Learning from a bloody past

In all the breast beating about the Kandahar hijacking raised by former R&AW chief AS Dulat’s book on Kashmir, people are forgetful of an important point: The terrible events of September 11, 2001 have forever ensured that there is only one way to deal with a hijack free the hostages through negotiations or commando action, or shoot it out of the sky. There is no middle ground left.

This said, we can look at that event with some hindsight. It is clear now, as it was then, that the handling of the event was a blunder, not a simple “goof up” as Dulat suggests. In keeping with the Indian tradition of no one being held accountable for anything, no heads rolled and no one was punished for that event. People blamed the Crisis Management Committee headed by Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, they in turn blamed the all-powerful Brajesh Mishra, the National Security Adviser, who in turn said that the NSG and Punjab Police personnel failed to do the needful. Incidentally, Prime Minister Vajpayee learnt of the hijacking 100 minutes after it occurred because he was not informed by the Indian Air Force pilots on his Boeing 737 since he was on an internal flight.

And, as usual no lessons were learnt. When terrorists struck in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, there was a repeat performance. The state’s Crisis Management Group headed by its Chief Secretary was a non-starter, the police chief barricaded himself near the Trident hotel instead of being in the control room, and the National Security Guards took their time arriving, ensuring that an event that could have been terminated within hours was allowed to play out for 60 hours. One of the major flaws in the idea of Crisis Management Groups at the time, was the belief that crises can be managed by committees, that too of babus who are better trained to avoid decisions.

Fortunately, a new hijack doctrine laid out by the United Progressive Alliance government in 2005, left out the Crisis Management Committee. The new policy framework was approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security which said that a commercial jet could be shot down if there were fears that it would be used as a missile by hijackers. Further, it ruled out negotiations on the demands of the hijackers. Negotiations, involving trained negotiators would take place only to seek the termination of the event and seek the safe release of the passengers. In addition, the government declared that it would seek the death penalty against anyone seeking to hijack an aircraft.

While the decision to shoot down an aircraft would rest with the CCS or, the PM, defence minister and the home minister, a provision was made for a quick decision by a senior Air Force officer in the event of an aircraft going rogue during landing or take off giving little time for the normal chain of command to be accessed. A hijacked aircraft would be accompanied by IAF fighters in Indian airspace and specific orders given to ensure that no hijacked aircraft which landed in an Indian airfield could take off again. Such aircraft would be liable to be stormed by the NSG, were there to be a situation that threatened the lives of the passengers.

Despite all this, it is not clear whether we would be able to handle the next event efficaciously. The only way such situations can be handled is by clear-cut doctrines, chains of command and repeated practice. It is true that no one event is like another. Yet, if the doctrine is well articulated and understood, the chain of command clear and uncomplicated, and those charged with dealing with the incidents put through regular exercises, there is no reason why they cannot handle any version of the challenge.

But that is where the rub lies. Most people have forgotten that we actually have an anti-hijack doctrine. They cannot be blamed because this is something that the government needs to educate the public on and this can be done through periodic exercises. This holds good not just for hijack threats, but terrorist actions as well. We may have overcome the challenges of Sikh and Islamist terrorism that afflicted us in the 1990s and mid-2000s, but only the foolhardy will say that the era of terrorism is over. It is not, and we must put all the lessons

Mid Day July 7, 2015

How we can save the nation's farmers

India got a reality check on Saturday when newspapers splashed the shocking conclusions of the first Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) since 1934, which revealed the extent of rural deprivation. 

Its primary finding was that rural households make up nearly three quarters of the country’s population, some 884 million people, and that an overwhelming 74 per cent of them survive on a monthly income of Rs 5,000 for their highest earner. 

The message from these staggering numbers is obvious: India has to resolve some very basic issues within before it can aspire to be any kind of power, regional or global. 

With agriculture contributing just 13.7 per cent to the Indian Gross Domestic Product, it is clear that the rural situation is a millstone around the country’s neck, rather than being an asset in the transformation of our economy. 

But this millstone happens to comprise of people - hundreds and millions of men, women and children who are illiterate, poor and hungry. 

Rural Assets

More than half of these households do not own any land, the primary rural asset. And neither are they able to create other assets because they lack education. Thirty-six per cent of them are illiterate and the rest of those considered literate barely qualify since they have not even completed high school. 

In practical terms a vast number of households have to struggle hard to get food, potable water, have no power or toilets. The consequences of this are illiteracy, malnutrition, and vulnerability to disease.

As another report being suppressed by the government and revealed by The Economist notes, fully 30 per cent of the country's children suffer from malnutrition and its terrible consequences of “stunting” and “wasting” - being abnormally short or underweight. You can be sure most of these folk are from the rural areas too.

Over the years, a large number of people have worked their way out of poverty, gained literacy, acquired the trappings of middle class living like refrigerators, washing machines, and a two or four-wheeled vehicle. But the SECC has just opened our eyes to the sheer scale of poverty that continues to blight our land. 

Because this deprivation is rural, many of those who make policy, read newspapers, and shape the discourse of the country through the TV, never really get to grasp what it means. 

Hidden away in the backwaters of Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh or Orissa, even the minor illness of an earning member of the household can mean slow starvation and death. 

Sadly, richer states are not too different - 47.6 per cent of rural Rajasthan remains illiterate and the much-touted Gujarat’s child malnutrition rates of 33.3 per cent are higher than the national average. 

At a macro level it is obvious that the country needs a manufacturing revolution, as Prime Minister Modi says, to shift these millions into productive occupations. But the issue is not simply one of investments, ease of doing business, FDI and the other buzzwords you hear, but of a process that would first eliminate hunger and disease and provide education to the rural masses. 

The figures say, for example, that only 5.4 per cent of the people in rural India have completed high school, and only 3.4 per cent have graduated from college.

Red Herrings 

With these numbers, who or what will populate your factories? “Make in India” or MNREGA are red herrings. What the country needs to urgently work on is an sweeping agrarian revolution. 

For too long policy - essentially subsidising fertiliser and providing unsustainable support prices - has drifted. In the meantime, the size of holdings has declined, even as the number of persons dependent on those holdings has increased. The water table has dropped precipitously.  

Biggest Problem 

But the biggest problem has been the fractured Indian agricultural market, dominated as it is by Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees. The result is that there are situations where brinjal is selling for Rs 300 a quintal in Punjab and Rs 3,000 a quintal in Gujarat at the same time. 

Middle-men distort the prices and availability of commodities. India does not have the option of forcing the process, as was done in the Soviet Union and China, and as the experience of countries like the US and Japan shows, it is not easy to reform the agricultural sector in democratic countries as well because of its political clout. 

But for India there is, perhaps, little choice. Politicians have been kicking the can down the road for the past decades. Now, they have accumulated to form the millstone that will block the progress of the country. 

Bold steps are needed to create a new agricultural paradigm, or else the country is condemned to walk on the development treadmill forever. 

Mail Today July 6, 2015

Not entirely a picture of health

Narendra Modi must be feeling pleased with himself. In addition to being the Prime Minister of the country, he has now become the lead yoga practitioner of the nation. There is something corny about having the PM lead a mass exercise event, but Modi is not your average politician. Behind the move, no doubt, is some thought and calculation.

 

India is making no bones about taking ownership of the yoga brand. There is nothing wrong with that. If the French can doggedly insist that they “own” champagne, we can certainly do that for this ancient form of meditation and exercise. The Modi government is seeking to kill two birds with one stone on this. First, to use yoga as a vehicle for India’s soft power in the world, and second as a mobilisational platform within the country around an issue which seeks to transcend barriers of caste and creed. This is something that Modi has been doing as a politician, witness his call for Swachh Bharat or for building toilets across the country.

In all this, traditionalists may complain that yoga is losing its essence, since its meditative aspects are very personal and do not quite easily lend themselves to “soviet” kind of drills that we witnessed on the Rajpath on Sunday. But then, in the years that India did not claim any kind of ownership, yoga has already developed various strains building from the traditional ones like hatha yoga, ashtanga yoga, kundalini yoga and so on and leading to modern teachers like Iyengar, Bikram or Bharat yoga.

Modi’s move to take international ownership of yoga has been carefully thought through. It was articulated in his first speech to the UN General Assembly as Prime Minister in September 2014, calling for the UN to adopt an international yoga day. As part of this, India’s permanent representative at the UN introduced a draft resolution at the UN General Assembly in December. The draft was supported by 177 Member states, and 175 of them co-sponsored the resolution which was adopted and the UN declared June 21, the summer solstice, as the International Yoga Day.

So, not surprisingly, there were reports of yoga day observance from around the world. Millions of people participated, from places as diverse as the iconic Times Square in New York to Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Eiffel Tower in France. There were observances in Kazakhstan, China, South Korea, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, to name but a few of the cities. Yoga could well emerge as the focal point of an Indian effort to promote its culture through government-sponsored institutes much in the way the French, Americans or the Chinese seek to do so around the world.

All this said, there is also need for a reality check back home. Promoting yoga cannot be a substitute for action on the ground on issues that affect the health of the people. This is a country with many people who have really serious health issues and who are wracked by malnutrition. Yoga cannot help, and there is need for caution against inflated claims that it can cure this disease or that ailment.

A perspective on the real health challenges in the country is provided by the India Country Report on Millenium Development Goals brought out by the government of India. Its own assessment is that the country’s target in halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger and in improving maternal health is in the “slow or off-track” category.

An uncomfortably high some 20 per cent of our billion plus population - come within the official count of poverty. The proportion of underweight children remains around 33 per cent and India has failed to meet the goal of reducing the proportion from 52 per cent to 25 percent between 1990 and 2015. Likewise infant mortality remains at a high figure of 39 deaths per 1000 live births, missing the 2015 target of 27. Associated with this is the maternal mortality ratio which should be 109 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2015, but it is actually 140. Whether it is malaria or tuberculosis or other diseases, India’s figures continue to be uncomfortably high.

For good health, there is also need to look at some other issues as well. First, is the provision of safe drinking water. While the government claims that 87.88 per cent of households had access to “improved source” drinking water, this does not quite mean that this water is either safe or potable. There is, of course, another area and this has been a focus of Prime Minister Modi’s attention access to latrine facilities. Even today nearly half the households in the country do not have proper sanitation facilities.

So, it is important to look at Prime Minister Modi’s yoga initiative in the perspective of the massive challenge of eliminating hunger and poor health that afflicts large numbers of our citizens. Before we can have the luxury of taking the high road to good physical and mental health with yoga practice, we need to gird ourselves towards some basic issues that relate to good health. At the same time, of course, we should not decry efforts, such as the one that took place on Sunday to promote sound health practices and at the same time make Indians proud of their cultural heritage.

Mid Day June 23, 2015