The question of expertise

There is a ship floundering off India’s premier port, Mumbai. Its containers allegedly packed with petroleum products and perhaps pesticides, are spilling over into the sea and washing up ashore. Yet, the port seems to have no expertise in handling the accident. A Dutch company has been hired post-haste to deal with the problem. And what of the Coast Guard which has often displayed numerous exercises on how to manage oil spills? No one knows what it is up to.


India is set to jump into the company of the leading powers of the world. The presence of half a billion poor is supposedly offset by a 200 million strong middle class, allegedly as good as any in the world. But a little bit of introspection will reveal that the country seriously lacks all round abilities and expertise in a range of areas that are required for the functioning of a modern and sophisticated society.

Command
We have often witnessed the folly of self-proclaimed expertise of our Defence Research and Development Organisation or the Department of Atomic Energy. But there are a host of other areas where the gaps exist. On Tuesday there was an item in a leading newspaper about the serious lack of vascular surgeons in India. According to the report, Orissa, MP, Bihar and Manipur have no vascular surgeons at all, neither does any government-run hospital in New Delhi. This country, that exports doctors to half the world, has a serious shortage of expertise in an area that would help tens of thousands of people who, because of diabetes or accident-related injuries, lose their limbs.
A corollary of the problem is the inability to manage large projects— to mobilise a large number of human and marshal resources towards a particular objective. For obvious reasons, this ability is often most manifest in war. So its shortcomings have been visible India. Lt Gen Harbaksh Singh who commanded the western army in the Indo-Pak war of 1965 termed its outcome as “a sickening catalogue of command failures.” While in smaller units Indians fought superbly— witness the Poona Horse in Phillaurah— larger units failed to gel. The Kargil mini-war was a big success precisely because it was won by a huge amount of bravery and the tactical skill of our small unit commanders.
The experience of executing the allied invasion of Europe in June 1944 or fighting the battle of Stalingrad came after a lot of blood and tears, but it did. No one would want such circumstances to build expertise, but successful generals do require leadership and managerial skills which, in turn, come from societies which understand the need for them.
Is it any surprise that the Commonwealth Games is such a shambles? There is, for one thing, no one commander. An essential element in the management of large projects, or a battle, is a clear line of command and, of course, accountability. Here we have the Organising Committee Chairman Suresh Kalmadi telling us that he was not in charge of procurement or of the construction of the stadia. And of course he was not in charge of the civic works. But who was? Was it the CPWD run by the Union government, the Union Ministry of Sports, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the NDMC or the Delhi government?
Not surprisingly, the same lack of clear cut lines of authority mark the management of most of our cities which are, predictably, in a mess. There are mayors with no power, and a chief minister (Sheila Dikshit) who is not in charge of law and order or of all the land use of the state she is elected to run.
It is not as if Indians inherently lack expertise. There is an enormous amount of ability in the self-effacing men who run our space programme so well. The ONGC, NTPC and many public sector companies have skills in abundance. The expertise that E. Sreedharan has marshaled for the Konkan Railway and Delhi Metro projects is too evident to recount. There is no dearth of expertise and managerial skills in our private sector, for example, in running airlines, hotels and information technology companies.

Control
In part, the expertise comes from within a well-rounded society. Ours which is so cursed by chronic poverty, with such large patches of illiteracy and so riven by caste is bound to have a problem. Reading a book on the British use of deception in World Wars I and II, it struck me that the British expertise in camouflage came from its schools of design and arts, and that the top cryptanalysts that they fielded and who made a key contribution in winning the war came from Cambridge and Oxford. In other words, civil society provided the crucial ingredient that was then melded into the war effort of these societies.
By contrast, a great deal of expertise and abilities in India are confined to the government system. Whether it is agriculture, food storage, universities, airlines, broadcasting, healthcare, the stifling hand of government limits them all. It is difficult to find an expert who can independently and intelligently comment on not just high falutin’ issues like nuclear power or submarines, but simple things like environment and town planning.
Clearly, the one message that we get from this is not only the need for the development of our universities and civil society institutions, but their existence as truly autonomous institutions.

Generalists
The big problem is the way we are administered. No matter what reforms the government claims to have carried out, it still depends on a generalist administrative cadre. A sophisticated society has public administration specialists, professional managers, hospital and education administrators, works engineers and so on. They do not have a general fit-all cadre of bureaucrats who manage an army one day, an airline the next, and a broadcast network the day after, because it is not humanly possible for a person to have the high level of specialisation to manage institutions in such varied fields.
But the old order has the country in a tight grip, whether it is health policy management, education, airlines or the military, all suffer from the lack of managers who can deliver results. The sad part is that the failure of the IAS-oriented administration system is visible in the condition of public health, education, agriculture and general administration in the country, but no political leader has had the time to bell the cat and set things right.
This said, we need to enter a caveat. We must be wary of fetishising expertise. Indeed, the last five years have shown us how on the advice of highly acclaimed experts and officials, the US made war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has succeeded in making a mess of both.
The failure of economic and finance experts is even more manifest, especially since among their number are Nobel laureates who shaped theories that led to the collapse of the world economy in 2008.
But the country does need to advance in a well-rounded fashion. And this means the development, and celebration, of expertise, or, if you want to put it another way, high-end abilities, in a range of areas— project management, environmental engineering, medicine, public administration, military, agriculture and food policy management. Without this, you can convince yourself that you are world class, but you will not convince anyone else.
This appeared in Mail Today August 11, 2010

UPA-II: At war with itself

Almost everyone is agreed that the United Progressive Alliance II government lacks something as compared to its first avatar. The Left would have us believe that it was the ingredient that provided the effervescence to UPA-I. But that would be too simplistic. There are other factors. For one, everyone is that much older and, hence a certain lack of vigour and cynicism. The leader of the government, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh looks frailer than ever and seems disconnected from the hurly burly of events. The other and real problem is that the issues confronting the government have somehow become more intractable and intricate. But the real problem is the dissonance in the coalition, primarily arising out of the disjunction between the Congress party and the government.

Divide

Like everyone else, the government was taken unawares by the unfolding of the economic crisis of 2008-2009. India managed to keep its head above water in great measure because of the efforts of the PM and his economic advisers. But what did surprise was their inability to get a grip on inflation as evidenced by the numerous forecasts that were somehow never met. There were some things that the government could have done but didn’t, particularly on the food front. The shoddy, and perhaps crooked, handling of the nation’s food policy, is one such area.
Many see the growing incoherence of the UPA-II as a result of the growing divide between the party and the government. Some see the diverse voices and views emerging as a strategy of occupying the political space of the Treasury Benches and the Opposition. Others see it as an estrangement between the “neoliberal” Manmohan Singh whose only concern is economic numbers— and, lately, peace with Pakistan— and Sonia Gandhi and the National Advisory Council, who think that service to the aam aadmi (common man) is the way to go.


Actually the problem is neither a good-cop bad cop routine, nor any kind of an estrangement, but a plain dysfunction of the governance system.Only that can explain the manner in which Digvijay Singh, a quintessential party man, is allowed to openly critique a vital aspect of government policy— tackling Maoists and violent Islamic extremists. Or, the sudden rebirth of the National Advisory Council, which seems determined to bend the government to its will. It has come with the usual cast of characters who, despite all their other good qualities, are singularly lacking in administrative and political experience that abounds in the UPA-II government.
Certainly there is grave disquiet at the widening gulf between Sonia’s NAC and the government over the direction of policy, especially social welfare programmes. The new NAC wishes to universalise PDS, provide the right to education to all, expand NREGA across the country, in addition to continuing with fertiliser and fuel cost subsidies. The government which must execute these tasks finds them simply undoable, not only because of the lack of executive capacity, but because it doesn’t have the money.

Fiscals

In the tenure of the first UPA government there was, in the words of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, a “perceptible improvement in the fiscal situation at both the Central and state levels”. According to the Economic Survey 2007-2008, revenue receipts of the government increased from Rs 230,834 crore in 2002-03 to Rs 486,422 crore in 2007-2008. The average annual growth of revenue receipts of the Central Government was of the order of 16.2 per cent. This enabled the government to undertake vast expenditures related to the NREGA, provide a loan waiver of
Rs 70,000 crore for farmers in 2008-2009 and fund ambitious schemes such as the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan for eradicating illiteracy, the Mid-day meal scheme, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the National Rural Health Mission and so on.
But in the last three years, the fiscal situation has deteriorated. Where the percentage of fiscal deficit to the GDP ratio was 2.6 in 2007-8, it ballooned to 6.1 in 2008-9 and 6.7 in 2009-10. Though revenue collections have gone up again, India is living off capital—the Rs 106,000 crore collected from the telecom auction have gone into the central revenues instead of being gainfully used to create assets for the future.
But this has not affected the appetite of the NAC revolutionaries who want the RTE, universal food subsidy, expanded NREGA, and a continuance of the fertiliser and fuel subsidies all together. The more enthusiastic members of the NAC —Jean Dreze, NC Saxena, Harsh Mander— are bent on pushing the fiscal envelope to the bursting point.
Each of the schemes— universal PDS or RTE will cost in the region of Rs 1 lac crore per annum. NREGA is currently Rs 40,000 crore, the fuel and fertiliser subsidy of about Rs 1 lac crore. Where is this money going to come from? Money is also needed, for education, health, defence, repaying past loans, more importantly, to invest in the future—for roads, schools, hospitals, power plants, factories and so on.
Who can deny the need to help the poor in a country like India? But, a look at the bottom line will tell you that you can, at most, take up one and a half of the schemes proposed, and that there is need to balance the emphasis on social welfare with policies of wealth creation.
The comrades in the NAC are not political people. They do not know, and probably do not care, about the consequences of failed promises. Given the reports of large-scale fraud in existing social welfare schemes, it is unlikely that the money will reach the intended beneficiaries and all you will get is large-scale resentment.
At this stage it is clear that there is no way in which the government can implement the RTE or the universal PDS scheme, not only because it lacks the money, but also the administrative capacity to execute the projects.

Opposition

The UPA-II has been functioning in a climate of impunity where allies like the DMK loot the system at will, and others like Mamata run down vital national assets, while Suresh Kalmadi’s bill could be tens of thousands of crore. Then there is Sharad Pawar whose handling of the food portfolio has been questionable, to put it politely.
On the political side of the UPA-II governance equation you have the Gandhi family, where Sonia intervenes in a discreet manner, and Rahul in fits and starts. They are the acknowledged leaders of the party, but their involvement in the day-to-day affairs of either the party or the government has been fitful, almost whimsical. While we know, sort of, what Sonia stands for, Rahul’s views on many of these issues is virtually unknown. He says and does the right things, seems to have a mature head on his shoulders, but we simply lack adequate data to know what he stands for.
Yet it is in their name that the party is pushing the government to an unsustainable path. The executive part of the team— Prime Minister Singh, Pranab Mukherjee, P. Chidambaram are doing the best they can, but they cannot defy common-sense and fiscal logic and nor can they stand up to their own party leadership.
For the present, luck favours the UPA-II. Mamata Banerjee has single-handedly battered the mighty Left. As for the BJP, it is saddled with two leaders— the irrepressible Nitin Gadkari who models himself on the comedian Dada Kondke, and L.K. Advani who refuses to fade away gracefully. But luck doesn’t last forever and it is never proof against a self-destructive urge.
This appeared in Mail Today August 5, 2010

The Failed Prince

HE was a Member of Parliament at the age of 28, a Union minister at 29, President of National Conference (NC) at 34, and at the tender age of 38, Omar Abdullah became Chief Minister of the strife-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir. Though he is his father’s son, and the grandson of the great Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, Omar Abdullah is in many ways a self-made man, an identity he underlined when he literally seized the crown from the hands of his father in the wake of the NC’s good showing in the 2008 elections, and placed it on his own head.

The victory was especially sweet for Omar who had taken over as President of the NC in June 2002 and gone down with his party in the state assembly elections later that year, failing to win even his own Ganderbal seat.

On January 5, 2009, a sense of elation was visible on Omar’s face as he was sworn in as the head of the NCCongress coalition. “People have given us the confidence and we have a number of challenges, but I assure you I will rise to your expectations,” Omar had told the audience gathered on the day he took his oath of office at the Zorawer Singh auditorium in Jammu. As a mark of his proximity to the Gandhi family with whom the Abdullahs have had relations going back to the 1930s, the Congress agreed that Omar should be Chief Minister for the entire term of six years, rather than share the office as had been done in the previous coalition between the Congress party and Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party.

Abdullah carried with him the hopes of the new generation — the people as well as the politicians. He was after all, first among a group of Gen- Next politicians who had been given exclusive executive authority as the Chief Minister. Everyone knew that it was not going to be easy. The state in question was, after all, Jammu & Kashmir. But, he came in at an extraordinary time. In the 2008 elections, the turnout was a high 61 per cent and even in Srinagar, the heartland of separatism, the vote had been, in the post 1990s era, an unprecedented 20 per cent.

Two short years later, Omar once again stares at the political abyss. Fifty-six days of political protest that have taken the lives of nearly fifty people and injured a thousand have brought the state government to its knees. The Union government in New Delhi does not have any answers either. A measure of the crisis is indicated by the fact that both are now actually seeing arch-secessionist Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s appeal to the Kashmiri youth to desist from violent protest as the only ray of hope in the otherwise stormy seas. FOR more than half of Omar’s life, violence has been an everyday affair in Kashmir. He has witnessed directly or indirectly the ups and downs of his party and his father: reviled in 1990, courted in 1995, dumped in 2002, and courted again in 2008. Assassination and death at the hands of the terrorists have been an everpresent danger for his family. There was no proverbial honeymoon period as chief minister for Omar.

He was thrown into the hurly burly of the most intense type of politics as the agitation over the Shopian rape case rocked the state within six months of his assuming office. PDP leader Muzzaffar Hussein Beigh needled him into resign-ing by charging that he was involved in a sex scandal. Yet some of what he faces today was foretold in the Amarnath Yatra agitation of 2008 when mass public protest brought the state to a standstill. Instead of guns, the Amarnath or Shopian case protestors used stones and arson.

This less-than-lethal method of protest took the security forces by surprise. Instead of an insurgency, the police were suddenly asked to confront what was, at best, a law and order problem. Unfortunately, they have been unable to cope and therein lies the rub. This became obvious following the terrible cycle of agitations and protestors’ deaths that began with the accidental killing of Tufail Mattoo who was hit by a spent tear gas shell on June 11. Omar had taken office assuming that his task was to build on the slow return of peace in the state. Infiltration had been steadily declining, as had violent militancy.

This was suited to his style and inclination. He saw his task as one of providing a clean and efficient administration for the people, providing jobs for the army of educated unemployed people who have formed the core of the present protests and so on. This was saying a lot because the Kashmir state government under his father and his predecessors was known for nepotism, corruption and inefficiency. But Omar is the anti-Farooq. Where his father is a back-slapping politician of the old school, Omar is intense and private. His father likes his evening whisky, Omar is a teetotaller. Unlike his father and grandfather, he is no great orator and shuns flamboyant gestures.

In many ways he identifies himself with a group of politicians who have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths but speak to a new India through Twitter and Facebook. It was no surprise then that even as the knives were out for him, GenNext MPs in Parliament issued an unprecedented statement of support for Omar cutting across party lines. Regretting the violence, the MPs who included Congress’ Deepender Hooda and Priya Dutt, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, BJP’s Anurag Thakur and others declared: “We, as representatives of the people ourselves, believe that together with a positive frame of mind we can seek resolution only through open communication.”

IN part Omar’s troubles have arisen from this effort to distance himself and his party from his father’s legacy. In the two years of his government, senior NC leaders like Abdul Rahim Rather, the finance minister, and Ali Mohammed Sagar, the law minister, have been sidelined. He has declined to take the help of his own father, as well as Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Saifuddin Soz. His power center has been his links with 10 Janpath and Rahul Gandhi. Instead of relying on his party colleagues, he has relied on his political advisor, businessman Devender Singh Rana, since 2008.

But his personality has become his biggest hurdle in the present crisis. Instead of reaching out to the people who had been killed or wounded in the protest, he sought to get New Delhi to change the behaviour of the security forces. It took him an astonishing 45 days and 49 deaths to make his first visit to a Srinagar hospital to commiserate with the wounded. It is not as though he is not empathetic, it is just that he probably thought that the gesture would be a hypocritical one. But then, a politician without a touch of hypocrisy is like a snake without his fangs.

Given his age, it would be foolish to write Omar Abdullah’s political epitaph. In any case he has one more quality that will ensure that we will see more of him — stubbornness. This quality is always a double-edged sword. But it gives Omar an enormous sense of conviction and self-assurance. Whether it is proof against the miasma that is Kashmir is, of course, quite another thing.

Mail Today August 8, 2010

A short comment on the situation in Kashmir

CLICHÉD or not, the only way to describe the situation in the Valley is that it is “complex”. It is so because it is the outcome of several factors that have generated a vicious cycle that the authorities are finding hard to break.
That cycle begins with violent street protests which lead to a tough police response, culminating at times in the police shooting dead a protester. Thereupon, protests against the death create a fresh cycle of violent protests which, more often than not, lead to yet another shooting.
Though the anger of the public is manifest — with even middle-aged matrons now hurling stones at the police — it is also manipulated by separatists who have links to the Pakistani intelligence agencies.
Yet, there is a nihilistic edge to the violence since the protesters and those who are manipulating them know that it is unlikely to either drive away India from the Valley or in any way improve the lot of the Kashmiris. This is the reason why people like Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin and the influential Jamat-e-Islami are opposing hartals and strikes which today almost always end up with instances of stone pelting.
The unique feature of the Kashmiri insurgency has been its ability to coexist with a kind of normality — schools and universities have functioned, apple and handicraft exports have continued apace and so on. But in the present climate, education and economic activity are at a standstill. It remains to be seen whether the orchard owners of Sopore and Baramullah will continue to support the shut down when the apple season begins. Because if that happens, they will suffer a huge loss, and so will the militants who they fund.
The only way to break the momentum of such protests is to wear it down. But India’s untrained and over-stretched police forces lack the training and sophistication to evolve a strategy which will ensure that the protests are contained without the loss of life.
Their task is not easy because though the protesters are using less-than-lethal stones, they are violent. And as Sunday’s incident in Pampore has revealed, they are not above some arson as well.
It is difficult to ask the authorities to make a systematic fire-fighting plan when the building is already on fire and the need is to douse it. But perhaps, even as they crack down in their inept way for the present, they should be planning for the longer term and begin training a force that can sustain stone-pelting assaults indefinitely without taking recourse to bullets. This is not an impossible task. All it requires is some imagination and some training.
Mail Today August 2, 2010

That horrible sinking feeling

The the last month, there have been a flurry of official visitors from the United States to New Delhi— Afghanistan Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, and Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Robert O Blake. Last month top officials of the two sides met each other under the auspices of a strategic dialogue in Washington DC chaired by their respective foreign ministers, S.M. Krishna and Hillary Clinton. Indian officials who attended these events and meetings are struck by the strong undercurrent of pessimism going through the Obama Administration in relation to its AfPak policy.
The problem according to some officials boils down to the infirmity of the Administration, as well as those rooted in the fundamentals of the US government system. The first is a product and a consequence of the inability of the Administration leaders to see through the fog of war in the AfPak region and determine who and where the enemy is, and even if this can be determined, just what can be done about it.



The deeper problem is the ideological and structural problems afflicting contemporary American politics. There was an era when foreign policy operated in a consensual framework and it was difficult to tell the difference between a Republican and a Democratic administration. But the US of today is deeply divided in terms of politics. This is evident from the difficulties the Obama Administration has had in getting bipartisan support for any major legislation that it has sought to pass.

Pakistan
The result is that it is difficult to determine the impact of the political shifts that will occur in Washington this November, after, as expected, the Democrats lose control of the US House of Representatives. By itself this may not be a disaster, but should the Democrats lose the Senate as well, the outcome could be devastating. Try as he might, President Obama is unable to regain traction with the electorate. Since the beginning of this year his approval ratings have been below 50 per cent and this month, for the first time, he has more people disapproving his performance than approving it.
In this scenario, US officials who manage the AfPak policy and who are political appointees are in a state of listless confusion. What will the next review on Afghanistan, scheduled for the end of the year, bring up? How long will they be relevant to the Administration’s scheme of things? As it is the whole situation has been roiled by the need to change commanders mid-stream.
The leaks of the US documents on Afghanistan have told us in just how much deep water the US is. American forces are fighting shadows on the ground and behind these shadows are shadier characters who are supposed to be their allies who are seeking ever greater rewards in exchange for this duplicitous support.
The documents have laid out in some detail the manner in which Pakistan has been backing the Taliban and the way in which ISI operatives work with the Taliban to push the anti-India agenda in Afghanistan. Yet in the period 2004-2009, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was the chief of the ISI for the first three years and has since then been the chief of the Pakistan Army.
This is the man who is today being touted as the great American hope for stabilising the situation on America’s behalf. But it would be wrong to portray Kayani as a villain. He is merely the corporate head of the Pakistan Army which is the real Pakistani protagonist in the AfPak war.
Just how deep the rot has gone in Islamabad is brought out by K Subrahmanyam in an article on Wednesday. He points out that Pakistan had requested the United Nations to probe the murder of Benazir Bhutto in 2008. The three man UN commission found that the threats to her came from the establishment (read Pakistan Army and ISI) and that the parallel investigations of that agency prevented the full truth from emerging.
Instead of acting on the issue, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a member of Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party, protested the verdict, compelling the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to re-endorse the findings of the inquiry team. Clearly Qureshi’s compulsions came from his fear of “the establishment.”
That this malign entity is able to overawe the party that formally rules Pakistan, led by the husband of the late Benazir, tells its own story.

Afghanistan
In these circumstances, the Obama Administration’s policy of putting 40,000 more troops for the limited period of a year is tokenism of the worst kind. That Obama announced the date of withdrawal well in advance indicates how much of a symbolic gesture it was. As it is, these troops are not finding much work to do because the offensive that was planned around them has been delayed, some say indefinitely.
The problem with US policy is that it is seeking to catch the tiger by its tail, when it ought to be confronted head on. That would require the US to first understand where the tiger is — in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. When the AfPak policy was announced, this writer had made the point that the circumstances had actually demanded a PakAf policy. What the year gone by has revealed instead is that the policy would have been better off with a marked Pak-Pak focus. Losing Afghanistan to the Taliban would be a disaster, but having assorted radicals led by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan assuming power in Islamabad would be a catastrophe.
Unfortunately, the US policy remains set on trying to work with the military-led Pakistan to stabilise Afghanistan. Holbrooke’s remarks in his recent visit to Delhi, “You cannot stabilise Afghanistan without the participation of Pakistan as a legitimate concerned party,” are accurate enough, but the question you need to ask is “What kind of Pakistan, and led by whom?” Certainly not the people who call the shots today.

America
The evidence that has come from Wikileaks and the Mumbai attack case suggests that the people who run the country are deeply contaminated by the jihadist elements who have skillfully used the Afghan crisis to strengthen their own position, never mind that in the process they are undermining the fundamentals of Pakistan itself. They have adroitly played a double game with the United States. America may pay a price for this, but the cost to Pakistan could be greater. None of this should give India any comfort. Whether it succeeds or fails, the Pakistan Army will remain India’s bane for a long time to come.
For reasons of its own, the United States believes that promoting this Army serves its short term interests. But this has implications for us, be it in the short or the long term. The Pakistan Army is politically naïve and is particularly prone to miscalculation. This is the lesson of Operations Gibraltar and Grand Slam in August 1965, as well of the ill-fated crackdown in Dhaka on March 23, 1971. Now this Army is also the custodian of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons which makes the challenge of dealing with the situation very difficult indeed.
India’s situation is fraught. It has foolishly depended on Washington to keep Islamabad in check. Now that America’s own determination is fraying, New Delhi is floundering.
Unfortunately, it is not as though any Republican-dominated system will make a difference to the situation. Given current trends, the party seems to be veering towards Sarah Palin’s way. There is probably little to choose between a wimpy Obama Administration and the flaky Palinesque Republicans.
This article appeared in Mail Today July 29, 2010

Headley revelations question the premises of the government's Pakistan policy

Fifteen years separate the bomb blasts that shook Mumbai in March 1993 and took more than 250 lives, and the jihadi commando assault of November 2008 where 157 people were gunned down. A lot changed in that period apparently except one thing—the unrelenting hostility of the Pakistani establishment towards India. This has been brought home to us from the remarks on Tuesday of the National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon who confirmed what Home Secretary G.K. Pillai had said earlier: That the Headley interrogation had revealed that there are clear links between the terrorists, official establishments and intelligence agencies in Pakistan. And, in Menon’s bleak words, “the link was getting stronger”.
The NSA’s remarks came a day after Pakistan signed a trade and transit deal with Afghanistan, one that barred India from transit trade with Kabul. The triumphal manner in which this was reported in the Pakistani media suggests just how far we are from the prospect of friendly relations with Islamabad. But the big question that Menon’s remarks raise is: Is there any use at all in trying to befriend Pakistan? Should we not shift our perspective a bit and begin viewing Pakistan as an adversary which needs to be contained, rather than a country waiting to be befriended?

Sentimentalist
What the Headley revelations do is to raise questions about the very premises of this government’s Pakistan policy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s belief that there can be normality in the near term is pious sentimentalism. India, despite its size and good wishes cannot transform Pakistan; all it can do— and aim to do— is to manage its relations with its important neighbour.


In the 15 years between the two set of atrocities in Mumbai, India made a major effort to befriend Pakistan by seeking to resolve the disputes between the two sides and putting in place a trade and visa regime that would promote people-to-people ties. The engagement was sustained even as Pakistani terror offensive against India intensified in the late 1990s. It did achieve some success, but if you do the sums you will find that we have failed to make any dent in the basically hostile strategic outlook of Pakistan towards India.
Pakistan has been much more focused. It has obtained a water sharing deal from India and now seeks an Indian withdrawal from Siachen and Sir Creek, and a resolution of the Kashmir issue favouring its position. All of these require Indian concessions. It has steadfastly refused to provide anything in exchange— MFN status for India, transit rights for Afghanistan and Central Asia, leave alone the cessation of terrorism. After all, India is an adversary nation.
The main details of the Pakistani complicity in the 1993 blasts came through Yakub Memon who surrendered in 1994. He revealed that the ISI took people from the Mumbai underworld, trained them in the use of weapons and explosives and sent them back to wreak havoc in the city. In 2008, the principal evidence of Pakistani official involvement has come through the agency of David Coleman Headley. The US is silent as are our Indian investigators who actually interrogated him. But statements of Pillai, and now Menon, confirm the worst.



The failure of the recent talks between the External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi has been attributed in part to GK Pillai’s statement that the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate was involved in the 2008 Mumbai operation from the beginning to the end. Mr Pillai does tend to misspeak, and you can question the timing of his statement. But surely there is something bizarre about taking umbrage to his timing but not what he said. And what he said is indeed sensational. If an agency of the Pakistan government was involved in the Mumbai attack, why is India bothering to talk peace with that government?
The Indian government’s policy works on the belief that there is a tussle between the civilian and military wings of the Pakistan establishment, and that it is in India’s strategic interest to back the civilians so as to forever marginalise the self-appointed guardians of the Islamic Republic— the Pakistan Army.
All this is possibly true, but not on a practical timeline. Policy is usually made for a two to five year time horizon, with a perspective of, say, ten years. The civilians may triumph in Pakistan, but given present trends, they will do so at an indeterminate time in the future which has no practical benefit for India.

Power
The policy would make sense if there was an actual struggle. The person who had the political clout to challenge the Army—Benazir Bhutto is dead, assassinated, many say, by the instrumentality of the Pakistan Army itself. Asif Ali Zardari lacks the political authority or credibility to pose even a mild challenge to the military establishment. As for Nawaz Sharif, he, too, has taken on the Army, but was bested. He was a creation of the military establishment to start with and his quarrel was with Pervez Musharraf and there is nothing to show that he is keen to take on the military again.
At this juncture, the military controls what it wants to in Pakistan. What it doesn’t is not significant from the politico-military point of view, and so has been left for Zardari, Gilani and Co to look after. The dismal conclusion from this is that India’s efforts to “befriend” Pakistan are misguided and futile. This is not to say India and Pakistan cannot ever be friends, but that in the near term— for which policy is usually made— they are unlikely to be so.
There was a time, till just a year or so ago, when many in the Indian system thought that “flexible engagement” could be a viable option—engage Pakistan where possible and contain it when necessary. But Menon’s Tuesday speech seems to suggest that this is not working and, in fact, things are getting more difficult. In these circumstances, the only option open to India is to resort to a policy of containment.

Containment
This means emphasising that it is not friendship that we seek with Pakistan, but the ability to manage a difficult situation in a difficult region, with a nuclear-armed adversary. Instead of seeing the relations in a framework of give and take, we need to underscore that our ties will be based on reciprocity. In other words, treat Pakistan as an equal, notwithstanding the actual asymmetry of the size and economies of the two countries.
This is the kind of mental shift that the United States made with the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 1970s. One of the more urgent requirements of this should be the effort to try and freeze the nuclear arsenals to lock the nuclear relationship with Pakistan on the basis of parity. This undergirded the Lahore agreement of 1999 and its logic has become more manifest in the years since.
Containment is not a military doctrine, but a politico-military one. Even while focusing on structures to keep peace with our neighbour, we must enhance our own deterrence capabilities and at the same time aggressively combat the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism and militarism across the wider region.
Mao Zedong once said that one must despise one’s enemies strategically, but respect them tactically. The Indian tendency has been to do the opposite. We have tended to elevate in our minds the ideological mishmash that passes off as Pakistan’s raison d'être, but only fitfully dealt with Islamabad’s effective covert operations and diplomacy across the region, if not the world.
This article appeared in Mail Today July 22, 2010