And so the results are out in the US. President Bush has received a drubbing. Many commentators on the left of centre seem to believe that a new era of greater concern for the man on the street and of bipartisanship at home and multilateralism abroad has dawned.

Indian commentators are scurrying to their personal computers to churn out lengthy disquisitions on what the overthrow of the Republicans would mean to the Indo-US nuclear deal   - as if the only thing that matters is the nuclear issue.

In fact whether it is Sri Lanka or Iraq or Russia,  these super patriots can't get out of their India-centric approach. But then there is more to events happening in the world than any possible fall-out for our country itself.

By all accounts, the Democrats have seized control of both the House of Representatives and the more powerful Senate. While the US liberals do hail the verdict, they are not so sure whether it would indeed signal any significant reversal of the policies pursued thus far.

For one, President Bush would continue to enjoy his extraordinary powers under the US constitution and so he would be in no hurry to recall troops in Iraq or close down the Guantanomo prison.

Secondly, the Democrats elected .are not all fair-minded progressives or even doves in the exact sense of the term. They all had voted for the Iraq war and their criticism of the way it was conducted is more tactical than one based on any question of principle.

Further, in a nation swamped by conservative propaganda, even the victorious critics would be too timorous to press for any radical agenda, especially on the foreign policy front.

It should be remembered here that many of their candidates made subtle shift to the right in an attempt to win over the conservative voters in borderline states.

Apart from seeking to embarrass the Bush administration through various inquiries and talking glibly about an exit strategy, nothing much is expected of these new legislators.

Still it is a welcome change as the political discourse would no more be dominated by the conservatives and those stressing sanity in Iraq would not be denounced as traitors.

From abortion to social security, liberal voices would be increasingly heard over the mass media. They would not be smothered anymore. The old contempt for international bodies like the UN and for issues like global warming would go. The US could be expected to be less arrogant towards its smaller neighbours.

Incidentally, the point of this column is not to sing hosannas to American democracy, but to stress that it has cost the world, particularly the Iraqis, enormously to make the American voters see reason.

It should also be noted here that the latter were angry not because millions of Iraqi lives were lost, thousands maimed, innumerable households ruined and the infrastructure shattered thanks to the US-led invasion.

No, almost their sole grouse is that over 2000 US soldiers had been killed in the last three years in Iraq. Barring some commentators on the margins, most others were only saying the Americans had got bogged down there, millions of dollars were going down the drain, so many precious American youth had sacrificed their lives in defence of democracy, yet others traumatized and after all this, there was no end in sight.

If then the Sunni insurgents had been less lethal and less fanatical, if the casualties had been confined to the Iraqis themselves, would the American activists have been content to shrug their shoulders and get along with issues like abortion and gay rights?

Or if the American strategy had been more effective and they had been able to achieve full spectrum dominance and been pumping out oil in huge quantities to the benefit of the American consumers, would the votes have been so negative?

It is all hypothetical, but chances are that a triumphant Bush-Rumsfeld team would have been hailed as liberators, never mind how the Iraqis themselves felt, Shias or Sunnis.

In the clash of civilizations, it had been proved that the western Christian, particularly Protestant, values have won, and rightly so. It was indeed the end of history, it would have been proclaimed.

So then the bottom line is but for the mindless suicide bombers of Iraq, the warmongers would not have sobered. What a commentary on a country that preens itself on a humane system of governance.

In a near parallel, during the IPKF misadventure in Sri Lanka, many individuals and organizations in India had dared point to the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian forces in the name of looking for the Tigers.

After some time, in fact, the Indian army did change its tactics, well before they were forced out by a cunning Premadasa-Prabhakaran duo. The public outcry had proved effective. In the US, on the other hand, but for the midterm elections, Bush would have continued to run amok.

Am yet to come across anywhere in the barrage of commentaries in the mainstream media since the Republican rout even a single word sympathizing with the terrible lot of the Iraqis.

They have almost been bombed back to the stone age, but there is no remorse, only endless quibbling over Rumsfeld's temperament, lack of planning, lack of intelligence gathering and so on.

Again everyone wrings his or her hands over the chaos the international forces would leave behind if the US chooses to pull out, but not even a slap on Bush's   wrist, saying it was his misadventure that had inflicted so many gratuitous miseries on that nation.

Closer home, the Indian civil society, though relatively effective in the case of the IPKF, has been powerless vis a vis the Kashmir imbroglio, for reasons we shall go into later.

There are some who do say that we should rein in our armed forces, not because we are suffering casualties every day but because what is inflicted on the Kashmiris themselves is unjust, but their protest is lost amid patriotic cacophony. Nobody has any ready-made solution, so perhaps the tragedy would be played out there in all its horror.

But hopefully some day, some day, a statesman in the true tradition of Indian ethos, vasudeiva kutumbakam, would emerge and then…..