The countdown has begun in India. As political pundits peer into their tea leaves before the results of another marathon election, the question on everybody’s lips is: will the Gandhi magic work again?

Exit polls show the coalition led by Sonia Gandhi will fall short of an outright majority, but her Congress party has a slight edge over its rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
But then exit polls in India have been way off the mark in the past. Like the last election.

In the 2004 election, the Congress scored a shock victory over the BJP, which many said was a result of Sonia Gandhi’s tireless campaigning and, more importantly, the magic of the Gandhi name. Nobody, just about nobody, had expected the BJP to lose? Or the Congress to win. Not even the Congress itself.

But will Sonia Gandhi do it again this time? Will the Gandhi name work like a charm again? Nobody is willing to hazard a guess this time. Indian voters are known to throw up enormous surprises.

One of the biggest upsets in the history of post-colonial India was Indira Gandhi’s massive defeat in the 1977 election. Mrs Gandhi was considered so invincible that a slogan coined by one of her partymen — Indira is India, India is Indira — had become a household buzzword. She was almost like a Mother Goddess at the time.

And so not even the sharpest of political observers could have predicted 1977. Not even Mrs Gandhi herself.

Defying all expectations, angry Indian voters threw out Mrs Gandhi after she imposed a state of emergency when she clamped down on dissent and launched a sterilisation programme as a solution to the country’s population problem. It was the first time the Congress had tasted defeat in national elections since it began ruling the country after India’s independence from Britain in 1947.

But it wasn’t the last. Indira’s son, Rajiv, who came to power on a massive sympathy wave after her assassination in 1984, didn’t lead the Congress to a majority win in 1989. The Gandhi magic, it seems, had lost its sheen.

Five years ago, when India went to the polls everybody had written off the Congress as a spent force. Newspaper headlines screamed the party was over.

But Sonia Gandhi took the party and the campaign into her hands. Rajiv Gandhi’s widow travelled across the country relentlessly, reaching out to voters in her heavily-accented but fluent Hindi, peppering her speeches with emotional references to her family, especially her husband who was killed by a suicide bomber in 1991.

Her children, Rahul and Priyanka, also joined the fray, campaigning for their mother in Uttar Pradesh where they always got rapturous receptions.

And it paid off.

The party won a stunning victory and for a brief moment, it even seemed like a Gandhi would get the prime minister’s job again. Sonia Gandhi eventually turned down the prime minister’s post, but the country’s first family has remained firmly in the political spotlight since.

As the elections rolled around this time, Sonia and her son, Rahul, hit the campaign trail again with emotional references to the sacrifices made by the Nehru-Gandhi family, particularly Indira and Rajiv, who were both assassinated.

And again, both drew enormous crowds as they campaigned in the heat and dust of various parts of the country, with people walking or cycling for kilometres just to see them.

But will the Gandhi name work again this time? Or will India’s voters look beyond dynastic politics at other more basic issues such as water, electricity, food prices and housing?

If India’s faceless bookmakers are any guide, the ruling Congress party will probably scrape through the current election with Manmohan Singh the firm favourite to retain the prime ministership.

But then again…

“Delighted and relieved,” is what the great-grandson of India’s iconic freedom hero Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi said once news came in that a collection of Gandhi memorabilia sold to tycoon Vijay Mallya will come home.

Over the last two weeks, the auction of Gandhi’s personal belongings has created uproar in India, with indignant citizens demanding to know why things came to such a pass.

Indians, who view the items as part of their national heritage, have said government intervention at a much earlier stage would have perhaps prevented the last minute dramatic build-up over the bidding.

Seller James Otis’ last minute change of heart to withdraw the items — Gandhi’s trademark wire-rimmed glasses, leather sandals, a pocket watch and a metal bowl and plate — failed and the auction went ahead as scheduled.

The one thing the controversial auction brought to light is the need for a clear mandate to bring home items of national heritage, spread out all over the world, in possession of collectors or individuals, before it escalates into a full-scale commercial ball game.

The interest generated over merely five of Gandhi’s items of daily use drove its price over the last two weeks to a staggering $1.8 million from the reserve price of $20,000 to $30,000.

Here’s the thing.

A man, popularly called the “Mahatma”, who himself shunned material possessions and believed in simple living, has given away in his lifetime many personal items to people he thought upheld his principles.

It may prove to be a monumental task to track all individuals or organizations in possession of Gandhi memorabilia and bring them back to the country to display in a museum. But it must be done if the government wishes to prevent them from appearing time and time again at auction houses.

“There is really no record… there are unthinkable numbers of people who have been in contact with the Father of the Nation over the long span of 78 years.

It is almost an impossible task to have an inventory,” minister for tourism and culture Ambika Soni said at a press conference hours after the auction.

She said the government has put in place a small group constituting leading Gandhians and instructed its missions across the world to keep an eye open for anyone coming forward with items connected with Gandhi.

Gandhi’s great-grandson Tushar Gandhi said all historical heritage must be protected.

“It’s not just about Bapu’s (as Mahatma Gandhi was affectionately called) personal items, but I think it’s time that the government formulated a comprehensive law to protect our national heritage.”

The Director of the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi said the auction might have set a dangerous precedent.

“Gandhiji wrote thousands of letters and gifted (some of his belongings) to people. Once you open up this kind of buying and selling, then you can never know in future if something is original or fake or a replica,” said Varsha Das, who is part of a committee set up by the culture ministry for looking at items that come up for sale and auction.

Is this then a wake-up call for India to protect its national heritage and prevent its commercialization?

Violence in Kashmir is down to its lowest level since the separatist revolt began in 1989, but peace remains a distant prospect in one of the world's most beautiful regions.

The Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Studies which tracks militant violence across South Asia says 541 people were killed in militant-linked violence in 2008, continuing the declining trend from the previous year when fatalities had fallen to 777. That was well below the 1,000 mark  used to define a high-intensity conflict and way lower than the 2001 peak of 4,507 deaths in a single year.

Just for purposes of comparison on a broad level, a separate analysis by the Institute shows that the number of people killed in militant-related violence in Pakistan hit 6,715 in 2008 from a 2003 figure of 189, reflecting a dramatic deterioration in the security situation.

So, as Pakistan fights the militants in its most serious internal challenge yet, some of whom it fostered to fight Indian forces in Kashmir, is peace at hand in the Himalayan region ?

Not by a long shot , going by the steady stream of street protests that seem to go off every now and then. Last year's demonstrations, the biggest since the revolt began, over a government decision to hand over land near a Hindu shrine deep in Kashmir to a trust now seem to have become a watershed, giving new life to a movement that was despairing.

And because it is a street campaign, a sort of a non-violent struggle, it could be potentially more challenging to the Indian state than the guns and grenades of the militants, say Kashmiri leaders.

"India is not scared of any guns here in Kashmir - it has a thousand times more guns," Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a leader of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, told the Wall Street Journal in this report in December.

"What it is scared of is people coming out in the streets, people seeing the power of nonviolent struggle."

Is this really a civil disobedience movement, a leaf from Mahatma Gandhi's book thrown in the face of those who rule India in his name?

{Reuters pictures of Gulmarg in Kashmir and a protest in Srinagar}

Taking a cue from a popular 2006 Bollywood film, where the hero follows the path of non-violence to protest against injustice,  hundreds of travel agents in India sent sweets to airline offices on Monday to protest against a cut in their commission.

Come October, and most airlines in India will stop paying commissions to travel agents, citing rising operational costs.

This will effectively seal the fate of hundreds of agents who will have to close shop for good.

In India, travel agents get a five percent commission on basic fare from airlines and most of them do not charge passengers any extra money.

On Monday, about 1000 agents of the Travel Agents Federation of India (TAFI) dispatched boxes of sweets and flowers to offices of various airlines across the country.

An airline official admitted he was initially clueless to receive so many sweets for taking such a tough decision.

“We decided to follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi, as depicted in a Hindi film and tell the airlines that this is how we will protest everyday,” Anil Punjabi, chairman of TAFI says.

The film Punjabi is taking about is “Lage Raho Munnabhai” or “Carry on Munnabhai” which stars popular actor Sanjay Dutt.  He follows Gandhian values and the path of non-violence as preached by Mahatma Gandhi to protest when some aged people are thrown out of an old-age home.

The film won rave reviews and won four national awards, and people began emulating the Gandhian way briefly.

Now that it is back, I wonder whether this could be the new way of resolving corporate wars and disputes ?

Is the sun setting on the Congress-led UPA government? India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is certainly riding high after victory in the southern state of Karnataka at the weekend , giving it a first chance to run a government in the south.And it’s the latest in a long losing streak for Congress in state elections. The question is whether the ruling party can turn things around.

The economy certainly isn’t helping. Rising inflation seems to have already wiped out whatever electoral benefits the farmers’ debt waiver might have brought. A slowdown in growth, already apparent in industrial production statistics, won’t help either.

So the first problem for the government is to bring down inflation in time for next year’s national polls.

For now, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is sounding optimistic, and a favourable monsoon would certainly help. But there is little relief on the horizon from global oil prices, and the government may soon have to bite the bullet and raise domestic fuel prices again.

Reining in inflation will be tough, but not impossible over the next year.

On the political front, all the momentum is with the BJP.

At times, Congress looks disorganised and rudderless. In several elections, Congress seems to have paid the price of failing to nominate a candidate for the chief minister’s job, and relying too much on the pull of the Gandhi family.

At the very top, many analysts are asking if the prime minister has provided the kind of strong leadership his country needs.

But a week is famously a long time in politics, let alone a year. State election defeats don’t bring down governments. It is how the parties react to these mid-term verdicts that can make a real difference.

And it is here that Congress has its chance. The BJP-ruled states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh go to the polls this year, and if voters turf out the incumbents in all three, the BJP could indeed lose some of its shine.

Let’s not forget that only a year ago the BJP was beset by infighting and divided over what its electoral USP was — development or Hindutva. The ageing L.K. Advani does not always strike the right chord with voters across the country, and it is far from clear Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi will emerge as a politician who can garner national support.

I have yet to see a national opinion poll which predicts a clear win for the BJP and its allies. The UPA is losing ground, but the BJP still has a lot of work to do to regain the top spot.