Category: Politics

It’s time to say goodbye (revisited)

That means my blog, Zenpolitics. It is time to say goodbye.

That’s what I wrote three months ago. I have decided to continue, but to give the blog a different slant, with more of a focus on history, and the historical context too often missing from politics. How successful I am, time will tell.

And why? (I wrote back in October.)

The crises keep on coming, and my original conception for Zenpolitics (see below) now seems, in one word, unrealistic. I wish it were otherwise.

Austerity after the financial crash had a serious impact at several levels. We engineered our own special crisis with Brexit. Trump didn’t help. We came through Covid, we learnt as we went along. The world economy it seemed was re-balancing.

Then came the invasion of Ukraine, energy and grain prices sky-rocketed, and the divide between more autocratic regimes who could turn to China for investment and support, and democratic societies, which could be tainted by their history as colonisers, was exacerbated. And now we have Hamas and Gaza and a crisis which may yet draw in the wider region. Countries take sides, worse, super-powers take sides. We have scant idea where it will lead.  

Our one-time conviction that the world was ready to fall into step with our open, liberal, freethinking and free-market view of the world has proved sadly mistaken.

Back in 2009, when I started this blog, the world was indeed a different place. My focus I wrote then would be on ‘taking the trash and the hyperbole out of politics and trying to look at people and issues in a way that’s detached from emotion and as they really are’. That is language of its time, immediately after Obama’s election.

It needs a different approach now. Emotions run high, and the stakes are higher. I can’t easily convert this blog into something it was never meant to be. I may start another blog, with a different theme, or find another way. My passion for politics, mulling over, talking, writing, about how we might yet achieve a better and more inclusive world will continue.

To anyone who has read this blog at any time in the past, and just happens to be reading now – it’s goodbye, and thank you for reading.

Taking sides

I quoted from a song called The Partisan is my last post. It has a history as I’ve discovered that long precedes Leonard Cohen. It was written, as ‘La Complainte du partisan’, by two members of the French Resistance, in 1943. It was widely popular. It expressed for me the emotion of the moment, as of a week ago, but it is a song about resistance to an occupier, and freedom from that occupier is clear-cut. And the current conflict around Gaza is anything but.

Far too little is written in the English and American media about the dispossession of the inhabitants of Palestine, of many many centuries standing, by the Jewish immigrants who created the state of modern Israel. (The plan of course had been that Jew and Palestinian should live together in harmony, communities side by side.)

But that wrong cannot be put right by the destruction of a country, modern Israel, which has been heroic in many ways, and which I’ve long supported.

I, like so many others, am conflicted.

While l support Israel in its determination to remove Hamas forever from Gaza, I also support Palestinians seeking to create a country of their own, with boundaries which allow the old areas of settlement, in and around Gaza, and Nablus and Ramallah and Bethlehem, and beyond, to flourish.

The Partisan is a song Palestinians might take up. For Israel, it would be a different song, though ‘song’ for Israelis facing what seems like an existential challenge is totally inappropriate.

Whatever our politicians say, the only answer has to lie in the UK, US and Europe identifying as much with the Palestinian cause as they do with the Israeli. And that means all of us, people and governments. Only if we do so will we ever find a solution.  A solution which both sides, those of Christian heritage, and those of Muslim heritage, can readily accept.

Amid all the terrible carnage, and the apparent intractability of the conflict, and the way in which all the world takes sides, and we polarise all the more, we have to keep that in in view.

The wind is blowing

Did Israel bomb the Al Ahli Hospital last night, or was it a misfiring Hamas rocket? If it is proved to be the latter, the Israelis are almost vindicated, in their eyes, and maybe many Americans. Also yesterday, an Israeli bomb hit a UNRWA school and at least six people were killed. Whatever the actual figure, the numbers killed by Israelis bombs in Gaza are appalling.

I won’t rehearse recent events here. We’ve all read about them. For Israelis, for all of us, the events of last Saturday week are reminders of the Holocaust. But I am also reminded of many wartime situations where the aggrieved party wreaks terrible vengeance on civilians. Whatever they say, that is what the Israelis are doing. It should be uppermost in Israeli minds. And it isn’t.

How can you have the open spaces and relative affluence of southern Israel and, across a fence, two million people living in poverty? Hamas and militant Islam have little or nil regard for human life. But Israel by its actions has given them a cause, a casus belli, and a location.

Israel and Palestine as two separate states working together, with no illegal settlements and Jerusalem a shared city. It is conceivable. Tragically, the current Israeli government continues to fall into the trap Hamas has laid for it. And the wider world takes side, and distrust between nations grows deeper.

How would I feel if I were Jewish, as so many wonderful people in my life (not least my best and wisest teachers) have been and are? Or an Israeli? And…. how would I feel as a Palestinian? As an Arab? As a Muslim?

Borders are the great curse of humanity. Our urge to possess. Or it could be our urge to reclaim. Behind and across too many borders are leaders, usually of an autocratic mindset, for whom violence is always an option, stored away, but excusable, they imagine, in certain circumstances, and of their choosing. And they are persuasive. Populist is not an unreasonable word to use.

I recalled Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Partisan’ last evening, listening to reports from Gaza.

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished

An old woman gives him shelter, but the soldiers came and ‘she died without a whisper’. Then three verses in French, and final one in English:

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we’ll come from the shadows.

I was also, yesterday evening, watching a movie, Walk With Me, about the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist and peace campaigner, Thich Phat Hanh. He wasn’t allowed back into Vietnam after 1973 by the Communist regime and he set up his Plum Village community in the Dordogne in France.

The movie is about individuals funding truth, finding their own peace. About landscape and community. But also about a battle with self, running, all the time, and arriving home. There is tacit and expressive and wonderful mutual support. You watch the seasons pass.

Isolationist? Remember that Thich Phat Hanh was an active peace campaigner, who risked his life. He died last year. He was, finally, back in Vietnam. He knew all about borders.

Bird migrations and BRICS machinations

House martins on telegraph wires. Resting awhile, then rising and joining forces, with a flock appearing out of nowhere. They’re darting and swooping and sharp-turning in pursuit of insects we can’t see, on a humid and cloudy late August day. She’s seen nothing like it, a lady who has known our patch for ninety years tells us. But we’re talking about house martins. Their numbers are radically reduced. Why now, we wonder. And it is something of a wonder, just watching them.

Over in Russia a plane has fallen out of the sky and Wagner leader Prigozhin was on the passenger list. (His death is now confirmed.) He was a flawed man, Putin tells us. Just one man. Or ten with the crew. Life is cheap.

The contrast plays on my mind. The one so stark a contrast with the other. The house martins we think are heading south, ahead of colder early-autumn weather we know is on its way. Next month or October, they’re off to Africa. Over the Sahel, where Prigozhin’s Wagner Group are in league with the rulers of Mali and the Central African Republic, and stirring crises in Sudan and Niger.

We know swallows head for South Africa, and house martins head south of the Sahel, though there’s some uncertainty as to quite where they winter.

It is South Africa where the five nations of the BRICS are meeting. With the economic heft of China and India and Brazil, and the drag weight of Russia, and the aspirations of South Africa itself, they are looking to chart the way to an alternative economic order. Reducing the power of the dollar (‘de-dollarisation’), and of the financial institutions developed in the post-war world which work, by their nature, in the West’s interests. That is the perception, and as we Western nations have been slow to realise, the reality.

And as of this weekend, applications to joint from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Argentina and Ethiopia have been approved. Statements of intent. Countries either side of the Red Sea, and Ethiopia a short hop to the south, and Argentina the outlier. Whether or not a country operates as a democracy is an entirely secondary consideration.

The focus will move on from South Africa. And for a time it may from the BRICS. Maybe it is all aspiration, and with the Chinese economy stuttering, and the dollar on an upswing, the balance of economic power will remain broadly as it is.

In the meantime the house martins and swallows (and swifts as well) will follow their time-honoured routes, and if we don’t destroy their climate, and ours, which we might yet do, will continue to do so long after we are all gone.

An act of theft

Edmund Burke, whose heyday as a politician, and as a writer on politics, was the late eighteenth century, remains today the respectable face of the political right-wing. Often quoted, and much revered.

At least he was the ‘respectable face’ until the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation came along and adopted his name for their version of far-right conspiratorial conservatism. In its own words, ‘the Edmund Burke Foundation is a public affairs institute founded in January 2019 with the aim of strengthening the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries.’

Simply, to my mind, an act of theft. Taking a good man down, albeit some 225 years after his death.

It is a foolish liberal who trespasses on to territory which conservatives in our time are fighting over, but Burke more than merits attention. He believed in tradition, but it was an evolving tradition, based on where we are now, and not a throwback, an attempt to return to a lost age that never was. (For background on Burke, see Jesse Norman’s excellent biography, published in 2013.)

Burke’s most quoted words are ‘the little platoons’. We should ‘love the little platoon in society to which we belong’. We are part of an organic whole, and there is a natural hierarchy. Jesse Norman expands on this to focus on the supposed faults of the Enlightenment and liberal individualism, from which he argues many of the problems of modern society emanate. It’s interesting to read back ten years and see how David Cameron and Jesse Norman were promoting the idea of the ‘big society’.

Attacks on liberal individualism can take us to some unfortunate places.

Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, in December 2019 praised Hungary’s ‘interesting early thinking’ on ‘the limits of liberalism’. (‘Short Cuts’, in the London Review of Books, 1st June 2023.) For an idea of what those limits might be, see below. Hungary is about the imposition of change, the imposition of values, Burke is about evolution.

Unlike those who claim to be his modern descendants Burke was also an astute judge of the realities of his time: arguing for financial reform, for greater freedoms and representation of Catholics in Ireland, and against the abuses perpetrated by the East India Company. If governments had listened to his wiser counsels the American War of Independence might have been avoided. And his reading of France after 1789, and how the revolution might and did play out, proved quite remarkably accurate.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the king-in-parliament as a successful modus operandi, and while the king alone might appoint his prime minister and cabinet, only with the approval of parliament could they operate with any degree of success. Political parties, in nascent form in Burke’s time, have provided the underpinning to parliamentary democracy as it has advanced over the last almost 350 years. And yet …

One feature of the new Tory Right has been an attempt to discredit parliament, witness the Daily Telegraph’s milking of the expenses scandal in 2008, and the attempt to elevate executive, or more specifically prime ministerial (Johnsonian) control.

Back to the Edmund Burke Foundation.

The recent National Conservatism Conference (NatCon, the eighth of its kind, the first in London), is a brainchild of the Edmund Burke Foundation, and attracted a lot of publicity. MPs Braverman and Rees-Mogg attended. So too, Michael Gove.

In June 2022 a group of National Conservatives put together a manifesto. Among the ten core principles: ‘the free market cannot be absolute’, the paramountcy of the Christian Bible, and severe restrictions on migration. A NatCon supporter and British MP Danny Kruger railed against faceless ‘powers that be … who are not on the side of the British people, but serve the abstractions of human rights, international law, or other signals of middle-class virtue’.

We are, with all this, living in the past – and with the danger that the future might lie with the likes of Orban and Erdogan, where parliament, media and judiciary are suborned, and where the religion of another age is called on to provide underpinning. Netanyahu it seems has similar ideas for Israel. Putin and Russian Orthodoxy is a story in itself.

For Burke ‘all the major religions were the products of custom, tradition and “long and prescriptive usage”’. (Norman, p91) He would have profoundly regretted our drift from religion but any notion of its reintroduction by diktat would have been, literally, inconceivable.  

How the NatCon Tories and how I read Edmund Burke are radically different. Let’s leave it at that.

Metropolitan – and other – elites

We’ve heard a lot of talk about elites. Am I part of one? With a university education. Middle class. Manchester-born and raised, I’ve lived in London for forty years. That may make me one of the one of the ‘metropolitan elite’.

Maybe I’m also an ‘anywhere’, someone’s who’s happy anywhere in the country, in the world, rather than a ‘somewhere’, someone whose happiest close to home. (We ‘anywheres’ are a species of public enemy.) Though, in truth, I’m both.

Then there’s Matthew Goodwin who imagines he understands the ‘ordinary working-man’, left behind in a hyper-globalised world by an elite who wilfully don’t care for his welfare. And yet – he fell in behind the free-traders, the globalisers, the Brexiteers who espoused a fanciful ‘global Britain’. Only, it seems the free traders aren’t responsible: it’s we university-educated types, who only care for themselves, according to Goodwin. Forgive our confusion.

Peter Turchin*, who I referred to in my last blog, defines four early warning signals for societies entering a disintegrative phase of a natural cycle to which all societies are prone. ‘Popular immiseration’ is the first phase, and the decline in real wages over the last fifty years can be seen as a cause of that. The fourth signal is competition and conflict between elites.

Turchin’s conclusions are based in some extraordinary statistical research but extrapolating to a natural cycle is a big leap. That said, is that what we have? A university-educated relatively liberal elite on one side and on the other a globalising free trade elite?

The curiosity has been the attempt of the free traders to get the ‘discontented masses’ on side, by adopting an anti-woke and socially conservative agenda, leading to the kind of populist rhetoric we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic, though far worse on the other side of the pond.

All this talk of elites has seriously, and dangerously, muddied the waters. Societies have always had and will always have elites of one kind or another, not least a financial and business elite, which has through history garnered wealth and privilege to itself, and an educated elite which seeks to pull up the drawbridge behind it.

There’s no better way of constraining that apparently built-in drift to elitism than a functioning liberal democracy which limits their influence on our politics and cuts the biggest egos who try to weaponise opinion down to size.

A nice, neat letter to Prospect magazine suggests that the ‘white working-class’ might actually want the same things as many other people, a decent job, a nice house, good schools – and, maybe, even, a university education of their children.

Make that our focus – and apply to everyone, all classes, colours and creeds. Not just white working-class males….

*Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, published by Allen Lane

Wiping the slate clean

Finding answers was always hard but it’s now in a different league of difficulty.

I began this blog a few years back wanting to write about how we could make liberal democracy function better. Now the issue is how liberal democracy can survive in the face of China, illiberal democracies in Hungary and Turkey, the Republican right in the USA, and, just recently, the ideas promoted by the recent National Conservatism Conference here in the UK.

The issue for many is a sense of lost power. Ideas of ‘nation’ muddled with social conservatism, as if this could be the way we Brits might claw back lost influence. Language and the Premier League mislead us.

Many on the other side of the spectrum would like to renounce power altogether, renounce capitalism, renounce politics, head for utopia.

What if we could go back in time. Start again. Wipe the slate clean.

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, refers to what she describes as ‘the ancient Mesopotamian idea of a wiping the slate clean’ – a wiping out of debts to allow a society to reboot. McKinsey estimates it would ‘wipe out $48trn of household wealth in the coming years’. That I assume is just the USA.

That takes me to another theme, growth, or the absence of it, the post-growth advocates and as the Economist describes them, ‘the actual de-growers’. We stop caring about growth targets and GDP. Or we go further and actively ‘shrink the pie’.

Only, it won’t happen, can’t happen. For one we’d have to rein in population growth. And if we take that too far we’ll have a massively reduced younger generation to fund the lifestyles of a vastly increasing older generation. The answer – we voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles. Which isn’t going to happen. More likely, the world economy would implode.

Tett quotes a biologist Peter Turchin, ‘a biologist and complexity scientist who employs Big Data to study ecosystems’. Studying reams of data over thousands of years he identifies a fundamental pattern whereby an elite grabs power and ‘tries to protect itself by grabbing more and more resources’. This leaves poor people even poorer and an ’over-production of the elite’. It’s a recipe for a social explosion. Is this what we’re currently seeing in the USA?

Tett suggests the only way ‘to shift this trajectory is to re-play the New Deal policies of the 1930s and the immediate post-war years in the USA, using redistribution to reduce inequality’. She’s not saying that Turchin is right, but that the symptoms he describes are indeed deep-rooted in modern American society.

There are many other parts to this jigsaw. Climate change, generative AI, China, Ukraine. Regarding China it’s been interesting to listen to what Henry Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, has to say. Lowering the temperature is key, contrary to what the new breed of American hawks, and a good few British, are arguing. That requires building confidence step by step. Establishing and maintaining a conversation, however deep the divide.

There is in all this one constant – our liberal democracy. Hold to that and we can still find answers.

A few recent disasters

Let me run through the list of recent disasters.

The Northern Ireland Protocol: this was meant to be a solution but became, predictably, a disaster when the DUP derailed the Northern Ireland assembly. The Tory right wing have further stirred the waters. The DUP continue to deliberate. Sunak, patching an agreement with the EU, is doing his best.

Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. Handing them over to a known anti-lockdown campaigner like Isabel Oakeshott is hardly credible. Her publishing them, an act of betrayal, dishonesty – she should be scorned, not welcomed. Oakeshott is one of those unfortunate breed of libertarians who would look out for themselves at the expense of others. Claiming public interest. On the other hand… we have a sense of how government works. It gets personal. Everything does. (And in this case unpleasant.) But keep it out of WhatsApp messages.

Sunak heads to France, he and Macron embrace, and we are, the Brits and the French, the friends we always should have been if Brexit hadn’t got in the way. But that’s drowned out by ….

Braverman’s refugee bill, which is nasty in its objectives, in effect denying refugees the right to claim refugee status, and in its language. And then we have…

Gary Lineker’s comments comparing Braverman’s language to that used in Germany in the 1930s. We’re not talking about the Holocaust. We’re talking about inflammatory language, and that Braverman is guilty of, and by association all her acolytes in government, including Sunak.

So much stems from this deep-rooted fear of outsiders. By closing our nearby borders we, by some marvellous sleight of hand, open them again to a more distant world, who, because the world long ago moved on from Empire, hardly cares if we exist.

Patriots – pater, father – so supporters of the fatherland. Make that motherland as well. Children retain their family loyalties, but they grow up. Nationalists – holding on to an unchanging idea of nation. And never growing up. And in our case nation gets muddled with Empire, and we have a breed of writers and historians, including Jeremy Black, Robert Tombs and Nigel Biggar, who find it hard to move on, and do themselves and the rest of us a massive disservice.

Lineker: we have to support him. He’s someone who is living in the present, not the past. And he has the right understanding of the BBC. He can speak out. So should others be able to do, in a private capacity. Anyone who remembers the Blair years will remember the hostility shown by left-wingers to the BBC. That’s how it’s always been. Let everyone speak, and chart a middle course. The BBC will sometimes get it wrong, but leave it alone.

Let everyone speak, give opportunities to everyone seeking refuge to find that refuge … but at the same time, hold to the middle ground. If we’re not centred, we fall apart.

Ukraine, Russia – and the world

Do I head to Northern Ireland with this post, or to Ukraine, or to India, or stay back home…? Northern Ireland, and that absurd boast from Rishi Sunak that Northern Ireland now has the best of both worlds. It can trade with open borders with the rest of the UK, and with Europe. Just as we all could do before June 2016. We will leave it there.

Ukraine: the issue our government should be focusing on. Instead we have and will have more of that ruinous Brexit aftermath.

It was my privilege with many of my fellow villagers to attend a Ukraine evening at the Ukrainian Social Club in Gloucester, which dates back to immediately after the Second World War. One highpoint was the dinner, with local dishes, beginning with borsht and ending with a layered coffee cake. Next came an auction, with a highlight being a very fine birch-wood clock, retrieved I believe from a bombed-out factory. It will in the near future have pride of place on the wall of our village hall. And, finally, a concert: solo violin, accordion, a Cossack dancer of extraordinary style and agility, and singing – adults and children – and Oksana in a long white dress and silver boots leading us, it seemed incongruously, but maybe not so, in the chorus of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

They were fundraising, we have to remind ourselves, for a war. Even Switzerland has to re-think its historic neutrality, though it’s not there yet. But more than that, we had a sense of a country, a culture and a language, and a thriving democracy (corruption issues notwithstanding). The contrast with their eastern borderlands, and with events in Donbass, is so extreme. And yet, Russia is the land of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam.

(Thinking of Donbass … Shakhtar Donetsk are one of Europe’s leading football teams, but they no longer play in Donetsk. In 2014 they moved to Lviv and now are playing matches in Kyiv.)

And they love their Shakespeare in Russia. I thought of Shostakovich’s curiously-named opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. The story is very different from Shakespeare but we have Lady Macbeth (she is planning a murder) as a universal trope or archetype. But I’m assuming any hint of the subversion of an existing order would be too much in Putin’s Russia, as it was in Stalin’s.

We went to Stratford for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest last Thursday. Prospero and Ariel are played by women, and quite brilliantly and convincingly so. There was a very special and personal link between them. Could we imagine a woman playing Prospero in a Russia where gender roles are increasingly narrowed down to the old male and female and ‘there-shall-be-no-other’ split?

We are curtailing our imaginations, we are losing creativity. Erdogan imprisons any journalist with a creative and thereby critical take on the country’s fortunes. He’s an example to Narendra Modi, responding to a recent highly critical BBC documentary with a police raid on BBC offices in India, on the grounds of tax irregularities. A charge of corruption is the reason for the arrest of one of the leaders of a rising opposition force in India, the Aam Aadmi party.

Istanbul’s mayor, a leader of the main Turkish opposition party, has been sentenced to over two years in prison for ‘calling members of Turkey’s supreme election council “fools” in a press release three years ago’. There’s a crucial election coming up.

Rupert Murdoch admits that his TV channels in the USA went along with the Trump lie about a stolen election. They are polishing their hate figures in the USA, polishing their anger. There’s a very relevant comment in an article by William Davies in the current London Review of Books. He highlights Donald Trump’s ‘affective state of seemingly constantly being on the verge of losing his temper’, adding ‘a sense of danger and excitement to his political career’. ‘Boris Johnson, by contrast, always appears to be on the verge of bursting out laughing’. Both approaches win converts, as we’ve seen only too well.

We have to be watchful on all sides and everywhere. Republicans in Congress are challenging the levels of expenditure on the Ukraine war. Maybe they aren’t as foolish and sinister as Trump in his cosying to Putin, but they haven’t fully bought into the reality that this is where democracy, as we understand it, stands or falls.

The reality is that democracy is for many, on the right primarily but also on the left (think Lopez Obrador, known as ‘AMLO’, in Mexico), seen as the way to power, and once they have that power they are keen to pull up the democratic drawbridge after them.

Bring on the Ukrainians: they are focusing our minds. We can see where our complacency might lead.

Travelling in India …

I began my last blog with a few words which may give a misleading impression.

‘All, on the surface, appears to be going well in India. The economy under Narendra Modi has momentum, a contrast to our own. Modi has a 77% approval rating. There was a sense of optimism among the people I spoke to.’

We returned from a two-week holiday in north-western India six weeks ago.

‘On the surface.’ I left open what might lie below the surface. India as envisaged by Nehru and the Congress Party in 1947 was to be a secular, non-aligned state. Nehru looked to the West, but also to communist Russia. India was partitioned, with terrible consequences, and the tension between India and its neighbour Pakistan is palpable, seventy-five years on, even to short-stay visitors. The army’s presence, in the areas where we travelled, is everywhere.

Over the last seventy years the Congress Party has gone into sharp decline and the fundamentalist Hindu party, the BJP, has taken hold of the levers of power, at a national and increasingly local level. The BJP under Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014.

In 1992 Hindu activists destroyed a mosque, at Ayodhya, on a site widely believed to have been the birthplace of the god Rama. If this act was symbolic of an India reconstituting as a Hindu state, the 2019 decision of the Modi government to revoke the status of Jammu and Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim territory, as a self-governing entity, and the transfer of power to the central government, was, and is, widely seen (outside India) as brutal act of suppression of Kashmiri, and Muslim, aspirations. Also pertinent is the 2019 legislation extending the National Register of Citizens to the whole country which would have the effect of leaving several million Muslims stateless.

Our own sampling of Hindu opinion during our stay in November suggested a disdain toward a Muslim population which is more and more ghettoised as threats and sometimes specific acts of violence increase. The irony of Delhi’s and Agra’s great tourist locations being Mughal and therefore Muslim forts and mausoleums, not least the Taj Mahal, seemed lost on our (otherwise splendid) Hindu guides.

All that said, India remains a functioning democracy of not far short of 1.4 billion people. We were in Shimla on election day for the state of Himachal Pradesh’s legislative assembly. We chatted to a friendly BJP teller outside a polling booth. (The BJP were noisily confident, but in this particular election they lost – and Congress won.)

The mood among the Hindu population was positive, almost aggressively optimistic. The economy is growing fast, and Modi, like him or not, is an influential figure on the world stage. The contrast I made in my last blog between the UK and India is for real.

And yet … quotes from my travel journal are apposite here:

‘Am I soft-pedalling on Modi too much? What of the Hindutva nationalist philosophy of the BJP? The Booker Prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy is no friend of the BJP. She writes in a recent book of essays of how “the holy cow and the holy script became of the chosen vehicles of (Hindu) mobilisation”. The “holy script” is Hindi…

… In The Times of India I read about a move to convert Christians among the Adivasi, India’s indigenous tribes, to Hinduism. Shivaji, the 17th century Marathi leader, is celebrated not least in movies as a Hindu proto-nationalist. The Shiv Sena movement, the leader of the local branch of which was shot the day before our arrival in Amritsar, is radical in its advocacy of a pure and dominant form of Hinduism. Muslim culture, and the Muslim population, which existed side by side with Hindu culture for many centuries, is under unrelenting pressure. And yet Bollywood still has many Muslim stars.’

Arundhati Roy, as an outspoken opponent of a regime increasingly hostile to dissent, lives dangerously. She sums up the situation, as she sees it, succinctly as follows. (The RSS is the ideological arm of the BJP.)

‘The abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, the promise of a National Register of Citizens, the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya are all on the front burners of the RSS and BJP kitchen. To reignite flagging passions all they need to do is pick a villain from their gallery and unleash the dogs of war. There are several categories of villain, Pakistani jihadis, Kashmiri terrorists, Bangladeshi infiltrators or anyone of a population of nearly 200 million Indian Muslims who can always be accused of being Pakistan-lovers or anti-national traitors.’

India has a militant China on its Himalayan border. It needs a strong army and a strong leader. You could argue it now has both. And a growing economy. But the cost in terms of its move away from the secular and open society that Nehru aspired to has been a high one.