US Rush To Afghan Peace, For Trump’s Reelection Or For Real?

US Rush To Afghan Peace, For Trump’s Reelection Or For Real?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

When the US signed the peace agreement with Afghan Taliban on February 29 in Doha, mutual recriminations were obviously brushed under the carpet but some of these must be remembered for historical record.

Taliban were defeated in December, 2001 by a coalition led by NATO and helped by Russia, Iran, India, the Northern Alliance of which the “Lion of Panjshir”, Ahmad Shah Masoud was the architect and leader while he lived.

Masoud carried his fierce opposition to Taliban and Al Qaeda to international forums. These included a fateful address to the European Parliament in Brussels in the spring of 2001. His forces, much the most effective in Afghanistan, had picked up chatter on a possible Osama bin Laden (Al Qaeda) – Taliban action on the US mainland. On September 9, two Arabs, with passports forged in Brussels, approached Masoud disguised as journalists in his hideout bordering Tajikistan and detonated their vests. That was the end of an Afghan hero who had begun to be compared with Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and others in that league. This was on September 9 as I have said earlier. On September 11, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. Did someone want Masoud out of the way because he knew too much?

So keen was Zalmay Khalilzad, US special envoy for the peace talks, to sign a document that on current showing he would have accommodated any formulations, even swear words, in the pre US election agreement. Read the text of the agreement and you will be amused. The heading to the document reads:

“Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America.”

If the US does not recognize the Emirate, the insertion of this self-definition of the Taliban could mean that the phraseology is not to be taken seriously or is valid only upto the US elections after which, well, who cares. Also, if suitable caveats were not there, the position of President Ashraf Ghani would look comical. As it is, he is looking in the region like the leader with the thickest skin. Having been tied at one ankle with rival Abdullah Abdullah, Ghani cannot even hobble without Abdullah’s concurrence or a US nod. To top it all, the Taliban are scaring him with nightmares of an Islamic Emirate in which even a self-imposed, posh exile (like Hamid Karzai) will become impossible.

All of this will tickle Robin Raphel to distraction. As under Secretary of State for South Asia, Raphel was among the authors of the original understanding with the Taliban in the mid-90s. The US, with Raphel in the lead, had spotted the Taliban as the most muscular force in Afghanistan. The game was simple. Taliban would control Afghanistan; the US would control Taliban. TAPI, the Turkmenistan, Afghan, Pakistan, India gas pipeline, because of which Afghanistan was stoked in the first place, would then become feasible. Everyone would toss up their hats and whistle. Then, as now, South Block was four square behind the US project. A slight problem then was that National Security Adviser, J.N. Dixit and his coterie had declared Raphel persona non grata because she had mentioned Kashmir as a “disputed territory” a statement attributed by South Block to her friendship with Benazir Bhutto.

As a journalist, lucky to be at the right place, I was witness to Raphel’s Afghanistan project coming to naught. Ambassador Frank Wisner had invited some of us to meet friends he was escorting to a holiday in Bhutan. Among his guests was Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the UN and a fixture in the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Just as the conversation picked up, Holbrooke received a call from Washington. He walked to the far end to take the call and returned waving his hands. “The Taliban project is over.” Apparently, Christiane Amanpour of the CNN had shaken up Washington with a series of prime time features on the excruciatingly harsh application of Shariah law on women.

Raphel lived to rue the telecast. “A strategic move had fallen victim to US gender politics”, she told this reporter. Well, she should now reach out and shake hands with Trump, Mike Pompeo, Khalilzad for the hospitality they are according to a project not dissimilar to the one she had launched in the 90s. The idea was to treat Taliban as the most powerful group in Afghanistan.

Will the Peace Agreement be followed up by a withdrawal of US troops? Between conception and execution a shadow does sometimes fall. After all, President Barack Obama had set his heart on withdrawing US troops by July, 2011. One would take the will for the deed in Afghanistan had Obama not jumped into the Syrian quagmire, the very next month, in August 2011. I was in Damascus when US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Stephen Ford, along with his French counterpart spoke to protesters in Hama, Homs, Darra, in small groups. Obama administration was providing communications facilities named “Liberation technology movement”. Bashar al Assad had to be replaced by someone more pliable.

Withdrawal from Afghanistan meanwhile remained a still born project. General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, cited the popularity of India’s socio-economic development work as an obstacle to peace, because it distracts Pakistan from its war-on terror focus. The US establishment in Afghanistan were unable to bank on Pakistan’s total co-operation for peace in the nation. Rawalpindi GHQ’s fears of what India might be upto was a constant distraction. Yes, Indian consulates in Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad and Kandahar were cited as “spy nests” from where India helped stoke rebellion in Baluchistan. Even McChrystal’s successor, Gen. David Petraeus complained of India’s “cold start” doctrine. In other words, Pakistan’s centrality to Afghan peace was the anchor to US policy. Are there reasons to believe that strategic appraisal has changed in Washington with regard to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan? Something is not adding up.

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Journalists In War Zone Produced Daily From Basement For Years

Journalists In War Zone Produced Daily From Basement For Years

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

What does one make of it, this singular absence of even a column-inch worth of interest in this land of Vasudev Kutumbakam, when Nazism in its raw, naked form comes riding on the back of the Croatian Catholic Church to organize celebratory mass for Croatia’s Nazi collaborators during WW-II. This, when the world is celebrating the 78^th anniversary of Victory in Europe.

There has been worldwide condemnation officially and in the media, but our disinterest disturbs me for two reasons: tolerance for fascism anywhere will, over a period of time, spur cantering majoritarianism here into a gallop.

The second reason is that it brought back memories of the horror perpetrated by the Serbs and Croats on the Bosniacs. I saw it from all angles – Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar and Pristina, capital of Kosovo. I visited Belgrade later, after the 72 day NATO bombing of Serbia pulverized Slobodan Milosevic and created the independent state of Kosovo. It is an unusual country in several ways. It is the only Muslim country with an avenue named after a US President, Bill Clinton. It was during the Clinton period that the bombing of Serbia eased Milosevic’s stranglehold on Kosovo.

Before US intervention, Pristina was an apartheid city. A school has a wall separating the well-furnished Serbian section from the Kosovar-Albanian part, unbelievably run-down. The solitary telephone is in the Serbian principal’s office. The Albanian Vice-Principal has no telephone. The contrast is like travelling from Israel to Gaza.

Clinton bombed Serbia to stop Milosevic from ethnically cleansing the Muslim population from Kosovo. The irony is that Kosovo happens to be the center of Serbian religious and historical lore.

Little wonder the Serbs have held onto the 2,00,000 strong Serb enclave of Mitrovica, abutting Serbia. When the US was creating independent Kosovo, why did they leave Mitrovica in local Serb control even though the enclave is part of Kosovo?

Big powers, while helping carve out new enclaves, always leave behind some issues for future manoeuvre – Palestine, Ulster, Kashmir. Also, freeing Mitrovica of Serb control or joining it with Serbia would have invited a vicious Southern Slavs backlash with active support of the Orthodox Church, powerful in Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece etcetera.

And yet, there are so many monasteries and monuments holy to the Serbs that it is impossible for them to wrench themselves emotionally from Kosovo, a Muslim majority state which is historically their holy land. Note the confusion.

Serbs anchor their nationhood to the monument outside Pristina, which reminds them of the battle of Kosovo (1389) a battle they celebrate even though they lost it to the invading Turks. They see defeat as a moment of glorious martyrdom: by their fierce fighting they blocked Turkish advance towards Europe.

It is a Serbian belief that the best wine in the world is distilled by the monks of the great 14^th century, Serbo-Byzantine monastery in Decan, near Pristina. How precariously Orthodox-Turks are poised is symbolized by a regular ritual: at dusk every day, a young, muscular priest, circles the main Church vigorously rotating a giant wooden rattle called tallantone, a sort of warning for the inmates to remain alert against the Turks.

This being the state of play between the two faiths, does the international community envisage a permanent role for KFOR, the NATO led peacekeeping force in Kosovo?

So proud was Secretary of State Madeline Albright of the Clinton-Albright intervention in Kosovo, that she asked her Policy Planning Chief, Morton Halperine, to initiate “A history of Kosovo project.” Prof. Richard Ullman of Princeton University, former Editor of Foreign Policy, led a high powered team on the subject. I wonder what happened to the study?

Let me now revert to the Croat Church’s misdemeanor in Bosnia which was the starting point of the story. No sooner did I reach Zagreb than I found my way to the office of Cardinal Kucharij in the Cathedral which dominates the city square. I was met by Father Juraj Jezerinac who, after pouring out a shot of traditional cherry brandy, became the willing source for stories.

First he confirmed that Cardinal Kucharij, after a visit to the Vatican, had obtained the Pope’s “OK” to recognize Croatia as soon as Yugoslavia began to break up. The EU, which had come into being to keep the intra-European peace, was keen for coordinated action on Yugoslavia. But a secret “OK” from the Vatican was a signal German Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, did not fail to pick up. German recognition of Croatia, ahead of other Europeans, set the cat among the pigeons. An imaginary Axis-Allies line began to surface. The brutalization of Bosnian Muslims did not ruffle London, Paris or New Delhi. No one in New Delhi even took note of the fact that General Satish Nambiar was abruptly replaced from the UN Force in Bosnia by European officers as soon as UK and France began to throw their lot behind the Serbs, WW-II allies. The observation by a senior Foreign Service officer in Paris will remain indelibly etched on my mind. “The balance of power shifted away from the Christians in Lebanon; it is shifting away from the Muslims in Bosnia.”

The four year siege of Sarajevo was of no interest to my friend in Paris. Equally, it disturbed nobody’s equanimity in South Block. Whatever the Serbs did in Kosovo or Bosnia was of no consequence. The logic advanced was that New Delhi’s relations with former Yugoslavia were in the context of the Non Aligned movement: New Delhi considered Serbia and Belgrade as inheritors of that legacy.

The editorial staff Oslobodenje demonstrated the kind of heroism probably impossible to come by in the annals of journalism. I had met the Editor, Kemal Kurspahic, at the last Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade attended by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989. His office in Sarajevo was now in a nearly inaccessible basement enclosed on three sides by the rubble of bombed out structure. “How did you bring out the paper, every afternoon in a war zone?” He pointed upstairs. “God.” I asked: “who financed you?” He fixed me in a gaze. “George Soros.”

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Will Political Lockdown Continue To Control Anger Of Migrant Workers?

Will Political Lockdown Continue To Control Anger Of Migrant Workers?

                                                                                           Saeed Naqvi

Why did some of us expect anything else from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the Nation the other evening? Why did we imagine that this massive migration of dispossessed, wretched labourers, walking unspeakable distances with babies on their shoulders, an aging mother on the waist, indescribable pictures of hungry children, pregnant women, misery beyond imagination, would even be noticed by the country’s most awesome leader? Like King John signing the Magna Carta with his Barons, Modi mollified the disgruntled business caste by giving a huge chunk to the MSMEs.

His silence on the 16 Gonds who slept between rail tracks to be run over by a goods train was stunning. Labourers were simply longing for what the Bard called “sweet nature’s second course” – sleep. And they got a surfeit of it.

Unlike western philosophers, who dwelt on society, our Seers had the cosmos in their ken. In their elaborate framework, migrant labourers have all been given lottery tickets for upward mobility only in the next life.

The great sociologist M.N. Srinivas asked, “What is Hinduism without caste?” Modi knows the answer. Since he is engaged in an architecture of Himalayan proportions to take us back to our “golden Hindu past”, he has fallen back on divine sanction to neglect the underclass.

With lamentable naiveté some of us began to expect tectonic changes once the lockdown was lifted. The build-up to the Bastille, we forgot, is a long process. What did the millions who migrated from the post 9/11 wars in Syria, Libya, Sudan, North Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen achieve in Europe? Nothing immediately. Initially Europe hid behind barriers. It takes a while for people to begin to cause organic changes. Since the countries from which the migrants came were Muslim, even fading images of Osama bin Laden and Jihad facilitated a revival of Islamophobia. Identity politics began to rear its head everywhere. Even post war Germany’s most successful leader, Angela Merkel was unsettled. In Bharat this genre of politics leads to communalism with which we have lived since 1947 but which, in Modi’s hands, is the brick and mortar for a Hindu Rashtra.

During this period of change, George Soros and Steve Bannon were hopping across Europe and the Americas, pushing for their respective visions of capitalism. Soros is a neo liberal capitalist within a democratic framework; Bannon, a known supremacist, seeks to promote the market in an illiberal, xenophobic order. Which one does Modi approximate to?

Soros has launched $1 billion fund for campuses to fight authoritarianism and to promote liberal values and democracy among the youth. Will some of this charity trickle down to Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia and numerous campuses which are fighting excesses with their backs to the wall? Soros, a Hungarian Jew, is involved in a cat and mouse with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian dictator who stands for, what he calls, “illiberal” democracy. Will Modi stand with Soros or with Orban?

Orban is very much on Bannon’s anti-Semitic, crypto fascist network. Anti-Semitic? But Modi is a buddy of Benjamin Netanyahu, is he not? Unlike in socialism, such contradictions are inherent within differing shades of capitalism. Recently, Bannon was accorded legitimacy on the Indian channel which defers to Modi on most issues.

Some months ago Bannon told a crowd of far-right French politicians – Marine Le Pen, for instance – that they should wear labels of “racism” like a “badge of honour”. If they call us “xenophobes and nativists” let them “because every day we get stronger and they get weaker.” Modi, likewise, thumbs his nose at critics.

Jair Bolsonaro, of Brazil, whom Modi handpicked to be the Chief Guest for the Republic Day parade is another one of Bannon’s favourites. Bannon bolstered his media management which enabled Bolsonaro to topple Lula da Silva whom President Barack Obama once described as the “most popular politician on earth”. This was at the G20 summit in 2009 in London. Modi would do himself a favour if he watches The Edge of Democracy, a great docudrama on Netflix, on the rise and fall of Lula.

Bolsonaro has been quite as forthright about Brazil’s indigenous people as Modi has been about the yoke of “1,200 years of ghulami”. One of his quotes is a classic: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry was not as efficient as the American (cavalry), which exterminated all the Indians.”

Bannon, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi and many “soul mates” waiting in the wings have got their fingers crossed. They are aching for a second term for Trump. But there is a huge fly in that ointment. The covid pandemic and the lockdown have so secularized the political game that serious policy makers are speaking a vocabulary which would make Senator Joseph McCarthy turn in his grave. Socialism is becoming a kosher concept in the post pandemic mayhem.

Little wonder, a brand new mantra of Universal Basic Income is acquiring wide acceptance. A productive work force, 40 million strong, is staying at home in Europe and receiving salary. Finland has done a path breaking study: 2000 Finns were paid UBI of 560 Euro’s per month for two years. They were able to improve their lives in every possible way. They were so productive that the Pope endorsed UBI in his Easter message.

Can Modi buck this trend? Ironically, Lenin provides him comfort. Human misery even on a gigantic scale does not by itself provide objective conditions for revolutionary change. Other factors are needed. A middle class willing to give the lead, for instance. Fortunately for Modi, this class is in his thrall. Even so, there is little doubt that an upheaval lurks on the horizon but what its contours will be is less than clear. Who knows, it may not be possible to lift the political lockdown quite yet. Which means no protest marches. Protesters, please return home, otherwise the nation runs the risk of expiry from coronavirus.

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Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair In The Trump Universe

Fair Is Foul And Foul Is Fair In The Trump Universe

                                                                                    Saeed Naqvi

When the tortoise agreed to ferry a stranded scorpion on its back across the river, which was in spate, he didn’t know what he had bargained for. Midway, the scorpion stung the tortoise, deep, through its hard shell.

“Why have you done this?” asked the tortoise. “Now we shall both drown.”

“It’s in my nature,” said the scorpion.

Given its own self-esteem, the US should have been “ferrying” the world through the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, the country is itself so overwhelmed by Corona that it has no time for leadership. Fair enough, let the US attend to protecting its people. But Trump’s Washington is not only making a mess of its own crisis, it is aggravating the world’s problems. The tortoise did not live to digest the lesson: a cooperative order is simply not possible with Trump.

If US capitalism in the post-cold war world were scripted like a Webster melodrama, the audience should prepare itself for some frenetic tattooing by the “scorpion”. Even as the world is focused on fighting coronavirus, US claws are out, groping the Venezuelan coastline, using Columbian territory as its very own. Eight mercenaries are reported dead, even as two pedigreed Americans are in Venezuelan custody, presumably, singing like canaries by now. Wordsmiths have already named the expedition as the “Bay of kids”, so infantile has this latest US adventure been to unseat President Nicolas Maduro. Former US Green Beret, Jordan Goudreau has claimed responsibility. President Trump has closed his gloves in front of his face like a pugilist on the defensive. “I knew nothing about it.”

Ofcourse he knew just about as much as he did about the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince’s idea of “privatizing” the Afghan War. Don’t laugh, Prince’s 100 page dossier spelt out details of how Afghanistan should be privately governed. The proposal was considered by freaks in the administration. According to the plan, Afghanistan would be ruled, just as India was, under a Viceroy. The plan was shot down. But Prince proved his resourcefulness once again in Venezuela. According to The Guardian, London, Prince secretly met one of Maduro’s closest allies, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez who also looks after security. About eight months ago, Prince was suggesting an invasion of Venezuela by “a private army of 5,000.” This was after the US had recognized Juan Guaido as the OPEC nation’s “legitimate President.” Which side of the street was Prince playing? The tricks have not worked. Trump will have to go into elections with a military failure in his backyard. Will his cohorts allow him to?

The world has been persuaded to put its head down on Corona. But this does not come in the way of the Trump’s military adventure: holding US-Sri Lanka joint training in March and April at Sri Lanka’s Air and Naval base in Trincomalee, despite a ban on travel because of the pandemic.

This military bonhomie at a time when the coronavirus stricken aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, has been advised to dock at Guam. More than 4,500 crew members have been moved ashore. The spike in corona cases among the Sri Lankan Navy and Army can be traced to the companionship with US military personnel.

How can one raise fingers at the island nation’s obsequiousness when the great nation to its north circumvents its own rules to ship Hydroxychloroquine to the US because Trump has threatened “retaliation” if he were not helped in his hour of need.

This is not all. The man who is building a wall to keep Mexicans out, delivers a stark message to his southern neighbour: American economic interest supersede Mexican health interests. In other words, allow workers to operate factories essential not for Mexico but to the US – pandemic or no pandemic.

Germans coped with that mentality in March: the Trump administration tried to lure a German firm, CureVac, to the US. This is not where the audacity ends. The vaccine, jointly developed, would be available to the Americans first. The Angela Merkel establishment politely showed US negotiators the door.

In the German episode, the US comes across as almost elegant compared to the highway robbery at the tarmac of Chinese airport loading protection gear against the virus’ for European destinations. American “highwaymen” paid three times the amount and diverted the equipment to the US. French officials called it the “war of masks”.

Meanwhile across the sea, Trump’s Sancho Panza (or is it the other way around), Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is stepping up air strikes against Syria, attempting Drone assassinations of Hezbollah field commanders, and, in brief, trying to pulverize the “axis of resistance”, with Iran as the prime target. The idea is to provoke just sufficient retaliation to enable Netanyahu to survive corruption charges, also to give Trump an opportunity to beat war drums, always a useful strategy in the election season, particularly when ratings are not promising.

The “Bay of kids” and his Gulf gyrations pale before the high wire act he appears to be developing (or bluffing) vis-a-vis China. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times is one of the many commentators who have chastised Trump’s “irresponsible” diatribe without any credible evidence.

The supremacist, neo Nazi rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, some years ago, attended openly by the KKK and sundry white nationalists, created ripples and waves which never really subsided. “There are very fine people on both sides” was Trump’s immortal observation, balancing between Klansmen and counter protestors.

From that persona, Trump never really distanced himself. The result is rampaging anti-Semitism. Israel’s respected newspaper Haaretz has expressed concern. Several protests against the measures taken by states to control coronavirus, have featured swastikas and worse.

Jewish Centre for Public Affairs CEO, David Bernstein is convinced, that “as more people become economically disaffected the more they will look for scapegoats.” Since the economic downslide is on an epic scale, so will corresponding racism grow in the US and elsewhere. Should this President get a second term, we shall all surely go down like that tortoise, gasping.

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Either We Wait For Vaccine Or Open And Face Wolf Outside?

Either We Wait For Vaccine Or Open And Face Wolf Outside?

                                                                                         Saeed Naqvi

In this, the second month of lockdown, as I look out of the room I use as my office, the deserted neighbourhood park has begun to look like our personal lawn. Since this window has been my vantage point for well over a decade, I have grown accustomed to the goings on in the park. The very first sentence in our constitution describes “India, that is Bharat.” This neighbourhood is “Bharat” even though the language at the Resident Welfare Association meetings is a kind of homespun English.

The “India, Bharat” enigma with which my late editor, George Varghese, grappled with urgent sincerity, had begun to resolve itself in the 60s, soon after Pandit Nehru’s death.  The Statesman’s first Indian editor, Pran Chopra revealed all the chips on the then elite’s shoulder: he juxtaposed Nehru’s association with the world inhabited by the likes of Yehudi Menuhin, with Shastri’s comfort level with calendar Gods.

In my park the dilemma has been long resolved. A chintan sthal at one end is used for pujas and aartis even on Independence and Republic days respectively. By popular demand (let me add in parenthesis) my hand is always there on the rope which unfurls the flag.

This part of Bharat finds itself protected even pampered by the lockdown. It has made itself even more exclusive by shutting the gates to the apartment blocks and with a stronger gate at the entrance to the street.

Some residents have found ways to salve their conscience by allowing the “sweeping-cleaning” women to leave with guarantees of monthly envelopes to be delivered to them outside the second gate. But who delivers the envelopes? This is unresolved.

In a nearby colony where friends live the intractable issue has been the disposal of garbage. Why can’t residents of individual apartments fill plastic bags with waste accumulated over 24 hours? These can be taken to the garbage dump which is only a few hundred yards away. Resistance to this proposition is widespread. In fact, resistance is in inverse proportion to the income of respective householders. RWAs work largely on consensus. How does one arrive at a consensus in days of corona without holding a meeting?

An enduring consensus has been reached. The colony will employ a “scavenger”. That is the preferred job description: its Hindi variant is considered politically incorrect. For an RWA so fastidious, settling on the job description alone is not the end of the matter. The “scavenger”, after all, will come from outside, possibly a “bastee” or a slum, by definition corona infested. When he rings the bell to collect the garbage bag, he will without the shadow of a doubt, leave corona on the switch. Moreover, he will have to open the gate to reach the “bell” and in the process “pollute” the gate.

Ingenuity comes in when obstacles are insurmountable. An inspired RWA member solved the problem. The “scavenger” will be given a whistle of sufficient shrillness as to be heard by individual residents. They will bring out the bag and hand it to the “scavenger” without making physical contact.

That the name of the “scavenger” is Ashraf which comes from “Sharief” which means a gentleman. He is clearly on the downward spiral accurately grasped by a Sachar Commission. He may be of interest to the Tableeghi Jamaat, the Muslim Religious Reform Group whose headquarters or “Markaz” at Nizamuddin, have become famous as the epicenter of coronavirus. Globally, the West will, on a given bad day, refer to the “Chinese” virus. In Bharat, political masters may consider the creative coinage: Mohammadan Mahamari Markaz. That may tend to be an exaggeration.

The currency such an alliterative chant is to be given will depend on the shade of saffron required at a given time. Our maestros of communal politics have learnt a profound lesson: communalism pays dividends only when tied to nationalism. For the game to be ramped up that high, the leadership will require Kashmir and Balakot Plus. But for good strategy, the old Persian saying is apt:

“Har sukhan mauqa-o-

Har nukta muqam-e-darad”

(Every word has its appointed moment;

Every dot, its appointed place.)

Anything else is not strategy; it is Trump in a China shop.

The season of coronavirus, however, may not be conducive to high wire acts, which require a stout safety net, which means a calm home front. But there remains that imperative of keeping cadres on their toes so that they don’t turn sluggish. Calmness, yes, but with sporadic Tableeghi bashing, beef lynching and such like will continue by way of mood music. There is a built-in deterrence on Love-jihad. Mutually assured infection, to distort a phrase from the Cold War, has closed that window of opportunity.

So far, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been spectacularly blessed by the Gods. Citizens protected by his dramatic lockdown are in his thrall for having being saved. Adults do not appear on balconies with their kitchenware as percussion, interspersed with the sounds of conch shells unless they are in awe or a spell has been cast on them. But too much of anything, even abject devotion begins to pall. Kaifi Azmi wrote:

Ram kab ayenge maloom naheen

Kaash Ravan hi koi aa jaata.

(How long do I wait for Rama? Even a Ravana’s appearance will liven up the scene)

Those locked-in are neither being afflicted by the virus, nor do they see vials of vaccine floating on the horizon. It is bit like Becket’s Waiting For Godot: two characters are waiting for Godot who never shows up. The play is a masterpiece on life’s meaninglessness.

Metaphysics aside, do we not sympathize with Modi who faces an acute dilemma? The Bharat which is locked-in is with him. But is he all at sea with the much, much bigger Bharat which, having been locked out, is beginning to look like a monstrously hungry wolf on the other side of the outer gates?

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