Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has done well to clarify that the exercise of lifting the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was initiated by the Cabinet Committee on Security, and is not being done on a whim by Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. Not surprisingly, the CCS is working on a political agenda aimed at restoring normalcy in the state, and the idea of lifting the heavy hand of security forces there has emanated from the Union government.
There is, of course, the well known position of the Indian Army, and the other security forces, who are dead set against any such move, claiming that it will give wind to the sail of the separatists and lower the morale of the forces. So vehement is their opposition that Minister of Defence, A K Antony, who is a member of the CCS, is said to be siding with them. Never mind that the Kashmir police chief S.M. Sahai is confident that state forces can deal with the situation on their own.
Across the world, in areas of conflict, there is often an unusual phenomenon—that of various parties developing a vested interest in its continuance. This seems to be the case with Israel, where hardliners of the Jewish state seem to be as wary of any efforts to promote peace, as are the extremists of the Hamas and Hezbollah.
Flexibility
The three are, to paraphrase Eliot, united in the strife that divides them. An onset of peace would undermine their positions with their respective people.
Are we witnessing a similar phenomenon in Kashmir and elsewhere in India? Have security bureaucracies who’ve gained enormous power and influence in the period of troubles developed a vested interest with the militants in ensuring that there’s no return to normalcy?
Ironically, they seem to be whistling against the wind. Peace seems determined to set in. Let us take the North-east, the region for which the AFSPA was initially mooted. It shows a varying but positive trend. Violence has been declining in Assam and Tripura and remains low in states like Meghalaya and Arunachal. In Nagaland and Mizoram, once affected by full-blown insurgencies, no security force personnel has been killed in the last two years. The only problem state really is Manipur, but more because of the nature of the militancy there, rather than any special threat to the security forces.
The Kashmir situation, is another case in point. Official figures show that there has been a sharp decline in violence since 2008 in terms of the conventional metrics—the numbers of civilians, security personnel and terrorists killed. The one issue that bothers the security establishment are the continued attempts, some quite intense, of militants trying to breach the Line of Control from Pakistan. The good news is that most of the attempts are thwarted and only a handful of militants actually get through.
So while there is a case for the continuance of the AFSPA in the areas around the LoC, where the chances of an armed clash are high, there is no reason why the state should not consider lifting it from some hinterland areas. And that is indeed what it has been contemplating. According to reports, it was considering lifting the disturbed area notification for the districts of Budgam and Srinagar.
The AFSPA was conceived of as a flexible instrument through which emergency could be imposed in specific areas, rather than the country as a whole. So it was originally imposed in the North-Eastern states and, in July of 1990, the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act was passed. It was applied in conjunction with the Disturbed Areas Act passed by the state government in the same year. Initially the AFSPA was only applied in the Valley and the 20 km area around the Line of Control.
Denial
When, by 2000, the situation in other parts of the state had deteriorated, the AFSPA was invoked in the Jammu division and thus came to cover Jammu, Poonch, Rajouri, Doda, Kathua and Udhampur.
But what could expand, clearly does not seem able to contract. Unfortunately, this very flexibility is in question when the Army refuses to consider the partial revocation of the AFSPA. The reason why the Army has taken such a position is not difficult to see. In recent years there have been some serious charges against it of extra-judicial killings and even outright murder.
The way in which the AFSPA is misused is evident from what is called the Pathribal case. On March 20, 2000, 35 Sikhs were gunned down by Lashkar-e-Tayyeba terrorists. Five days later the Army killed the alleged perpetrators at Pathribal in an intense gunfight that charred the bodies of the terrorists beyond recognition.
Public protests led to an exhumation of the dead, and DNA tests proved that those killed were local villagers, not any alleged militants. The CBI took up the investigation and indicted five Army officers, including a brigadier for killing five civilians and claiming they were militants.
The Army has challenged the right of the CBI to file a chargesheet without the sanction of the central government citing the AFSPA. Privately, the Army admits what it says was a goof up, but its stand is that it was misled by the state police’s Special Operations Group into killing the innocents and that while they were being indicted, the state police personnel were getting away scot-free.
Similar cases dot the tortured Kashmiri landscape. A Ministry of Defence reply to an RTI request said that between 1989 and 2011, the Kashmir state home department had sought sanction to prosecute in 50 cases as per the AFSPA. Of these 31 related to the Army and the others to the paramilitary. Sanction had been denied in 42 of the cases. In another affidavit of 2009, relating to another case, the MoD said it had not given permission for any of the 35 cases for which permission for prosecution had been sought. The Army refuses to see that a law as draconian as the AFSPA must also have draconian safeguards.
It is the power of the Indian democracy that it insists that its forces have the right to kill only through a legal statute. But that statute, and the concept of the rule of law, must be respected in letter and spirit.
Morale
That has clearly not been the case. While it has given the necessary protection to many security force personnel, some bad elements have misused its provisions to commit patently illegal acts. The problem with the armed forces leadership is that it is not willing to recognise this. Its actions seem to equate the illegal actions with the legal ones. Their somewhat lame excuse is that a rigorous application of the law of the land will affect the morale of the forces.
Nothing can be worse for the morale than for murderers to equate themselves with the soldiers who legally fight armed insurgents at the risk of their own lives. Or for the murderers to claim they have acted on behalf of the state and, worse, have their superior officers protect them. That is what the current application of the AFSPA seems to amount to.
Kashmir stands at an important cross-roads right now. The authorities there insist that they can manage the situation in some areas minus the AFSPA. The government can agree to their demand by withdrawing the Army from areas where the AFSPA no longer holds.
The people in the Valley who have voted for peace through their actions deserve a dividend. A partial withdrawal of the AFSPA will impart invaluable momentum to a normalisation process that is already under way.
Mail Today November 2, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Saturday, November 05, 2011
Lessons from Bush's terrible blunder
The American decision to withdraw from Iraq brings to an end a sorry episode of recent world history, where a country was rent apart by a superpower on the basis of delusion, and perhaps deceit. The Americans do not go as victors, and neither can the hapless Iraqis see themselves as such, even though the forcibly altered paradigm has led to the Shia majority coming into their own in what is now a trifurcated polity.
The one clear winner seems to be Iran, which has become the clearly dominant actor in the Persian Gulf, one step away from nuclear weapons, with an exhausted US being unable to do anything about it.
Even now it is difficult for the rest of the world to understand just why the United States invaded Iraq. There was, of course, the new doctrine of pre-emption enunciated by George W Bush in the wake of 9/11. But that, presumably, related to terrorism. The weapons of mass destruction threat that was subsequently trotted out was clearly a figment of someone’s imagination.
War
What seems more alarming is that the US was sucked into the war by Dick Cheney and his trusted exiled Iraqi contact, Ahmad Chalabi, who has a remarkably close relationship with Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever be the cause, it had the effect of distracting the US from the real war on hand—against the Taliban and assorted radicals under the leadership of the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iraqis and in their own way, the Americans, have paid a huge price for this folly, while the price in terms of opportunity cost in Afghanistan still remains to be computed.
Iraq is important to the military historian as well. It is the war that taught us lessons about the devastating abilities of what are called Revolution in Military Affairs technologies. But it also came with the counter-revolution where armies operating below these technological radar screens landed the American forces into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The “shock and awe” that the US promised was inflicted on Saddam Hussein’s army. So devastating were the precision long-range strikes, that in many cases the military formations were destroyed well before they reached the forward edge of battle. Indeed, where the usual norm is that divisions with 10 per cent casualties are considered hors de combat, Saddam’s divisions faced 40-50 per cent attrition. One estimate claimed that of the 2,500 artillery pieces he had started with, he was left with just 34 by the end of the war. Iraqi ineptitude played a significant role in this defeat. The poorly trained Iraqi forces were overwhelmed by the technological superiority of the Americans.
But once the American occupation of Iraq got under way, the nature of the war changed. Bombing, ambushes and assassinations became the norm and Iraq got divided into mutually hostile factions of Shia, Sunni and Kurd forces. Into this mix came the Islamists from across the world, determined to take the opportunity to make the US bleed.
It took a first-rate US general, David Petraeus, to recognise the problem and go about setting it right. The US had to change from a high-tech, shock and awe approach to one that stressed working with the local people and providing them security and then systematically helping them to rebuild the institutions that had collapsed in the wake of the American invasion and the overthrow of the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
Transformation
Simultaneously, another lesson was being learnt in another theatre. In 2006, Israel launched a 34-day campaign against the Hizbollah in Lebanon. Despite intense bombardment and attacks, the Hezbollah were able to maintain their forces and were able to put up a well-equipped, well networked force over which its leadership was capable of maintaining command and control right through the conflict. By operating among the Lebanese people and using dispersal and camouflage tactics, the Hezbollah were able to fight the high-tech Israelis to a standstill, even though, they underestimated the cost Lebanon would have to pay in terms of the destruction wreaked by the Israelis.
The key lesson of the Iraq war is that the armed forces of today need to be equipped and trained for a huge bandwidth, ranging from counter-insurgency (COIN) and counter-terrorism (CT) to conventional conflict and war involving weapons of mass destruction. This requires high quality commanders who have a synergistic relationship with their political leadership. This is because each COIN or CT situation has varying political nuances and dealing with them requires careful politico-military surgery.
It also requires a deep restructuring of the armed forces, in the way they are organised, trained and equipped. At one level it requires a new breed of special forces who are able to effectively engage local populations and assist in capacity building and advise local police and paramilitary forces. At another level it requires highly proficient soldiers and officers who can take advantage of modern technology and exploit it to their ends. As it is, it is apparent that to survive against a well trained force equipped with modern weapons requires great tactical skill and an ability to effectively use the terrain and adapt to circumstances. This is why the Hezbollah were able to survive the Israeli blitz of 2006.
Incidentally, one of the many lessons of these wars has been the limits of air power. Control of the air has little meaning in conflicts where the insurgent hides among the people. A too indiscriminate use, as in the case of the Israelis, only builds up the morale of the people to resist. Precision can only come through altering the existing paradigm where fast heavy fighters are replaced by lighter UAVs.
India’s first problem is modernisation which is decades behind schedule. An army minus any effective self-propelled artillery, as the Indian Army has been for decades, can hardly launch an effective offensive against adversary forces. The second issue is training. The time has come for a sharp upgrading of the skills of the average army officer, not in the usual military skills, but in modern technology and management. This means that officers need to possibly get engineering and management degrees alongside their conventional skills.
India
These issues, naturally, relate to restructuring. A million plus army of that kind would simply be unaffordable. The army has to carry out a restructuring and see whether it needs to shift its emphasis in different directions. For example, does it need 5,000 tanks which can only be used on the Pakistan border since an armoured thrust of any consequence, could trigger a nuclear war? Are the Special Forces that India has built up, merely super-infantry, or should they be more deeply integrated with intelligence services for special operations? Should India move towards air-mobile divisions which can play a role across mountain regions as well? Should the forces themselves be reorganised into mobile brigades, rather than divisions?
The Indian Air Force which has largely stayed out of the army’s counter-insurgency campaigns, too, needs to restructure itself to meet the newer challenges. It must get a counter-insurgency doctrine and prepare to fight in conditions very different from the Battle of Britain scenarios that they seem to be geared towards today.
There is an old saying that generals usually learn to fight the last war better, but there are also generals who win wars. Most often they are the ones who quickly adapt to circumstances and come up with solutions that work. America’s misadventure has lessons for all the armies in the world and they would be well advised to heed them.
Mail Today October 28, 2011
The one clear winner seems to be Iran, which has become the clearly dominant actor in the Persian Gulf, one step away from nuclear weapons, with an exhausted US being unable to do anything about it.
Even now it is difficult for the rest of the world to understand just why the United States invaded Iraq. There was, of course, the new doctrine of pre-emption enunciated by George W Bush in the wake of 9/11. But that, presumably, related to terrorism. The weapons of mass destruction threat that was subsequently trotted out was clearly a figment of someone’s imagination.
War
What seems more alarming is that the US was sucked into the war by Dick Cheney and his trusted exiled Iraqi contact, Ahmad Chalabi, who has a remarkably close relationship with Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whatever be the cause, it had the effect of distracting the US from the real war on hand—against the Taliban and assorted radicals under the leadership of the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iraqis and in their own way, the Americans, have paid a huge price for this folly, while the price in terms of opportunity cost in Afghanistan still remains to be computed.
Iraq is important to the military historian as well. It is the war that taught us lessons about the devastating abilities of what are called Revolution in Military Affairs technologies. But it also came with the counter-revolution where armies operating below these technological radar screens landed the American forces into a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The “shock and awe” that the US promised was inflicted on Saddam Hussein’s army. So devastating were the precision long-range strikes, that in many cases the military formations were destroyed well before they reached the forward edge of battle. Indeed, where the usual norm is that divisions with 10 per cent casualties are considered hors de combat, Saddam’s divisions faced 40-50 per cent attrition. One estimate claimed that of the 2,500 artillery pieces he had started with, he was left with just 34 by the end of the war. Iraqi ineptitude played a significant role in this defeat. The poorly trained Iraqi forces were overwhelmed by the technological superiority of the Americans.
But once the American occupation of Iraq got under way, the nature of the war changed. Bombing, ambushes and assassinations became the norm and Iraq got divided into mutually hostile factions of Shia, Sunni and Kurd forces. Into this mix came the Islamists from across the world, determined to take the opportunity to make the US bleed.
It took a first-rate US general, David Petraeus, to recognise the problem and go about setting it right. The US had to change from a high-tech, shock and awe approach to one that stressed working with the local people and providing them security and then systematically helping them to rebuild the institutions that had collapsed in the wake of the American invasion and the overthrow of the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein.
Transformation
Simultaneously, another lesson was being learnt in another theatre. In 2006, Israel launched a 34-day campaign against the Hizbollah in Lebanon. Despite intense bombardment and attacks, the Hezbollah were able to maintain their forces and were able to put up a well-equipped, well networked force over which its leadership was capable of maintaining command and control right through the conflict. By operating among the Lebanese people and using dispersal and camouflage tactics, the Hezbollah were able to fight the high-tech Israelis to a standstill, even though, they underestimated the cost Lebanon would have to pay in terms of the destruction wreaked by the Israelis.
The key lesson of the Iraq war is that the armed forces of today need to be equipped and trained for a huge bandwidth, ranging from counter-insurgency (COIN) and counter-terrorism (CT) to conventional conflict and war involving weapons of mass destruction. This requires high quality commanders who have a synergistic relationship with their political leadership. This is because each COIN or CT situation has varying political nuances and dealing with them requires careful politico-military surgery.
It also requires a deep restructuring of the armed forces, in the way they are organised, trained and equipped. At one level it requires a new breed of special forces who are able to effectively engage local populations and assist in capacity building and advise local police and paramilitary forces. At another level it requires highly proficient soldiers and officers who can take advantage of modern technology and exploit it to their ends. As it is, it is apparent that to survive against a well trained force equipped with modern weapons requires great tactical skill and an ability to effectively use the terrain and adapt to circumstances. This is why the Hezbollah were able to survive the Israeli blitz of 2006.
Incidentally, one of the many lessons of these wars has been the limits of air power. Control of the air has little meaning in conflicts where the insurgent hides among the people. A too indiscriminate use, as in the case of the Israelis, only builds up the morale of the people to resist. Precision can only come through altering the existing paradigm where fast heavy fighters are replaced by lighter UAVs.
India’s first problem is modernisation which is decades behind schedule. An army minus any effective self-propelled artillery, as the Indian Army has been for decades, can hardly launch an effective offensive against adversary forces. The second issue is training. The time has come for a sharp upgrading of the skills of the average army officer, not in the usual military skills, but in modern technology and management. This means that officers need to possibly get engineering and management degrees alongside their conventional skills.
India
These issues, naturally, relate to restructuring. A million plus army of that kind would simply be unaffordable. The army has to carry out a restructuring and see whether it needs to shift its emphasis in different directions. For example, does it need 5,000 tanks which can only be used on the Pakistan border since an armoured thrust of any consequence, could trigger a nuclear war? Are the Special Forces that India has built up, merely super-infantry, or should they be more deeply integrated with intelligence services for special operations? Should India move towards air-mobile divisions which can play a role across mountain regions as well? Should the forces themselves be reorganised into mobile brigades, rather than divisions?
The Indian Air Force which has largely stayed out of the army’s counter-insurgency campaigns, too, needs to restructure itself to meet the newer challenges. It must get a counter-insurgency doctrine and prepare to fight in conditions very different from the Battle of Britain scenarios that they seem to be geared towards today.
There is an old saying that generals usually learn to fight the last war better, but there are also generals who win wars. Most often they are the ones who quickly adapt to circumstances and come up with solutions that work. America’s misadventure has lessons for all the armies in the world and they would be well advised to heed them.
Mail Today October 28, 2011
Friday, October 28, 2011
Statues will not assure Mayawati immortality
It is difficult to take issue with Mayawati for her monuments, never mind their huge cost. She is only following in the footsteps of past rulers and leaders. At least she built her own National Dalit Memorial and Green Park. Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter simply appropriated the prime minister’s official residence, a Lutyens-era building, converting it into a monument for the first prime minister of the country. The same happened with Indira Gandhi, and the families of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Jagjivan Ram followed suit, beginning a trend that could well convert Lutyens Delhi into a necropolis.
Mayawati is merely a mortal and no doubt she expects that her great Dalit Memorial Park will memorialise her life for centuries, if not millennia. But the Park, she also seemed to suggest in her inaugural speech, was her beachhead for the invasion of Delhi.
She repeatedly emphasised that the Dalit Memorial on the east bank of the Yamuna stood, as if in counterpoint, to the Nehru-Gandhi memorials on the west. In other words, they signified the arrival of Dalit power at the very gates of the capital. False modesty has never been one of Mayawati’s faults, and she has made it known more than once that the Dalit ki beti intends to become the Prime Minister of India.
Imprint
There is nothing wrong in her seeking to make a political point, or to establish a symbol of Dalit power through statues and monuments. This has a history going back to the Pharaohs and Caesars. Megalomania, or a search for immortality, can result in memorials aimed at leaving an imprint for thousands of years. But history is quite impartial on the matter. China’s first emperor Chin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) built an enormous
monument in Xian which has been located —though, yet to be opened, its attendant terracotta army has made the site famous.
In contrast, however, there is someone whose impact is even greater, Genghis Khan (1162?-1227CE), whose descendants ensured that his tomb would remain hidden forever. The great Khan clearly needed no monuments and has imprinted himself on historical memory through his great conquests and, apparently, his sex life. Recent research claims that 8 per cent of the men living in the region that formed part of the Mongol Empire carry Y-chromosomes identical to Genghis which amounts to a staggering 0.5 per cent of the population of the world today.
Yet statues and monuments can be destroyed, obliterating history. UP’s second most important political formation, the Samajwadi Party, has declared that it will pull down Mayawati’s monuments if it came to power. Fearing guerrilla attacks on the parks, Mayawati has set up a special force to guard them.
There is a precedent in history there as well. The successors of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten (1300 BCE) destroyed his temples as thoroughly as they could. But they did not reckon with researchers of the twentieth century with computers who matched every piece of a destroyed frieze and told us the story of the great king of ancient Egypt, husband to the beauteous Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamen.
It would be futile to tell Mayawati that a bigger imprint on history has been left by people who have no monuments at all, at least not historically identifiable ones—Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. What they have left is a legacy of words and ideas which are far more pervasive than the awe any monument inspires. In that sense, actually, Bhimrao Ambedkar does not need a statue to honour him; he has the words of the Indian Constitution to memorialise him.
Politics
So the lessons of history, insofar as monuments are concerned, are somewhat chequered. Great buildings get re-labeled, like the great Hagia Sophia (360 CE) in Constantinople which was converted into a mosque and then a museum. As for statues, they are much easier to deal with. With some luck they are merely carted away, as in the case of the imperial statues that litter the Coronation park in Kingsway Camp in New Delhi. If you are unlucky like Stalin, Lenin and Saddam, the statues are pulled down and destroyed. Or, of course, if the culture changes, as in Egypt, a statue, like that of the Pharaohs, is shorn of any claim to divinity and remains merely as a museum piece.
Somehow, I think that it is not the eternal that bothers this arch practitioner of realpolitik right now, but the immediate and the limited. And that happens to be the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh state assembly. Having failed to make a dent in other states, it is clear that Mayawati cannot permit any erosion of her party’s dominant position in the state. In that sense the speech at the inaugural of the park was actually the beginning of her 2012 state assembly election campaign.
The enemies have been clearly identified. The Samajwadi Party would have the first claim to be her principal rival. But it was scarcely mentioned in her speech. Instead, all her ire was focused on the Congress. The reason for that is not far to seek.
The Congress came up with a surprise performance in the 2009 General Elections winning one more seat in the Lok Sabha than the BSP. More important, it became clear that Rahul Gandhi’s campaigning had made an impact and managed to erode a bit of Mayawati’s non-Jatav Dalit vote. This is the party whose leader Rahul Gandhi has made guerrilla raids into the state, picking up issues that show up Mayawati’s government as being insensitive not only to the poor and weak, but the Dalits as well.
Achievement
Election outcome analyses have shown that Mayawati’s Brahmin-Bahujan strategy is no longer working. The National Election Study 2009 revealed an erosion of the Brahmin support with a large proportion of upper caste votes going back to the Congress, and a smaller to the BJP. Additionally the Congress gained Muslim and non-Jatav Dalit votes, though not at the expense of the BSP.
Not surprisingly, all talk of the “sarvajan” samaj seems to have stopped and
Ms Mayawati is focused on preserving her Dalit fortress. But, at the end of the day, given the fractured electorate, rock-solid Dalit support alone will not be enough to enable the BSP to form a government again.
Enormous will power and organisation skills have brought Ms Mayawati where she is. But whether it is the elections, or her own achievements, they are yet only engraved in stone. The world outside the Dalit Memorial Park remains harsh, especially so in Ms Mayawati’s UP. She cannot pass on the blame to past governments alone. Indeed, till the 1980s, UP was badly off, but not as badly off as it is today relative to the other states of the Union.
So, when the next assembly election comes around, Ms Mayawati will not have to address history, but the people of her state who are only partly Dalit. They will decide whether she has, as she claimed in her speech, fought against criminalisation and corruption. More important, they are bound to raise queries about development issues.
She has had four terms as Chief Minister, though in fairness only the current one will run the full term. Even so, Nitish Kumar has shown in neighbouring Bihar that real change can be brought about, even in seemingly hopeless states within years, should the leader have the right qualities.
Mail Today October 18, 2011
Mayawati is merely a mortal and no doubt she expects that her great Dalit Memorial Park will memorialise her life for centuries, if not millennia. But the Park, she also seemed to suggest in her inaugural speech, was her beachhead for the invasion of Delhi.
She repeatedly emphasised that the Dalit Memorial on the east bank of the Yamuna stood, as if in counterpoint, to the Nehru-Gandhi memorials on the west. In other words, they signified the arrival of Dalit power at the very gates of the capital. False modesty has never been one of Mayawati’s faults, and she has made it known more than once that the Dalit ki beti intends to become the Prime Minister of India.
Imprint
There is nothing wrong in her seeking to make a political point, or to establish a symbol of Dalit power through statues and monuments. This has a history going back to the Pharaohs and Caesars. Megalomania, or a search for immortality, can result in memorials aimed at leaving an imprint for thousands of years. But history is quite impartial on the matter. China’s first emperor Chin Shi Huang (259-210 BCE) built an enormous
monument in Xian which has been located —though, yet to be opened, its attendant terracotta army has made the site famous.
In contrast, however, there is someone whose impact is even greater, Genghis Khan (1162?-1227CE), whose descendants ensured that his tomb would remain hidden forever. The great Khan clearly needed no monuments and has imprinted himself on historical memory through his great conquests and, apparently, his sex life. Recent research claims that 8 per cent of the men living in the region that formed part of the Mongol Empire carry Y-chromosomes identical to Genghis which amounts to a staggering 0.5 per cent of the population of the world today.
Yet statues and monuments can be destroyed, obliterating history. UP’s second most important political formation, the Samajwadi Party, has declared that it will pull down Mayawati’s monuments if it came to power. Fearing guerrilla attacks on the parks, Mayawati has set up a special force to guard them.
There is a precedent in history there as well. The successors of the monotheist pharaoh Akhenaten (1300 BCE) destroyed his temples as thoroughly as they could. But they did not reckon with researchers of the twentieth century with computers who matched every piece of a destroyed frieze and told us the story of the great king of ancient Egypt, husband to the beauteous Nefertiti and father of Tutankhamen.
It would be futile to tell Mayawati that a bigger imprint on history has been left by people who have no monuments at all, at least not historically identifiable ones—Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad. What they have left is a legacy of words and ideas which are far more pervasive than the awe any monument inspires. In that sense, actually, Bhimrao Ambedkar does not need a statue to honour him; he has the words of the Indian Constitution to memorialise him.
Politics
So the lessons of history, insofar as monuments are concerned, are somewhat chequered. Great buildings get re-labeled, like the great Hagia Sophia (360 CE) in Constantinople which was converted into a mosque and then a museum. As for statues, they are much easier to deal with. With some luck they are merely carted away, as in the case of the imperial statues that litter the Coronation park in Kingsway Camp in New Delhi. If you are unlucky like Stalin, Lenin and Saddam, the statues are pulled down and destroyed. Or, of course, if the culture changes, as in Egypt, a statue, like that of the Pharaohs, is shorn of any claim to divinity and remains merely as a museum piece.
Somehow, I think that it is not the eternal that bothers this arch practitioner of realpolitik right now, but the immediate and the limited. And that happens to be the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh state assembly. Having failed to make a dent in other states, it is clear that Mayawati cannot permit any erosion of her party’s dominant position in the state. In that sense the speech at the inaugural of the park was actually the beginning of her 2012 state assembly election campaign.
The enemies have been clearly identified. The Samajwadi Party would have the first claim to be her principal rival. But it was scarcely mentioned in her speech. Instead, all her ire was focused on the Congress. The reason for that is not far to seek.
The Congress came up with a surprise performance in the 2009 General Elections winning one more seat in the Lok Sabha than the BSP. More important, it became clear that Rahul Gandhi’s campaigning had made an impact and managed to erode a bit of Mayawati’s non-Jatav Dalit vote. This is the party whose leader Rahul Gandhi has made guerrilla raids into the state, picking up issues that show up Mayawati’s government as being insensitive not only to the poor and weak, but the Dalits as well.
Achievement
Election outcome analyses have shown that Mayawati’s Brahmin-Bahujan strategy is no longer working. The National Election Study 2009 revealed an erosion of the Brahmin support with a large proportion of upper caste votes going back to the Congress, and a smaller to the BJP. Additionally the Congress gained Muslim and non-Jatav Dalit votes, though not at the expense of the BSP.
Not surprisingly, all talk of the “sarvajan” samaj seems to have stopped and
Ms Mayawati is focused on preserving her Dalit fortress. But, at the end of the day, given the fractured electorate, rock-solid Dalit support alone will not be enough to enable the BSP to form a government again.
Enormous will power and organisation skills have brought Ms Mayawati where she is. But whether it is the elections, or her own achievements, they are yet only engraved in stone. The world outside the Dalit Memorial Park remains harsh, especially so in Ms Mayawati’s UP. She cannot pass on the blame to past governments alone. Indeed, till the 1980s, UP was badly off, but not as badly off as it is today relative to the other states of the Union.
So, when the next assembly election comes around, Ms Mayawati will not have to address history, but the people of her state who are only partly Dalit. They will decide whether she has, as she claimed in her speech, fought against criminalisation and corruption. More important, they are bound to raise queries about development issues.
She has had four terms as Chief Minister, though in fairness only the current one will run the full term. Even so, Nitish Kumar has shown in neighbouring Bihar that real change can be brought about, even in seemingly hopeless states within years, should the leader have the right qualities.
Mail Today October 18, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
We need a better policy of openness
Recently, Law Minister Salman Khurshid moaned that the Right to Information Act (RTI) was creating problems for “institutional efficiency and efficacy” of the government. He went on to add that the government had “no regrets” in having brought the Act. “But then too much of RTI work is hitting the working of government departments” and the time had come to see how “we can make it more effective and hassle-free.”
Unfortunately for him, the statement came in the aftermath of the “letter bomb” in the form of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) releasing the controversial finance ministry note which said that the 2G spectrum could have been auctioned at better price, had the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram insisted.
Legislation
But Khurshid and others who are alarmed at the workings of the RTI have a point. It is true that information is power and that the laudable aim of the legislation was to empower the citizen. This is something the bureaucracy understood very well and was not very happy about sharing information. So it is fighting the RTI tooth and nail. But, as the Hazare experience has shown, an excess of anything, even democratic rights, can be bad.
The RTI was one of the path-breaking pieces of legislation mooted during the United Progressive Alliance’s first stint in government. It is a pity that in its second spell, the UPA is reeling from the consequences of the RTI, or scheming with the babus to somehow kill it.
The most devastating recent use of the RTI till now, has been the 2G papers obtained by BJP activist Vivek Garg. Whether he was tipped off about the existence of the papers is one thing; what is clear is that it had the effect of shaking the government of the day. But one result of the controversy is that it has paralysed the government with officials refusing to put down their views on paper which could, through the RTI, find its way into the public domain.
There was nothing unique in itself in the RTI. Other democratic societies have also felt the need to come up with a freedom of information legislation to make the workings of government more transparent. But, given the government of India’s colonial DNA, it was nevertheless remarkable that such a legislation did actually come about. A great deal of credit for its efficacy in its key growing years rests with Wajahat Habibullah, the first Chief Information Commissioner, a soft-voiced and polite bureaucrat with impeccable Nehru-Gandhi credentials, and rock-solid integrity. It were his rulings that cut through the yards of red-tape that the babudom unleashed in a bid to stifle it. At another level the powerful have unleashed their goons on RTI activists, killing as many as 13 persons across the country in the past two years.
Not surprisingly, the big users of RTI have turned out to be people with a vested interest—someone overlooked for promotion, a businessman seeking information on a rival’s government contract, a political activist seeking to embarrass the government.
But it is also a tool that enables an outraged citizen get information on why his roads are in a state of disrepair. An NGO query in Bhopal revealed that ten persons had died in the Bhopal Memorial Hospital due to unethical and possibly illegal drug trials. There have been other such far-reaching revelations that have helped improve the overall climate of governance.
The RTI commissioners are aware of the problems with RTI. In a recent decision they said that the minutes of meetings for the IIT Joint Entrance Examination could not be provided as it would lead to a “breakdown” of the examination system. But there are places where the decisions teeter between the right of privacy of public servants and the legislation. In February, for example the CIC said that the service details of a government servant were not confidential. This was in keeping with its previous decisions of taking property details and income tax returns of public servants out of the confidentiality list, a decision that has been challenged in the high court. The previous chief justice K G Balakrishnan had raised the issue of RTI and pending judgments of the court. It’s important that in the process of upholding the right to information, the RTI does not make governance difficult.
Grandstand
As we have noted anything taken to an excess can be harmful. And so is the case with the RTI. There is genuine danger of the government being swamped by RTI queries. According to a response, ironically to an RTI query to the effect, the PMO revealed that queries to it had increased from 48 applications in 2005 to over 3,000 queries in 2010 alone. I can imagine that this could rise manifold in years to come.
Equally important is the issue of the confidentiality of the workings of the government. If everything is open to RTI, officials and ministers will act like MPs in Parliament. Ever since the proceedings of Parliament began to be televised, MPs have been using the floor of the House to grandstand on issues, rather than deliberate on them. So, there is danger that officials will take decisions, not without fear or favour, but with an eye on the public opinion.
Secrets
The vagueness over what is secret begins from the Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923 which was essentially aimed at military threats against India. It sought punishment for those who communicated information—maps, codes, passwords, sketches etc— that could adversely affect the sovereignty and integrity of the country and punished all those who illegally possessed documents relating to national security.
All agencies involved in security—the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and so on—have a system of ascending scale of classification—confidential, secret and top secret—by section officers, under secretaries and deputy secretaries. But while the OSA provides a legal definition, howsoever obsolete, about what is secret—maps, sketches, codes, passwords, note or document relating to the sovereignty and integrity of India— we have no clarity about the sanctity of the documents of the other departments of government, including the Cabinet and the PMO.
The result is that decisions on just what is secret and what is not, are being defined on a case by case basis by the Information Commissioners. Given the volume of queries, this is not a particularly good way of going about this.
What the government needs is an ordered policy of transparency. By now we have a body of decisions by the RTI commissioners which indicate the kind of information that should be in the public domain. So why doesn’t the government place such information in the public domain and ensure that you do not have to use the RTI to obtain the information?
Second, the government should, with the Information Commissioners, work out a regime through which certain documents will retain confidentiality for a particular time span—say 10 years, 20 years and 30 years. So, certain sensitive decisions will be declassified automatically after a particular time span. It is a well known fact that there are no secrets with an infinite time span.
Third, the government needs to revisit the OSA. This colonial era statute has outlived its utility by several decades. There is need to redefine secrecy in relation to national security in light of modern technology where sub-metre satellite imagery is available to the public and hackers are able to penetrate the computers of the PMO and the National Security Council Secretariat. Note that no significant OSA conviction has taken place since the mid-1980s when the Larkins brothers were convicted.
Does that mean that there are no spies and traitors operating in India? Don’t count the pathetic “spies” who are frequently caught by the police with alleged sketches and diaries detailing their activities on behalf of the ISI.
Mail Today October 13, 2011
Unfortunately for him, the statement came in the aftermath of the “letter bomb” in the form of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) releasing the controversial finance ministry note which said that the 2G spectrum could have been auctioned at better price, had the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram insisted.
Legislation
But Khurshid and others who are alarmed at the workings of the RTI have a point. It is true that information is power and that the laudable aim of the legislation was to empower the citizen. This is something the bureaucracy understood very well and was not very happy about sharing information. So it is fighting the RTI tooth and nail. But, as the Hazare experience has shown, an excess of anything, even democratic rights, can be bad.
The RTI was one of the path-breaking pieces of legislation mooted during the United Progressive Alliance’s first stint in government. It is a pity that in its second spell, the UPA is reeling from the consequences of the RTI, or scheming with the babus to somehow kill it.
The most devastating recent use of the RTI till now, has been the 2G papers obtained by BJP activist Vivek Garg. Whether he was tipped off about the existence of the papers is one thing; what is clear is that it had the effect of shaking the government of the day. But one result of the controversy is that it has paralysed the government with officials refusing to put down their views on paper which could, through the RTI, find its way into the public domain.
There was nothing unique in itself in the RTI. Other democratic societies have also felt the need to come up with a freedom of information legislation to make the workings of government more transparent. But, given the government of India’s colonial DNA, it was nevertheless remarkable that such a legislation did actually come about. A great deal of credit for its efficacy in its key growing years rests with Wajahat Habibullah, the first Chief Information Commissioner, a soft-voiced and polite bureaucrat with impeccable Nehru-Gandhi credentials, and rock-solid integrity. It were his rulings that cut through the yards of red-tape that the babudom unleashed in a bid to stifle it. At another level the powerful have unleashed their goons on RTI activists, killing as many as 13 persons across the country in the past two years.
Not surprisingly, the big users of RTI have turned out to be people with a vested interest—someone overlooked for promotion, a businessman seeking information on a rival’s government contract, a political activist seeking to embarrass the government.
But it is also a tool that enables an outraged citizen get information on why his roads are in a state of disrepair. An NGO query in Bhopal revealed that ten persons had died in the Bhopal Memorial Hospital due to unethical and possibly illegal drug trials. There have been other such far-reaching revelations that have helped improve the overall climate of governance.
The RTI commissioners are aware of the problems with RTI. In a recent decision they said that the minutes of meetings for the IIT Joint Entrance Examination could not be provided as it would lead to a “breakdown” of the examination system. But there are places where the decisions teeter between the right of privacy of public servants and the legislation. In February, for example the CIC said that the service details of a government servant were not confidential. This was in keeping with its previous decisions of taking property details and income tax returns of public servants out of the confidentiality list, a decision that has been challenged in the high court. The previous chief justice K G Balakrishnan had raised the issue of RTI and pending judgments of the court. It’s important that in the process of upholding the right to information, the RTI does not make governance difficult.
Grandstand
As we have noted anything taken to an excess can be harmful. And so is the case with the RTI. There is genuine danger of the government being swamped by RTI queries. According to a response, ironically to an RTI query to the effect, the PMO revealed that queries to it had increased from 48 applications in 2005 to over 3,000 queries in 2010 alone. I can imagine that this could rise manifold in years to come.
Equally important is the issue of the confidentiality of the workings of the government. If everything is open to RTI, officials and ministers will act like MPs in Parliament. Ever since the proceedings of Parliament began to be televised, MPs have been using the floor of the House to grandstand on issues, rather than deliberate on them. So, there is danger that officials will take decisions, not without fear or favour, but with an eye on the public opinion.
Secrets
The vagueness over what is secret begins from the Official Secrets Act (OSA) of 1923 which was essentially aimed at military threats against India. It sought punishment for those who communicated information—maps, codes, passwords, sketches etc— that could adversely affect the sovereignty and integrity of the country and punished all those who illegally possessed documents relating to national security.
All agencies involved in security—the armed forces, intelligence agencies, and so on—have a system of ascending scale of classification—confidential, secret and top secret—by section officers, under secretaries and deputy secretaries. But while the OSA provides a legal definition, howsoever obsolete, about what is secret—maps, sketches, codes, passwords, note or document relating to the sovereignty and integrity of India— we have no clarity about the sanctity of the documents of the other departments of government, including the Cabinet and the PMO.
The result is that decisions on just what is secret and what is not, are being defined on a case by case basis by the Information Commissioners. Given the volume of queries, this is not a particularly good way of going about this.
What the government needs is an ordered policy of transparency. By now we have a body of decisions by the RTI commissioners which indicate the kind of information that should be in the public domain. So why doesn’t the government place such information in the public domain and ensure that you do not have to use the RTI to obtain the information?
Second, the government should, with the Information Commissioners, work out a regime through which certain documents will retain confidentiality for a particular time span—say 10 years, 20 years and 30 years. So, certain sensitive decisions will be declassified automatically after a particular time span. It is a well known fact that there are no secrets with an infinite time span.
Third, the government needs to revisit the OSA. This colonial era statute has outlived its utility by several decades. There is need to redefine secrecy in relation to national security in light of modern technology where sub-metre satellite imagery is available to the public and hackers are able to penetrate the computers of the PMO and the National Security Council Secretariat. Note that no significant OSA conviction has taken place since the mid-1980s when the Larkins brothers were convicted.
Does that mean that there are no spies and traitors operating in India? Don’t count the pathetic “spies” who are frequently caught by the police with alleged sketches and diaries detailing their activities on behalf of the ISI.
Mail Today October 13, 2011
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Everybody loves an entitlement in India
So, our politically correct activists have forced Planning Commission Chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia to eat crow. They have got him to accept that a statistical device through which poverty is measured in India will not be the means of determining who is provided entitlements. Actually it was never intended to be so and it is good that Union Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh has clarified that the government will take into account other elements of deprivation before considering specific entitlements for rural households.
The statistical constructs to define poverty are something that economists have debated for years, but it has spilt over into the public domain for a variety of reasons. First, the Rs 32/26 construct had all the usual suspects, Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy and their ilk foaming at the mouth.
Then even politicians as diverse as Mayawati and Murli Manohar Joshi jumped into the issue. The reason was not difficult to find. Poverty lines in India have been a means of giving entitlements, and in turn the grant of entitlements is a means of harvesting votes. And right now, the government is in the midst of preparing an Act that will provide subsidised food for half the population of the country.
Scams
The 32/26 construct has its roots in food consumption. It was set in the 1970s from the monthly consumption expenditure of a family whose members consumed 2,400 calories of food in rural areas and 2,100 in urban. This has since been monetised and indexed to give us the 32/26 value of today. The calorie consumption index has had a chequered history. They emerged from pre-World War II studies in Germany of the physiology of work of European loggers. How they relate to Indian physiques and conditions is a mystery.
No one can deny the state’s responsibility in providing food for its destitute citizens. In line with this, the state has two approaches before it. First, to buy vast quantities of food grain, store it and arrange for its distribution. The second approach is to provide cash directly to the beneficiaries.
The first approach is marked by massive leakages. First, the FCI’s acquisition process is riddled with corruption—poor quality grain purchased and passed off as good. Second, it is stored in such awful conditions that a good amount of it
simply rots. Third, on its way to the
fair price shops, as well as in those shops, it is diverted.
Last year, under the pressure of the courts and following investigation by an SIT, the CBI was asked to probe the diversion of food grains meant for the poor in Uttar Pradesh which was being shipped out by the trainloads straight from their storage areas to Bangladesh and Nepal.
Schemes
The value of the foodgrains ran into tens of thousands of crore rupees over several years. The food was meant for a slew of entitlement programmes that activists swear by—Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana, a food for work scheme; Antodaya Anna Yojana, meant to provide food security for the poorest families; the Midday Meal Scheme to give children a nutritious meal on all working days.
Yet, there seemed to be little outrage of the kind that accompanied the 2G scam, perhaps because the villains were the cogs of the system—district officials, FCI managers and railway personnel. There were no well-known political faces in the cross-hairs of the media.
Faced with diversion, many specialists have been suggesting a variety of alternate measures—food coupons, direct cash subsidies which will go into the bank account of the recipient through a smart-card. But this looks like a bit of day-dreaming. There are unlikely to be banks and even post offices in the poorest areas in India. Those who reach Delhi or Mumbai, even in the most menial of jobs, are not poor compared to the many, mainly women, children and the aged, who live in the contiguous villages of Orissa, Bihar, Chattisgarh, West Bengal border, or in Bundelkhand.
When middle-men can gouge the middle-class in Delhi, who will guarantee that the poor in the remote rural areas are given food grain at actual market prices and not at sharply marked up ones? As for coupons, not only can they be forged, but you can be sure, unscrupulous traders will trade these for half their value for cash with the indigent.
The UPA government is set to make food into an entitlement. Estimates vary, but you could have some half of the country’s population lining up for subsidised food grains. Given the quality of governance in the country, this huge exercise is likely to lead to massive fraud and you can be sure that the really poor and needy will somehow slip through the net.
The other issue is the question of allocating valuable resources. Despite the growth of its economy, India’s fiscal situation is not all that good. Taking on the burden of a massive food entitlement programme could mean depriving vital areas—education, health, infrastructure— of much needed investment.
These are areas which could yield dividends in terms of higher productivity, both in the city and the country-side. Indeed, these are vital if the country wants to ensure that the 500 million or so people it thinks in need of entitlements are to be shifted from farming marginal land into gainful employment where their incomes will be much more than the dismal 32/26 we are stuck with for now.
Fix
Indian academics, people like Amartya Sen, Jean Dreze and Utsa Patnaik, have been debating the issue for years. Yet we have no clarity on what it is to be poor. In trying to include food to its list of entitlements, the government seems to be going the wrong way. Figures show that there is widespread malnutrition in India, not only among the poor, but the richer people as well. The issue is not so much the quantity of food they eat, but its quality.
What is needed is an enhancement of proteins in the diet through inclusion of eggs, fish, meat and milk. Getting all that into the entitlement list would be impossible. What can be done, instead, is to make programmes like the Mid-day Meal Scheme effective.
Actually, probably the most important fix that will improve health and nutrition would be access to safe drinking water. Much of the poor health of children and adults is on account of water borne diseases. Fix that and a large part of the poor health and nutrition problem will be fixed. To do that you need some determination and less hypocrisy about poverty.
But most political parties find it useful to use a promise of entitlement to garner votes. This has been carried to ridiculous limits in states like Tamil Nadu where the poor are being gifted colour TVs and mixers.The politicians need to pause and think about these policies which could easily lead to the emergence of a class of people who find it more convenient to remain allegedly poor. This is what the current crisis in Europe is all about.
While it is true that there can be no comparison between poverty levels in Europe and India, it is also true that human responses to a particular situation, in this case, the convenience of living in an entitlement culture, are similar.
There is a need, therefore, of targeting the helpless poor— the children, old folk, mothers and the sick— for entitlements, while the able-bodied need to be helped to get on the track of better education and gainful employment.
Mail Today October 5, 2011
The statistical constructs to define poverty are something that economists have debated for years, but it has spilt over into the public domain for a variety of reasons. First, the Rs 32/26 construct had all the usual suspects, Harsh Mander, Aruna Roy and their ilk foaming at the mouth.
Then even politicians as diverse as Mayawati and Murli Manohar Joshi jumped into the issue. The reason was not difficult to find. Poverty lines in India have been a means of giving entitlements, and in turn the grant of entitlements is a means of harvesting votes. And right now, the government is in the midst of preparing an Act that will provide subsidised food for half the population of the country.
Scams
The 32/26 construct has its roots in food consumption. It was set in the 1970s from the monthly consumption expenditure of a family whose members consumed 2,400 calories of food in rural areas and 2,100 in urban. This has since been monetised and indexed to give us the 32/26 value of today. The calorie consumption index has had a chequered history. They emerged from pre-World War II studies in Germany of the physiology of work of European loggers. How they relate to Indian physiques and conditions is a mystery.
No one can deny the state’s responsibility in providing food for its destitute citizens. In line with this, the state has two approaches before it. First, to buy vast quantities of food grain, store it and arrange for its distribution. The second approach is to provide cash directly to the beneficiaries.
The first approach is marked by massive leakages. First, the FCI’s acquisition process is riddled with corruption—poor quality grain purchased and passed off as good. Second, it is stored in such awful conditions that a good amount of it
simply rots. Third, on its way to the
fair price shops, as well as in those shops, it is diverted.
Last year, under the pressure of the courts and following investigation by an SIT, the CBI was asked to probe the diversion of food grains meant for the poor in Uttar Pradesh which was being shipped out by the trainloads straight from their storage areas to Bangladesh and Nepal.
Schemes
The value of the foodgrains ran into tens of thousands of crore rupees over several years. The food was meant for a slew of entitlement programmes that activists swear by—Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana, a food for work scheme; Antodaya Anna Yojana, meant to provide food security for the poorest families; the Midday Meal Scheme to give children a nutritious meal on all working days.
Yet, there seemed to be little outrage of the kind that accompanied the 2G scam, perhaps because the villains were the cogs of the system—district officials, FCI managers and railway personnel. There were no well-known political faces in the cross-hairs of the media.
Faced with diversion, many specialists have been suggesting a variety of alternate measures—food coupons, direct cash subsidies which will go into the bank account of the recipient through a smart-card. But this looks like a bit of day-dreaming. There are unlikely to be banks and even post offices in the poorest areas in India. Those who reach Delhi or Mumbai, even in the most menial of jobs, are not poor compared to the many, mainly women, children and the aged, who live in the contiguous villages of Orissa, Bihar, Chattisgarh, West Bengal border, or in Bundelkhand.
When middle-men can gouge the middle-class in Delhi, who will guarantee that the poor in the remote rural areas are given food grain at actual market prices and not at sharply marked up ones? As for coupons, not only can they be forged, but you can be sure, unscrupulous traders will trade these for half their value for cash with the indigent.
The UPA government is set to make food into an entitlement. Estimates vary, but you could have some half of the country’s population lining up for subsidised food grains. Given the quality of governance in the country, this huge exercise is likely to lead to massive fraud and you can be sure that the really poor and needy will somehow slip through the net.
The other issue is the question of allocating valuable resources. Despite the growth of its economy, India’s fiscal situation is not all that good. Taking on the burden of a massive food entitlement programme could mean depriving vital areas—education, health, infrastructure— of much needed investment.
These are areas which could yield dividends in terms of higher productivity, both in the city and the country-side. Indeed, these are vital if the country wants to ensure that the 500 million or so people it thinks in need of entitlements are to be shifted from farming marginal land into gainful employment where their incomes will be much more than the dismal 32/26 we are stuck with for now.
Fix
Indian academics, people like Amartya Sen, Jean Dreze and Utsa Patnaik, have been debating the issue for years. Yet we have no clarity on what it is to be poor. In trying to include food to its list of entitlements, the government seems to be going the wrong way. Figures show that there is widespread malnutrition in India, not only among the poor, but the richer people as well. The issue is not so much the quantity of food they eat, but its quality.
What is needed is an enhancement of proteins in the diet through inclusion of eggs, fish, meat and milk. Getting all that into the entitlement list would be impossible. What can be done, instead, is to make programmes like the Mid-day Meal Scheme effective.
Actually, probably the most important fix that will improve health and nutrition would be access to safe drinking water. Much of the poor health of children and adults is on account of water borne diseases. Fix that and a large part of the poor health and nutrition problem will be fixed. To do that you need some determination and less hypocrisy about poverty.
But most political parties find it useful to use a promise of entitlement to garner votes. This has been carried to ridiculous limits in states like Tamil Nadu where the poor are being gifted colour TVs and mixers.The politicians need to pause and think about these policies which could easily lead to the emergence of a class of people who find it more convenient to remain allegedly poor. This is what the current crisis in Europe is all about.
While it is true that there can be no comparison between poverty levels in Europe and India, it is also true that human responses to a particular situation, in this case, the convenience of living in an entitlement culture, are similar.
There is a need, therefore, of targeting the helpless poor— the children, old folk, mothers and the sick— for entitlements, while the able-bodied need to be helped to get on the track of better education and gainful employment.
Mail Today October 5, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
Pakistan versus America
Looked at in any way, the situation is intriguing. Here is a country which is dependent on the United States and the world to the extent of an aid package of $4.4 billion in 2010 alone. It is besieged by jihadis from within. Yet, not only does it encourage jihadis to attack its neighbours, but its principal benefactor, the United States, as well. Indeed, now the US says that it is not merely encouragement, but Islamabad is providing direct support to the jihadis to not only attack American facilities in Afghanistan, but kill American soldiers. You would say that this behavior is crazy. Some would say that artful Pakistan is protecting its national interests, and is merely as crazy as a fox. Others, however, would argue that Islamabad, is crazy, simply crazy.
Perfidy
There is an inevitable sense of schadenfreude in New Delhi as it watches the meltdown of United States’ relations with Pakistan. Since the mid-1950s, the gullible Americans have been part of Islamabad’s project of maintaining strategic parity with India. And now, as American officials directly accuse the Pakistan Army of being involved in attacks against their Embassy in Kabul, and their troops in Afghanistan, the chickens are truly coming home to roost.
An account in Tuesday’s New York Times describing how an American major was treacherously killed in 2007, as he was leaving a peace meeting with Pakistani officials, points to a pathological behaviour that goes well beyond a desire on Islamabad’s part to preserve its national interests in Afghanistan. Yet the Americans have been forbearing till now.
Analysts like Fred Kaplan claim that Admiral Mike Mullen only noted that the September 13 attack on the US Embassy and ISAF headquarters in Kabul was carried out “with ISI support.” That this did not mean that the ISI had foreknowledge of the attack.
However, Reuters put out an item citing Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst who has advised the Obama Administration on Afghanistan, that the US had evidence that the attackers “were in telephone contact with people connected to Pakistan’s principal intelligence agency.” On Saturday, an unnamed Pentagon official told Washington Post that Admiral Mullen overstated his case about the Pakistani relationship with the Haqqanis.
There are three known attacks in Afghanistan where the US has traced the attackers’ links to the ISI: The attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul in July 2008, on Kabul Bank in Jalalabad in February this year and the assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul in June. There have been other attacks, such as the one on the Hamid Guest House in February 2010 in which 9 Indians were among the 16 killed, which have had all the hallmarks of a proxy ISI strike.
Targeting Indians and Afghans is one thing, hitting the headquarters of your long-time ally and aid-giver quite another. No matter how it seeks to fudge it, playing both sides in a war is a dangerous game, especially when you target a country which is much stronger than you are and which is under great political and economic stress.
Till now the US has swallowed its bile and sought to keep peace. Given the fact that 60 per cent of the supplies for the ISAF and US forces go through Pakistan, makes it difficult to contemplate alternatives. To an extent, the US has opened up the northern route through Russia and the Central Asian Republics. But its hostility towards Iran has blocked off an important overland route that could have matched that of Pakistan.
Islamabad claims it wants peace, but it has gone out of its way to foil every attempt by the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan national government headed by Hamid Karzai. The February 2010 arrest of Mullah Baradar and the recent assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani are just two of the instances that point to that policy. What Pakistan wants is a peace in which their proxy, the Haqqani network is the dominant actor.
Accountability
Pakistan has made a great play about how its responses have been the outcome of its national interests, particularly the threats to its sovereignty. These are specious claims. In the post –United Nations environment, sovereignty is not absolute.
All those who have signed the UN Charter have ceded some of our sovereign rights and over time, we have ceded more through our commitments to various international agreements. Moreover as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Islamabad is also subject to UN Resolution 1368 that was passed in the wake of 9/11, which reaffirmed the right to collective self defence and called on all states to bring the perpetrators of the attacks to justice. It also stressed that “those responsible for aiding, supporting or harbouring the perpetrators, organisers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable.”
But there are limits to what the US will bear, even for keeping the supply routes open. As it is the convoys have suffered enormous loss from periodic attacks, many of them almost certainly initiated by the ISI. But the US is not likely to easily swallow direct attacks such as the ones we are witnessing in recent times.
What would Pakistan do if the US gave it an ultimatum on the Haqqanis, saying that if Islamabad does not act, it would and very visibly begin building up forces for the purpose near North Waziristan? What if it got UN sanction to pursue that goal? Pakistan may think China will pull its chestnuts out of the fire, but given its past track record, and its generally ruthlessly pragmatic role, Beijing could well step aside and let Islamabad stew in its own juice.
Pakistan is making a huge mistake if it thinks that all this is a matter of a year and the US will pull out and leave. That is unlikely under the present conditions. The US would not like to repeat a “departure from Saigon” moment with the Haqqanis firing AK-47s in celebration at departing helicopters from Bagram. Neither will it be sanguine about leaving Afghanistan to a motely crew who will allow terrorists to establish camps and train themselves for more missions against the US and the West.
India
Many wonder what India stands to gain, or lose, from the course of events. We lose a lot from a Pakistani meltdown triggered by the actions of the US. Failing Pakistan is one thing, a failed one quite another. You can be sure that if Islamabad takes on the US, it will indeed fail.
India’s interest is best served by a stable Pakistan, but one that is not a rogue actor on the international stage. However, a great deal of responsibility for bringing Pakistan down in a soft landing from the artificial altitude it has occupied in the last fifty years, rests with the United States. Sadly, after decades of pandering to Pakistan’s fantasies, it is the US which is having to contemplate the hard landing.
India should wish the Americans well, but be wary of any joint schemes of bringing Islamabad to heel. The US is two continents and an ocean away. But Pakistan is our neighbour and so we must pursue a policy which will not lead to any self-defeating long-term bitterness. As it is, there seems to be little clarity in the direction the US wishes to take.
Our Pakistan policy must display firmness, and even toughness, when needed, but also seek to be fair and accommodating, if required. Call it flexible containment, or engagement, if you will. There is no automatic congruence of interests between us and the Americans, though there is considerable room for coordination and cooperation.
Mail Today September 29, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
