Last week saw dueling sex scandals involving Hindu holy men. First, a television channel ran a sting operation in which it filmed Swami Nithyananda, an extremely popular godman who runs a major ashram just outside the IT hub of Bangalore, getting it on with a woman believed to be (her face is a bit blurry in the video) a well known Tamil film star (although there is some debate about whether it is Ragasudha or Ranjitha.)

Following airing of the tape, the swamis enraged followers - feeling betrayed by Nithyananda’s seeming hypocrisy — attacked his ashrams in both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The police also filed charges against him for “cheating” and “enraging people’s religious sentiments.” (If only that were a crime in America too!) The swami was forced to release a statement assuring his followers that he had done “nothing illegal” — not exactly the strongest denial ever.

Then, in an even bigger scandal, a popular mystic named Shiv Murat Dwivedi was arrested by Delhi police and charge with running a prostitution ring involving up to 100 of his female devotees, including many “respectable” girls — college students and airline stewardesses — with middle class backgrounds or, at least, middle-class aspirations, as well as some “society women,” according to a report in The Straits Times. The report also said that “Dwivedi, who worked as a security guard at a five-star hole and at a massage parlour before taking to religion, was said to have amassed more than 600 million rupees ($10 million)  over a period of 10 years [through prostitution and other illegal activities.]” There are other reports that Dwivedi had a criminal record for prostitution previously and that he remade himself following his release from prison as a holy man. He may have lured the women into his prostitution ring with promises of access to the rich and powerful and then blackmailed them to get them in the game. According to another report, while some of the women volunteered to work in the guru’s sex business, others were coerced, perhaps because the swami had loaned them money to pay for schools or training courses.

It is always remarkable that more people don’t see these phony gurus for what they are: con artists. Belief in swamis and gurus seems particularly widespread in India, again even among classes of people who, in the West, would not be the sorts to fall for the acts of televangelists. For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, I recommend the tail end of a chapter called “The Imaginary Horse,” in Edward Luce’s great survey of contemporary India, In Spite of The Gods.

You can read The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the story here. And the BBC’s here.

And, in fact, others are less sure. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. And in a conversation with The New York Times’ Alissa Rubin, a Taliban spokesman said the attack was aimed at Europeans and other Westerners, not Indians. He denied it had anything to do with disrupting detente between India and Pakistan, which the day before the bombings had held peace talks in New Delhi for the first time since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks (which were the work of LeT.)

An unnamed U.S. military intelligence official quoted by The Washington Post yesterday in a story that was widely picked up by the Indian press said he believed that the Haqqani Network was behind the attack. Others have speculated that some combination of groups, perhaps the LeT working with the Taliban, or perhaps the LeT working with the Haqqani Network, carried out the attacks. (The Indian authorities believe LeT, working with the Haqqani Network, carried out the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in the summer of 2008.)

The prevailing view in New Delhi is that the jury is still out. Indian officials quoted in today’s Hindu said they were looking at several possible suspects including the Haqqani Network, LeT, the Pakistani Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, or some combination of those groups. (This idea of combinations of terrorist groups is interesting and I will explore it more below.)

But what New Delhi is certain about, and not for the first time, is that Richard Holbrooke is wrong. Holbrooke, the American special envoy for Af-Pak issues, responded to a question about the Kabul attack at a press conference on Wednesday by saying that he did not accept that “this was an attack on an Indian facility.” Noting that there were other foreigners killed and injured, he said the guest houses were simply “a soft target” and pleaded with people to “please, let’s not draw a conclusion for which there’s no proof.”

This drew a sharp rebuke from Indian officials who described Holbrooke as “absolutely incorrect.” The Indians say that no matter who was responsible, they are sure Indians were deliberately targeted. They said that from Afghan officials they know that the terrorists had specific information about Indians occupying the guest houses including the fact that some of them worked for an NGO aimed at empowering Afghan women and that a certain senior diplomat on secondment to the Afghan Interior Ministry lived in one of the buildings. The terrorists apparently went room to room asking for certain individuals.

So it is possible that Holbrooke is wrong. But the reason the Indians are so keen to point out that he’s wrong is all about the fact that the Indians really dislike Holbrooke.  Not personally, of course (although that may also be true), but his role. No matter how many times he denies it, the suspicion in New Delhi is that Holbrooke and the Obama Administration see India’s dispute with Kashmir as ultimately linked to Washington’s policy toward Pakistan. (The logic being that the U.S. can’t have an effective Afghanistan policy until it fixes Pakistan and it can’t fix Pakistan until it fixes Kashmir.) This suspicion seems impossible to dislodge no matter what Holbrooke does. And Holbrooke certainly tries. He now goes out of his way at every press conference to deny that he has anything to do with India or trying to resolve the on-going dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He won’t even mention the K-word, choosing instead to refer to it in his Wednesday press conference as “that certain area between [India and Pakistan] that I’m not going to mention by name.” And he said on Wednesday that he thinks that linking Kashmir to Af-Pak “runs counter to stability in Afghanistan. Afghanistan must be dealt with on its own merits.”

But this sort of thing just leads to jibes that Holbrooke doth protest too much. The Indians know that some people on Holbrooke’s staff, if not Holbrooke himself, do indeed think that a solution to Kashmir might be one thing they could offer Pakistan that would really get the Army and the ISI fully on board with the campaign against the Taliban and other Islamic militants based on both sides of the Af-Pak border. And Holbrooke is a consummate dealmaker.  He lives for the big peace settlement — for the grand bargain. He doesn’t just want to tinker around the edges of a policy (although that seems to be the role he’s been boxed into now.) It must be extremely frustrating to be in his job and not be able to really get involved in how India interacts with both Pakistan and Afghanistan. For a really good exploration of Holbrooke, his team and the frustrations created by his limited mandate, I highly recommend George Packer’s fantastic profile of Holbrooke from the September 28 The New Yorker. (Full disclosure: I am among those who thinks that it makes sense to at least explore the impact that peace between India and Pakistan would have on both Afghanistan and the support for Islamic militants in Pakistan. As I argue in my Newsweek story, a peace settlement between India and Pakistan would certainly remove the ISI’s prime excuse for continuing to allow the LeT to operate with impunity from within Pakistan.)

So it is not surprising that whenever Holbrooke comes to New Delhi for consultations, the press is full of stories about how he may be secretly plotting to link India to US Af-Pak strategy. Or why Indian officials leap all over him if he implies that Pakistan is not using terrorist groups to fight a proxy war against India in Afghanistan. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Richard Holbrooke, and that’s no easy thing.

Now, enough about Holbrooke. Let’s circle back to the suggestion that LeT might be working with the Taliban or the Haqqani network to carry out attacks in Afghanistan. This is interesting and the source of a lot attention among Western security analysts at the moment.  Stephen Tankel, a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington, DC, and an expert on LeT, has pointed out that, traditionally, LeT was disdainful of the Taliban and stayed well away from them. The LeT came out of the Ahl-e-Hadith school of Islam, whereas the Taliban come out of the Deobandi school and they have significant differences in their religious interpretations. And while the Ahl-e-Hadith school is much closer to other Salafi movements, such as Al Qaeda, LeT became wary of Al Qaeda too in the late 1990s because it was working so closely with the Taliban. (Meanwhile, Al Qaeda, while relying on certain logistical support from the LeT in Pakistan — primarily safe houses — after the loss of its safe haven in Afghanistan in late 2001, was also  somewhat distrustful of the LeT because of its close relationship with the ISI, which it thought could betray the group to Western intelligence.)

But all of this has started to change. In 2006, the LeT made a decision to belatedly get involved in the Afghan conflict. This may have been, as Tankel writes in his forthcoming book on the LeT, because Pakistan had begun curtailing its activities in Kashmir so the LeT was looking for a new venue to practice jihad. Or it may have been because the ISI, which has always maintained close contacts and a good deal of influence with the group, wanted the LeT involved in Afghanistan to check what it saw as growing Indian influence there.

In response, the LeT began shifting more of its activities from the Punjab, in Pakistan’s heartland, and Pakistani Kashmir, where it had traditionally operated training camps and staged operations, to the lawless tribal belt along the Afghan border. Here the group mingled more with fighters from other militant organizations, and seems to have been able to transcend ideological differences to begin closer affiliations with some of them. On a tactical level, the groups share many of the same goals. And it is also the case, as I argue in my Newsweek piece, that LeT has become increasingly close to Al Qaeda in recent years. Al Qaeda, in turn, maintains close links to the Haqqani network. So there is quite a lot of overlap here and this may explain the alleged joint Haqqani-LeT operations, such as the Indian Embassy attack in 2008 — and perhaps the guest house attack last week.

As an unnamed Indian official told The Hindu today, various militant groups operating out of the Af-Pak border region are now “all mixed up with one another.” That also seems to be the assessment from Western intelligence officials and security analysts I talked to recently. Individual militants, who may get to be friendly because they have bases in close physical proximity, may have attended the same training camps, or share certain facilities now, are coming together to plan and carry out attacks. And as a result, it is becoming much harder to say which group executed which attack. Instead, the model is much more like producing a movie, where a bunch of people from different organizations may come together for a specific project, but then go their separate ways. And Al Qaeda, which has maintained close ties with both the Salafi and Ahl-e-Hadith organizations as well as the Deobandi groups, may act as a kind of broker and facilitator in this process.

Getting to the bottom of who attacked the Kabul guest houses last week may shed valuable light on the extent of these connections. And if it turns out the LeT was involved and that Indians were deliberately targeted, it will once again highlight the extent to which India’s role in Afghanistan matters when trying to think about a strategy for, not just Afghanistan, but the entire region.

But in the meantime, I’d like to call your attention to the latest cover story in the Asian edition of Newsweek, which I wrote. In the piece, I look at fears that Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, is increasingly shifting its sights to Western targets. I quote some current and former Western intelligence officials who are alarmed at the growing associations between LeT, as the group is usually known for short, and Al Qaeda. One worry is that the group could lend its formidable international network to Al Qaeda for an attack in Europe or the United States. But, more significantly, I note that “to some analysts, LeT may be an even greater threat than Al Qaeda because of its technological sophistication, its broader global recruiting and fundraising network, its close ties to protectors within the Pakistani government, and the fact that it is still a less high-profile target of Western intelligence.” The story explores in depth the potential threat LeT poses to the West and Western targets within South Asia.

Any way, I encourage you to check out the story. And I promise more posts in this space forthwith.

So it says quite a lot about current geopolitics that just as the United States has decided it will abandon its publicly-funded effort to put men back on the moon, India has announced that it might have a manned lunar mission as early as 2016 (although at the moment, it has only committed itself to putting two Indian astronauts into low Earth orbit that year.) China has already said it plans to have a manned moon shot by 2020.

Welcome to the new multipolar world, one where American power is on the wane, while new great powers, such as India and China, are rapidly on the rise. It is also a world characterized by “coopetition” and space is a great example of this. Great powers cooperate on some space efforts (the International Space Station or probes such as Chandrayaan-1, a unmanned moon explorer that was built and launched by India but carried scientific instruments designed by NASA as well as scientists in the UK, Germany, Sweden and Bulgaria) and yet, at the same time, compete fiercely for bragging rights on other space missions (so far the Indian and Chinese manned space flights seem to be wholly national projects.) And maybe more than bragging rights if you look at the increasing militarization of space by the U.S., Russia and China.

But as Ben Sandilands at the Australian blog Crickey points out, this new world order may be tough for Americans to come to terms with. Americans once took great pride in their space program, which was seen as a representative of many of the values they believed made their nation great: its ingenuity, its resourcefulness, its ability to think big, to conquer nature (an American value since the first settlers eked out an existence in a forbidding wilderness), and to ever be at the cutting edge of technological progress. Most importantly, it was evidence that America was a country that could achieve monumental, even seemingly impossible, things if it could put its collective mind to the task. Further, it was a nation that believed it was worth spending national treasure to prove such a proposition. As President John F. Kennedy famously said in the 1962 Rice University speech in which he affirmed that America would seek to put a man on the moon by the close of the 1960s (a decision he had actually committed the U.S. to in May 1961):

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

I wonder how President Obama regards his decision, leaked to the press last week, to shift America’s current efforts in space back into low gear? In fact, some would say that Obama has actually put the car in neutral, or even turned off the engine altogether.

As part of his effort to rein in non-essential government spending, Obama is proposing killing off the Constellation Project. This was President George W. Bush’s ambitious effort to send Americans back to the moon by 2020. The project, on which $9 billion has been spent since 2004, had run into trouble, with cost overruns in the program to develop the Ares I and Ares V rockets, the Orion capsule that would sit atop them and a moon lander dubbed Altair. A presidential panel found that the project was likely to miss its goal of returning Americans to the moon by at least eight years.

Obama — who is actually increasing NASA’s overall budget — instead wants to put a heavier emphasis on commercializing space flight, with NASA helping private companies develop a kind of space taxi that would carry crews to and from the International Space Station. It also wants private companies to fund the development of the new moon rockets and landers, with the idea being that they would recoup these costs from eventual contracts to carry NASA astronauts — as well as paying civilians or corporate payloads.

It is as the Crickey blogger notes, an interesting role reversal: here you privatization being proposed as the solution by a Democrat, Obama, to replace a Big Government program that had been proposed by a supposedly small government Republican, Bush.

But it is also a sign of the times: the U.S. government can no longer afford to dream as big as it once did.  Instead, it looks to private businesses — many of them headquartered in America and employing many Americans, but increasingly global in character — to carry efforts forward. But the priorities of private business may not always coincide exactly with America’s national interest.

It is hard not to read Obama’s decision to have NASA exit the business of building rockets and vehicles for manned space flight as another sign of American decline from its mid-20th Century zenith. In those years, America, as Kennedy put it, did things that were hard — and not just in space. It didn’t just put a man on the moon, it also passed landmark civil rights legislation and Medicare, a single-payer government health insurance scheme. Today, health care reform in America looks like it is about to become another victim of political gridlock and partisanship. And a global agreement to stem climate change looks like it may fail, in large part because the United States refuses to commit itself to doing something that is hard. In fact, as Tom Friedman likes to point out, America won’t even do things that are easy — like increase the tax on gasoline or mandate higher fuel economy standards.

Meanwhile you have emerging nations such as China and India which still see space exploration as a critical national project and apparently — thanks to GDP growth in excess of 7% — feel they have the money to spend on it. Now, some of these countries benefit from low labor and manufacturing costs. For instance, India’s manned space mission is projected to cost less than $3 billion — less than a third of what NASA has already spent on the soon-to-be scrapped Constellation Project. And India is already a world leader in providing low cost launch services for satellites produced elsewhere. So perhaps it is best to outsource the “hardware” part of space exploration to these low cost providers. But as one finds with business outsourcing, the outsourcers have a sneaky way of working their way “up the value chain,” and suddenly you turn around and your outsourced provider is actually your competitor — and they are eating your lunch.

It should also be noted that India may have a lot of obstacles to overcome to fulfill its own manned space flight ambitions. Its Chandrayaan-1 space probe suffered a catastrophic malfunction 312 days into its mission, having completed less than half of its intended service life of two years. And, as I have written in this space before, one can certainly debate the wisdom of a country where the majority of the population is miserably poor — without access to clean drinking water or a toilet — spending billions to put people on the moon.

But it is also true that America was once a nation that thought it had the resources to both solve problems at home as well as go to the moon. It was a country that aspired to do things precisely because they were hard. Now it seems content to leave the hard work to others, like India.

**In response to the comments from “George” below, thank you for pointing out the error about Chandrayaan-1’s catastrophic failure. I have updated that information above. Still, the space craft survived for less than half of its intended service life. And while ISRO, the Indian space agency, claims the craft completed 95% of its intended mission in that time period, the agency was extremely slow to acknowledge that the probe had in fact ceased operating properly, at first denying reports of a catastrophic malfunction, only to confirm them days later.

Also, in response to Greg, my statement about poverty in India was just that — a statement of fact, not a jab. Some here in India wish the world would stop focusing on the country’s poor  but the sad fact remains that there are more people living in poverty in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa. And India’s leaders haven’t forgotten this fact. They are keenly aware of the need to lift hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty. In this context, I think it is perfectly legitimate to question India’s spending priorities. And as I hope was clear from my statements about America, I don’t think it is necessarily an either/or proposition (America spent money on both the space race and on combating poverty during the 1960s) but I do think it is a very legitimate question to raise and I will not be ashamed for raising it.

a) To what extent does the hawkish nature of the comics actually reflect deep insecurity among the Indian middle class — and not just on the far right — about the nation’s vulnerability to terrorism and its inability to prevent or respond effectively to attacks such as Mumbai?

b) Why should Indian comics be any different than Western comics of the same ilk, which arguably also reflect a hawkish fantasy about the efficacy of the gun and the ability of righteous warriors to set the world right? Is this really any different than G.I. Joe?

You can see the story about the likely retraction by the IPCC here in today’s Hindustan Times.

Maybe it’s just me, but you would think the IPCC would have relied on something more solid than a report in The New Statesman. Wouldn’t they have at least contact Hasnain for his original data and verified that before they issued a prediction on something as significant as Himalayan glacier melt?

First, let me apologize for my months-long absence. I had been traveling — to Nagaland, Darjeeling and Thailand, among other places — and working on a number of magazine assignments, and I let the blogging slip a bit I’m afraid. In the meantime, a lot has happened: the Obama-Singh summit, the Mumbai attack anniversary, the Bhopal anniversary, revelations about David Coleman Headley, Copenhagen, the Telangana crisis, a sex scandal involving an 86-year old politician, etc. I will try to catch up on some of this in the coming days and weeks, and also try to give you a sense of what I’ve been up to.

But now on to some more recent developments: When last we left Shashi Tharoor, the suave United Nations diplomat who is currently India’s junior minister for foreign affairs, he was in trouble with Congress party bigwigs over his Twitter posts. Well, he’s been at it again. Last month, Tharoor used his popular Twitter feed to answer a question from a reader about India’s new tightened visa regime. The reader wanted to know if India’s new visa restrictions were, in the name of preventing terrorism, simply preventing tourists from visiting India’s glorious sights?

(Quick context to this question: In light of revelations about David Coleman Headley — the U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin who traveled to India to conduct reconnaissance for the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, providing information for, U.S. prosecutors allege, 2008’s deadly Mumbai attacks — the Indian government has changed its visa rules. Among other changes, it has mandated that any tourist who comes to India on a long-term visa must take a break of at least 60 days between each visit. The rule has drawn strong protests from the U.S. and the U.K., both of which have complained that the 60-day period is too long for many people and that the new rules have so far been applied inconsistently.)

Tharoor was quick to tweet back: “Dilemma of our age. Tough visa restrictions in hope of btr security or openness & liberality to encourage tourism & goodwill? I prefer latter.”

The comment made headlines, especially in light of the earlier Tharoor Twittergate. There goes Tharoor again, using his Twitter feed to disagree with his own government’s policy, the subtext of the reporting went. It was enough to land Tharoor in hot water with his boss, Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, and the rest of the Cabinet, which had approved the new visa policy. Krishna brought Tharoor in for a stern talking to. The foreign minister later told the press that he was the ultimate decision-maker when it came to foreign affairs and that once a policy was formulated, “everyone has to fall on the same page.” Ouch.

Then, last week, Tharoor was in trouble once more. He had been moderating a discussion in which British Minister of Parliament and India expert Bhikhu Parekh offered a critique of the foreign policy legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Parekh said that while Nehru, who was a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, had elevated India’s status in world affairs, he also infused Indian policy with a “self-righteousness” that other nations found off-putting. Tharoor, who has himself written a biography of Nehru, was quoted by three Indian newspapers as saying that, unfortunately, he agreed with this aspect of Parekh’s critique. Nehru, Tharoor said according to these press accounts, “gave us the negative reputation for conducting foreign policy as a sort of moralistic running commentary on other people’s behaviour.”

His reported remarks caused outrage within the Congress Party, which is the party of both Nehru and Tharoor. (It is also the party currently led by Nehru’s granddaughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi.) Nehru’s or his relatives have led Congress since Independence and it criticism of the party icon is considered a major taboo. “I am very surprised by the style of Tharoor. He is a member of the Congress and his responsibility is to carry forward the legacy of Pandit Nehru and not to be critical of it,” Congress Party spokesman Shakheel Ahmed said. The other Congress spokesman, Abhishek Singhvi, was even more blunt in some ways: “Nehru is a giant about whom no one can be dismissive in a one-liner,” he said. “Given [Tharoor's] past history [of controversies], it’s useful to apply the principle that silence is golden.” Ouch again. 

Tharoor had to take phone calls from various party officials, including the Prime Minister, asking him to explain himself. He also called a press conference in which he claimed he was badly misquoted and lambasted the press. He said he was merely summarizing Parekh’s remarks - in his role as the discussion’s moderator — not offering his own views. He also said that some of the remarks attributed to him were actually Parekh’s. “Irresponsible reporting may briefly gratify a few sensation-seekers in the media, but they do no credit to the need for informed discussion of foreign policy issues in our democracy. India deserves better. So, frankly, do I,” Tharoor said.

Poor Shashi. I have to agree with him — he and India do deserve better. But the what they deserve goes far beyond a more responsible media, which is what Tharoor was talking about. Instead, India deserves a political discourse that welcomes debate and which is willing to at least examine long-held myths. Idol worship may have done India a lot of good in terms of religion, but it makes for bad policy.

As I have noted before, Tharoor is exactly the sort of dynamic foreign policy leader India needs. He is smart, articulate, sensible and reform-minded. Within the ministry of external affairs, he launched a policy planning group to help promote more strategic thinking. He also understands the need for India to change the way it is perceived by other countries — particularly those in the West –  if it wants to play a bigger role on the global stage. (The critique of Nehru’s foreign policy offered by Parekh — and perhaps endorsed by Tharoor — is dead on: for too long India has been content to be a moral critic, not a constructive player. I wrote about the halting efforts of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to change these perceptions in a recent Newsweek story.) He understands the importance of new technology (hence his Twitter addiction).

And yet he is singularly ill-suited for contemporary Indian politics — particularly in the Congress Party — where slavish devotion to party leadership is more highly valued than good ideas and an understanding of the world. In each of these controversies, Tharoor’s real crime has not been the substance of what he’s said; it’s been insubordination. In India, breaking rank — short-circuiting the hierarchy - is the gravest of crimes. To Congress Party bigwigs Tharoor must appear to be a very dangerous man indeed, a true loose cannon. He had his own reputation before he ran for elected office and he has his own following of admirers, not just in India, but globally. The independence that such a following affords Tharoor is something the Congress Party cannot abide.

In each of these three controversies, on the substance Tharoor was undeniably correct: Sonia’s austerity drive was nothing more than token window-dressing, not a real policy (you will notice that most references to it have vanished); the new visa rules are a draconian overreaction more likely to dissuade tourists from visiting India than posing any real impediment to a determined terrorist; and Nehru did imbue India’s foreign policy with a kind of moral self-righteousness which, if it ever served India well, no longer does so today.

But in India none of this matters. Instead the debate is all about the shock of Tharoor’s challenging received wisdom, government hierarchy and perhaps more importantly, party hierarchy. The mainstream media, often a progressive force in developing societies, is, in this case, a highly conservative one. Rather than rooting for Tharoor’s innovative ideas and embrace of new technology, they seem to be rooting for him to fail.

For now, Tharoor is holding on. One gets the sense that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with much of what Tharoor thinks, even if he disagrees with him airing his views publicly — especially on a forum such as Twitter. For now, Singh may have been able to keep the long-knives of the Congress party away from Tharoor’s neck. But Tharoor may not survive the next gaffe. (And here we ought to use the classic Michael Kinsley definition of a gaffe: i.e. a gaffe is what happens when a politician speaks the truth.) If he is drummed out, this government and India will be the worse for it.

One of the internal debates within the BJP is whether to present itself primarily as a secular center-right party that favors free market reforms and moving India closer to the West, or primarily as a Hindu nationalist party that emphasizes communally divisive issues. Well, in Maharashtra where the BJP is allied with Shiv Sena, a party known for its extreme stance against both Muslims and immigrants from outside the state, the politics of xenophobia seem to have failed. Shiv Sena had its worst election showing in two decades. It was so bad that Balasaheb Thackeray, the controversial Shiv Sena leader, accused the Marathi people of  stabbing the party in the back. That’s quite a twist. The party did especially badly in and around Mumbai, which had been Shiv Sena’s traditional stronghold.

The question now is what lesson will the BJP draw from this defeat? Will it reinforce the moderate, pro-business reformers within the party — the very group that seems to have been hit worse in the recent party in-fighting? Or will the party continue its self-destructive turn toward ever more radical and fringe communalism? If it does, the BJP days as a national party that can seriously challenge the Congress may be over.

(Although it should be noted that the vote was not an entirely resounding blow against communalism: One of the reasons that Shiv Sena did so badly is that in many constituencies its traditional vote bank was split by the rising popularity of an equally xenophobic and extremist party, the Maharashtra Navnirman Samithi, which is led by Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj Thackeray.)

The Congress meanwhile will be cheered by the election results, which will be read as an endorsement of its policies so far. But in India it is always dangerous to draw insights into national politics from state elections, which are usually decided on local issues. So Congress ought not to become complacent. Just twelve months ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Congress was a moribund party that would have to be lucky to win another term. Now the CW has swung 180 degrees. But it could just as quickly swing back again. One sign of trouble: in Haryana, the Congress and its allies managed to hang on to power but lost substantial ground, resulting in a hung assembly. This lead one leading Indian paper to call Congress’s showing “victory by default.”