My friends always remind me that I got Bush and US completely wrong. I had long maintained, until the day Bush attacked Iraq, that it made a lot of sense for the US to achieve its goals with Iraq without any military intervention. If the US were not to attack Iraq, there would be a credible threat hanging over Saddam, and it was very probable that the US objectives would have been achieved. Alas, that did not happen. I was quite wrong. Bush went to war and is now unsuccessfully trying to pick himself, and the Republicans, from self-created debris.

Why did Bush do such an ex-post (and some would argue ex-ante) stupid thing? Job for political scientists and psychiatrists, but I would say that one factor was most responsible - the arrogance of power. And that is the only explanation possible from CPIM's foray into Nandigram. How does it happen that a party which professes to have humanitarian pro-poor objectives ends up acting the same as those not openly flaunting such sentiments? Let us examine what the CPIM could possibly gain by sending 5000 police and allegedly CPI cadre in police uniform and slippers into an unarmed village (Sonachura) with a population of around 6000 (Census 2001). And killing somewhere between 15 and 100 innocent villagers. The people of this village had refused to sell the land to the government because they knew they would not get a fair price. Though state governments of all hues are claiming that the unfortunate tragedy at Nandigram happened because the farmers are obsessed with staying at the same place as their great great forefathers, the reality is most likely that the farmers know that the state will buy the land from them at Rs. X and sell it to their hand-picked SEZ developer at 3 to 5 times X. The state claims eminent domain - the villagers respond with sticks and stones and their finger.

Knowing all this (nobody should accuse politicians of being dumb) why did the CPIM send their goons along with the police to attack unarmed villagers? Both ex-ante and ex- post, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya (BB), had very little to gain from such an ill-advised police mission. Most likely reason, if we ever find out, is that he was set up by the "true" Marxists within his party, Communists who (correctly) believe that economic development will be the death of Marxism. And BB's endeavor to actually provide development would endanger the power of the CPIM. Hence, the invasion of Nandigram - teach the peasants a lesson they won't forget (how dare you stand up to the master, you wretched peasant) and blacken BB. Much the same reason as Bush's invasion of Iraq - the arrogance of power. The profound belief that you can do no wrong; how could you, when since Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot, you had always championed the cause of the downtrodden, the poor, the unarmed?

The cricket world has been shocked by Pakistan cricket coach Bill Woolmer's very cold- blooded murder. How could such a murder take place against a prominent person and at a time when a billion plus eyes were watching? It is like murdering someone in broad daylight and in front of hundreds of witnesses. It is like Jessica Lal's murder. And we know that Ms. Lal's murderers were free to roam around - at first. The match-fixing mafia, with alleged links to cricket officials around the world, also felt, like Bush and the CPIM, that they could never get caught. Like the other two, they also had history on their side. Hansie Cronje was likely murdered via a plane crash, and (almost) everybody has been made to believe that it was an accident. So how could Woolmer's murder backfire, how could anything backfire? Hard to foretell the future, but if history is a guide, this blatant display of power and arrogance will only end one way - thankfully, in ruin for the arrogant murderers.

Proof that justice may be delayed but does arrive was provided yesterday by the Supreme Court in its judgment which rejected the Congress party initiative to bring reservations in college admissions to the so-called Otherwise Backward Castes (OBC). In classic can do no wrong arrogance of power style, the party, via its Education Minister, Mr. Arjun Singh, initiated another program of destroying a society in order to save it (like America in Iraq or CPIM in Nandigram?). With as much arrogant force as it could muster, the party railroaded its social justice program (pogrom?) - reservations for 52 percent of the entire population in addition to the 24 % SC/STs that already had reservations in universities, jobs, life etc. All other political parties (led predictably by the Nandigram CPIM) joined in this crass political expedition.

None of the political parties, least of all Arjun Singh's Congress, bothered to examine for a moment whether the 52 % figure for OBC's, ostensibly based on a 70 year old census, was realistic. If the estimate was in grave error, no problem; we will pass a constitutional amendment stating it was so. Only this time, the Congress met with a Supreme Court with some spine (not unlike their judicial brothers across the border in Pakistan). The Court has plaintively asked: what is the empirical basis for the 52 % figure for the OBC's? (They did not add, but could have, that they understood the "theoretical" basis!) Provide an explanation and the Court can proceed. Last heard, those consumed with power arrogance, and doomed ultimately to fail, were busy plotting to disband the judiciary or at least passing an amendment making the Court unconstitutional. And mandating that 52 % of the population is OBC for all time to come.