"The love that lasts forever is an illusion of youth
All roses die and fester — and that’s the truth, the truth, the truth..."

From Bachchoo Kalaam

Nick Clegg is not yet an important politician in Britain. He is the latest elected leader of the Liberal Democrats, the third part in Parliament and today part of the Opposition. The Lib-Dems can at best hope in the next Parliament to assist one or other party with a clear majority. They are not even as instrumental to British politics as, say, Mayawati will be to the Indian Lok Sabha or the support of the CPI(M) is to the Congress coalition in New Delhi.

And yet Nick Clegg has gained an unusual sort of notoriety. A journalist for GQ, which describes itself as a "man’s magazine," asked him recently how many women he had sex with in his life. The questioner phrased it less delicately. Clegg, instead of saying that it was none of his business, said "30," and then quickly backtracked, saying it may not have been as many as that. But that was his spontaneous reply.

My daughters have a put-down phrase, which is "Too much information." It is used to terminate verbal gushing which borders on the distasteful. It is used to stop descriptions by people who are obsessed with their toilet habits or have an illness or disorder that should remain discreetly unmentioned. TMI comes into force.

The British media reacted in the way my daughters might have. The journalist was seeking too much information and Clegg’s readiness to supply it was in bad taste. For a national politician to register what can only be seen as an ungentlemanly boast was seen as a disaster. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it was a calculated exercise in winning the admiration of sections of the population who would consider it fresh honesty for a politician, or of the male section of the population who was envious of the number or patronisingly contemptuous of it, and of the female section of the population who might think that the boast and the number were pretty macho.

In the wake of the admission or boast, statistics were published. The average number of women that a British male has sex with in a lifetime is 14.7, (which could leave one wondering what it would be like to encounter seven-tenths of a woman?)

I don’t know who or why this statistic came about and who initiated such a questionnaire. It must have been the successors to the Kinsey report and the Masters and Johnson exercise of the last century, in which censuses of American sex were meticulously taken.

So there is young Clegg, with his more than double of the national average. Should he be ashamed? Proud? What does he say to Mrs Clegg, whom he married when he was 32. He is now 41, so that presuming he started having sex at 16 which he claims and presuming that he has never "played away" and cheated on Mrs Clegg, it’s about two women a year for 16 active years.

If he was born in the "Swinging Sixties" and brought up in the left-over Seventies and the Thatcherite Eighties, when permissiveness still cast its shadow, that’s a modest number. Do all men count? Is it notches on a gun? Isn’t it possible to lose count, through the haze of time, the daze of drunkenness, drugs, pain, uncertain encounters in once-visited rooms?

A few years ago, sitting in a restaurant in New Delhi having a pleasant dinner, a prominent Indian journalist turned to me and asked me what my score was. I didn’t get the question immediately. I know that Indians are obsessed with cricket and it vaguely crossed my mind that he might have thought I was player of sorts, but then his subsequent remarks made it plain that he was after a different sort of statistic.

"Oh, I don’t know," I said.

"Come on, you must know," he said.

"I have no idea and even if I did I don’t think I’d discuss it."

"Come on yaar, bataa! 20, 50, 100, 200?"

"I really have no idea. I have never counted and how would one do it anyway?"

"Oh, it’s like that?" he asked "Too many to remember, too many to count?"

He sounded competitively defeated.

"I didn’t say that. Shall we order some dessert? What’s good, you now this place."

He wasn’t to be put off.

"England and Europe, yaar, you spent your student days there. Must have really gone to town, yeah?"

"Didn’t seem like it," I said.

I must confess at this point that this entire conversation, the questions and the answers, were taking place in the presence of his wife and the mother of my children who was on this trip with me to India.

I would have thought it made the questioning awkward because it certainly made the answers cautious.

"Let’s change the subject. Don’t you agree, girls?"

"Just give me an indication of the maximum," he implored.

It was evident now that this was no statistical journalistic survey. He was measuring my possible answers against some memory, some desire in his own existence.

I was tempted to explore the vein.

"So what’s your ‘score’ as you call it?"

"Nothing like yours," he said.

"But like you asked me, make an estimate?"

"It’s shameful, yaar," he said.

It was my turn. "One, two, seven, 14?"

"Maximum." His voice fell.

"And a lot of them were Indians of course?"

"Yes. I didn’t study abroad."

"Well, if we are talking about powers of seduction, there must be an index, a multiplier which tells you how seducible one nationality of girls is as compared to another. I have found the common belief that this or that nation’s girls are more easily seduced to be a complete myth."

I could see he didn’t like that observation.

"Actually," I said "If all your conquests were Indian, then you can multiply your statistic by five, I have been told it takes five times as long to persuade them."

I think this cheered him up. I could see him doing the multiplication mentally and deciding he could live with the result. In the pop industry and for stars or sportsmen of a popular sport it may be true that quantity matters more than quality. These professions live off their image and cultivate their attractiveness as an adjunct to their singing, guitar-playing, acting or batting and kicking skills. But what does Clegg care and why did my Indian journalist friend?

Note: My protest that I have never counted is not the same as I have lost count.

Hezbollah is one of the world’s most radical terrorist organisations. Over the last week or so, it has staged an armed assault on the democratic government of Lebanon.

Barack Obama issued a statement in response. He called on "all those who have influence with Hezbollah" to "press them to stand down." Then he declared, "It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment."

That sentence has the whiff of what President Bush described as appeasement. Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organisation like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What "Lebanese consensus" can Hezbollah possibly be a part of? If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

That didn’t strike me as right, so I spoke with Obama on Tuesday to ask him what he meant by all this.

Right off the bat he reaffirmed that Hezbollah is "not a legitimate political party." Instead, "It’s a destabilising organisation by any common-sense standard. This wouldn’t happen without the support of Iran and Syria."

I asked him what he meant with all this emphasis on electoral and patronage reform. He said the US should help the Lebanese government deliver better services to the Shias "to peel support away from Hezbollah" and encourage the local populace to "view them as an oppressive force." The US should "find a mechanism whereby the disaffected have an effective outlet for their grievances, which assures them they are getting social services."

The US needs a foreign policy that "looks at the root causes of problems and dangers." Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that "they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims." He knows these movements aren’t going away anytime soon ("Those missiles aren’t going to dissolve"), but "if they decide to shift, we’re going to recognise that. That’s an evolution that should be recognised."

Obama being Obama, he understood the broader reason I was asking about Lebanon. Everybody knows that Obama is smart (and he was quite well informed about Lebanon). The question is whether he’s seasoned and tough enough to deal with implacable enemies.

"The debate we’re going to be having with John McCain is how do we understand the blend of military action to diplomatic action that we are going to undertake," he said. "I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism. Those are the terms of debate that have led to blunder after blunder."

Obama said he found that the military brass thinks the way he does: "The generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough."

I asked him if negotiating with a theocratic/ideological power like Iran is different from negotiating with a nation that’s primarily pursuing material interests. He acknowledged that "If your opponents are looking for your destruction it’s hard to sit across the table from them," but, he continued: "There are rarely purely ideological movements out there. We can encourage actors to think in practical and not ideological terms. We can strengthen those elements that are making practical calculations."

Obama doesn’t broadcast moral disgust when talking about terror groups, but he said that in some ways he’d be tougher than the Bush administration. He said he would do more to arm the Lebanese military and would be tougher on North Korea. "This is not an argument between Democrats and Republicans," he concluded. "It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H.W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall."

In the early 1990s, the Democrats and the first Bush administration had a series of arguments — about humanitarian interventions, whether to get involved in the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In his heart, Obama talks like the Democrats of that era, viewing foreign policy from the ground up. But in his head, he aligns himself with the realist dealmaking of the first Bush. Apparently, he’s part Harry Hopkins and part James Baker.

There is a certain romanticism and mythology attached to a visit to Southall. It represents a time when hardworking Punjabi migrants left their country on both sides of the Punjab, post Partition. England was also suffering following the World War II, and desperately needed labour. Many proud Jats were now forced to work in factories such as Woolfe’s Rubber Company, Nestle and the Lyons food processing plants as well as the airport, mostly as unskilled labour. It was a miserable transition: From the clear crisp Punjab sky, inhaling the fragrance of freshly baked makki ki roti and warm honey-like gur — to being cooped up on a factory floor. But the practical Punjabi did it — especially encouraged by the higher incomes, and also, if they worked at the airport, tickets back home which sometimes cost just 20 per cent of the actual fare.

The Punjabis were not the first migrants into Southall. Like many such "ghettos" it had already seen the first wave — who were also poor, but white. In the 1930s they came from the coal mining areas of South Wales and Durham and the poorer areas of South Ireland. These were followed by the West Indian migrants in the 1940s, and then finally the Punjabis in the 1950s. Each gradually displaced the other. But the Punjabis who now live in Southall are not a bunch of homogenous Jat Sikhs. Some of them came in the 1970s from Kenya and Uganda, once again as refugees, and were tarkhans and lohars who were brought to East Africa to build the railways and towns. While the Jats had come with very little, the Punjabis arriving from Africa were urbanised, and much wealthier. As Marie Gillespie observes in her book Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change, it led to a strange a topsy-turvy caste system in Southall. Many of the tarkhans, lohars, and other so-called "lower" castes lived better, drove fancier cars, and wore more gold jewellery than the Jats. But the caste-system (even though it had been eradicated by Guru Nanak) apparently still reigns strong in Southall, with even separate gurdwaras for the different castes. Indeed, if the discrimination becomes too much, some of the "backward" Sikhs prefer to worship at Hindu temples.

The emigrants from Africa also included Hindus and Muslims. And over time the Muslim community has become marvellously diverse, including those from Pakistan, India, East Africa, Mirpur, Bangladesh, Somalia, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Malaysia, Trinidad and Fiji...

Partly because I have my own prejudices about ghettos, championing a more culturally diverse lifestyle, I had till recently studiously avoided Southall. For instance, a visit to East London, which houses a large Bangladeshi community (immortalised in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane) made even me (as brown-skinned as anybody else) feel uncomfortable amongst the overload of burqa-clad women and the gents with their long flowing beards and in-your-face salwar-kameezes. Why bother to live in London if you want to create a mini-Bangladesh? It mystified and unnerved me, and I had the same discomfort when I stepped into Southall. Why create a mini-Punjab when you can enjoy the diversity of London? But, of course, there were economic, language, and racist reasons for Brick Lane and Southall once upon a time, long before Britain became so "multi-culti."

Some parts of Southall, however, are refreshing: for instance, the beautifully-named Glassy Junction, a pub which cheekily faces the gurdwara just across the road. Punjabis (both Pakistani and Indian) share the same street happily. And there are large supermarkets selling fresh produce. But I could have blinked and found myself in Amritsar: Everyone spoke Punjabi, and I haven’t seen so many Sikhs together on one road for a long time (not even in Delhi). You do not feel you are in London at all. There are tacky stalls selling stuff straight from Lajpat Nagar at five times the price. The Glassy Junction accepts rupees and the McDonald’s serves halal meat. Yes, you can actually buy garlands for your puja room, and the latest movie (Tashan) is showing at Himalaya Palace cinema. To make me feel more at home, I even got wolf-whistled at by a young sardar. But I have to say I felt no joy about the visit. The same sense of unease that had crept upon me in Brick Lane now surrounded me in Southall. I sat eating my plate of golguppas (which cost almost Rs 300) at Jalebi Junction, feeling a terrible sense of disorientation. Was there still a need for places like this? Wasn’t chicken tikka the British national dish? Wasn’t racism a distant memory? Doesn’t the lifestyle in Southall belong inside a museum? Shouldn’t we take photographs and create a shrine to Southall, for those brave migrants who came nearly 60 years ago, and physically shift out the kitsch and claustrophobic kinship? Fortunately, it seems that the Punjabis, as they become more affluent, are now actually shifting out, making way for newer waves of migrants — and so soon Southall may lose its Punjabi flavour for an Afghani or Polish makeover. It would be wonderful to see it change and become more diverse. Though I do suspect that by choosing a Punjabi parliamentary representative every time, it may be stultified into an "Asian vote bank."

But of course this place has seen great struggles for its identity and has also been associated with groups such as the Southall Black Sisters, who have campaigned vigorously for women’s rights. Their "campaign song" symbolises the robust spirit of Southall in many ways:

Yeh Kaali Kaali Behne
Yeh stroppy stroppy chaal
Yeh picket/shiket laga ke
Kar dete bura haal
Voh Home Office walon ke
Udha dete hain baal
Yeh Kaali Kaali Behne
Yeh stroppy stroppy chaal
(Sung to the tune of Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhen)

A year-and-a-half ago I transcribed here in this column a piece of news from the CNN saying that on 31 October 2004, resorting to a feudal law that was abolished in the following month, the town of Prestopans, in Scotland, granted official pardon to 81 people — and their cats — executed for practicing witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries. According to the official spokesperson for the Barons of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun, "most of them had been condemned without any concrete evidence — based only on witnesses for the prosecution who claimed they felt the presence of evil spirits".

The oddest thing about this news item is that the town and the 14th Baron of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun are "granting pardon" to people who were brutally executed. Here we are plump in the 21st century, and those who killed innocent people still feel they have the right to "pardon". To my surprise, that did not bring the matter to an end. At least according to the highly respected Reuters news agency, there still exist witches to be pardoned by the system. In a piece of news published recently, the granddaughter of one of them has just launched a campaign for the "posthumous redemption" of Helen Duncan, a woman accused by the English during the Second World War. Duncan’s crime was to have answered, during a séance of spiritualism, a question asked by a mother desperate to know the whereabouts of her son, a member of the crew of the ship HMS Barbham. The medium stated that the ship had just sunk and that the entire crew had died. This was true, but the fact was being kept secret so as not to affect the morale of the soldiers. The news soon spread, and reached the government. Based on a law dating from 1735, Winston Churchill ordered her arrested until the war was over. Helen Duncan died in 1956, without ever being pardoned. Her granddaughter, Mary Martin (now aged 72) has already even managed to have an audience with the minister of the interior of the Tony Blair government, but to no avail. As I write these lines, the Baron of Prestoungrange is directly involved in the matter, and has even opened a site on the Internet (www.prestoungrange.org/helenduncan) to raise international support.

In the words of the Baron: "The 300 soldiers executed for desertion during the First World War have already been pardoned. The denunciations that caused the death of a group of 20 innocent young people in Salem, Massachusetts, have already been treated with due respect. We have already apologised for trading in slaves and adopting piracy as a noble way to make the UK prosperous. What has to be done to pardon Helen Duncan?" It is simple. In the beginning, Duncan was accused of spying. A massive investigation concluded that it was impossible for a woman to have access to official secrets. How, then, could she have known what had happened to the frigate HMS Barbham?

The only explanation that remains is: Witchcraft. And what purpose is served by the old laws, even if they have been forgotten by a civilisation that deems itself enlightened and immune to the superstitions of yore?

Their purpose is to be applied.

Translated by James Mulholland

The serial blasts in Jaipur on May 13, which killed about 60 innocent civilians, have many general characteristics common to many terrorist organisations in South Asia. Among important examples of such characteristics are the use of bicycles to plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in crowded places and mixing projectiles such as ball-bearings of cycles with the explosive.

Bicycles as carriers of IEDs have often been used by different terrorist groups since the jihad against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Jihadi as well as non-jihadi groups have been using cycles. Among the non-jihadi organisations which use bicycle bombs is the United Liberation Front of Asom (Ulfa). The greatest advantage of bicycles for terrorists is that they are used by millions of people and unattended bicycles left in crowded places do not attract suspicion. Cycles are also used under certain other circumstances — when the terrorist organisation has only limited funds, when it has no capability for stealing cars and motorcycles and having them driven to the targeted place, and when it wants to use an unconscious cutout to take the IED to the spot without using its own cadres for this purpose. Ulfa uses such cutouts for having cycles fitted with IEDs left in crowded areas, for which they are paid. In this manner, the Ulfa cadres escape identification and arrest. Ball-bearings are also often used to increase the lethality of the explosive. The LTTE has been using them for nearly 20 years now. When the Sri Lankan authorities imposed severe restrictions on the sale of ball-bearings in the Tamil areas, the LTTE started smuggling them in sackfuls from Tamil Nadu. By mixing ball-bearings with the explosive, one can not only increase the lethality of the IED, but also economise on the use of the explosive. A small quantity of explosive can cause a large number of casualties if mixed with ball-bearings and other projectiles. By mixing ball-bearings, a low-intensity explosive can be made to cause a high-intensity killer effect.

The IEDs at Jaipur were activated by mechanical timers. According to published details of one IED, which failed to explode, the timing mechanism was an ordinary clock. This was similar to the modus operandi of the Khalistani terrorists in Punjab in the 1980s. The new trend among jihadi organisations in other countries has been to use the alarm mechanism of mobile telephones to time an IED. This was apparently not used in Jaipur.

In recent months, the police in Karnataka, Goa, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh had claimed to have neutralised a number of jihadi sleeper cells constituted by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) with the help of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).During their interrogation, those arrested reportedly spoke of the plans of these organisations to attack Israeli and Western tourists in Goa. In fact, Goa had been repeatedly figuring in interrogation reports as a possible target for attacks by the LeT, or HuJI, or both. Jaipur had not figured in the interrogation reports.

The fact that Jaipur, and not Goa, was attacked, is mysterious. This would indicate one of two things: Either those arrested and interrogated earlier had misled the police by talking freely about Goa when their real target was Jaipur; or the Jaipur blasts were carried out by an organisation totally different from the organisations (the LeT and HuJI) to which those arrested earlier belonged.

Tourism has been an important target of terrorists all over the world. Al Gamah Al Islamiyah of Egypt used to attack tourist targets in Egypt in the 1990s. The Jemaah Islamiyah of Indonesia targeted Australian tourists twice in Bali, in 2002 and 2005. Al Qaeda targeted foreign tourists (mainly Israelis) in Mombasa in 2002, in Casablanca in 2003 and in Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt in 2005. Their primary targets were foreign tourists though locals also got killed. In Jaipur, there was no targeted attack on foreign tourists. No foreigner has been killed. They did not attack restaurants, bars, hotels etc, which are known to be frequented by foreign tourists. The terrorists targeted the tourist potential of Jaipur, but not foreign tourists in particular. Some police officers and embedded journalists have already started blaming the LeT and HuJI even though the blasts do not carry any unique signature of any organisation. The only way of identifying the organisation responsible is by arresting the perpetrators and interrogating them. Till we reach that stage, it will be premature and unwise to blame anyone. Almost 24 hours after the blasts, two TV channels of New Delhi claimed to have received an anonymous email claiming responsibility for the explosions on behalf of a group called "the Indian Mujahideen. The email was purported to have been sent by guru_alhindi_jaipur@yahoo.co.uk. The most significant thing about this message is that it has included the picture of one of the cycles alleged to have been used in Jaipur with the number of the cycle readable. If a cycle with that number had in fact been used in Jaipur, this claim could acquire some authenticity.

In the 1980s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) of the UK used to follow a similar modus operandi whenever it planted an IED. Through phone calls, it used to give clues to the police to enable them to establish the authenticity of the IRA’s claim of responsibility.

It may be recalled that before the blasts outside some courts in UP last November, a message claiming responsibility for the blasts on behalf of "Indian Mujahideen" was received by local TV channels. There was also a reference to Guru-al-Hindi in another message. This was suspected to be a reference to Afzal Guru, who has been sentenced to death in the case relating to the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001 and who has appealed for clemency. The message of November 2007 had also claimed that the "Indian Mujahideen" had nothing to do with the LeT or HuJI.

It is not clear whether the cycle is the one recovered by the police with the IED intact after it failed to explode and whether they released the photo to the media. If so, the inclusion of this photo in the email is not significant.

If not, it is. If the cycle in the photo is found to have been used and successfully activated, that would be an indication that an organisation of Indian Muslims hitherto unknown to the police has been operating undetected.

In this connection, please refer to my following comments in my article on the November blasts in UP at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers25/paper2474.html: "It has been reported that an email message purported to be from "Indian Mujahideen" received by some TV channels before the explosions indicated that these explosions were about to take place. However, it referred to explosions in two, and not three, cities. ‘Indian Mujahideen’ does not refer to any organisation, but it refers to Indian Muslims in general, and says that Indian Muslims have decided to take the offensive and wage a jihad."

"In justification of this decision, it refers to the severe penalties awarded to the accused in the Mumbai blasts of March 1993, and the lack of action against Hindu police officers who committed atrocities on Muslims. It also refers to the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the recent assault on arrested JeM (Jaish-e-Mohammad) suspects by some lawyers."

"The message is not only a warning of their intention to act, but also an explanation of why Indian Muslims have decided to act. The main point, which the sender of the message has sought to convey, is that the criminal justice system treats Muslims severely, but is lenient with Hindus. The language used is typically Indian, the context and arguments used are typically of Indian Muslims, and the issues raised are those which have been agitating the minds of sections of Indian Muslims, such as the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, lack of action against the Hindu police officers of Mumbai who were found guilty of excesses by the Srikrishna Inquiry Commission, the severe penalties awarded to Muslims who had retaliated in March 1993, and the Gujarat riots."

"It admits that the Muslims were responsible for the explosions in Varanasi, Delhi, Mumbai and in a restaurant and park in Hyderabad, but says they were not responsible for the blasts in Malegaon in September 2006, in the Samjhauta Express and the Mecca Masjid of Hyderabad this year (2007). It is silent on the recent blast in Ajmer Sharief, a Muslim holy place famous for its tolerant Sufi tradition."

"It says that the Indian Muslims have decided to wage a jihad for Islamic rule and talks of a ‘war for civilisation.’ It warns that their next targets will be police officers."

B. Raman is a former additional secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat