R. Prasannan

get-me-an-enemy-of-my-stature

Sat Apr 11 11:03:20 IST 2026

Gyanesh Kumar and co seem to be fans of Agatha Christie. Their Election Commission might be in an SIR soup, but her grey-celled sleuth would have marvelled at the neat alphabetic order in which they have arranged the current round of polls. Polling in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry are being completed first, Tamil Nadu will be next, and West Bengal last. C’est bien, as Hercule Poirot would have exclaimed.

The alphabetic arrangement makes political sense too. Electoral politics in the latter two states is different from the other three. The contests in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry are between local rulers and their local opposition. Himanta Sarma of the BJP is fighting Gaurav Gogoi’s Congress in Assam; Pinarayi Vijayan of the communist-led front is fending off V.D. Satheesan and others of the Congress-led front in Kerala; and N. Rangaswamy’s AINR Congress’s pact with the BJP is pitted against the V. Vaithilingam-led Congress’s partnership with the DMK in Puducherry. The protagonists and the antagonists are all very local; the issues they deal with and duel over are also verily local.

Not so in Tamil Nadu or West Bengal. M.K. Stalin and Mamata Banerjee have hardly any local rivals of equal stature. Rather, they are dismissing their local challengers as nincompoops with little political worth or electoral mass. Mamata hardly utters the name of Samik Bhattacharya, Suvendu Adhikari or Dilip Ghosh. Stalin mentions Edappadi Palaniswamy, but only to call him a stooge of Narendra Modi.

To both Mamata and Stalin, Modi is the challenger. The issues they are raising are of a larger federal nature, the narrative they are raising is of a grander scale, and the enemy they are taking on is the electoral Goliath of the 21st century India.

Listen to their electoral rhetoric. Stalin launched his campaign on March 31 from Tiruvavur, with a grand-sounding federal call to “protect the rights of the state” from the NDA-AIADMK alliance. Udhayanidhi, chip off the old Dravidian block, followed suit urging voters to choose between Modi and Stalin. Virtually every issue the father-son duo raises is about Modi or the Centre—“Tamil Nadu should be ruled from Fort St George, not from Delhi,” they say.

So they dub Modi’s double engine as ‘dabba engine’, charge him with dividing people over faith, funding friends, and playing favourites with states. Instead of fighting off Palaniswamy or Nainar Nagendran, they are pitting Tamil pride against Hindi raj, Dravidianism against Hindu raj, secularism against sanatanism. If the BJP claims India is growing because of Modi, Stalin is talking of how Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Karnataka are growing despite Modi.

As in the Cauvery delta, so across the Howrah bridge. Making the best of every slip that Modi makes—calling Bankim babu as Bankim da, or Sri Ramakrishna as Swami Ramakrishna—Mamata is claiming to defend Bengali cosmopolitanism against Modi’s exclusivism. Thus, Gyanesh Kumar’s voter list revision, to her, is a Modi regime idea for disenfranchising minorities, an act as perniciously divisive as Lord Curzon’s 1905 partition of Bengal that set the Hooghly on fire.

If language pride is the basis of Stalin’s cultural identity war, it is cuisine pride for Mamata. She is pitting the Bengali’s fondness for fish against the BJP’s overtly manifested Vaishnav-sanctified vegetarianism. The gist of her messaging is simple—Modi and his BJP are everything that Bengal and Bengali are not.

The BJP’s question is: wouldn’t the waters that breed shoals of fish also let the lotus bloom?

prasannan@theweek.in

god-save-the-archbishop

Sat Apr 04 14:28:03 IST 2026

Among the several hundreds who gathered outside the cathedral where Dame Sarah Mullally was being enthroned as the first woman archbishop of Canterbury was a Catholic activist, Jane Varner Malhotra. The 57-year-old with an Indian surname, who had flown in from the US, carried a sign reading “Catholics, let’s do this”.

Easier pronounced than ordained. As in the case of humans, so with institutions—the older you are, the more rigid you get when it comes to changing your habits, pun intended. The Catholic church is older than the Anglican, tracing its origins to Jesus’s own disciple St Peter.

Indeed, the English church claims to be nearly as old. Legend has it that Pope Gregory the Great inquired about a few fair-faced boys he saw in a Roman slave market. Told they were pagan boys from the land of Angles, he exclaimed “non Angli, sed angeli” (not Angles, but angels), and sent priest Augustine to proselytise England, the Angles’ land.

Augustine converted King Ethelberht of Kent (easy job; he had a Christian wife already) in 597, built a priory and an abbey at Canterbury, and is revered as the first archbishop. The archbishopric has since survived assassinations (Thomas Beckett), beheadings (Simon Sudbury), being burnt at stake (Thomas Cranmer) and more.

Canterbury’s primacy was often challenged by York, the only other province in Britain. The matter was settled in the 14th century by Pope Innocent VI. He recognised York as ‘Primate of England’ and Canterbury as ‘Primate of All England’. That sounds like the difference between Britain and Great Britain or cyclopaedia and encyclopaedia.

But the Anglican church is actually younger than even Methuselah. In the 16th century, King Henry VIII wanted to annul—not divorce—his first marriage to his brother’s widow Catherine of Aragon (he didn’t want to be the keeper of his brother’s wife), so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, in the hope of getting a male child. Pope Clement VII, who was under the thumb of Catherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, refused, citing canon law.

Henry, who had campaigned against Protestant ideas spreading in Europe and had been honoured by the Pope as Fidei Defensor or Defender of Faith, now told the Pope to go to hell (not literally; God forgive), severed the English church’s links with Rome, and established the Church of England with himself as its head and Canterbury as the highest priestly office. But he kept the title; the monarch of England is still styled Defender of Faith.

For an old institution, the Church of England has been fairly open to reforms, especially in the post-war era, ordaining women as priests, recognising gay and lesbian rights, and now getting a woman archbishop. All the same, Anglicans outside England, especially several in Africa, are resisting change. So much so, a group of bishops met lately in Nigeria’s capital Abuja and threatened to elect Rwanda’s Archbishop Laurent Mbanda as rival to Mullally, but refrained from the move at the last minute.

The Nigerian move has sent shock waves across the global Anglican laity. For, of the 95 million Anglicans around the world, two-thirds are in Africa. Most of them are opposed to same-sex marriage, which the church in England no longer damns, and say “the majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that the Bible requires a male-only episcopalism”. The issue, they say, “is whether scripture or contemporary culture governs the life of this church”.

Anglicans in England aren’t worried. If God has been saving the king, He will save the king’s archbishop, too.

prasannan@theweek.in

persian-genies-turn-iranian-geniuses

Sat Mar 28 11:38:27 IST 2026

Mathematicians like to say Alfred Nobel’s wife was seduced by the Swedish number cruncher Gosta Mittag-Leffler, and that’s why there’s no Nobel prize in maths. Balderdash! Nobel never had a wife.

Canadian John Charles Fields made up for the short shrift given to number wizards with the Fields Medal. Unlike Nobel honours, which are usually given to sages past their prime, the Fields Medal is given to nerds below 40.

Fields Medal, too, has been partial. Since its inception in 1936 it wasn’t awarded to any woman, till 2014. That was when Maryam Mirzakhani of Iran claimed it.

Iran? A land that forces women to cover their heads and prevent girls from going to school? Yes and no. Iran’s laws expect women to wear the hijab, but they encourage girls to go to school. So much so, there are more girls studying medicine in Iran than boys; and, nearly half (47 per cent) of the students in universities are girls.

With all the dogmatism under a theocratic regime, Iranians have been proudly owning up their pre-Islamic glory when sciences flourished under the Achaemenids, the Parthians and the Sasanians, and building up on them to explore the frontiers of modern western science.

Just as India was once thought to be a land of snake-charmers and fakirs who climbed ropes, the west and the western-influenced elite elsewhere think of the entire Islamic world as lands of burqa-clad women and men who tie tea-towels around their heads. That’s exactly why the world hasn’t fathomed how Iran has developed the techno-wizardry that has helped it stand firm and fight for nearly a month against the combined missile bashing by the world’s most powerful country and the region’s strongest. A two-front war that even India dreads.

Like in the case of India post-1974 and 1998 nuclear tests, western sanctions have only boosted Iran’s home-grown technologies. When tech was denied they invented it, just as we did in the case of supercomputers, rocket gyros and carbon-carbon missile nose cones. Compared with ours, their life under sanctions has been longer in time and harder in severity; consequently, their innovations have been more successful. When their Arab neighbours were spending billions to buy F-16s, Abrams tanks, and Patriot missile-knockers, Iran was investing their fewer billions in knowledge industries as also developing and building their own war-fighting gizmos.

Spending close to four per cent of GDP on R&D (India spends a paltry 0.7 per cent; the US four), Iran is among the world’s top 25 (top 10 in a few) in nanotech, AI, robotics, pharmaceuticals, and other frontier technologies. With 4.35 million (2017 figures) students in more than 2,000 universities (India has fewer than 1,300), and more than a quarter of them in engineering sciences, Iran is not only the knowledge leader in the Islamic world, but is aspiring to be among the world leaders in technology. With all the sanctions in place, students are state-funded to enrol in western universities, and sages from abroad are invited to lecture in Iranian institutions. A decade-old count revealed that one in four Iranian PhD students was enrolled abroad, the majority in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Sweden and Italy.

Much of this transition has come about under the ayatollahs. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been particularly stressing on building a strong S&T foundation. His 20-year programme unveiled in 2005 called for an investment of $3.7 trillion to fund the transition from an oil-selling state into a techno-power.

The question is: was all the bombing by Don and Bibi aimed at knocking all this off?

prasannan@theweek.in

china-a-sleeping-kumbhakarna

Sat Mar 21 11:12:51 IST 2026

Two centuries have passed since Lord Amherst made a pit-stop at St Helena on his way back from a failed trade mission to China, and was told by the exiled emperor of the French: “Let China sleep; when she wakes she will shake the world.”

Much water has flowed down the Yellow River and other streams since. Napoleon died shortly of suspected poisoning; Amherst became governor-general of India and expanded the British empire beyond the Brahmaputra on to the banks of the Irawaddy to make the famous remark, “The emperor of China and I govern half of the human race and yet we find time for breakfast.” The empire collapsed after a century and half of lording over a quarter or more of the world; the US rose from its ruins as the western superpower and held sway for half a century and in half the world; Soviet Russia challenged it, overstretched itself and collapsed; communists took over China and are now claiming to be making it a superpower militarily, scientifically, technologically and geostrategically.

Yet the wake-up and the shake-up that Bonaparte talked about hasn’t come about. Wake-up signs were detected early this century after China caught the global optics with an Olympics in Beijing, some bullying about in the South China Sea, a bit of sabre-rattling in the Taiwan Strait, and a little muscle-flexing against India on the Himalayan peaks. Geopolitical and strategic scholars have since been spending much of their waking hours analysing China’s every factor and action that could make it a superpower—its techno excellence, its fast-growing missile might, its ocean-going navy, its command over strategic minerals, its control of the global trade chains, its fast-growing economy, its ever-running factories, and its overall socio-economic resilience. All of these, we were told, would soon give the US a run for its greenbacks, industrial might, stealth bombers, space missiles, and its much-resented political will to command lesser lands into submission.

But the dragon is still sleeping like a giant Kumbhakarna or, at best, yawning. The problem of this somnolence is easily diagnosed. China may have all the attributes of a superpower—money, minerals, missiles, manufacturing plants, digital skills and even AI wizardry, but it lacks two things. One, the political will to command countries. Two, the soft skills that a superpower needs for making the rulers of submitting states feel comfy in its tent—a sort of Pax Sinica, much like Pax Britannica or Pax Americana.

Look at how Beijing is responding to the Connecticut Yankees’ war against the Achaemenian ayatollahs, who had been their friends. The self-styling superpower hasn’t been able to lift even a diplomatic finger, let alone a military one, to save Iran, or even to persuade the trigger-happy Don to stop shooting and try talks.

This despite China being hit directly by the blockade of the Hormuz Strait. Much of the oil that greases China’s much fabled industrial machine comes through the strait. Yet China has meekly accepted the fait accompli, and started looking towards its only strategic ally, Russia, for oil.

Indeed, Cold War history tells us that superpowers are loath to confront each other militarily, but fight only through proxies. So it might be with China. But where are China’s client states who would take up cudgels on its behalf?

China is yet to develop strategic stake in distant lands, and defend them against others. Till it does, it will remain a sleeping Rip Van Winkle with his trusty musket rusting away, and decades of eventful history passing him by.

prasannan@theweek.in

carney-sees-evil-in-the-world

Sat Mar 14 11:19:47 IST 2026

The similarities between Canada and Australia are striking. One is close to the North Pole, the other to the South Pole. Both are in the Commonwealth, have too much land, too few people and a lot of uranium.

Together, they produce a third of the world's uranium and lithium. Both have had now-hot now-cold ties with India. Canada signed a nuclear deal with India in 2010, Australia signed a uranium sale deed in 2014, but both had been largely holding on to their stock, thanks to their domestic politics.

There are dissimilarities, too. Australia plays Test cricket, Canada doesn’t. Few Australians speak French; a quarter of the Canadians do. Canada didn’t have enemies around; Australia has distant China to worry about in the Indo-Pacific.

Last week Canada’s PM Mark Carney landed in Delhi and signed a $2.6 billion uranium deal. The Canadians were India's oldest atom-mates. Homi Bhabha, who taught us nuclear physics, had a passion for rowing river-boats. His teammate at Cambridge was a Canadian, Bennett Lewis. Lewis became Canada's atomic boss just as Bhabha came to head India's.

Bhabha asked his team-mate to help build a reactor in India; Lewis sent his men. They built Cirus. Then came the Candu (Canada Deuterium Uranium Reactor)-type reactors for Rawatbhata in Rajasthan. Its technology has been replicated in other reactors.

When India tested a bomb in 1974, Canada said the plutonium was taken from Cirus, and cut all links in the nuclear chain that led to India. The ties warmed up especially during the Stephen Harper-Manmohan Singh years, till Justin Trudeau came up with his half-lies about Narendra Modi’s spies having killed Sikh radicals in Canada.

Carney has since atoned for Trudeau’s sins. He has promised to work with India on small modular reactors, and told Modi that he, too, viewed terrorism, extremism and radicalisation as challenges that threaten India, Canada and the world. Next, he jetted to Canberra, where he told Anthony Albanese that the old world order is crumbling, and Australia and Canada should work together as “strategic cousins”; both are middle powers who should write the new rules that determine security and prosperity, and not “let the hegemons dictate outcomes”.

Why this change of mind? The fact is, the Canadians had been innocent to the bad ways of the world. Ever since James Wolfe scaled a cliff in the dark and captured the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759 from the French, Canada’s borders have hardly ever been threatened. They have had no enemies around who sent in infiltrators, terrorists or territory grabbers, as we have. Their only border, with the US, is the world’s longest unguarded one.

Naturally, Canadians are conditioned to be good—genetically and geopolitically. They naively championed the world’s weirdest disarmament idea—give up landmines. Poor fellows didn’t know that armies might give up, but terrorists and the Taliban, who don’t sign Geneva conventions and Ottawa oaths, wouldn’t.

They saw no evil in anyone or anywhere. This faith in liberty and decency had blinded them to make laws that are so liberal that they let even Kanishka bombers roam free. They didn’t know that their goodness was being made use of by baddies like the Khalistanis, however few they are.

Then, all of a sudden, two years ago, a big bad bully came to live next door and started eyeing the unfenced border with Canada, and claiming the Canadian compound as his. That was the first time that Canadians understood how it felt when someone coveted your home and gas-warmed hearth. Now Carney is going around preaching against hegemons. Jolly good!

prasannan@theweek.in

whos-afraid-of-irans-missiles

Fri Mar 06 15:45:26 IST 2026

Give a dog a bad name and hang him—so goes an English proverb. That’s what’s happening to Iran now at the hands of Don Trump and Bibi Netanyahu.

Iran once bore the bad name of being a bomb-maker, despite having signed the NPT in 1968. India and Pakistan got away because India had refused to sign a treaty that discriminated between the world’s five bomb-haves and the remaining have-nots, and Pakistan said ditto. Yes, there are issues on which India and Pakistan agree.

Iran, indeed, was a bomb-maker. The ayatollahs did attempt to make atom bombs, apparently to guard Iran from the bombs that Bibi had kept hidden in his basement, till Barack Obama persuaded them against the bid in 2014. But come Donald Trump in 2018, the US went back on its promises of no-sanctions, and the ayatollahs returned to their bomb labs. Last July, Don and Bibi showered bunker-busters on Iran for 12 days just in the manner “the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire” and declared that all of Iran’s atom labs have been put out of business.

Which means, Iran has been posing no nuclear threat to anyone in the neighbourhood since last July, both by Iran’s admission, and by the Don-Bibi duo’s claim. Then why are the two at war again with Iran?

Trump’s charge is that Iran is developing long-range missiles that could threaten Europe, US troops overseas, and “soon reach the American homeland”. But as any cracker-crazy kid would tell you, a 3,000-km range ballistic missile is no big threat if it carries only a conventional TNT warhead. At the end of a 9,000-km flight from Tehran to New York (as a ballistic crow would fly), an ICBM would just coast and burst like a Sivakasi rocket somewhere in a pool in Queens or Brooklyn leaving no scratch on the Manhattan skyline.

Leave alone distant New York, no mullah or ayatollah in his right senses would burn up ballistic hardware worth millions of rials just for sending burning Diwali crackers to one’s bad neighbour’s courtyard. Didn’t we see in the first Gulf war of 1991 how Saddam Hussein’s Scuds, “those inaccurate tools of terror”, as George Bush Sr called them, landed as damp squids in the sands of Israel and Saudi Arabia? They drew no blood or scald but only derisive laughter. And we are currently seeing how limited is the damage from Iran’s short-range darts that are falling in Israel, the UAE and Qatar.

So what do they have against Iran? As Israel’s charge goes, Iran has been arming the Houthis and the Hezbollah militias who have been shooting darts at Israel now and then, and at other pro-American regimes in the neighbourhood. But that’s no serious threat since Israelis have been used to life under iron domes.

The real war aim is no longer hidden. Don and Bibi have stated that they want to effect a regime change in Iran. Don’s predecessors’ bids in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up with hundreds of bodybags being sent back home. This time they want to effect a regime change from the air, leaving the dirty job of a street revolution to the Iranians themselves.

All the same, any bid to change a regime, from the earth or air—or from prithvi or akasa as Indian sages called them for DRDO to adopt names for their missiles—would end up in pataals of chaos. After 20 years of a bleeding war, the yanks left Afghanistan back in the hands of the Taliban. After prosecuting a sand-grinding war in the Mesopotamian deserts, they left Iraq, till then a progressive country with a sound techno-scientific base, in the neolithic age.

prasannan@theweek.in

vanuatu-is-no-godmans-kailasa-r-prasannan

Sat Feb 28 17:14:08 IST 2026

Most Indians wouldn’t have heard of Vanuatu. That applies to a Supreme Court judge, too. Not a matter of concern, though advisable for them to get copies of the Manorama Yearbook; it names its president and PM.

While hearing a Vanuatu man’s appeal over a bail order, Justice Sandeep Mehta exclaimed: “There is no country like that…. This country is like Kailasa,” referring to the fictitious island-republic where fake godman Nithyananda has fled with his bhakts and wealth.

No surprise in India where a high court judge, M.C. Sharma (now retired, thank God!) of Rajasthan, said peacocks don’t procreate through sex; instead peahens get pregnant by drinking the tears shed by peacocks. Considering that this entire act ought to be performed without glycerin which peacocks have no access to, the fowls would need several moments of melancholy before procreation begins. Lucky we, who procreate in pleasure, not pathos.

Let’s veer back to Vanuatu. The judge was unaware of the real Vanuatu, a Commonwealth country (earlier New Hebrides) that got freedom in 1980 from an Anglo-French joint rule, and is a UN member. The hon’ble judge was also unaware that a brother judge had only a year ago delivered a milestone constitutional judgment about governor’s powers in which an order of the Vanuatu supreme court was touched on. As a common law country, Vanuatu’s SC judgments have as much precedent value in Indian constitutional courts as do the judgments of the English, Australian, Canadian or US apex courts.

Justice Pardiwala had quoted Australian constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey’s contention that “where a constitution is prescriptive, and a constitutional breach is involved, a court is more likely to hold the breach to be a justiciable issue, even if it relates to the grant of assent to a bill”. She had referred to the opinion of Millhouse, J. in Constitutional Reference No 1 of 2008 reported in [2009] 1 LRC 453, which held that “where a country has a written constitution, the courts always have the jurisdiction to remedy breaches of the constitution. The said decision was also accepted by the Court of Appeal of Vanuatu in Republic of Vanuatu v Carcasses… which held that while a court will not otherwise inquire into or adjudicate upon issues arising in Parliament, it would be empowered to interpret and determine whether there has been a breach of a constitutional right”.

Carcasses, by the way, doesn’t refer to any cadaver material, but to Vanuatu’s former prime minister Moana Carcasses who, in a one-year stint from March 2013, indulged in several acts of corruption, but also aided the advancement of constitutional law by triggering many a legal battle over the legitimacy of his government and parliamentary actions. The land’s apex court had to adjudicate them for the benefit of the rule of law in Vanuatu, which also would help further the cause of judicial scrutiny in common law countries like India.

Otherwise, Vanuatu was in the news for all the wrong reasons last year. IPL fugitive Lalit Modi paid a crore or more to get a golden citizenship in the tax haven isle only to be revoked a month later by their current law-abiding PM with whom India has a healthy bond. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met his delegates during a 2023 visit to neighbouring Papua New Guinea, and offered them and other isle states sea ambulances, dialysis units, generic drugs, and cyber training to their techies. Later, in January 2025, he sent Vanuatu a relief cheque of $500,000 when the isles were hit by a deadly earthquake.

How sad! Fugitives from law know Vanuatu; not one of our lords of law!

prasannan@theweek.in

vande-mataram-read-the-lips

Sat Feb 21 11:35:35 IST 2026

Patriotism is a noble sentiment. It is another matter that Samuel Johnson called it the last refuge of a scoundrel. That was in another age and another context. Suffice to say, it is a positive sentiment and a unifying one in these times of strife. But, as is said, even nectar is poison if taken to excess.

We have had, and will continue to honour, a splendid national anthem all these 80 years, widely lauded for its rhythmic simplicity and its 52-second brevity, if you count out Japan’s 34-character ‘Kimigayo’ for its brevity, or England’s one-liner ‘God save the king’. No offence meant, Blighty; to each blighter, his poison.

The country, its leaders, its constitutional worthies, its soldiers, its school-goers, and of late its cinema-goers, have been doing well and straight up with Jana Gana Mana, though many busybodies have questioned whether Gurudev Tagore’s Bharata Bhagya Vidhata was the Creator of the world or the king of England. After all, he had composed the poem for the 1911 Lahore Congress, which was taking place around the time George V was setting his booted foot in Bharat. Tagore has sworn by all the vidhatas that he meant the Almighty, but the controversy has lingered on.

Anyway, as Justice D.Y. Chandrachud observed while hearing whether cinema-goers should stand up when the anthem is being played, we have been asked of late “to wear our patriotism on our sleeve”. No harm; we all like to listen to its lyricism, its rhythmic simplicity, its brevity, and its subtle expression of love towards Bharat.

Now comes a double whammy—we are being asked to wear our patriotism on both sleeves. The rulers have elevated Vande Mataram to near-anthem status, and decreed that both shall be played at official events, may be played in schools, that the masses will sing along on most occasions, and that we will have to stand still for full three minutes and 10 seconds, apart from the 52 seconds for Jana Gana Mana.

Stand at ease! I am not here to write another treatise on whether Nehru and co dropped the song’s two stanzas so as to appease the Muslims, or whether Bankim Chandra wrote the poem on a particular date, as is claimed now. We thought poets don’t just sit down and write one whole poem in one go, except impulsive versifiers like Lord Byron who could write one while undressing. That was writing at the drop of a shirt.

My worry is about certain points in the order. One, the masses ought to sing along whenever the song is sung. At the moment, how many of even our super patriots know the full song by heart?

Two, since most Indians will take a few years to memorise the heavy-duty Sanskrit words in the song for joining mass recitation, printed lyrics may be circulated. Chances are that several of us may leave the printed sheets on our seats after those events, which may be trampled upon inadvertently, leading to brawls, riots and prosecutions.

Three, since schools ‘may’, and not ‘must’, start classes with mass singing, a few schools or classes may opt out, leading to fracas between pro-singers and non-singers among teachers and parents.

Four, you needn’t stand up if a newsreel or a film shows a clip of the song as part of the story-line. But super patriots may still do, and urge others to follow, leading to brouhahas.

Five, the order says “it is not possible to give an exhaustive list of occasions on which mass singing” is expected. The result: unlisted solemn events could end in brawls between pro-singers and non-singers.

And one final question: as Chandrachud wondered, “Where do we stop this moral policing?”

prasannan@theweek.in

prime-minister-modi-replyhas-sparked-concerns-undermined-debate-and-dented-the-dignity-of-parliament

Sat Feb 14 11:09:42 IST 2026

Parliament’s first session of every year, usually the budget session, and the first session after a new house is constituted, open with an address by the president. It expounds on the government’s activities and achievements during the previous year, and sets out the policies, projects and programmes it wishes to pursue. The ruling side then moves a motion of thanks to the president; the house debates the motion; and the prime minister replies to the debate before it is put to vote and passed, most of the time without amendments.

The Lok Sabha missed one of the steps this year; the motion was passed without the prime minister replying to the debate.

It is a time-honoured tradition of courtesy extended to the head of state, evolved since the monarchy’s Restoration in 1668 which also established parliament’s supremacy in England. The king made a speech at the beginning of every session, and the house debated over the government’s policies contained in the ‘humble address’. The system has been ‘tightened up’ since 1714 during queen Anne’s reign, and over the years has evolved in most Westminster democracies as one of the most important debates in the house wherein members get to discuss matters of national or international importance.

The motion usually gets passed since the government has the majority in the lower house, though there have been occasions when it didn’t. Stanley Baldwin’s minority government failed to get its motion of thanks to king George V passed in 1924, and the government had to resign. A.B. Vajpayee’s motion of thanks to president Shankar Dayal Sharma in 1996 wasn’t put to vote, because his minority government fell on its 13th day.

What happened this time is unprecedented. The prime minister didn’t reply to the debate over the motion of thanks, with the speaker saying, he had “received credible information that some members of the Congress party could have approached the prime minister's seat and caused an unforeseen incident”.

Several issues arise. One, if there was such information, the house had the right to know where from such “credible information” had come. After all, the speaker is more of a custodian of the interests of house, than of the government. As much was established when William Lenthall told king Charles I who had marched into parliament with 400 armed men in 1642 to arrest five members: “May it please Your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and I humbly beg Your Majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this to what Your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.”

Speaker Om Birla’s concern was, "If such an incident had occurred, it would have severely damaged the dignity of the nation.” Indeed, it would have. But the speaker could have summoned the CISF to stand guard outside the house, and summoned them inside as watch-and-ward staff (a practice started recently, after the tradition of having the houses’ own watch-and-ward staff, started by the first Indian speaker of the Central Legislative Assembly Vithalbhai Patel, was dispensed with), if things went out of hand.

Now, the whole world has come to know that the government wanted to avoid a discussion over the charges that ex-Army chief Gen. M.M. Naravane has raised in his ‘non-book’ about the Galwan incident. Both the government and the speaker have fallen in the house-trap set by the opposition, who are moving to get the speaker impeached.

The result, the dignity of both the nation and Parliament are being damaged.

prasannan@theweek.in

when-power-runs-in-the-family

Sat Feb 07 11:05:57 IST 2026

All the aayis, taayis, mamis, kakis and mulgis in Maharashtra and their elder sisters elsewhere are celebrating that their state has got its first woman deputy CM in Sunetra Pawar. Indeed a great moment, except that she has got the post as a legacy of her deceased husband. Nothing to be ashamed of. Lady Astor became the first woman to take a seat in the House of Commons, because her husband had to give it up when elevated to the House of Lords.

This has been a problem more with India and most oriental democracies. Sri Lanka had two woman rulers, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Chandrika Kumaratunga—both from the same family. Indonesia had Megawati Sukarnoputri, Pakistan had the Bhutto daughter, Bangladesh had the two daughters of the two Rahman clans, and more.

No different in India either. With all respect to them including Sunetra, their political acumen and administrative abilities, the fact remains that several women—right from Indira Gandhi who was the world’s second woman PM—reached positions of power because they came from political families, either by birth or marriage (much the same about several men too). This is not to forget a few illustrious exceptions like Jayalalithaa, Mayawati or Mamata Banerjee, who came up on their own and ruled, or have been ruling, with more grit than most of the men who have ruled their states before or after.

Sunetra was born in a political family. Her brother was an MP, and she married into Maharashtra’s most influential and powerful political family headed by one of India’s most regarded, even by his opponents, living politician.

She entered active electoral politics during the 2024 general election. She contested from Baramati and lost to incumbent MP Supriya Sule—an overreach, considering Baramati had been the seat of the family patriarch Sharad Pawar who had legated it to daughter Supriya. After all, in an Indian family pecking order, daughter-in-law or niece-in-law, comes much after daughter. Especially so, if that branch has been staying a wee-bit estranged from the patriarch. Sunetra lost by a margin of 1.58 lakh votes, and has been in the Rajya Sabha since.

To repeat, this is not to denigrate Sunetra’s achievements, or those of other illustrious women who have made it to positions of power. Such thoughts are as far away from my mind as Bihar’s Rabri Devi is from Britain’s Margaret Thatcher.

Much as Narendra Modi and Amit Shah scoff at the dynasticism in the Congress, the fact is that it is regional parties, including several of the BJP’s allies, that are practising family politics more than the national parties. Among the largest political dynasties are Tamil Nadu’s Karunanidhi clan which sent several sons, nephews and daughter Kanimozhi into politics, the Reddys of Andhra Pradesh who sent the wife (Vijayamma) and daughter (Y.S. Sharmila) of the erstwhile patriarch into politics, the Raos of Telangana (K. Chandrashekar Rao and K.T. Rama Rao), the Gowdas of Karnataka where patriarch Deve Gowda’s two sons and two daughters-in-law were/are in legislative or local bodies, the Yadavs of Bihar and the Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh.

Haryana, where the political fight of the late 1970s onwards has been between a couple of Lal clans, and has been the most male chauvinistic state (where several daughters have been prevented from being born, and where they are now importing brides for their boys) has also encouraged their girls into politics. Erstwhile patriarch Devi Lal’s grandson Ajay Chautala has sent his wife Naina to the assembly, while clan head Bansi Lal’s daughter and daughter-in-law have been in the state and Union legislatures.

prasannan@theweek.in

military-medals-no-bars-please

Sat Jan 31 14:36:34 IST 2026

Two decades or so ago, a soldier won a Sena Medal for a second time. A mofussil paper wrote he had won a medal, but been barred from wearing it. Most readers, village simpletons, thought their fauji beta had done something wrong, and been ‘barred’ from wearing his medal.

Nothing of the sort. Blame a poor scribe’s ignorance of the fauji lingo, or the military’s mulish refusal to speak in ‘civil’ tongue (no offence meant) when they communicate with civvies. In this case, the press note listing the year’s R-Day honours had mentioned ‘Bar to Sena Medal’ against the trooper’s name. Scribes regular on the defence beat know ‘bar’ means the soldier is getting the same honour for a second time (when a bar or a clip gets attached to the medal). Since small papers can’t afford full-time defence scribes, and get their generalists to decipher the hieroglyphics of the honours list, some poor drudge comes out with such bloopers every year.

This year’s list too reads like the Rosetta Stone: “Bar to Sena Medal: 3010203A L/HAV SATYA PAL SINGH, SM, 6 RAJPUT.” No secret code—3010203A is the winner’s Army number; L/Hav means lance havildar; Satya Pal Singh his name; SM means the Sena Medal he won earlier; 6 Rajput is the 6th battalion of the Rajput regiment; and you know the ‘bar’.

As a defence correspondent for two decades from the early 1990s, I had drilled into several brass-hatted brains, and even at commanders’ conferences attended by chiefs and C-in-Cs which I had been honoured to address, to use ‘civil language’ in their public interfaces. They have all laughed at the poor scribe’s ‘bar’ plight tale, nodded their heads to my suggestions, but ‘bars’ and slashes still mar their communiques. I still dread every January 25 evening when fellow-scribes call me, as if I were an Alan Turing, asking me to decipher a trade called ‘ACH GD’, whether ‘TELST RTO’ is Army’s driving licence office, and SEW is the guy who stitches buttons on their uniforms.

Gallantry citations are worse! The Chakra winner might have ‘neutralised’ (killed or wounded) an enemy company single-handedly, and captured a post. But the release would say, at some point of time he had ‘made contact with the enemy’. A shocked scribe once asked me: “What is this? Did he go and meet the enemy?” I pacified him saying, ‘to make contact with the enemy’ means becoming aware of, spotting, or engaging the enemy in combat.

Indeed, facts are finger taps away these days, and any scribe with a smartphone can get them in seconds. But the lists arrive late evening, and how many 1,000 seconds would a poor drudge take to decipher the codes in which 400-odd medals are couched, and translate them into Assamese, Marathi, or Telugu before his first edition closes? Editors, busier with ‘more important’ Padma awards, would list a few of the higher ranks and move on.

There, we commit a cardinal crime. Honours are more sacred for the YOs (find out!), JCOs and ORs, than for the star-ranked brass. A village home that had sent its brave boy to the fauj, and had heard he had done proud in Kupwara or Nowshera, would be waiting to read in the papers if he had been honoured. His kith and kin would be proud, they would keep the paper clipping framed on the wall; so would his neighbours, schoolmasters, playmates, and his love-lorn maiden, who would all be toasting with laddoos, pongal or payasam.

It is tough for the fauj to change. Please don’t. Have it the way you want. But can’t you just put an asterisk at the phrase ‘bar to SM’ and add a footnote on what it means, or give a glossary of your MWOs, TELST RTOs, and ACH Gds?

prasannan@theweek.in

mumbai-mayor-and-a-cats-luck

Fri Jan 23 18:03:25 IST 2026

In the mid-1980s, Manchester moved to abolish lord mayors, and have plain mayors. Outraged, The Economist, the custodian of traditional English values, wrote: if that lad Dick Whittington had gone to London with his cat and become the city’s chief metropolitan councillor, nobody would have remembered him. The exact words might have been a bit different; I am quoting from my fading memory. The idea was to highlight why mayors were ‘worshipful’, and lord mayors ‘right worshipful’.

There are several versions of that lad’s tale. The most popular, told as a fable, is that orphan Dick walked from Lancashire to London hearing that its “streets are paved with gold”, but found it all cold. A kind-hearted merchant Fitzwarren gave him bed and a cook’s job. When his master’s ships were sailing to distant lands, Dick gave him his cat to be sold. The ship landed at Barbary coast which was infested with rats; Dick’s cat and her litter killed them all.

Pleased more than a Cheshire cat, the host king, a Moor, rewarded the merchant with pots of gold. On return to London, the good Fitzwarren gave it all to Dick, who too took to trading, made a fortune, lent money to the king, was knighted (who would have remembered him as Sir Richard Whittington?) and became the Lord Mayor of London for four terms from 1397 to 1419.

The story has the right period setting—the Black Death, the early sea-faring days, the rise of mercantile cities, and the early signs of what Karl Marx called a new bourgeois class’s rise to political power. Though we no longer have ‘lord’ mayors, and though no Tom, Sir Dick or Harry is known to have adorned the post, India’s most mercantile city still holds its mayors in high esteem. Why else are Devendra Fadnavis, Eknath Shinde and their partymen, allies in the Maharashtra government, scrambling like a clowder of cats over the mayorship of Mumbai?

Truth be told, Mumbai’s mayor wields hardly any power. A civil servant, of the ubiquitous IAS kind, wields it as chief commissioner, and a standing committee of elected councillors virtually holds the purse. No small kitty that. Mumbai has an annual budget of about Rs75,000 crore, more than four times of Delhi, and much more than of several states. Though wielding little statutory power, just being in that worshipful seat gives the mayor tremendous political clout, next perhaps to the chief minister, home minister and finance minister of Maharashtra. No wonder, Shinde is ‘herding his cats’ and hiding them in a hotel, knowing well that fatter cats from the rival Uddhav Thackeray camp of the Shiv Sena may pounce on them.

But who among their councillors are the parties thinking of as mayor? That would depend on who Dame Luck favours. Literally! The rule is that the mayorship ought to be available to scheduled castes, tribes, backwards and women. Which category would get the job is decided by a draw of lots and not by rotation. Unfair, isn’t it? Parties can propose candidates only after the raffle decides which category would get it this time.

The problem is that no party has enough councillors of its own, and every party would need an ally’s or an opposition party’s support to make a mayor of its choice. Shinde has asked the larger BJP’s support to make his guy a Mr or Ms Mayor, but the BJP is turning the tables on him by asking for the mayorship of neighbouring Thane, where Shinde’s men have a majority of their own to make their man the mayor.

Give it, Shindeji! After all, Pitt is to Addington, as London is to Paddington. So is Mumbai to Thane.

prasannan@theweek.in

elgin-ephesus-and-erdogan

Sat Jan 17 11:23:01 IST 2026

Lord Elgin was wrong. Not the eighth earl whom we know as a viceroy of India, but his more famous father, the seventh who had carted away the Parthenon Marbles from Athens during 1802-1812. Elgin feared the Ottoman Turks, who had occupied Greece, might vandalise them.

I used to believe him, and spent a whole afternoon once in the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles rooms, thinking of and thanking him. Now, after a 10-day Christmas-New Year holiday in Turkiye, I am convinced the Ottomans would have guarded the marbles and all the Hellenic sites, relics and ruins even better.

The Turks’ capture of Constantinople in 1453 changed the world from medieval to modern by forcing Europe to seafare, see new lands, gain knowledge, ‘renaissance’ themselves, invent machines, (colonise lesser peoples), and usher in the age of science and reason. The Turks, too, captured and conquered as their forefathers had; they too destroyed much, but preserved more, and built still more.

So much so, Turkiye has a lot to show you as their own family silver, and not of ‘others’—Hellenic sites of Troy (where, like Dr Faustus, I hallucinated Helen was hanging on to my arm; it was my wife), debating halls of the pagan Greeks and champion arenas of the Romans, Hercules’ gate, Nike’s images, Byzantine ruins including Mother Mary’s supposed retirement home in Ephesus with its topless towers and memories of epistles received from St Paul, and of course the crown city from where Constantine the Great lorded over Christendom, and Justinian decreed Lex Romana.

The city retains its Byzantine soul after 575 years of Muslim rule. The Byzantine walls cannonaded by Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 have been rebuilt. Basilica Cistern, the underground reservoir that supplied water to the city for 2,000 years, is still held up by Roman columns on whose bases are sculptured the fiery head of the Greek demoness Medusa. (Look away, you may turn to stone.) Old churches are still there, new were built during the zenith of Ottoman glory. A beautiful 1898 Bulgarian Orthodox church stood close to our rooms in Istanbul; an old wooden Armenian church stands at the square of a popular shopping spot.

Hagia Sophia is there, standing proud with its murals and mosaics, including the one depicting Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and a divinely-inspired fantasy of Constantine showing a model of the city to Jesus and Mary, and Justinian I a model of Hagia Sophia. The shrine remains as pristinely Christian as was the model, of course with the rebuilds done by successive Byzantine rulers.

Then what has Erdogan done? Well, he has let Turkish Muslims use a hall for prayers, without any way harming or hurting the structure, its murals or its thousands of visitors who come from across the world. He has his political reasons for that; more about it some other time.

Most Turks I met were eager to see India, meet Indians, trade with India, and can’t understand the current chill in ties. They are proud of what they are—a member of NATO, the gateway to Europe, the guardians of the Bosphorus who can block or lock up Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea fleet, and a people of both culture and technology. They may like to join Pakistan’s newfangled alliance, so has Saudi Arabia who are our friends.

They are a happy people. Bars serve fine wine and vile arrack (raki) till 2 am (the one closest to my abode was named Erdogan Bar). They take everything with a smile or a laugh, except any vile word on Ataturk. They revere him as we do Gandhi; you see his pictures and statues everywhere, and not even one of the dictator Erdogan.

prasannan@theweek.in

march-to-caracas-yankee-oil-doo

Sat Jan 10 15:20:36 IST 2026

Lefties and liberals want Narendra Modi to condemn Don Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. All invasions are bad; innocents get shot. But if we condemn one, shouldn’t we condemn all?

When Leonid Brezhnev’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, we looked the other way. When the Russian bear rolled down into Afghanistan, Indira accused Andrei Gromyko, without anyone hearing, of “bringing the cold war to our doorsteps”. We didn’t condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. We kept quiet when Benjamin Netanyahu invaded Gaza. There are more.

Military-pacted, non-aligned, neutral or simply spineless, every ruler acts in his country’s supreme self interest when confronted with global crises. So it was with Nehru and Indira; so it is with Modi.

The same with Trump. The philanderer-president may be accused of all the seven cardinal sins or more, but concede one virtue to him—he practises what he preaches.

Look at his Venezuelan adventure. He had told the whole world and its elder brothers—Putin, Xi, Starmer, Macron, Merz &c—that he wouldn’t let any carpetbagger from the east ride into the American continent and take control of its vast assets. This “Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine”, proclaimed late November, had warned he would “deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets in our hemisphere”.

This column had discussed the Monroe doctrine then. Annoyed with the European powers fighting their colonial wars on the American continent, US president James Monroe told them in 1823 to keep off the New World; in return the US wouldn’t poke its nose in European affairs.

Venezuela is the first place where Trump is practising the doctrine. He may have given several reasons for ousting Maduro—he was a tyrant, a drug lord or even a mad dog. But the real sin of Maduro in Trump’s eyes was that he had stepped out of the Monroe rekha—he was giving control of Venezuela’s oil fields, the largest in the world, to non-hemispheric actor China—and he was arming himself with Chinese weapons. Not in my backyard, decided Trump. Now, among the first things Trump said after ousting and arresting Maduro is that he would control the oil fields.

The libs are cheesed off with Trump also for letting Maduro’s 2-I-C Delcy Rodriguez, perhaps a partner in his crimes, take command, and not the Nobel-winning liberal icon Machado. I would say, for the first time, we saw Trump following the norms of democracy at least in letter. Venezuelans had elected Maduro and Rodriguez to rule them, and sent Machado to lead the opposition. Now when there’s a vacancy at the top, it’s the number two among the elected rulers who should fill the post, and not the one who had lost the polls.

How would the invasion impact the world? As lawyers say, here the Monroe doctrine ought to be ‘read with’ the Trump corollary. In return for keeping their messy fingers out of the American pie, Monroe had also promised to keep off Europe’s nasty post-Napoleonic politics dictated by Prince Metternichs and Lord Castlereaghs.

Trump has been saying much the same ever since he came to power the second time, seeking to MAGA by minding its own business and stop intervening or bankrolling other people’s wars. So, don’t be surprised if he lets Putin have his way in Ukraine or looks the other way if China arm-twists Taiwan.

Now, what about us? Well, haven’t we always found our own ways and pacts of convenience?

prasannan@theweek.in

crimes-and-confessions-copy-pasted

Sat Jan 03 10:54:46 IST 2026

Allow me a bit of self-praise and a confession. I scored good marks in school, never cheated, but once helped a buddy to cheat. The bloke copied my essay verbatim, and got caught by repeating my mistakes.

Our sleuths are as naive as my buddy at times. Look at the confessions of the 13 accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blast case (187 killed; 817 hurt). Making use of anti-terror laws that allowed confessions to cops as evidence, they got all the 13 to sing and sign their sins. It didn’t need rocket science for the Bombay High Court judges to find the statements were all from the same template, extracted through torture and tutoring. They read so similar—names, dates and deeds minorly altered—that the judges made comparative charts of the texts of the 13 confessions. Straight copy-paste jobs! Worse, even the police medics had recorded torture marks on the accused’s bodies. The court had no go but to let them go, a few weeks ago.

No different was the case of the necrophiliac of Nithari, Surinder Koli. The cops told us he had raped 20 young women and kids, killed them, had sex with the dead, chopped their organs, and even ate parts of them. We believed because, in our eyes he looked like Renfield, that servant of Count Dracula who eats spiders and bugs. In this case, a dark-skinned dalit, living in a large mansion with an evil lord who was away during the day pursuing his own sins.

But the law lords of the Supreme Court found the police story no more credible than one of old Magyar wives’ tales, and that Koli had been tortured and tutored to confess. He retracted on the confession in court; there was no trace of blood in the castle kitchen where he had killed 20 young women and kids, danced his necrophilic numbers, or ate his cannibalistic repasts. They also found the recovery of the murder knives and the dead ones’ bones from a drain was a stage-managed drama. They let him go, a mental wreck after having spent 18 years in the lonely death row and once having been readied for the gallows.

Both acquittals outraged us, honest citizens who had swallowed the police stories hook, line, sinker, limbs and bomb shards. To us, all the accused had fitted the villain bill—Koli because he was dark and a dalit, the other bunch because they followed a faith that the majority didn’t, were poor enough to be recruited for evil, smart enough to make bombs, and evil enough to trigger them in trains to kill people.

Officers of the law, it is time you changed your ways. Our colonial era laws are claimed to have been modernised, but your probe tools remain as darkly mediaeval as the Spanish Inquisition. Torturing suspects, tutoring witnesses and faking proofs will no longer get you conviction from smart defence counsel and wiser judges. Forensics offers you new ways of solving crimes. Try technology; it would work better and yield you better conviction rates.

Friends, Indians and countrymen! Shed your prejudices, or keep them aside when it comes to matters of justice. Stop getting outraged with the judges if they let go a few who you wanted to hang. Get outraged about the injustice done to the suspects who waste away their youth in prisons just because they had been born in the wrong caste or followed the wrong faith.

On a lighter note, remember Hercule Poirot’s words, in the film version of The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, to Captain Hastings who had the habit of jumping to conclusions: “Merely because a man does not offer you a drink, Hastings, does not mean that he is necessarily guilty of other crimes.”

prasannan@theweek.in

the-maria-von-trapp-in-rahul-gandhi

Sat Dec 27 11:07:49 IST 2025

Remember the song of the Nonnberg Abbey nuns about the novice Maria in The Sound of Music? “Out of focus and bemused”, “unpredictable as weather”, “as flighty as a feather”... They had “many a thing to tell her, many a thing she ought to understand. But how do you make her stay, and listen to all you say?... How do you keep a wave upon the sand”? In short, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”

Replace the she’s in the song with he’s, and her’s with his. Bingo! You get what every Congress leader is saying about Rahul Gandhi—“out of focus and bemused”, “unpredictable as weather”, and “as flighty as a feather”. They have many a thing to tell him, many a thing he ought to understand; but how do they make him stay, and listen to all they say?

In short, how do you solve a problem like Rahul?

Among the first to feel so was Himanta Sarma. After several pleas a decade ago, he made Rahul stay for him, but couldn’t make him listen to all he had to say. Sarma found the young Gandhi keener on feeding his dog than on listening to what crises were dogging the Congress in Assam. Disgusted, Sarma quit the party, joined the BJP, and rose to be the Congress’s nemesis in Assam.

Mohammed Moquim, the latest, didn’t reach that far. For three years the poor Odisha ex-MLA had been seeking an audience with Rahul. Frustrated, he wrote to his mother about the “emotional disconnect felt by workers across India, who feel unseen and unheard”. No sooner had he made the letter public, than he was kicked out of the party.

Every opposition MP might have felt much the same during the closing days of the winter session of Parliament. The Narendra Modi regime was moving to remove the name of the revered Father of the Nation from modern India’s kindest-ever poor welfare scheme, introduced by a Congress-led government—one that had saved millions of Bapu’s daridra narayanas (God in the poor) from hunger, one that had been the closest to Rahul’s mother’s heart, and one that the leftists had hailed for its bleeding-heart welfarism and the rightists had applauded for putting money in the pockets of the poor who began buying shop goods.

The outraged opposition MPs expected Rahul, as the hon’ble leader of the opposition, to come charging, lead the assault on the government, and defend the honour of the Mahatma. In vain. They couldn’t make him stay, or listen to all they say. Like Maria who was singing in the woods when she should have been praying in the chapel, he was riding a BMW bike in Munich instead of leading the charge in Parliament. When asked, partymen said sheepishly that he was discussing democracy and global climate responsibility with German think-tanks. Any better ideas?

There is more. Rahul had shaken the nation and the whole democratic world with his stellar show over the vote theft charge, and had led a rally through Bihar. But when he found his allies had other campaign issues for the assembly polls, he simply scooted, only to surface towards the end of the poll campaign. By then most Congress voters had bolted.

Mend your ways, young man, like Maria did. The flighty-as-a-feather girl matured when she found the von Trapp kids needed love, care and attention, and she could provide them all those. Your mother had been providing all these to the Congress for the last quarter century and more. She is tired; she needs rest.

It’s time you stayed, and listened. Congressmen have many a thing to tell you, and many a thing you ought to understand. Give them your ear immediately. They have very little patience left.

prasannan@theweek.in

area-of-the-globe-pie-is-cubed

Sat Dec 13 11:45:18 IST 2025

Floating in his private pool, China’s helmsman Mao Zedong shared his strategic vision with visiting Soviet strongman Nikita Khrushchev in 1958: “You look after Europe, and leave Asia to us.” Obviously, he expected the US to withdraw into its pre-war Monroe world of the Americas, thus making the world tripolar.

Khrushchev, wiser to the world and with a European disdain for the rustic comrade from the eastern paddies, retorted: “No one has authorised us to look after Europe; who has authorised you to take care of Asia?” Indian diplomat T.N. Kaul has recorded this in his memoirs A Diplomat’s Diary. Guess how Kaul learnt of this private chat? Khrushchev’s interpreter told him. Lesson for diplomats: walls may not have ears, but interpreters may have wagging tongues.

What Mao wanted from Khrushchev, Don Trump is delivering to Xi Jinping. With his national security document, a 21st century version of the 19th century Monroe doctrine, Trump is focusing on the American continent to make the US great again, leaving most of the rest of the world to be sorted out between Xi and Vladimir Putin.

Let’s sort out this Monroe conundrum. Finding that European powers were fighting their colonial brawls on the American continent, US president James Monroe told them to keep off the New World; in return the US wouldn’t poke its nose in European affairs. This 1823 statement is thought to have been a definitive proclamation of American isolationism.

Much water has churned the Atlantic and the Pacific since. Scholars now see traits of isolationism and interventionism in America’s global conduct—isolation during the 19th century, intervention in World War I, isolation during the Great Depression, intervention during World War II and thereafter. The fifties and the sixties saw the armed eagle flying around the world, but in 1969 Richard Nixon attempted, in vain, with his Guam doctrine, to take the Vietnam-scarred eagle back to its Monroe nest.

Jim Carter let the eagle fly out as a dove of peace, but it got its wings burnt over the Persian sands. Since the days of Ron Reagan who succeeded him, the eagle has been poking its beak in every conflict on every continent. Trump thinks it’s all been a waste of US tax-payers’ money.

Trump has found a way to MAGA—invoke the Monroe doctrine “to restore American pre-eminence in the western hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region. We will deny non-hemispheric competitors [read China] the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets [like the Panama Canal] in our hemisphere”. He calls it a “Trump corollary to the Monroe doctrine”.

Got the point? He won’t let any eastern tyrant control assets on the American continent, invest in American military industries or dump cheap goods in American markets. He will guard the Caribbean and Latin American lands as his backyard. (Venezuelans, listen!) Xi may do whatever he fancies in most of Asia or Africa as long as those actions don’t threaten American interests there. (Taiwan, Japan, Australia, India, breathe easy!) Russia could be contained and confined—so one may assume—to eastern Europe and central Asia, and roped in to re-establish “strategic stability”.

Western Europe? Getting crowded by Asiatics and Africans, they are losing their “western identity” and facing “civilisational erasure”. They better control the inflow, and spend more euros on arming themselves.

If they don’t? Let the devil, the mullahs or Putin take them.

prasannan@theweek.in

a-vikram-bhatti-tale-from-bengaluru

Sat Dec 06 10:53:14 IST 2025

Though blessed by Indra to rule for a thousand years, Vikramaditya is said to have lived for two thousand years. Behind that was a clever trick played on the gods by his sorcerer-brother Bhatti.

Indra gifted Vikramaditya with a magical throne, and blessed him to rule from it for a thousand years. Bhatti, who wanted to be his brother’s lifelong companion, prayed to Kaali for a similarly long life. Kaali, to test his devotion, asked him to bring Vikram’s severed head. Vikram heard about the gory demand and happily cut off his own head for the sake of his brother. Bhatti took it to Kaali; she gifted him a lifespan of two thousand years.

Now, Bhatti sneered at the goddess saying, he no longer had any faith in the boons given by the immortals. Indra had blessed his brother to rule for a thousand years, and the guy was lying there headless at a ripe young age. Kaali gave an amused smile and brought Vikram back to life.

As in Murphy's law, so in Vikram-Betaal stories—every solution creates a new problem. The siblings wanted to live together and die together, but now one would rule a thousand years, and the other would live two thousand. The resourceful Bhatti found a way out. He asked Vikram to rule from the throne for six months a year, and spend the remaining six months in the forest (where, to kill boredom, he’d amuse himself carrying corpses and a Betaal!) while Bhatti would rule from the throne as his regent. To cut a long fable short, the duo lived for two thousand years, and died together.

By now, you might be wondering if this column is turning into a fable corner. Two weeks ago we likened Prashant Kishor’s fate with that of a soothsayer in a Tenali Rama tale. Now here I am telling you a Vikram-Betaal tale. What next? The Panchatantra? Aesop’s Fables? Arabian Nights? Or Arthur’s knights?

Can’t help, good readers! Our politics is increasingly turning as bizarre as the fables. Look at what’s happening in Karnataka where Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his deputy D.K. Shivakumar are playing out a Vikram-Betaal farce.

Two and a half years ago, the two joined hands to defeat the BJP, bringing an otherwise sinking Congress to power in Karnataka. Sidda, the elder of the two and thus the Vikram in our tale, made a claim to the magical throne in Bengaluru, saying he had the support of more people, especially the backward castes which the Congress would need in the days to come.

DK, the schemer, strategist, and the party’s fund-raiser, conceded the claim after much haggling, but suggested a ‘fabulous’ Bhatti scheme for the regime to survive five years—Sidda would rule for half of the regime’s five-year term, and leave the throne to DK for the remaining half.

Somewhere along the line, the script varied from the fable. When the time came for Sidda to go for his vanvaas, he refused. Now Bhatti finds himself outwitted by his elder bro. He looked towards the high command heavens, but found the gods and goddesses split into two camps.

Last heard, the crisis is brewing like south Indian filter coffee in the percolators in both leaders’ homes. They have been inviting each other to power breakfasts in their homes, and sorting out their electoral conundrums over coconut chutney and Mysuru idlis and sambar.

Bon appetit, gentlemen! Stop your squabbles, and count your blessings. You still have a state to rule, unlike your partymen in most of the rest of India. Who knows, the gods may double your blessings in 2028, if you behave well and rule wisely like Vikram and Bhatti.

prasannan@theweek.in

is-it-miltons-law-mlords

Sun Nov 30 09:05:31 IST 2025

John Milton seems to have foreseen four centuries ago how our law-makers and law judges would behave. He gave us the word ‘pandemonium’, which we have been using freely for describing disorder in Parliament. Now with its answer to a presidential reference last week, the Supreme Court has shown us what the blind poet meant by ‘confusion worse confounded’.

First, the facts of the case. There used to be a problem with Articles 200 and 201 in the Constitution. The articles say a bill passed by a legislature becomes law only after the governor or the president okays it. If a guv thinks a bill is flawed, he may return it to the house or refer it to the president. But the articles don’t set a deadline for any of these actions. Governors who didn’t like their governments, or the bills presented to them, have been making use of this silence of the statute to keep bills pending. Media Miltons of the modern world called it pocket veto.

Finally, the Tamil Nadu regime of M.K. Stalin, fed up with Governor R.N. Ravi pocket-vetoing bill after bill, went to court asking the judges to set a deadline for governors to sign on the dotted line, return the bill to the house, or send it to the president. Last April, a two-judge bench said that the governor should do one of the three things within three months; if he doesn’t, the bill would be deemed to have got his assent.

Many felt that the judges had exceeded their limits and had written into the Constitution, something forbidden. The judges said they were invoking Article 142 that gave them the power to innovate the law so that “complete justice” got done. But the Union government, peeved with the judgment, got the president to send the matter again to court, this time as a reference seeking advisory opinion.

A five-judge bench headed by the outgoing CJI B.R. Gavai gave its opinion last week. They said their two brothers had erred in the April judgment, and that the court can’t give deadlines to the president or the governor.

Where’s the confusion, you may ask. Haven’t the five judges restored status quo ante-April? No; therein lies Milton’s confounded confusion.

What the two judges delivered in April was a binding judgment, applicable to the whole of India till a larger bench nullified it. Now the larger bench of five hasn’t nullified it; it has delivered only an opinion which has persuasive value, but isn’t yet the law of the land. Yet governors could argue that since the November advice came from a larger bench, it should get a higher weightage than the April judgment.

Now you wait for the fun. Several Stalins, aggrieved by their pocket-vetoing governors, would seek to notify pocket-vetoed laws citing the April order. Several Ravis, drawing strength from the November opinion, would cry foul. Classic cases of confusion worse confounded.

What else could the five judges have done, you may ask. After all, it was the president who asked them to give their opinion under Article 143. Simple! Citing that there was already a binding judgment given by their brothers in April, the five could have respectfully returned the reference unanswered, as their illustrious predecessors in M.N. Venkatachaliah’s court had done to the reference on the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute in 1994. They could also have told the government to seek a review of the April order or even seek a constitutional bench to give the final word.

They did nothing of the kind. Instead they wrote a 100-odd page opinion which did nothing new except call the Constitution swadeshi.

prasannan@theweek.in

when-stars-blinded-the-astrologer

Sat Nov 22 17:55:55 IST 2025

Emperor Krishnadeva Raya once decided to invade Bijapur. The sultan of Bijapur, knowing he couldn’t fight the Vijayanagara army, sent a smart and young astrologer to the Raya's court. The soothsayer impressed the king and courtiers with his glib talk, and drew the king into asking him how the planned war would fare. The fellow then pretended to read the royal horoscope, drew a grim face, and said the stars weren’t favourable.

The Raya was dismayed, as were his courtiers who were preparing for war. Then walked in the fabled jester Tenali Rama, actually a wise man like all jesters in the courts of the orient and the plays of Shakespeare. Rama suspected the astrologer to be an enemy agent, and began quizzing him. “Can you predict your own death?” Rama suddenly asked. The astrologer replied: “As per my calculations, I shall live up to 90.” The next moment, Rama drew his sword and cut the fellow’s head. Horrific, but everyone took it as the price for violating the shastras.

Astrologers say they can’t predict their own futures, though M.J. Akbar tells us in After Me, Chaos that emperor Humayun did. He foresaw his own death. Be that as it may, satvic jyotishis warn that if anyone can read one’s own future, one shouldn’t speak it out or seek to alter it through parihara kriyas. Humayun did neither.

Star-gazers have an earthy reason for forbidding self-prediction. Personal emotions, biases and desires could cloud your vision, leading to inaccurate predictions.

That’s what happened to Prashant Kishor. Though not an astrologer, he seemed to have been foreseeing how parties would fare in polls, and making a living out of suggesting electoral and political parihara kriyas that would ward off the doshas visiting them. Thus he is said to have strategised more than half a dozen electoral wins, including Narendra Modi’s in 2014.

But as Humayun failed in predicting the fate of his own battles, Kishor failed in foreseeing the outcome of his own election. His Jan Suraaj, launched three years ago, failed to win a single seat, and 236 of its 238 candidates forfeited deposits.

Kishor’s big mistake was to confuse strategist with leader. He was a strategist, never a leader. He had no masses to lead—neither the forwards nor the backwards, neither the majority nor the minorities, neither the moneyed nor the jobless, neither the middle class nor the low class, neither the conservative nor the liberal, neither the rightist nor the leftist. A few from every one of these classes agreed with what he said, but they were just a few among the chattering gatherings, scattered across Bihar—a few thousand jobless, a few thousand who were piqued by the liquor ban, a few thousand who were cross with corruption.

Vote for your kids, he said, meaning vote for the future; but Biharis were concerned about their present. They wanted MLAs who could get their sons freed from the thana, MLAs who could call the bank and get them a loan, MLAs who could call the collector and get their land freed from the moneylender. Kishor didn’t appear to them as one who could.

He talked principles, but gave tickets to turncoats. He had no ideology. Arvind Kejriwal may have come to power sans ideology and stayed in power for a decade, but that was in urban Delhi where there are more piqued persons than mobilised masses.

And then a fatal flaw. He ran away from the battle when it was to be joined. He had threatened to take the field at Raghopur against Tejashwi Yadav, then backed off to his strategy room.

In the end, Kishor cut the sorriest figure in the Bihar round of 2025.

zohran-mamdani-cultural-identity-new-york-mayor-indian-heritage

Sat Nov 15 11:11:20 IST 2025

Zohran Mamdani, who has Indian blood running in his Mississippi-long veins, has become New York mayor. Yet most Indians and expats, who had burst crackers when Rishi Sunak kissed the king’s hand, are washing their hands off him. Bad grammar, bad politics.

First the grammar. If you don’t want to be responsible for what someone else is doing, the right thing to do is to wash your hands of it—not off. Read King James Bible. Roman magistrate Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the Jesus case, when Jewish priests asked for his blood. Did Covid-era rules prevail under lex Romana?

Modern judges don’t get into this handwash business. They recuse themselves, or cite limited jurisdiction. They’d have said the Jesus case involved Jewish law, whereas they had been sent to administer Justinian’s law, and disposed of the case.

Rightly so, juridically and grammatically. Most of us dispose off the stuff that we want to throw away, when we can actually dispose of all the stuff with a single f.

Now let’s talk politics. Indians usually toast with scotch—these days distilled in India, and named Indianly as Indri or Amrut—when anyone with an Indian first name, middle name or surname makes it to a town crier’s post in Thimphu or Timbuktu. Yet Mamdani, who has become the lord of the richest city in the richest country, hasn’t been adopted by flag-wavers in India or Diwali lamp-lighters in America.

Last July, Mamdani had made a strong case before them. He set the Mississippi (with his mother-made masala) on fire by eating rice with hands. Yankee WASPs and such nasty creatures in the west stung him like hornets on social media with unsocial comments.

I thought all the cultural rightists and those of us who lead hand-to-mouth lives in the literal sense would jump to his side and beat the cutlery-armed white knights with bare hands. Nothing of the sort. Most of them kept their hands off him, rightly with a double f.

Why? Simple! Though his mother has an Indian surname that is spelt like a Malayali but is actually Punjabi, he was fathered by an India-born Ugandan citizen of Muslim faith.

The libs and the lefties have since adopted him to trash the Trumpists, racists, monoculturists, cultural supremacists, and running dogs of imperialists. Sociological treatises are being readied in PhD factories about culinary imperialism, bromatological bias, and gastronomical racism, while cultural nutritionists are coming out with WhatsApp treatises on the health benefits of eating with hand, quoting all the medical and spiritual texts from Arabic to Persian to Sanskrit. The hypotheses are already out on social media.

I’d say—hands off, manyavar, janab and gentlemen! When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Ayurvedic texts may tell us that it’s healthier to eat with hands, but Cardinal Richelieu invented the table knife because you can’t eat a steak with bare hands. Try it, and William Hanson will cook you alive and eat you with Sheffield cutlery.

We don’t have to impose our values on others. Eating a banana leaf-spread Kerala sadya with knife and fork would be as ridiculous as eating fish-and-chips with bare hands. There’s nothing nationalistic about either; Gandhi, the greatest nationalist who wore loincloth, also ate with a fork.

The rule is simple. Eat western food with your household silver or restaurant cutlery; eat your roti-rice and curry with your hands. Eating habits are conditioned by climatic conditions and culinary traditions.

And the ultimate lesson—eat with your hands, fork or chopsticks, but wash them well before eating.

prasannan@theweek.in

nitish-roads-or-tejashwi-jobs

Sun Nov 09 08:49:35 IST 2025

Why do we need roads? Nobody here has got a car,” a dalit lad whom I had picked up as a local guide during the 1998 general elections snapped when I complained of the back-breaking drive to Laxmanpur Bathe, the village where scores of dalits had been massacred by upper-caste men a few months earlier. In a moment I was enlightened why caste made more electoral sense in Bihar than bijli-sadak-paani promises.

Bihar’s roads were once known for their back-breaking potholes and shotgun-wielding outlaws. Biharis didn’t care two hoots or shots about either. Only outsiders bothered.

Came Atal Bihari Vajpayee selling dreams of the Golden Quadrilateral, and east-west corridors. As Biharis too, like the rest of Indians, began dreaming of silky smooth roads, Lalu Prasad promised to make Bihar’s roads as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks. The dream girl didn’t mind then, but took offence years later when she was making baby steps into politics. Lalu, who had lost power by then before he could make his promise good, said it wasn’t he but Vajpayee who had made the sexist remark. Cheek!

India’s greatest road-builders have been Biharis, not counting Atal ‘Bihari’. Check our middle-school history textbooks. We forget it was Magadha’s Asoka and his grandfather Chandragupta Maurya who are recorded to have built roads in India for the first time. They also planted trees on the sides, and dug wells for travellers to drink from—what we in the Nitin Gadkari generation call roadside amenities.

In the mediaeval age came Sher Shah Suri from Sasaram. After unseating the Mughal king Humayun, he ruled from Delhi for just five years before getting blown up in a gunpowder accident. During the short reign, the Sur left two indelible marks on India’s economic landscape—one is India’s national currency, the rupee, and the other India’s first national highway dotted with kos minars, drinking water baolis and free kitchens set in garden serais. The engineers of the East India Company would develop it 300 years later as the Grand Trunk Road.

With plenty of rivers that provided cheaper waterways, Biharis soon forgot roads, but took to the river and rail, the latter after the British built tracks across the Gangetic plain in the 19th century. The railway story of India wouldn’t be complete without travellers’ tales about ticketless passages, stolen berths, and chain-pulled halts from across Bihar.

Not just the trains, but the rail ministry itself became a Bihari fief in free India. The eight rail ministers from Bihar (the highest from any state)—from Jagjivan Ram to Lalu—pampered Bihar with new trains, new zones, divisions, locomotive plants and workshops, wheel-making foundries and more.

It was only after Nitish left the rail job and took the highroad to chief ministership that Bihar thought again of roads. The state has 4,006km of state highways today, apart from the 5,400km of Gadkari-built roads, hundreds of bridges, overbridges and flyovers, all free of potholes and outlaws, rendering Nitish’s poll campaign literally a ‘roadshow’.

Are these enough to earn him votes? Nitish thinks so. Not his rival Tejashwi. Like Dr Johnson who mocked his Scottish friend James Boswell that Scotsmen’s only prospect was the highroad to England, Tejashwi is saying the only prospects for the jobless lakhs in Nitish’s Bihar today are the rail tracks and highways that take them to the farms, factories and gig-job aggregators in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.

So what would Biharis vote for? Nitish’s roads or Tejashwi’s jobs?

prasannan@theweek.in

conmen-and-other-lovable-rascals

Sat Nov 01 15:01:19 IST 2025

A year ago, this column discussed why we love felons. That was after two convicts escaped by scaling the walls of a Haridwar jail, wearing monkey costumes. The jailers sat and watched, thinking they were watching Ramlila. As discussed then, there is a charming ingenuity about such rascality. Look at the number of films that have been churned out about jewel thieves, jail-breakers, conmen, train robbers and bank robbers—from the old wagon heists of the American Wild West and The Great Train Robbery of England to our Dev Anand’s Jewel Thief, MGR’s Ninaithadhai Mudippavan, Dharmendra’s Shalimar, Bachchan’s Mr. Natwarlal, Sholay, and several recent Akshay Kumar films. The heroes conned tycoons, hoodwinked landlords, sneaked out of prisons, robbed banks, stole jewels and our hearts. All men of ingenuity and a lovable streak of daredevilry.

Many readers told me that such ingenuity was no longer possible in the modern world of digital vigilance. Sentries no longer shout “halt, who goes there?”, but digital alarms beep, e-boom barriers block passages, and 360-degree-eyed robots shoot intruders. Prisons, treasure houses, bank vaults and state secrets are safer in the digital world than in the world of Natwarlals.

Sorry, champions of e-vigilance! There are minds cleverer than your gizmos. Recall how two years ago a few electronically naked fellas sneaked in through the world’s strongest guarded border fence without alerting a single alarm, and started another war in the Middle East? A nearly illiterate murder convict recently broke out of the max-guarded prison in India’s most literate state by growing a beard to hoodwink the cameras, and fasting himself thin so as to slip through bent window bars. The guy erred in his post-egress flight plan and got caught within hours.

A few Parisian felons have outdone everyone. They have broken into the Louvre, one of the world’s richest and most guarded museums, and sped away with a few crown jewels of France’s last imperial household—a tiara, a necklace and earrings that belonged to Duchess Maria Amalia of Parma and Napoleon’s stepdaughter Hortense, an emerald necklace and earrings of Napoleon’s wife Marie Louise, a tiara, a bodice bow and the crown of Napoleon III’s wife Eugénie, together priced at $150 million or more.

What sport! They came wearing flashy workmen’s clothes one bright autumn morning when visitors were thronging the place, erected a furniture lift on the building’s street wall, and climbed into the first floor gallery, breaking the window glass. Anyone watching them would have thought they were either repairing a window, or stealing stones. A fifty-fifty chance of getting caught, but everyone thought the former. That’s what you call a calculated risk, where everyone thinks what he wants to think.

The egress was riskier, as always. They smashed two display cases, alerted alarms, threatened guards, grabbed nine jewels, climbed down the same route, jumped on the pillions of their two mates’ motorcycles, and rode away like courier boys who had just picked up a delivery order.

Scandalised? The whole world is, but listen to what their culture minister Rachida Dati said: "We saw some footage: they don't target people, they enter calmly in four minutes, smash display cases, take their loot, and leave. No violence, very professional."

I’ll bet all the 3,000 stones and 39,000 pearls on the dress worn once by the 17th century Queen Marie de Medici that there is more than a tinge of admiration in her words. As someone said, they deserve not the jewels, but the crown itself.

prasannan@theweek.in

ashley-tellis-downfall-diplomat-spy-allegations

Sat Oct 25 10:54:56 IST 2025

The Ashley Tellis story reads a little like The Lady Vanishes, one of those Hitchcock mysteries set in the inter-war era. There’s this middle-aged English governess Miss Froy—amiable, curious and talkative as all middle-aged English governesses were in the books—travelling to London from an East European land. Strange things happen on the way—an avalanche stalls the train, a stranger is strangled to death, a maiden who had befriended Miss Froy gets knocked out, and Miss Froy vanishes. When the maiden comes to and asks about her, everyone on the train asks—Froy who?

The Tellis tale is eerily similar. An India-born American, Tellis was the toast of the diplomatic circuits in Delhi and DC during the 2000s. He was there to advise ambassadors, lobby for the nuke deal, speak at seminars, strengthen India-US ties, brainstorm in think tanks, transform Asia-Pacific into Indo-Pacific, lecture at universities, and socialise at cocktails. Delhi thought he was our man in DC; DC thought he was their man in Delhi—in the honourable sense of being a mutual friend.

Then one day in October 2025, Don Trump’s Feds knocked on his door and took him away, saying he was neither Delhi’s man in DC nor DC’s man in Delhi, but Beijing’s man in the Beltway. Suddenly, things turned around as in the case of Froy. Old pals pretended not to have known him, diplomats disowned him, universities disaffiliated him, think tanks distanced themselves, websites erased his name, corporates cut his contract, and asked—Tellis who?

Everyone in DC and Delhi was in the know. Tellis had been a critic of China, and a friend of all the president’s men under George Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and even Donald Trump-I, and of all the PM’s men under Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi. Things changed under Trump-II. As Trump found many in the world and in US politics weren’t playing the game by his rules, he unleashed a tariff war on the world, and a McCarthyist-style witch-hunt at home. There’s a heightened scrutiny of foreigners, stalking of political rivals, deep probes into China links of enterprises and academics, and fund cuts on institutions that harbour dissenting intellectuals.

What made Tellis the fall guy in Indian eyes was that he had been getting miffed with India of late. Friends say, he had meant India well, but found India wasn’t rising to his expectations. The man who had argued that a nuclear-energised India would balance China in the Asia-Pacific wrote in 2023 that India, lacking the guts to stand up to big bully Beijing, had been a bad bet for the US. The Indian intelligentsia, who wants to hear only good things said about them, just couldn’t take it.

Now, for the charges against Tellis—(a) he printed out classified papers and kept them home, (b) he had four dinners in four years with Chinese officials, (c) at dinners they chatted over Iran-China ties, US-Pak ties, emerging tech and AI, and (d) to one dinner he carried a manila envelope, and returned with a “red gift bag”.

Poor Feds! They missed the fact that all the printing jobs were done last month, whereas the dinners had taken place years and months earlier.

Now, two million-dollar questions. One, do the Feds think spies still pass on secrets in envelopes, and that spymasters give cash and rubies in red gift bags? Then they would look for genies in brass bottles and aliens landing in the Bermuda Triangle. Two, did they check whether he dined on Chinese noodles or American chop suey? The choice of the cuisine should reveal where his loyalties lay.

prasannan@theweek.in

why-happy-voter-worries-bjp

Sun Oct 19 17:14:33 IST 2025

The BJP once called itself a party with a difference. That was in the days when A.B. Vajpayee lorded over the party, determined its destiny, claimed to practise politics of principles, disallowed defectors, debated history, holidayed in the hills, read poetry, quoted Rubaiyat, cited the Ramayan, spoke in genteel phrases, ate at iftars, and ruled the land like a merrily caring Old King Cole.

Those differences have since faded away; the BJP is now much like the rest of the parties. No harm. That’s the way things should be. In politics, it isn’t good if one of them acts lofty among the nasty, sports a halo on the head, and goes around with a holier-than-thou tattoo on the forehead. Yet there’s one thing that still marks the BJP different.

Most parties, if they are ruling a land, would strive to make their people happy all the time. They would claim to be giving jobs, building roads, getting the streets policed, supplying power, erecting bridges, distributing rations, offering freebies, and doing more, so that voters would go to the polls with smiles on their lips.

Not so the BJP. They, too, strive to make the people happy when they are ruling the land, and do all the above-listed things to see smiles on people’s faces. But things tend to change when the polls approach—the party would then like to see a scowl on the voter’s face rather than a smile. It wants an angry voter, not a happy voter.

This column had noted the same on the eve of last year’s general election—that the voters were happy and the BJP was worried. The statement proved to be right; the party ended up winning fewer seats in the new Lok Sabha than in the earlier one. Worse had happened to Vajpayee. He had ruled India claiming to be making Indians 'feel good', and went to the polls saying “India [was] shining”. But like Harold Wilson, who went to the polls claiming “we never had it so good” and lost, he too bit the dust.

The memories of the 2004 defeat and the 2024 setback are haunting the BJP now, when Bihar, where the party is a partner in power, is going to the polls. Despite all what Tejashwi Yadav would carp, Bihar under the JD(U)-BJP partnership has been better-ruled than it was under the Lalu family’s goonda raj. Roads are getting built, bridges erected, girls going to schools, homes lit, factories running, and more. The voters are generally happy.

But the BJP is worried. Like the Canadian thinker William B. Munro, the BJP believes that “the average man does not vote for anything, but against something”. He doesn’t vote with his mind; he votes with his heart. So, don’t appeal to his reason; appeal to his emotion.

In short, the BJP wants an anger factor. So it has spotted a bogeyman in Seemanchal, a pop term for the Purnea division which borders Bangladesh (not exactly; a narrow strip of West Bengal territory lies in between). The party launched a campaign that Bangladeshi Muslims had sneaked into the region, and applauded from the sides when the Election Commission started a summary revision of the voter list that would weed out the bad voter.

The anger appears to have been misplaced. The weed-out drive hasn’t caught more than 400 foreigners yet (most of them Nepali Hindus), and the campaign seems to be backfiring. For two reasons. One, if indeed there are foreigners, the blame would be on the JD(U) and the BJP who have been ruling the state for most of the last two decades. Two, the campaign is embarrassing the ally JD(U) which, like other parties, would like the voter to go to the polls with a smile rather than a scowl.

prasannan@theweek.in

of-willows-and-kalashnikovs

Sat Oct 11 10:50:44 IST 2025

We jealously guard our borders. We also guard our feuds with neighbours from third party meddling. Whenever a third power offers to talk things out between us and the Pakistanis, we quote chapter and verse from the Shimla scripture and say, “Sorry, no table for three.”

India and Pakistan no longer play cricket on each other’s pitches. Yet, we have no qualms about taking our nasty sporting wars to third country playfields. We render their pitches into mock battlegrounds where we play shamelessly to each one’s raucous home galleries. And ever since fans clashed by the night in Leicester over the 2022 Asia Cup match, the constabulary in English towns have been on their sweating toes every time an Indo-Pak match took place in some cow corner of the cricketing world.

Last month’s Asia Cup matches in Dubai took the cake, but not the cup–literally. The Indian captain refused to shake the Pak skipper’s hand; a Pak player gesticulated a fighter plane crash with his fingers raised to six; another one fired imaginary shots from his bat raised in the manner in which Ajmal Kasab had raised his accursed AK-47 while sashaying into the Mumbai train terminus; and India refused to take the cup from the match-conducting ACC’s president who happened to be a minister in Pakistan. Sadly, there were no angels in white in the whole episode.

Having been a victim of Pakistani terror at Pahalgam only months ago, Team India might have found it tough to shake a Pakistani hand. Understood. But gentlemen, if we didn’t want to touch a Paki with a barge-pole, with a willow bat or with a wicket-keeper's gloved palm, why the hell did we agree to play them? We could have boycotted the match, as some Shiv Sainiks have been saying.

The Sainiks are the kind who would plough out a pitch rather than let Pakistanis play on it. They dug out the Wankhede the night before a 1991 match, and the Feroze Shah Kotla in 1999. I guess it’s time the teams got nightwatchmen to guard the grounds before the games get afoot.

A boycott would have wrecked the ICC, you say? My padded left foot! Didn’t the ICC keep apartheid South Africa out for 21 years from 1970? The western world boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets hit back by boycotting the next one at Los Angeles.

Carl von Clausewitz thought war is a continuation of diplomacy by other means. Modern thinkers have sought to correct him saying, war is a failure of diplomacy. They innovated international sports to create atmospheres of trust. Pierre de Coubertin, father of modern Olympics, drew upon the same spirit that inspired ancient Greeks to forget their feuds and enter truces that ensured athletes and fans from feuding states could travel safely to the games and return peacefully.

We too have tried cricket for peace or truce. When he got tied down in Afghanistan and wanted calm on his border with India, Zia-ul-Haq invited himself to a match in Jaipur. Pervez Musharraf, who fought us in Kargil and frothed at us in Agra, finally tried truce at a 2005 cricket match in Delhi. Yousuf Raza Gilani came to watch a match in Mohali with Manmohan Singh and agreed to a slew of confidence-building measures.

Now, the two countries are turning sports into a continuation of war. We are using strategic vocabulary to describe defeat and win; we are turning sportsmen into gladiators; we are making match money, we are killing the game; we are winning matches, but we are losing the sport.

Remember, a willow, whether it is from Kashmir or Yorkshire, is not a Kalashnikov.

prasannan@theweek.in

a-tale-of-two-sonam-wangchuks

Sun Oct 05 20:23:56 IST 2025

Two Sonam Wangchuks have done India proud in recent times—one a soldier, the other a civilian. Both have fought, or been fighting, battles to save their native Ladakh for India. One got a Maha Vir Chakra and retired as a colonel. The other got a Magsaysay and is in jail.

First about the soldier. Sonam joined the Army in 1987, fought insurgents in the northeast and the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and was posted to Ladakh Scouts as a major when the Kargil war broke out. There he scored the first victory for the Indian Army by capturing Chorbat La, earning an MVC.

The Kargil war was all about saving Ladakh. Pakistanis had occupied the heights in the winter of 1998-99, and were firing at Indian convoys carrying food, fuel and firearms up the highway to Ladakh. Their plan, which was to cut India’s main supply line and capture Ladakh, was foiled because two Ladakhi yak-herds alerted the Army about the intrusion. The timely alert enabled India to launch operations before the enemy came in force.

The other Sonam too had been working to save Ladakh—not only from the Chinese and Pakistanis, but also from perdition. Ragged in his Srinagar school for his rustic accent and mountain ways, he ran away to Delhi where he worked his way to a BTech, and an architecture degree from France. Then he returned to serve his people, improve their lives, reform their schools, innovate ways to store stream water as ice stupas (how natively innovative!), save glaciers, and preserve their fragile culture and frigid environment.

He had also been ticking the right boxes of patriotism. When the Chinese came into Galvan in 2020, he mobilised his people against them and got them to boycott Chinese goods. When he heard that our troops in Ladakh were freezing at their icy posts, he innovated heat-trapping solar-powered tents for them. When rulers in Delhi scrapped the special status of Jammu & Kashmir and separated Buddhist-majority Ladakh, he hailed the decision which, he and his co-Ladakhis thought, would free them from the misrule of Srinagar, get them jobs, and give them a free hand to preserve their culture, promote their language, and let them live their lives their way.

Sadly Delhi rule was found to be worse than Srinagar’s. It didn’t give them jobs, it let outsiders into Ladakh causing fears of a cultural invasion and an environment disaster, and it hasn’t given them a representative government. Sonam launched protests; Delhi has thrown the man from snowland into a jail in blazing-hot Rajasthan.

As the two yak-herds proved in Kargil, as have several tribes in the northeast over the decades, the natives on the frontiers are the eyes and ears of the army. Winning their hearts and minds is not the job of the army alone, but also of the nation’s rulers in Delhi. Delhi’s bold move to scrap J&K’s special status has brought peace to the valley; in the process it has kindled unrest among a most loyal people on a fragile frontier.

Delhi sees the trees, but misses the woods. From Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, India’s rulers have been mistaking border security for national security. A boundary is a line; a border is the land up to the line; a frontier is the vast marches on both sides of the line. Boundaries are manned by the paramilitary. Borders are guarded by the military. Frontiers need strategists and statesmen to manage.

We guard the borders and boundaries, but neglect the frontiers. In the process, we also turn loyal frontiersmen into resentful rebels—on the Naga hills, in the Manipur valley, and now on the Ladakh mountains!

prasannan@theweek.in

eyeless-in-gaza-from-balfour-to-starmer

Sat Sep 27 10:56:03 IST 2025

One couldn’t miss the several historic ironies when Britain declared support to a Palestine state last week.

One, we saw the original sinner at the confessional. It was Britain which had sowed the idea of a homeland in Palestine for the globally dispersed Jews in 1917, thereby triggering the strife that has been raging in the Middle East since. In the process, they two-timed the Arabs who had supported them against the Ottoman empire in the First World War. Remember the story of Lawrence of Arabia.

Two, it was a Jew who made the statement for Britain last week. Keir Starmer, though a Christian by birth and an atheist by faith, is a synagogue-goer. One may say that it is to keep shalom at home—his wife is a Jew—but many Jews consider him as one of them, as they did Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century.

Three, Starmer used much the same wording for a Palestine state as foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, who had fathered the idea of a homeland in Israel for the Jews in a letter to the Jewish banker Lord Rothschild. In the letter, published on November 9, 1917, Balfour had promised a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small Jewish population. Now, after “we recognised the State of Israel more than 75 years ago as a homeland for the Jewish people… today we join over 150 countries who recognise a Palestinian state too…,” said Starmer.

There is a fourth irony. Israel may be winning the military war on Palestine, but is losing on the diplomatic front. Since Yasser Arafat proclaimed a Palestine state in 1988, about 150 of 193 UN members have thumbed it up—13 of them came in after Benjamin Netanyahu launched his war two years ago. Two years ago, no western country (except Sweden) would even hear of a separate Palestine; now there are Norway, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, Britain, France, Canada, Australia and Portugal. Two are in the big five; four of them in G7.

Therein lies a fifth irony: the two who are holding out, apart from the US, are the two old Axis allies, perhaps penitently. To India, it’s a moment of vindication. India had always balanced its ties with both—voted against partitioning Palestine in 1947; yet recognised Israel in 1950 but did not establish diplomatic ties; recognised the PLO in 1974 and the Palestine state in 1988; and finally opened diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992. Ironically, that was done with the consent of Palestine leader Yassir Arafat, a deft act of diplomacy by Narasimha Rao that was hailed by his critic L.K. Advani

Since then ties have soared with Israel, but not soared with Palestine. India stayed committed to the Palestinian cause, consistently condemned the terrorism of one side and genocide by the other side, and advocated dialogue to resolve the conflict. Narendra Modi did tilt towards Israel, declared India "stands in solidarity with Israel" in Netanyahu’s war on terror, abstained from UN resolutions calling for ceasefire, but has now voted in the UN in favour of a two-state solution, along with Britain, France and co.

Well and good! But are these declarations going to be wishes writ in the waters of the Jordan river? Therein lies the biggest irony. Netanyahu is depopulating and 'depalestining' Gaza fast—his war has killed some 65,000 people in two years, and about 90 per cent of Gazans have been rendered homeless. At this rate, will there be any Palestinian left to live in Gaza, which is part of the Palestine state recognised by 150 of 193 members of the UN?

prasannan@theweek.in

gen-z-revolution-history-youth-protests-political-change

Sat Sep 20 13:14:57 IST 2025

Sick of listening to the Gen X talking about sex and the new sexual mores most of the time, a colleague once exclaimed: “These kids of today think they discovered sex.”

Much the same about the Gen Z. The way our commentators are toasting them for having led the revolts in Colombo, Dhaka and Kathmandu that led to change of regimes, one would think these kids discovered revolution.

No grudges. The Gen Z deserves credit for storming the palaces of sin where the ruling elite had been indulging in their orgies of wealth, and for effecting regime changes that wouldn’t have been possible through the democratic ballot. But the way commentators are making heady wordy cocktails for their celebratory toasts makes you think that the upsurges of the past had been led by pensioned persons of post-menopausal age.

Sorry to disappoint you, kids! Revolts of yore had also been led by young and virile men and women like you. They didn’t adopt any character of the alphabet to call themselves as you have, but it was the youth who led revolutions throughout history. George Washington was 33 when he opposed Britain’s Stamp Acts in American colonies. Georges Danton and Maximilian Robespierre were 30 and 31 when they spearheaded France’s notorious reign of terror. Vladimir Lenin may have been 47 when Russia’s serfs stormed the Winter Palace, but he had been active in the Bolshevik movement since 22. Jayaprakash Narayan may have been in his 70s when he called for total revolution, but it was Bihar’s college youth in their 20s who took to the streets on his call.

So it has been in Kathmandu, Dhaka and Colombo. It was the youth—Gen X, Y, Z, P or Q—who took to the streets and effected regime change.

What triggered their anger on Kathmandu’s streets was a ban on their little jobless pastimes—their reels, memes and trolls. Jobless and jealous (no offence meant) of the ‘nepo kids’ who were flaunting their politically powered parents’ ill-gotten wealth, they had been venting their pains and pangs in tik-toks, reels and mimes. Those passions burst forth when their little pastime apps were denied to them.

For all you know, K.P. Sharma Oli would have saved his job and government had he taken a leaf out of India’s Doordarshan managers of the 1980s. Whenever the Rajiv Gandhi regime apprehended a riot in any major city, it got the DD, then India’s only TV channel that otherwise telecast notoriously unwatchable programmes, to show a vintage Bollywood hit that kept the rabble-rousers glued to TV sets. On Sunday mornings in the late 1980s, India’s town streets looked like Covid-hit cities of three years ago—no shops, no traffic, no pedestrians, no pickpockets. Everyone and his mamashree were watching the Ramayana serial.

The long and short of the Sunday serial and cinema story is this—that the youth need pastimes as much as they need jobs. If Karl Marx thought that the capitalist order kept the labouring masses opiated with religion, the apps have been keeping the Gen Z sedated in the joblessly growing economies of the 21st century.

This is not to belittle the anguish of the Gen Z. Their pains are genuine, anger justified, and action righteous. To be fairer, they are better behaved than many of the celebrated revolt leaders of history. If the youth of France let loose a reign of terror, the Gen Z of Kathmandu, Dhaka and Colombo allowed institutions of their constitutions to take over.

Horace Walpole exclaimed in fear at the onset of the age of revolutions: “Our supreme governors, the mob.” Not in Kathmandu, Dhaka or Colombo.

prasannan@theweek.in

mig-21-legacy-indian-air-force

Sat Sep 13 12:54:38 IST 2025

The chief was looking livid when we walked into the briefing room at the Air HQ. Pointing to a picture of a MiG-21 on the wall, he asked “You call this a flying coffin? You want me to junk it?”

The year was 2000 or 2001. Another MiG-21 had fallen off the sky, and commentators were calling it flying coffin. “Take it from me—I shall fly it; my successors shall fly it; we will fly it for decades.”

Military bravado, we thought, and quietly listened to the rest of the briefing. His anguish was understandable. MiGs were falling off the skies, a dozen a year. I had watched, in shock and pain, one hitting a mountainside in Leh a few years earlier. Spares weren’t available from ex-USSR; air-frames and engines were old; no advanced jet trainer for the pilots to learn jet flying.

A week later, IAF PRO Rajesh Dhingra called. “Chief is visiting Bareilly tomorrow, and would take a few press people. Would you join?”

We flew in an An-32, and checked into the mess. Soon we were told the chief would meet us “out there”. As we walked out, we saw Air Chief Marshal Anil Yashwant Tipnis, clad in flight overalls, waiting for us. “I told you, I shall fly it. You will see me flying a coffin.” After a quick visit to the washroom (“always take a leak before you fly”), he jumped into the cockpit of a MiG-21 and shot up, his 60-year-old body fighting 9G force. As we held our breath, he vanished into the blue at supersonic speed, reappeared, flew past the base a few times, and landed with a thumbs-up.

At the debriefing, he said: “It’s not the weapon that wins wars; it’s the soldier. The weapon—an aircraft, a tank or a warship—is as good or as bad as the man who uses it. We do have some issues with MiG-21. Believe me, she’s a good airplane of her generation, and my boys who fly her are as good as the best in the world.”

Realising that he had been a bit harsh on us, he said, “We have dinner night today; you’ll see us at our formal best. Join us; black shoes and ties, please.” All rancour forgotten, we joined the toast over “Mr Vice, the President!” and “Gentlemen, the President”.

Over the next few months, we would learn about the issues plaguing the MiG-21 fleet from Tipnis and his successor S. Krishnaswamy. Crashes had happened earlier too, but they had caught headlines mainly after Flt Lt Nachiketa’s MiG-27 had a flameout over Kargil in 1999 on the very second day of the air operations. Nachiketa survived, was captured by the enemy and returned as would be the F-16 killer Abhinandan Varthaman 20 years later, but his buddy Sqn Ldr Ajay Ahuja, who went to Nachiketa’s aid in a MiG-21, was shot down.

If Tippy fought his MiG campaign by personal example, Kichu waged his war with facts, figures and statistics. After every accident anywhere in the country, he would brief us in detail, sharing every nugget of info—the type of the aircraft, its vintage, its engine, its air-frame, the vintage of its tyres—not just in terms of age, but in terms of the landings they had done! We even joked—at this rate, Krishnaswamy would have us believe it’s safer to take a MiG-21 to New York than a Boeing-747. Believe me, he once showed us it was true, statistically!

Asked why he wasn’t pressing the government for a quick decision on Advanced Jet Trainers, Krishnaswamy replied: “I don’t want the government to take decisions under pressure; that’s why I am telling you all these—that we can manage with what we have.”

But he was disarmed when the mother of a pilot who was killed in accident began a campaign. “I can fight the enemy; I can’t fight tears,” he told us privately.

prasannan@theweek.in

jd-vance-presidential-ambition-donald-trump-third-term-loophole

Sat Sep 06 10:48:49 IST 2025

This column said last week that vice-presidents of yore made no news; they do nowadays. We cited J.D. Vance and Jagdeep Dhankhar. Vance has since set the Potomac on fire, claiming in an interview that he is ready for the top job. Indeed, he added Don Trump “is in good shape...,” but “if, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy….”

Many fear, Vance has dug his political grave. One, Trump is alive and kicking like a mule. Two, a golden rule in politics is that even if you’re dying to get the top job, you should act like a virakt.

Two men have paid the price for violating it—one in the US, one in India, both after ‘terrible tragedies’.

When Ronald Reagan was shot, his vice George Bush Sr was in Texas. Alexander Haig, who was secretary of state, walked into the White House press room and announced, “I, Al Haig, am in control here….” He was right in making the claim, but his brashness put people off. Reagan recovered; Haig lost his job.

When Indira Gandhi was shot, Pranab Mukherjee is said to have made an open claim for the top post. His admirers say he only wanted to be a stop-gap PM, a la Gulzarilal Nanda, till Rajiv took over. Soon he was out of the Congress to serve out a brief vanvaas.

How should one conduct oneself when one covets a job and opportunity knocks? Do like what Bush did, after Haig ‘took control’. He landed in Washington, where his aides told him to take a chopper to the White House to show the world that everything, including the nuclear button, was under control. Bush negatived it, saying, "Only the president lands on the South Lawn."

Or do a Narasimha Rao. When Rajiv was murdered and many asked him to take over, Rao got the party offer the crown to Sonia. Perhaps he knew she would say no. The gesture stood him in good stead in the scramble for power afterwards.

Morale of the stories? When Lady Opportunity knocks, don’t fling open the door and seat her in your living-room. Take her quietly into your closet; she will know when to come out.

Vance is safe for now. We don’t know if Trump is displeased. Even if he is, he can’t sack a veep. All the same, Vance’s succession is not guaranteed. For, many say that Trump may seek a third term.

Doesn’t the law prohibit a third term? Yes, but legal eagles say, there are loopholes.

Ever since George Washington refused a third term, US presidents have conventionally never sought it. But the exigencies of the Great Depression and the World War made Americans overlook the convention and give F.D. Roosevelt a fourth term. After his death early in his fourth term, they made the 22nd amendment in 1951 that banned anyone from being ‘elected’ to a third term.

How can Trump bypass the law? Take a leaf from Vladimir Putin’s power book, and improvise on it.

Russia had a law that prohibited more than two consecutive terms to a president. After serving two terms, Putin got his man Friday Dmitry Medvedev elected prez, and he served under him as PM. Both did one term like that, and swapped places in the next election.

The US law doesn’t allow a third-time ‘election’, even non-consecutive. But it doesn’t explicitly prohibit ‘succession’. So, Trumpists say, he could make one of his yes-men run for president, and he would run for VP. Once elected, both will serve a few days in their elected positions, and then the elected POTUS will resign citing ill health, family problems or insanity. Under the US law, if a prez dies or quits, the vice takes over for the rest of his term, as Gerald Ford did after Richard Nixon quit. Trump would then rule for the rest of the term.

Probable? No. Possible? Probably!

prasannan@theweek.in

indian-vice-president-role-rajya-sabha-chairman

Sun Aug 31 10:24:48 IST 2025

Thomas Marshall, vice-president under Woodrow Wilson from 1913 to 1921, once lamented: “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice-president of the United States. And nothing was heard of either of them again.”

Vice-presidents of yore made no news—in India or the US. Who remembers S. Radhakrishnan or Zakir Husain as VPs? We remember their presidencies. How many remember G.S. Pathak? The job, as John Garner who was Franklin Roosevelt’s veep from 1933 to 1941, said, was as "useful as a cow's fifth teat".

No longer so. VPs make news these days. Look at J.D. Vance! He has emerged as Don Trump’s hatchet man.

There used to be a pattern to the vice-presidency in India. The first three became president, the next three didn’t, the three after them did, and the three who followed didn’t. The pattern got broken when a fourth VP in a row, Venkaiah Naidu, missed the top job.

A few created constitutional history—M. Hidayatullah as the first judge to get the job, and also as the only one who has been chief justice, vice-president and acting president. When Zakir Husain died in office and V.V. Giri quit to contest as president, Hidayatullah, then CJI, was sworn in as acting president. Later he was elected unopposed as vice-president. B.D. Jatti created a flutter when he initially refused the Janata regime’s request to dismiss nine Congress state governments.

A few of the recent ones brought vibrancy to the post—Hamid Ansari with his intellectual acumen (also as the only one to get a second term after S. Radhakrishnan), Naidu with his popularity (he loved hosting events, holding book launches, and meeting people), and Jagdeep Dhankhar with his brash conduct.

Dhankhar will go down in history as the only VP who was threatened with impeachment. He goes unmourned. He angered those whom he tried to please, and alienated the opposition with his partisan conduct in the Rajya Sabha.

Dhankhar’s exit was dramatic. He wanted to get the motion to impeach Justice Yashwant Varma moved in the Rajya Sabha which he presided over, rather than in the Lok Sabha where the government wanted to put up its show. In the end, he quit over ‘health’ reasons.

That was Dhankhar’s second quit ‘act’. Back in 1990, he had grabbed headlines by resigning as a deputy minister in protest against V.P. Singh sacking deputy prime minister Devi Lal. The next morning he quietly took back the resignation.

Much of the role, rules, and traditions around the presidency is derived from the British monarch’s, but the Brits have no parallel to our vice-president. Our veep, if at all, is modelled after the US’s—to the extent of he (no woman till date) being the ex-officio chairman of the upper house. That’s what earns him his pay. The VP is the only official who doesn’t get any salary or perks for his designated post. His pay, Rs4 lakh currently, is for his work as Rajya Sabha chairman. But when he acts as president, he is entitled to the salary and privileges of the president.

The vice-president’s, if you ask me, is a tougher grind than the president’s. Dear old Shankar Dayal Sharma once broke into tears, trying to run an unruly house. It’s worse these days.

There are ceremonial tasks, too. The VP is chancellor of the Panjab, Delhi and Pondicherry Universities, visitor to Makhanlal Chaturvedi University of Journalism, and president of the Indian Institute of Public Administration. All these would now be tasks before C.P. Radhakrishnan or B. Sudershan Reddy, whoever among them makes it.

Good luck, gentlemen! We will see one of you in the house.

prasannan@theweek.in

alaska-crimea-nato-russian-view-putin-ukraine-nato-perspectives

Sat Aug 23 11:01:20 IST 2025

Don Trump chose the wrong spot to host Vladimir Putin—Alaska, a gold- and oil-rich land Russia had lost to the US 158 years ago. The sight of several Russian Orthodox churches—80 including a 230-year-old cathedral in Kodiak—if Putin saw them from the air, would only have steeled his resolve not to concede any more land to the west.

Alaska was once Russia’s. After his defeat at the hands of the British in the 1854-56 Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II worried that Britain would next invade Alaska from Canada. Instead of losing it in war to an enemy, he thought it prudent to sell Alaska to the neutral US for $7 million. Russian nationalists are yet to forgive the tsar for the folly.

How the atlas misleads us! It shows Russia and America hemispheres apart. We think they are poles apart, too. Quite contrary! They are hemispheres apart politically, but poles together geographically. In winter, when the Bering Strait freezes, you can walk from Russia’s Big Diomede isle to the US’s Little Diomede, only three miles away. It could take you a day—the international dateline passes through the strait.

Let’s leave geography and talk geopolitics. The world thinks that Russia had been annexing lands, first as the tsarist empire and then as the communist empire. But Russians think they have been losing lands—Alaska to America and Crimea to the British in the 19th century, and all the ex-Soviet republics to the nasty west in the post-Cold War 20th century.

Russians believe they did a good thing to Europe by disbanding the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance they had with the East Europeans during the Cold War. In return, they expected the west to disband NATO. But NATO cheated. They not only refused to disband but expanded towards Russia roping in Russia's ex-allies, and placing troops, tanks and atomic arms at Russia's doorstep.

The west has been painting Putin as the sinner in the Ukraine war—he invaded a weak neighbour. But Russians feel the west has been sinning against them in the last three post-Cold War decades, breaking every promise they had made, cheating on every deal, and damning every covenant.

Even the little kind deeds of the past were now proving to be Russia's curse. Back in 1954, Russia had gifted Crimea, where Russia has been berthing its Black Sea fleet, to Ukraine. But when Ukraine threatened to ‘sell’ those ports to the west, Putin annexed Crimea in 2014.

In Russia’s eyes, Ukraine is at the nasty NATO game again. It was when the next-door neighbour threatened to join NATO and sell its sovereign soul to the west that Putin said, enough is enough and invaded Ukraine. The war made him a global pariah; the west imposed sanctions on him and tariffs on those who bought his arms and oil; the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant on him for war crimes. Now with the leader of the western world hosting him in Alaska, where he said no to a ceasefire till he got a final truce, he has left the west holding the bomb with a burning fuse.

What does Putin want? He wants Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern lands, most of which he has already captured. He might let Ukraine have all the security guarantees from the west against an invasion from Russia, but Ukraine shouldn’t join NATO as a member. For, a membership would entail stationing US, British, French and German tanks, guns and missiles on Ukraine territory from where Moscow is only a short march away.

Little Ukraine may be seeking security guarantees against Russia; Russia is seeking guarantees against a nasty west.

prasannan@theweek.in

india-voter-fraud-allegations-election-commission-under-scrutiny-india

Sun Aug 17 09:07:08 IST 2025

Liberia had only 15,000 voters, yet Charles King won the 1928 presidential poll by 60,000 votes. A mob burnt the ballots in Papua New Guinea’s Enga province in 2002. Officials counted the votes from the charred remains (don’t ask me how; ask those who counted Rs15 crore in burnt notes in Justice Yashwant Varma’s house), and found two lakh more ballots than registered voters.

We read these in trivia books (my bedtime reading) and laugh. Soon India may figure in them to make a chapter of laughs—that is, if Rahul Gandhi’s charges are true.

Rahul had been alleging vote fraud. Sour grapes, we thought. With a poll body that had built up a shining reputation, we thought it “more likely to see someone fatally struck by lightning than witness a case of in-person voter fraud”, as Tom Perez said. Now, if Rahul is right, we’ve been struck by lightning and hit by atom bomb.

Rahul had been intrigued by three things—his Congress losing states and seats where it had done well in the previous round, a freak rise in voter numbers in some seats, and reports of hordes of voters appearing in several booths minutes before the closing time of polling.

Three things made him smell rats. One, the commission was delaying giving out final voting figures. Two, when asked for digital voter lists wherein one could find a name by typing it and giving a search command, the commission gave him non-searchable versions. That much for digital India. Three, when asked for CCTV footage from the booths, the commission said those had been destroyed after 45 days of counting.

A frustrated Congress took up Mahadevapura assembly segment of Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha seat as a test case. For two reasons. One, the number of voters there had grown by 140 per cent from 2008 to 2024, whereas the other seven segments had a growth of only three to 27 per cent. Two, the BJP had scored a surprise surge there when most other segments had expectedly gone to the Congress. The majority in Mahadevapura was enough for the BJP to offset the setbacks in the other segments and win Bengaluru Central by 32,000 votes.

Manual search by 60 Congress nerds in six months found 11,965 voters had been listed more than once in different booths, 40,009 had fake parentage and addresses (s/o Dfojgaidf, house number zero), 10,452 were staying in single addresses (80 souls in a one-room home), 4,132 with fake or no photos, and 33,692 elders registered as ‘new voters’.

Shocking! Yet, we would have dismissed these as a bad loser’s brawl with the umpire, but for the umpire’s conduct. We had thought the umpire would give a cautious response a day or so later, such as…. ‘the Election Commission has taken note of certain points raised by the hon’ble leader of the opposition… The commission will discuss these and come out with a response in due course’. Bureaucratic, but dignified.

Not this time! Even before Rahul had concluded his presser, commission officials were challenging him to come on oath, as if he were making a post-poll complaint. Suddenly, the umpire became a player.

Indeed, the rule is that election complaints have to be filed in 45 days after results. But how could one have, if it took 60 nerds six months to find out about voter fraud in one assembly segment?

Rahul may still be wrong, and the poll body right. Rahul is a politician, trusted by some, distrusted by more. We can vote him into the house or vote him out to hell.

The commission is a constitutional body, trusted by all, distrusted by none. We can’t vote it in or out. It has to stay above reproach.

prasannan@theweek.in

pakistan-mineral-wealth-trump-interest-india

Sat Aug 09 15:56:04 IST 2025

Donald Trump is mad at India. For reasons galore. We laughed at his claim to have stopped our war with Pakistan; we didn’t nominate him for a Nobel; we are haggling with him over tariffs; we aren’t buying his F-35; we do business with Iran; we buy his enemy’s oil. Finally, a frustrated Trump said, “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”

We laughed at that too. Then he turned the knife in the stab; said he had “concluded a deal” to develop Pakistan’s “massive oil reserves” and he is “choosing the oil company that will lead this partnership…. Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling oil to India some day!”

That got our goat. Choosing a terrorist state and a bankrupt economy over a resilient democracy and a robust economy, a Quad member and a strategic partner? Many in India were hurt, shocked, upset, angry or outraged. A few smirked, knowing Pakistan has as much oil under its soil as the Thar has water under its sands.

What if Trump is throwing a red herring? A red herring is the kind of thing that we see in whodunnits where the murderer plants wrong clues to mislead the sleuths—like the word ‘rache’ (German for revenge) scribbled on a wall next to the corpse in the Sherlock Holmes story 'A Study in Scarlet' that misled sleuths to think the killer was a German. The term was popularised in 1807 by William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert hounds from chasing a rabbit.

Let’s leave crime stories and get back to geopolitics. Trump is known for his red herrings in political narratives. As Sam Kwait-Spitzer, who called him king of red herrings, wrote in 2018, Trump “has a profound need to distract, deceive, and gaslight”, and there have been “seemingly infinite occasions in which the president has wilfully sought to mislead the public”.

What if he is now trying it on the world?

As most of us know, Pakistan has no oil. Then what is Trump prospecting for? My unintelligent guess is—gold and more.

Gold in Pakistan? Yes, folks! They are said to have it in plenty—not just gold but more. Reko Dik has the world's fifth largest copper-gold reserves, Thar has the second largest coal reserves, Khewra and Bahdarkhel have the second largest salt reserves. Geologists say 92 minerals worth $6 trillion are buried in the land stretching from Gilgit-Baltistan (we flinch) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the hills of Balochistan, the sands of Sind and the plains of Punjab—coal (185 billion tonnes), copper (7,000 million tonnes), gold (1,658 million), salt (10 billion), silver (620 million), lead-zinc (24 million), manganese (1.597 million), chromite (three million), iron ore (1,450 million). If mined well, prospectors say, Pakistan could become “the Saudi Arabia of copper” in 20 years!

Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir have been going to China for investments and knowhow to mine these out, and China has been snaring them into its CPEC loan trap. The duo would want to balance the Chinese, and who else can do it but the yanks? Was that what Munir and Trump talked over their lunch in the White House?

But can you be friends with the mutually warring Americans and Chinese?, many may ask. Remember the boast of the Yahyas and the Bhuttos of the cold-warring 1970s?—that Pakistan was the only country that could be friends with the capitalists and the communists.

Geostrategists in the soon-to-be-vacated South Block! Let’s stop flinching at Trump and smirking at Pak, and get our act together.

prasannan@theweek.in

indian-constitution-grammar-interpretation

Sat Aug 02 10:50:03 IST 2025

The simple phrase ‘as soon as’, which your middle-school English teacher told you is a subordinating conjunction and you are still figuring out who was subordinate to who, appears 28 times in our Constitution—eight times followed by ‘possible’ and 20 times by ‘may be’.

Forget your English teacher and her Wren & Martin; let’s get constitutional. There are times when the Constitution is simpler to explain than is English grammar. What I meant was: the phrase ‘as soon as possible’ appears eight times in the Constitution; ‘as soon as may be’ appears 20 times. Examples? Here they go.

Article 68(2) says, “An election to fill a vacancy in the office of vice president occurring by reason of his death, resignation or removal, or otherwise shall be held as soon as possible after the occurrence of the vacancy....”

Article 93 says, “The House of the People shall, as soon as may be, choose two members of the house to be respectively speaker and deputy speaker thereof....”

To you and me, both phrases mean the same for all practical purposes, and are even interchangeable, just as ‘as soon as’ and ‘no sooner than’ are. (Remember the number of times you had to convert sentences with ‘as soon as’ into lines with ‘no sooner than’ in your exercise book, and got pulled up for placing ‘than’ in the wrong place?)

But the government knows grammar and the Constitution better; that ‘as soon as possible’ emphasises immediacy and prompt action, whereas ‘as soon as may be’ requires diligent and responsible execution within a reasonable time frame. That much has been explained, not by Wren & Martin, F.T. Wood or H.W. Fowler, but by the Supreme Court through several judgments.

Now let’s look at how the rulers are following both. The vice presidency fell vacant last week. Following Article 68(2) in Devnagari letter and atmanirbhar spirit, the government is moving with alacrity to get it filled. Good job!

But in the case of the vacancy in the post of the deputy speaker of the Lok Sabha, the rulers are giving a liberal interpretation to ‘as soon as may be’ mentioned in Article 93. So liberal that ‘as soon as may be’ has now stretched to six years and more. The 17th Lok Sabha ran its full course without a deputy speaker; it looks like the 18th will follow suit.

That’s fine. Let the rulers decide how soon is ‘as soon as may be’.

But there are two other instances where they are treating ‘as soon as possible’ as casually as ‘as soon as may be’.

One is in Article 200. It says, if a governor wants his legislature to reconsider any non-money bill, he may return it to the house “as soon as possible after the presentation to him... for assent”. Several governors have been interpreting this ‘as soon as possible’ just like the Centre has been reading the ‘as soon as may be’ in the case of the deputy speaker election. So much so, an irritated M.K. Stalin of Tamil Nadu went to court and got the judges to give a three-month deadline to governors to sign or send back a bill. Now the Centre has gone back to court with a presidential reference seeking clarifications.

The fourth ‘as soon as’ pertains to a court order itself. While upholding the scrapping of Article 370 which had given a special status to Jammu and Kashmir, the judges had also directed that “restoration of statehood shall take place at the earliest and as soon as possible”. It has been one and a half years now, and the people of Jammu and Kashmir are waiting to know how soon is ‘as soon as’.

Honourable judges and learned grammarians! Can you help?

prasannan@theweek.in

politician-retirement-age-india

Sat Jul 26 11:22:26 IST 2025

We thought the opposition wanted the BJP out—lock, lotus, Hindutva and Hinditva. Now it looks they want only Narendra Modi out.

Look at how they’ve clutched on to what Mohan Bhagwat said. When honoured with a shawl at a book launch earlier this month, the RSS boss quipped, “When a shawl is draped on you at 75, it means you have grown old; just move aside.”

To the opposition, that sounded like a saffronised Kamaraj Plan, and a signal from the RSS to Narendra Modi, who will turn 75 in September, to move aside. It is another matter that Kamaraj’s own Congress had dumped his plan the soonest; the lefties largely followed it, and the righties when it suited them. Two notable ones in the 1970s were Nanaji Deshmukh from the right and Acharya Kripalani from the centre-left. Since then there have been many, including gentleman-comrade Jyoti Basu at 76, and now Jagdeep Dhankhar at 74, though inadvertently.

Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Sanjay Raut wants Modi to follow suit. He has reminded Modi that he had got the top job by “forcing” out L.K. Advani and M.M. Joshi on the ground they were past 75. “Let’s see if he applies the rule to himself now.” Congress’s Pawan Khera echoed the view.

Khera’s boss Mallikarjun Kharge may disagree. At a similar book launch last September, the 82-year-old had said there “should be no retirement age in politics”; rather, those who have “ideological conviction and a will to serve… should do so till their last breath”. Even Modi’s critics would concede that Modi doesn’t lack either, though they may hate his ideology.

What the BJP does to Modi is their business, but the larger question is—should politicians have a retirement age? Most of the middle-classes, the ones who serve, earn salaries, pay taxes, superannuate (with or without pension), stand in queues, curse politics, yet elect politicians, would say yes. They think, politics is a job just as theirs, and they want politicians, too, to retire just as they do.

They think big India is still not doing well on several parameters of progress because we continue to be ruled by people who are past their thinking prime. Since brain volume diminishes over time, and your ability to put in physical work too does, the country would be better ruled by those who are closer to the cradle than to the grave. India, they think, needs younger brains and stronger hands to lead it—like Finland’s Sanna Mirella Marin, who became PM at 35 and left the job at 39 in 2023, or New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who got the job at 37 and left at 44.

But neuroscientists say, cognitive performance varies widely; while some skills decline with age, others improve. Some oldies possess the mental acuity of people decades younger—V.S. Achuthanandan, for example, who passed away on July 21 at 101.

History shows age is no criterion for judging governing gifts. William Pitt, not even 25 when he became PM first, is still considered among Britain’s greatest; so is William Gladstone who was 82 when he made it the last time. Narasimha Rao and A.B. Vajpayee were past 70 when they were called to rule; both rose to higher levels of statesmanship than did a youthful Rajiv Gandhi.

Youth is a matter of perception. Shashi Tharoor at 69 and M.K. Stalin at 72 may look more youthful than Amit Shah at 60 or Nitin Gadkari at 68, but all four are storehouses of ideas and powerhouses of energy in their own ways, as was Manny Shinwell sitting with a pucky smile in the British Parliament at 101, or Rishang Keishing in India’s at 94.

Politics is not a job; call it a profession, if you please. There’s no retirement age for professionals.

prasannan@theweek.in

india-infrastructure-design-flaws

Fri Jul 18 15:51:52 IST 2025

Rivers don’t bend like Beckham. Nor do roads. Both are designed for movement—one for water, the other for vehicles. They meander in slow, gentle curves; no sharp cuts.

Buildings are meant for the opposite job—to limit movement, to keep you within spaces. They have sharp corners, and walls perpendicular to the floor.

What if a road-layer makes a house, and a house-builder erects an overbridge? You’d get a house with curved corners, and a bridge with sharp turns. A sample of the latter has been built in Bhopal costing Rs18 crore; Indore is reportedly planning one with two sharp turns. Together they should give Pisa’s tower a run for its slant.

Most of India’s public utilities are Tughlaqian attempts at fitting square pegs in round holes—service lanes that take you to the wrong end of the main road, cycle tracks dotted with kerbs, ramps that look like mini Everests to the wheel-chaired divyangjan, arrow-shaped chrome-and-steel roadsigns positioned to hit New Delhi’s footpath walkers on their faces, ATM kiosks with doors that hit your behind if someone opens them (contrast them with the good old STD booths, desi copies of London’s iconic phone booths), bus waiting sheds with steel-bar seats that burn your bottoms in summers.

Leave summers; the rains are upon us. How many stations can you count where you can board a bus without getting wet? We have even airport terminals without roofs over the alighting point. Let’s be fair, square or perpendicular—train stations fare better. Platforms in major stations, built by colonial rulers, were benignly roofed up to the edge; you can still board your coach without getting wet.

Kerbs are of a standard height across most of the world—six inches in most of America—letting you park your car without the bumper hitting the kerb. How many of you have parked a car anywhere in India without ever denting the bumper?

We build utilities, structures and products. They tick all the boxes of structural engineering. We don’t design them; we don’t look at how people would use them.

Look at our Arjun tank. It has the world’s best armour (Kanchan), the best gun, the best fire-control system, the best everything that goes into a tank—superior to those in Challenger, Merkava, Abrams, Leopard or T-92. But when we put all these best things together, the tanks got fat by an inch or two, heavier by a kilo or two for our rail rakes and narrow border bridges to take them. It took years to rectify them. One of its builders told me in tears—“We didn’t have design engineers.”

Why talk of tanks? We haven’t yet designed a good car. Did someone say Indica? Where is it now? Does it have a progeny?

We may have built rockets and missiles; those are for specific use by specific persons. Not so in the case of bus waiting sheds, airports, kerbs, wheelchair ramps, bridges, cars or even tanks. They are for mass use; we don’t know how to design them.

So we put square pegs in round holes. Literally. Look at Lutyens’ New Delhi, one of the world’s best designed cities with tree-lined avenues, picturesque round-abouts, walkways and footpaths. Its basic design was rounded and radial—the old Parliament House, Connaught Place, Gole Market, Gole Dak Khana, and roads radiating from these circles crossing each other at large round-abouts. Smooth, curved, meandering, yet flowing.

Now? We have erected triangular road signs that hit pedestrians in the face, traffic lights at round-abouts as if they were squares, and a triangular Parliament House next to the old rounded structure.

prasannan@theweek.in

f-35-owners-pride-others-meme

Sat Jul 12 12:58:44 IST 2025

Heard of the mitrailleuse machine gun? The world’s first rapid-fire gun developed in the 1860s, it was like Onida TV—owner’s pride and enemy’s envy. The French owners kept it under such thick wraps that when the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 broke out, the guns were issued to frontline troops without operating manuals. By the time clearances were obtained and the manuals arrived, France had lost the war.

Looks like that’s going to be the case with the F-35. The plane, billed at $100 million as a futuristic fifth-gen fighter, is being offered only to the US’s closest pals. Don Trump had condescendingly offered it to us, but has come to think it as a case of casting pearls before a cow.

Now the plane is looking increasingly like the mitrailleuse gun. The Americans had given a few to their British buddies, who have since been flying it around like boys who got new toys. A few of the naval version came to our neighbourhood, and one of the birds ran out of fuel! The pilot found Thiruvananthapuram on his GPS, ensured Shashi Tharoor wasn’t around, and landed there.

That looked like a Viktor Belenko act. Belenko, if you have forgotten, was a Soviet pilot who landed in Japan in 1976 with a MiG-25, the world’s fastest (three times faster than sound), highest-flying and most super secret plane then, pleading no fuel. Once he landed, he wanted to defect to the west. As the Soviets seethed, the Americans landed in hordes, seeking to peek into the mystery plane. They ripped it apart, found its techno-wizardry beyond them, failed to put it together, and shipped it in crates to Russia.

The F-35 pilot, a British gentleman, had no such traitorous intent; God’s own Malayalis, ever hospitable, had no evil spy-fly ideas either. They gave him food, fuel and civil clothing (perhaps offered him an Ayurvedic massage, too), but as he got back into the cockpit after his R&R, he realised the plane wouldn’t start.

Like the frontline French gunners in the Franco-Prussian war, he didn’t know anything about the plane except to fly it—not even how to open the bonnet and check the engine oil, battery water and fan belt, the chores my generation used to do every morning in our Ambys and Fiats. (Today’s drivers may laugh, but this morning drill taught us a lot about how car engines ran, how to check the oil level on the dipstick, how the dynamo was connected to the battery, how the radiator cooled, how to wipe the distributor dry and re-start the car if it got stalled on water-logged roads.)

The pilot radioed for help; his mother ship HMS Prince of Wales sent half a dozen engineers. As in the case of Humpty Dumpty, all the king’s toolings and all the king’s men couldn’t put the fighter in flight again. The yanks had kept everything to themselves.

His Malayali hosts have since been having a roll on the troll. Even the state tourism department made an e-poster showing the plane in a coconut grove and saying, “Kerala is such an amazing place, I don’t want to leave.”

Last heard, a squadron of engineers have landed to fix the plane or take it apart and send it in crates to London, much like how Belenko’s MiG-25 was shipped to Russia.

There’s one twist to the MiG-25 story that I heard in Moscow in 1993—that the KGB had actually worked on Belenko to defect with the plane, so as to dazzle the west with their techno-wizardry.

Sounds far-fetched. But was somebody playing a sales trick to impress us by landing an F-35 next to our southern air command? If yes, it has backfired. Show me one air marshal who would buy a plane that needs special tows to move it into a hangar?

prasannan@theweek.in

plane-truths-from-two-accidents

Sat Jul 05 10:50:41 IST 2025

As a reporter, I had the misfortune of covering two airline accidents. One, India’s worst ever; the other—pardon me for saying so—the best ever.

First about the best ever. To beat a pilots’ strike in 1993, Indian Airlines had wet-leased foreign airplanes, complete with crew, to fly domestic routes. One such bird, an Uzbek Air Tupolev-154 flying in from Hyderabad piloted by a Russian, crashed in Delhi on a foggy January morning.

I reached the airport, still fog-thick, within an hour and half of the crash, and joined the crowd of scribes. We were briefed by airline staff, airport managers, and civil aviation worthies. They gave us all the basic info they had—the plane, its age, the crew, the passengers, the approach path, the glide path, the limit of visibility, the traffic at the hour, the various categories of fog landing, and what they knew had happened—the plane had veered to the right on touch-down, the right wing scraped the asphalt, the plane tilted, the tail broke away….

Next they ferried us to the wreck, let lensmen click from a safe distance, and answered more queries.

Why did I call it the best ever? Because all the 165 passengers and 13 crew members lived to tell us tales. We had even some comic relief. As we were being briefed on the tarmac, there walked in a middle-aged sardarji flashing his boarding pass and looking for his luggage in the mangled wreck!

The other is a tragic tale—of India’s worst ever. A Saudi Boeing-747 taking off from Delhi with 300-plus passengers collided with a chartered Kazakh Air Ilyushin-76 coming in to land with 30 people around 6.40pm in November 1996. A colleague and photographer rushed to Charkhi-Dadri village where the wreckage had fallen; I was assigned to do the airport and DGCA rounds.

At 9.30pm, three hours into the crash, civil aviation director-general H.S. Khola briefed us with whatever he knew at that hour—about the pax, the crew, what had happened at what moment, the flight path, the glide path, why planes landed and took off in the same direction, and even about the lack of airborne collision avoidance system (ACAS) in most planes.

Four days later, aviation secretary Yogesh Chandra, flanked by Khola and others, held a detailed briefing. They played the recording of the trialogue between the ATC and the two planes, and also gave us copies of its transcript. That gave us a total picture of what had happened—which plane was where at which moment, how many nautical miles, who was asked to climb, who was asked to stay course, who was to descend, how many feet, how each was alerted about the other, why the same corridor was used for entry and egress, lack of a double-directional runway, how various radars work, how ATC handles vertical and horizontal separation, what are o’clock positions—everything and anything about airplane navigation and ATC management. We left the hall feeling like rookie aviators.

Khola also made a public vow—by next year-end he would ensure no plane lands on terra firma indica without ACAS. The man kept his word, making Indian airspace collision-free.

Why am I telling these old scribes’ tales? Because, India has had the second worst air disaster three weeks ago and we are still groping in the dark. There is no official word yet except the first day’s basic press statement from the DGCA, and snatches of info given out afterwards—such as who would probe the crash, where would the black box be checked, and so on.

The result? Armchair experts and fake newsmakers are ruling the roost, and saturating the air space.

prasannan@theweek.in

dont-grudge-asim-munir-his-lunch

Sat Jun 28 12:58:37 IST 2025

Was it a free lunch that Field Marshal Asim Munir got from Donald Trump? We in India would like to believe so. Let’s admit it—we’re a spot peeved that a guy who lost a four-day drone-and-missile war to us got into the reckoning of the world’s most powerful man, so much so as to get a lunch coupon.

Narendra Modi, too, got an invite to the White House when he was in Canada for the G7 summit, but no lunch card attached. Modi sent a regret note, saying he had to catch a flight to Croatia. Wise move!

Whether we like it or not, what Munir got wasn’t a free lunch. First of all, as economists say, “There ain’t no free lunches.” The saying originated in 19th century America (where else do you get a double negative?) where saloons offered free lunches to tipplers. They made the food so salty that customers ended up buying more and more beer.

The point is—no one offers anything free in this big bad world hoping to get an entry pass into paradise. There are hidden costs behind any good or service offered free.

Secondly, why should the POTUS, even a bit potty one like Trump, host Munir to lunch unless he wanted something that only Munir could deliver? Rarely or never has a visiting military chief got to be hosted by the president in person to even a mug of coffee, let alone a lunch, unless he was a head of state or government. Thus, Ayub, Yahya and Musharraf had been hosted in person, not as military chiefs but as presidents.

What if a prez really wants to meet a visiting lesser mortal, say a vice-prez, a deputy PM, a minister or a military chief of a foreign land? The visitor may get to call on the president, but the more common practice is to get a drop-in by the president. That is, the visiting mortal would be sitting, chatting or even playing cards with his counterpart or host in the latter’s room when the president would ‘drop in’ for a chat with the visitor.

Sounds casual and coincidental?—as if the president was passing by the room when he heard a familiar voice, and dropped in to say hello? Not really. All coincidents in diplomacy are planned well in advance, just as Winston Churchill’s off-the-cuff remarks were, by his own admission. Thus, when L.K. Advani, as deputy PM, was being hosted in her White House room by NSA Condoleezza Rice in 2002, George Bush ‘dropped in’ for a 35-minute chat. Our foreign office tom-tommed it as a great honour.

We don’t know if Munir got a great lunch or a salad-dressing down like the one that poor Volodymyr Zelensky got. The point is that he has got Pakistan back in the west’s and in the White House’s reckoning. Whether we in India like it or not, that was inevitable. For geography has given Pakistan a location in the atlas from where it can command the price it wants. As real estate agents would say, Pakistan has got a ‘corner plot’ in south and central Asia’s geopolitical atlas, and commands the crossroads of the region’s trade and commerce.

We needn’t grudge. On the contrary, it is good for us if the yanks engage India and Pakistan, as long as they don’t call for a table for three to mediate our neighbourly tiffs. Look at this way. Joe Biden’s flight from Kabul in 2021 had left the Pak generals in the cold, and they have since been seeking warmth in China’s embrace. The old Pak-China friendship had been developing into a strategic axis, giving Indian generals nightmares about a two-front war. It’s in India’s interest, too, to ensure that the US keeps Pakistan engaged, at least as a counterweight to the growing Chinese influence in Pakistan.

prasannan@theweek.in

war-farce-or-a-persian-tragedy

Sat Jun 21 11:37:56 IST 2025

Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana. The line has since been folk-tongued to sound like a proverb—“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.”

Like axioms in maths, proverbs don’t need proof. But Bibi Netanyahu is hell-bent on proving it. Don Trump, the joker in every pack of global crisis, is cheering him from the sidelines. Wait and watch! They’ll repeat history either as a Persian tragedy or a Farsi farce.

One can forgive Don. He is ruling a country with 250 years of history—too short to learn from mistakes of the past. Worse, a car-maker once told them that history is bunk. They revere him like a Confucius or a Chanakya.

But Bibi? He is ruling a people who have memories spanning two millennia and more. Yet he is letting himself repeat a mistake he had witnessed in his neighbourhood, just two decades ago.

What is Bibi up to? By his own admission, he is seeking a ‘regime change’ in Iran, a land ruled by ayatollahs for half a century since its people kicked out a ‘progressive’ tyrant who claimed to have descended from the Sasanians and Achaemenids of ancient Persia. In reality, he was but the son of a plebeian soldier who had executed a coup in 1925 and called himself Shah.

The Shia ayatollahs undid all the good and bad things the Shah had done, installed fundamentalist regimes, called America the Great Satan, issued fatwas on writers, made girls wear burqa, and sent spies to moral-police the people. But unlike the Taliban and other Sunni fundamentalists, they let girls go to school, held elections, invested in science, and let ancient Persia progress into a modern state.

Let’s get back to Bibi and his plot for a Persian regime change, a phrase many in the west have come to abhor after their flop show in Baghdad. More ominously, the excuse given by Bibi is the same as what was given by George Bush when he went into Iraq—that Iraq had made weapons of mass destruction, a euphemism for atomic, chemical and biological bombs.

Their search ended like chasing a mirage in the Mesopotamian sands. They found baby food packets in place where they thought were war chemicals, path samples in place of war germs, and power-generation rigs where they thought atom bombs were being made. Frustrated, they hanged the Mesopotamian lord, and left Iraq, one of Islamic West Asia’s two most technologised and industrialised lands, in a worse ‘messpot’ than they had found it.

Now Bibi and Don are targeting the one left. The reason? The same! That Iran is close to making atom bombs. Thank God, no poison gas or germ bombs this time.

To be fair, this time it looks truer. By most accounts, Iran is close to making bombs, if not already made. But then who made them make the bombs? They resumed bomb-making after Don Trump cheated on a deal that Barack Obama had made with them in 2015. Iran had vowed to destroy their stacks of enriched uranium, scrap two-thirds of their gas centrifuges, build no heavy-water facility, let IAEA inspectors roam around their atom labs, and so on. In return, Obama promised them relief, grants, technology, and the west’s hand of friendship.

Enter Trump in the White House, and he scrapped the deal. Iran had stuck to its its word—IAEA boss said so in March 2018—but Don and Bibi said Iran was hiding their bomb tools. To cut a long bomb story short, Trump went back on the atom deal; the ayatollahs back to their atom labs.

Now, what has been the big idea? Clean out the bad bombs, or cripple West Asia’s two most tech-savvy nations?

prasannan@theweek.in

green-red-or-saffron-a-tricolour-confusion

Sat Jun 14 11:03:14 IST 2025

Kerala planted more trees this green day than had been planned. No harm. The more the merrier, the greener, and the shadier. No pun intended.

Kerala’s farm mandarins—not orange, but red, and both puns intended—had planned statewide tree-planting events on environment day, June 5. With due respect and more propriety, they had asked Governor Rajendra Arlekar to preside over the inaugural in the Raj Bhavan, where farm minister P. Prasad, a passionate green thumb from the CPI, would join.

A word about the gov. An old disciplined swayamsevak from Goa, Arlekar had come to be liked by Kerala’s ruling reds. They had found him a far cry from the neo-converts to saffron, such as his talkative predecessor or the restless soul governing over their Dravidian cousins in Tamilagom. So much so, they had come to ignore his minor saffron flirtations such as getting ultra-rightists to lecture in the Raj Bhavan, so long as those were the governor’s events and not the government’s.

But when the farm babus looked at the arrangements for the green day in the Raj Bhavan, they were shocked to see a Bharat Mata picture on the dais with flowers and lamps. The event, they were told, would start with a puja to the picture.

The mantri’s mandarins saw red. How could a state event start with a puja to a saffron deity, even if she was claimed to be Bharat Mata? Worse, she was holding not the national tricolour, but the RSS jhanda, and probably its agenda. But the governor would hear none of their objections. Have it my saffron way, or get off the green way, said he.

In the end, the state had three events—the governor’s saffron one at the Raj Bhavan, the government’s green event elsewhere, and the protesting CPI’s red plantings across the state. Good! As we say in Malayalam, “Sampathu kaalathu thai pathu vechaal, aapathu kaalathu kaa pathu thinnaam.” Nothing intimidating! It’s only a wise rhyme meaning—‘plant ten buds in good times, get ten fruits in bad times’. In plain English, ‘save for the rainy day’.

But who listens to such advice these days when economists talk like credit card-sellers? They tell us to save less and spend more so that India will grow! Really? We thought that’s sure way to go broke. Money, we thought, doesn’t grow on trees—even on the ones planted on green day.

Let’s leave savings and talk saplings and politics. The communists have a point, and, for a change, the Congressmen agree. They say, Arlekar, much like most RSS men, is confusing the image of Bharat Mata with the spirit of Bharat Mata, or missing the woods of patriotism for the trees of nationalism. The commies, too, have high regard for Bharat Mata and, as Prasad said, “We have children dressing up as Bharat Mata at government events.” To prove the point, the CPI’s protest events had party chief Binoy Viswam, a mild-mannered gent, crying himself hoarse with ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ slogans.

Thankfully, none of them thought of giving a red flag to Bharat Mata. That would have been like waving the red rag before a bull.

Critics say the image of Bharat Mata, as the RSS has come to portray her, is a 20th century icon, born of the fiery rebel spirit spawned in Bengal after its 1905 partition. She is a creation of spirited modern artistry, her original saffron saadhvi avatar painted by Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. The real spirit of motherland or matrubhumi, say the reds and others, is a sublime one. Not iconographic like Lady Britannia portrayed with two lions, or a bare-breasted Miss Liberty leading the people of revolutionary France.

prasannan@theweek.in

kharge-clausewitz-stretegic-culture

Fri Jun 06 17:14:03 IST 2025

How times have changed! Three decades ago, George Tanham sneered at Indians for lacking a strategic culture. Today we have Mallikarjun Kharge quoting Clausewitz.

Yes, folks! Seeking a special session of Parliament to discuss the Pahalgam bloodbath and aftermath, Kharge said it was time the government came clean on both. To stress the point, he said, “The fog of war is clearing.”

‘Fog of war’ is a phrase derived from Prussian thinker Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. In simple terms, it denotes the predicament faced by commanders when events in the battlefield present a confusing picture. Gifted are those generals who see through the fog with their mind’s eye, foresee the enemy’s moves, and move own forces.

What sent Kharge on a Clausewitz track was the tacit admission by defence staff chief Anil Chauhan. He said in Singapore that though all fliers in Op Sindoor came home safe, the IAF had suffered some “initial losses” and that some “tactical mistakes” were made, but “remedied” and “rectified” in two days.

A thousand political blushes would have been saved if he had said this on Indian soil, to Indian leaders and to Indian citizens. No harm. To err is human, to forgive is divine. To err is also civil, to rectify is military. All militaries make mistakes, but they discuss those, and make amends. That’s also part of a vibrant strategic culture that Tanham was talking about.

What Kharge and co would like to know is this—what were the mistakes, what were the losses and, as Chauhan put it, what was done to rectify them and remedy them?

Asking for military secrets? No, by George, Jagjivan or Chavan! Losses are common in battles, and militaries in democracies admit them then and there.

Our own 1965 war saw Pakistan’s showroom-fresh Starfighters and Sabrejets shooting down four of our World War-worn Vampires and Mysteres on the first day, and a pilot flying a fuel-dry Gnat landing in a Pak airfield the next day. The 1971 round opened with 11 of western India’s air bases being smashed in three waves of vicious Pak attack. The Kargil war opened with two supersonic MiGs going down, and a mean Mi-17 downed by a puny shoulder-fired Stinger.

All losses were admitted then and there; they made news. The opposition didn’t fault the boys; the media didn’t shame the men; the news didn’t kill morale. The losses made our pilots revise tactics, the ground commanders double-guard the bases, the technicians cut the turnaround time of every plane, and a charged-up citizenry cheer them all. In no time, they cut the losses, improved tactics, and soared into the skies firing from all cylinders and gunpods.

Why are we holding back now? Do we fear that the loss of an armament would reflect badly on the choice of weapons we bought? No, sirs. A Rafale being damaged (the French forbid!) is no proof that we bought a bad plane.

Battles are won as much with superior tactics as with superior weapons. How else did our puny Gnats finally prevail over Pakistan’s dreaded Sabres? How else did our war-weary Shermans and Chieftains make graveyards of Pattons in 1965? And, most recently, how else did a much-reviled MiG-21 (pray, who called them flying coffins?) shoot down a much-feted F-16 in the post-Balakot mop-up job?

Strategic culture is about equipping generals to see through the fog of war. It is about coming clean on war errors. It is about enabling the citizen to cut through the clutter of propaganda. It is also about an informed political elite discussing and debating them in open forums. Which forum is more suitable for this than Parliament?

prasannan@theweek.in

field-marshals-and-failed-marshals

Sat May 31 11:10:53 IST 2025

Politicians generally distrust war-winning generals. In Pakistan, they distrust war-losing generals.

Politicians see potential Bonapartes in war heroes, and get them out of the way with a few medals, honours and sinecures. Harry Truman sacked Korea winner Douglas MacArthur fearing challenge to civil supremacy. Mahinda Rajapaksa promoted Eelam war-winner Sarath Fonseka as chief of defence staff, with no command powers. The general quit soon, dabbled a bit in politics, and faded away with a five-star rank.

In Pakistan, politicians fear war-losers. For good reason. Pervez Musharraf lost in Kargil, but upstaged Nawaz Sharif in a coup within months. Now Asim Munir has lost a four-day war with India, and Nawaz’s brother Shehbaz has saved his job by giving him a five-star rank. In Pakistan, a battle loser is as dangerous as a wounded tiger.

Munir is their second field marshal. (Trollers call him failed marshal.) The other was Ayub Khan who wore the rank literally on his shoulders, and figuratively on his sleeve. Old bloke gave it to himself.

Generals in India wear their stars on their cars, and on the gorget patch on their collars. The gorget patch, if you don’t know, is that scarlet pip (gold in Navy, blue in Air Force) that colonels and above sport on their collars. A brigadier wears one star, a major-general two, a lieutenant-general three and a full general four. In the rare case of a guy being made a field marshal or equivalent, he would have five stars on his collar and car.

India has given five stars to three men—the 1971 war-winner Sam Manekshaw who got it with his pension papers, first chief K.M. Cariappa long after he started drawing pension, and the 1965 air war-winner Arjan Singh even later. Sam and Cariappa were made field marshals, Arjan got the equivalent rank of marshal of the air force. None in the Navy has got the equivalent rank, admiral of the fleet.

No grudges, except from Air Chief Marshal P.C. Lal who led the air force in the 1971 war. He is said to have resented Sam being showered with praises, ranks and stars. But Admiral S.M. Nanda, who pulled off two surprise attacks on Karachi within one week, told Indira Gandhi that he didn’t mind Sam getting an extra star as long as it wasn’t one of his.

The point is—five stars are rarely given these days, except as hotel ratings and chocolate bars. The British, who fought the most number of wars in modern history, have field-marshalled 141 of their generals. The Americans, fighting the most number of wars in the post-World War era, have been tight-fisted. So far only four or five of their generals have got full five, but the rank is called general of the army. They didn’t want George Marshall, the first of their modern-day five-stars, to be trolled as Marshal Marshall.

Field marshals in banana republics are self-conferred. Idi Amin of Uganda, who staged a coup as a major-general in 1971, skipped two rungs of the ladder and anointed himself field marshal.

Muammar Gaddafi was the humblest. He was dictator of Libya from 1969 to 2011 wielding absolute power, but never thought of giving himself a rank above colonel, a middle-level rank.

Why should he have? He had staged a coup when he was just a lieutenant, one of the lowest among the officer-ranks, and picked up the rank of colonel, skipping captain, major and lieutenant-colonel. One can be sure, he would have had several real star-rank officers saluting him during his 42-year reign.

Who knows, the guy might have got a kick out of that.

prasannan@theweek.in

adultery-military-and-a-little-poetry

Sat May 24 10:50:54 IST 2025

Admiral Ben Key, married and father of three, had fun with a subordinate. Key isn’t gay; the subordinate is a woman. We don’t know if it was adultery; the British tabloids—prudes!—don’t tell us if she was someone’s wife.

Key has been kicked out, and King Charles has anointed General Gwyn Jenkins to head the Royal Navy. A general to head the navy? Yes, mates! Jenkins will be the first general to be the ‘first sea lord’. He was a commando in the Royal Marines, the Royal Navy’s amphibious special ops force.

Good luck, Jenkins. Keep your eyes open, and your ears safe. Once a captain Jenkins crossed the sea path of the Spaniards in the south seas, and they sent him back minus an ear. An MP brought the severed ear to parliament; the sight of it fired England’s fiercest sea spirits leading to a nine-year war with Spain starting 1739. They called it the War of Jenkins’ ear, perhaps the first war triggered by the sight of a human organ, after Cleopatra’s nose.

Let’s leave Gen Jenkins to sort out the royal naval mess, and get back to Sir Ben’s non-crimes. Under English law, cheating your wife, or having fun with another’s, is no longer a crime. Nor is it under the old Indian penal law or under the current Bharatiya kanoon. Guys who are into it say it is fun—till your wife or her husband gets to know of it. After that it’s hell.

But then, Key isn’t just another ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’—that’s what they call their aam aadmi (shall we say ‘man on the slow train to Karjat’?) He was their ‘first sea lord’, a post once held by the likes of Louis Mountbatten when Britannia ruled the world’s waters. Other navies had admirals; the Royal Navy had sea lords. They still have, though the sea lords are verily King Canutes now!

The long and short of it is that Sir Ben was England’s first sea lord, and they have asked him to stand down to face a probe. Not a court-martial, thankfully. The Royal Navy claims to have never court-martialled an admiral since 1757, when John Byng faced the firing squad for “failing to do his utmost” in a battle against the French.

Sleeping with a woman who isn’t your wife—be she single or married—is no longer a crime for the constabulary to knock on your door. England decriminalised adultery long ago; India’s Supreme Court did it in 2018 through the Joseph Shine judgement. But His Majesty’s law lords and sea lords aren’t impressed; nor would our military jurists be. Sleeping with a subordinate or a subordinate’s spouse is still an offence under military law in both countries. Our court revisited the issue in 2023 and ruled that the armed forces are exempt from the ambit of the Shine judgment.

Yes, mates! The guys and gals in uniform don’t have all the rights and freedoms that we on the slow train to Karjat have. They have a different set of dos and don’ts, and one of those is not to indulge in unofficerlike conduct. Sleeping with a colleague or colleague’s wife is a conduct unbecoming of an officer, and you can face the sack for doing that.

Fine, let the British do whatever with their first sea lord, and let our military courts do if they find an officer having committed the offence. I am here not as a Peeping Tom lurking near officers’ bedrooms, but out of poetic interest.

Poetic interest? Yes, I like the phrase we use for describing the crime of adultery in India’s military. We call it ‘stealing the affections of a brother officer’s wife’.

Patriarchal, perhaps! But I shall bet all my hoarded Spanish gold to say it was coined by a Keats or a Casanova!

prasannan@theweek.in

a-weapon-to-hit-not-hurt

Sat May 17 11:06:02 IST 2025

Apologies, Matthew Arnold! Intelligent, not ignorant, armies have clashed by the night. Not on Dover beach, but over the Indus plains and Karakoram hills for three nights.

There were three battles in the Sindoor war (I call it war because it was waged between two militaries)—a battle of missiles, a battle of guns, and a battle of drones. The last may go down as history’s least lethal war. It killed none; neither side claimed to have hurt humans nor suffered hurt to humans! Even the Anglo-Zanzibar war, history’s shortest (44 minutes), killed a few.

First about the battle of missiles. India’s opening shots were at nine terror holes from Muzaffarabad in Pak-occupied Kashmir to Bahawalpur in Pak-owned Punjab—24 strikes delivered from war-jets in 25 minutes from 1.05am on May 7. Pakistan claims to have sent up fighters, shot down one or two of our birds. No proof. We may know once the fog of battle clears.

This was the most lethal of the three battles. Took a few lives—bad lives. Pakistan conceded their 11 soldiers and 40 ‘civilians’ were killed. More, says India. We will leave the body-count alone as in the case of the birds downed. No prizes for guessing who the ‘civilians’ were. Civilian terrorists get military funeral there.

Then there was the old ‘border’ war along the LoC, fought on and off for eight decades. It usually stays cold, but turns hot when Pakistan has a fresh batch of terror graduates to be sent to our side. Their troops open fire, giving cover for the boys to sneak in. It can also turn hot when either side wants to have a photo-shoot (pun intended) or when the area’s CO had had a bad breakfast.

Most of these LoC firings end in local-level flag meetings or truces decided at higher level. One such truce had been holding since 2021, but sparks have been flying past few months. Perhaps that was when Pakistan was planning Pahalgam. Anyway, the shells and bullets fired from the other side are said to have killed about our 20 troops and civilians. Sad! But nothing new. These two were lethal battles.

There was a third one. It lasted three nights along the LoC and the longer border. It killed none. It was a novelty. It hasn’t yet been fought over South Asian soil or in its airspace.

It started on Wednesday, the night after our missile strikes. Hundreds of drones swarmed across the border and the LoC like fireflies in the woods—lighting up the night air but hurting none. We claim to have shot down every one. Probably yes, probably no. Either way, it hurt none. Except perhaps damaging—not destroying—a few air defence installations.

Soon, it was our turn. We sent our drones to their air bases, including the ones near Islamabad and Lahore. They damaged the enemy’s air assets, but left its managers alive. Pretty decent.

This drone war, decently non-lethal, went on till Pakistan upped the ante on Saturday morning. They sent a “high-speed” missile through the swarm of drones. India shot it down over Sirsa.

Now the real game was afoot. We again scrambled our Rafales and MiGs, and shot missiles at close to a dozen air stations across the border and LoC, damaging Pak radars, installations and command-control consoles, but (hopefully) killed none. Pakistan sued for ceasefire.

Now, why did the generals send drones to hit us? Three guesses. One, to tell the public of Pakistan that they were hitting India. Two, to scare us—to tell us that they know where our air defence assets were located. Three, by hitting without hurting, they were pleading with us to pipe down.

prasannan@theweek.in

how-powerful-is-the-pope

Sat May 10 15:37:19 IST 2025

The pope? How many divisions has he got?” Joseph Stalin is said to have shouted at Winston Churchill when the Brit talked about protecting the Catholics in Europe from the Nazis. Now, Donald Trump has hurled a worse insult at the pope. After Francis died, he said he would “like to be pope”, and then posted on the White House X account a doctored image of himself wearing a white cassock and papal headdress. The civilised world treated the boorish act with the contempt it deserved.

The pope has no divisions to command, nor large lands to lord over. Though papacy claims a hoary tradition of 20 centuries, the modern state of the pope is not even a century old. Vatican, the world’s smallest sovereign state, was created in 1929 through the Lateran treaties.

Papacy may look an anachronism today—a theocratic monarchy in an increasingly godless world of technology. Not a member of the UN, but with diplomatic ties with most countries, not on behalf of the Vatican state, but on behalf of the Holy See. This Holy See, which many think was always seated in Rome, had often moved its habitat—to Avignon, to Pisa and elsewhere. It was without territory from 1870 till 1929.

Yet it wields power. Not just spiritual power over the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but a moral power in a world that seeks to be guided by ethics. Many think the moral power is waning in a world where fewer are going to church, and churches are being sold to pubs. Blessed Mary, quite the contrary! The moral power of the pope is only increasing in recent times, his political power declining.

Time was when popes could marshal not just divisions, but corps and kings. Calls by Popes Urban II, Eugene II and Innocent III sent Europe’s crowned kings, feuding barons and knighted warriors charging into the Holy Land to clash with Saladins and perish at their hands in the sands. Pope Gregory VI made the mighty Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV freeze for three days in a snow storm outside his mountain retreat in Canossa in 1077.

Mediaeval popes—not all but many—made not only war, but peace and even love. Many enriched themselves, their kin, and the English language. ‘Nepotism’, literally meaning promoting nephews, has its origins in the practice of popes and cardinals appointing close kin to positions of power. This abuse of power by successive popes and cardinals led to Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door, kicking off the Reformation and the modern age of reason.

Yet, papacy survived, displaying a remarkable adaptability in a changing world. Even as it initially resorted to institutions of ill-repute like the Inquisition, progressive elements were also at work. The last hurrahs of its political power were heard in 1493 when Pope Alexander VI divided the soon-to-be-colonised world between Spain (in the western hemisphere) and Portugal (the east), and in 1583, when Gregory XIII decreed the calendar that the world follows to this day.

Since then the political power of the pope has been waning, but his moral power waxing. Most of the post-Lateran popes have been saintly souls unlike their mediaeval predecessors, and have been spreading the message of true love, peace, brotherhood and harmony.

Papacy attained its highest glory in the late 20th century. Its power of virtue may not have moved mountains, but has torn political iron curtains and social segregations. The first Polish pope was instrumental in punching the first hole in the Iron Curtain, the first Latino pope reached out to the sexually ostracised.

The next pope?

prasannan@theweek.in

tire-them-out-and-hit-them

Sat May 03 15:13:08 IST 2025

Pahalgam has been avenged, partly. Only the knockout punch remains. It will be delivered at a time, spot and in a manner that India and its armed forces, or its other coercive arms, choose.

Avenged, you may ask. How? On the action side, we have only sent back a few innocent Pakistani citizens, stopped trade, and threatened to choke their rivers. What’s the big deal in these? Nothing.

We hit back by not doing what Pakistan’s mullah-generals, who have been recruiting urchins and training them “to do dirty work” as their defence minister admitted, wanted us to do.

The generals expected us—not only the state of India but the people of India too—to get angry. Indeed we are angry; but we aren’t showing the anger in the way they thought we would. They thought India would get provoked over the lines of faith, and that the whole of India would turn into a post-Godhra Gujarat. That’s why they trained their unschooled boys to ask our tourists about their faith, and then chose the victims by their faith.

But Kashmiris themselves called the Pakistani bluff at Pahalgam. Adopting a unanimous resolution condemning the cowardly killings, the strife-torn territory’s law-makers said they were “mindful of the sinister design behind the selective targeting of the victims....”

The rest of India, too, has been mindful. The whole of India read and heard about the selective targeting, but refused to get provoked on the lines of faith, community or kinship. Hindus didn’t blame Muslims, rulers didn’t blame the opposition, the rest of India didn’t blame Kashmir. India has had one of its finest hours in the post-Pahalgam days.

Indeed, sour notes were heard here and there, both from the ruling and opposition side, but India has largely stood as one, trusting its state, its rulers, and its armed forces.

India has given the decision-makers time to think, brood, deliberate, debate, plan, and strike at the right time, in the right place and in the right manner. No pressure should be brought to bear on them—not political, not economic, and no cries for blood from us the citizens. They will strike at the time of their choosing. It could happen before this column comes out of the press, it could be after dinner tonight, before lunch tomorrow, this weekend, next month, this summer, during the monsoon, or even later. Let’s wait.

The later the better. For two reasons. One, that will keep the mullah-generals in suspense as long as possible. Let the suspense kill them before our boys deliver the final punch. Let them sweat it out through this summer and longer, not knowing when, where or how our men will strike.

Two, let the wait make them lower their guard. The more we delay, the less vigilant they would be. That will also lessen the risks our men will be exposed to.

In the meantime, we can sit assured that the mullah-generals and their cowardly crowd have been exposed. They have run out of the bombs, bazookas, and the smarter gadgets of terror that they had saved from their Afghan stint. They no longer have the dare or devilry to attack targets of strength—assembly building, army camps, convoys or even communication towers. The Pakistani terrorist has been reduced to a mere dacoit who kills unarmed wayfarers.

The people of Kashmir have seen through this. They are no longer afraid of the boys who sneak in from the other side with bullets in their belts and bombs in their backstraps. No surprise why Kashmiris are out on the streets, boldly condemning the civilian-killing cowards.

prasannan@theweek.in

remembering-ranjit-nair-physicist-and-friend-to-the-maharshis-of-global-science

Sun Apr 27 10:14:23 IST 2025

Ranjit Nair died on April 14. I felt bad and sad. Two days later, Nikku Madhusudhan, an India-born Cambridge physicist, announced he had found life on an exo-planet about 120 light years away. I told myself, I’m going to miss Nair.

Had Nair been around, I’d have phoned him to know about Nikku’s work, and he would have given me lessons in exobiology. That would have been like listening to Stephen Hawking—literally, figuratively and acoustically. Afflicted with dystonia some 20 years ago, Nair had a problem with his speech muscles. Yet his friends strained their ears to catch his words of scientific wisdom, as they would have when listening to Hawking’s computerised speech, each word worth its weight in moonstone.

Nair would even have given me Nikku’s number, or that of a Cambridge pal through whom I could have contacted Nikku. His phone book was a who’s who of the world’s finest minds—Nobel scientists and those who missed the prize.

Few in India knew him or knew about him, but the maharishis of global science knew Ranjit. He was my (and of many hacks like me) turn-to source for any information on the world’s scientists. He knew them all. If he didn’t, he would find ways of reaching out to them through his network of Nobelists, Fields Medallists and other sagely friends.

His passion was to get the rajarshis and devarshis among them to India. “Indians have only heard of them; I want Indians to hear from them,” he used to say. The principal public activity of the Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science that he founded, funded and nurtured after he quit NISTADS was to get these sages to India. He organised their lectures in memory of Einstein, Tagore and J.C. Bose.

Thus he brought Nobel winners like Gerard't Hooft, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (both Physics), Yuan T. Lee, Ahmed Zewail, Alan Heeger, Robert Huber (Chemistry), Rolf Zinkernagel, Torsten Wiesel (Medicine), non-Nobel sages like Raja Ramanna, Vilayanur Ramachandran, and E.C.G. Sudarshan; George Cardona to talk on ‘Panini in the history of Indian thought’, Wilhelm Halbfass on ‘the concept of aakasa (space) in Indian thought’, and James Langer on 'how solids bend and break'. And, of course, the two brahmarshis of the post-Einstein age, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose—men who knew about the big bang beginning, infinity and everything in between.

On the CPFS platform, they didn’t speak just formulas and theorems. Nair made them speak in such a way as to stimulate the listeners’ brains, and make them laugh.

I remember a Nobel laureate talking as much about the convergence between Physics and Chemistry as about the convergence point on the low-hanging diamond necklace that a charming lady was wearing at the Nobel banquet.

He wagered with sages—with Hawking on the end of physics after a call on president K.R. Narayanan in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and with a bunch of his oenophile pals from Cambridge on why champagne tastes better when poured into the glass in a particular way.

Nair loved Cambridge, where he got his master’s and doctorate in Physics, after his graduation from Kerala. One can imagine the groves of the Cambridge academe in the 1970s—hosting the world’s wisest scientists, worst anarchists, dangerous communists, nasty nihilists and passionate poets.

Ranjit, I guess, flirted with two types among them—the sages of science and the minstrels of muse. From among the former he collected his friends; from the latter he chose his wife—Rukmini Bhaya Nair, poet and litterateur.

prasannan@theweek.in