The ‘‘poster boy for India’s vicious communal tensions’’. The ‘‘face of India’s future’’? One that has launched a ‘‘new generation of Hindu militants’’. The question marks battled with the full stops in NEWSWEEK’s cover story on ‘‘Modi’s Moment’’, a year after Godhra. There’s even talk, the magazine said, that Modi could be India’s next prime minister. NEWSWEEK framed the worries, real and exaggerated. That ‘‘Modi-style intimidation’’ of minorities is making India feel like ‘‘1930s Germany’’. That the judiciary’s failure to investigate his government for its complicity in the riots is ‘‘Balkanising the country’’. It spoke of the Congress’s difficulties in confronting the depth of ‘‘Hindu nationalist sentiment’’ in India. It pointed to a new generation of ‘‘up-and-comers’’, in the words of Jairam Ramesh, ‘‘the Albert Speers generation’’: technocrats who are economically liberalisers and socially bigots. To Congress, from NEWSWEEK: don’t try and beat the BJP at its own game. Because ‘‘. the best chance of defeating a demagogue lies in ideas and policies that speak to people’s needs.’’ But in the end, it turned out to be the familiar two-in-one take on the subcontinent. The story on Modi’s India was immediately followed by a report on ‘‘A growing Talibanisation’’ in Pakistan along the Afghan border. Where newly powerful mullahs are issuing fatwas running musicians out of show business. And police hold public bonfires of confiscated videos, CDs films, cosmetics. ‘‘like the stridently religious Hindu nationalists in neighbouring India.’’??? The WASHINGTON POST wrote that the installation of Savarkar’s portrait in Parliament reflected the ‘‘degree to which hardline Hindu nationalism has moved into the mainstream of Indian politics, drowning out debate on other topics.’’ The FINANCIAL TIMES’ concerns about India’s economy in Budget week sounded sedate in comparison. Jaswant Singh must resist complacence, it urged. It pointed to the government’s fiscal deficit and the quality of deficit spending — salaries, interest payments and administrative costs with the remainder frittered on subsidies hijacked by middle-class lobbies. Expert sounds warning bell Making his most expansive case for war yet, George W. Bush detailed the post-Saddam scenario. As Bush framed it, it was a hopeful vision of a free Iraq, serving as a catalyst for peace in a troubled region. A ‘‘neo-Wilsonian view of the imperative to spread liberty and democracy’’ wrote the WASHINGTON POST. Thomas Carothers, a democracy specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, countered that a US attack would heighten anti-Americanism, strengthen militant Islamic groups and deter Arabic countries from experimenting with political change. ‘‘This does not mean that the Arab world will never democratise,’’ Carothers wrote in FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ‘‘But it does mean that democracy will be decades in the making and entail a great deal of uncertainty, reversal and turmoil’’. NAM: Overcome by global politics? As 116 leaders gathered in Kuala Lumpur for the Non-Aligned Movement’s 13th summit, John Aglionby in the GUARDIAN had a question: ‘‘What has 232 legs but cannot walk in a straight line in any direction, has trouble expressing any sort of definitive opinion, and is probably at death’s door?’’ NAM could become a socio-economic force, fighting for the rights and interests of developing countries at the IMF or the WTO, argued Aglionby. But, he rued, global politics continues to dominate proceedings. His diagnosis: you can take the movement out of its founding era, but you cannot take the founding era sentiments out of the movement. Thereby hangs a debate not many seem willing to join anymore. Clean bowled by Ashish Nehra Someone alert the anti-doping unit, urgently recommended the cricket columnist in Britain, because surely a cricketer could face suspension for having traces of a performance-enhancing drug in his name. They are talking, of course, of Ashish Nehra whose bowling sent England to the brink of World Cup elimination. Another columnist flattered Nehra: If India loses against Pakistan at the Centurion today, he predicted that someone, somewhere in India, will burn an effigy of Ashish Nehra.
