Refresh @10 - I

IT was the peak of campaign for the 2004 general election in Vadodara. A gung-ho "India Shining" BJP presented quite a contrast with a brooding Vajpayee. A directionless Congress was behaving as a reluctant participant having mentally conceded the poll. Senior reporters were busy in covering more important events of the campaign – the trails and the Vajpayee-Sonia rallies. Cubs like me would do smaller side stories like press conferences and the stuff. One fine day, the chief reporter gave an assignment. Please go and meet Manmohan Singh. He would meet select journalists at Welcomgroup Hotel. It was my first assignment to cover a national leader. I sauntered excited to find only one more reporter - the PTI stringer waiting in the lobby. 

Moments later a Congress Seva Dal attendant ushered us into a suite. At the centre of the room just around the sofa stood our subject. In a fawning white Kurta and his trademark blue turban Sardar Manmohan Singh greeted the duo with a submissive Namskar both hands folded. Even a city neta's casual confidence was yet to arrive in the man.

Singh had the demeanor of a candidate out for his first interview. The PTI man shot off a question on what would be priorities of Congress if it came to power. I perhaps asked him what he thought of country's present economic situation given he was an Economist himself. That was rather patronising. The answers are difficult to recall now, but I do remember that we both had to strain ourselves really hard to get a word of what MMS spoke. Unassuming to the extent of being self effacing, one came out unimpressed from the meeting. Understandably, only one newspaper and one agency thought of covering him, dismissed in two columns next day. And not even a Municipal level Congress leader was present to escort someone who would be India's Prime Minister a fortnight later!

Arab Spring A Process

It began with the Palestine, and has gone on to replicate itself in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and now Syria. The Arab Spring is turning out to be a movement from friendly tyrants to an unfriendly Islamist democracy. But should it be a surprise? Afterall, as early as 1970s the secular Shah of Iran was replaced by a theocracy that now talks of obliterating Israel from the face of Earth.

In mid-1990’s controversial scholar Samuel Huntington in his now famous book “The Clash of Civilizations” – the title itself borrowed from Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis – had written that in the Muslim world, in almost every country, the most likely successor regime waiting in the wings was an Islamic one. A decade and a half later it’s coming true to the chagrin or otherwise of the rest of the world.

So, essentially, what we are seeing now is the product of an Islamic Resurgence that began on the back of the Oil boom of 1970s. From its earlier stage Islamization of the social and cultural space it is now at a vantage of occupying the political space in nation after nation. The economic surge and a youth bulge gave the Muslim world a movement akin to the Christian Reformation. Long before we even heard of it, the Muslim Brotherhood had created a charity supra-structure with schools, colleges, hospitals, and other charities – a sort of religious-welfare-state-within-the-secular-state – which is now being leveraged for attaining political power.

As terror group Indian Mujahideen broke on the national stage in 2008 a disturbing pattern emerged. That of well off and well educated youth involved in these activities. This rather out-of-context mention is actually connected with what has happened in much of the Muslim world as part of the Resurgence. Huntington calls it a revolution, and like all revolutions it’s driven by the youth and the intellectuals. It is not for nothing that the Islamist appeal is particularly strong in technical institutes, engineering faculties, and scientific departments. In Iran, for example, literacy was 15 per cent in 1953 when the Shah ruled. It was 49 per cent when the Shah was overthrown in 1970s.

Understandably thus, it is not for nothing that our own IM boys come from similar well educated and well off backgrounds. So is it worrisome for us? Well Huntington would want us to take heart. The Oil boom and the youth bulge peaked in mid-90s and would taper off over the next decade, he avers. Bringing down with it the rabidity and the accompanying violence as the ageing Islamists possibly jaw-jaw over war-war. Amen is only what one can say.