The distant gleam of greatness - by Aakar Patel

Sunday, December 21, 2008 (The News)

Nehru is the touchstone leader for the secular Indian. Gandhi was religious, bringing him closer to the common man, and he looked wrong. The secular Indian may be devout through the observance of ritual but is put off, as Nehru was, with Gandhi's religiosity, and anti-modern appearance.

Both Gandhi and Nehru were British-educated, setting them apart from Ambedkar, who went to Columbia University, and returned with an American's clarity. Nehru was agnostic -- though recently there was published a photograph of him in old age entering the Ganga wearing a janoi, the Brahmin's thread -- and anglicised. He despised the RSS, the other touchstone for the secular Indian.

Indians know him through caricature: the Chacha Nehru of Children's Day, the man betrayed by China and, since 1991, the man clueless about the economy. Australia's ambassador Walter Crocker observed him for six years and wrote about him in a book as no Indian would -- and perhaps could.

India's newspaper editors dismissed the account, called A Contemporary's Estimate, as sensationalist, because they were unable to grasp leaders as real men. The book has just been reprinted. The man who emerges from Crocker's first-rate portrait is complete, and attractive, though flawed.

Crocker says Nehru was spectacular with the public, unequalled even by Gandhi, even though when Crocker first encountered Nehru in 1945 in Bengal, he was in a crowd pushing and slapping people away. Unlike most Indians, Nehru had an interest in nature and was able to identify plants. He kept animals at home including pandas, but his house in Delhi itself was not private.

An office ran day and night on the ground floor in shifts. He came out at 8.30 am and anyone could walk up to him at that time. Scores of people would live on the footpath opposite his gate, cooking and cleaning and sleeping there. Though they irritated Nehru, the police were forbidden from driving them away.

He was quick to temper, as a society woman chatting during a concert recital learnt. What Nehru would have thought of mobile phones going off in the audience would not be hard to imagine. He understood music and liked the violinist Yehudi Menhuin.

He made many speeches, too many, often three in a day, and was careless with his time. Foreign delegations, even those of students, would secure appointments while bureaucrats and ministers would wait for days. He was a poor administrator in a nation that has always needed firm administration. He was moralistic when it came to Europe and constantly lectured it on what it had done wrong.

Intellectually, Crocker rates Nehru very highly, and compares him not unfavourably to Rajagopalachari -- "the sharpest mind in Indian public life" -- though Nehru did not have the originality of Gandhi. Crocker says he once took a scientist, a Nobel laureate, to Nehru, who picked out a careless remark, and, politely, demolished it.

Nehru's personality was attractive; what about his policy? His great failure was his military defeat to China in 1962, and China marked the end of the period of Nehru's reverence in India. But he was attacked in print and in parliament only at the end of his career, from mid-1959 to his death in 1964.

Nehru hid India's border dispute with China till September 1959. Once he revealed it, the hysteria in India gave him little space to compromise. His subsequent Forward Policy brought war. Even today, Indians who wish to see a map of how their country looks in physical control, must consult maps made outside India, because the real map distresses us.

Despite his failures, Nehru's personality and his secularism have aged well, even if we think the wheels have come off his policies. One reason is his ability to create state institutions of unsurpassable quality. Nehru's legacy is secure because of these institutions.

Under him India created the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Space Research Organisation, the Indian Institutes of Management, which are at the vanguard of India Shining. In the arts, he set up the National School of Drama, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Sahitya Akademi, the Film and Television Institute. He commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to produce a report that led to the National Institute of Design.

All five IITs set up before 1994 were set up under Nehru; none under Indira or Rajiv. Manmohan Singh, who is Nehruvian in his orientation, has added six more. Institutions came up in the Nehru era that have not come up since in the public sector. They remain unmatched by any other poor nation; and not a few rich ones.

We like leaders from the past so that we can deify them. Their angularities do not show from the distance. Up close we are put off by their weaknesses. Manmohan Singh, the leader who has most improved our lives, we think of as weak, because he depends on Sonia Gandhi, and ineffective, because he does not mirror our rage against Pakistan.

But he has actually been our most effective leader.

Vajpayee was moderate, but unhinged on some issues including his childlike passion for acquiring an atomic bomb. He is seen as a statesman on the basis of his oratory, which in the subcontinental fashion is high on emotion. And he is seen as a man of refinement because of his poetry, which is actually banal. Our inspection of leaders who are around us is poor and based on their raw appeal.

Thackeray, whose appeal really comes from his oratory, is seen as strong because he can say fierce things. But he has not a single successful policy to his name, other than the renaming of things that other people built.

His Shiv Sena does not govern even its home state of Maharashtra let alone India, but reading Thackeray's published utterances you would think him a man of influence.

Mayawati, who governs 200 million people in Uttar Pradesh, puts us off because we find her ugly, and because of her caste we find her uncultured. Her appeal to her community and her considerable political craft is dismissed.

Crocker notes that Nehru insisted that Muslims be allowed to retain all their customs, including polygamy, which he did not like (Nehru had polygamy banned for Hindus). All his life, Nehru was interested in Muslim welfare.

His tentative speculation, published in the Modern Review, on the Ahmedi question, called for the subsuming of sectarian identity in favour of something larger. It invited attack from the great Iqbal, who delivered himself of a harangue against the Ahmedis. It says something of Nehru's standing among Muslims that Iqbal found it necessary to respond theologically, dismissing Ibn Arabi ('psychologically unsound') along the way.

Like Gandhi's, Nehru's image with Muslims has worn well, and rightly.

Jinnah's image as a Muslim leader, rather than the constitutionalist he was, has also worn well. After Advani visited Pakistan and praised Jinnah, India's Urdu newspapers went into rapture.

Close examination of Jinnah would put Indian Muslims and Pakistanis off. Jinnah's faith, Ismaili Shia, put him at the heretical end of the Allah Hafiz Muslim's scale. Because of this Liaqat had Jinnah buried with a Deobandi (Shabbir Usmani) leading his funeral prayer.

Jinnah did not care, as his championing of Zafrulla Khan shows, and perhaps did not even know, about the strength of the Indian Muslim's feeling toward the Ahmedi. Jinnah was secular and offered constitutionalism to his followers, who actually wanted identity. Jinnah was a Gujarati South Bombay Muslim, a breed that is unique and whose contours are instantly recognisable to residents of this city. His tastes were refined and elegant and did not reflect the Indian Muslim's love of the shiny and loud.

But Jinnah also disappoints the intellectual.

He wrote no book, or anything else of significance. At 40, his favourite book was Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, and his daughter Dina says he was greatly influenced by HC Armstrong's second-rate biography of Ataturk.

Leaders look better to us from afar because we do not study them or look on them dispassionately. It is easier for us to buy the myth and deify the leader, or dismiss him in full.

Muslims hate George W Bush because of the war on terror. But Bush showed great faith in Muslims. His cabinet believed Americans would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. Why did they believe this? They assumed Iraqis would anticipate the democracy project unfolding, as indeed it has. A suppressed Shia majority has been empowered through democracy in Iraq. Bush showed great optimism on Islam.

He refused to buy the formula that Muslims could not be democratic, and gambled on them. He showed the westerner's character in laughing off the shoes thrown at him, while Muslims rejoiced in the thought that they had avenged the humiliation of invasion. But Iraq's Shia leadership has accepted Bush's wisdom.

We hate him now but how will he be seen from the distance? We do not yet know. In that sense, Bush's legacy will actually be written by Arabs.



The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@gmail.com
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Shoe attack by a TV reporter on Bush mars farewell Iraq visit. "This is a farewell kiss, you dog."

On Sunday, 14 December 2008, President Bush ducked a pair of shoes hurled at his head in the middle of a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The assailant, Muntazer al-Zaidi, a television correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt, also shouted: "This is a farewell kiss, you dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."



Shoe attack on Bush mars farewell Iraq visit

15 hours ago

BAGHDAD (AFP) — A journalist hurled two shoes at President George W. Bush on his farewell visit to Iraq on Sunday, highlighting hostility still felt toward the outgoing US leader who acknowledged that the war is still not won.

Muntazer al-Zaidi jumped up as Bush held a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, shouted "It is the farewell kiss, you dog" and threw his footwear.

The president lowered his head and the first shoe hit the American and Iraqi flags behind the two leaders. The second was off target.

Zaidi, a reporter with the Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo, was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.

Soles of shoes are considered the ultimate insult in Arab culture. After Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, many onlookers beat the statue's face with their soles.

Bush laughed off the incident, saying: "It doesn't bother me. If you want the facts, it was a size 10 shoe that he threw".

He later played down the incident. "I don't know what the guy's cause is... I didn't feel the least bit threatened by it."

Bush, on his fourth and final official trip to Iraq since he ordered the March 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam, admitted: "There is still more work to be done."

As he and Maliki signed a security pact setting out new guidelines for US troops in Iraq, the president said: "The war is not over, but with the conclusion of these agreements... it is decisively on its way to being won."

Earlier, Bush ventured out in a motorcade through Baghdad streets, the first time he has gone somewhere other than a military base or the heavily protected Green Zone.

Pool reports said the unmarked motorcade passed through darkened streets that appeared heavily guarded, before arriving at Maliki's residence.

Bush hands over the delicate task of overseeing the US withdrawal from Iraq in five weeks to Barack Obama, who has pledged to turn the page on the deeply unpopular war.

"I'm so grateful that I've had a chance to come back to Iraq before my presidency ends," he said at a meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

In the evening, the president flew by helicopter from the Green Zone to Camp Victory near Bahgdad airport, where he greeted hundreds of US troops under a huge US flag and a gigantic crystal chandelier in the Al Faw palace, formerly used by Saddam.

Bush has staunchly defended the invasion that triggered years of deadly insurgency and sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 4,200 American troops.

.....

Read this report and watch the video on BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7782422.stm

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Iraq TV demands release of Bush shoe attacker

32 minutes ago

BAGHDAD (AFP) — An Iraqi television station on Monday demanded the immediate release of one of its journalists who caused a furore when he hurled shoes at visiting US President George W. Bush.

Muntazer al-Zaidi jumped up as Bush was holding a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday, shouted "It is the farewell kiss, you dog" and threw two shoes at the US leader.

Bush ducked and the first shoe hit the American and Iraqi flags behind the two leaders, while the second was off target.

Zaidi, a reporter with the Al-Baghdadia channel which broadcasts from Cairo, was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.

"Al-Baghdadia television demands that the Iraqi authorities immediately release their stringer Muntadhar al-Zaidi, in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the American authorities promised the Iraqi people," it said in a statement.

In Cairo, Muzhir al-Khafaji, programming director for the television channel, described Zaidi as a "proud Arab and an open-minded man."

"We fear for his safety," he added.
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Once upon a time, there was a benevolent leader namely George W. Bush who was very lenient on ISI's role in sponsoring terrorism...

Amir Ahmed Khan notes that Pakistani politicians, army and intelligence agencies need to adopt a concerted, robust strategy on the war on terrorism. Also, they need to develop confidence building measures with the regional and international players namely USA, China and NATO.

Read the three reasons because of which the USA officials are currently upset with the Pakistan Government, particularly its intelligence agencies.

For example: “American Officials told AZ that whenever they informed Pakistan army about the high level target , the target would escape”.

Amir Ahmed Khan reports that the American officials have warned Pakistan that if it did not address the three major concerns, then the day may not be too far, when Pakistan (its Government, people, media, and politicians) might say that:

Once upon a time, there was a benevolent American leader namely George W. Bush who was very lenient on ISI's role in sponsoring terrorism...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/urdu/pakistan/story/2008/10/081022_parliament_resolution_aak.shtml
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