation and sensationalism (with honourable exceptions of course). The English press in particular has devised a formulaic way of conducting ‘news business’ making the traditional role of acting as the guardian of the fourth estate of democracy to be a secondary one. The coming to town of the energetic and privately-owned TV news channels has exacerbated this trend. These channels thrive on a business model that is advertiser-driven and hence, relies on a competition that tries as much as possible to pander to the lowest common denominator of tastes to enhance viewership. Coverage of issues that do not quite resonate well with the upper middle classes in the country, who never had this better a life in all the years after Indian independence, is virtually nil. Thus what dominates television and print media (except for some honourable exceptions) is news that is ‘sellable’ and that which has a ‘commercial value’, is sensationalist and opinion that is clearly anti-labour, anti-poor and pro-nouveau/established rich. On every issue, where there has been a direct clash between forces of non-elite (blue collar labour, rural peasantry, unorganised labour, marginalised sections) and the elite (corporate big businessmen, foreign investors, ‘celebrities’), the media has taken the side of the elite.

That the arena of contestation where the poor have hit back (electoral democracy) sits uncomfortably with the elite, for whom ‘politics’ is nothing about merit or ‘class stature’ means that the media rubbishes politics and brands the entire ‘political class’ under the same brush. Of course, there are exceptions – those politicians who sit well with policy-making that favours the elite are given place of pride in coverage and given titles of ‘messiahs’ and ‘visionaries’. One only has to witness the adulation that the current finance minister, P. Chidambaram (a compulsive votary for neo-liberal reforms in the country) enjoys among the media along with other pro-big business and pro-elite politicians, to see this in action.

So cloistered is the media in India today in a territory that is very much cut off from the reality that governs the majority of the third world nation’s population, that it gets its political prognostications serially wrong. In 2004, when Indian voters brought down a right-wing government, which announced that India was ‘shining’ (even as the agrarian crisis was in full flow and the march of inequality was on), the media were gung ho about the existing establishment retaining power. Its coverage of politics is not highlighted by an anti-establishment role, but by a derision for ‘politics’ itself. Witness, for example, the coverage (or the lack of it) of the parliament.

The parliament is only in the news during disruptions and bedlam. Question hours, discussions, policy positions are either given the short shrift or are ignored in toto.

The derision for politics is accentuated especially when it comes to the coverage of the policy positions of the left space in the political spectrum in the country. Instead of analysing and critiquing positions taken by the Left, the tendency is not just to dismiss and disregard, but to subject leftist politicians to unfiltered abuse. A sample of this was available extensively during the Indo-US nuclear deal coverage. From calling the leftists traitors to the national cause, to insinuate extraterritorial loyalties and to excoriate any reasonable opinion that divorced from making a common cause with the Americans on every issue, the media clearly went overboard in maintaining its coloured credentials.

Even the credit waiver issue was given a new spin: the government had embarked upon this waiver as a populist move in lieu of snap polls. For the elitist media sections, the nuclear deal must be signed despite the leftists’ opposition (and even if there was a majority consensus against the deal in parliament), even if it meant that the government would fall in doing so. And the reasoning: some senators from the US had warned of an expedient timetable that had to be adhered to, in the ‘national interest’. As yet, the government is still strained to answer some of the legitimate concerns over the deal that has been signed with full cognisance of its positioning within a strategic partnership with the US. But this was not a problem for the custodians of the media as it sat well with the perceptions of the elite on the necessity of the nuclear deal.

Such a pro-elite shift in the media can only be explained by the fact that the larger part of the media is owned by corporate bodies, in partnership with foreign-based news channels themselves under corporate thrall. The ownership cuts across different segments in the media space from print to mass media and opinionating suffers from the fact that the proprietorship gets precedence over independent editorial control. In the print media for example, because of the predominance of commercialism over objectivity and analysis, the proprietor determines editorial and news content, with the editor (once an all powerful entity in the press) playing a subservient role. As for the TV news channels, the considerations of instantaneous gratification of the viewer requires that opinionating and news reporting are tuned to dubious rating principles that give precedence for quantity over quality. The only way of getting back the normative nature of the fourth estate in the country would be to regulate the content in the media, primarily through self-regulation and by setting a code of conduct. The preponderance of commercial and corporate interests in the media must be curtailed through stringent norms on cross-ownership and foreign control over the media. Freedom of the press must not mean a negative liberty, which misinterprets freedoms that were established in the form of a social contract between the people of the country and the ruling classes and that were instituted in the constitution.

Sainath on the media

Sainath excoriates the media.....

The Story of Stuff

Eye opener!!.. Thanks, Aniket.

Cricket, Excesses and Market Mania

Article published as a commentary in the Economic and Political Weekly

The Indian Premier League (IPL), a corporate driven tournament featuring a set of city teams playing Twenty20 cricket has made news with a multimillion dollar player auction. Players from various cricket playing nations were “bought” and “sold” through bids made by the corporate owned teams (the franchisees). Cricket in India has become the only sport that has captured widespread mass and media attention. The popularity of the sport has increased in leaps and bounds and the way the sport has been managed and administered has reflected the dominant mode of economic transactions in the country.



From being a sport that was a hangover from the colonial era and restricted to teams divided on communal basis (the Pentangular, for example, during the early 1940s) to becoming a symbol of nationalism and now to becoming a full- fledged commercial enterprise, cricket has traversed a path very much followed by the nation in its socio-economic course. If playing for the nation’s pride was what drove professional cricket after independence, it is playing for commercial gain that is the driving story today, much in consonance with the sharp changes in the nature of nation-building that exists in India today.

An Afterthought

Sport was always viewed as an afterthought activity for leisure by the post-independent Indian state and it never fitted in with youth development and community building. The neglect of sport because of this lack of priority has meant that India as a nation has performed poorly in international competitions and, other than a few individual and team successes, the story is one of despair. Even in sports where Indians held a traditional advantage such as hockey, the lack of adequate institutional support and planning has meant that the sport has gradually withered away.

Cricket, however, underwent a different trajectory. Run by an autonomous board (the Board of Control of Cricket in India or BCCI), which has created a structure of age group, state, and domestic tournament based cricket and manages the national cricket team, cricket has effectively become a popular sport that has touched several urban and semi-urban bases in the country. At the same time, the powerful board has followed an opaque model of functioning even as it has earned money by the fistful owing to the growing popularity of the sport, particularly after the victory in the 1983 World Cup and the growth in popularity of one-day cricket.
The growth of the market economy since 1991 given the BCCI manifold opportunities in the “system”. So, just as corporate bodies in India control pretty much the nature of growth and the pulse of nation-building, cricket has passed into their hands too. In the past, Indian cricket was used as a tool to buttress nationalism; and the Indian cricket team (managed by the BCCI) was meant to represent the Indian nation in international competition. The players in the national team were therefore performing a national duty. However, over time, commercial and corporate interests could no longer be kept out of the way cricket was run.

Ergo, the IPL, an assortment of eight city-teams (franchises) playing Twenty20 cricket. This new league is a form of commodity market, where the commodities are players, the owners are the corporates, and the value of the commodity is determined by a set of rules that play itself out on a maidan with cricketing instruments and more so on the television screen in the form of commercials.

Commodity Market

The establishment of this commodity market was kicked off by an auction system that instituted market value for the players through a valuation process. This valuation process considered not just the skill levels of the players but also their brand building capabilities. So it is that Ishant Sharma, a tyro who has promised a great future through some inspiring performances in Australia for the Indian team was valued at $ 9,50,000 as compared to the established Umar Gul valued at just $ 1,50,000 although he took the most wickets playing for Pakistan in the World Twenty20 tournament. Sharma’s value as a representative for brand building the franchise, owing to his Indian nationality, trumped over the real value of Umar Gul.

Obviously the corporates were looking ahead at great returns for their investment. India had just won the Twenty20 World Cup some months ago and this form of the game had captured the imagination of the masses. Added to the buzz of Twenty20 was the glitz from yet another set of obsessions of the Indian public: the entertainment industry (Mumbai film personalities) plus the new consumerism of the middle classes. Now this potent mix was bound to churn out golden eggs from the cricket goose and the Indian cricket board only had to release its employees to partake in the process. The BCCI had the advantage of running the game in the second largest populace in the world and it was only natural that it could influence other boards in releasing its own players for the jamboree that the IPL was. Ergo, the league got an international flavour adding more golden eggs and more value.

This bonanza for cricketers in a formal sense is a huge progressive step. Earlier, players were stuck in an atmosphere where the board decided their allowances and pay – even after substantial raises in recent years – which were commensurate with the semi-egalitarian economic environment of the past. So, a cricketer despite his performance and the attention that he received was paid a pittance and the only recompense he had was that he was playing for “national pride” that sat well with the politico-economic story after independence.

Qualitative Difference

Commercialisation of sport is a reality that has existed all across the world. But there is a qualitative difference between the forms of commercial sport that exist in mature capitalist and developed countries and what is taking shape in India in the form of the IPL. In the US, for example, major leagues have been established for four main sports – baseball, basketball, American football and ice hockey (a league exists for soccer too). These sports are played seasonally as a well integrated market that cohabits with a regulated structure.

Participation is guaranteed for interested sections through feeder units in colleges and schools and infrastructure is established through community ownership and city planning administrations. In other words, a fully fledged sport environment with corporate ownership and state and community support exists, transacting action in the various leagues.

In Japan, professional baseball leagues involve corporate owned city-based teams too. Sports persons are fed to these leagues from the school and college levels (the extremely popular Koshien school baseball tournament for example) and athlete development programmes are coalesced with youth development activity driven by the state. In Spain, club football acts as an avenue for passionate local nationalism (Spain is a composite country with different autonomous regions) to be channelised into sporting competition. The local governments play an important role in youth and skill development initiatives. The clubs and cities have also diversified into other sports such as basketball and tennis (polideportivos) thus opening avenues for sports persons who are not footballers alone. Market driven competition has not diluted the essence of the sport either. In nations where the state predominates in planning and administration of sports, such as in Cuba and China, emphasis on youth development and participation in amateur sports is given very high priority.

In India, the growth of cricket at the expense of other sports derives from the lack of a participatory sporting culture. Sport, traditionally viewed as leisure activity has been shunned by governing institutions and there has been virtually no focus on youth development and infrastructure building from village to city levels. The reduced emphasis on youth and skill development for sport in general ensures that the process of bringing up talent remains anarchic and only cricket with its relatively more mature feeder systems of age group tournaments, clubs and state boards remains the dominant form of sport activity.

Cricket’s thriving, in contrast, has been limited to urban and semi-urban areas and has been driven purely by popularity. The rural masses hardly have any hope of getting through to such tournaments without state intervention in grooming talent in these areas.

Anarchic Nature

The anarchic nature of market-driven sport also ensures that only a small coterie of readily recognisable talent gets attention. Those slogging it out in domestic cricket with skill levels say suited more for the more rigorous 5-day Test cricket would pale in comparison to the players getting to play in the IPL Twenty20s. The IPL is bound to skew and distort cricket as it is today a jamboree that is not so much balanced in its recognition of skills as much as it values brands. The IPL itself was a response to the Indian Cricket League (ICL). The ICL was started by the Essel group to operate outside the purview of the BCCI, and weaned away domestic players disenchanted with playing conditions and lured by the money offered by the corporate owners of the league.

Seen from a larger perspective on sports management and administration in the country, the IPL becomes a distorted money-spinning exercise devoid of substantial participative value. Thus a cricketer like Ishant Sharma would earn $ 9,50,000 over three years for merely bowling four overs each in about 16 games in each year and for endorsing a brand while other sports persons such as hockey players suffer from lack of compensation and training facilities. Reliance on corporate bodies alone to promote sports would only help bring in so much benefits of commercialisation-inflated value for the commodified participant and exclusive pandering to the voyeuristic desires of the consumerised spectator.

The corporates themselves realise that they are unlikely to earn any money in the initial years; returns, if any, will come later. Why then were some of the biggest names in the business? There could be many reasons. The professed ones are related to brand building. The more accurate explanations are of two kinds. One is plain vainty – as expressed in the money poured out by the likes of Vijay Mallya, Mukesh Ambani and the filmstar Shahrukh Khan. They can indulge in this vanity because business has never been so good in India. The second reason is that it is a sign of excess all around that this finds its expression in many areas – excess in the lifestyles of the rich, excess in consumerism, excess in business endeavours and excess in “bidding” for team licences and players. History tells us that the period of excess is followed by a period of collapse. The only unknown is how long it would take.

After Fidel who?

Nice joke by Good Ol' Letterman:

Chomsky on US Foreign Policy in Latin America

ZNet Videos on Chomsky's views on US Foreign Policy in Latin America :

Part I

Part II

Developers of the world -Unite!

A spectre is haunting the proprietary software industry: Free-Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Karl Marx would have been elated at the success of FLOSS today as a subversive and alternative to the global behemoths of proprietary software. As little as ants would be but equally hardworking and persevering, as diverse as workers may get to be, the FLOSS community across the world has rewritten the rules of intellectual contribution and technological growth. They have broken the shackles that tie them in respective nationalities and units and have created a new chain formed from intellectual and autonomous solidarity. They have created a business model so powerful and so transcendent that this has forced even proprietary software to adopt it in its own way.



Any primer on the software industry in the world today would tell you that the industry was dominated by corporate units. For example, in the most important operating system and word processing/office applications business, Microsoft Technologies has had a huge monopoly. This has been buttressed by a variation of ‘license raj’ that allows code written by Microsoft to be available in the form of high ‘APIs’ or keys that are available for licensees to buy. In essence, users are denied access to proprietary software’s code base and all one gets to have is the ability to ‘consume’ the product without having the ability (or only having a limited and constrained one as defined in the copyright license) to alter the product to their choice.

Free and open software on the other hand makes a qualitative leap by allowing the consumer to build upon/alter and improve the product. The success of operating systems such as GNU/Linux, internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and office applications such as OpenOfficeare and other FLOSS applications has meant that the user not only has enough choice on the product to consume, but that he/she has the power now to become a product developer since the source code is available. The availability of the source code comes with a license too, albeit of a philosophically and instrumentally different kind: a ‘copyleft’ license. This license does not come with a negative freedom aspect of preventing users to do something outside the license, but actually comes with a positive freedom that enforces users to keep the software ‘open’.

There are some basic differences between the ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’ streams. The former harps upon the philosophical notion of liberty in using and modifying software, while the latter talks about the fundamental leap in performance because of the advanced community-oriented business model that ‘open source’ provides.

Despite such distinctions, however, very few software products exist that are exclusively ‘open’ and not free or vice versa. The success of the free and open source movement was seen particularly in the collaborated effort that went into designing an OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard for word processing and electronic office document applications. This standard was arrived after nearly three years of toiling by the developing community across the world, which included individuals and other big companies specialising in enterprise applications such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Now the ODF standard is widely accepted as an Office standard and has been adopted by Open Office, Google Documents and other applications. The presence of a unifying standard made the job of users using various applications easier. These multiple applications could communicate to each other sparing a headache for the users to have to face the problem of incompatibility of various application file formats even though they performed one single documentation/word processing function. Evidently this affected the monopoly strength of office applications offered by the biggest software company in the world, Microsoft Applications.

The logical thing to do would be to adopt the ODF standard for Microsoft Office products keeping the philosophy of universalisation intact. Yet, Microsoft chose to introduce its own open source standard OpenOffice Extensible Markup Language (OOXML). The logic that Microsoft provided was that the presence of many standards helped foster the free market as has been the case in other areas such as Picture Readers. The adoption of OOXML as a universal and full international standard, however, hit a roadblock as a majority of countries affiliated to the worldwide standards body, International Organisation for Standardisation decided to reject it in September 2007. OOXML still had a lifeline thrown in the form of a ballot resolution process that gave the countries another chance to review their decision based on Microsoft’s responses to their complaints made in September 2007. The most important complaints were the fact that the standards document was unwieldy and cumbersome and also fact that OOXML was not truly ‘open’ and was written in a manner to continue the monopoly status of Microsoft in the market. The ballot resolution process is to come out with a verdict next month holding in the balance the acceptance of OOXML as an international standard.

In the meantime, in another blow to proprietary software, Microsoft was fined a huge amount of $ 1.3 billion for having violated anti-trust laws by a European Union (EU) court. Such setbacks have had an unintended effect: Microsoft recently affirmed to make available several sections of source code interoperable with open source, signalling a change in philosophy to a gradual acceptance of the open source policy. Open source advocates and others have, however, reacted with cautious optimism but seen in the light of things, it is clear that the subversive called the open source movement has had a tremendous effect on the way the industry is run.

Not long ago, advocates of the proprietary software model were calling the open source movement as ‘communist’ and ‘market-unfriendly’. But the relative cost-free nature, liberating outlook and transparency offered has made open source hugely popular. In India, for example, FLOSS advocates have been successful in getting a state government announcing statewide education and use on FLOSS. FLOSS makes immense sense for resource constrained governance bodies in India as well as help creating myriad developer communities in a participative model.

The challenge remains for FLOSS evangelicals to take forward the process of educating the populace in the country to be familiar with basic programming and application usage skills. This requires the state to play an active role to facilitate this process.

Monopoly and proprietary software have an advantage in influencing state and governmental institutions because of their large market base and ready capital. Unscrupulous ways of influencing state governments have persisted in India, for example, where executives of proprietary software cajole government heads to promote their brands in lieu of some form of charity given. FLOSS activists must overcome this huge challenge in order to get their philosophy accepted and model implemented for the good of people who are still on the barren side of the digital divide.

Verdict against Autocracy

Editorial written for Economic and Political Weekly

Voters in Pakistan have rejected the forces of autocracy, but will Washington and the military acquiesce?

Real News Network Videos featuring commentaries on the Pakistan election:

The Pakistani electorate has given a decisive verdict against the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam) – PML(Q) – the party which supported president Pervez Musharraf and his duplicitous rule. Although the overall mandate for the national assembly is fractured with no party winning an absolute majority, the emergence of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) as the single largest party and the marginalisation of Musharraf’s supporters is the telling story of the elections.

It was widely expected that with a sympathy wave after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the PPP would win a large number of seats, perhaps close to a majority. But, boosted by a strong showing in Punjab province, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) – PML(N) – led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was able to notch up 66 seats, not much behind the 88 won by the PPP. The manner in which the PML(Q) lost, with several of its prominent leaders, such as former prime minister Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain, biting the dust revealed the resentment against Musharraf’s rule. Another aspect of the verdict was the comprehensive rejection of extremist religious forces with secular parties such as the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) and the Awami National Party (ANP) winning a substantial number of seats.

The elections were held against the backdrop of militant violence and voting had been postponed after the assassination of Bhutto. A positive aspect was the non-interference from the military following a professional order by the chief of army staff, Ashfaq Kayani. By delivering a verdict against both pro-Musharraf forces as well as the radical religious right, the Pakistani people have taken forward the surge of democratic activity and activism that began with the movement for the reinstatement of chief justice Iftikhar Choudhury. Musharraf was “re-elected” to the post of president by the legislature in October 2007 by invoking an amendment to the Constitution. This election was later validated by a pliant judiciary after the incumbent chief justice and other judges were removed during a declared emergency.

Hanging in the balance now is the president’s future, as Nawaz Sharif has called for his impeachment and also for the reinstatement of the ousted members of the judiciary. The PPP led by Bhutto’s husband, Asif Zardari has remained non-committal but the overall electoral verdict necessitates an understanding between the PPP and the PML(N), which means that these issues will have to be discussed by the two parties. A two-thirds majority is required to impeach Musharraf, to realise which the PPP-PML(N) combine would have to seek support from other smaller parties.

At the end of the week talks were under way between these parties and the ANP, and from all indications it is now a matter of not if but when Musharraf will be eased out of power. In the past, democratic rule in Pakistan has seen the tenures of Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto marred by corruption and politics of clientalism and patronage. The resultant instability had given the powerful military an excuse to intervene in politics. Ever since Musharraf’s coup in 1998, constitutional rules have been re-written or bent to prolong his presidency, helped particularly by the writ of the military in Pakistan. A big question is if the current position of the military under Kayani to stay out of politics will continue. Entrenched as the military is in all areas of Pakistani economy and society, outsiders can only hope democracy and civilian rule will be strong enough to keep out the men in uniform.

Another important imponderable is the role that will be played by the west, particularly the United States, which has always meddled in the internal affairs of Pakistan. The US had considered Musharraf an ally and had hoped to continue its relationship with a troika of Musharraf, Kayani and the next prime minister in order to prosecute the so-called war on terror with Pakistan’s help. With the high weightage provided in the mandate to anti-Musharraf forces, such an arrangement now seems difficult to sustain.

Apart from extremism in regions such as Waziristan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and violence in the main cities, Pakistan is also faced with economic troubles with high prices of essential items and shortages of important commodities. The previous government had built growth on privatisation, overseas remittances and US aid. Both the PPP and PML(N) are expected to adopt centrist policies but the question is if the post-election alliance will be able to address the pressing economic issues of the day and prevent instability. The next government’s ability to honour the mandate will ultimately depend upon whether the democratic environment created in the elections can remain free from yet another spell of military interference and US influence.

As skewed as the system

Article written for The Post

In these columns a few weeks ago, we had tracked the story of cricket from a political-economy perspective. It was established that cricket traversed a path that reflected the dominant political economy of the environs where it flourished. So, if the game was a hang over from the colonial past, treated as leisure activity for the wealthier sections in its initial days of establishment in erstwhile British colonies, it later on adapted to political economy of these various countries becoming a national sport in some, particularly in the subcontinent. This article builds upon that story to evaluate the latest hot topic on the cricket front: the institution of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

India, over the years since 1991 has established a thorough going liberalisation and privatisation process which has put paid to state planning. The impetus on nation building through creating an equitable society and to mainstream marginalised sections has given way to letting the market get the preponderance over questions of economy while the state plays the role of a facilitator to the process. In other words, nation building remains the overhanging project but the builders have changed the story to one of growth rather than equity. Now, this process over the years has gone on in leaps and bounds anarchically without fetters as opposed to the gradual establishment of a liberal democratic free market environment and a nation state in other developed countries.

The sudden leap to a laissez faire in matters of economy has created new opportunities and at the same time plentiful distortions and it is only bound to happen that sport with its malleability could affirm to the new system in the same terms as set by the system. So, indeed just as corporate bodies in India control pretty much the nature of growth and the pulse of nation-building, cricket has passed in to their hands too. The Indian Premier League, an assortment of eight city-teams (franchises) playing Twenty-20 cricket is a form of commodity market, where the commodities are players, owners are the corporates, and the value of the commodity is determined by a set of rules that play itself out on a maidan with tools called bats, balls and stumps, and on the television screen in the form of commercials.

The establishment of this commodity market was kicked off by an auction system that instituted market value for the players through a valuation process. This valuation process considered not just the skill levels of the players (their use value) but also their brand building capabilities (say their exchange value). So it meant that Ishant Sharma, a tyro who has promised a great future through some inspiring performances in Australia for the Indian team was valued at $950,000 as compared to the established Umar Gul (valued at $150,000), who took the most wickets for Pakistan in the World Twenty-20 tournament. Sharma's exchange value as a representative for brand building for the franchise, owing to his Indian nationality trumped over the real value of Umar Gul.

Obviously the corporates were looking ahead at great returns for their investment. India had just won the Twenty-20 World Cup some months ago and this form of the game had captured the imagination of the masses. Added to the buzz was the glitz from yet another weakness of the Indian public: the entertainment industry (Mumbai film stars) plus the new consumerism of the middle classes. Now this potent mix was bound to churn out golden eggs from the cricket goose and the Indian cricket board only had to release it's employees to partake in the process. The Indian board had the advantage of running the game in the second largest populace in the world and it was only natural that it could influence other boards in releasing its own players for the jamboree that the IPL was. Ergo, the league got an international flavour adding more golden eggs and more value.

This bonanza for cricketers in a formal sense is a huge progressive step. Earlier, players were stuck in an atmosphere where the board decided their allowances and pay which were commensurate with the semi-egalitarian economic environment of the past. So, a cricketer despite his performance and the attention that he got, was paid a pittance and the only recompense he had was that he was playing for “national pride” that sat well with the overhanging politico-economic story after independence. But it is also necessary to take a perspective that is not merely nominal but substantive.

It is indeed true that commercialisation of sport is a reality that cannot be done away with. Be it the Major Leagues in the US or the football leagues in Europe or the professional leagues in Japan, sport has increasingly become corporate driven in these advanced capitalist nations. But the question remains if this form of sport activity cuts away from the larger logic of nation building at all and if it is purely market driven activity? Lets compare the case of IPL in India with what's happening in other sports.

In the US, for example, major leagues have been established for four main sports- baseball,basketball, American football and ice hockey (a league exists for soccer too). These sports are played seasonally as a well integrated market that cohabits a state supported structure. Participation is guaranteed for interested sections through feeder units in colleges and schools and infrastructure is established through city planning administrations. In other words, a full fledged sport environment with corporate ownership and state support exists that transacts action in the various leagues.

In Japan, professional baseball leagues involve corporate owned city-based teams too. Sports persons are fed to these leagues from the school and college levels (the Koshien school baseball tournament is perhaps the most important amateur sporting event in the country) and athlete development programmes are coalesced with youth development activity driven by the state. In other words, yet another example of co-ordination between the state and the market. In Europe too, the case is similar. In Spain, for example, club football acts as an avenue for passionate local nationalism (Spain is a composite country with different autonomous regions) to be channelised into sporting competition. So Barcelona vs Real Madrid is a way of pitting Catalonian and Castillian nationalisms against each other. Both the local governments play an important role in youth and skill development initiatives. The clubs and cities have also diversified into other sports such as basketball and tennis thus opening avenues for sports persons who are not footballers alone. Market driven competition has not diluted the essence of the sport either. Football remains a 90 minute game without any tinkering done to bring in instant gratification just because the market runs the sport and demands it.

In contrast to this well oiled structures that exist in the developed world, Indian cricket predominates because of its market value and state ignorance of other sports. Virtually no emphasis on youth and skill development ensures that the process of bringing up talent remains anarchic and only cricket with it's established feeder systems of age group tournaments, clubs and state boards remains the dominant form of sport activity. Even here, the game restricts itself to urban environs as the rural masses hardly have any hope of getting through to such tournaments without state intervention in grooming talent in these areas.

The anarchic nature of market driven sport also ensures that only a small coterie of readily recognisable talent gets attention and therefore the moolah. Those slogging it out in domestic cricket with skill levels say suited more for the more rigorous test cricket would pale in comparison to the slammer banger batsman in the IPL Twenty-20s. The IPL is bound to skew and distort cricket as it is today into a jamboree that is not so much balanced in it's recognition of skills and use values as much as it effects brands and exchange values. It is symptomatic of the system that Ishant Sharma will be paid $950,000 for bowling 4 overs a game in about 10 games and for showing his gleaming teeth for a brand while persevering hockey players play at shoddy stadiums and get pittances for their effort. It is the same system that generates a handful of multibillionaires and thousands of farmer suicides in a decade.

Hasta La Victoria Siempre, Campanero Fidel

Article written by Comrade Aniket Alam for The Post

This line, which was supposedly spoken by Ernesto Che Guevara before his departure for Africa to fight with the anti-colonial revolutionaries there, is a fitting slogan to bid adieu to one of the greatest revolutionaries and Marxists of our times. This line would roughly translate as "Until [we achieve] victory forever! Comrade Fidel". Yesterday, Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, announced his decision to step down from the top post bringing to an end an entire era which he straddled like a colossus.

Clichés often belittle a person's contribution but it would not be incorrect to state that Fidel Castro is among those few world historical individuals whose contribution to human history will resonate long after the writer and the readers of these words have turned to dust.

Even when it happened, the Cuban revolution was a near impossibility. Situated just 90 miles from the mightiest superpower of the world – the United States of America – very few people expected Cuba's socialist experiment to survive under the hostile gaze of its dominant northern neighbour. Over the years, in a manner strangely reminiscent of the treatment meted out to its eastern neighbour – Haiti, Cuba has been sought to be economically strangled by one of the most stringent economic and political embargoes by the USA. Not only that, the US Government has tried to destabilise the Cuban Government every which way including sponsoring "invasions" by disgruntled Cuban expatriates living in Florida. The CIA's attempts to kill Fidel have taken on legendary proportions with 638 assassination attempts (you read that right!) having being documented over the past five decades.

One of the reasons Cuba managed to survive the economic blockade and the hostile attacks was the support given to it by the erstwhile Socialist State system led by the USSR. Close to 90 per cent of Cuba's foreign trade was with the Socialist states and almost all its fuel supplies came from there. But, ironically, even though the mighty superpower that was the USSR collapsed under the weight of its own mistakes and shortcomings, Cuba – which seemed to be dependent on the USSR for its survival – survived the collapse of the Socialist State system and continues to be the sole example of a mature socialist system of our times. This column had previously discussed the manner in which Cuba had managed to survive the collapse of the Socialist States in the last century ("The Anti-Growth Manifesto", 31 October 2007). There is one more, significantly more important, reason for Cuba's ability to not only survive economic blockade and political terror from the USA but to survive as a thriving socialist system.

Previously, this column spoke about how Cuban doctors have spread out all over the world, including in Pakistan after the 2005 earthquake, providing relief and medical aid to poor people free of cost. The fact that these Cuban doctors, considered among the most capable of their profession in the world, have not "sought asylum" in America or European countries and become rich doctors, but continued to work in poor countries indicates that simple idealism is a reality in Cuban society. For someone living in a country where every second teenager "dreams" of migrating to the developed West, it is surely surprising that an overwhelming majority of Cubans do not leave their country even when they have a choice. But Cuban idealism does not end here.

Last year, Cuban doctors working in field clinics in rural Bolivia performed a free operation on a retired soldier of the Bolivian army who had lost his eyesight to cataract. A simple event, but for the fact that this soldier was the one who had shot Ernesto Che Guevara dead in 1967! Where does such generosity of spirit come from?

One of the founding principles of the Cuban communist party has been sacrifice. Cuban communist party members are expected to sacrifice and set an example to other citizens. Unfortunately, this word has been such a favourite of spin-doctors that it is normal for the readers' eye to glaze over with cynicism at seeing it here. In Cuba this translates into real practical steps. In all matters of benefits, communist party members are last in the queue while in matters of contributing labour and life, communist party members are first in the list. So if there are a certain number of heart surgeries which can be performed in a particular month in a given district, communist party members will be last in the queue for that and non-party members will be operated upon first. Similarly when food was rationed in the 1990s, communist party members would get food only after the non-members have gotten their share.

Not only this, Communist party members in Cuba are held to a higher level of personal morality and probity. I remember reading about a gang of four drug smugglers who were caught in the mid-1990s and found guilty of the charge. Three of them, who were not communist party members, were sentenced to life-imprisonment, while the one who was a communist party member was sentenced to death. This principle has led to a natural barrier to all sorts of opportunists and careerists joining the communist party for their benefit, as happened in all other socialist states.

But the Cuban Communist Party did not confine this simple, yet pathbreaking, principle to their party but worked to broadcast it widely in Cuban society in general.

In the early 1960s, when Cuba was grappling with the challenge of increasing its industrial and agricultural productivity it was counselled by its Soviet advisors that one way of getting people to work harder and produce more was by providing material incentives. So, for example, the best workers would be given salary bonuses or the best farmers given better shares of their produce. Che Guevara, with the support of the Cuban communist party, opposed this method, arguing that to promise material rewards for good work was to sow the seeds of a anti-communist ideology inside society and its individuals. It would encourage people to look at their self-interest and foster competition between workers and farmers, rather than encouraging people to foreground the common good and fostering collaboration and cooperation.

In a somewhat bitter argument, Che and the Cuban party stood their ground over Soviet and East German advice. Che argued that good workers should be honoured publically rather than given material goods for working well. If people start working well in anticipation of material goods then it would lay the material foundation for the entry of bourgeois ideas of self-interest driven individualism. He argued that this would be the mortal enemy of socialist reconstruction of society. The demise of the Socialist State system of the twentieth century into a cesspool of renegade capitalism and the continued existence of Cuba as a standard bearer of Socialism probably is the greatest living proof of the correctness of this principle.

Today, when Fidel Castro – the leader of the Cuban revolution and Che's close associate – retires from the leadership of Cuba, it is a good occasion to salute these principles of the Cuban revolution which show the way ahead for socialists all over the world. The flame which was lit by the slave army of Haiti in 1804 has been kept alive by their compañeros in Cuba. Emancipation of the human being remains a practical possibility, a living reality.

First among “differentials”

Article written for The Post

First among “differentials”

The presidential primaries in the United States' two major parties, the Republican and the Democratic parties have reached a decisive phase. While senator John McCain has become the presumptive nominee from the Republican side, senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are fighting a close battle to clinch the Democratic nomination; Obama seemingly having his nose in front in the photo-finish race so far.

A few weeks ago, we did a profile of all the candidates on foreign policy, from the eye of a third world watcher and found that none of the candidates from both parties had a vision that could be accepted with glee by the majority of the developing world. Yet this lack of substantive choice based on foreign policy does not mean that the candidates are figures cut from an one-dimensional block. There exists serial differences in approach and vision between not just the parties but also among the candidates in the Democratic party that should interest a political observer enough to make prognostications about what kind of administration would be in offer if these candidates are nominated.

Hillary Clinton, if elected would be the first woman president of the United States. While that is a great and long due prospect, it is another first that worries the observer: the pioneering “first gentleman” in office: Bill Clinton. The Bill Clinton administration during the 1990s was definitely a more appetising government compared to the disastrous George W Bush administration. It presided over a economic boom and left a fiscal surplus but did not offer a substantive difference from the earlier Republican administrations in foreign policy or even on the question of removing poverty through welfare measures in the capitalist American system. This is seen as a legacy of the “third-way” movement led in the Democratic party by a section belonging to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The DLC promotes a mixture of right-wing corporate friendly policies and welfare concepts while retaining hawkish positions on foreign policy.

The Bill Clinton administration, akin to the Labour Party under Tony Blair was the hallmark of the “third way” movement, which pushed the Democratic Party to the centre-right in the political spectrum. Bill Clinton is expected to play a guiding role in a future Clinton administration under Hillary. Hillary Clinton has not disavowed the positions of the DLC or the Clinton administration and does not correspond to the more populist slogans in the party's progressive sections of rejecting corporate lobbying and special interests. At the same time, Hillary Clinton has taken bold measures on domestic economic policies such as a mandated health insurance programme to help get nearly 50 million uninsured Americans insured. On foreign policy, however, the unilaterist streak in the DLC's thinking is reflected in Hillary Clinton's positions on Iraq and Iran (whatever she might say about her withdrawal plans from Iraq). Despite centrism and non-radicalism being the governing principle of the Clinton politics and campaign, there exists a vast area of confrontation between the right wing Republicans and the Clintons owing to the partisan politics in the '90s involving the Clintons' personal life which was attacked with vigour by the Republican opposition.

This reliance on centrist and entrenched interests is exactly that has drawn attack from Barack Obama. Obama, a relatively new political entrant (he has merely two years on his resume as a senator) plays to the large American gallery which is distrustful of the special interest based Washington politics. He promises change, hinting at overturning the cynical and lobbying based politics that has characterised the American federal centre. However, in contrast to John Edwards (the withdrawn Democratic candidate), who stood on a platform of confrontation against special interests and the right wing forces (read Republicans), Obama has a different perspective on how to enact change. He rejects the reductionist approach of straitjacketing politics within the “left-right” divide and wants to engage in drawing in on commonalities while holding on to liberal, progressive values. This, he believes can be achieved through raising the pitch of value based politics through inspiration and non-partisanship. He refrains in confronting even his worst political enemies trying to draw positives out of his rivals and trying to build bridges while enacting progressive policies. Critics and observers would point out that such a formal approach will hardly bring about substantive change as this understanding goes against the ordained system of class differences that characterises society. But Obama's answer is that his reliance on his diverse personal background and on refreshing consistency in policy positions would inspire more participants in the democratic process and bring about “change”. A grain of truth exists in this argument, as the record breaking high turnouts in the primaries have pointed out, as also the support to Obama from Republicans who call themselves, “Obamacans”.

From a virtual underdog, Obama has risen to be a stronger candidate, overcoming Hillary Clinton's established machine in many of the states that have completed their primaries. The contest is still on, even as Clinton has attacked the deliberate “poetic” nature of Obama's appeal of “change” as opposed to her substantive policy positioning based on “experience”. Obama's vision of a non-mandated health insurance programme is criticised as a compromise by the Clinton campaign. More or less though, the battle among the Democrats is one of image and aura and not ideological.

John McCain, on the other hand is an intriguing candidate, who has brought in scorn from the far-right sections of the conservative Republican Party. It is a reflection of the great right-ward shift in American politics that John McCain, who holds a conservative record on foreign policy (bullish is the right term), pro-business record in economics and who is a decorated war veteran is termed not to be conservative enough by his own partymen. Part of this suspicion is the fact that McCain holds on to old conservative values of American patriotism (imperialism for the developing world) that is still based on agreed international norms. In contrast, the neo-conservative Bush administration has used folly and deception to go to war and has recidivist views on torture and internationalism. McCain rejected the nonsensical tax-cuts to the super-rich (one reason for the super-fiscal deficit of the non-performing American government). This has drawn the ire of the influential far-right Republicans who see McCain's moves on a bipartisan approach to illegal immigration and his disavowal of torture as signs of him being “liberal”, a bad word in the conservative lexicon.

Conversely, the dismal failure of far-right conservatism which has resulted in misery for great numbers of Americans who are disillusioned with the state of health care, housing and fiscal misery, not to mention the disastrous invasion of Iraq, has meant the demise of any viable far-right candidate in the primaries. John McCain, despite his “maverick” credentials, therefore becomes the Republican nominee by attracting independent and moderate voters. It remains to be seen how McCain could defeat Obama or Clinton without the entrenched far-right support. It also explains the courting of the far-right by McCain in the recent past (he has now promised to make the tax-cuts for the rich permanent) and has avowed the continuation of a bullish foreign policy in west Asia to defeat “jihadism”, even if means bombing Iran and continuing to stay put in Iraq. For the far-right in the US, any regime in west Asia opposed to American imperialism is jihadist (note the repeated pronouncement of the largely secular Ba'ath regime in Iraq as being close to Al Qaeda). McCain re-affirms this nonsensical understanding of west Asian nations.

For an observer, the American primary process is a reflection of the dominant political discourses in the nation. The American media, though, channelises this discourse through the formal route of image and aura, which destroys the larger substantive idea of representation of all political streams. It is a great weakness of the American system that vox populi lacks adequate representation in ideas, but only in images.

Sporting Parallels

An Article I wrote about 4 years ago when in Infosys, Hyderabad

A Feature by V.R.Srinivasan

The advent of ESPN-Star into the Indian television arena has not only wrought in a lot of excitement among sport lovers but has opened up frontiers to view an eclectic mix of the best sporting action occurring across the planet. Today, the "buffet" served for the sport viewers have veritably increased with a lot more players in the sports telecast arena". We have been able to relish and appreciate the best of sports, and this article will focus on the several similarities between different sportspersons across different sports and cricket specifically.

Sachin Tendulkar and Ichiro Suzuki:

When Yours Truly was in Japan for nearly two years, he was struck by the ebullience of an iconic sportsman named Ichiro Suzuki, who plays for Seattle Mariners in Major League Baseball. Ichiro is as much a superstar in Japan as is Sachin Tendulkar in India. However what was striking was his very close resemblance in style, substance and character to Sachin.

The six-lettered Ichiro is a five-star person in Japan, not merely because he is referred to by the first name, which is very uncommon, but also because of the dint of his performances when he consistently averaged the highest among all batters while playing for Orix Blue Wave in the non-descript Pacific League in the NPB (Japanese Professional Baseball). He moved over to the superior Major League in 2001 and didn't miss a beat averaging 0.350 in his first season as a Mariner leadoff hitter. He still plays as the most consistent hitter for the Mariners constantly in tune to win the batting title in the American League. Now that’s uncannily similar to what’s been done by Sachin throughout his batting career.

What’s very common to him and Tendulkar is the way both handle themselves on the field and away from it. His picture-perfect batting technique mirrors that of Sachin in many respects. His all-round hitting ability across different areas in the park parallels Sachin's 360-degree dominance of the wagon wheel during batting. Ichiro has a fierce arm from right field constantly threatening runners on bases, similar to Sachin's ability to give the ball a rip from the boundary line while fielding deep. And the most common attribute to these superstars is how they handle their private lives: free of controversy, fully dignified and absolutely mature. They have another common feature; they give really bland and boring interviews, reserving their insight to while playing the game rather than talk about it. Both are hence laconic but special sportsmen who deserve every bit of the adulation they receive.

Zinedine Zidane and VVS Laxman:

Anyone who has seen Zidane play would affirm to the magical abilities and the gazelle-like play that are so part and parcel of "Zizou"'s game. Zidane is a genius who mixes elegance with innate talent in the right proportions while delivering consistently for both country France and club Real Madrid, who are both the top teams in the football world owing a lot to this maestro. The telling feature of Zidane's play is how he seems to be from a different planet with his shimmies, flicks, dribbles and cuts amidst a crowd of defenders, making his counterparts and colleagues on the same field look like mere mortals. This feature is what brings into focus, India's panache-batsman VVS Laxman. When Laxman is on song, the sound of the ball hitting the meat of his bat sounds mellifluous, the flow of his blade is as smooth as the note that emanates from a Beethoven symphony, the ball is caressed across the field as if no friction exists on the ground and the timing of the shot is as perfect as the jump from one note to another in an Ilayaraja song. Both these sportsmen aren't exactly muscularly endowed, nor are they versions of Adonis, it's the way they play that draws the choicest eulogies and hosannas from the sport watching public.

Laxman has a long way to parallel Zidane's standing as the best footballer on the planet, in cricket. Yet for sheer elegance and wizardry with the bat, his name pops up immediately when similar players in different sport are thought about in the same "style" league as Zidane.

Brian Lara & Kobe Bryant:

Before venturing into the similarities, it’s the dissimilarities that have to be pondered about between these two players. Brian Lara plays in a Lone-Star team whose winning/losing is dependent on his performance more often than not. Kobe Bryant plays in a team which is consisted of four future Hall of Famers, the strongman Shaquille O'Neal at Center, "The Glove" Gary Payton at Point Guard and the second highest scorer in the NBA ever, "The Mailman" Karl Malone at Power Forward. With such a robust and strong squad, the pressure is not solely on Kobe's shoulders to take his team to glory.

However, both these players have an uncanny knack of playing the best with their backs to the wall. Kobe, who has been mired in an alleged sexual harassment trial all season long, has endured a sore shoulder, played all season with hardly any pre-season training and has still performed when he was least expected to. His 36-point outburst against Houston in the fourth and decisive playoff game came right after a court attendance in Colorado. The two outrageous three pointers at the brink of the buzzer against Portland in a late-season game were testimony to his crunch-shooting prowess. Game after game, he has re-affirmed that he is among the best who "perform-when-it-matters-the-most". This is precisely what Brian Lara is renowned for. His knocks of 153* (which included a fervent partnership with Courtney Walsh for the 10th wicket), 213 against Australia in 1999,the "bring-the-smile-back" 400* were all innings that showed tremendous grit in times of utmost peril. When the game is on the line, Brian Lara and Kobe Bryant's numbers are invariably dialed and most surely their teams are obliged with a saving/winning performance.

Muttiah Muralitharan & Sohail Abbas:

Sport is full of surprises. Sport is full of the inconceivable. Happenings in Sport are mostly unpredictable. There are a few very "Sure-Fires" in sport, very few "take-it-to-the-bank" stories. Muttiah Muralitharan, the controversial but extremely effective and most deadly spinner from Sri Lanka is a sure-fire performer though. With lots of 5-fers and lots of 10-fers in test cricket in his pocket, there seems to be no one as consistent as this wily off spinner in world cricket. We can always expect at least one 5-wicket haul in a test match from him and invariably our faith and Sri Lanka will be rewarded.

Such consistency has a parallel in Sohail Abbas in Field Hockey. The Drag-flick specialist is a constant threat to the opposition when a penalty corner cometh. His success rate in the penalty corner zone is the highest in international hockey and Pakistan have won a slew of matches due only to the sheer brilliance of Abbas. He has a variety of flicks in his armory and he constantly befuddles the opposition in penalty corner positions with a great sense of direction and a wondrous ability to punch in the requisite power in the shot. A nonpareil target hitter, Sohail Abbas along with Muttiah Muralitharan make up paragons of consistency.

Thanks to the dedicated sports channels, one gets to study the nuances that are common to different sportspersons playing different fiddles and under the ambit of different rules. Three cheers for the globalization of sport!

Article originally written for an amateur site: cricketfundas.com

Candidates as Salespersons

Editorial published in the Economic and Political Weekly

Candidates as Salespersons

Image and aura predominate over policy options in voter choice of candidates.

Candidates in the two major American political parties, the Democratic and the Republican parties, continue to fight for the respective parties' presidential candidate nomination for the elections in November this year. Expectations that the primaries in a number of states on February 4 would yield a defining result have not been proven correct.

About 30 states have concluded their primaries and caucuses. Among the Republicans, senator John McCain has emerged as the front-runner, while on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to engage in a close tussle. Trends have indicated that there has been a huge surge in the number of voters who have identified themselves as Democrats, clearly affirming to the unpopularity of the current Republican regime headed by president George Bush. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise a break from the right wing policies of the current government, in the economic arena as well as on the foreign policy front. If the Democratic candidate wins, the US would have either a woman or an African American president for the first time.

As voters have identified the continuing occupation of Iraq and a sagging economy as primary concerns, these have dominated the speeches and political positions of the candidates. On the Democratic side, both the candidates have promised to withdraw troops from Iraq, but only gradually and in a phased manner. They also insist that they will be “pro-active” in areas such as Afghanistan and take appropriate diplomatic measures against Iran to counteract its supposed nuclearisation. Both candidates do not rule out military action against Al Qaeda in Pakistan if there is sufficient information on the presence of Osama Bin Laden or against Iran either, but Barack Obama, who spoke against the invasion of Iraq in 2002 as an Illinois state senator, promises to engage in talks with the heads of Iran, Syria and other regimes supposedly “hostile” to the US.

Hillary Clinton, who voted as a senator for both the invasion of Iraq as well as the consideration of a military action against Iran, while harping on international diplomacy, retains hawkish positions on policies in west Asia, and supports the continuation of the economic embargo against Cuba. The Republican candidates want a continuation of the Bush policy of unilateralism and pre-emption and show no remorse for the erroneous war. John McCain is even more hawkish on Iraq as he had supported a “troops surge” and has ruled out any timetables for their withdrawal from Iraqi soil.

The Democratic party candidates more or less affirm to centrist policies on economy. The crucial difference between Clinton's and Obama's positions lies in the issue of health care. Nearly 50 million American residents lack health insurance and this is a pressing issue in the elections. While Clinton argues for a mandated insurance coverage that could eventually lead to a form of universal care, Obama rules out a mandated programme (except for children).

For the Republican party candidates, social issues (abortion, gay rights) and illegal immigration are the primary issues of contention. John McCain, a former Vietnam war prisoner-of-war and veteran, is seen to be a moderate as compared to the arch-conservative Bush and leads the race over fiscal conservative Mitt Romney, social conservative and former Baptist preacher, Michael Huckabee, and libertarian, anti-war long-shot candidate Ron Paul. Except for Paul, all of them share a hawkish foreign policy, oriented toward a militarist position against “jihadist” forces in west Asia. McCain's wins in the primaries have come through support from moderate sections of the Republican party and independent voters, a fact that has made arch-conservatives in the party jittery about his possible nomination.

The format of the primaries, ensures that more than the issues, it is the image and aura of the candidates that determine their vote getting ability. Omnipresent media networks emphasise body language, image and personality as talking points in the campaign. Barack Obama, for example, has campaigned on the slogan of “change” from the years of right-wing rule under the Republicans and the “third way” policies of Bill Clinton, in contrast to Hillary Clinton's harping on her “experience” as a two-term senator and as the wife of a former president. Candidates such as John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich, who offered substantially different policy positions closer to the progressive and populist ethos of the party, have had to withdraw from the race. They did not enjoy the same media coverage and public presence owing to fewer campaign funds in comparison to the frontrunners, who have raised and spent millions of dollars on advertisements and campaigning.

There is virtually no media coverage of primaries of other smaller parties such as the Green Party or of independents who have comprehensive differences with the policies of the centre-right space straddled by the two big parties in the US. One could argue that the nature of primary elections in the US, owing to the undue emphasis on campaign resources and candidate image, is devoid of substantive differentiation in the political spectrum as compared to other democracies in Europe or even India.

Full Blown Conflict -IV

Final part of the Series on Sri Lanka from The Post

Civil wars, especially those arising cantankerously from ethnic divides, create impasses from which the process of extricating peace is the most difficult. The Sri Lankan problem involving the ethnic Sinhalese and minority Tamils is not a one-off case without precedent or parallel in the world. Kurds spread across Turkey and Iraq have fought for an independent Kurdistan; Basques in Spain speaking Euskadi have demanded a separate Basque state carved out of Spain and France; the Portuguese speaking East Timorese achieved independence after a protracted and bloody phase in a fight for independence; and the intra-tribal rivalries that has engulfed Africa are legion.

The formation of a nation is to be determined not merely on the basis of simple identity demarcation, but through the lens of imagination of the constituent masses. In other words, the question to be asked is whether the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Sinhalese have a common imagination of their histories and shared interests within a geographical limit. The presence of substantial intermingling among these communities despite linguistic differences and shared common interests in the form of common professions mean that there indeed is a shared history for the ethnic Sinhalese and the ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka. It is definitely true that there are regions where ethnicities predominate in their numbers; as in the East and the North that are dominated by the Tamils and the inner parts of the island as well as the south that are constituted mainly of the Sinhalese. But there is also a wide scattering of other minorities as well as the intermingling of either community.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) claims a separate nation out of the north and the east on the basis of the incompatibility of the Tamils in a Sri Lankan nation dominated by the Sinhalese. LTTE chief Prabhakaran makes this evocative statement to his followers often that a homeland for the Tamils, which co-exists with a Sinhala state, is due. Central to the argument is that the LTTE imagines a Tamil nation distinct culturally and ethnically from that of the existing Sri Lankan state. The behaviour of the LTTE in negotiations over the past few years has tended to emphasise that they are the sole representatives of not just the Tamil community, but a de facto Tamil state, dealing with the Sri Lankan government. Tamil nationalism for the LTTE is no longer about ‘sharing the Sri Lankan state pie’, but carving a new pie for the community. The LTTE envisages the Eelam to be the homeland of Sri Lankan Tamils in the island and demarcates the geography to cover the north and the east parts of the country. These areas are also home to Muslims who are uncomfortable with the narrow Tamil nationalism and who have been at the receiving end of governance in areas controlled by the LTTE.

Therefore, as such there exists three forms of nationalism in the conflict: Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim. The substantial Muslim population in the east and the north have been lukewarm to the separatist struggle of the Tamils and this lack of enthusiasm has even gone on to take the form of hostility, particularly towards the LTTE. Essentially, the LTTE project of a separate territorial nation-state for the Tamils is hindered by this emphasis on a narrow linguistic nationalism that does not accord the space to minorities such as the Muslims. More or less, this nationalism suffers from the same majoritarian impulses that created enough grievances for the Tamil community to estrange itself substantially from the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan political system.

Added to this is the question of how would the Tamil plantation workers (migrants from India in the 20th century) fit within the scheme of Eelam. These workers, based in interior and mainland Sri Lanka, have won political and economic rights after years of trade union struggle represented by the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) whose deceased leader S. Thondaman is regarded as one of the strongest working class leaders in the country. This section of the Tamils has participated in the political processes of the Sri Lankan state and has not acceded to the principle of separatism for all Sri Lankan Tamils. Again this means that the narrow Tamil nationalism project envisaged by the likes of the LTTE for an Eelam would not include the Tamils of recent Indian origin, thereby complicating the claims for statehood for all Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Again, it is essentially clear that basing the idea of a new Tamil nation merely on ‘ethnic nationalism’ obscures the real problem in Sri Lanka: the absence of a legitimate civic nationalism that accords a sharing principle to all minorities and is not tied to the interests of the majority. Added to this problem is the fact that there exists a federal state for the Tamils in India in the north. Despite initial demands for an independent ‘Dravida-nadu’ in the early 1950s, the integration of Tamils within India under the principle of linguistic reorganisation of units (states) in a federal union is complete. The Tamilian identity is sufficiently subsumed and integrated within a civic Indian identity. The Tamilians have been successful in instituting their native tongue as one of the nationally official languages and the federal system of governance has ensured that Tamils have equal rights as much as any other linguistic group within the nation. The Indian government is very chary, therefore, about the prospect of an independent Eelam carved out of Sri Lanka based on linguistic ethnic nationalism.

In essence, this author repudiates the fact that the Tamils in Sri Lanka are better off with their own nation-state. The very basis of this nation-state is the same rationale that drove the ethnic conflict in the first place: chauvinist nationalism that was and is still being espoused by many sections of the Sinhala majority. It is, therefore, imperative that the political centre in Sri Lanka makes all efforts to ensure federal rights for the minority Tamils and provide them with large doses of autonomy in several aspects of governance to assure a “shared political future” (as analyst Jayadeva Uyangoda points out). In other words, the plurality of the Sri Lankan state must not only be token, but be real, vibrant and inclusive.

The trouble is to incorporate this rationale in the current political miasma that Sri Lanka is in. As seen in the preceding sections, both the sides in the conflict have now taken intractable positions and hardened military stances ruling out the possibility of reasoned opinion pointing toward a solution to the conflict on the lines argued above. The civil war that has re-erupted with increased hostilities (bombings by the government, guerrilla attacks by the LTTE) has dashed all hopes for a protracted political solution. The government is being naïve in assuming that the LTTE can be destroyed militarily and then peace can be established followed by a political settlement, without considering the psychological impact on the Tamils of the military process. With the absence of a realisation of an inclusive nationalism that does not peter down to a ‘unitary’ state among the Sinhala polity, it is impossible to create an environment for a lasting settlement, even if the LTTE is demolished completely.

The LTTE on the other hand holds on quixotically to a one-point agenda of complete secession, trying to rely upon eventual international sympathy to their project. The political praxis adopted by the LTTE (suicide bombings, terror attacks, political assassinations) is not going to allot it any legitimacy in an increasingly terror-weary international political order. This organisation must give up its irrational emphasis on a one-point agenda and return to talks and ceasefire and agree to a political settlement by involving other sections of the Tamil polity as well. The LTTE can use the internal differences among the Sinhala polity to argue for a civic, shared and integrated nationhood as a first priority and it could take a leaf from the book of the political methods used of late in Nepal by the ex-insurgent Maoists.

To the extent of pushing the Lankan government to stop the military attacks and assure a federal settlement, convincing the Tamil representatives to eschew rebel violence, the international community, especially India can play a pressure group/facilitating role. For the sake of humanity in Sri Lanka and in South Asia, one hopes that such a culmination takes place sooner rather than later.

(Concluded)