Over the last 2-3 decades, politics in Tamil Nadu has plummeted to its nadir in terms of ideological bereftness of the parties and the distancing of successive governments from the launching of developmental schemes in preference to populist measures and freebies.

The West's "next confrontation," observes MJ Akbar, an Indian Muslim author, "is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin." (1996, Quoted by Samuel P Huntington)