Books: Hold Your Guns

THE TALIBAN: RELIGION AND THE NEW ORDER IN AFGHANISTAN
BY PETER MARSDEN
ZEN BOOKS
PAGE: 162 PRICE: (Pak) Rs 395

It has been easy for the world to keep the Taliban off the global agenda. Its treatment of women, its medieval ways made it legitimate to say it was beyond the pale. But this Pushtun movement, however xenophobic and crude its version of Islam, is clearly the new ruler of Afghanistan. The recent blustering with Iran underlines how impossible it will be to ignore.

This slim volume is among the first to try and hold the Taliban up to the light and consider how the world should handle it. Peter Marsden mildly suggests engagement. He argues the Taliban was a societal response to the mujahideen's failure to form even a semblance of a government after the Soviet withdrawal. The Talibs earned popular support by simply effacing banditry and corruption. Even their brand of Islam struck a chord: Afghans associate urban and western culture with their years of trauma.

Marsden makes half-hearted attempts to draw parallels with other fundamentalist groups like the Wahhabis. But the Talibs lack intellectual content and, the author believes, have no interests beyond Afghanistan. For him they are an extreme but traditional Afghan reaction to forcible modernisation.

The book has flashes of insight, as when it reveals that the Taliban differs from most Islamic groups in lacking a political ideology. It has filled this gap by granting great authority to the ulema. But there is little on the Taliban's decision-making structure. The analysis of local influences, like Pakistan, is shallow.

Reflecting Marsden's own years in Afghanistan with an NGO, he dwells overly long on Kandahar's interactions with aid agencies, including a pointless catalogue of how Taliban practices violate the UN human-rights convention. However, the NGO experience reveals the Taliban to be neither monolithic nor wholly unreasonable -- the underlying message of this book.

AUTHORSPEAK: SISIR DAS
Multiple Fantasy
Sex, bureaucracy and other naughty ideas

If Sisir Das hadn't qualified for the IAS in 1970, he could have contemplated a career as a stand-up comic. As a storyteller, this Bangalore-based civil servant can be excruciatingly funny. The brunt of his sarcasm is borne by the labyrinthine system he is part of, with its lumbering babudom, clueless ministers and general cacophony. Perhaps that's why Das occasionally has to escape into the world of words. This month comes his first work of fiction, The Last Lambada (Sterling), a novel set in his native Orissa.

Contrary to any impression the title may give, the book has nothing to do with Brazilian dances. Rather, Lambada refers to a clan founded by a feudal lord of prodigious promiscuity. As Das writes, "The reason why the new ruler ranked so high in their wives' affections was because a certain part of his anatomy was of a commendable size -- "long and big" as the women would gleefully say. So the spiteful husbands gave him the nickname "Lambada", a combination of words in Oriya which has the same connotation." The story stretches through the centuries and is told with a passion which is as wicked as it is wry.

It is also as different as can be from Das' previous book: Civil Service Reform and Structural Adjustment. Soon Das will swing right back to the realms of non-fiction with a study of corruption. Doubtless his nifty, even impish, streak will keep away profound banalities. Rather, Das will talk of the "corruption threshold": the remuneration below which the civil servant has to resort to bribes or embezzlement if only to match inflation. He will argue that a theoretical but most undesirable alternative is to reduce the salary bill to a minimum, pay public servants a pittance and in effect sanction a "kleptocracy". Of course, this will also ensure that the Government never attracts the best talent. If you think Das is being provocative, that's precisely his idea.

Those who are horrified by Das' choice of subjects -- sex and dishonesty -- will be glad to know that his next novel has a religious theme and is centred around the Jagannath temple in Puri. Actually, religion and Das go back a long way. Some years ago he spent time at a university in the US researching liberation theology, the cocktail of Catholic faith and Marxist mobilisation in Latin America. However, his immediate priority, like that of the Department of Space where he works, is an upcoming satellite launch. This man wears so many hats, he may as well start a shop.

-- Ashok Malik