Help Pakistan, despite its own follies

It has been more than a week since the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the furore it has created simply refuses to die down. Mostly, of course, the tumult is now a great deal about Pakistan’s bluster, matched evenly by Indian bravado.
It doesn’t take much to see where Islamabad is coming from. A country which has made mendacity an intrinsic part of its national policy is compelled to rant when caught out. But just what accounts for the bluster and boast that we are seeing from New Delhi? Can it be the fact that the United States has walked the talk in its promise of getting its man dead or alive, while India can only gnash its teeth and moan about the opportunities it has lost in the past?
Some Indian pain comes from the false comparisons that are being made between Indian and American capabilities and circumstances. Take just the satellites—the US would have had the use of half-a-dozen of a kind India will probably take another thirty years to acquire— the 18 tonne KH-12 satellite which can provide real time imagery of interest from space, the Lacrosse radar satellite which can provide the imagery through bad weather, the Intruder which snoops on communications traffic and so on. Besides the billion dollars or so it takes to build a satellite, you need a launch vehicle of the Delta IV or Soyuz class
which can hoist 10-20 tonne satellites to low earth or geosynchronous orbit.

Circumstances
The stealth helicopter that the Americans used is of a class that no other country in the world possesses. The Pakistan Air Force chief may now claim that his radars were not active, but his initial statement was that the radars failed to pick up the American helicopters. Being in the Islamabad air defence zone, there is no way that the radars would have been inactive.
More important, are the circumstances, and possible consequences of an operation launched by the US, and one launched by India. Let’s be clear, if the US operation had come apart, it would have led to great embarrassment for the Americans. Success, as you can see, has led to a great deal of tension between Washington and Islamabad, but they still remain on talking terms. At the end of the day, both need each other, albeit for different purposes. And this mutual dependency does generate a degree of moderation in their discourse.
An Indian operation, on the other hand— success or a failure— would have almost certainly triggered off a wider war. This is because Pakistan perceives itself as India’s rival, while despite poor relations it is used to being a surrogate of sorts of the US. There should be no surprise that while Islamabad feels  humiliated by the bin Laden killing, it also feels that the asymmetry between it and the US is much too great to convert its anger into a practical policy of retaliation. The US is, after all, half-a-globe away.
In the case of India, however, not only would Islamabad feel compelled to retaliate, it also has the wherewithal to do so. India may prevail in a long war with Pakistan, but no war between two nuclear armed countries is going to be a long one. And for a short one, the ratio between the land forces the two sides can deploy is roughly even. In any case, war, with a possible nuclear outcome, is not something that anyone should contemplate with equanimity, even though some of our hawks think we are being over-cautious. And therein lies India’s frustration, and the recourse of its hawks to false bravado.
And so we come to the issue of the policy that India needs to adopt towards Pakistan. In the past ten days, since Osama was sent to his maker, there has been a torrent of criticism of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that Pakistani duplicity undermines the very basis of his peace policy. This would be true if you accept the simplistic, and indeed caricature, version of Pakistani reality trundled out by our chicken hawks. In this version, everyone and everything in Pakistan is duplicitous and therefore there is little use in negotiating with them.
There is nothing wrong in holding that belief, but the question that the hawks must answer is: If Manmohan Singh’s flexible engagement is not the right policy, what would they suggest?

Policy
We hear a great deal about why Mr Singh is wrong to engage with Pakistan, but his critics do not provide a coherent and sustainable policy option. Neti, neti, may be good philosophy, but it’s no substitute for policy.
Talks with Pakistan may yield little. But at least they have the value of maintaining an engagement with some parts of the fractured Pakistani deep state. It also has the benefit of keeping international opinion on our right side. At a time when Pakistan is trying to get the US to nudge India out of Afghanistan, engagement with Islamabad, howsoever cosmetic, serves to  signal that our relations with Pakistan are not as bad as Islamabad claims they are.
Given the balance of forces, war is not a viable option between India and Pakistan. No one will doubt that the Indian military will fight with great bravery if asked to do so. But can a war deliver the outcome of our choice — an end to Pakistan’s support for terrorism? The lesson of all wars is that it is one thing to initiate it, quite another to be able to control its course and consequences.
Pakistan is a far more complex problem than what many of our hawks assume. It does not have the clinical pathology of a schizophrenic. That would be simple indeed. Its dangerously fractured polity has now been seriously compromised by the power of Islamism.
 The political power of the Pakistani deep state is divided between the civilian politicians and the Army. But today both these institutions have been neutered. The civilians have been battered by the street power of the jihadists and the Tehreek-e-Taliban’s suicide bombers. More dangerously, perhaps, the Army and its Inter Services Intelligence Directorate may now have Islamist networks  operating within, unbeknownst to their leadership. This can explain both, as to how Osama bin Laden came to be living in the Abbottabad compound, and how elements in the ISI provided the wherewithal for the Mumbai
operation.
Brink
The civilians acknowledge  this openly, but the army is paying the price for trying to put a lid on it. That explains why, despite suffering huge losses in its battle with jihadists, the Pak army is hesitating to clinch the war in North Waziristan. The army, which has always seen itself as the guardian of Pakistan, is clinging even more desperately to its national flag.
The rhetoric about breaches of Pakistan’s sovereignty and humiliation acquires a nationalistic narrative instead of being allowed to gain the jihadist twist. Given Pakistan’s history, a lot of that nationalism translates easily into anti-Indian jingoism. A bit of schadenfreude may be fine but anti-Pakistani jingoism would  hardly be the appropriate response here.
The Pakistani deep establishment which was flying high for so many decades, is visibly stalling and so our effort must be to ensure its soft landing, rather than permit a devastating crash.
Mail Today May 12, 2011

A note on Special Forces

General  V.K. Singh’s  claim that India can launch special forces operations-- of the kind the United States did to kill Osama bin Laden-- probably reflects the esprit de corps of the para-commandos, of whom the Army Chief counts himself as one, rather than a true assessment of our capabilities. 

In fact there are only two countries which have displayed an ability to launch high-risk, virtually  suicidal operations, in modern times—Israel and the US.

India does have Special Forces, but they have been largely used as a kind of super-infantry where they are employed on missions which the regular infantry would baulk at. We don’t lack brave men, but we don’t possess the combination of political will, politico-military-intelligence integration and specialized technology that makes these operations possible. Special Forces work is a full-time job requiring specialized language and cultural skills which cannot be acquired if you are also deployed in routine military duties.

We also do not have the desperation of Israel which launches such operations because it believes that its national survival is at stake. Neither do we have the ferocious determination and technological prowess of the world’s sole super-power, which has used military as an instrument of foreign policy through much of its history. A great deal of technology, of course, goes with the ability to launch them. The US with its enormous constellation of surveillance, Elint and Comint satellites has a great advantage. It is also far ahead of most countries in stealth technology and the debris of the destroyed helicopter in the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad indicates that it was a stealth machine which successfully spoofed the Pakistani air defence radars. Claims that the Pakistani radars were inactive can’t be taken seriously since Abbottabad is in the air defence zone of Islamabad/Rawalpindi area.

By their very nature, true Special Forces  operations are fraught with not just physical danger, but grave political consequences arising from failure. A goof-up in Abbottabad would have led not only to the possible capture and deaths of the US Navy Seals, but a possible sinking of the Obama presidency.

The disaster that hit Operation Eagle Claw through which President Jimmy Carter sought to end the crisis arising from American diplomats being held hostage by Iranians in April 1980 not only sank his re-election chances, but also poisoned Iran-US relations thereafter. One problem of Eagle Claw was the lack of cohesiveness of the various elements—the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marines.

In India, the three Services cooperate only in name. The Air Force doesn’t do night flying on helicopters, but the Navy does, but neither will cooperate with the Army on a sustained basis. And all three of them have the poorest of relations with the Research & Analysis Wing which, in any case, lacks the covert operations culture which is vital for such operations. 

One thing that Indian commanders who say they can do an Abbottabad do not realise, is the enormous technological assets that the US has brought into play. The MH-60 Blackhawk that the US crashed in Osama’s compound, was modified by the Joint Special Forces Command’s technology division to be stealthy. Considerable surveillance by satellites which we can only dream about possessing, were deployed along with human intelligence resources.

The key issue in Special Operations is political leadership. The US JSOC may have supervision of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Special Forces, but their missions are cleared by the President himself, because they have ramifications far wider than the world of the military or intelligence services.

Besides political leadership, Indian Special Forces require to have a far better working relationship with our intelligence services. Here we are talking of integrating two cultures—that of the armed forces and that of the civilian intelligence personnel, who would not only be people in R&AW, but NTRO, IB and those dealing with geospatial imagery. In this matrix, whether they have the right kind of body armour, assault gun, grenade or pistol, is really secondary. Actually India has the Special Frontier Force under the R&AW, which was originally created for operations in Tibet, but it has now become obsolete and it is not clear what the mission of the force currently is.

Reviews of two recent books on Pakistan

IN SOME ways these books are complementary and their basic goal is to try and understand what Pakistan is all about, and the dynamics of the social, political and ideological developments taking place there. While Riedel, a former CIA officer, sees his task as one to propose a course of action in dealing with Pakistan, Lieven, a former journalist and now academic, seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the country, its institutions and people. He has examined the structures of the Islamic republic — its justice system, religious tensions, its vaunted military and syncopated politics, and the rise of the Taliban.
But, he insists, Pakistan is neither a failing, nor a failed state. Ironically one of his most emphatic judgments (and he makes many) is that the Pakistan Army would be able to hold its own against all the challenges because of its discipline and unity and the only thing that could change this is a US invasion which the officer-class failed to oppose. This would put the Pakistani soldiers in a dilemma of obeying their commanders or responding emotionally as Muslims opposed to US activities in the region.
This is the perspective with which we must see the Pakistani reaction to the Osama killing. The establishment may not be complicit in his presence in the country, but it cannot afford to be seen as having done nothing while the US entered the country and carried out the operation. Nationalism, of the Pakistan Army variety, is therefore a means through which the GHQ seeks to keep the radicalisation of the forces at bay.
While Lieven has provided a sympathetic portrait of Pakistan, his prescriptions are somewhat one-sided. He calls for India and the US to accommodate Islamabad’s concerns over Afghanistan, and for Sino-US cooperation to assist Pakistan whose real challenge is not so much Washington and New Delhi, but the ecological challenge — primarily the water stress — that the country faces.
Lieven’s arguments on the need to cherish and respect Pakistan are all right, but his solutions  seem to demand more from others than from Islamabad.
The only way in which Pakistan’s security and its well-being can be assured in the longer run is the integration of the country into larger regional framework. But as long as Pakistan insists on seeing itself as the fortress of Islam and  its relations with the US, Afghanistan and India in zero-sum terms, it cannot get on to a workable track.

It is only through better ties with New Delhi that Pakistan can also handle what he himself calls its central problem — water stress. Actually both India and Pakistan have recognised through summit meetings in January 2004 that the best means of muting their conflict is through a regional framework where Islamabad can deal with New Delhi without feeling that it is being dominated by India. The regional framework also provides the best possible way of resolving the Kashmir issue and that of Afghanistan’s border dispute with Pakistan. The emergence of a genuine South Asian Free Trade Area cannot but have benign political consequences. This is also a means by which external forces like the US, which are, as Lieven recognises, an anathema to Pakistanis, can be kept out. But Islamabad resists any effort to open up.
Riedel’s sweeping narrative and analyses sometimes misses the mark, or states the obvious. For example he places the IC814 hijack along with other terrorist actions by the Mullah Omar-Al Qaeda combine. But that’s not true. It was an autonomous action, the fourth or fifth in a series of hostage taking whose aim was to obtain the freedom of Masood Azhar. Equally, his claim that Ilyas Kashmiri was involved in the Delhi kidnaps in September 1994 also seems to be at variance with facts.
The organiser of this was Ahmed Sayeed Omar Sheikh, the British-Pakistani who is serving a life sentence in Pakistan for killing Daniel Pearl. Lastly, Riedel’s prescription on Kashmir — LoC as a permeable international border — is precisely what India and Pakistan have been discussing since 2005.
Riedel is right in saying that the only way to “change Pakistani behaviour is to engage Pakistan.” But the problem is the nature of the engagement. After all, the US has been engaged with Pakistan for a long time, but few will disagree with the fact that its returns have been mixed.

He is right in his short-term red lines that Pakistan must follow — avoid giving sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban and promoting the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. But he, like Lieven, ignores the less glamourous, albeit slower, process of trying to fashion a larger South Asian area, by building economic and people-to-people relationships which will alter mindsets, without necessarily touching borders.
The issue is quite simple — will India and Pakistan need to resolve their well-known problems before they can become friends, or will a process of growing engagement create the conditions in which the two can become friends, allay suspicions and resolve their outstanding problems.
I for one would place my bets on the latter course.
Mail Today May 8, 2011

A victory in the long war against terrorism

Machiavelli is the author of the saying “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Islamabad was certainly practising what the author of The Prince advocated: The hideout where Osama bin Laden was killed was a stone’s throw from Pakistan Military Academy, the headquarters of a Pakistani army division and the regimental centres of the Frontier Force and the Baloch Regiments. In the parlance of covert operations, such places are called “safe houses” and what could be safer than a house in the middle of a cantonment?
The relationship between Islamabad and Washington has been somewhat strange. The Pakistanis have ostensibly delivered all the Al Qaeda figures they could lay their hands on  for what is now a total of $20 billion in aid. At the same time, the Pakistani establishment has provided support and sanctuary to the Taliban, the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group and the Haqqani network which is fighting the US in Afghanistan. The Americans have been fully aware of this double game, but been able to do little about it. Will Osama’s killing change things?
 
Questions
Speaking to the nation, and indeed the world, US President Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that the operation was an entirely American affair and any information about it was conveyed to the Pakistani authorities only after the deed was done. A report of a meeting in Islamabad convened by President Asif Zardari and attended,  among others, by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the heads of various intelligence agencies notes, “The meeting was told that the Pakistan forces did not take part in the operation and the operation was done under the US policy and Pakistan was informed after the completion of operation.”




For a man who had vanished into the thin air after that battle in Tora Bora in the winter of 2001, there are a lot of answers that the world will be looking for. Some will be forthcoming through his autopsy which the Americans will have no doubt conducted. For example, was he in need of regular dialysis? Second, there will be questions about his whereabouts in these years and his relations, if any,  with Pakistani authorities. The answer to this, too, will be forthcoming since the US has custody of his wives and children who will no doubt be debriefed. In addition there is an unspecified number of persons captured at the site who will provide some answers.
There are some questions that Pakistan, too, needs to answer in a credible fashion. Principally, who owned the building where Osama was staying? We should not forget that all the top Al Qaeda leaders who have been arrested till now were found in Pakistani safehouses—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshib in Karachi, Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad. We are being told that the national identity card of the house-owner was bogus and that no such person exists. How convenient!
Just as the rise of bin Laden had consequences for the world, so could his sudden death. His killing took place at a time when the Arab world has been hit by a string of what are clearly secular revolts—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria. It is quite clear, as of now, that the Islamists have taken a back seat and that the popular anger against authoritarian rule has been led by the rising middle-class, rather than a bunch of fanatics who want to take the region, if not the world into the medieval ages. So, bin Laden’s end could be the signal that the high tide of jihadism which was unleashed by the American-Saudi jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, is now ebbing.
In Pakistan, there are two possible outcomes. One, that his death will mark the beginning of the end of the Al Qaeda led anti-American war in Afghanistan and the elimination of the groups which were propped up by the outfit—the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Haqqani network and the loose coalition of Punjabi militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Harkat-ul-mujahideen and so on and
so forth.
 
Consequences
On the other hand, the event could actually intensify the anti-American movement in Pakistan and serve to re-energise the jihadists and their constituency. This is, after all, a country where the murderer of Salman Taseer was feted by the middle-class lawyers of Lahore. Radicals of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba know that the US will use the occasion to push the Pakistan army into an offensive in North Waziristan. And if the US has additional information on the possible complicity of some Pakistani officials in shielding bin Laden, they would gain a major leverage against the generals in Rawalpindi who are procrastinating. 
The consequences of Osama’s death will be indirect in India, though they could be important. Despite periodic alarums, the Al Qaeda did not operate in India and had no “India” chapter. The link comes through Pakistani militant groups that had allied themselves to the Al Qaeda and who shared their Wahabbist religious outlook such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba.  But even the Lashkar which focuses its operations on India, has by-and-large avoided recruiting Indian Muslims. Their operations, such as the Mumbai attack were handled exclusively by Pakistani and Pakistani-origin Muslims, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by the Mumbai police.
But, if the US learns that there was much greater complicity of Pakistani officials in giving sanctuary to Osama, things could be different. For the past several years, the US has made its distrust of Pakistan quite clear; even while it has provided Islamabad with billions of dollars of aid, it has stopped sharing vital information, such as planned drone strikes with their Pakistani counterparts. The recent relationship between the two countries has been rocky. Last week, the Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Dawn newspaper “It is fairly well known that the ISI has a long standing relationship with the Haqqani network [which] is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners… but that’s the core that I think is the most difficult part of the relationship [between the US and Pakistan].” 
 
Win
But winning one battle does not constitute victory in a war. The death of bin Laden can be a beginning of a process, but one which we cannot take for granted. The Al Qaeda idea has spread far and wide and while it is unlikely that another leader of Osama bin Laden’s calibre will emerge, there will be many smaller bin Ladens around.
The United States needs to carefully use the occasion of bin Laden’s death to shift the momentum against the jihadists in a definitive manner.
They have shown great courage and determination in planning and executing the covert operation that netted Osama, but now they need equal political common sense and hard diplomacy to consolidate their gains.
Mail Today May 3, 2011

A marriage made in hell has lessons for us all

What would you say of a relationship where the enemy of one partner is the ally of the other? Not much, I am sure. Well that’s the short description of the US-Pakistani marriage. Even as the Al Qaeda-Taliban alliance kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan provides the former sanctuary, aid and even direction. And Islamabad remains, for the record, a major partner in what the Americans used to once call the Global War on Terror.
This twisted relationship is the burden of the latest tranche of Wikileaks documents published by The New York Times and The Guardian which relate to the 2004-2007 period. The more recent contretemps —where Islamabad has demanded a curtailment of drone strikes and CIA activities in Pakistan— have been about Pakistan’s insistence that the only condition under which it will continue its relationship with the US is within the bounds of this somewhat lethal ménage à trois.



Alliance
Subsequent American decision-makers were not so shrewd. Under the influence of Cold War hawk John Foster Dulles, the US armed Pakistan to the point where superiority in armour, artillery and air force propelled Islamabad to make war with India in August-September 1965. And this was just the beginning.
In the second instance, in the 1980s, the US indulgence was more serious. Non-proliferation, a central tenet of US policy at the time, was simply ignored as Washington looked away when Pakistan stole and otherwise obtained nuclear weapons and missiles from a variety of sources.
In the third instance, the US, but for a brief period in 1992-3, ignored Pakistani state involvement with terrorist activity against India. It was only when the US was attacked in 2001 did Washington change its position. Even then, it displayed enormous forbearance, as has been brought out by the Guantanamo tranche of the Wikileaks documents, which indicate that the US has a great deal of evidence of official Pakistani complicity in terrorism.
And these documents only pertain to what passed through the Pentagon’s SiprNet system which was allegedly accessed by Bradley Manning who gave the documents to Julian Assange. The information available with the CIA and other US intelligence agencies could conceivably be much greater.
Yet, in the 2000-2007 period, the US again took an indulgent view of Pakistan, heaping aid and honours (grant of major non-NATO ally status in 2004) on Islamabad. But today the situation has changed.
But now Pakistan is no longer a factor that will make a difference between defeat and victory in Afghanistan—it is the factor that is contributing to what looks like an imminent American defeat, or retreat from Afghanistan.
 
Interests
Nothing concentrates the mind, like the guillotine or the prospect of defeat. American leaders are now talking a different language. Many observers think that the issue has come to head because of the drone campaign. That’s not true. The US has, with Pakistani permission and from Pakistani bases, been using drones to attack the Al Qaeda-Taliban militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan for several years. It is true, of course, that the drone issue is inextricably tangled with the mess that is the US-Pakistan relationship.
The principal US drone strikes have been in North Waziristan  which the Pakistan army has avoided entering because it is the place where its principal ally in its duplicitous Afghan game is located—the Haqqanis, father and son and proxies that can be used against India and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The US has avoided strikes in the Quetta region or elsewhere because of Pakistani sensitivities.   The Pakistanis are now using the threat to evict the US from the bases from which drone strikes are launched, to express their anger against the US’ counter-terrorism activities from Pakistani soil against targets that Islamabad cherishes, such as the Haqqanis, tribal allies like Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Mullah Nazir as well as the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. Given this situation, the US has had little alternative but to bypass the ISI.
 What seems to have immediately got Islamabad’s goat is the American effort to check the activities of the LeT which in its reckoning has become a major danger to the US. The LeT was reportedly the target of the activities of Raymond Davis and several American CIA operatives.
What has worried the US are the cross connections between the Al Qaeda, Taliban and Pakistani militants like Ilyas Kashmiri as well as what could be rogue ISI personnel, or those who are acting on behalf of the outfit on the basis of plausible deniability.
For its part, Islamabad is simply not willing to let go of the Haqqanis and the LeT, entities in which it has invested so heavily.
 
Illusions
The Pakistani attitude to the conflict in Afghanistan is somewhat curious. On one hand, it is a fact that the Pakistan Army has been fighting a tough campaign in the tribal areas of the country to defeat the Tehreek-e-Taliban. But, by staying out of North Waziristan, it is betraying the very sacrifices that Pakistani soldiers are making elsewhere. Because, it is well known that almost every kind of militant that opposes the Pakistani state is holed up in that area as well.
The Pakistanis do not want to act in that region because militant groups they consider vital for their policy of gaining control of Afghanistan in the post-US withdrawal scenario are located there.  In short, the national interests of the two allies in the war against terrorism are clashing head-on and there seems to be little room available for compromise.
The illusion Islamabad suffers from is that time stands still and a return of the Taliban would mean a country once again dominated by Pakistan. The last ten years of conflict have changed the Taliban’s composition and outlook. Taliban attitudes towards Pakistan vary from pragmatic opportunism to outright contempt. The Taliban need Pakistani sanctuary, but to expect them to be grateful for it after they win— presuming of course that they do— would be naivete of the highest order.
Recent statements suggest that the US has become more realistic in its assessment of what Islamabad can’t do, and what it can but won’t. But that does not alter the fact that the world’s foremost military power, the United States, is confronted with a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ scenario. If it were not for the fact that the outcome of this relationship has a bearing on India’s well being, one could have been pardoned for a sense of schadenfreude.
Mail Today April 28, 2011

There is more to change than mere laws

Indians  seem to have a love affair with laws. They imbue them with talismanic properties, and so they have laws for the right to information, the right to education, to prohibt dowry, pre-natal determination of a child’s sex, child labour, and a basic law on the right to work. A law to guarantee food for all is currently being debated within government. And now there is a demand for a law  to fight corruption.
No doubt the fertile National Advisory Council has some more exciting laws in mind for the future. All this is despite the   experience which shows that laws, especially those that seek to alter social behaviour,  don’t always work —  think of the continuing problem of dowry, female foeticide, caste discrimination and child labour. 


Looked at one way, there could be an argument that this faith in the letter of a law is born out of a desire to force the pace of modernisation. In today’s India, sadly, it also reflects a bureaucratisation of politics, where social reform and entitlements are dished out by a benevolent government and bureaucracy, rather than through a process of politics that shapes society and is in turn shaped by it.
In that sense, it represents an atrophying of our mainstream political parties who are content to rule through grandstanding, usually to TV cameras, rather than undertake the hard work of educating and mobilising public opinion towards desired end. In such a climate of lassitude, evil triumphs, be it in the case of sex determination which is preventing millions of girls from taking birth, or the brutal rule of the misogynist and anti-social khap panchayats of Haryana and Western UP. 

Middle-class 
In greater measure it represents a lack of understanding of the fact that the elimination of social evils, and affirmation of human rights, are products of social, political and historical processes, not merely laws. A law is just the codification  by a legislative body to a social or political demand. These thoughts come to mind as we look at the Anna Hazare phenomenon.
 Corruption has been a slow burning fuse in India. But in 2010, it flared up with the revelation of a spate of scams and scandals across the country. It began, arguably, with the IPL episode that led to the downfall of Lalit Modi and Shashi Tharoor, and was followed up in quick succession by  the long-playing CWG fiasco, accompanied by the CAG’s confirmation of the scale of the 2G spectrum scam, the UP humongous food scam and culminating in the arrest of Hasan Ali, who had allegedly stashed tens of billions of dollars abroad for corrupt politicians and officials. 
To the horror of the middle class even the revered Indian Army got embroiled in the process through the Sukhna and Adarsh society scams.
 Many have commented on the middle class nature of  Hazare’s support. Perhaps this is a fact, if so, it is probably what persuaded the government to compromise. Revolutions are  a middle class phenomenon as the English, French and even Russian revolutions reveal. The middle class  was central to the upsurge against Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s. And it was the class which gave us the independence movement and our first wave of reform in the late 19th and early 20th century.  
Sadly  the  Indian middle class of today cannot be compared to their counterparts in Europe who provided a leavening to the European advance — Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Lord Keynes, Hegel, Darwin —  to take a few random names.
 Our middle class of today produces great managers, scientists and economists, but its philosophers, social reformers and academics occupy the margins of an intellectual wasteland.  For the bulk of the Indian middle class, intellectual inspiration, if you can call it that,  comes from new age gurus like Ramdev, Jaggi Vasudev, Sri Sri Ravishankar, Sai Baba and others.
 Like all middle classes, the Indian one is  vocal, and its sense of outrage — often self-centered and hypocritical — is magnified by the 24x7 news channels and newspapers, particularly the influential publications in the English language. So our politicians — themselves Grade A rascals —  feel compelled to heed them.
Mature democracies have all gone through the stages we have, but in time that spans hundreds of years. Child labour played an important role in the industrialisation of England in the early 19th century and in the United States in the last part of that century.  Criminalised politics, mass prostitution and ill-treatment of women, the poor and the under-classes were all features of democracies whose societies are the envy of the world today.

Progressive
 In some ways India is  at the point where the United States began its Progressive movement, whose emphasis was on rationalism, pragmatism and democracy, an effort whose bottom line was to create a political apparatus which could meet the needs of a country that had undergone profound economic and social change.
 Late 19th century US had all the social evils we see around us today — the oppression (reinforced by violence) of blacks, criminalised and corrupt politics, predatory businessmen who thought nothing of manipulating governments and stock markets, child labour, gender oppression, extreme exploitation of labour, especially that of migrants.
The Progressive movement was not one coherent affair. It spanned several decades and involved many  political currents and counter-currents. It was illuminated by the writing of “muckrackers” like Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and writers like Upton Sinclair and buttressed by the work of intellectuals like Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. And it involved thousands of middle-class activists, writers, lawyers, journalists, clergymen and social workers.

Process
 By World War I, it had helped break up business monopolies, regulated railroad competition, created vast national parks, modernised municipal governance, promoted direct elections to the US Senate and strengthened the power of the federal government. It was in this era that the steel baron Andrew Carnegie began a trend when he sold his business and gave away his entire fortune for education, research and peace. It was also the era that gave birth to  voluntarism in the US.
An anti-corruption movement requires far greater depth than the one that went into the Anna Hazare fast. Reform movements around the world have come about in clusters in the 1830s, 1860s and 1920s  in  UK,  in the 1830s, 1900s and 1930s in the US.  Reform occurs in a  certain climate and covers multiple subjects — education, health, temperance, the rights of labour and so on. The activists often straddle several interests. Jyotiba Phule was involved in movements to uplift Dalits, gender equality and reforming religion.Gandhi’s various interests, too, are well known.
The reformist impulse in the first half of the 20th century yielded laws, passed immediately after independence, leading to universal franchise, abolition of landlordism, reservations for Dalits and the codification of the Hindu personal laws. They were underpinned by the huge effort of  intellectuals and  activists too numerous to name here. And, most important, they drove the politics of the nation, not professional politicians.  
Mao once said that a revolution is not a dinner party. It need not be the charnel house he created in China, but neither can it be a flash mob that gathers for a weekend of agitation and then disperses. Political, social and intellectual change must march in a mutually reinforcing lock-step. A law is — or ought to be — merely a final legal stamp of a forward advance which is already with us.
Mail Today April 22, 2011