India must heed the lesson of Japan's nuclear disaster

The great Tohoku earthquake and the consequent 
tsunami has not just shifted the earth off its axis, it has also given a hard knock to the prevailing paradigm about nuclear power being the energy source of the future. Whether or not it is a fatal knock remains to be seen, as the disaster that has hit the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan plays itself out. As of the writing, Japanese workers continue to battle heroically to avert a wider nuclear catastrophe which could result in a large number of casualties.
An event of this magnitude has had predictable global consequences. The powerful and vocal anti-nuclear power community has pounced on the developments to revive a movement that had flagged in the face of the demands for clean energy in the era of global warming. Nuclear power votaries and personnel involved in the industry rose equally quickly to the defence of “their” technology. Both sides have valid arguments, and it would be hubristic to believe that the event was a one of kind and has  limited lessons. What it has done is to question our prevailing assumptions about the nature of natural disasters. 



The great Tohoku earthquake was  the fifth largest since 1900, and it has been 1200 years since an earthquake of this magnitude has hit that plate boundary, unleashing a tsunami which sent waves higher than ten metres crashing onto north-eastern Honshu, Japan’s main island.
It upended the contemporary knowledge about the scale of earthquakes and tsunamis that Japan had been used to in modern history.  Japan, of course, implements a strict building code for construction in the country which faces many major and minor earthquakes every year.  
 
Guidelines
Nuclear power has had its critics since its very inception. They have pointed to the inherent dangers of nuclear power technology. For strategic reasons, primarily the fact that it lacked any oil, Japan decided that nuclear energy would form an important part of its energy mix.  Japan has 52 operational power plants and three under construction, as many as fourteen of these are in the region facing the earthquake and tsunami. The Fukushima Daiichi plant has six reactors of which four are in serious trouble. The Fukushima Daini plant and the Onagawa plant with three reactors which face the region of the earthquake, did shut down and, in the case of the Daini plant, the cooling was temporarily halted, but soon resumed.
Everywhere in the world,  the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants takes place in a tough regulatory environment. In Japan, because of the high seismicity of many parts of the country and its environs, the regulations have been that much more stringent.
Most nuclear power plants, including the Japanese, are designed to handle major earthquakes and shut down safely automatically. While nuclear plants near Kobe were not affected by the 1995 earthquake, in subsequent years earthquakes did result in several power plants shutting down. The reactors were originally designed to withstand earthquakes of the intensity of 6.7 on the Richter scale, assuming that the earthquake took place directly underneath the reactor. The event would result in an automatic shutdown of the reactor, maintenance of its cooling and its subsequent startup. After the 7.2 magnitude Kobe earthquake, the safety figure was revised upward to  7.75.
In the past decade, the Japanese nuclear safety agencies have revised even these guidelines and put in place newer parameters based on ground motion, rather than the earthquake intensity, and power companies upgraded their safety features  to meet the requirements.
The problem, however, was not an earthquake or a tsunami, but a combination of the two. While the earthquake did result in the planned shutdown of the four operational Fukushima reactors, the resulting tsunami really created the problem. It swamped the plant’s electrical machinery and the pumps used to keep the reactor cool failed. The backup generators, too, packed up and the limited battery backup was insufficient to meet the enormous requirements for cooling the fuel rods.
 
Hubris
The Indian nuclear establishment has reacted to the dismal news from Japan with alacrity, but the past record of obfuscations and secrecy makes the Department of Atomic Energy’s statements on the subject suspect.
As for the critics, they have used the event to buttress their case against nuclear power. There are a number of ongoing agitations against nuclear power  plants in India. Anti-nuclear power votaries, some of who make a living from their activism, are in the forefront, but in most cases the real momentum for the agitations come from farmers upset over the loss of livelihood from land that the government has taken over, or plans to take over. Some of the critics seem more eager to refight their battles against the Indo-US nuclear deal, rather than deal with the specific issue confronting us.
And that issue is: Can India do without nuclear power ? Given the overall shortage of power in the country, it cannot. It may not want to rely on nuclear power for all its energy, but it certainly needs nuclear power sources to meet the enormous demands that it confronts in the coming decades. DAE officials have been arguing that India does not have the same kind of seismicity that Japan has, and is unlikely to face an earthquake of the intensity that it has last Saturday.
True, but neither had the country heard about a tsunami till the 2004 event. Though that tsunami was not at the scale of the one that hit Japan last week, it was powerful enough to take tens of thousands of lives in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand. It also led to a shut-down of the Kalpakkam nuclear power plant. What would a ten-meter tsunami have done?
In all fairness, nuclear power alone is not threatened by earthquakes. Big dams, too, can be destroyed by a temblor.  We have several large dams such as the ones in Bhakra and Tehri whose destruction could result in a massive loss of life and property comparable to a nuclear disaster. But unlike a nuclear event which can contaminate a region for hundreds of years, the ecology will easily recover from a burst dam.
 
Response
What the country needs is to look at the Japanese experience with a cool head and a sharp eye. An event like the great Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing nuclear accidents demand a thorough review of the safety features of existing and planned power plants in the country. The prime minister has promised as much.
But he should also insist on establishing a truly independent regulatory body that would look into matters of siting nuclear power plants and  validating their designs. Such a body should be structured for credibility with the people, rather than comfort with the government.
We should also explore other advanced nuclear technologies where accidents  will not lead to long-term catastrophes. The Generation IV reactor initiative has several projects with safer and more proliferation resistant reactors. While many of these are still in the future,  the so-called pebble-bed reactor is a technology which has been around us for a while and which deserves serious consideration. A 300 MW reactor based on the technology was constructed in Germany, but later dismantled because of political opposition.
Governments and regulatory bodies cannot cater for every possible eventuality. After all a significant asteroid strike can bring a disaster of enormous magnitude and there is little that can be done to prevent it. Human beings have not achieved what they have by taking a neurotic approach to life, the Japan event has confronted us with a situation, and we must react to it in a prudent and mature fashion.
Mail Today March 17, 2011

Disarm the criminals, or arm the people to fight them

The proliferation of guns--licensed or otherwise-- poses risks for all

The death, on Tuesday, of Radhika Tanwar at the hands of a stalker is heart-rending. A young life has been snuffed out for no fault of her own. A cowardly killer used the easiest method to kill her —shot the unsuspecting victim at close range with a country-made pistol and walked away. On Wednesday, a gun was used to shoot a couple and injure them grievously. Almost every other day  a murder is committed with the use of a gun. It takes something to bludgeon or knife a person to death, pressing the trigger of pistol is much easier. The state has done little or nothing to make it difficult to get one and so,  for the homicidally inclined, the gun has become the weapon of choice.
 
History
Guns were not always so easily available. In the 1960s when the Maoists decided to take on the Indian state in Naxalbari, in West Bengal, the  only firearms they could muster were some  12 bore guns and hunting rifles looted from tea estates. In fact many of the Naxalites used pipe-guns made of ordinary water pipes.
Chambal had its dacoits and Mumbai  its gangsters, but the easy availability of guns in northern India is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its epicenter lies in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar where the breakdown of administration in the 1960s and 1970s led to the proliferation of workshops churning out country-made weapons. Today’s Naxalites, of course, are armed with a variety of weapons — .303 rifles, SLR and INSAS carbines — many of which have come from government armouries by means that are not easy to determine.
Parallel to this has been the exponential growth in the availability of licensed arms. Till the 1960s, getting a gun license was quite difficult in India because of the hang-over of British colonial laws where the issue of licenses was closely linked to loyalty to the empire. But the rise of democratic politics saw a proliferation of gun licenses as newly rising castes saw gun ownership as much an issue of prestige, as to offset the perceived advantage of their upper caste rivals. 
In India strict gun-control laws were an outcome of the imperial necessity. The eighteenth century, in which the British fought their way to dominance in the Indian subcontinent, was a very violent one. Given the Mughal mansabdari system, armed men owing allegiance to their feudatories were scattered across India. With the breakdown of Mughal authority, India, particularly in the north, saw a long period of anarchy where petty rajas and landlords vied with each other for control, and the British by virtue of their superior military organisation and world view managed to prevail. Once they came to power, and especially after the 1857 uprising, they undertook a policy of systematically disarming the people through tough legislation and laws that made the ownership of weapons without license a major crime.
This was not very different from the system they had back home. In the seventeenth century, the British aristocracy created laws restricting hunting and gun ownership to the upper classes and denying them to the poor.  The legacy of this continues to this day and UK has some of the toughest laws against owning guns. Civilians, regardless of the circumstances, cannot own handguns. Other guns, mainly for hunting and sport are strictly licensed.  
But by  themselves guns don’t kill. As the slogan goes, “guns don’t kill, people do.” It is true that the easy availability of guns promotes its use in crime in the US. The American  right to bear arms is written into their constitution and has as its basis the history of the country which was liberated from the colonial yoke because the people had the firearms to turn against their British overlords. But, Switzerland with a similar history, i.e. where people fought for their freedom and were able to defend their country against their bigger European neighbours because they remained armed and ready for war, does not have the kind of crime statistics you see in the US.
It is a certain kind of a social and political milieu that provides the backdrop of their usage for violent ends.
In the US it is obvious in its stratified social system and ghettoisation of the minorities.
Unfortunately, the ambiance in India with its burgeoning urbanisation, poverty and social tensions make for an incendiary situation. Layer upon this a ruthlessly  predatory attitude towards women and the weak, compounded by the breakdown in effective policing in most parts of India.
 
Proliferation
The big threat lies from unlicensed weapons. And these have proliferated widely. Making the weapon itself is not the problem, even the technology available to a village craftsman can do the needful. Ammunition is an issue, but leakages from the licensed system as well as from the police and the armed forces have created the problem. Last year, this paper reported how ammunition from CRPF armouries in UP managed to find its way to Maoists in the jungles of Chhattisgarh.
Given the rapid urbanisation of the country and the emergence of large unpoliced or poorly policed areas can result in the rise of criminal gangs who are not afraid of taking on the police. We already see some aspects of this phenomenon in the Ghaziabad-Meerut area of the national capital region. If something is not done to check the proliferation of country-made weapons, things could go from bad to worse.
The police need to first understand that there is a problem. The issue of misuse of licensed weapons is straightforward enough. Here the police need to not only strengthen the processes relating to the issue of licenses, but to also institute a process whereby which licenses can be withdrawn from people who  could become a threat to society because of their possession of a licensed weapon. In other words, the licensing process should involve much more continuous  monitoring.
As far as the country-made gun phenomenon is concerned, the challenge is vaster. One aspect of it is the location and destruction of workshops that produce them. The second is to break the supply chains of ammunition for such weapons.
 
Leaching
The third, and most doable, is to leach away the weapons from those who possess them. Countries have tried different ways of doing this — Brazil, Zambia, South Africa have experimented with amnesty and cash bounties to encourage people to turn in illegal weapons.  
What the Delhi police can easily do is to offer an amnesty, to start with, and then undertake a sustained drive to locate and seize these weapons. One way to do this is surprise search and seize drives where the police can seal off a mall, a market or a bus stand and search every person for hidden weapons. This will deter people from carrying the weapons around. For its part, the union government needs to pass laws that will enhance punishment for the manufacture, transportation and possession of illegal weapons.
If the police and the government throw up their hands and claim they cannot do anything, it may be a better idea to make licensing easier and encourage the ordinary citizen to become a gun-owner and train them in the use of guns.
 At least this will be able to equalise the advantage that the criminals have vis-à-vis the common folk as of now.
Mail Today March 11, 2011

The Home Ministry's cure for terrorism is worse than the disease

The Union Budget 2011-12 is unexceptional when it comes to supporting the Indian national security buildup. The formula adopted by the finance minister is to provide the sum asked for and add that “additional funds will be made available if required.” Such funds rarely get any public scrutiny, the parliament standing committees, do of course, examine the demands for grants, but in a normative rather than an analytical fashion.  As a result, people are unaware of the wider implications of certain decisions. One such relates to the Rs 39.75 crore appropriated for the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid).
The challenge in the internal security area has only been seriously taken up in the wake of the Mumbai attack, even though the country has faced terrorist attacks for the past three decades. The post Mumbai efforts involve beefing up the National Security Guard to act as SWAT teams in various urban centres, creating a system of coastal and maritime security, as well as boosting internal intelligence coordination. 

Natgrid
All these are as they should be. But there are some measures which are now beginning to impinge on the rights of the average citizen. Prominent among these is the Natgrid for which some Rs 75 crore have been appropriated in the Union Budget in the last two years.  The proposal to link up all manner of individual information — tax, travel, internet and telecom usage, credit card spending, investments and so on, is the kind of thing that bureaucrats, especially national security ones, dream about. Sitting in their office, and at the press of the button, they can track everyone and everything at all times.
But this is the stuff of nightmares for the average law abiding person. Things would be fine if we had a sensitive and subtle bureaucracy. But we don’t. We have one which is already tipsy on power. While its core comprises of  dedicated and well-meaning persons, a significant proportion — much too large for comfort— are venal and not sufficiently ground in the ethics of good governance.  Trusting sensitive personal information to them is like allowing a fox to guard a hen coop.
A national grid where various intelligence agencies who collect information through various sources share their informationat various levels of classification makes for good sense and will aid  efficacious action against criminals and terrorists. But not the proposed Natgrid.
So far the principle behind the  interception of phone calls and its invasion into the privacy of a citizen is that he or she must  do something suspicious for which the authorities then seek a warrant which is signed by the Home Secretary and his equivalent. The interception  undertaken for a strictly limited period and the records subsequently destroyed.
What is being proposed now is an open ended system where as many as 11 intelligence agencies will be given a licence to trawl through the data banks of telecom and insurance companies, stock exchanges and banks, internet providers and airline booking networks to undertake  a grand fishing expedition which they hope will yield them something.
I am not being paranoid when I argue this. We have, after all, the example of the Radia tapes before us. These tapes were obtained by official sanction and were in official custody, yet they were leaked out. While there is an element of schadenfreude in the discomfort of some well known journalists being revealed as ethically challenged individuals, no crime seems to be evident, at least from the tapes so far released.
 Yes, they refer to lobbying and the craven politics of the UPA government, but that is in itself not a crime. There is considerable merit in Ratan Tata’s affidavit to the Supreme Court arguing that the indiscriminate publication of private conversations did constitute a violation of his constitutional rights.
Most of us will concede that the government needs to have the ability to tap phone conversations to take on organised crime, terrorism and money laundering. But the governments needs to assure us that its minions use the powers in a responsible way. As of now there is nothing in the law, nor the behavior of the government, to convince us that they will do so. 

NCTC
The Natgrid is the core of the grander plan of the Union Home Ministry to establish a National Counter Terrorism Centre. The scope of the NCTC, as outlined by Union Home Minister in his December 2009 Intelligence Bureau Centenary Endowment Lecture, would be truly awesome — not only would it subsume the Multi-Agency Centre, the Natgrid, National Investigation Agency and the like, but, also, more questionably,  the National Technical Research Organisation(NTRO) and the  the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).
There are two problems here. First, the existing MAC and enhanced security awareness since 26/11 have yet to break up a conspiracy in advance using all the current level of snooping that they have presumably been doing. Consider, on the other hand, the record of UK where several conspiracies have been rumbled in advance with sufficient evidence to jail the conspirators through an open trial.
In India, the intelligence agencies claim that they have disrupted several conspiracies, but none of them at the point where there was enough evidence to enable people to be fairly tried and convicted for their acts. Of course, there are always encounters, but then dead men don’t talk. Given the reputation of the police, these more often than not raise more questions than answers.

Flaws
The second issue is the scope of the NCTC. The NTRO and the JIC that Mr Chidambaram wants in the NCTC do not only deal with terrorism. Notwithstanding Mumbai, the Union Home Ministry needs to understand that terrorism is not the main threat to the country’s security. They are painful and ugly challenges, but they can hardly damage our system, in the manner an attack by an external state adversary can. The NTRO’s remit, for example, includes ballistic missile defence, or that part of it that deals with the detection of hostile incoming missiles, it also looks at, among other things, the issue of cyber security. Surely these are not subjects that can be supervised by the NCTC.
Actually, the US experience with its NCTC has not been particularly good. The obvious example is the case of Umar Farook Abdulmuttalab, the so-called underwear bomber. Information on his activities was known — the British intelligence sent a report to their American counterparts in November 2009 and his own father met and informed two CIA personnel in Abuja, Nigeria a week later about his predelictions. His name was added to the data base of the US NCTC, but was not sent to that of the FBI that  screened incoming air travelers. On December 25, Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate plastic explosives sewn into his underwear while on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.
The obvious lesson here is that the large all-encompassing bodies are not a particularly good idea. In matters of security, as well of systems in general, there is need to build redundancies. In other words, systems where a failure does not end in a  cataclysmic disaster, because there are other systems  there as backups.
 We  need to stop,  think and question the logic of  outfits like the Natgrid and the NCTC which, besides being of questionable utility in fighting terrorism, are also a major encroachment into the very liberties our Home Ministry is supposed to protect.
Terrorism, a major threat, is not the only national security challenge we confront. But it is perhaps the only one which requires discrete and subtle use of strength, rather than a sledgehammer that the Home Ministry is envisaging and the Parliament  unquestioningly funding.
Mail Today March 3, 2011

The flabby Indian state surrenders to terrorists once again

The philosopher George Santayana once said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  He was probably talking about Indians, even though he did not quite say it. The Orissa government’s decision to concede all fourteen demands of the Maoists, in exchange for its collector R. Vineel Krishna and junior engineer Pabitra Majhi, marks yet another surrender by an Indian state to the armed might of a militant group. Clearly we have learnt nothing from the fiasco of the IC 814 hijack of 1999 or the release of Rubaiya Sayeed in 1989. 
In part, the problem seems to be in our muddled response to Maoism. Because they claim to speak on behalf of the people and have organised poor tribals to fight what they say are the depredations of the state, there is an assumption that they are some kind of Gandhians who use guns only when compelled to do so.  That is simply not true and let us not fool ourselves: The Maoists have obtained their ends by threatening to execute the two officials. Looked at any way, this is an act of terrorism.
 
Price
There will be people who will say that the Maoist demands were largely reasonable. That is true, but the masters of public relations that they are, they have taken care to camouflage their real demands—the release of imprisoned senior cadre—with the ones which  show them as friends of the poor and the exploited. So, it is true that some good ends will be served by the episode—justice may be nudged a bit on behalf of tribals who lost their land because of a NALCO project, the Orissa government will harden its existing opposition to the Polavaram dam project in Andhra Pradesh, trumped up cases will be withdrawn against some tribal activists, and so on, so forth. But, all these have been obtained with the real threat of death hanging over two people.
The consequences of this surrender are bound to be negative. The next time the Maoists want to spring a colleague from jail, they will kidnap another functionary of the state, perhaps some lowly policeman and threaten to kill him. If the official is relatively junior, the state may not even react and the hapless person could  be executed.
I wonder whether the alacrity with which the Orissa government acted had something to do with the fact that the officer in question is from the Indian Administrative Service, and that the officials advising the Chief Minister on the issue are also members of the same prestigious service which is known to look after its own to the exclusion of everyone else.

Another consequence of the state kneeling before the Maoists will be in the conduct of the anti-Maoist operations. Already, as one of the pre-conditions for the release, the government has suspended anti-Maoist operations in the jungles of Malkangiri. If Maoist cadre, presumably arrested after a great deal of effort by the police, can get away like this, why should the police personnel waste their time and effort, and risk their lives, in actively pursuing them ?
 The penalty for the Orissa surrender could be long lasting. Even today the country is dealing with the consequences of releasing five Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front militants for the kidnapped daughter, Rubaiya, of the then Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed. This disastrous decision gave the still fledgling Kashmiri militancy its greatest boost in December  1989. For the first time, the Kashmiri militants felt, they had actually bested the Indian state. The result was that tens of thousands of young Kashmiris went across the Line of Control to receive arms training from the waiting Pakistani handlers.
Ironically, the militants had been on the verge of releasing Rubaiya anyway. The public opinion may have been heavily influenced by the JKLF’s azadi propaganda, but the outfit itself came under a great deal of social pressure for the dastardly act of holding a young woman hostage.
 
Folly
Yes, Kashmir was still in its age of innocence. Farooq Abdullah, then Chief Minister of the state was aware of this and he refused to release the jailed JKLF leaders, Hamid Sheikh, Sher Khan, Javed Ahmed Zargar, Noor Mohammed Kalwal and Mohammed Altaf Butt.  However, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s ministerial colleagues in Delhi— Arun Nehru, I.K. Gujral  and Arif Mohammed Khan—recommended to Prime Minister V.P. Singh that he be overruled and the JKLF militants were released.
The next historical lesson came from the IC 814 hijack. A passenger aircraft with 176 passengers aboard was returning from Kathmandu to Delhi when it was hijacked on December 24, 1999 by some Pakistani Harkat jihad-e- Islami terrorists. The authorities bungled in not being able to stop the aircraft when it landed in Amritsar, and so it went to Lahore, then Dubai and finally landed in Kandahar, then under the control of the Taliban. Twenty-seven passengers, including one Rupin Katyal— who had been stabbed several times and who later died— were released in Dubai.
On the ground, the aircraft was surrounded by Taliban personnel who claimed they were there to protect the aircraft and its passengers, but in reality had been deployed to prevent any Indian military action. After several days of negotiations, the hijackers obtained the release of Masood Azhar, a top terrorist leader who had been in jail since 1993, Ahmad Sayeed Omar Sheikh, a British-Pakistani terrorist who was in jail for kidnapping several foreigners in New Delhi in 1994, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, a Kashmiri militant leader under arrest since 1992.
 
Retrieve
After their release, Masood Azhar split with the Harkat jihad-e-Islami and set up the Jaish-e-Mohammed which was involved in the attack on the Parliament House in New Delhi in December 2001 and other terrorist acts. Sheikh’s career has been even more notorious. He was reportedly involved in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl, as well as in the assassination plots against President Pervez Musharraf. He is currently in a Pakistani jail. Both Azhar and Zargar remain free.
The result of the IC814 hijack and the 9/11 incident in the United States in 2001 compelled New Delhi to adopt a tough anti-hijack policy. India would not negotiate with hijackers, authorities had pre-authorisation to immobilise aircraft on the ground, the air force would, under certain circumstances, shoot down an aircraft under the control of hijackers.
But the whole can only be the sum of the parts. The Union government can only do so much, the states need to do their bit, especially in the case of the Maoist movement which confronts the state with a complex problem. It feeds on  poverty and deprivation and the systemic injustice and exploitation in many parts of the country. But it is also a fact that the leadership cadre of the Maoists are a bunch of cold blooded killers who ruthlessly run an empire of extortion and exploitation of their own.
There is little point in lamenting over what has happened. The Union and the Orissa state governments must now focus their efforts in retrieving the situation  to the extent they can. Instead of going easy on the Maoists, they should press on with the anti-Maoist campaign. 
This does not mean a relentless military effort, but a sophisticated strategy which separates the Maoist fish from the waters in which they are swimming through effective political engagement with the locals, more development work, better security for government officials, and an overall resolve to press the campaign into a fight to the finish.
Mail Today February 24, 2011

Don't write the PM off just yet

It should have been said of him that he came, he saw and he conquered. But the Prime Minister’s modest goal in his carefully managed “interaction” with the TV media on Wednesday,  was not to emulate Caesar, but his wife, whose aim  was merely to remain above suspicion. Dr Manmohan Singh’s decision was not a matter of choice, but the need of the hour, since he sits besieged by the rising tide of public anger relating to corruption in his United Progressive Alliance government.
The Prime Minister may have had an immediate goal in organising the “interaction” — to break the downward spiral his government seems to have entered. But there seems to be a larger goal—to transform the political danger confronting his coalition into an opportunity to best the Opposition.


This may seem counter-intuitive at present when his government is beleaguered, and even the conduct of the coming Budget session of Parliament is in doubt. But Dr Singh has not reached where he is by linear thinking. His chosen martial art is judo.

Judo
He has in the past, too, used his seeming weakness to come out on top. He did it in 2004 with regard to his rivals in the Congress party to gain Sonia Gandhi’s affections, and he repeated it in 2008, and lined up his reluctant party to push his Indo-US nuclear agenda through parliament, by hook and by crook. Mr Advani and the Bharatiya Janata Party grandees who are salivating at the prospect of returning to government be warned.
If there was one unambiguous message in today’s interaction, it was that the PM was not about to put in his papers out of disgust or frustration, or the barracking tactics of the Opposition.  “I have a lot of unfinished business,” he said and “I intend to stay the course.”
If the PM appears all alone right now, it is also, perhaps, that he chooses to be so. The subtext of the press meet was to absolve Manmohan Singh from any blame in the scandals that have hit the UPA government.  The PM seems to have subtly islanded himself  from not just his own government, but also his party.
After the TRAI, Telecom Commission and the Finance Ministry had approved of A Raja’s decision not to auction the spectrum, “ I was in no position to insist that an auction took place,” he noted at one point. At another he declared, “ I have not met anybody myself,” in reference to a charge that the PMO was in the know on the Antrix-Devas deal. And, most importantly, he declared  “ I am not afraid of appearing before any committee, including the JPC.” He doesn’t have to belabour the point, but the emphatic “I” says it all.
There is an artfulness in his defensive tone. He  acknowledged, for example, that he could make mistakes, but, he pointed out, he was not as bad as he was being depicted, presumably by the media. Yet, his message was clear—he intended to stay the course. “We shall overcome, we shall prevail,” were  the brave, if somewhat hopeful closing lines of his prepared statement.
No one has, even now, questioned the Prime Minister’s sincerity or his honesty. He provided reasonably convincing explanations for why he, personally, cannot be blamed for either the 2G sale or the Antrix-Devas deal, you can even accept his point on the importance of giving space in the coalition to the partners to determine their own nominees. But surely, there is an element of naiveté in not understanding as to why the DMK was so insistent in getting the telecom portfolio. It wasn’t to serve the public.
The real issue remains the need for the PM to pull out of the downward spiral his government is caught in. And the question in everyone’s mind is whether Wednesday’s  effort can give some breathing space to what looks like a dying government.  The jury is clearly out on that. 

Change
It wasn’t surprising that the events in West Asia—the overthrow of tyrants in Tunisia and Egypt — was also brought into the meet by a questioner. The PM’s answer was correct, if predictable. India is a democracy, at least in terms of providing periodic opportunities for the people to change their government.
Alarmingly, what we are witnessing in India is the slow erosion of the solid political edifice that has largely kept social and political peace in India. It is being brought on by a careless political class that seems determined to live on past political capital.
Where in Egypt we see the possible beginning of a process of the construction of a democracy, in India we are witnessing  an unthinking effort to destroy it. Sadly, the very people designated to  lead the democratic system— the politicians— are in the forefront of the effort.
The Prime Minister has said that he is dead serious about getting to the bottom of the scams that have undermined his government and not sparing anyone.  The big question is: Has the PM bought enough time from an angry public to ensure that he can push through the Union Budget for the coming year, and then carry out his promised exercise of deep restructuring and reshuffle of his Cabinet?   

Choices
The key is in the choices the PM makes in the coming three months. Will he, for example, bring a bill that will create an  empowered Lok Pal to check corruption? Can he truly rid his Cabinet of the corrupt  notwithstanding what he quaintly calls “coalition dharma”? Will the lumbering legal process make a visible impact in the Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Society, 2G and Devas-Antrix scams? Can enough be done in this short period to deter our venal babus and politicians?  
Even so, you must give Dr Singh full marks for trying. He may have come across as being  nervous and defensive, but to write him off would be a serious mistake.  The press meet was a carefully considered act, aimed at communicating with the middle class which plays a key role in shaping opinion in the country.
With his humility and genuine sincerity, the prime minister, offering himself to  interrogation by a JPC,  would have gone across well with the  tens of millions who  witnessed the media interaction. They may even agree with the PM that it is the media which is sapping national confidence, not the corrupt netas and babus.
Dr Manmohan Singh will have achieved his short-term goal if he has bought a couple of months he says he needs to show that he means business with regard to UPA-II and its agenda. But the longer term goal of restoring his own reputation and that of his government could be more elusive.
A rotten edifice that came up over decades cannot be dismantled and rebuilt in a short space of half a term of a government, that, too, one that has been so seriously implicated in all manner of wrongdoing.
Mail Today February 17, 2011

Authoritarian rule is usually brittle

The events in Tunisia and Egypt have brought out starkly the difference between an autocracy and a democracy. You can never predict the way things will unfold in an autocracy. Democracies are quite predictable. Take India. You may not be able to predict which party will be leading the government in 2020, or who the prime minister will be, but you can be sure that things will be, more or less, a variation of what they are today. Doesn’t sound very exciting, but that’s the way it is.
Things work differently with authoritarian states. Seemingly unshakeable regimes suddenly find the ground beneath their feet shifting. The events in Egypt and Tunisia are actually a pale replay of what happened in Iran in 1979 or in Eastern Europe and Russia a decade later.
 
Faultlines
Usually empires, kingdoms and governments come apart following a defeat in a war, a financial crisis or a military coup. But in modern autocracies, with their well-developed systems of secret police, press censorship and repression, the faultlines develop and extend themselves silently. The collapse is usually swift and often triggered by a trivial set of events. Many explanations have been offered for the collapse of the Shah of Iran, or the Soviet Union. But only in hindsight. Prospectively no one predicted the events.


Looked at through this prism, two countries of great importance to India stand out—Pakistan and China. On paper, Pakistan is a democracy, but just on paper. It has its elections, change of governments, a somewhat free media. But then there is the Army, whose role as a guardian of the nation goes beyond what is expected in a democratic polity. The edifice of formal government in Pakistan, too, is a shaky one.
The ground rules keep shifting somewhat dramatically year on year. It was just last year that the Prime Minister regained his primacy as the head of government. His powers had been usurped by the military dictator Pervez Musharraf and his civilian successor, Asif Ali Zardari was not too keen to shed them and they had to be reluctantly pried from his hands by a united Pakistani political establishment, aided by the Army.
The case of China is more straightforward. The Communist Party of China makes no bones about running an authoritarian system, so effective that it has even been able to police the usually ungovernable world wide web. So remarkable have been the economic achievements of the country, that people talk of the Beijing Consensus where an authoritarian government with a market economy is being spoken of as a model for third world countries. Rather than go the route of Russia which became a democracy prior to restructuring its economy, the CPC has adjusted itself to provide the booming market-based Chinese economy an effective system of authoritarian political stewardship. This system is based on a vast bureaucracy which has evolved a system of internal rules which ensure that the excesses of the Maoist period are contained. It limits the term of party and government leaders, much in the same way as many democracies do, but the key decisions on who will be the leaders is decided on in an opaque manner. Deng Xiaoping, who was himself the core of the second generation leadership set in place a system that has seen the third generation—Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Zhu Rongji— successfully take the nation to great heights and hand over command to the fourth generation—Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2002-3.
We are now on the eve of another leadership shift in China, as the fifth generation comes to the fore. It’s now clear that in 2012, Xi Jinping will succeed Hu as the General Secretary of the party and the President of China. Li Keqiang’s attendance at the World Economic Forum meet in Davos last week seems to have cemented his candidature for the prime ministership in succession to Wen Jiabao. 
This is where the uncertainties begin. The stability of the Chinese leadership has been a function of the enormous expansion of the Chinese economy, the great skill of the politicians in command, and the consensus within the CPC on the need to play by the internal rules, whatever they are. But, the Chinese economy cannot grow at this blistering pace for the next decade as well.
As it is, faultlines are becoming visible between the town and countryside, and the east and the west. A measure of the fragility of the Chinese system is evident from the haste with which Hu abandoned the G-8 Summit in Italy and returned home in the wake of the disturbances in Xinjiang in July 2009.   
 
Earthquakes
While China’s great economic progress is a tribute to its astute leaders and hardworking and hugely gifted people, the order and control that you see in modern China is based on an authoritarian system. Its cities do not feel the kind of pressure their Indian counterparts are subjected to because you need a special passport to live and work there. The population has been kept in check by methods that would never work in India, as became evident during the Emergency of 1975-1977. The legal system in China is virtually non-existent. Land is sequestered at will and uprisings crushed ruthlessly.
Unlike India where instances of social and political disorder are often limited by ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries, in China such movements grow to dangerous levels, sometimes developing an all-China character, resulting in regime change. In the mid-19th century, the Taiping rebellion spread across southern China and led to the loss of millions of lives.
The Wuchang uprising that preceded the 1911 Revolution that overthrew the Qing empire, is another case in point. Though it was initiated by the central authority, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s also falls into the pattern of civil disturbances that begin in one part of China, spreading quickly to its length and breadth. The Tienanmen uprising of 1989 occurred because the authorities refused to permit the people to mourn the passing of the reformist Hu Yaobang. It shook the Communist rule as nothing else has done in recent times.
In the ensuing years, the potential for a cataclysmic all-China uprising has grown. For one, Mandarin has effectively established itself as the dominant Chinese dialect. For another, the internet has provided the people a limited mode of self-expression which was hitherto prohibited.
 
Warning
This is not to say that China will go the way of the Soviet Union or Egypt. The Chinese have a clever and competent leadership and they are undoubtedly aware of the structural time bomb they are sitting on. There are indications that the issue of more political freedom is the subject of intense debate within the Chinese Communist Party. Given China’s importance to the world economy, a cataclysmic change is highly undesireable. 
The Chinese have reacted to the Egyptian developments with prudence. They have, for one thing, gotten some of the portals to censor “Egypt”-related searches. The state controlled TV and newspapers have steered the discussion on events in Egypt carefully, highlighting the perils of disorder and chaos. A million men marching, demanding more personal liberties in Cairo may not threaten the rulers in Beijing right now, but there is always tomorrow.
The events in Egypt have given the lie to the belief that if your economy is doing well and governance tough, you don’t really need the constant renewals of the consent of the governed through free and fair elections. The events in the Arab world do sound like the tolling of the bell against  the so-called Beijing Consensus.
Mail Today  February 3, 2011