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One night in early July 2006, I took down from a shelf in my study V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers, searching for the account of an interview Naipaul had conducted in Iran with Ayatollah Khalkhalli, Khomeini’s hanging judge. The ayatollah had been rude and abrupt with Naipaul, and he had demanded, with Naipaul seated in front of him, that the questions for him be written down first. This is how Naipaul reports on what followed: “I could think of nothing extraordinary; I decided to be direct. On a sheet of hotel paper, which I had brought with me, I wrote: Where were you born? What made you decide to take up religious studies? What did your father do? Where did you study? Where did you first preach? How did you become an ayatollah? What was your happiest day?”

We had to use the prison phone to talk. I was allowed to speak only in English. (Later, Lakhani’s wife, Kusum, would tell me that this rule meant that she could no longer talk to her husband in their native tongue, Gujarati. “In a way, I have lost a language,” she said.)

The simplicity of those questions, their plain curiosity, and the surprise at the end, appealed to me. And that night in July, hours before my trip to Springfield, Missouri, where Lakhani is an inmate in a federal detention facility, I copied out Naipaul’s passage in my notebook. When I met Lakhani, I followed the same order: Where were you born? What was your first job? When did you come to the West? How did you meet the FBI informant? What was your happiest day? Like the ayatollah in Naipaul’s book, Lakhani didn’t answer each of my questions directly, often speaking only in generalities that were difficult to pin down; and for long bursts he fulminated angrily against his lawyer (whom he called a “first-class idiot”) and against the informant (whose name he didn’t mention once, often only identifying him by his religion, calling him “Mr. Musalman”); but the presence of those questions on the page in front of me had imposed a structure on our conversation.

During the meeting, Lakhani and I sat divided by a bulletproof glass window, and we had to use the prison phone to talk. I was allowed to speak only in English. (Later, Lakhani’s wife, Kusum, would tell me that this rule meant that she could no longer talk to her husband in their native tongue, Gujarati. “In a way, I have lost a language,” she said. In their conversations on the phone, she felt odd saying to him what she had so far said in English only to strangers, “It is raining very heavily” or “It is very hot today.”) Lakhani looked much thinner than he had in the photos taken at the time of his arrest; his hair had turned completely white and lay in silvery curls at the top of his forehead. He told me that he had been born in 1935, in Porbander, the coastal town in Gujarat that was also the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. He lived in a joint family and remembered that at seven each morning the priest arrived to teach the children how to read from the Gita. His father was an engineer for the Bombay Housing Board, and had been responsible, Lakhani said, for subsidized housing for the poor in Bombay.

I asked, “What games did you play? Were there cricketers that you liked?”

Lakhani smiled and rattled off the names of the legends of the nineteen forties and fifties: “Vijay Merchant, Vijay Manjrekar, Lala Amarnath. Believe me, you ask me about…” He stopped and, for the first time in our conversation, began to cry.

His father died when Lakhani was fifteen and he went to study at the Government Law College in Bombay. His ambition was to be the attorney general. He said that he was a good student, adding, “I’ve never been number one, I’ve never been number three.” In Bombay, he enjoyed the good life, watching Hollywood films at the Metro and New Empire theaters, films like Guys and Dolls, with Marlon Brando in it, and the hugely popular war film The Bridge on the River Kwai. No one in Lakhani’s family had ever gone abroad, and he was the first one to leave for London. He enrolled in economics at the London School of Economics, but he was homesick and his studies didn’t go anywhere. All around him, young Indian men were dating white women, but he waited to marry a Gujarati girl.

A family friend then set him up in a Jewish clothing company called Carnegie Models; this was his first job. He said, “I am basically an intelligent man. I am a good salesman. I am a good PR man.” When he said this, Lakhani looked at the prison official standing behind me, who was there to observe our meeting. The official was silent and unresponsive, but Lakhani asked him in a coaxing, pleading way, “Isn’t that true?” Lakhani recalled that he sold seventy-five-shilling woolen dresses for women, “round neck, three-fourth sleeve, good waist,” to a buyer in Sweden. He sold around seven thousand pieces of this single dress. After seven or eight years, he started his own company, Ric-Rac. He became boastful again. He said things that were untrue. He said, “I brought Indian cheesecloth to England. I was the king. I was the first Indian to own a Rolls Royce. During the nineteen seventies, I was the richest man in London.”

Lakhani began to beg him, calling him “Brother” and then “Boss,” urging him to let me stay a few minutes longer.

In the nineteen eighties, however, things took a downturn. An order worth one million pounds was canceled, and Lakhani’s business sank under “a mountain of debts.” He began selling rice and spices to Arab countries. And fate once again turned a corner and he was rich again, taking holidays with his family in the south of France. Each year, he said, “From August 15th to August end, I had a suite reserved for me in the Majestic Hotel in Cannes.” There was a recession in Dubai in the late-nineteen eighties, but then the Russian market opened up and the same thing happened in Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. For four years, Lakhani made “a lot of money.” Then, the Indian economy was liberalized and Lakhani invested in it. He bought a small airline company and called it Up Airways. But that business went down quickly. And that’s when he made the wrong contacts. Lakhani said that Delhi was like Washington, D.C., full of lobbyists, and he had been led to the FBI informant whom he now called “a third-class bastard.” I had reached the end of my list of questions. I asked Lakhani, “What was your happiest day?”

Did he misunderstand my question? Because he smiled for a while. Then he said, “Will you be happy if you’re here?”

I said, “That is not what I meant. Were you not happy before?” He said, “I’m happy here also. This body is not mine. This is not Lakhani. They will not put me in a cemetery.”

He stopped and I thought he was going to cry. He wiped his eyes and smiled again. He said, “I have never been unhappy in my life.”

He began to repeat that had he not met the FBI informant, this wouldn’t have happened to him. He had made a mistake. My time was up and I said that I would come back the next day. Lakhani repeated to me that I was to call his wife, who was visiting their son in New York City, and remind her to call him between four and five that evening. He was allowed one weekly call and if she didn’t pick up the phone and the answering machine came on he would have to wait another week to talk to her. I began to gather my papers and Lakhani began to press me to stay a little longer. I looked back at the prison official, but he simply pursed his lips to say that there was no more time left. Lakhani began to beg him, calling him “Brother” and then “Boss,” urging him to let me stay a few minutes longer.

In Springfield, across the street from the prison, there was a strip club called Teasers. The use of black light inside made the dancers’ thongs and teeth glow like the fluorescent stickers that bikers wear at night on their jackets. The young women, thin and topless, had masked their skin with powdery glitter. It was a slow night, despite it being the weekend, with only a handful of customers. The taste in music at this establishment was rather literal: the songs being played were along the lines of T-Pain’s “I’m N Luv (Wit a Stripper).” One of the women working that night came over and asked if I’d buy her a drink. When we were settled with our beverages, she said, “My stage name is Ivory. Because of my skin. I don’t tan.” Ivory said that she wanted to go to India, and added, by way of explanation, that she loved animals and architecture. When she saw me looking around at the walls and the furniture, she called Teasers a “shithole” and then asked me what it was that had brought me to her town. I had interviewed an inmate, I said, gesturing in the direction of the prison. She wanted to know why the man was inside, and I, unable to think of anything else, replied that he had tried to sell a missile to a terrorist. Ivory stopped sucking on the straw in her Red Bull and vodka and said, “That’s not cool.” And then, after a brief pause, she asked cheerfully, “So, how was your Fourth of July?”

Ivory’s last question began to appear more and more inspirational to me the next morning when, sitting across the glass partition from Lakhani, I had to endure an hour or more of ceaseless invective against his Jewish lawyer (whom he alleged was in cahoots with the prosecutors) and the Muslim informant (who had used duplicity and greed to mislead him). I had entered the interviewing room that day and even before I had sat down Lakhani had asked, “Did my lawyer tell you about the oil refinery?” I said, “No.” And Lakhani said, “He is a bastard. He is a bastard.” I didn’t know what he was talking about and told him so. Lakhani began to narrate to me a complicated story about how he had made a deal with the government of the United Arab Emirates about investing in an oil refinery and had been in Abu Dhabi finalizing that deal when Rehman came into his life. He wanted me to note that it was not him that the FBI had been after but the Ukrainian state-owned company that was selling arms all over the world. The president of Ukraine had been selling arms to Iraq, and the Americans were nervous, and the FBI had failed in its attempt to catch the real culprit and had ended up with Lakhani. He said, “This is the truth, nothing else.”

There was no admission of guilt, and I suddenly began to think how easy it would have been for a jury to dislike this man, even if he wasn’t the terrorist the government wanted to believe he was.

I tried, more than once, to seek clarifications. But each time, my questions would be brushed aside. “Listen to me,” Lakhani would say, and then he’d cite another random fact or detail of case history. He rambled endlessly and appeared obsessive, but he had a wonderful memory. He recited the phone number of a man in London with whom he hadn’t spoken for years. Nothing that he said about his case seemed coherent or easy to follow, but everything he said came with precise references to dates or court-transcript page numbers.

His lower jaw was missing a tooth in the front and spittle dribbled out when he spoke in a rage against what had happened in his past. But Lakhani wasn’t angry with himself. Most of his anger was reserved for his lawyer. He said, “I’m moving around with top-most people. It was the worst defense. I made twenty-two trips to Ukraine. Did my lawyer pay for them? Scotland Yard had issued twenty-two passports to me.” There was no admission of guilt, partial or otherwise, and I suddenly began to think how easy it would have been for a jury to dislike this man, even if he wasn’t the terrorist that the government wanted to believe he was. And yet, was it only delusion on Lakhani’s part as I was tempted to believe, or something else, more of a stubborn pride, perhaps, that insisted that he wasn’t the man the government said he was? I don’t know. A week later, while talking to his wife, I learned that at various times Lakhani had agreed to plead guilty and then changed his mind. If he had indeed done that, he would have gotten only a few years in prison at most; the way things turned out, Lakhani is scheduled for release in 2044. (At the sentencing, Lakhani had appealed to the judge, saying, “I don’t want to die here in this country. Everybody would like to die in their own country.”) Kusum Lakhani told me that she had gone with the lawyer Henry Klingeman to the hospital where Lakhani was being treated during the trial; her husband had tubes attached to his body and he promised her that the moment he was out from the hospital he would plead guilty. That didn’t happen. And then, the weekend before the presidential elections, with Bush facing a close race, the government made a new offer of a plea bargain. Kusum Lakhani had received a call at two-thirty in the morning. She was in London. Klingeman told her that Lakhani was going to plead guilty the next day and he was going to call the media. But, again, Lakhani decided to press instead for his innocence. (I later asked Klingeman about this, but he denied ever telling Mrs. Lakhani that her husband was pleading guilty as neither Lakhani nor the government ever seriously considered making an agreement.)

When I first saw Kusum Lakhani, a small Indian woman waiting for me by the side of a street in Manhattan, she reminded me of my mother. Over lunch, she said to me in Hindi, “Upar se aasman phat gaya, neeche se zameen hut gayee” (The sky split over our heads, the ground shifted under our feet). Then, turning to English, she asked me, “You know the meaning of loss?” The last word was pronounced to rhyme with “shows.” Kusum had come wearing some mascara, but she cried often and the make-up spread, giving her a more grieving air. Then, she began to tell me about the day Lakhani was arrested. The festival of Raksha Bandhan was being celebrated that day and she had been fasting; just that morning, the couple had arrived in New York from London, and while Kusum sat with her son, her husband rushed to the Wyndham Hotel in New Jersey where Rehman was waiting. After some time, the FBI had come to the apartment, and then the television cameras.

At her husband’s sentencing, Kusum Lakhani too had spoken a few words: “Please excuse me my India accent. Of this I am very proud. If I may use offending words, please forgive me in explaining if I am not able to. Only thing I want to say, we do not belong to any of the terrorists group… We are normal people. We live normally. We have good life in London… We are God-fearing people… My husband of course got in with the wrong people, which was all set up, of course you know it so I don’t have to say anything.” In her conversation with me, like her husband, she shared her suspicions about both the FBI informant and the defense lawyer. During the trial, she had often seen her lawyer talking or exchanging jokes with the prosecutors, and this had made her realize that they were colluding against her husband. Both Klingeman and Rabner were Jewish, she told me, as if that explained it. The informant was a Muslim. Kusum Lakhani’s family had suffered during the Partition, moving from Karachi in the newly created country of Pakistan. When her husband had spoken like this, his language was so aggressive and abusive that it had been easy for me to dismiss it, but listening to Mrs. Lakhani’s simpler, wholly sincere words of prejudice, I didn’t quite know how to respond. She was addressing me as a Hindu man, but I couldn’t find a way of mentioning to her that my wife was a Pakistani Muslim and, oddly enough, the longer I listened to the anxious, conservative, even bigoted woman sitting in front of me, the more I felt that it was I who was being dishonest. A few months later, I was in a wine-store one evening, in the aisle containing California Chardonnays, when my cell-phone rang. It was Kusum Lakhani, wanting to know if I had written anything about her husband. I was able to say nothing assuring to her, and to make matters worse, I mentioned that I was upset that her husband had sent several accusatory letters to me from prison. Hemant Lakhani had wanted to know why I was interviewing his lawyer: he wanted me to regard him as the sole source of information about his case. Cruelly, I told Mrs. Lakhani that I felt no inclination to talk to her husband ever again. Although I haven’t indeed spoken again to Lakhani or his wife, I’m often reminded of them, and I’m reminded of their nemesis, the informant Rehman.

For instance, in May 2009, when I heard the news that four men, all black Muslims, had been arrested for participating in a plot to bomb New York City synagogues and shoot down military planes. The plot had been revealed with the help of a confidential informant. Then, the following day, a news report revealed that all of the accused were former convicts. One of them was schizophrenic and had been recently convicted of purse-snatching; when a friend visited his apartment after the arrests, he found urine stored in bottles and raw chicken on the stovetop. Another man was a crack addict. The federal authorities had provided the accused, with the help of the informant, fake bombs and even a fake heat-seeking Stinger missile. The men were arrested after they had planted the mock explosive devices in cars parked outside a synagogue. My interest flared when I read that the informant was a Pakistani man who had first met the men in a mosque. Had Rehman returned to do duty for the FBI? The news report mentioned that the informant had earlier been arrested on charges of identity theft and turned into a government informant. He would come to the mosque and offer to take worshippers out for meals; his talk was about violence and jihad. The imam at the mosque said that the stranger’s behavior was “suspicious” and that the members of the mosque “believed he was a government agent.” The informant would take the accused to Danny’s Restaurant; he usually paid for the group and the restaurant owner thought that he was the boss. This would have pleased Rehman, I thought. But the following day, in another report in the New York Times, the informant was identified as Shahed Hussain, and I felt a little disappointed. Except that there wasn’t much to distinguish between the two men: both Rehman and Hussain played at being wealthy at the government’s (read taxpayers’) expense. Both had committed crimes that drew the attention of the authorities; and to escape deportation or other punishment, they lured their vulnerable targets with gifts and promises. I could imagine myself sitting at another trial months later where it would be unclear how motivated the accused would have been if the informant hadn’t played his crucial role, and this question would only be a part of the greater mystery of the way in which the war on terror was being conducted. There was one further twist to the story. A writer for the Village Voice reported that the FBI’s Special Agent Robert Fuller, the lead investigating officer in the arrest of the four men, had a controversial record. He was the subject of a lawsuit in the mis-identification and arrest of a Canadian man named Maher Arar, who had then been renditioned to Syria and tortured for a year. Fuller had also been a part of the team that had been warned of the presence and travels of two September 11 hijackers in the days preceding the attacks; on August 23, 2001, Fuller was assigned the task of arresting the two men but he failed to locate them on the database he used. And, in February 2004, Mohamed Alanssi, an informant working for Fuller, had tried to kill himself by setting himself on fire in front of the White House. Alanssi survived with serious burns but his suicide letter was addressed to Fuller. It said, “It is my big mistake that I have cooperated with FBI. The FBI have already destroyed my life and my family’s life and made us in a very danger position… I am not crazy to destroy my life and my family’s life to get $100,000.”



“The function of law enforcement is the prevention of crime
and the apprehension of criminals. Manifestly, that function
does not include the manufacturing of crime.”
Sherman v. United States

On May 4, 1990, an Arkansas orthodontist named William Pickard had placed an ad in USA Today offering to sell a banking license in Grenada. On that very day, an Indiana-based U.S. customs agent named J. Thomas Rothrock was attending a seminar on money laundering, and he saw Pickard’s ad and decided that it was suspicious. It was an odd assumption for Rothrock to have made because if a banking license is useful for money laundering, it doesn’t make much sense to want to sell it. Nonetheless, the agent called the number provided in the ad and pretended that he had money from an organization that needed to be deposited offshore. Rothrock spoke several times to Pickard, and, after several months, was able to induce Pickard and his partner, Arnold Hollingsworth, a farmer in Arkansas, to enter a scheme that would allow the laundering of over $200,000.

Pickard and Hollingsworth were both arrested after the two of them had made separate visits to Indianapolis to meet with Rothrock and collect large amounts of cash. An Indiana jury convicted both men and they received prison sentences. This decision was reversed, however, by the court of appeals in a landmark case. Judge Posner, writing for the majority in Hollingsworth, wrote:

Predisposition is not a purely mental state, the state of being willing to swallow the government’s bait. It has positional as well as dispositional force. The dictionary definitions of the word include “tendency” as well as “inclination.” The defendant must be so situated by reason of previous training or experience or occupation or acquaintances that it is likely that if the government had not induced him to commit the crime some criminal would have done so; only then does a sting or other arranged crime take a dangerous person out of circulation. A public official is in a position to take bribes; a drug addict to deal drugs; a gun dealer to engage in illegal gun sales. For these and other traditional targets of stings all that must be shown to establish predisposition and thus defeat the defense of entrapment is willingness to violate the law without extraordinary inducements; ability can be presumed. It is different when the defendant is not in a position without the government’s help to become involved in illegal activity. The government “may not provoke or create a crime, and then punish the criminal, its creature.”

Neither Pickard nor Hollingsworth had committed any crime before and the judicial panel thought that had the government left the two to their own devices they would have only been contemplating financial ruin and not lengthy terms in prison. It was also held unlikely that in the absence of the customs agent anyone else would have appeared and guided the two men into money laundering. “No real criminal,” Judge Posner wrote, “would do business with such tyros.”

In his closing statement during the Lakhani trial, the defense lawyer Klingeman was echoing the Hollingsworth ruling when he began by reminding jurors that his client was a “willing” participant but not a “ready” one in the government sting. Facing an uphill task of convincing his audience of the defendant’s complete innocence, Klingeman told the jurors that they were not being asked to like Lakhani, or respect him, or even judge him morally. They were only to ask whether Lakhani was guilty of the charges against him, and for doing that the jury must consider whether there was reasonable doubt regarding Lakhani’s predisposition. There was cause for doubting whether the missile that had been brought into the courtroom on the very first day of trial could have ever entered the United States without the government bringing it in. No real terrorist would ever approach Lakhani. “There was no missile plot,” Klingeman argued, “until the government created the missile plot.” Pointing a finger at law enforcement’s need to establish itself, after the attacks of September 11, as the protector of the people, Klingeman said that the government’s role was “a lot like the fireman who lights a fire and pulls the alarm so that he could be the hero and put the fire out and rescue the people.”

In the Hollingsworth case, one of the judges on the panel wrote a dissenting opinion in which he pointed out that the majority had created a “fictional image” of “allegedly ‘innocent’ would-be international financiers.” The dissenting judge was of the strong opinion that “the defendants were not reluctant to engage in criminal activity and there was no inducement; the government merely presented the defendants with an opportunity to commit a crime (as they do in all ‘sting operations’), an opportunity that a law-abiding citizen would have refused.” Similarly, at the end of the Lakhani trial, the government attorneys presented the defendant as “the eager and enthusiastic salesman” who was “the poster child for a willing broker anxious to peddle a missile for use by terrorists.” (More flamboyantly, Lakhani was called “the Energizer bunny of arms traffickers.” I wonder whether the defendant found it oddly flattering.) The prosecutors emphasized Lakhani’s many business contacts, his familiarity with an Indian gangster, and, above all, the statements against America on tape, remarks like “America is a village of motherfuckers.”

Alert to the argument advanced by the defense about Lakhani’s lack of proficiency as a criminal, assistant U.S. attorney Rabner reminded the jurors, “He’s not charged with being sophisticated in his illegal arms dealings. You don’t have to be sophisticated to be a criminal. You could be a dumb criminal.” Here, too, the Lakhani trial seemed to be following the precedence of Hollingsworth. In the latter, a second dissenting opinion had the following to say: “My colleagues in the majority treat Pickard as a pathetic figure. Perhaps he is. Police are better at nabbing bumblers than accomplished criminals. Being a novice caught on an initial sally into crime is no defense, however.” The only difference was that, unlike both Pickard and Hollingsworth, Hemant Lakhani wasn’t acquitted. The panel of eight women and four men on the jury deliberated for seven hours over two days and declared him guilty on all counts.

Let us return to Hollingsworth one last time. The majority opinion in the court of appeals had asked speculatively what would have happened to Pickard and Hollingsworth had the customs agent not responded to the ad in USA Today. The judges conjectured that Pickard, who, despite a good medical practice, had a history of bad business investments, would have “folded his financial venture.” Pickard’s bid to become an international banker, the majority opinion went on to suggest unequivocally, “would have joined his other failures—his movie theaters that failed, his amusement park that failed, his apartment building that failed, his attempt to market cookbooks written by his wife that failed.”



Such a sad and impressive litany.

It reminded me powerfully of Lakhani and of the reasons why, at the sentencing, the defense lawyer Klingeman likened Lakhani to Willy Loman.

For hundreds of thousands of American high-school and college students reading in their literature classes Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman is a figure who is so uncannily familiar in his enormous futility and, equally, his flawed humanity. The lawyer in his appeal was saying to the judge that he pitied his client and wanted her to be lenient. But I’ve been unable to shake off the comparison for its astute link to something far greater than Lakhani and his individual record of unsuccessful striving. Happily or unhappily, failure is not unique to Lakhani. Arguably, it is the shared fate of an overwhelming part of the world’s population. The tapes that the government lawyers played at the Lakhani trial, giving the jurors a taste of the defendant’s rants against America, were milder, less venomous, versions of speeches pouring out of public speaker systems in various parts of the world. Doesn’t that hate also spring from a species of failure, a failure in which the United States is seen as having a hand? Writing soon after the attacks of September 11, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk asked us to try and understand “why millions of people in poor countries that have been pushed to one side, and deprived of the right to decide their own histories, feel such anger at America.” Often, the anger that erupts in violent protests on our television screens, with the burning of effigies of Bush and Cheney, doesn’t necessarily require sympathy. This is because the display of such anger, Pamuk argues, is sometimes designed to conceal the absence of democracies in those societies and to reinforce the power of local dictators. Similarly, the presence of “superficial hostility” can be a way for the indigenous elite to mask the misuse of funds provided by international agencies, so that the bristling against a distant, foreign enemy distracts attention from the inequities at home. Nevertheless, Pamuk’s main aim is to force a recognition of the conditions under which the United States is misguidedly imposing an ideology of defeat on millions of people and thereby lending support to the terrorists it is purportedly fighting against:

There are those in the U.S. today who unconditionally support military attacks for the purpose of demonstrating America’s military strength and teaching terrorists “a lesson.” Some cheerfully discuss on television where American planes should bomb, as if playing a video game. Such commentators should realize that decisions to engage in war taken impulsively, and without due consideration, will intensify the hostility toward the West felt by millions of people in the Islamic countries and poverty-stricken regions of the world—people living in conditions that give rise to feelings of humiliation and inferiority. It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself that directly engenders support for terrorists whose ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human history; it is, rather, the crushing humiliation that has infected the third-world countries.

Even Hemant Lekhani, with his fanciful and overreaching sense of ambition, would not have contemplated offering to politicians and policymakers, through the lesson of his trial, a salutary lesson in global geopolitics. And, if we are so inclined, we can add this to his already long list of failures. But we can perhaps readily concede that this inability to see past one’s own strengths or weaknesses and engage with the wellsprings of the world’s misery is a failing that Lakhani would share with those rich and powerful individuals who hold the reins of the world, and in doing this, he would have at long last found a place among those whose company he had always desired.


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Amitava Kumar’s most recent work of non-fiction A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and novel Nobody Does the Right Thing, both published by Duke University Press, are out this month. He is Professor of English at Vassar College.

Editors Recommend:

The Limits to My Self-Importance: David Frum, the neo-conservative who coined “axis of evil,” on how writing for the president is like writing for the movies, the administration’s “departures from the law,” and why the president should have brought in Democrats to make decisions.

To contact Guernica or Amitava Kumar, please write here.

Excerpt copyright Duke University Press, 2010.

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