It's a famous victory, the unprecedented third win in a row for Labour. In spite of themselves, Britons voted Blair back to power. There are hardly any takers for that first statement while nearly all sections of the British media converge on the latter one.The Times analysed it as ‘‘Nobody’s triumph’’. The Daily Telegraph wrote that ‘‘Tony Blair will be retiring sooner than he had hoped’’. The Financial Times called it his ‘‘Pyrrhic victory’’. But it was Time that came up with the most eloquent freeze frame. Tony Blair, it said, returns to 10, Downing Street much like the errant spouse returning home for the sake of the children. The re-election of a prime minister who, most opinion polls say, has lost the trust of a substantial section of his people, even as they also show that not one of his rivals has managed to earn it, has touched off a peculiar reaction. Even traditional Labour supporters are diving under the Blair mandate and they come up flashing some anxiety or the other.Some seize the moment to revive simmering worries about the legitimacy of a first-past-the-post system. For the Guardian, the mix of a ‘‘61 per cent turnout. the growth of a multi-party politics and the unfairness of the first-past-the-post system combine to mean that no government since 1929 has been elected by as few voters.’’ How can 36 per cent of the vote give one party total power — asked columnist Jonathan Freedland in the same paper.Many, including Freedland, articulate another concern: Blair’s slashed majority could cut short not just the Blair era, but also shrivel the New Labour project in a situation in which the long-ignored backbench Labour rebels may suddenly have the ‘‘whiphand’’. Could it be that for Labour, the most substantive promise that Blair can deliver on is his successor? Having elected Tony Blair, many openly wait for Gordon Brown. The more resigned among them hope for a new Tony Blair, less ‘‘presidential’’, more willing to ‘‘reason, cajole and compromise’’.Basically, it’s Blair. It’s also Iraq. Electoral victory has not settled the argument at all.Talking democracyWill it still be called a democracy, if the Islamists win? In the democracy debate in the Middle East, this question returns to haunt the western media.Last week the Economist counted out the gains notched by ‘‘Islamism’’ at the hustings: Islamist candidates won ‘‘sweeping victories’’ in Saudi Arabia’s local elections; in Iraq, religious parties are the strongest; in the proposed Palestinian vote, Hamas and Islamic Jihad may trump the secular parties; the Muslim Brotherhood continues to be the most resilient opposition group in Egypt. The magazine urged a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon. It warned against lumping all Islamists in the same box. Many have reinvented themselves as technocrats. Many are committed to constitutional limits on power and other ‘‘western’’ things. Meanwhile in the Middle East, the turbulence on the ground is perceptibly changing the subject in the region’s media. In Beirut’s The Daily Star, for one, a series of recent editorials has exhorted the Lebanese people to keep alive the popular participation kindled by the mid-March protests which eventually forced Syrian withdrawal from their country. Because, in a post-Syrian political order, a ‘‘new social and sectarian contract’’ is to be renegotiated in independent and democratic ways. But what if the new electoral laws fail the people? What if they themselves become a hindrance to true representativeness in polls at the end of this month? In that case, the paper recommends that the young organise a ‘‘white ballot campaign’’. They must mobilise others to cast blank ballots and force a count of all the unmarked ballots. ‘‘A sizeable number of blank ballots would diminish the legitimacy of those who failed to answer the public call for change.’’Back to school?The Washington Post visited Dataan in Rajasthan to track the Indian government’s ‘‘innovative’ free lunch programme. Dataan school records showcase a 23 per cent increase in girl’s enrollment and attendance since the programme began three years ago in a state where the official drop out figure for girls is 59 per cent before finishing fifth grade. The New York Times framed the incompleteness of the success story. It went to Badarpur near Delhi and found that while free lunch may have brought children back to the classroom, the classroom is such an impoverished place. Teachers are mostly absent, benches and tables are missing. Children line up for the food holding out their notebooks. And, ‘‘The gruel is slopped on to their learning from the day.’’P.S.: IN a prime-time news conference, George W. Bush said: ‘‘If you choose not to worship, you’re equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship.’’Last week, Washington Post columnist George F. Will picked up that statement. He wrote: ‘‘The state of America’s political discourse is such that the president has felt it necessary to declare that unbelievers can be good Americans.’’
