Working with buffaloes

It’s pretty rare for a British PM to resign and hand over to someone else. Normally the resignation is followed by a leadership election, and there is frequently very strong competition.

One would have to go back over half a century, to when Harold Wilson resigned in 1976, and his Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, became PM. Though there was a leadership election, Callaghan was seen as the most likely successor.

It was also the first time that the Labour Party had to swap horses midstream. But now the Labour Party is faced with the same situation. Keith Starmer has resigned, and there is a clear successor in Andrew Burnham. The last time Labour had to replace a PM was in 2007, when Tony Blair resigned, and Gordon Brown took the job unopposed.

There are differences, of course. Wilson was under a much more diffuse pressure to resign, as he had been Labour leader since 1963. Starmer was under pressure after Labour lost badly in the local body polls in May. Unlike Wilson, who was PM for nine years between 1964 and 1976, or Blair, who had been PM for a decade between 1997 and 2007, Starmer has only held office since Labour won the last election in 2024.

But there has been a bit of a change, for the frontrunner is not one of the leading members of the Cabinet, like Callaghan or Brown, but someone who had some bother finding a seat in the Commons, which is necessary to contest the leadership election. Indeed, his entry in Parliament after a by-election, which took place because the member resigned to make way for him, was the signal for Starmer to resign.

Burnham also resigned as the Mayor of Manchester, which reminds one of Neville Chamberlain, the Tory PM who is vilified for having given away too much at Munich, in practice of the policy of appeasement. He had been Mayor of Birmingham in his day. The Tories seem to have made a habit of making Mayors party leaders: there was Boris Johnson, a former Mayor of London. Like Chamberlain, that too didn’t end well.

It might be reading too much into the local body polls, but it does seem that Labour might end up replaced by the Green Party, while the Tories might end up replaced by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which is a Conservative Party with the racism preserved. The Tories have tried to handle their racism, first by having Saeeda Warsi as party Chairman,and then having Rishi Sunak as PM, and after he went down to defeat, by replacing him with Kemi Badenoch. Right, after an Indian man, a Nigerian-origin woman.

In Romania, politics continues to be monopolised by white males. The government led by Ilie Bordjan fell, and guess who got invited to form the next one> His deputy, Adrian Vestea. Imagine if Shah Mehmood Qureshi had replaced Imran Khan in 2023. Vestea has failed to form a government, though, which means that if another is not formed, the country will have to move to a snap election.

Meanwhile, there are more important developments taking place, with the Asia Buffalo Congress taking place in Lahore from October 12 to 16, along with the Dairy Asia Expo-2027. Apart from dairy farmers, there will be a lot of policemen. Most policemen are from rural areas, and have fond childhood memories of buffaloes, buffalo milk and the smell of cooking (Dried buffalo dung bring the fuel of choice in most rural kitchens.

As for professional life, in rural areas, the buffalo has a crucial, indeed all-pervasive, role. One of the most important crimes is cattle theft. Indeed, cattle theft is often at the root of other crimes. Muders and attempted murders can be traced to an old enmity created because someone’s grandfather stole someone else’s grandfather’s buffalo. Bride burnings often take place because the dowry was considered insufficient, with the insufficiency being a shortage of buffaloes.

Eve this event is being scarred  by violence, with an Indian delegation having announced that it will not be coming because of the Pehelgam incident.

The Asia Congress is a sort of prelude for the World Buffalo Congress, in Sorrento, Italy, from October 28 to 30. Reports that the IGP Punjab will preside over a session devoted to theft are not accurate, nor is the report that India is going there. The Congress will focus on the manufacture of buffalo mozzarella.