Punish the murderers in uniform

  
A Special Investigation Team set up by the Gujarat High Court has confirmed what has long been known: That 19-year old Ishrat Jehan, her employer, Javed Shaikh, and two others were murdered on June 15, 2004 by the Gujarat police, rather than being gunned down in an encounter as the police claimed. A magisterial inquiry in 2009 conducted by S.P. Tamang, too, came to the conclusion that the four were killed in cold blood. So shoddy was the effort to pass off the murder as an encounter with terrorists that the police party left a trail of evidence.

Sleepers
Besides the fact that the four had been killed by weapons of a calibre that the police did not possess, not one of the 70 rounds fired by the police in the alleged encounter was recovered. Worse, the police claimed that they shot out the left tyre of the car in which the four were travelling and it thereafter hit a divider on the right; actually, had they done so, it ought to have swerved left.




Mr Tamang has determined that the four had actually been kidnapped on June 12 from Mumbai by a Gujarat police squad and brought to Ahmedabad and murdered, and their bodies were later taken to the spot of the alleged encounter. Even now, there is need for a more detailed inquiry as to how the Gujarat police was able to abduct people from another state and get away with it. Further, we need to know how Jehan and Shaikh were linked up to two possibly Pakistani nationals about whom not much seems to be known, except the police charge that they were Lashkar-e-Tayyeba militants from Jammu & Kashmir.
Former Home Secretary GK Pillai insists Jehan and Shaikh were working for the LeT, and were being used to provide cover to the militants whose mission was to kill Narendra Modi. The police also cite the fact that Jehan and Shaikh were initially hailed as martyrs on the LeT website and then the post was hastily taken off. It is difficult to take them at their word because of their many lies, not only in this, but other Modi and Gujarat linked cases.
Even assuming that Jehan and Shaikh were LeT sleepers, they were, by no means, outside the pale of the Indian law. They were not even, as is alleged in the case of Sohrabuddin,  well-known dangerous criminals who had to be shot at sight, rather than arrested.
There are many, including Modi in the Gujarat State Assembly elections of 2007, who have argued that Sohrabuddin was a criminal and ‘deserved to die’. They conveniently overlook the murder of his wife, Kausar Bi. Needless to say, they see no irony in the fact that arrogating to yourself the right to kill, allegedly for a higher cause, is exactly the argument that terrorists give.
It goes without saying that in any civilised country, the right to kill is one that is exclusively reserved for the state. While in war time, and through special legislation like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, it is delegated to its armed forces, in normal circumstances it is only exercised through the judiciary and that, too, through judicial due process. Here, as we have seen in India, it is exercised in the “rarest of rare” circumstances.
Unfortunately, the Indian political system has tolerated extra-judicial killings and fake encounters for too long. They have seen it, as the Mumbai police have, as a means of getting rid of dangerous underworld figures who, notwithstanding draconian laws like the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) of 1999, are difficult to keep behind bars. Police personnel in insurgency-ridden states have seen it as a way of getting rid of dreaded terrorists who if left in jail would pose a threat to the police personnel and their family.

Establishment
But this argument is not quite accurate and the problem is much worse. The Asian Centre for Human Rights has, on the basis of reports to the National Human Rights Commission, pointed out that there have been 14,231 custodial deaths in police and judicial custody in India in the 2001-2010 period.
Of these the highest number, 250, is in Maharashtra, then comes Uttar Pradesh, 174, Gujarat, 134, Andhra Pradesh, 109, West Bengal, 98, Tamil Nadu, 95. As can be seen, a number of these states are neither afflicted by gangsterism or terrorism. Most of the deaths, the ACHR points out, are a result of torture. More than anything else, it reflects not the anger of people against terrorism or crime, but the casual way in which we treat human life in this country.
The reason for this state of affairs is the cover given to these murderers in uniform by the establishment. They are hailed as “encounter specialists” who put their lives on the line. Awards are showered on cops who have done nothing more than shot unarmed men. It is not surprising that virtually no policeman ever loses his life, or even gets a scratch, in the many alleged encounters that they have participated in.
The motive of the political class is to ride the “tough on terrorism” plank. No one has been more adept at this than Narendra Modi. Not surprisingly, the maximum number of fake encounters are related to people killed in the process of plotting Modi’s killing.   Besides Sohrabuddin, Ishrat, Javed and the two alleged Lashkar men, we also have Sadiq Jamal who was shot dead, allegedly while plotting to kill L.K. Advani in Gujarat and Samir Khan Pathan who was killed while trying to escape, again after his arrest for a plot to kill Modi in 2002.

Dharma
Modi could not but have known that many of these alleged conspiracies were not really authentic. But he has chosen to ride the communal tiger. It began with his cynical decision to exploit the post-Godhra killing of Muslims to win the 2002 State Assembly elections, and was continued till the 2007 arrest of
D G Vanzara, the deputy commissioner of police in Ahmedabad for the Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi murder. It is perhaps too late to expect Modi to uphold the ideals of ethical conduct expected of the chief minister of a state. His failure to observe Raj Dharma was manifest even in 2002.
But India can and must rid itself of the shame of being a country where the rule of law is only selectively employed, and where people can be deprived of their life and liberty at the whim of the police. For this reason, the state must make an example of the people involved in the Ishrat murder and use the opportunity to take Indian policing to the 21st century from its rather barbaric past.
The Indian police system must develop the moral outrage needed to root out any sympathy for those who carry out fake encounters. The policemen involved must be seen for what they are—murderers. And being in uniform, they deserve much more severe punishment than is meted out to your run-of-the-mill killers.
Whether or not the judicial system takes a long time to convict and execute criminals or not, is not the concern of the police, and neither have they been appointed the official executioners of the Indian state.
India is at the cusp of a moral revolution. Across the country, the people are showing that they are tired of political corruption. This is the time when we need to draw up new norms of police conduct as well, with tough rules that outlaw torture and extra-judicial killing.
Mail Today November 24, 2011

The State of the Matter

So far the honours for the Uttar Pradesh sweepstakes are even. If Rahul Gandhi has pitched himself to show that the Congress is the  Bahujan Samaj Party’s main opponent by his “angry young man” act, Mayawati has come back with a googly— the proposal to  split the state into four—stumping the Congress. The game is far from over, but you are at least sure that you will get some high quality, high voltage politics in the run-up to the UP state assembly elections.
Ever since it was created, there have been moves to divide the state of Uttar Pradesh. The state’s origin lies in the exigencies of the British conquest of India and at some point it was christened the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh, being shortened in 1937 to United Provinces. After Independence, this was conveniently changed to Uttar Pradesh. Around the size of the United Kingdom, and three times as populous, this gigantic state was the fulcrum of national politics. At its peak, it returned as many as 85 members of the Lok Sabha.

Breakthrough
The party which controlled its politics decided who would be prime minister in New Delhi. But with the rise of identity politics the clout of the state was fragmented. Even so, as Mayawati revealed in the 2007 elections, it is still possible for a single party to dominate the state, even if not as completely as the Congress had in the 1950s.
There is little to be said for the claims that Ms Mayawati’s move is an election stunt. All politics are ultimately geared towards winning elections in a democracy, and the call to divide the state into four is a political move, plain and simple, so there is not much to complain about.  You have to hand it to Mayawati; she has the instincts of a gambler. She has staked the state which her party dominates and is offering to divide it into four, an act which is fraught with electoral consequences for her BSP.
She undoubtedly hopes that it could provide the breakthrough she has been looking for at the national level since 2007.  But the bigger questions are, first, whether her move will succeed, and second, whether it will benefit her and, finally and equally importantly, the inhabitants of the new states.
Under the Constitution, the eventual call on the creation of a new state rests with the Union government. The Congress history shows its disinclination to create new states. It did so with Maharashtra-Gujarat, Haryana-Punjab and Uttaranchal-UP only after agitations. Even now, as Telangana is virtually a fact, and burning, the party continues to waffle. Faced with the googly the party has limply suggested a new states reorganisation commission.



The Congress has its own imperatives. Being an all-India party, it doesn’t have the instincts or cunning of Mayawati who is looking for that big win. So, for the present Mayawati will, by default, be allowed to set up a straw man and beat him in the coming months. And in this way, she will ensure that some of the heat she would have faced for the corruption and criminalisation of the BSP-led government is deflected.
The second issue, too, is complicated. From being the top dog in UP, the BSP will have to rewrite the electoral equations in the new states. The Paschim Pradesh, for example, is the natural home of the Jat-dominated Rashtriya Lok Dal. It also has a significant proportion of Muslim voters, a fact that has been noted by the Muslim-baiting BJP. Bundelkhand could well be a natural outpost for the Samajwadi Party.
Whether the division will benefit the inhabitants of the new states is indeed a moot question. The record in India is mixed. One of the aspects of Mayawati’s proposal is that there is really no demand for UP’s division. When Uttarakhand separated, it was as much the result of geography and culture, as of an intense agitation for a separate hill state and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s mishandling of it.

Failures
While there has been a demand for a separate “Harit Pradesh” to incorporate regions of western UP, these have been more in terms of declarative statements of leaders of the RLD, rather than through any mass agitation. Likewise, Ms Mayawati’s claim that she had championed the division in the past, too, rests on the fact that she wrote three letters to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue in the past three years.
Compare this with the storm that is raging in Telangana where there is support for a separate state, as  well as vehement opposition to it. In the past, too, states like Maharashtra, Punjab, and Haryana emerged through an intense struggle. Himachal, the most successful of the small states, was a collateral effect of the reorganisation of Punjab. Jharkhand, too, was the result of a long struggle spanning half a century.
The experience of the creation of new states shows two trends. On the one hand you have successful states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Himachal, and Mizoram and on the other you have those like Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand which are failing, if not failed, states. Maybe it is unfair to call them failing or failed. But the outcomes for the inhabitants have not been particularly good and in many cases, these states are barely solvent, and depend on central largesse for survival. Their inept governments have not generated any economic growth and have, instead, depended on expanding government jobs for their inhabitants.

Gambler
Take Uttarakhand. Instead of taking the trajectory of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand has been marked by rampant corruption. The same seems to have happened in Jharkhand. The takeaway could well be that the winning political party has the means to corrupt the entire political class. N.D. Tiwari patented the idea of providing some kind of sinecure to each and every member of the legislative assembly belonging to his party. He was probably outdone by Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank whose largesse extended to party bosses in New Delhi as well. Though Jharkhand had a strong identity and vast resources, it has been cursed by political instability which has probably been aided and promoted by venal politicians like Shibu Soren and Madhu Koda. In just two years of his chief ministership, the latter allegedly acquired assets worth Rs 4,000 crore.
The experience of Himachal Pradesh shows that a decent, capable and far-sighted leader can make a major difference in the fortunes of a state. Unfortunately, none of the new entities created after 2000 has had that luck. In the case of the four states that Mayawati wants to create out of UP, we are not even sure as to who could lead these states. We know, of course, that Ajit Singh could get himself or his son to become the CM of the Paschim Pradesh. But as for the others there are few obvious names. No doubt they will emerge, especially after Mayawati has precipitated the issue.
The bigger question is about Ms Mayawati’s own future. As a politician, she has been peripatetic. She has contested polls from places like Haridwar (now in Uttarakhand), Kairana and Bijnor in West UP, Akbarpur in East UP, Harora assembly seat from West UP, Bisli from Central UP and Jahangirpur near Noida. But West UP aka Harit Pradesh is the one place where she would face the most coherent opposition. Perhaps there is a hidden message in the Dalit memorial park in Noida facing Delhi.
This leaves you wondering whether it is guile or gamble that guides her deeper strategy.
Mail Today November 18, 2011

Is it possible to have a secure cyber universe ?

Last week, in a hotel in a Washington DC suburb, the US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted a symposium. The goal was to reach out to the geek community to find a solution to a problem that seems to be on the top of many minds—cyber security. It was clear from the remarks of the leaders of the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, that as of now they have run out of ideas for ways to protect the US military, and by extension, other American computer networks, from attacks by hackers.
There is an irony here: Darpa helped create the internet yet it finds itself unable to cope with the dark side of what it has helped create. Besides the government, many American companies including some prime defence contractors have had their computers hacked and some of their most sensitive files compromised. What the Darpa is looking for is the proverbial magic bullet. As of now defence against hackers constitutes identifying malware, removing it from the system and waiting for the next attack.
This is bad news for countries like India. In the past four years or so, many websites belonging to the government have been subject to cyber attacks. By their very nature the authors of these attacks have been difficult to pin down. The attacks vary—some are probing attacks to map out networks, others are deeper probes to locate and extricate important data. Yet, even something as innocuous as the Commonwealth Games of 2010 suffered as many as 8,000 attacks.

Incidence
This indicates that the scale of what has to be protected is enormous and goes well beyond what is called National Critical Infrastructure. Figures in the 2009 Annual report of  the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) show that phishing attacks had risen from just 3 in 2004 to 374 in 2009, peaking at 604 the year before. Likewise, network scanning and probing attacks had gone up from 11 in 2004 to 303 in 2009. Website compromise through malware propagation had gone up from 835 in 2008 to 6,548 in 2009, the last year for which Cert-In figures are available.
In June 2008, hackers struck at nearly 10 websites in various ministries over a period of 24 hours. But it was the Ministry of External Affairs which has been a major target. In February 2009, several of its over 600 computers were found to be infected with a spyware which tracks or controls  user action. In this case, the spyware would automatically “copy” an email being sent by an office and dispatch it to another address as well.
In an interview with The Times ( London), India’s then National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan confirmed that his own office, as well as two other government departments, were targeted on December 15, 2009. He also spoke of an earlier incident when a Trojan had been embedded in an email with a pdf attachment, allowing the attacker to access the computer remotely, download and also delete files.
More recently, in July 2011, Indian government systems faced one of the most serious and sophisticated attacks till now. In the early hours of July 12, emails from one address with an attached Microsoft Word document titled “cms.ntro:daily-elec.mediareport (2011)” were sent to the top officials of India’s security system, including the NSA, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, and the Special Secretary (Internal Security) in the MHA. The document purported to be a daily report issued by the government’s Central Monitoring System which tracks radio broadcasts of neighbouring countries. Any attempt to open it would have actually resulted in the release of malware that established itself in their computer systems. Fortunately, the intrusion was prevented.
In an April 2010 report, Information Warfare Monitor, working with Shadowserver Foundation came out with a report titled, Shadows in the Cloud—Investigating Cyber Espionage 2.0. This report categorically asserted that it had uncovered a suspected Chinese cyberwar offensive against India. Among the Indian institutions targeted were the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) headed by the NSA.  During the period of observation, fourteen documents, including two marked “Secret”, and those assessing the situation in the North East, and Maoism, were taken out by hackers.
Computers of the Indian embassies in Kabul, Moscow, and consulates in Dubai and Abuja, Nigeria were compromised.  Military units such as the 21 Artillery Brigade in Assam, the Air Force Station at Race Course Road, New Delhi, and the Air Force station in Darjipura near Vadodara were compromised.

Source
Among the documents withdrawn was a detailed briefing on a live fire exercise, and another relating to the Pechora surface to air missile. Military educational institutions such as the Army Institute of Technology in Pune and the Military College of Electronics and Mechanical Engineering in Secunderabad were also attacked and 21 documents exfiltrated from them.
Who is responsible for these attacks? The “Shadows” investigators, as well as “The Dark Visitor”, a blog that researches Chinese hacking activities, have concluded that there are strong links of the attacks to Chengdu. This is interesting, since Chengdu’s University of Electronic Science and Technology has had a strong association with the Chinese hacking community. It is also the location of one of PLA’s Technical Reconnaissance Bureaus and the headquarters of the military region that deals with India.
The “Shadows” own assessment is tentative, even though it says that “this investigation and our analysis tracks back directly to the PRC”. It also says that the information may be moving from the underground fraternity of hackers to the Chinese state.
In early August 2011, the computer security company McAfee said in a report that there had been a series of cyber attacks on the networks of 72 organisations across the world, including the United Nations, governments and corporations, over a five-year period. India and the UN were, McAfee says, the primary target of the intrusions.

Steps
While it did not name the country, it did say that there had been “one state actor” behind the attacks. It takes little imagination to guess that the country in question is China. The sharply escalating nature of cyber attacks against India led to the government of India creating a Crisis Management Plan whose key action was the creation of the CERT-In as the national nodal agency in cyber security which works with international CERTs. Sectoral teams have also been created along with teams of security auditors that can provide a wide range of services on a commercial basis.
The legal basis of the national cyber security action in India is laid out by the Information Technology Act of 2000 which was amended in 2008. Under this, the government has the authority to scan Indian cyber space, detect incidents and threats, audit practices and protect critical and other infrastructure. India has only recently announced procedures and protocols for communications monitoring and interception, but like the rest of the world, it has some way to go before security can be assured in its networks and systems. Ever since the 2009 intrusions, the NTRO has been actively involved in the cyber security of India’s national security apparatus.
Days after the August 2011 report by McAfee, the Chinese government released a report claiming that far from being the aggressor, China was the victim when it came to cyber attacks. The report claimed that about half of the 493,000 cyber attacks on the websites of the Chinese government and other agencies in the past year “originated from abroad, particularly the United States and India”. The report was prepared by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Centre, which is said to be the Chinese government’s “primary computer security monitoring network”.
If the Chinese claim to be victims and the US says it is unable to guarantee protection against cyber attacks, countries like India are in trouble. There is need for those charged with cyber security in the country to look deeper, perhaps within our own IT institutions and companies, for talent that can come up with the necessary solutions.
Mail Today November 11, 2008

AFSPA rollback makes sense

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
 

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

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