Natwar Singh has exhausted his capacity to hurt himself. But he has not exhausted his capacity to hurt the Congress. The story of the ex-foreign minister of India confirms an old view of mine. While there is always the danger of character assassination in public life, the far bigger danger for politicians is character suicide.
Now that Natwar Singh has more time on his hands, if not more peace in his mind, he is probably allotting blame for his misfortunes. Paul Volcker is surely on top of his list. But, in all honesty, he needs to divide the blame between Volcker and hubris. The details in the UN report were half the problem. The other half was television: Or, to be more specific, the frequent appearances of Singh and Son on the box. Volcker condemned Natwar Singh in his report. Natwar Singh ended up condemning himself on television. The minister is an extremely well read man. He might have paused to check Shakespeare. “He doth protest too much.” As for Jagat Singh: His innate aggression might be tolerated in a decadent feudal environment, but it does not travel very far in civilized society. If the not-so-young man thought he could huff and puff his way out of trouble, he has not grown up.
One wonders if either Natwar Singh or the Congress took any advice on how to handle a problem that quickly pole-vaulted into a crisis. Friends comment, or suggest; that is perfectly normal and understandable.
The initial reaction seemed based on the view that this was a silly season story, the sort of news that fills a gap when nothing much is happening. Hence the slightly thoughtless initial reactions, both by the Congress and the minister. “The Congress will send a legal notice to the UN.” In other words the Congress was sending a legal notice to India, since India is a member. “Who is Paul Volcker? He doesn’t even know that I am the foreign minister of India!” It was silly to doubt Volcker’s credentials, and a phone to any sensible man in America might have prevented such a mistake. But hubris tends to have an escalating impact on poor judgment. By the time Singh was asserting, vibrantly, that “I, as foreign minister of India” could dictate national policy it was apparent that he was out of sync with the culture of democratic governance. After that his departure was no longer a question of whether but of when.
Mercifully (for the victim), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh brought one stream of the running story to a halt when he decided that Natwar Singh could no longer be a tenable custodian of the nation’s foreign policy. The prime minister’s initial defense of his colleague is not to be faulted. He cannot jettison a senior minister in the first onslaught even though he was aware of Volcker’s reputation, as well as the integrity of the committee that had done the damage. But the final compromise, in which Natwar Singh has become a minister without portfolio, achieves nothing. Natwar Singh is no Lal Bahadur Shastri, whose advice was needed even after he resigned his portfolio. Nor did the former resign; he was ordered to walk the plank (in his own interest, since the plank was fitted out with a temporary safety net).
The compromise has fuelled suspicion that Natwar Singh knows something that we do not, at least not yet; and that something could hurt others in the Congress.
This may not be true, but the Indian voter is a suspicious sort of chap. The chances of anything remaining secret are remote. By the time the various wringers have done their work, at least half a dozen inquiries would have sifted through the oily affairs of an elitist friends’ circle who thought that the world was their oyster and their dads were little pearls. There is the Volcker report, already with us, documents awaited. The Enforcement Directorate has begun its interrogations and alerted airports that the directors of Hamdan, Andaleeb Sehgal and Vikas Dhar should not be permitted to leave the country for the moment. The tax authorities will doubtless want their turn. Virendra Dayal has been put on a parallel track, to report on UN processes and reports. Justice R.S. Pathak, with the powers of a civil court, will inquire into the Volcker conclusions. And then of course is the continual enquiry report being done by the media. Ironically, Natwar Singh and his son might find that, of all these options, Volcker might have been the most gentle.
The media has, so far, the softest job. Volcker has done most of its work; all it needs is a bit of follow-up. This is bad news for the Singhs, since with each layer and each lead their protestations look that much more hollow. It is apparent now that Paul Volcker’s basic information came from documents seized from government records after Saddam Hussein’s defeat. He then crosschecked the names with bank transactions. There were no allegations against those who did not figure in bank records: Witness Bheem Singh, a Jammu and Kashmir panther. I can hardly comment on the merits of each individual allegation, but the case against Sehgal looks strong. Sehgal was in the picture only because of his connections with the Singhs, and, as confirmed by a former Congress minister, P. Shiv Shankar, a member of the Congress delegation to Iraq, was in the group only in his capacity as their friend. It would be very unusual if two plus two did not make four. It is safe to assume that Andaleeb Sehgal did not go to Baghdad under the false assumption that it was Paris in summertime.
The life of a government is best measured in events, not months and years. By that yardstick, the Manmohan Singh government has reached its midway mark. The early hiccups, like the shindig over tainted ministers, did not affect its stride; in fact, it was the BJP that was sounding strident. But 2005 has been a year in which the government has aged faster than it expected. The budget was more hype than hope; economic reforms were trapped in the contradictions of the ruling alliance. There were political mistakes, the most unforgivable being the mismanagement of Bihar after Lalu Yadav failed to get a majority in the first assembly elections of the year. The consequences of that mistake will be evident in the November polls. Now we have a very old-fashioned scandal, as grubby as they come. Since the foreign minister was involved, it was entirely appropriate that it had an international flavor. But the most significant fact of this scandal, as far as the Manmohan Singh establishment is concerned, is that it is a Congress scandal.
The lead singer pulls in the bigger bucks in any performance, but he also pays a higher price when things go wrong. In fact, if the lead cracks up, the show disappears. If a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha slips in the ruling coalition, it barely raises a yawn. If Lalu Yadav stumbles, despite his 25 MPs, it is probably good news for the rest, since his ability to blackmail the coalition is dented. But if the political and ethical credibility of the Congress goes, then the edifice crumbles. The coalition can still brazen it out in arithmetical terms, but it will not be able to function as a government. It will also whittle Dr. Manmohan Singh’s personal credibility. Take that away, and there isn’t much left.
During his more intemperate spells, just before he lost his job, Natwar Singh often asserted that he was indistinguishable from the Congress. That is precisely the sort of thing that a Congress prime minister or a Congress president might not want to hear. The last thing the Congress wants is to have beloved sons like Jagat Singh, who have dear friends like Andaleeb Sehgal and pathfinders to Baghdad like Aneil Mathrani. A Congressman might have such afflictions, but the party would like to consider itself a little bigger than an individual.
Alas, the paradox. The only time an accused is readily believed is when he spreads the accusation. Natwar Singh’s power lies in ambiguity. As long as there is no clarity, and the whisky trail, or the oil-cash trail, does not lead to specific hands and homes beyond doubt, he and the Congress are safe. But there are too many documents leading to too many established companies; will everyone keep quiet? If Natwar believes that he is being made a scapegoat, will he sing?

A tale of two disasters and two responses
John Lancaster

As a journalist who covered last year’s Asian tsunami, I never thought I could feel anything like nostalgia for that terrible event. But that was before I saw what the earthquake had done to the Allai Valley in Pakistan.
A ruggedly beautiful place of terraced farm fields and stream-laced forests, the valley is — or was — home to an estimated 200,000 people, more than half of whom are thought to have lost their dwellings in the massive earthquake that devastated northern Pakistan on Oct. 8. By the time I landed on one of its upper slopes in a Pakistani Army helicopter three weeks later, landslides still blocked most roads into the valley, and many survivors had yet to receive any help.
At the ruined village where I spent an afternoon, families were living in crude shelters made from empty cement bags and salvaged timbers. That night, I camped nearby with a handful of soldiers who had taken over the grounds of a wrecked medical clinic. As I lay shivering on the hard earth, too cold to sleep and cursing myself for not having brought a better sleeping bag, I could not imagine how the villagers would cope with the imminent arrival of winter and its heavy snows.
Soon we are likely to know. In the aftermath of the earthquake, which killed at least 73,000 people and left an estimated 3 million without homes, United Nations officials have warned that the death toll could rise sharply from hunger, disease and exposure. Logistics and harsh weather make the earthquake an even bigger humanitarian challenge than the tsunami, say the officials, who have chided foreign donors for not reacting with the same urgency and largess. Even allowing for a degree of hype about the current crisis, it is hard for anyone who has witnessed both relief operations to argue with their basic point: The world has been stingier in its response to the earthquake than in its response to the tsunami.
A comparison of the global response to the two disasters shows how decisions by donors — governments, corporations and individuals — are often shaped more by emotion and timing than by hard-headed appraisals of need. The tsunami, to be sure, was breathtaking in its scope and destructiveness. It ravaged coastal communities on the rim of the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to East Africa, killing more than 200,000 people in 13 countries.
I will never forget the sight of an estuary near the eastern city of Batticaloa that was lit one evening for miles by fires burning along its banks. It took me a moment to realize that what was burning was corpses that had been doused with gasoline and set alight to prevent disease. The emotional trauma suffered by millions of survivors in Sri Lanka and elsewhere, to say nothing of the physical damage, will linger for years. But if the scale of the disaster was overwhelming, so, too, was the generosity of the global response. A UN emergency appeal to donor governments brought in 80 percent of the $977 million target in three weeks. By contrast, three weeks after the earthquake, the UN had managed to raise just 20 percent of the $550 million it was seeking. The humanitarian relief operation that followed the tsunami was the largest in history, involving military forces from 40 countries.
The private sector was similarly big-hearted. In the United States, the tsunami sparked what by some reckonings was the greatest outpouring of charity ever mustered in response to a foreign disaster, from Hollywood celebrities writing million-dollar checks to schoolchildren “adopting’’ shattered villages in countries they had barely heard of. One aid group, Doctors Without Borders, was so swamped with donations in the first week after the disaster that it took the unprecedented step of asking people not to send any more money for tsunami relief.Aid groups working in the earthquake zone do not have that problem.
The New York office of Action Against Hunger, for example, had received just $42,000 in earthquake donations within three weeks of the disaster, compared with $475,000 in the same period after the tsunami, according to spokesman John Sauer.Combined with a bottleneck in the global supply of winterized tents, the shortfall in resources is forcing aid workers to make painful choices about who gets shelter and who doesn’t, according to Kevin Hartigan, South Asia regional director for Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services. “We are not able to serve every family,’’ he said. “You didn’t have to do any of that triage in Sri Lanka.’’

In the land of Romeo & Juliet: Wherefore art thou, romance?
Malindi Corbel

IT is fascinating to see people pay homage to a love story. The Casa di Giulieta here in Verona, Italy — the house where Juliet Capulet, she of what might be the most fabled of all love stories, is supposed to have lived — attracts thousands of visitors every year. Its success with tourists confirms a popular belief in love and romance.
A known fiction, the story of Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona, was a staple of 15th-century Italian literature well before being made famous by Shakespeare.
In the 1930s, Verona’s city council bought the house of a real 12th-century family named Dal Cappello, added on a balcony and billed it as the Capulets’ house. It is where tourists come to stand under, or on, the famous balcony. And it is where hundreds of thousands of love letters addressed to Juliet have been sent over the past 70-odd years. Why is that balcony such an effective lure? In defence of the tourists, we might say that visiting Juliet’s house is hardly the same as believing that it is the real thing. It merely testifies to the enduring popularity of a story with a perennial resonance in our sentimental notions of love and romance, often inextricably intertwined. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet were a fiction, but romance is real.
A closer look at the roots of romance, however, might put us on our guard. As a verb, “to romance” implies being insincere, engaging in flattery, though short of “obsequious,” which has strictly pejorative connotations. A “romantic” novel is make-believe, impossible, a flight of fancy. Across all the modern and older definitions is the notion of something imagined, extravagant, chimerical. “Romance” originally referred to the old vernacular language of France, “romanz,” which descended from Latin, the tongue of the Romans, and now refers to all such European languages. When the old French was used in literature, such stories were called “romances,” because any “serious” literature would have been written in Latin. That is not to say that the use of the vernacular dictated the genre of literature: That association developed over time, because stories written in romanz were written overwhelmingly for a specific audience — royal women and ladies of the court. Stories that featured women more prominently were generally stories of love. The significant movement in romanz literature that started in the late 11th century was carried by the troubadours, who came from the south of France. They set out to redefine the prevailing Christian ideals of love, masculinity and femininity, and owed a good measure of their success to the support of two French noblewomen, Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne. As Eleanor presided over her “courts of love” as the duchess of Aquitaine and later queen of France, her support for the troubadors’ conception of chivalric or “courtly” love ultimately advanced these newly romanticised notions throughout Europe.
What was once whimsical became a Western institution. Today, the irresistible fantasy of romantic love has also become a heavily marketable reality. Preying on the single woman or man, the ubiquitous magazines, talk shows, psychic hotlines, self-help books — an entire industry — live and feed off our romantic inclinations, and instill in us simultaneously the fear and stigma of being alone. What we’ve come to refer to as romance is rather the indulgence in what we imagine love to be — or perhaps what we have made it — but in either case it is decidedly influenced by those conventional Western ideas of heterosexual intimacy. And it is precisely this Western notion of romantic love that Romeo and Juliet embody. Are we so readily indoctrinated, wanting and waiting to be gulled? Looking up at Juliet’s balcony, we imagine her declarations of love — a romantic love that we want so much to be true. And in that moment, we find ourselves, in effect, being romanced. For all of us tourists of the heart, the House of Juliet confirms the centuries-old triumph of the idea of true love — perhaps the most seductive Western conception of all time.