Cleansing the soul in Spring ’02

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of deadland, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain

TS Eliot (1888-1965) begins 'The burial of the dead' in The Waste Land with these soul-stirring words. Times are no less desperate for South Asia. We sorely miss an Allama Eqbal who could reassure South Asians thus: "Something there is in us, that nothing can erase us so. Though time's revolution for centuries hath been our foe." Time's revolutions are turning at such a speed that we are not able to realise that we are going round and round in circles.

In Serendib, the old adage that the more things change, the more they remain the same, is once again proving to be true. Once again, Sinhala chauvinists have started behaving spitefully, and the fragile peace process may just unravel if they have their way. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LITE) seem to be leopards wanting to change their spots. Tired of being branded the most lethal terrorist outfit in the world, the LTTE leadership seems to have decided that future wars with the establishment in Colombo must be fought on the negotiating table set by the facilitators from Oslo. Post 9/11, it is a changed world for armed insurgents everywhere. 'Freedom fighter' is no longer a kosher term in the lexicon of Bush bin Bush.

Head Tiger Velupillai Prabhakaran has assessed the geo-political reality and has decided to come out of his lair. Addressing a press conference after a gap of 12 years in the bush, Prabhakaran was ill at ease in English and looked little like the much-feared rebel leader of myth and fact. But the safari suit and hesitant demeanour does not hide the fact that the dreaded militant is merely responding to events beyond his control. He has not had a change of heart, it is the transformed situation which has forced him to the table – most importantly, the Western countries' closing of the fund conduits from expat Tamils. But do not expect the Tiger Supreme to purr like a cat. He urged India to forget the "tragic incident" that consumed the life of a former prime minister in the prime of his life, and he refused to divulge his strategy for the upcoming negotiations with the Colombo government in June.

While Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe wants to keep the door open and prefers to read the LTTE overtures magnanimously, President Chandrika Kumaratunga has no illusions regarding a group she likens to the Al Qaeda. But for the war-weary island, there seems to be no way ahead except through talks, so the president should make her peace with the idea. But if the June negotiations in Bangkok fail to produce a tangible peace, there is no telling what the resulting retributive cyclone will do to the country.

Afghanistan is relearning an old lesson of history: winning a war is relatively easy, it's establishing control in a war-ravaged zone that tests the mettle of any leadership. Former King Zahir Shah is back in his ancestral land, Hamid Karzai is lining up international support for his regime, and the Loya Zirga may be held sometime soon. But what is it that is different now, than earlier, that will usher in peace this time among the fiercely independent communities – the Pushtuns, the Hazara, the Uzbek and the Tajik, to name just the larger ones? The Americans have come, released their smart bombs, and are in the process of departing, with their principal quarry, ObL, still on the lam. The promised aid will never be paid up in full, as is always the case. For all the eyes he has turned in the West – rather like a latter day Dalai Lama – I would not envy Mr Karzai but would wish him all the good fortune that he so badly needs. Uneasy lies the head under that karakul cap. If Kabul does accept Dhaka's offer to help rebuild the Afghan army and police, Saarcy can only hope that the Bengali officers will refrain from im-parting coup lessons. The Royal Nepal Army would probably be a better exemplar for the security forces of a country in the Hindukush, with a myriad of identities rather like Nepal-in-the-Himalaya. Alas, His Majesty's forces are presently otherwise occupied, pursuing their Maoist quarry with the monsoon rains barely a month away. Till now, Nepal's men in khaki had been serving as United Nations blue helmets with no real combat experience under their belts. One can expect that if they are able to best the very capable Maoists in a fair battle, the demand for the Royal Nepal Army's peacekeeping services will grow dramatically.

But the story unfolding in the hills and plains of Nepal gets ever-more depressing. For last six years, the government in Kathmandu has been pushing the boulder of peace up the hill only to see it tumble down to the bottom. The wily Maoist strategists have used every weapon in the book – from human shields to propaganda to well-planned attacks using indigenous and modern weaponry. The army is finally up and about, and is notching up small victories, but the Maoists still range free. Desperate, the government has fixed a price upon the heads of prominent insurgents, and wants them dead or alive. But, especially since the declaration of the state of emergency in late November and the deployment of the army, the Maoist leadership is probably holed up in the safehouses provided by their CCOMPOSA (Confederation of Communist and Maoist Political Organisations of South Asia) comrades in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Meanwhile, both those who kill and those who die – be it the army, police or the insurgent militia – are mostly the weak and the oppressed.

An American military delegation went on a reconnaissance mission to the most insurgency-affected districts of Nepal and Washington has promised to extend USD 20 million worth of military hardware to strengthen the Royal Nepal Army. While we may be wary of an army thus strengthened, and fear for the democracy once the current problems are over, we have only the Maoists to thank for this American gift to the generals of Nepal. Meanwhile, it is unlikely that even this amount will be enough to completely modernise the army. When the helicopters and the armaments are delivered, the cost of running a suddenly top-heavy military will fall squarely on the impoverished population and economy.

History repeated itself as a farce in the one-horse race of the referendum in Pakistan. The Supreme Court recognised the validity of self-proclaimed President Pervez Musharraf's plan of action to legitimise himself and the outcome was never in doubt. While the general has proved to be an ace strategist in res-ponding to American demands on Afghanistan, and he does have an uncanny knack for besting the Indians in public relations, his history lessons have obviously been perfunctory. Similar plebiscites in 1960 and 1984 produced predictable results, but predictably enough failed to change the status of either Field Marshall Muhammad Ayub Khan or the Islamic evangelist-general Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. As Roedad Khan wrote in Karachi's Dawn, "The tragedy of Pakistan is that our rulers, like the Bourbons of France, don't learn from history and are doomed to repeat the same mistakes." Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation that it would produce a different result.

General Musharraf's failure is a double tragedy – his decision to carry through with the meaningless political charade has put a question mark over the elections slated for October, and it has diluted the impact of his CEO's zeal of cleansing public life in Pakistan. The reduced stature was tragically evident in his televised address to the nation in the last week of March, where he looked a pathetic caricature of his former Ataturkish self, sounding like any of the run-ofthe- mill politicians that South Asians everywhere recognise so well. And the General looked phoney in his newly stitched Sherwani. And one had so hoped that Emerson's dictum that every hero turns out to be a bore in the end would not apply to the snappy General Musharraf.

But General Musharraf would be looking even worse, if it were not for his neighbour, the poet-premier of the Republic of India. Atal Behari Vajpayee once wailed over the fate of Hiroshima in verse, but in the next breath he ordered Pokharan H. He begged lyrically for Mahatma Gandhi's forgiveness for being "guilty of breaking oath, of defiling Rajghat, of forgetting the real aim and leaving incomplete the journey" – and then turned around to become an ardent apologist of Narendra Modi. For those not familiar with the political career of this RSS propagandist of yore, the contradictions in the personality of Vajpayee may seem baffling. "A shrinking Vajpayee," wrote the talk-show host Karan Thapar in The Hindustan Times. "The mask is off," agonised Siddhartha Vardarajan in The Times of India. Hold your horror, gentlemen, and shed that belated outrage. Did you not allow yourself to forget that the Bharatiya Janata Party, which Vajpayee leads, is nothing but the repackaging of Guru Golwalker-inspired Jan Sangha? Do you not see in the poetic utterances of Vajpayee ("Jayprakashji, keep faith, for we shall reknit the broken dreams.") the mumbo-jumbo of a conartist rather than the up-front duplicity of a masked man? Was this not the same prime minister who just a couple of months ago had teased UP Muslims that he didn't really need their votes in the UP Assembly elections? And are his recent pronouncements not consistent with his longstanding views on Kashmir, the Muslim Personal Law, or the demolition of the Babri mosque?

New Delhi's mediawallahs at least have the easy option of restrained criticism of the New Delhi government. But for the diplomats of South Block, there is no escape from the despair of having to defend the dirty deeds of their saffronite political masters. There has been an unequivocal domestic and international condemnation of the Gujarat government's complicity in the communal violence post-Godhra. Some European diplomatic missions in New Delhi have termed the carnage "ethnic cleansing" in deliberately leaked media reports. An exasperated JN Dixit, firebrand former foreign secretary, couldn't help but admit that the stature of his country has sunk to "zero global credibility". And yet, South Block is reduced to telling the world that the Indian government "didn't need lessons in secularism from the West." This, remember, is the country which held the torch of freedom high and did not shirk from its leadership role in criticising South Africa or Israel when the times demanded it. How one wishes that the stridently moralistic India of yesteryear was back up on the world stage, lifting a stern finger of warning to states which would act against human decency. Give me that any day, to this shifty-eyed caricature of government that the BJP has turned 'GOI' into.

Eliot ends The Waste Land by repeating the invocation of 'Shantih' three times. According to the poet's own notes, he uses the word to evoke the meaning implied in the formal ending to an Upanishad, which he translates as "The Peace which passeth understanding". Vajpayee can rhapsodise over such an impenetrable idea in his terse Khari Boli. However, Saarcy feels that the peace that the South Asians really need is the peace of the Buddhist prayers. But can Buddha answer our prayers if we keep blowing him up again and again – in Pokharan, in Jaffna, in Ayodhya, in Bamiyan… and now in Gujarat? Stop composing poems, Pandit Vajpayee, and stick to Hanuman Chalisa. We are all in need of a soul cleansing.