India’s 16th general election has been unique for many reasons. No previous election has been so relentlessly and exhaustively discussed; no previous election – not even the post Emergency election of 1977– has aroused so much passion, so much fury; so much hope and so much fear. And in no previous election has the result been so completely a foregone conclusion. But almost no one thought that the BJP would get as many as 283 seats, a comfortable majority on its own, and that the Congress would be reduced to a pathetic rump party with only 44 seats.
These results have left the opponents of the BJP and the secular liberal intelligentsia in shock. But for the country this is not by any means an unmitigated disaster. Its most obvious blessing is that it will ensure a smooth and swift transition of power to the new government. Had the results been indeterminate; had the BJP found it difficult to form a government, there would have been a collapse of confidence in the Indian economy abroad and a run of dollars out of the country that would have destroyed whatever chance remained of a quick economic recovery.
That hurdle is decisively behind us. Investors, both domestic and foreign, have been quick to perceive this. That accounts for the 1500 point rise in the Sensex since the beginning of the current week, and the additional 800 point rise on Friday 16th. A billion dollars of foreign institutional investment had propelled the pre-election rise. Today Indian investors too, who had long shunned the equity markets, have begun to come back to it.
But it would be self-deluding to believe that with the election over, and a stable new government in place, we can go back to business as usual. India has entered new and uncharted territory in the development of its democracy. The first phase of development – single party dominance by the Congress party — was replaced by coalition rule in 1989. Most political Pundits had predicted that this would fatally weaken the centre and make India exceedingly difficult to govern. They were proved wrong. As a book being released in the US in the coming weeks, “ Why India Matters”, points out, coalition governments took more hard decisions and propelled India much further up the radar screens of foreign governments than the Congress had been able to do in the last two decades of single party dominance.
But coalition democracy was built around two central poles – the Congress and the BJP — and the Congress pole has now collapsed. Whether we like it or not, therefore, we are returning to another phase of near–single party dominance with no conceivable combination of parties to form a viable opposition and put a brake upon its actions. And this single party—the BJP, is not the benign Congress of yesteryears. Not only does it espouse a radically different ideology from the Congress, but it has little in common even with the BJP of Vajpayee and Advani.
The leaders of today’s BJP are not from the Metropolis but the Mofussil. They are products of an internal convulsion within the BJP after its defeat in 2004 that saw the exodus of Vajpayee, Advani and virtually all the urbane and seasoned leaders whom the public recognized and respected a decade ago. Today, most of Modi’s core team are state leaders who have no idea how different, and how difficult, governing a nation of 1.27 billion people can be. They will have to come to grips with its bewildering diversity. They will have to learn, as Emperor Ashoka learned when he created a religious police to enforce his edicts and fatally weakened the Mauryan empire; as the Mughals understood from the very start, and as the British learned in 1857 after they tried to ride roughshod over Hindu and Muslim customs and beliefs, that India can only stay united if its rulers accept and respect its cultural diversity and religious plurality.
Vajpayee had tried to hammer this into his party and the RSS through a succession of four annual New Years’ Day “Musings”. Had the NDA won the 2004 election, he would have completed his task. But the NDA’s defeat became the springboard for a wholesale rejection not only of his closest colleagues in the BJP, but also of the philosophy of tolerance, and respect for diversity, that he had tried to instill into the Sangh Parivar.
There is reassuring evidence that Modi, like Vajpayee before him, has devoted a good deal of thought to this challenge, and has come to similar conclusions. As long ago as at the Hindustan Times Leadership summit in 2007, he had insisted that Hindutwa does not mean Hindu cultural, let alone religious supremacy but its opposite – a respect for India’s religious pluralism and cultural diversity. He has not made a single anti- Muslim statement throughout his campaign, and has rebuked those who have. But like Vajpayee when the NDA first came to power in 1998, he too will have to find a way of making the Sangh Parivar accept this definition.
Modi’s task, however, will be far harder than the one that Vajpayee faced a decade ago. For India is now in the dangerous middle stage of capitalist development that Europe passed through in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is the stage in which a relatively new, and still financially insecure, propertied class tries to tame growing class conflict by diverting the attention of the have-nots towards convenient scapegoats on whom they can pin the blame for their misfortunes. Europe chose Jews to be the scapegoats. The result was a rising , increasingly virulent, anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust.
In India, extremists in the Sangh Parivar have elected Muslims to be the scapegoats. If Modi does not reign them in India will, literally, have no future. For India is a world of minorities, in which the Muslims are only the largest. An attempt to impose cultural homogeneity upon them will lead to its disintegration.
The BJP’s absolute majority, and the decimation of not only the Congress but all the caste-based smaller parties of north India, has made Modi’s task more difficult, for it has removed most of the natural checks to cultural authoritarianism within our democracy. However, absolute majority has also created one silver lining: Absolute power brings with it absolute responsibility. For the last five years the BJP has played the role of a spoiler in India politics, constantly stoking religious and cultural animosities, disrupting the functioning of parliament and ensuring that an already weak Congress is able to do nothing. Absolute majority has put an unambiguous price upon that kind of irresponsibility. That road is now therefore a costly one for the party to travel. One can only hope that its leaders will realize this before they have had the time to do further damage to India’s social fabric.
The Congress has only itself to blame for its rout , for in the past six years it has given the country the worst government it has ever had. The list of its mistakes, and of the opportunities it has missed, is too long to accommodate in this essay, but one stands out above all others because of the misery it has inflicted upon ordinary Indians, and because it became the launch pad for Modi’s rise to power. This is the complete dog’s dinner it made of the economy.
In the last four years GDP growth has halved from 8.4 percent (in 2009-10) , to a little over four percent in the past year. Industrial growth has collapsed spectacularly — a 16.4 percent drop from 14.5 percent in October 2009 to March 2010, to minus 1.9 percent in January to March 2014.
This has devastated the economy. The construction industry is moribund: the skyline of Gurgaon and NOIDA in Delhi is pockmarked by the silhouettes of half-competed skyscrapers. The growth of real fixed investment has fallen by 80 percent from the level reached in 2010-2011. There has been only one large Initial Public Offering of shares by a private company for an industrial or infrastructure project, since Reliance Power’s 7,500 crore IPO in February 2008, and that too occurred as long ago as in January 2011. Over 200 blue chip companies, that had borrowed heavily or issued convertible debentures abroad, are staring a debt default in the face, because of the collapse of their share prices and the 40 percent devaluation of the rupee in the past five years.
Within the country tens of thousands of small companies have gone quietly bankrupt, with no one even bothering to keep count. Data on employment collected by the National Sample survey and the Ministry of Industry suggest that at least 40 million job-seekers have lost, or failed to find, jobs and been deprived of a future.
Had the collapse been caused by forces beyond the government’s control there would have been misery but not the level of anger that they have shown at the polls in the past five months. This anger has been fed by the suspicion, that has hardened into conviction, that the government’s faulty polices were responsible.
While they may not have understood precisely what the UPA did wrong, they have not believed its repeated assertion that the economic collapse had been caused solely by the global recession. If this was true, they have wondered , how did industrial growth bounce back in July 2009 within less than a year of the start of the recession when the global recession was at its height.
To industrialists, shopkeepers and workers unorganized sector workers, if not to Dr Manmohan Singh’s legion of economists, the mistake has been obvious for three years. His government became obsessed with fighting inflation in order to retain its popularity, and did not realize that unlike the inflation of 1993-95 and all previous bouts of inflation in India, the inflation that began in the summer of 2006 was not driven by an excess demand but by global and local shortages of supply . From January 2007 , therefore, it began applying the wrong remedy. It kept raising interest rates and cutting down money supply to lower demand when the cause of the price rise lay in a relentless rise in global commodity prices fuelled by China’s voracious demand , by freakish weather conditions and limitless exports of vegetables and fruits regardless of what that did to domestic prices.
Not only did the government start raising interest rates as far back as January 2007, but it persisted in doing so for seven years in the face of unequivocal evidence that these had had absolutely no effect on the cost of living. Instead of giving price stability and economic growth all that the Manmohan Singh government gave the people was stagflation and despair. Untramelled power was therefore the Congress’ gift to the BJP, perhaps the last gift that it will ever be in a position to give.
Indian politics has entered uncharted waters, but these are not as unfriendly as many secular and liberal intellectuals believe. As of 7.00 PM on Friday , with the counting almost over The Congress’ share of the vote had fallen by almost 10 percent to 19.8 percent. This is huge and probably spells the end of the party as an all-India party. But 19.8 percent is 1.4 percent more than the BJP got in 2009. So the Congress is down but not necessarily out. Whether it will continue to decline will depend on its capacity to stay together in defeat and to realize that the slavish sycophancy that it fostered within itself by clinging to the so-called Gandhi-Nehru charisma has outlived its purpose and become a millstone around its neck.
Second and more important, the Aam Admi Party may have got only 2.2 percent of the national vote but for the poor and underprivileged it has opened the gates to an empowered future. Not only has it won four seats in Punjab, but starting with nothing in a totally alien town, Kejriwal collected 36 percent of the vote in Varanasi. And although it didn’t win in Delhi it retained 33 percent of the vote.
Indeed, had the regional and caste based parties known any history, and realized the danger that the combination of prolonged economic distress and a powerful orator promising immediate economic relief could pose to them, and had AAP got out of its nihilistic mood, understood the reasons for its sudden rise in Delhi, and planned its electoral campaign around a national platform of reforms that would empower the have-nots, the result of this election would have been far more balanced.
The Mayawatis Mamatas and yadavs of the world may not have got the esage before, but it is difficult to believe that have not got it now. This is that the days of fighting nationa elelctions on the basis of caste , creed and community are rapidly coming to a close. A Yadav or Kurmi or Chamar’s vote is not a party’s entitlement. It has to be earned. Throughout the electoral campaign Kejriwal and Modi had one thing in common – neither of them once appealed to the voter to caste his or her ballot for anything other than performance and justice. Therein lies our hope for the future.

When India’s ambassador Ashok Kantha presented his credentials along with 13 other ambassadors to Chinese President Xi Jinping last month, he was one of only three diplomats with whom the president held one-to-one talks after the ceremony was over. One would have thought that this was as unambiguous, a signal of the importance that Xi’s government attached to its relations with India, as any a government could have given. But what he told ambassador Kantha at the meeting was even more significant: he regarded furthering the India-China strategic partnership as his historic mission. What he wished to do was to move India-China relations beyond the bilateral context and deepen cooperation on regional and global issues.

Xi’s gesture was not an isolated one. India’s Republic Day reception in Beijing on 26 January was attended by Vice-President Li Yuanchao. Not only was this extremely unusual but, to the amazement of the European diplomats who were present, Li went on to deliver a short speech extolling the historic relations between China and India.

This too had followed a succession of overtures to India by the new government in Beijing, whose significance New Delhi either did not, or did not want to, recognise. These included China’s speedy withdrawal of its troops from the Daulat Beg Oldi sector in Ladakh after their initial intrusion; Xi’s declaration after his meeting with Manmohan Singh at the BRICS summit in Durban last year that he wanted to settle the Himalayan border dispute not “gradually” but “as early as possible”; and his decision, also communicated to Singh at Durban, to make India the first country that his Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, would visit on his tour of Asia in May.

Since then, Chinese participants at several seminars have mentioned Beijing’s desire to raise the bilateral ties to one of long-term strategic cooperation. But India has reacted to these overtures with considerable wariness. Only a day after Xi’s meeting with ambassador Kantha, New Delhi summarily refused to give Chinese aircraft permission to enter, or overfly, the Andaman Sea in search of wreckage from Malaysian Airlines’ ill-fated flight MH-370. Considering that the majority of its 240 passengers were Chinese, this was a callous thing to have done. But what was even more disturbing was the vociferous approval that the Indian public bestowed upon the government for its rejection. One anonymous military official summed up the national attitude when he told the South China Morning Post: “We don’t want Chinese warships sniffing around in the area on the pretext of hunting for the missing jetliner or anti-piracy patrols.”

The contrast between Xi’s overtures and this viscerally distrustful response is so striking that it is difficult to see how the gap in trust can ever be bridged. Yet, bridge it we must if we want to resolve our longstanding border dispute, and play a constructive role in the remaking of the chaotic international State system.

As the 1962 war had shown, our Himalayan border is an area where we are at a severe military disadvantage. Diplomacy is, therefore, the only way forward, but its success depends upon building a measure of trust. This is the ingredient that is missing in our relations with China. The reasons, as The Times of India noted on 24 March, lie in the border war of 1962.

To say that the Indian public, its armed forces and most of its policymakers remain traumatised by that humiliating defeat would be an understatement. But the reason why the trauma has endured long after the Chinese seem to have put it behind them is not just that we suffered a defeat, but that we have never understood precisely why the war took place. Indians remain convinced that China was the aggressor. It claimed 140,000 sq km of Indian territory across the entire length of the Himalayas, and had begun nibbling away at it as far back as in 1954. But in his widely read book, India’s China War, Australian journalist Neville Maxwell has squarely accused India, and then PM Jawaharlal Nehru in particular, of having started the war.

Maxwell has accused Nehru of being an “imperialist” who adopted a Forward Policy of defending the borders drawn in Tibet unilaterally by the British, and of trying to evict China from any territory it occupied west and south of these borders through the use of “non-violent force”. The Chinese, he claims, were slow to catch on to his designs and continued to believe, until as late as 1961, that he would negotiate the borders in the Himalayas peacefully. They were only shaken out of their stupor by India’s aggressive patrolling and establishment of scores of posts along its definition of the border. From this, Maxwell went on to declare India the aggressor in the 1962 war, and China the victim.

Indian scholars and analysts have tried to refute many of Maxwell’s thesis for more than four decades. But they have been severely handicapped by lack of access to the Indian Army’s report on the causes of the military debacle, written by Lt Gen Henderson Brooks and Victoria Cross holder Brig Prem Bhagat. Maxwell, on the other hand, was given a copy of the report, which he did not put out in the public domain, but used liberally to prove his thesis — a thesis that accepted the Chinese version of events as uncritically as it rejected the Indian.

Forced to rely upon anecdotal evidence to refute Maxwell, scholars such as K Subramaniam and Inder Malhotra have only managed to dent the edges of his assertions. As a result, Indians have never achieved closure on their humiliating defeat. Instead, as it happened to the Germans after their sudden, unexplained, defeat in World War I, the wound has continued to fester. Today, our incomprehension of the past is threatening to poison our future.

For Indians, closure will only come when they too have read the Brooks- Bhagat report and used its solid factual base to draw their own conclusions. But if the government had continued to have its way, the report would have remained in limbo, possibly forever. However, in February, Maxwell did the Indian people an inestimable service by releasing the first part of the Brooks-Bhagat report on his website. New Delhi’s immediate reaction was the inexcusable one of blocking his website. But, fortunately for us and our future, by the time it did so, several copies of the report had already been downloaded and are now available on the Internet. This has at last given the Indian people an opportunity to understand the past and put it behind them.

The report does not speculate upon the political causes of the war. Its mandate was solely to conduct an “operations review” of the causes of “the reverses suffered by the army, particularly in the Kameng division of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA)”. Its terms of reference were to inquire into “what went wrong with the following: 1. Training; 2. Equipment; 3. System of Command; 4. Physical fitness of the troops; and 5. Capacity of commanders at all levels to influence the men under their command.

But Brooks and Bhagat concluded very early on that to carry out their mandate they needed first to examine the “developments and events prior to the hostilities, as well as the balance, posture and strength of the army at the outbreak of hostilities”. Their conclusions were so damning that they caused the report to be buried. The sections of the report now available to us give an insight into why this happened.

The report confirms that the war was indeed triggered by India’s Forward Policy and condemns it because it violated every canon of the art of war, and scaled new heights of ineptitude. But it also makes it clear that this policy was adopted only in December 1961. Prior to that, the Indian government had adopted a defensive policy that was intended to maintain the status quo in the Himalayas and avoid conflict to the maximum extent possible. In so doing, it also reveals the extent to which Maxwell had uncritically swallowed China’s version of the conflict in his book.

Till late 1959, the report points out, the Indo-Tibetan border was a dormant one. The army was not even involved in policing it — the task had been left to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police. But two violent clashes, in August at Longju on the western edge of NEFA, and in October at Kongka La on the Kashmir-Xinjiang frontier, turned it into a ‘live’ border.

The government’s task for the army was “to restrict any further Chinese ingress into Indian territory in Ladakh” and “to establish our rights of possession on our side of the McMahon Line and to prevent infiltration”. Both these directives were very far from the Forward Policy that, Maxwell claimed, Nehru had adopted in the early-to-mid 1950s.

Following the army’s assumption of responsibility for policing the border, the Army Headquarters issued an “intelligence appreciation” of the Chinese forces in both regions. This was followed by “operational instructions” to the Eastern Command in December 1959, and to the Western Command in February 1960. In Ladakh, the intelligence appreciation estimated that the Chinese would deploy one regiment plus a few tanks. Based upon this, the Army HQ concluded that any future confrontations would involve troops at no more than company or battalion strength. To counter the Chinese deployment, therefore, the Western Command was asked to deploy one brigade and two battalions of the Jammu & Kashmir Militia. In fact, the area was so remote that by the end of 1960, the Western Command had only been able to deploy one infantry battalion (one third of a brigade) and the J&K Militia.

In the eastern sector, the intelligence appreciation prepared in 1959, estimated that China had one division facing Sikkim and Bhutan, up to two regiments on the McMahon Line in western NEFA, and one regiment in eastern NEFA. However, it concluded that China was in no position to launch an offensive because it was still “consolidating its hold on Tibet”. So the Eastern Command deployed just one infantry division in NEFA. It also had a division in Nagaland, and two brigades west of NEFA, but given the vast distances, the mountainous terrain and the absence of roads, these were in no position to reinforce the troops in NEFA within any meaningful period of time.

The operating instructions to the two commands were also similar: establish posts; patrol the areas in between; show the flag, but avoid confrontations. In the eastern sector, the orders were explicit: there was to be no patrolling closer than 2-3 miles from the McMahon Line. There was to be no aggressive action on any count; if Chinese patrols were encountered south of the line, they were to be told to withdraw. The troops were to fire only in self-defence.

Maxwell cites India’s refusal of a Chinese proposal for a mutual withdrawal of forces by 20 km after the Kongka La clash as proof of Nehru’s imperialism, but the report suggests a different explanation. Kongka La was 65-80 km inside what India considered its territory. Thus, agreeing to a 20 km separation from this point would have been tantamount to ceding the rest of the territory to China. However, in practice, India did precisely that: except at one point (Demchok), it kept its troops west of “the Chinese Claim”, a line proposed by the Chinese in 1954 but not accepted by India. In addition, both countries took care to leave a wide gap between their forces.

In 1960, possibly after then premier Chou Enlai’s failure to make Nehru agree to renegotiating the border, the Chinese began to build up their forces in both sectors. By October 1960, they had more than one division in Ladakh, including supporting armour, and had built roads and tracks to all their western outposts, greatly improving their capacity strengthen them at short notice. An even more striking imbalance developed in the eastern sector. By July 1961, China had three full divisions supported by armour and mountain artillery in NEFA, two in the west and one in the east.

In October 1960, therefore, the Western Command asked that its forces in Ladakh be built up to a full division. But instead, for reasons that the report does not analyse, it did not get a single additional unit of any size. In December 1961, therefore, the Western Command had only one regular and two J&K light infantry battalions without armour, without even mortars and medium machine guns, without access roads, supplied wholly from the air to face the Chinese forces in Aksai Chin.

Much the same story was repeated in the Northeast. In May 1961, the Eastern Command also submitted an Emergency Expansion Plan that involved raising five more divisions for different parts of the Himalayan frontier. But although it kept pressing New Delhi for more troops for the next two years, it got none. Therefore, to man NEFA’s 900 km border with Tibet, it had a single division minus a brigade that had, for reasons unknown, been detached and sent to Nagaland.

This was the grim imbalance in both sectors when the government decided in November 1961 to adopt the Forward Policy. The Army HQ’s directives required the Eastern and Western Commands to set up scores of new outposts and push patrols as close as possible to the India-defined border in Ladakh and to the McMahon Line in NEFA. But both the commands had to do this without a single additional soldier.

New Delhi’s instructions remained to avoid conflict and fire only in self-defence, but the Brooks-Bhagat report leaves readers in no doubt that the Forward Policy was, in military terms, both irresponsible and indefensible. In Ladakh, it increased the number of outposts to 60 and located most of them in positions that overlooked the Chinese road through Aksai Chin. This was a situation that Beijing was virtually guaranteed not to tolerate. It demonstrated this by setting up its posts opposite the Indian posts and frequently surrounding Indian posts. This led to five armed confrontations. The most serious occurred on the Galwan river.

In May 1962, overriding the objections of the Western Command, the Army HQ ordered it to set up a post on the Galwan river. When it was set up in July, it was immediately surrounded by 70 Chinese soldiers. The Western Command advised against supplying the post through a land route and doing so only from the air, but New Delhi overruled it once more and ordered it to use the land route. The supply columns were forced back day after day for four days. In all, the siege of the Galwan post lasted for 12 days.

In NEFA, the Eastern Command set up 24 new posts. Many of these were up to 14 days’ march from their bases. This created a logistical nightmare and put the troops at risk of death through exposure, disease and starvation. The Chinese responded by setting up posts opposite the Indian posts. This brought the troops into eyeball confrontation. By late summer 1962, therefore, the entire border had become a powder keg.

Although Brooks and Bhagat did their best to stay within the narrow confines of their terms of reference, they found it impossible to do so without shedding some light on why the government ordered an army, which had been enfeebled by being stretched ever thinner, to initiate hostilities against a vastly superior force that had all the advantages of terrain and logistics on its side. Its conclusion was damning: “Against all evidence of increasing military disadvantage, and all the warnings that the Chinese gave us by actions like those at Galwan and Dhola, the government had convinced itself that when forced to choose between going to war against India and withdrawing, the Chinese would withdraw. Their indictment of the Forward Policy approaches the heights of literature: The Art of War teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy not coming but on our readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking but on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

In the end, it was New Delhi that provided the casus belli for the war. As part of the Forward Policy, the Army HQ had decided to set up a post at the tri-junction of the Bhutan, India and Tibet border, but in August 1962, it was informed by the Eastern Command that although the McMahon Line broadly follows the watershed, the tri-junction was not located upon it, but 3-4 miles south of it. Chinese patrols had been coming south of the watershed till the tri-junction shown on the maps, so New Delhi decided to move its Dhola post 4 miles north to the tri-junction on the watershed. However, to “avoid alarm and queries from all concerned”, it decided to continue giving it the map reference of the old tri-junction. On 8 September, the Chinese surrounded the Dhola post with 600 soldiers.

The Eastern Command’s immediate response was to send an order to the local units to “link up” with the Dhola post, i.e force a way through the Chinese encirclement. This was followed by a spate of top-level meetings, chaired by defence minister Krishna Menon in New Delhi and the army chief in Tezpur, Assam. At these meetings, the 33rd Corps, which had the immediate responsibility for NEFA, recommended sending two battalions to encircle the Chinese who were laying siege to Dhola from the south. But this sensible and realistic proposal was brushed aside at both the meetings and the army was ordered to clear the Chinese out, using force if necessary. When Indian troops attempted to carry out this suicidal order, they gave China the invitation to attack in strength that it was waiting for.

What should the Indian public and its representatives learn from the disclosures contained in the Brooks-Bhagat report? The most important is that China is not the aggressive, expansionist nation that two generations of Indians have been reared to believe. In Indian eyes, China committed its original act of aggression when it began to build a road connecting Tibet and Xinjiang through Aksai Chin in the mid-1950s. But the term “aggression” presupposes the existence of recognised, and clearly demarcated national boundaries. Aksai Chin, however, fell in no-man’s land between the Karakoram and the Kuen Lun mountain ranges where no recognised border existed. Based upon trade and travel routes, the Chinese considered the Karakoram range to be the traditional frontier between Ladakh and Tibet, but the boundary line that India had inherited from the British lay further east along the Kuen Lun mountains. Topography and hindsight show us that this alignment lost its raison d’etre the moment China annexed Tibet, for the British had chosen it with the specific purpose of blocking the valleys between the two ranges that could have given Russia easy access to Tibet, and thence to India and southern China, through Tibet. This alignment was, therefore, a product of The Great Game, and became history when China annexed Tibet.

It also became a claw stuck into China’s underbelly, for it lay athwart the road it needed to build to connect Tibet to Xinjiang. Given Aksai Chin’s importance to China and unimportance to India, the Ladakh border could have been settled easily through negotiation. But there is no record of the Chinese ever having formally raised this issue before starting to build the Tibet-Xinjiang road.

However, having secured its basic requirement, China went to great lengths to demonstrate its desire for a negotiated settlement. The lengths to which it was prepared to go were demonstrated by Chou when he virtually forced himself upon Nehru in New Delhi in February 1960, and went from one Indian Cabinet minister’s home to the next, trying to obtain a consensus. Nehru’s failure to take advantage of this extraordinary overture must be counted as one of the greater, and by far, the most costly, diplomatic mistake India has made. For the hostility that Chou encountered, and the humiliation to which he was subjected by ministers such as Morarji Desai, almost certainly triggered the rapid build-up of Chinese forces in the east and the west, that led Nehru and his advisers to adopt the Forward Policy.

But even then, the Chinese exhibited a strong preference for the use of “nonviolent force”. Thus they surrounded but did not attack the Galwan and Dhola posts. The message, again, was that they preferred to settle the dispute through negotiation, although the price would almost certainly be higher.

The report also reveals that the Chinese have been remarkably consistent in the terms they have set for a settlement. In Ladakh, the terms of the 1993 Agreement for Peace and Tranquility in the Border Regions, including the pulling back of troops by both countries to create a non-militarised border zone, are almost identical to the status quo that was established in 1960. This was also true of NEFA (now Arunachal) till 2006 when, without any warning, the Chinese went back to describing the whole of the state as a disputed are and calling it Southern Tibet.

By putting the blame for the war squarely upon the Forward Policy and, therefore, by implication upon Nehru, the report has also forces us to re-examine the prevailing belief that Nehru’s bloated sense of his own importance made it impossible for him to believe that the Chinese would ever attack India. This is simplistic to say the least, for it leaves out one crucial ingredient in the decision-making process: the role played by public opinion in tying his hands and leaving him with very few options.

The Indian public had never accepted Nehru’s tame acceptance of China’s annexation of Tibet, and was viscerally hostile to China. It had been enraged by the discovery of the Aksai Chin road, and alarmed by the incidents at Longju and Kongka La. The publicity that surrounded the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet and arrival in India in April 1959 and the stories of Chinese atrocities brought by his followers had rekindled the anger of the people. Inder Malhotra, who was then the political correspondent of The Statesman, has given a graphic account of the pressures that this generated upon Nehru:

“Before and during the failed summit, bitter domestic discord raged in this country, at times theatrically. Nehru had to brush aside strident demands that there should be no welcome for Chou Enlai throughout his stay. Despite the chill, all courtesies were maintained. But on the demand for the exclusion from the negotiations of his protégé, the controversial defence minister Krishna Menon, Nehru had no option but to yield. However, when Menon did manage to have a pow-wow with Chou Enlai, popular rage knew no bounds.”

The dangers that democracies face from ill-informed public opinion is, therefore, the second lesson to be learned from the debacle of 1962. Nehru knew that he had used up most of his political capital getting Indians to accept China’s annexation of Tibet. When China began to build its Tibet-Xinjiang road without even informing, let alone reaching an agreement with India, and when a spate of revelations of the oppression the Chinese had unleashed upon Tibet gained currency after the Dalai Lama’s arrival, he felt unable to concede any more ground.

Even at this point, Nehru wanted to do no more than establish a new de facto line of separation between Tibet and Ladakh. But finding himself caught between the renewed Chinese military build-up in Aksai Chin and NEFA, and a rising “bunker mentality” at home, he may have felt that showing the flag to establish red lines was the only option left, at least to buy time till things cooled down. What is more, had the Chinese Communist Party not entered a period of crisis at that precise moment, he might just might have gotten away with it.

What Nehru failed to take into account, and what Maxwell does not even mention, are the changes that were taking place within China that were pushing it towards a Grenada-style “small winnable war”. In 1959, the Great Leap Forward had just started, so the Chinese were content to stake out the territory they needed for the Aksai Chin road. But by 1962, it had failed.

China’s leaders had cut down tens of thousands of acres of forests for firewood, produced worthless junk in its backyard furnaces, and plunged an already poor country into famine. Lacking a national food market, Beijing had been forced to sit helplessly by as 16 million people starved to death. In 1962, therefore, Mao Tse-tung knew that the Communist Party’s Mandate of Heaven was in tatters and needed something to shore it up. New Delhi’s 21 September orzder to push the Chinese off the Thagla ridge must have come as a gift from heaven.

To sum up, the 1962 war was not a product of Chinese expansionism (if one rules out its annexation of Tibet). Nor was it a product of Nehru’s, ie India’s imperialism. It arose out of China’s attempt at consolidation. China tried repeatedly to nudge India towards a negotiated solution, but did not realise that no democracy could afford to negotiate from a position of weakness. On his part, Nehru was not the puffed-up peacock that his present-day critics make him out to be, but a visionary leader who failed to make his people accept his vision, fell foul of public opinion, and lost his capacity to lead the country at a crucial time on a crucial issue. The crucial error that both countries made was not to perceive the visceral link between foreign and domestic policy. China never understood how public opinion could impede the search for a negotiated solution; Nehru did not have the faintest inkling of how much China’s natural aversion to conflict had been eroded by the failure of the Great Leap Forward.

The 1962 war was a product of these failures, but these are failures typical of young nations. Both countries have learned immensely valuable lessons from it. This became apparent in 2009, when after three years of increasing acrimony, renewed aggressive patrolling and frequent intrusions across the Line of Actual Control, and an unambiguous ultimatum by China to prevent the Dalai Lama from visiting Tawang, it was then premier Wen Jiabao who took the initiative to meet Manmohan in Thailand, and arrest the drift towards a repeat of 1962.

What is even more significant, both governments realised that public opinion, inflamed by the international media, was the main impediment to peace and arrived at the brilliantly innovative decision to ban the international, and limit the local media’s presence in Tawang, while allowing the Dalai Lama to continue his trip unimpeded.

When India is on the verge of an epochal shift in its domestic politics, the publication of the Brooks-Bhagat report has provided the historical perspective that the next government will need to respond positively to China’s overtures.

Oil, however, is not the only natural resource over which conflicts are likely to break out in the future. Another, even more dangerous, casus belli is water. Disagreements between upper and lower riparian states over their rights to river waters have sparked many wars in the past. Today, with the human population exceeding 6 billion, and per capita water consumption rising rapidly in developing countries, the threat of such conflicts is higher than ever. While solar energy cannot augment the supply of water, it can eliminate the main cause of conflict by making hydro-electric power projects redundant. It can do this by providing peak power far more cheaply, rapidly, and in an eco-friendly way, than either storage or run-of-the-river power plants. Nowhere would the benefits from this be felt more acutely than in the triangle of countries that share the waters of the Brahmaputra (Yarlung-Tsangpo river), China , Bangladesh and India. The possibility that China might build dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo to divert some of its waters to the arid regions of the north was first mentioned at the first International conference of the Global Infrastructure Fund in Anchorage , Alaska in 1986. Although Chinese officials rubbished the idea as being impossibly expensive to implement, they did not rule out the possibility of constructing dams on the river to generate power. This ambivalence raised understandable alarm in Bangladesh and India but Beijing sought to allay their fears by assuring them that it intends to build run-of the river dams that will redirect , but not stop, the flow of its waters into India and Bangladesh .
These reassurances have not, however, prevented China and India from entering an undeclared race to capture the hydro-electric potential of the Brahmaputra river basin. Chinese writers began to air plans for harnessing the Yarlung –Tsangpo in 2005 but it is possible that India began to formulate its plans after the publication of a book by Li Ling in 2003 titled Tibet’s waters will save China . As the downstream riparian, India is hoping to establish first user rights to stake its claim to an uninterrupted flow of the Brahmaputra’s waters. In International law first user rights start upon the completion of a project, so the number of projects that India has signalled it will take up in the Brahmaputra basin has risen rapidly from 146 announced in a s Ten-year Hydro-electricity Plan unveiled by India’s Central Electricity Authority in 2007, to about 200 today. What is more a scramble has developed to start as many of these, as soon as is possible.
The pace of planning and implementation has also picked up in China. Citing the need to cut down CO2 emissions the 12th five year energy Plan, unveiled in 2012, shifted its emphasis back onto giant hydro-electric projects once more. Chief among these is the exploitation of the hydro-power potential of the Yarlung Tsangpo. In all, China intends to build 40 dams on the river and its tributaries. Of these 20 dams on the Yarlung –Tsangpo are expected to generate 60,000 MW of power while 20 smaller dams upon its tributaries are expected to generate another 5.000 MW. Eleven of the 20 projects on the Yarlung –Tsangpo are to be located between its source and the Big Bend where the Brahmaputra turns northwards, executes a huge ‘U’ turn and falls from 3,500 metres on the Tibetan plateau to 700 metres , in the undulating hills of Arunachal Pradesh in India. These will generate 20,000 MW of power. The balance, of 40,000 MW will be generated from the Big Bend. The plan, put forward by ex-Premier Li Peng’s family-owned corporation, the Three Gorges Dam Company, is to build a vast tunnel under the ridge that separates the two arms of the Big Bend, and divert 50 billion cubic metres of water a year to the south-eastern slope where it will fall over nine cascading hydropower dams to generate 40,000 MW of peak power. India, for its part, plans to generate 22,000 MW from two large dams on the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh and 10,000 MW from dams on its tributaries. In all therefore the two countries plan to generate 97,000 MW of power from this tiny region of their respective countries.
Such ambitious but conflicting plans were bound to have a political fallout. Its first indication was an abrupt announcement by the Chinese Ambassador in New Delhi, that China considered the whole of the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh to be a part of Tibet. This was a complete reversal of it’s earlier position, developed in a succession of bilateral negotiations since 1994, that China was prepared to settle for a substantial modification of some parts of the existing temporary boundary, called the Line of Actual Control. What gave the announcement added significance was that it was made on Indian television three days before President Hu Jintao paid a state visit to India. The announcement took the Indian government by surprise and was followed by three years of rising tension along the border. China began to refer to Arunachal as “South Tibet”, and to its principal monastery at Tawang as Tibet’s second most important monastery after Lhasa. It also began to deny visas to Indian offiicals who were serving in Arunachal Pradesh. The tension was not defused till there was a meeting between Premier Wen Jiabao and Prime minister Manmohan Singh designed specifically to prevent its spilling over into military conflict, at Hua Hin, Thailand in October 2009 . However, if the hunger for power and water continues to grow, the respite this meeting gave the two countries could prove temporary.
A calamity waiting to happen
All this took place over plans that were little more than engineers’ dreams. And the dreams have kept growing larger. The Big Bend region is one of the least known area of the world. In all some 360 dams are to be built on slopes with as much as a 70 degree gradient, at the meeting point of three of the youngest and most unstable mountain ranges of the world.. But neither China nor India have made even a rudimentary assessment of the impact that tearing down billions of cubic metres of rock and earth to build dams, tunnels and roads, and storing millions, in some cases billions, of cubic metres of water in will have upon the stability of the earths crust in this region.

Aerial view of the San Andreas Fault, California , USA.

This neglect is deliberate, for both governments are fully aware that the Himalayas have seen a succession of the most severe earthquakes in recorded history. Four of these, measuring 7.8 to 8.9 on the Richter scale occurred within a span of 53 years between 1897 and 1950. The first and last occurred just 53 years apart in the region immediately south and west of the Big Bend in the Brahmaputra. The 1897 earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale (equivalent to the explosion of 7.6 million tonnes of dynamite, or a medium sized hydrogen bomb) and caused widespread damage and loss of life in what was then called upper Assam. It was caused by the build up of pressure as the Indian ( tectonic) plate pressed against the Shillong Plate , a part of the far older Eurasian Plate. The quake occurred when the former shifted 11 to 16 metres as it dived under the latter, over a stretch of 110 kms, along what is known as the Oldham fault. This is one of the largest tectonic shifts recorded so far. Its effects were felt through the entire earth’s crust over this length.
The 1950 earthquake was the severest recorded in the Himalayas. It occurred at Rima, Tibet, not far from the site of the 1897 ‘quake. Measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale it is one of the ten most severe earthquakes in recorded history. Its epicentre also lay on the fault line where the Indian continental plate smashes into the Eurasian plate and dives beneath it. Survivors from the region reported mudslides damming rivers and causing them to rise high when these broke, bringing down sand, mud, trees, and all kinds of debris. Pilots flying over the area reported great changes in topography, caused by enormous land slides, some of which were photographed. An aftershock of this earthquake, a long way to the west of it, was severe enough to register 8.6 on the Richter scale and caused avalanches and floods that destroyed swathes of forest in the Mishmi and Arbor Hills.
Earthquakes in the Himalaya regularly cause landslides that block rivers, causing them to rise till the pressure of the stored water breaks through. The result is a flash flood downstream that causes havoc among the villages and towns that lie in its path. The 1950 earthquake and the 8.6 magnitude aftershock that followed caused avalanches that blocked several of the tributaries of the Brahmaputra. One such dyke in the Dibang valley broke quickly and caused relatively little damage. But another, at Subansiri, broke after water had collected behind it for 8 days and unleashed a 7-metre-high wave that submerged several villages and killed 532 people. In all, the 1950 earthquake killed more than 1500 people in Assam. Geological studies, including the radio carbon dating of sand found on the surface, have uncovered at least one other giant earthquake in the same area that took place in 1548. and two earthquakes in the central region of the Himalayas , that were severe enough to break the earth’s crust all the way to the surface. These occurred in 1255 and 1934.
The 1934 earthquake, which measured 8.1 on the Richter scale and had its epicentre about 10 kms south of Mount Everest, devastated north Bihar and Nepal and killed at least 30,000 people. This occurred before any dams had been built. The dykes that were overwhelmed were of mud and broke in a matter of days. But earthquakes of this magnitude will almost certainly break concrete dams as well. For the Richter scale is a logarithmic scale. An 8.1 magnitude earthquake releases three times as much energy and an 8.7 magnitude releases 23 times as much as a 7.8 magnitude ‘quake . Should any of the proposed dams crack during an earthquake or an ensuing flood, the colossal wave of water , mud and boulders that will be released will kill millions and completely devastate the areas of Tibet, India and Bangladesh that lie in its path. The overwhelming majority of deaths and damage will take place in India and Bangladesh.
India got a foretaste of this some years ago when a flash flood in the Yarlung-Tsangpo, caused by torrential rains and landslides, wiped out an entire island in the Brahmaputra, killing nearly all who lived on it. Chinese hydrologists knew that the flood would occur but did not warn their Indian counterparts. India got another foretaste of what can happen in June 2013 when three days of torrential rains in the valley of the Bhagirathi river, one of the two main tributaries of the Ganges river, caused landslides, that blocked a tributary and destroyed the entire town of Kedarnath when the mud dyke broke, killing between 5,000 and 10,000 people in a matter of hours. Over the previous twenty years the hill slopes overlooking the Bhagirathi valley had been ravaged by the construction of dams and tunnels for the Tehri hydro-electric project, the second largest in India. The rains therefore brought on a catastrophe that many had feared, but hoped would never happen.
The Tehri project has a generating capacity of only 1,000 MW, one fortieth of what the 9 dams at the Big Bend will have, and almost one hundredths of what India and China intend to create in the region. Twenty years from now, when thousands of explosions of dynamite, that have been used to build tunnels for 240 or more power projects, have loosened billions of tonnes of earth and the population has increased tenfold, the entire region will be a calamity waiting to happen.
The Solar alternative
China has become the lowest cost producer of solar photovoltaic panels and heliostats in the world, and India has begun the construction of the largest solar PV power station in the world (4000MWe), as well as the largest Solar thermal power station in Asia (250 MWe). But neither country’s government has grasped the fact that every step they are taking down this road is making their hydro-power development plans redundant For in Spain, a solar thermal power plant that began to supply power to the grid in 2011 has shown that China and India establish 97,000 MWe of generating capacity on less than 10,000 km2 of land. This sounds like a lot of till one realises that it is only one twentieth-fifth of the land area of the Thar desert (that straddles India and Pakistan), and is only a fifth of the land that the Indian government has already reserved within its part of the desert for the construction of solar power plants. It is also barely two-thirds of one per cent of the land in the Gobi desert of China.
. The technology is incorporated in Terresol’s 19.9 MW Gemasolar plant at Fuentes de Andalucia. This plant was approved in February 2009 and came on stream in May 2011.It is the first solar plant in the world that is designed to provide power throughout the day in exactly the same way as coal fired plants do today. To do this it stores enough of the sun’s energy, collected from 2650 heliostats in a mixture of potassium and sodium salts to generate power for 15 hours a day using the stored heat alone. Round-the-clock solar power has become possible because this combination of molten salts loses only one per cent of the stored heat in a day . In an average year, therefore, stored heat generates 5475 hours of power while direct sunlight is required for only the remaining 1025 hours, or less than 3 hours a day. Gemasolar is thus generating 129 GWh of power per year, and supplying 110 GWh to the national grid.
It does this from 304,000 sq metres of heliostats spread over 185 hectares of ground. Assuming that the power generation plant takes up another 15 hectares, Gemasolar requires on square km of land on an average for every 10 MWe of generating capacity. Thus the entire 97,000.MWe of generating capacity that China and India are aiming for in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh can be set up on 9,700 km2 of land.. This sounds like a lot of land but it is less than a quarter of the area of the Thar desert in the Indian state of Rajasthan that the Indian government has already reserved for solar power plants in the second phase of its National Solar Mission. It is also less than one per cent of the land area of the Gobi desert in China.

Timeline photos. Copyright UrvishJ@flickr — with Saba

The Gemasolar plant demonstrates that solar thermal power has many other advantages that make it far more economical than hydro power. First, unlike the Three Gorges dam project that took just under 12 years to complete, the Gemasolar plant came into operation 27 months after it received the go-ahead from the Spanish government. This means that power will be available ten years sooner with solar power plants. In those ten years it will generate additional GDP, and therefore additional savings for investment. Second with power available for 6,500 hours a year every megawatt of installed solar capacity will generate 50 percent more power than the Three Gorges power plants, whose maximum plant availability has been 4,360 hours . It will also be double of the power that India extracts from its 1500 MW Nathpa Jhakri power plant in Himachal Pradesh, in the western Himalayas.
Solar power can meet the need for power at peak load times that hydel power is designed to meet, in as little as two years. Concentrated solar thermal power(CSP) plants can supply power whenever it is demanded. What is more, thanks to the steep fall in the cost of solar panels triggered by China, they can now do so at a substantially lower cost. This has not been immediately apparent because economic appraisals measure only the initial capital cost and the number of hours the plant is able to deliver. They almost never take the cost of delay into account because this is a social cost borne by society and not the investor. Yet this is by far the largest and most important of the three costs .

Comparing the true costs of various energy from various sources
It is not easy to make best practice estimates of the cost of generating power from different sources of energy, specially if they are to be found in different countries. To make this possible, the table below uses the bare capital costs estimated for thermal, nuclear , hydro and solar power in the US, in April 2013, and running costs and Plant load factors found in china, India and Spain .
.
Comparison of economic cost of alternative power sources. 2013
Thermal Nuclear Hydro Solar1
Cap cost/ MW capacity(US$m) 3.246 5.530 2.936 7.3143
Plant Load Factor (hrs/yr) 64002 78842 28932 6.5004
Cap cost per MWh($) 507 701 1014 664
Construction period(yrs) 5 8 10 2.55
Net saving foregone6 1,350 2,970 4050 0
True Cap cost per MWh ($)7 1,857 3601 5064 664

1 Capital cost based upon the technical specifications of the Gemasolar 19.9 MW central tower CSP set up at Fuente de Andalucia in Spain, which came into operation in May 2011.
2. These PLFs are the actual experience in India. The PLF for nuclear power plants is that achieved in plants that have not experienced difficulties in obtaining uranium.
3. Based upon price of heliostats prices quoted by Chinese suppliers ($120 per sq.m)and the assumption that these account for half of the total cost of the solar thermal plant. One American supplier is also offering these at $126.
4. PLF based on 15 hrs of supply per day from stored heat and 3 hours from direct sunlight being delivered by the Gemasolar plant.
5. Actual construction period at Fuentes de Andalucia was 2yrs 3 months.
6. This is calculated as the saving out of additional GDP that is foregone during the longer gestation period of the project. In India the GDP in 2011-12 was $1.5 trillion and the saving rate was 36 percent. These ratios have been applied to all the four types of plants
7. This is row 4 + 6.

In the above table the ‘private’ cost, i.e. the bare capital cost that appears in the investor’s balance sheet, of delivered power (MWh) from different sources is given in Row 3. . The ‘social’ cost, i.e. cost to the nation is given in row 6. This is the private cost plus the savings out of GDP foregone through the non-availability of power to the country during the construction period of the project, beyond the earliest date on which the power can be supplied by the technology with the shortest gestation period, i.e solar power. Needless to say, this is only that part of social cost which can be readily calculated in terms of GDP foregone. It does not include less measurable but equally tangible costs, such as employment foregone and damage to the environment.
The table shows that while the ‘private’ capital cost per MWh (excluding operational costs) is lowest for coal-based power plants, it is only 30 percent higher for a solar thermal plant. This difference disappears entirely when we add their operational costs , which are highest for coal based and lowest for solar thermal plants. However it is when we look at social costs that the chasm widens. The social cost per MWh of solar thermal power is one eights of the cost of hydr-power and one third thatof coal based power. All of its other benefits – benefits that can save human beings and most other species on the planet from extinction – are additional to the economic benefits calculated above.

India’s 16th general election will be the most important that it has held in its 66 years of independence. It will also be the most dangerous. For Indian politics is in the midst of a gigantic 90 degree turn away from the politics of caste and entitlement , towards the politics of class. If this is shift is not managed well, it has the capacity to destroy the democracy of which we have been justifiably proud for the past six decades.
If one were to judge from the spate of opinion polls that have been held in recent weeks, the euphoric statements of media anchors, the surreptititous realignments being made by regional parties, the failure of a Third Front to be born, and the swelling return flow of foreign financial investment, the results of the coming general election are a foregone conclusion. The BJP and its allies are bound to win; Narendra Modi will most probably be India’s new prime minister; industry friendly policies will once again be adopted and growth will pick up once more. To say that virtually the entire propertied class of India , not to mention foreign governments and investors, are praying for this to happen would not be much of an exaggeration.
There is only one fly in this ointment. It is the Aam Admi Party. At present most people consider the AAP to be not much more than a fly, for it has fought elections only for the Delhi State Assembly – hardly the typical state or constituency in the country. That may be why the opinion poll published last week by NDTV, the most reliable of the many that have been published so far, has given it only four seats and given the NDA 232.
But the AAP is not a fly. A more apt description would be a dark horse in a dark room. One senses its presence; one suspects it may be larger than it seems, but since one cannot actually see it, one does not know how large it is or how fast it is growing.
As of this moment , we can only guess where the AAP is going, because the AAP itself is still feeling its way ahead in the new, and alien, territory of electoral politics. But small or large, it has already shifted the arena of political contestation, and begun to redraw the conflict lines in Indian democratic politics. The most radical change it has wrought is to introduce class conflict explicitly into Indian politics. Closely related to this is its decision to forego traditional appeals based on caste, creed and ethnicity, and base its own appeal solely upon issues of governance.
The AAP’s manifesto for Delhi fully reflected both departures. “The AAP will make no promises to you. Instead it will ask you to make a promise. This time you will not cast your vote on the basis of kinship. You will forget caste; you will drive away the distributors of alcohol and money’. It listed 35 areas in which reform was urgently needed and spelt out 201 specific reforms. But it warned the people that they would achieve very little if they did not participate in all aspects of its implementation and monitoring. Its final paragraphs were: “AAP has not come to ask you for your vote. If there is anything we ask of you, it is to have faith in yourselves; and to listen to the voice of your soul. This election is not about the victory or defeat of political parties; it is about victory or defeat within ourselves. In front of the voting machine, we must think of the future of our children, the future of our city and our dreams for the future of our country.”This is not the language that voters have been accustomed to.
In the 90 days since the Delhi state elections Kejriwal’s political credo has evolved. Initially it did not contain an explicit element of class. His attack was on corruption, crony capitalism and a clientelist democratic system – evils that the professional middle class is every bit as opposed to as the poor. But in Delhi he found that the response to his party had come overwhelmingly from the white collar and working classes. A study of voting in the slum colonies of the city showed that all but two had voted overwhelmingly for the AAP. What is more, most of this vote had come in the last two hours of voting – the time when the working class usually votes. As a result his statements and actions have become explicitly geared to mobilising the ‘have-nots’ – those who have either not benefited from the acceleration of growth in the past two decades, or have become its victims through a loss of land, income, status or security.
Kejriwal’s 49 –day experiment with government in Delhi is widely regarded as a mistake that has cost him credibility among his own supporters, not to mention the wider electorate. In the India Today conclave of March 7, former police commissioner of Delhi, Neeraj Kumar, read out an SMS that jeered at Kejriwal savagely for having ‘run away’ from the challenge of running a government. But in retrospect it is beginning to look like a brilliantly calculated move designed to expose the sham that democracy has become, by showing how readily all political parties sank their differences and joined hands to repel boarders the moment they sensed a threat to their monopoly of power. He seems to have succeeded because an instant (and no doubt wildly inaccurate) opinion poll carried out by a TV channel within hours of his submitting his resignation showed that if an assembly elections had been held then, 67 percent of the respondents would have voted for the AAP.
In the weeks since he resigned as Delhi’s chief minister Kejriwal’s assault on the crony capitalist state has become more focussed. He has simplified his message by rolling the Congress, the BJP and Big Business into one easily recognisable bundle. And he has personalised this bundle by giving it a set of names — Narendra Modi, Mukesh Ambani, Adani. While intellectuals may disapprove of this facile and overtly populist stratagem, its impact on the ordinary public cannot be wished away. Kejriwal is building his party and (one hopes) his alternative model for democracy, upon the pent up anger of three generations of Indian’s who have been preyed upon mercilessly by a corrupt and criminalised State. The Delhi elections showed them that they did not have to suffer its depredations helplessly. Today they need symbols to attach their hatred to.
How far Kejriwal will succeed in mobilising the have-nots of Indian society remains the biggest enigma of this election. AAP has fought elections in only one small and atypical state so far. From its runaway success we can deduce that it has the capacity to mobilise a substantial chunk of the urban blue collar, white collar and professional vote in every large city. But logic can take us only that far. Beyond that we are in the land of intuition, where one person’s guess is as good as another’s.
But in his bid to polarise politics around class Kejriwal has other allies, of whose existence he is only dimly aware. The best of them is the Congress party. In the past four years the UPA government has gratuitously destroyed India’s growth by relentlessly raising interest rates in a futile but pig-headed bid to stop inflation. As a result industrial growth has all but stopped for the past two and a half years. Virtually the entire propertied class is therefore living in mortal fear of bankruptcy and is flocking to the banner of Narendra Modi.
Barring a handful of exceptions, the members of this class are not against the reforms that Kejriwal is pushing. For, if anything, they have suffered even more at the hands of the predatory state than the poor. But in the past four years they have seen the collapse of India’s dazzling growth; they have seen orders shrink, sales slow down, inventories pile up and the cost of maintaining them rise relentlessly as the Reserve Bank has pushed interest rates ever higher. They have seen the rupee crash, industry stall, small companies close down by the tens of thousands, and the golden future for their children, they had taken for granted till just the other day, disappear in smoke. Today they are flocking to Modi because he has a proven track record of being industry-friendly, and because the BJP still contains ex-ministers who steered the country out of its previous recession (1997-2002) and know how to do so again.
To them, and to the 10 million or so young people who have entered the labour market every year for the last four, and found that there are no jobs to be had, Modi is a saviour. Anything that jeopardises his ascension to power becomes a direct threat to them. This is the other half of the rapid polarisation between haves and have-nots, that is making the coming election unlike any other that we have held in the past 65 years.
This polarisation is already well advanced. In the December state assembly elections, the BJP’s vote rose by nine percent in Madhya Pradesh, but the Congress’ vote also increased by 6 percent. The rise took place at the expense of third parties and independents who lost three quarters of their share of the vote. In Rajasthan 8 of the BJP’s 12 percent increase in vote came at the expense of third parties, and only four percent from the Congress. In Chhattisgarh too both parties increased their share of the vote at the expense of local parties and aspirants.
But the eruption of the AAP is speeding it up. For the Delhi elections showed that where there is an alternative to both the Congress and the BJP, the have –nots will prefer to vote for it. Should this happen, the next election will not yield a stable government, confidence in Idia’s future will crash once more, foreign exchange will rush out, and the rupee will tumble to depths never dreamed of before.
It comes as no surprise therefore that today, as Arvind Kejriwal prepares to take on Modi in Varanasi, the possibility that the AAP will cut severely into the ‘Modi wave’ has begun to force heads of Indian and foreign banks and corporations to rethink their options. In the coming weeks this uncertainty will percolate into India’s middle bourgeoisie and speed up its rush to the security offered by Modi.
There can be little doubt that the BJP under Modi will be able to revive India’s growth. But it is equally certain that he will give short shrift to the dream of accountability and equity that AAP has awakened in the vast urban and rural masses. In the weeks that follow the disappointment of defeat and the loss of hope will percolate from the large to the small towns, and from there into the villages. Modi’s blatant disregard for Muslim sensibilities will further alienate large sections of that community.
In the coming years , therefore, three powerfully explosive forces, that are separate and still largely dormant today will coalesce to create a more dangerous confrontation than any India has known. There are the Maoists, the disaffected urban working class, and the Muslim underclass. The further this polarisation progresses the less space will it leave for democracy to function. For democracy needs a middle space of uncommitted voters who can bring about changes of policy and government by shifting their vote from one party or coalition to another. The guardians of this middle space are the members of civil society, and the flagbearers of civil society are the media. Today the extent to which the collapse of economic growth and the acute insecurity it has created in the propertied classes has erased this middle space and endangered civil society can be gauged by the openness with which the media—TV in particular – is backing Narendra Modi. This is why Kejriwal’s attacks on the media and its links with Mukesh Ambani have created no sense of outrage, except in the media itself.
Had the emerging polarisation been even-handed – had the new Left that is being born had a xlearly articulated programme that addressed the well-grounded fears of the haves as well as the have–nots, the coming election would have seen the birth of a new , deeper, and more responsive phase of Indian democracy. But today, the regional parties that could have created this Third Front against the BJP’s Goliath we have only the AAP’s David. And, however welcome Kejriwal’s call for honesty and accountability may be, his party is in no position to offer, on its own, the alternative that India ‘s large, endangered middle class so desperately needs.
Only a Third Front , that is prepared to make common cause with Kejriwal, and simultaneously reassure the Indian middle class that it will get the economy moving again, can halt the rush to Modi that has begun today . But the formation of such a front requires the perception of a common threat. And, as the bickering over seat allocation among its potential members has already shown, the putative members of such a Front have no inkling of the storm that lies ahead.

NEW DELHI: Tarun Tejpal, the founder-editor of Tehelka, has been charged with “sexual harassment, physical contact, advances involving unwelcome and explicit sexual overtures, rape, rape by a person of a woman in his custody taking advantage of his official position,wrongful restraint and wrongful confinement”. These charges have yet to be proved, but Tejpal has already spent 80 days in jail. He has done so because despite his surrender of his passport and willing cooperation with the police, he has been denied first anticipatory bail, and then bail.

Instead, the Goa magistrate’s court sent him to police and then judicial custody, routinely extended the latter every ten to 12 days and finally rejected his bail petition on January 21 on the sole, unsubstantiated accusation of the investigation officer that he had tried to intimidate her.

Tejpal is by no means the first victim of this gross abuse. In 2000 AD following operation West End, the sting operation conducted by Tehelka, that caught BJP leaders taking bribes from soi-disant arms dealers, the NDA government launched an all-out attack on the magazine—then an e-journal. Among those whom it arrested on trumped up charges of insider trading and share price manipulation was Shankar Sharma, the founder and head of First Global, one of the most dynamic of the new generation of financial companies that was coming up in Mumbai. His crime was that he owned 13 percent of the original share capital of Tehelka.
Sharma too spent three months ‘in judicial custody’ in Tihar jail before being released without any charges being filed against him. During the years of harassment that followed the police raided First Global’s offices 25 times. SEBI forced it to close, destroyed its client and revenue base, and cost its 216 employees their jobs at the height of the 1997 – 2003 recession.

The NDA government’s attack on Tehelka was even more relentless. In 2000, having been caught with its pants down, it did not arrest Tejpal. Instead it embarked upon a slow strangulation of Tehelka that had, by the time the government fell, reduced its staff from 105 to 15, and left Tejpal personally in debt to the tune of a crore of rupee.
Even that did not slake the then government’s thirst for vengeance. When, under immense media and public pressure, it set up the Venkataswami commission to investigate the bribery tapes, it included a clause in the terms of reference – ‘term D’ – that required the commission to look into “all aspects relating to the making and publication of these allegations.”

Only the veteran lawyer and columnist A.G Noorani noticed the enormity of its implications for press freedom: “Never in the half-century of the Commission of Inquiry Act 1952” he wrote, “has anybody been asked to probe the credentials of those who made the charge”.“If this move is allowed to pass muster the press will effectively be muzzled. Anytime it publishes an exposé, the government will retaliate by setting up inquiries not only into the truth of the charges, but also into the motives, finances and sources of the journal which publishes them.”

It is against this background of vendetta that the Goa government’s treatment of Tejpal needs to be examined. It is important to remember that the alleged victim did not register an FIR with the Goa police. What she asked for, in not one but two emails to the managing editor Shoma Chaudhuri, was an apology and ‘closure’ of the incident. It was the BJP government of Goa that decided to register an FIR suo moto.

The charge it levelled against him was not of sexual harassment; not of sexual molestation; not even of sexual assault, but of the terribly violent act of Rape. It was able to do so because parliament had changed the heading of “sexual assault”, given to the amendment bill to cover its widened definition of sexual crimes, with the word ‘rape’. This highly emotive word provided the Goa government, and the BJP’s leaders in Delhi, with a convenient mantle of concern for women’s rights and security, under which to re-launch its vendetta against Tejpal.

The timeline of the BJP’s statements and actions, both in Delhi and Goa, exposes the virulence of its campaign. On November 21 when Tarun Tejpal’s apology, and his resignation from Tehelka for six months, first hit the press the Goa Chief Minister, Manohar Parriker, said “ Progress of the inquiry will depend on whether the complainant registers a complaint. Because it is a body offence, the complainant has to have a role. Unless I have a complaint, I cannot prove guilt.”

But it took him only 24 hours to turn turtle: at 2.20 PM on November 22 he told Times Now that ‘a crime was a crime’ and that he had instructed the police to go after the culprit. Three hours later he told the same channel that Tejpal was the culprit. Three days later, on November 25, he made a remark to NDTV that was not only biased but vulgar: “Someone told me that this man (Tarun Tejpal) is saying that it is consensual. I wonder what he must have done within four minutes and that too in a lift.” Two days later he accused Tejpal publicly of being a “ Congress Stooge”. So much for the BJP’s impartiality and objectivity!

What made him turn turtle? The answer is a Facebook posting by Arun Jaitley on November 21. Jaitley not only pointed out that Tejpal could be accused of rape under the amended law, but that managing editor Shoma Chaudhuri could be charged with abetment, pressurising Tehelka journalists and tampering with evidence. He thus laid out all the grounds for the Goa government’s change of heart and the denial of bail that followed. In the next seven days a host of BJP leaders made 19 statements demanding punishment for Tejpal and/or Chaudhuri. In Delhi a BJP MLA led a mob that defaced Chaudhuri’s house and car.

But these public attacks tell only half the story. For behind the smokescreen they have created, the Goa police has also refused to present at the bail hearings evidence in their possession that could have mitigated the accusation of rape and inclined the magistrate towards granting bail. Among the many grounds presented by his lawyers but ignored by the judge, two stand out. The most important is that the CCTV tapes of the Hotel show that Tejpal and ‘the victim’ were in the elevator on the evening of the alleged molestation not for four minutes but two minutes and nine seconds. The second is that the “victim’s’’ accusation that Tejpal’s family visited, and threatened, her and her mother is an outright falsehood. For an email she sent the same evening shows that the visitor was her erstwhile closest friend, Tejpal’s daughter Tiya. The email thanked Tiya for her visit, but it took her only another 12 hours to change her story and claim intimidation. One can only wonder why.