In Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood and Al Nour Party were endorsed overwhelmingly by people as they were recognized as honest and incorruptible. Is there a chance in India for Welfare Party of India to get such an endorsement of honesty and incorruptibility that is the most wanted USP of any political group at this juncture when entire political class is being rejected as rotten and fit for ousting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-watching-elephants-fly.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Op-Ed Columnist

Op-Ed Columnist

Watching Elephants Fly

Thomas Fuchs

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: January 7, 2012

Cairo

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

SOMEDAY I’d love to create a journalism course based on covering the uprising in Egypt, now approaching its first anniversary. Lesson No. 1 would be the following: Whenever you see elephants flying, shut up and take notes. The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying. No one predicted it, and no one had seen this before. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.

If you do, the first thing you’ll write is that the Islamist parties — the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour Party — just crushed the secular liberals, who actually sparked the rebellion here, in the free Egyptian parliamentary elections, winning some 65 percent of the seats. To not be worried about the theocratic, antipluralistic, anti-women’s-rights, xenophobic strands in these Islamist parties is to be recklessly naïve. But to assume that the Islamists will not be impacted, or moderated, by the responsibilities of power, by the contending new power centers here and by the priority of the public for jobs and clean government is to miss the dynamism of Egyptian politics today.

Come with me to Cairo’s dirt-poor Shubra el-Khema neighborhood and the dilapidated Omar Abdel Aziz School, where I watched the last round of voting on Wednesday at a women-only voting center. We were guided by Amr Hassan, a 22-year-old commerce student from the ’hood — a secular youth, who fought to topple the Hosni Mubarak regime in Tahrir Square last year.

Here is what was so striking: virtually all the women we interviewed after the voting — all of whom were veiled, some with only slits for their eyes — said that they had voted for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists. But almost none said they had voted that way for religious reasons.

Many said they voted for Islamists because they were neighbors, people they knew, while secular liberal candidates had never once visited. Some illiterate elderly women confided that they could not read the ballot and just voted where their kids told them to. But practically all of them said they had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist candidates because they expected them to deliver better, more honest government — not more mosques or liquor bans.

Here are some quotes from Egyptian women on why they voted Islamist: “I love the Muslim Brotherhood; they are the only honest ones. ... I want good education and clean air to breathe. ... We need proper medical care. ... I want my kids to be properly educated. 

They can’t find any jobs. ... The Muslim Brotherhood is not just an Islamist party. It is going to help solve all the problems of the country. ... We have to get the youth working and to raise salaries. Education here is only getting worse. ... My biggest fear is lack of security. We sit in our homes — afraid. You are afraid your son won’t be able to go back and forth to school without being kidnapped.”

Meanwhile, when I asked our young guide Hassan, the revolutionary, whom he had voted for, he said that he wrote on his ballot “Down with the SCAF” — the acronym for the Egyptian military council now running the country. He spat out his disgust with the fact that while secular youth like him toppled Mubarak, the Islamist parties were winning the elections and the army generals — who abandoned Mubarak to save themselves — were still in power!

And there you have Egypt today — a four-way power struggle between the army, the rising Islamist parties, the smaller liberal parties and the secular youth of Tahrir Square. All of them will have a say in how this story plays out. “We want to see a new Egyptian government with new thoughts,” said Hassan. “I am ready to go back into Tahrir Square if I have to.”

Indeed, everyone feels more empowered now. The army has its guns and now runs the country; both the Islamists and the liberals have won electoral mandates; and the secular youth from Tahrir feel empowered by the street — by their now proven ability to mobilize and to fight whenever they see things going awry. Even the silent majority here, called “The Party of the Couch,” feels more empowered, having just voted in high numbers in an election where the votes actually got counted.

My favorite election story was told to me by an international observer, who asked not to be identified. His voting station had just closed and as the polling workers were loading up the box filled with votes onto a bus to be taken to a central counting station, an Egyptian woman, who had just voted, ran over to them and shouted: “Please, never leave that box alone. This is our future. Go and make sure they put it in the right place.”

That box and all the hopes stuffed into it by so many average Egyptians is surely necessary for a new beginning here. But it is not sufficient. The country needs a leader — there is still a huge vacuum at the top — who can take all those votes, all those hopes, and meld them into a strategy to create the jobs, schooling, justice and security that all Egyptians clearly crave. If that happens, those ballot boxes really will have delivered a different future for Egypt. Until then, I am just taking notes.

Will Ikhwan-al-muslimeen have a day in the Egyptian sun ? By Kaleem Kawaja

Will Ikhwan-al-muslimeen have a day in the Egyptian sun ?

 

By Kaleem Kawaja

 

 

After 3 decades of the autocratic rule and domination of the Egyptian state by one family and their wealthy cronies, finally the day of reckoning has arrived.  For three decades this clique headed by Hosni Mubarak, supported by the American military industrial complex and the US oil lobby, allowed neither political freedom nor economic emancipation, nor religious expression to the ordinary people of Egypt.  In the face of the brutal onslaught of the Israelis on the impoverished Palestinians, this regime prevented the free expressions of solidarity by the Egyptians.

 

But as the saying goes, every dog has his day.  So now the powerless and helpless ordinary people of Egypt are bringing down this arrogant oligarchy that lived on the support of the foreigners. Noting the crowds in Tahrir square in Cairo for about 12 days now it was impossible to ignore the large masses of Muslim Egyptians offering two Juma congregational prayers on two successive Fridays.  What was unmistakable was the fact that the ordinary Egyptian Muslims are relgious people who find offering congregational prayers in the full view of the western media an important part of their daily lives.  Indeed at a time of crisis and facing many dangers and divisions they felt that the congregational prayer to Allah can keep them united and relieve their national afflictions and emergency.  The message is that the view that Islam can help them in their hour of crisis is not something to be shy about.

 

Surely that must have felt good to the many Egyptians who have good feelings towards the eighty year old Ikhwan-al-Muslimeen, who anchor the life of the Egyptian nation around the core valus of Islam.  Over the last eight decades Ikhwan has seen many ups and downs and has made many mistakes.   When they tried to make Ikhwan militant, that ran against the core values of Egyptians.  Ikhwan faced many hardships from even the venerable Gamal Nasir, the popular hero of Egypt, who has been the only uncorruptible head of the Egyptian state in the last hundred years. Mubarak was just a oligarch who usurped power and kept it with foreign help.

 

At this time while the miseries of the Egyptian people should be the focus for a change in regime in Cairo, in America the media is full of only one concern: will the new regime be friendly towards not only America but also Israel.  Even in this time of Egypt's national peril the American politicians are thinking mostly of the interests of theocratic and brutal Israel.  And they wonder why America is not popular in the Muslim world?  Indeed the manner of discussion in the Ametrican media gives one the impression as if they are talking about one of the states in US itself.  Look at the press statements of the US President and Secretary of State.

 

An interesting element that I observed in the US media is that several American commentators have said that Ikhwan-al-Muslimeen is not an extremist Muslim organization and they do not pose a danger to a secular polity in Egypt.  Apparently some Americans have learned a lesson from the sad experience in Algeria where annuling an election in which the Muslim group had won, caused much instability and violence.  Yet Ikhwan faces many dangers, most from the Israelis and Americans and their henchmen in Egypt who may try to pursuade the Egyptian army to keep Ikhwan out.  Even though of all parties Ikhwan suffered the most for decades at the hands of the Mubarak regime.

 

Let us hope that at this time as several national political groups come together to change the nature of the despotic regime, Ikhwan will project a cooperative and constructive face, allaying the fears of those who fear a militant Islamic face from them.  Like the Istiqlal party in Turkey they have an opportunity to gradually return Egypt to its long peaceful Islamic heritage.  Let us hope that they will not make the mistake that Taliban did in Afhganistan when they mindlessly put militant and sectarian postures as policies of the state, that scared the world and that also did damage to the core peaceful and egalitarian image of Islam as a political force.