Off to See the Raj

Injah prepares to welcome President Bush

Hyderabad: A 'praja court' (public court) here Sunday held US President George W. Bush guilty of "perpetrating terrorism in the name of fighting terrorism and killing people including women and children".

Bush...faced charges ranging from war mongering and mass killings to violation of all international charters and aggression against sovereign countries.
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The public hearing on "crimes of George Bush" was held by a coalition of 40 groups including Left parties and their affiliated organisations, human rights and women's groups, and trade unions.
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Meanwhile, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), which along with other Left parties is opposing Bush's visit, launched a website on the issue.

So in many ways India is representative of the world in microcosm, where voices like this one from New Delhi are also raised:

And then came 9/11. The world changed as the towers burned, and George W. Bush was not even watching it on television. In a few flaming moments, the idyll of the post-Cold War world was shattered. From the breached Wall in Berlin to the towering inferno in Manhattan, it was, in retrospect, a short-distance journey in freedom. Fear became the state of the Union, and George W. was not supposed to be the leader with the right mojo. The illegitimacy of Florida. A weltanschauung as big as a Texas ranch. The compassionate conservative with little interest in the butchers of Baghdad or Beijing or wherever. Not even America First, it was America Alone. No Wilsonian adventure, thank you. The smirk. The syntax. After Clintonian brain power, what chance? History intervened and offered its services as George W's make-up artist. Look what we have got.

Hang on. It depends on the angle from which you are looking. Peanut Marxists at home and caviar socialists elsewhere and hate-mongers in the Middle East may shudder at the imperialist in cowboy boots, slinging his gun at the last revolutionaries of the Third World. The war criminal. The oil-guzzling moralist. The empire builder. The torturer-in-chief. The prison guard. Liberty slayer. Security fanatic. Give us more Chavez, take away this war-crazy American. Those who live outside history and miss their spider-hole hero are bound to deny Bush his glory. For they have nothing at stake except the pirated editions of Chomsky and the last vestiges of a few redundant isms. Bush, a president reborn at Ground Zero, surprised himself by setting off this century's first war for the sake of an idea.

The idea is not wrapped in star and stripes alone, even India -- not the India of Prakash Karat, of course -- will accept that. We have been living through terror with the Hindu rate of stoicism. Bush made freedom a war cry, a moral rejoinder to the troglodytes of religion. If kites fly in Afghanistan today, if Saddam Hussein is a harmless hallucinator in a court-room drama, if democracy is not a one-man-all-votes farce in Mesopotamia, if Osama bin Laden is nothing more than a disembodied voice marketed by Al Jazeera, the world has to be a better place. It is, and it owes this freedom to the moral rage of the combative conservatives in power. Bush is the embodiment of that rage, and it makes him the newest entry in the list of men who contributed the most to the freedom struggle of the world after 1945. Bush joins Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan.

There was a logical progression from Reagan's Evil Empire to Bush's Axis of Evil. Bush père was not the true inheritor of Reaganism. Bill Clinton, the smartest of his generation, didn't have a historical situation to play out his mind. Bush got Evil Empire Part II, an absolute negation of all that end-of-history triumphalism of the West. Faith replaced ideology; the empire was not territorially distinctive. It was an empire of fear and terror. Bush was not scared to play moral crusader. Afghanistan was the first chapter in the just war; the Baathist psychopath invited himself to the next. The Arab street has not erupted in the name of Saddam. Rather, election rallies have gone far beyond Baghdad and deep into Palestinian ghettos. Still, an Arabian spring may be a distant dream, but Bush's idealism has given the streets a chance to dream.

He is engaged in one of history's grandest freedom projects. Everyone except those who live in the back alleys of civilization has a stake in it. For India particularly, it is a mission that incorporates some of its deepest nationalist worries. In principle, Bush's war is India's too. Rarely does one man's sense of justice become a transformative force on a global scale. That is the story of George Bush as the towering aftermath of 9/11.