The British Home office had then just issued some `stop and search’ orders in view of the increasing number shoe, suicide and other kinds of bombers among fundamentalists who were mushrooming all over Britain at the time. British Muslims were outraged – for the police were now authorised not just to stop on suspicion but also strip and search suspects for hidden bombs. But then ministers and members of parliament began to hold dialogues with the British Muslim community, apologising in a half-hearted way for the orders and trying hard to explain that they did make a difference between Muslims in general and terrorists in particular.

But that was not all. I found British sensitivity to minority sentiments at the highest anywhere in the world and, frankly, I thought it had been quite unnecessary to apologise for the stop and search orders.

How else do you protect innocent citizens from bombers and terrorists? I noticed, though, that despite the outrage leaders of the British Muslim community had begun to advise their members about co-operating with the police searches. “If you have nothing to hide, you should have no problem submitting to a search,’’ was he refrain I oft heard during that brief visit.

Nevertheless, I did feel that the British authorities were still bending over backwards to guard the sentiments of their minorities and, coming from a nation that is accused of appeasing its own to an extreme, I said as much to the officers I had met during the study tour. They were embarrassed, simply shrugged and said nothing.

That sensitivity is probably responsible for the hacking to death of a soldier in London this week but I am stunned that the young men who perpetrated that brutality are British-born, university-educated and yet could be such jehadists that they hung around for the police to arrive and gun them down – hoping that would have directly send them to jannat. I’m glad all that they are now getting is some tough nurses tending to their wounds and the houris will be a long time coming.

I frankly do not know any longer whether it is better for governments to be as tough as the US, as lenient as the UK or somewhere in between like India where genuine terrorists escape the net most of the time while innocent young boys of a certain community are rounded up routinely by the police – and then let off by the courts for lack of evidence without even so much as an apology for ruining their lives.

However, if one looks at the Boston bombing of last month and the London attack, I shudder to think that terrorists today could be friendly neighbourhood boys brought up in civilised fashion who get so indoctrinated that they are unable to distinguish between barbarism and heroism.

At least Ajmal Kasab had come from a deprived background, sold to terrorists by his impoverished father and it can be said he had no choices. The same cannot be said of the Boston bombers or the London hackers – they are cold-blooded terrorists and this is what even the Bombay police had discovered and feared in the early 2000s when they found high motivation levels among some home grown terrorists across Maharashtra. Those boys spoke English better than their lawyers, had never been deprived of any of the resources that had been available to most of the rest of us and were all professionals – like doctors, chartered accountants and software engineers. That trend seems to have now travelled to the West and if this were to become the face of terrorism in the future, I wonder how impossible it might be for nations to contain the virus.

I agree with Lord Ghulam Noon that if British Muslims wish for a Muslim parliament or a sharia law in that country they better go where such laws already exist – here is no place in civilised society for any such barbarism. Why has the UK not thrown such elements out of the country, particularly when many of them are not even British born or naturalised?

Lord Adam Patel, a Gujarati migrant from India who now sits in the House of Lords, had then told me, “Britain is the best country to live in anywhere in the world.’’

Lets hope they keep it that way and that a couple of misguided youth do not win over the larger civilised people in this world, But for that, I guess, Britain would have to stop bending over backwards.

Nearly 15 years ago when the Hansie Cronje scandal had hit the headlines round the cricketing world, a top ranking police officer had told me there were only two honest men in the Indian cricketing team — Rahul Dravid and Saurav Ganguly. They had never fixed a match and, in fact bookies were afraid of even approaching these two because they told them off in no uncertain terms each time the bookies tried and threatened to inform the authorities. The cop did not exclude any one else and I was shocked because there were many more iconic players in the team at the time – Ganguly and Dravid had not even made it as captains then.

“What about the rest? They are national heroes!’’ I protested.

“Well you think these were not?’’ he said, naming some past cricketers who had been very big names indeed. They all used to throw their matches but betting was more a cottage industry at the time. Soon the underworld got wind of it and got into it in right earnest. “We know who is honest and who is not. But we cannot always name the wrong ones and sometimes the laws are so structured that there is little we an do about it.’’

Much as the Delhi police has caught three Rajasthan Royals players in a spot foxing racket, the Bombay police too had not been probing cricketers to begin with. It was chasing the underworld for other crimes and stumbled upon their conversations with cricketers by accident. It took some time and effort for them to expose the racket and from what he told me I understood that it all began at a time when cricketers were underpaid and not earning in millions as they do these days. So I fail to understand why these three IPL players should have been so greedy and risked their careers and reputations when they are already hugely overpaid for league matches and could have gained little else by fixing their games.

It is ironic that this had to happen to one of the two honest men in Indian cricket – it would not have been easy for Dravid as he realised his team members were involved in spot-fixing. Stands to reason that that is now the new modus operandi of bookies for as the police officer told me more than a decade ago, a whole game cannot be fixed or thrown without the complicity of the coach and the manager and taking into confidence almost the entire team. Obviously, that era is now past and one bookies now have to look for people with low moral fibre and a high greed quotient. There will always be that kind in every walk of life and society.

I was not present at that event in the 1970s, one must blame the late actor IS Johar for starting it all for a lark. He was good friends with some one I am related to closely and I was told that at a party thrown for the Indian and West Indies team one evening, he just placed bets on who would win and who would lose the test match the next day. All bets were on West Indies winning and that team co-operated in whole measure with Johar. So India, which was expected to lose, won that match the next day.

But look at where West Indian cricket is today: they are hardly a formidable team and barring one or two players who are there on individual merit, we see no legends coming out of that part of the cricketing world any more.

India now is among the top cricketing teams of the world as West Indies was in the 1970s and for whatever it is worth I would hate to see our team go the same way. And this I say as no big fan of cricket, including the IPL which I think is a sheer waste of time and money and leaves me cold besides.

Yet I am shaken up by the scandal and can understand the emotions cricket fans might be going through right now. Moreover, this is one area where we dominate the western world. So why should we throw it all away? Why should we confirm their stereotype of us as `grubby, greedy Indians’?

Wasn’t it Mahatma Gandhi who said there is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed?

Well, the Indian Premier League just proved that.

Sharad Pawar was right in advising the Congress not to celebrate its victory in Karnataka too soon, though I cannot help but suspect that even he was shocked at the Congress sweep – perhaps he had been expecting more damage to the Congress by his two friends in that state, old pal HD Deve Gowda and new found friend BS Yedyurappa who is now all set to be part of the third front at the head of which Pawar hopes to become prime minister one day.

Pawar was said to have advised Yedyurappa through the Karnataka polls on how to win his seats and damage the mother party as he had done in 1999 to the Congress in Maharashtra.

But given the results, I do not believe Yeddy is as much a winning force as he had thought he would be before the assembly results.

So if the BJP is set to lose Karnataka in 2014 and the Congress Andhra Pradesh, where do the two main parties get their numbers from and make it to government at the Centre?

I believe even regional outfits like the Samajwadi Party and the Trinamool Congress might not do as well in their respective states next year for obvious reasons and much as Narendra Modi is being touted as the saviour of the future, his state has only 26 seats — given the Karnataka experience he seems to not wash at all with people outside of Gujarat.

The BJP got a drubbing in all the areas where Modi campaigned even after those constituencies were chosen carefully as safe seats for the BJP where Modi could campaign without damaging his reputation or charisma.

A friend who knows how much I fear a polarising and communal personality taking centre stage in India laughed as he saw the Karnataka results pouring in and told me he was convinced the more Modi is projected as a potential Prime Ministerial candidate the better it would be for secular forces in the country and when it came to a choice between two secular parties people would indeed opt for the one that stood a better chance at making t it to the government as they have done in the southern state.

But if that is true – and that could only mean another victory for the Congress, what of all the scams and scandals the various ministers seem to be involved in and seem to be looting the nation with impunity? Do we really want more of the same?

But then, as my friend said, the real and root cause of all the Congress’s problems seems to be the Prime Minister – of course, an honourable man but there is no better description of him today than to equate him with Dhritrashtra.

Dr Sngh’s tenure worked very well in the first term but now hos niceness seems to translate only into inaction or weakness.

I am genuinely beginning to believe that Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh did not shoot an arrow in to empty air when he spoke of dual power centres being detrimental to both the government and the party.

Sometimes one can be too nice by far and when Sonia Gandhi seemed to have laid down the law to the Prime Minister, union railways minister Pawan Bansal did have to see the writing on the wall and go home.

Why it took so long I cannot fathom because usually the Congress does not wait for court verdicts before kicking out people for allegations of corruption – starting with Abdul Rehman Antulay in the 1980s to Ashok Chavan more recently in Maharashtra with Natwar Singh, Shashi Tharoor and Suresh Kalmadi thrown in between (though that does not seem t stop anyone much and some are rehabilitated soon enough).

The saffron parties are no better given the Karnataka experience and the fact that Modi in Gujarat is petrified of having a proper and independent Lokayikta appointed in his state; I had believed that there were only two persons on government — Dr Singh and Mamata Banerjee — who were clean as a whistle.

Now Dr Singh seems to be protecting the corrupt and with the chit fund scam tainting Mamata and her Trinamool Congress here do we look for alternatives?

To paraphrase the famous s adage, governments seem to corrupt and if we do not want coalition governments, will absolute majority corrupt absolutely? Is a mish-mash then the better option?

His older brother soon cut short his dreams – their father was in the Indian Police and I remember the high drama as the younger boy was banned from joining the Intelligence wing of the government with threats from both parents to commit suicide if he did. I also recall what the father had said, “If you join the Intelligence, we may never see you again. You will be forced to live under false identities, we will have no idea about your missions, we will not even know if yur are alive or dead. Instead if you really want to serve the country, I would suggest you join the Indian army. I don’t mind if you die fighting bravely for the country, But not in a cloak and dagger fashion!’’

He was unhappy for years and just out of spite he did not join the army, instead he got himself an MBA and went off to the US, as far away from his parents as possible – in a bid to punish all those who had stopped him from chasing his dreams. His parents were saddened but always said `not as much’ as they would have been if they hadn’t known what had happened to him, “Even if he now over comes back to India again and settles down there wth a foreign wife, we at least know where he is and that he is alive and kicking. The suspense of not knowing would have really killed us.’’

Over the years I understood why his parents had stopped him from beng a spy, After what has happened to Sarabjit Singh I wonder what motivates and drives a man to undertake such missions for the country at such high risk for life and family. I am sure it is not patriotism alone for many of our spies seem to come from circumstances where such missions and the rewards might be highly worth it, I, at least, have no doubt that Sarabjit was not just a poor inebriated farmer who crossed the border under a stupour and I agree with his sister Dalbir Kaur that the government should have been more careful after they hanged Ajmal Kasab and particularly Afzal Guru, For no less than former Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil had indicated some years ago that the Indian government could not hang Afzal if they wanted to keep Sarabjit alive, “They have threatened to execute him if we hang Afzal,’’ he had said and everybody missed the underlying significance of that revelation.

Ajmal Kasab was, of course, abandoned by Pakistan right from the start despite the fact that he had crossed over to complete a mission assigned to him by his own country. Afzal was an Indian citizen but it is now clear he was working for Pakistani elements, whether state or non-state actors, and Sarabjit’s brutal murder in a Lahore jail was par for the course, as Patil had warned all those years ago.

What or rather who made the difference to Indian policy on executions is probably President p Pranab Mukherjee and that is just as well. Without going into the merits of capital punishment, I believe India has not been a soft state vis-à-vis Pakistan or else we would still have been feeding both Ajmal and Afzal on Indian tax payers’ money, That we did do that for so many years before hanging them I see as an act of fattening the goat before the slaughter – no one can accuse us of not having followed the law of the land, human rights violations or kangaroo justice.

The same clearly cannot be said of Pakistan. We may lawfully hang dreaded criminals but we do not lynch, we do not bludgeon our prisioners to death and we do not behead enemy solders on the borders of our country. Unlike hotheads who are demanding an eye fpr an eyue, which can only render the whole world blind,

I would rather be an inheritor of Buddha’s non-violence than an aulad of Chengiz Khan who came upto Pakistan but could never cross the Indus river and overrun Asoka’s territory. I also believe in Albert Einstein who said non-violence might seem to be slow and not working at all but in fact there is nothing that works more surely and wirh as deadly effect as ahimsa. Just look at how President Mujherjee as the country’s foreign minister achieved with just words after 26/11 what we might not have with a war as many others were advocating at the time. He exposed and put Pakistan ion the mat, it is today widely recognised as a rogue state and the most dangerous place on earth in terms of terrorism and rogue elements.

My civilised Pakistani friends are embarrassed all the time at having to explain away the misdemeanours of their country, I never feel let diown by mine. I am proud to be an Indian even if I will never be able to spy for my country. That is for better men and women (I am told there ar plenty of Mata Haris even in the Indian Intelligence services).

Meanwhile, I surprised myself by waking up with a prayer for Sarabjit in the morning, May his soul rest in peace. And may no one else be as abandoned as he was by his own countrymen on the end!

I had always considered the Congress to be a party that is too celeve by half and not given to foolish mistakes that other political parties might be prone to from time to time.

In 2007, colleagues were taking bets with me that there would be a midterm poll and I always said “Not before December 2008, if an early poll at all.’’

I was eventually proved right and I had thought the party will be able to again sail through to 2014 but it seems now more and more beleaguered and I wonder how they lost all the advantages they had in government.

In fact, that thought comes to mind with regard to other parties as well – the BJP has lost its toehold in Karnataka, the Triinamool Congress has lost its goodwill in West Bengal, the Samajwadi Party has lost its credibility in Uttar Pradesh, Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party is certain it will lose the voters of farmers by the dozens after his nephew Ajit Pawar’s crass remarks, even Navin Patnaik is under siege in Orissa.

Notably the only party in governance that still holds itself together is Jayalalitha’s AIADMK and that too because it compares better with M Karunanidhi’s DMK which, I believe, might never be able to get over the 2G scam imbroglio.

In the midst of all this even if Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar seem to be doing well in their respective states, I wonder how far they will get without each other’s support and Modi is a clear no-no for Nitish as is by now amply clear.

I am beginning to increasingly believe that under the circumstances it would be better by far for the UPA to declare an early poll but from my conversations with many leaders in the Congress and the NCP, I have come to the conclusion that that will not happen unless the Congress is cornered and pushed against the wall without room to manoeuvre.

But who has the courage to bell the cat? Allegations are surfacing in Karnataka from aides of B S Yedyurappa that certain central leaders, including those with big time ambitions, were paid heavy duty money over Yeddy’s term as chief minister – and when that makes the national media, the BJP will suffer another major dent in its credibility and Nitin Gadkari’s alleged scams will be nothing compared to this one.

Similarly Congressmen in Maharashtra are waiting with xl sheets and power point presentations for access to either their party president Sonia Gandhi or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to bring them up to date with the scams indulged in by both Sharad Pawar and his nephew but no one is willing to lend tgem an ear.

Everyone seems to be in such a mess so far as voters’ perceptions go and yet everyone seems to be sure they are becoming the next Prime Minister of India.

I wonder where that hope comes from and I shudder to think the mish mash we might soon have after the next Lok Sabha election which, knowing the Congress, might yet happen not before 2014.

All this sound and fury without much substance that is now currently underway in the country then reminds me of the popular Hindi idiom – na soot na kapaas aur julahon mein lattha latthi!

Under the circumstabcez I should be despondent and filled with cynicism but somehow I am having great fun watching all the television debates, the statements of various leaders of all political parties who are shouting themselves blue in the face and the certainty of each that each of them will be a winner.

I would like to place bets again but I guess it is too early for that. It is best not to feel too sorry for the country (don’t we richly deserve the governments we get!) and leave it to Mother India to sort it all out eventually.

But how ever did the country bring itself to such a sorry pass? I still remember the outrage I felt when I read the history book which said Winston Churchill had described the leaders of independent India as men of straw and Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel as two tired old men of Indian history.

Well, I can identify who the two tired old men of India are today and all the rest are just men of straw.

The only u hope seems to be the women – within their ideological or political limitations, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Uma Bharti, Sushma Swaraj, Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Sonia Gandhi, Sheila Dixit.

They all seem to be made of better stuff. As for Mamata Banerjee, the less said, the better!

I had not known what stress and trauma might be involved in seeing a little child bleeding down to her ankles and piteously crying out in pain. The case had just been reported to a NGO whose’ office I was sitting in at the time to speak to its president on the amendment to the law on rapes in view of the Mathura controversy. She had barely begun to brief me when her workers rushed in with the news. She dropped everything and carried me along. I wished she had not because I have still not gotten over that sight and the trauma of it.

Up until then I hadn’t really thought about the indignity, pain and feeling of violation that a rape victim encounters. This one was just a little girl and her mother, barely 22. Also had no idea what she was faced with. I suddenly understood the fear in my mother’s eyes and the tension in her body each time I came home late. And now that I am surrounded by little girls that age – my neighbours’ children – I am very uncomfortable to see them playing alone or in groups but unsupervised in the neighbourhood garden and cannot even bear it when their mothers send them across to the store down the road to get some last minute supplies or groceries they might have run out of.

All those years ago, when the NGO was done with reporting the rape to the police and securing action against the juvenile offender, I had had my first lesson in the social dynamics of the country. The victim and the perpetrator had belonged to the same community and both were children besides. “So there can be no other angle to this crime,’’ the police officer said. The rapist being a juvenile added to the problems of registering an FIR but the NGOs had their way though it needed the women workers to do some real rough – and tough – talking with the cops to get them to sit up and take notice –they had been more inclined to persuade the 22 year old mother to hush up the crime for a consideration.

Nearly 20 years later there is a sense of déjà vu as I see reports filtering in about how the Delhi police tried to bribe the father of another five year old girl who was similarly violated in the state capital and I wonder if nothing has changed in three decades or if it ever will, A five year old child is not even aware of her sexuality and I was horrified to see one policeman suggest that she might have invited the rape. He was almost slapped by the NGO workers, only a sensitive police commissioner who ordered the FIR registered had been able to save the day.

I moved away from that kind of reporting soon enough but in the meantime I learnt some lessons from the NGO which I realise are true even today. Its president had told me we must educate both men and women that the honour of girls and women “is not about their underwear’’. Their honour should be measured by the same yardstick as we do men – are they honest, incorruptible, with good values and gentle demeanours. “So no man must be allowed to believe that he has shamed a woman just because he has succeeded in violating her body. Women should be weaned away from the belief that their lives are not worth living after such an unfortunate incident.’’

At the end of the day, rape is not even about sexual gratification – it is all about a twisted sense of power which a weasel satisfies by raping a child and a fox by picking on a lower caste woman in the villages. That is why, perhaps, some miscreants in West Bengal threatened the girls of Presidency College in Calcutta with rape. That is also why and how one of my colleagues, two decades ago, was threatened with rape by a woman on whose fraudulent activities in a school she had been exposing. In the days before mobile phones this woman locked this colleague up in a room in the school and said, “ Tell me who has been talking to you or lese I will ask my brother to rape you!’’ Yuk!

This woman was among the sophisticated elite of Bombay and it took her friends a six hour search to locate the missing colleague. Thankfully she returned safe and sound for the brother could not bring himself to fall in line with his sister. So I wonder if it is even about just men alone.

It is a pathetic mindset that has to be fought against and the fight cannot succeed unless that change happens – no amount to laws will prevent rapes and if anyone thinks this has to do with either the BJP or Congress or even the Trinamool Congress-ruled states, they are either sick or need to be sent back to primary school to be trained in social ethics all over again.

Meanwhile I pray for the little girl in Delhi and all the little girls in this world and hope there will be a time when they no longer have to have their childhood snatched away from them so abruptly – and that pain and bewilderment that I saw in the five year old child’s eyes so many years ago does not have to be reflected in any other little girl’s eyes ever again.

I know that it is too much to hope for. But I hope, nevertheless.