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October 1, 2012

NYT loses its Punch


No one called him by his full patrician name, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, scion of the family that owned the New York Times , arguably the most influential newspaper in the world.

Few called him even Mr. Sulzberger.

He was Punch to everyone he met, from the coffee boy at the old New York Times building just off Broadway, to the most musty of Editors. It was a nickname that Mr. Sulzberger had gotten in his childhood when he and a sister, Judy, would stage Punch and Judy skits for the entertainment of the family.

So Punch it was, always Punch and that too, with such a cheery smile that

everyone who ran into him somehow felt uplifted. He would invariably have a joke or two in the elevator. And sometimes, on a whim, he would invite anyone he met for a meal at one of New Yorks fanciest restaurant. Punch loved his food.

He loved his family newspaper most of all. And had it not been for Punchs sturdy stewardship during the 1970s and 1980s when advertising was migrating to suburban publications, magazines and, of course, television the august Times would have most likely been extinct by now. Punch once told me that it was hard to imagine the Sulzberger family without The Times , and hard to believe The Times wouldnt have the Sulzbergers at its helm.

The transformation he undertook to save The Times was simple on the face of it. Instead of cutting back on the

papers coverage of everything from world politics to local culture in New York, he and his star Executive Editor, Abe Rosenthal, added new sections that would appeal to sophisticated urbanites sections such as leisure, home decoration, healthy lifestyles. Parts of the daily read like a lively magazine.

Mr. Rosenthal a mentor of mine, just like Punch Sulzberger would often say, In times of trouble, we dont make the soup thin. We add tomatoes to the soup.

Readers appreciated that. And The Times was again on the path to profitability. It acquired several regional newspapers, strengthened its foreign bureaus, stepped up coverage of its own backyard, New York, and expanded reporting on an America whose social mores and politics were changing.

For some people it was hard to accept that this mild man would have the nerve and courage to institute such changes. As with Kathleen Graham, Publisher of the competing Washington Post , Mr. Sulzberger had steel in his spine, and, also like her, his adrenalin kept pumping. Little wonder that under their leadership their respective papers flourished.

I was a young man then when I joined The Times , just starting out in journalism. In a few years, The Times posted me to Nairobi, Kenya, to cover sub-Saharan Africa. Punch came to visit Nairobi along with Abe. He wanted to see everything, meet everyone who mattered, talk with everyday people. It was impossible to keep up with this much older man.

He liked travel. He enjoyed landing up in places where The Times had bureaus. He wanted to see for himself how his correspondents worked in the field. He had no wish to play the unseen hand.

That is not to say that he didnt give Abe Rosenthal a free hand to shape and re-shape The Times , which in time became the worlds most influential newspaper. But Abe adored Punch, and Punch was terribly fond of Abe. Few Publishers and Editors have been in such sync.

Years after he had retired and handed over the reins of the company to his son, A.O. Sulzberger Jr., I was having lunch with Punch at The Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. In the perception of many readers, the paper had lost its edge; Editors who succeeded Abe Rosenthal did not edit

from their gut, as Abe did, a quality that Punch appreciated.

I asked Punch straight out, And how do you like The Times these days?

Punch reflected on that question for a bit. I think he was wrestling with the idea that it would be unseemly for him to criticise his son, who was now the Publisher. Finally he said, I think the golden age of The Times was when Abe and I were there.

That said sensibility.

lot

about

Punchs

Hes gone now, the last of the titans of a golden generation of Publishers and journalists. The Times itself is now focusing more on its digital versions. Who knows what the paper will be in five or a dozen years.

But whatever its avatar, the paper will always contain a bit of Punch in it his good cheer, his unflappability, his genuine concern for the dispossessed, his insistence on a journalism of fairness an integrity.

I was privileged to work under him and Abe Rosenthal. What a life they led. And what a life they gave me, a life where I travelled the world and reported on it for America, a life of a story teller in the bazaar. How does one repay that debt? How does one replace giants, how does one replace friends?

(Pranay Gupte was a staff reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times . E-mail: pranaygupte@gmail.com)

Arthur Ochs Sulzbergers stewardship in the 1970s and 80s made the newspaper the force it is today October 1, 2012

A salary plan that changes nothing


Recently during a press conference called by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Minister of State (Independent Charge), Krishna Tirath, proposed the formulation of a bill through which a certain percentage of a husbands salary would be compulsorily transferred to his wifes bank account to compensate her for all the domestic work she performs for the family. According to the Minister, this percentage of husbands salaries would not be taxed and would provide women the much needed source of income to run the household better, and more

importantly, to spend on her own, personal consumption. In a later clarification, the Minister identified this payment as an honorarium and not a salary which is to be paid to wives for all the services they otherwise render for free.

This proposition has not gone down well, especially with women of higher income brackets who see such proposed action as unnecessary intervention in the realm of the private, i.e. the realm of familial relations. Many such women also believe that this government intervention amounts to reducing wives into glorified maids who need to be paid every time they walk into the kitchen, wash the baby, sweep the house, etc. Sadly, what is sidelined amid all the clamour and jokes about commercialisation of the mia-biwi relationship is the necessity of recognising the back-breaking work

performed by women to sustain their families. Of course, what we also lose sight of is the sheer hollowness of such proposed legislation. For example, such legislation, if implemented, would not provide women a source of income which they earn independently of their husbands. Instead, women would continue to depend on their husbands earnings and employment status, and thus, remain dependent on the family structure for their individual financial sustenance. Indeed, the problem with the proposed legislation is not that it is unnecessary and demeaning, but that it is informed by a poor understanding of economics surrounding household work and womens labour in general. Clearly, the question then is whether the Indian state is even serious about uplifting the position of the woman within the home and in recognising her contribution to the national economy.

Historical issue

Assigning an economic value to womens domestic labour is a longstanding debate. The international womens movement has continuously debated the question and reached many important conclusions. It is now time for the larger society to engage with the movements propositions seriously. First, as a society we must learn to accept that there is sheer drudgery involved in day-to-day household work. The fact that such work is performed by a woman for her husband and other family members in the name of care and nurturing cannot be used to conceal that this is a thankless job which the majority of women feel burdened by. Just because some women do not have to enter the kitchen every day since their maid does the needful, we cannot write-off the helplessness with which

the average woman walks towards her kitchen hearth, every day without fail. Here, there is no retirement age, no holiday, and definitely, no concept of overtime.

Second, we must realise that the process whereby womens domestic labour has been rendered uneconomic activity , is a historical one. It was with the emergence of industrial society and the resulting separation between the home and the workplace that womens housework lost value whereas mens labour outside the home fetched wages. Third, as a society we must accept that while many are uncomfortable with providing an economic value to womens domestic labour, chores such as washing, cleaning, cooking, child rearing, etc., are already assigned such a value by the market when need be. After all, many middleclass homes buy such services through

the hiring of maids, paying for playschool education, crche facilities, etc. Fourth, womens domestic labour must be accounted for in the economy precisely because it is one of the contributing forces in the reproduction of labour power expended by this countrys working masses. In fact, because a womans domestic labour is devalued by the economy, a mans wage can be kept low. For example, if all families were to pay every day for services like washing, cooking, cleaning, etc., because women of the household did not perform such duties, the breadwinners of each family would need to be paid higher wages so that they can afford to buy such services off the market.

The solution

This being the reality surrounding womens unpaid, domestic labour,

where does the actual solution lie? Does it lie in redistributing limited family incomes between husband and wife, or, in redistributing the national income so as to enhance individual family incomes, and hence, the womans share within the improved family consumption? Importantly, while pressing for valuation of womens domestic labour, the progressive womens movement has always argued that if the value of unpaid housework is paid but does not add to or increase the total household income, such remuneration amounts to nothing. Hence, one of the most important conclusions reached on this question of unpaid domestic labour is that the state should pay for it, especially by providing women gainful employment, special funding, subsidised home appliances, free health care, etc. In this way, women would earn through an independent source of income and be freed of an

overt dependence on the family structure for their consumption. There would also be a gradual undermining of the sexual division of labour which has resulted in women being tied to their homes and unable to do little else.

Of course, what has not won much attention so far is the fact that the proposed legislation posits wages for housework rather than employment for women as a long-term solution. Indeed, questions have been raised whether the proposed legislation is implementable, but not whether it does the needful. For example, will the government be able to put in place the required administrative machinery? How exactly is the value of womens household work to be calculated, or simply put, how many bais will equal a wife? Will the number of family members she rears determine whether she is entitled to

greater compensation? And what of widowed women who do not have a husbands salary to draw on?

Absolves the state

However, implementation is far from the real problem with such legislation. Mechanisms can always be put in place if administrative sincerity prevails. The real problem with the Ministrys endeavour is the rationale by which it is driven. The proposed legislation should be criticised because it absolves the Indian state of the responsibility it owes to women who contribute daily in sustaining the national economy. Indeed, if the proposed legislation is formulated and implemented, it will only result in undervaluing and underpaying womens domestic labour.

To elucidate, if we actually sit down to calculate the cost of all the different household chores a wife does for free, the figure would easily touch amounts that in no way can be compensated by a small percentage of the husbands wages. Furthermore, with varied family incomes, such legislation would result in women being remunerated differently for the same kind and same amount of domestic work. In the case of the average working class or lower-middle class family where the total family income is anywhere between Rs.2,000 to Rs.10,000 per month, such legislation would assign women a pittance as an economic value for their back-breaking housework. This pittance will not empower the woman as the total family income remains the same. Without a growth in the actual family income, neither will such families be able to change their consumption pattern, nor will the nature of household work change so as to

enable women to do other things instead of just labouring at home.

Clearly then, the issue at stake is how to minimise housework for women so that they too can step out of the home to earn, to enhance family incomes and to have greater say in family as well as public matters. Greater employment generation for women by the state, and widespread introduction of facilities like crches at all workplaces, subsidised home appliances, unhindered promotion post child birth/maternity leave, etc. are the need of the hour. While direct employment helps to create women who are financially independent, the provision of the latter helps women to remain in the labour market, despite starting a family. If the average woman is to be freed of the yoke of household drudgery then it is evidently the Indian state which has to pay by creating concrete conditions

for her greater economic participation outside the home.

(Maya John is an activist and researcher based in Delhi University.) October 1, 2012

Man who was Bharat sarkar


Life grudges courtesy. Death nudges it.

Brajesh Mishra, on crossing over, has received the praise many held back when he was with us.

The Prime Ministers thoughtful and sincere tribute to the former National Security Adviser restores ones faith in the future of civility in politics. It also gives us a definition of an ideal public

servant and, more specifically, a rolemodel of an NSA.

During the five years that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister, his safari-suited Principal Secretary and National Security Adviser was, after the charismatic PM himself, the nearest that anyone came to embodying Bharat Sarkar.

Facts are facts. Hard facts are harder facts.

A poet in politics, Prime Minister Vajpayee thought lyrically and spoke in what sounded like free verse. If such an intellectual aesthetes stewardship of the country could see India become a nuclear weapons state and, at the same time, make strategic moves for a composite dialogue with Pakistan, then the verser had to have

had a grammarian helping him. And that was Brajesh Mishra.

The signet of power needs an indelible inking pad and a very sharply chiselled and firmly fonted seal pressing on it. Vajpayee and Mishra together made the imprimatur of the State. True, the Cabinet had a powerful Home Minister, a very visible Defence Minister and an articulate Foreign Minister. Yet, if the magnetic field of Atal Behari Vajpayees government had one single lodestone charging the terrain and holding it together, that was Brajesh Mishra.

The then Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and NSA was and was not an official. He had his politics but did he belong in Deen Dayal Upadhyay Bhavan? As a quintessential member of the Indian Foreign Service, he was rehearsed in diplomacys book of

scores but his mind was no singing prisoner of a cuckoo clock.

As NSA, Brajesh Mishra had a certain weight of political intelligence and a height in terms of diplomatic experience. The two together translated into influence, impact. And so when he held the position of Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister and National Security Adviser, one that no one had combined in himself earlier, he was already a non pareil . To that he added another plus , which came from the Prime Ministers total and unwavering trust in him. The Brajesh Mishra impact over the NDA government and, by extension, over the India under NDA could well be called his BMI Brajesh Mishras weight in credentials divided by his height in metres of impact squared.

His former colleagues in the Indian Foreign Service either liked him to the point of looking up to him or they resented him for his supreme selfconfidence which could seem arrogant if not offensive. One former diplomat who had an ease of equation with Mishra without sharing his political predispositions was the Nehruvian 10th President of India, K.R. Narayanan. Three reasons can be identified for President Narayanans high comfort level with the NSA. First, his seeing a desirable equilibrium at work between Prime Minister Vajpayees lyrical idealism and the NSAs prosaic pragmatism. Second, his seeing the NSAs Patelesque resoluteness as that of a patriot and not that of a warmonger. Third, the Presidents intellectually arrived-at respect for the office of NSA as a lightning conductor on the edifice of the state and its deeply grounded lodestone.

Brajesh Mishras departure, amid widely-expressed cross-party admiration for his work as NSA, is a natural occasion for us to reflect on the office of the NSA, whether conjoined to the office of Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, or otherwise. In times when the nation engages in fluctuating negotiations with neighbouring governments two of which are nuclear weapons states with belligerent anti-India elements and opposition groups in some of those countries, dangerous non-state adversaries with possible collaborators within India, cyberintrusions both insidious and overt, and several forms of restive and open violence working within the country, the nation needs a security pivot outside the multi-member, multiparty, multiplex of the Cabinet.

The Prime Minister, for many a year to come, may neither be able to

afford to be a Chamberlain nor risk affecting a Churchill. He will, by the logic of our geopolitical circumstance, have to quest patiently for conciliation while keeping the guard against shocks high. He will, also, need to be an unflagging and earnest idealist in the matter of universal disarmament while knowing all that deterrence entails. Only a bold NSA can suggest some form of unilateralism along with a universalist approach towards a nuclear global zero.

Fortunately, even incredibly, the NSAs who have succeeded Brajesh Mishra have combined calm intellection with no-nonsense realism. One does need to watch him from the inside or too closely to see that our present NSA does not conflate security with paranoia, nor political intelligence with a craving for intercepts. More pertinently, that he becalms posturers, sabre-rattlers and mood-

jitterers among political and nonpolitical entities, while keeping our security nodules on the qui vive .

The Prime Minister of India and the NSA form a twosome-ness that is distinct, exclusive. It is in the trust that one reposes and the other receives in the confidence of their consultations transacted in the white heat of emergencies, that suraksha lies. Whether the Prime Minister acts as a Chamberlain or a Churchill, the NSA has to be a Chanakya. But in the sense of being versatile, not just clever.

The secured chamber of security planning needs to open a window. And that is the window of sharing our security policys broad trajectory with the country. Security planning need not be an Eleusinian mystery, a secret doctrine involving rites known only to the initiated. Not in the alert and open-eyed Republic that is India.

There was a touch of the elusive and the mysterious about Brajesh Mishra. This did not strengthen his BMI. If his great contribution to Indias security method is to be systemically strengthened, it will have to rise above some of our first NSAs own masterly elidings.

(Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former Governor of West Bengal)

Brajesh Mishras political intelligence and diplomatic experience together translated into unmatched influence over the Vajpayee government October 1, 2012

The feminisation of old age


According to the World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision , the

current youth bulge in the country is expected to last till 2025, after which, the growth rate of the elderly is likely to take over. It is imperative that the current needs of the youth and the emerging needs of the elderly are addressed simultaneously within the diverse demographic fabric of the country. In 2009, there were 88 million elderly people in India. By 2050, this figure is expected to soar over 320 million. Between 2000 and 2050 the overall population of the country is anticipated to grow by 60 per cent whereas population of people of age 60 years and above would shoot by 360 per cent. The ratio of the dependent population to that of the working population is defined by the dependency ratio. Investment in the elderly population is no longer a question of choice.

By 2050, women over 60 years would exceed the number of elderly men by

18.4 million, which would result in a unique characteristic of feminisation of the elderly population in India as is being experienced in many provinces of China. In fact, the two most populous nations will together contribute to 38 per cent of the global elderly population.

Ageing differently

The predicament of elderly women is aggravated by a life time of genderbased discrimination. The gendered nature of ageing is such that universally, women tend to live longer than men. In the advanced age of 80 years and above, widowhood dominates the status of women with 71 per cent of women and only 29 per cent of men having lost their spouse. Social mores inhibit women from remarrying, resulting in an increased likelihood of women ending up alone.The life of a widow is riddled

with stringent moral codes, with integral rights relinquished and liberties circumvented. Social bias often results in unjust allocation of resources, neglect, abuse, exploitation, gender-based violence, lack of access to basic services and prevention of ownership of assets. Ageing women are more likely to get excluded from social security schemes due to lower literacy and awareness levels.

Angst of ageing

While narratives may vary, the stories of ageing women are those of loss and loneliness. During my interactions with residents of an old-age home it was evident that many are forced to either live in a house uncared for or leave their homes with nowhere to go to. Consumed by isolation, Radha Sanyal{+*}confided that she decided to walk out with dignity before her

family could actually propose the same. But living in temple premises, public parks and pavements deprives her of the dignity that she wrestled to preserve in the first place.

Although the degree of isolation may vary, with urbanisation and nuclear families on the rise, elderly women living in metropolitan cities are more likely to feel socially alienated than their rural counterparts. Challenges of health security get aggravated by the fact that elderly women often tend to underplay their ailments. Preoccupation with nursing an ailing spouse, lack of awareness, nutritional deficiencies or simply neglect are some of the reasons that often take an adverse toll on their health.

While investing for old age is important it is equally critical to safeguard ownership of assets. Religious dogmas on liberation serve

to allay the brutal contours of existence. That explains why widowed destitute elderly women seek refuge at pilgrim spots. The promise of salvation after death helps them in embracing the hardship that dominates the last years of their lives.

Longevity dividend

Just as all things end, so would the effects of Indias youth dividend. When people live longer, it offers society a chance to reap a longevity dividend. This implies that the elderly continue to contribute significantly for an unprecedented period of time.

In order to address this unprecedented demographic shift it is necessary to to understanding the challenges of an ageing population. A joint study by the United Nations Population Fund and Helpage

International called Global Report on Ageing seeks to fill the knowledge gap. It is to be released nationwide on October 1, 2012, on the International Day for Older People.

It has been a decade since the adoption of the Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing (Mipaa). Its bold agenda focused on three priority areas: older persons and development; advancing health and well-being into old age; and ensuring enabling and supportive environments.

As a signatory to Mipaa, India has the responsibility to formulate and implement public policy on population ageing. Issues of poverty, migration, urbanisation, ruralisation and feminisation compound the complexity of this emerging phenomenon. Public policy must respond to this bourgeoning need and

mainstream action into developmental planning. Gender and social concerns of elderly, particularly elderly women, must be integrated at the policy level. The elderly, especially women, should be represented in decision making. Benefits of social schemes must percolate to the grassroots. Increasing social/widow pension and its universalisation is critical for expanding the extent and reach of benefits. Renewed efforts should be made for raising widespread awareness and access to social security schemes such as National Old Age Pension and Widow Pension Scheme. Provisions in terms of special incentives for elderly women, disabled, widowed should also be considered.

Innumerable reasons add up to make ageing women in India one of the most vulnerable segments of the population. Their social and health

security can no longer be compromised. In a country of ageing women, India must step up to the challenge to offer more than just the solace of promises. Courtesy: U.N. Information Centre for India and Bhutan

(Frederika Meijer is UNFPA Representative, India/Bhutan) October 2, 2012

No room for haste


The past year has witnessed unprecedented official efforts to rein in the growing tuberculosis epidemic. In 2011 alone, 1.2 million new TB cases were reported while 60,000 patients already inflicted died. In reality, the real incidence, most likely was much higher the number of new cases diagnosed and treated by private practitioners has not been factored in. It is to change this that TB was made a notifiable disease in May

this year. The government had to bite the bullet as effective interventions can be taken only if a system is in place to capture the true incidence and prevalence of the disease, including the drug-resistant cases. Herein lies the biggest challenge ensuring every new case diagnosed by the private health sector is accounted for. This can be achieved only if the government engages with the private sector by first taking it into confidence. The draft versions of the Joint Monitoring Mission (JMM) and the National Strategic Plan for TB Control, 2012-2017 have made strong recommendations to engage the private health sector to stem the spread of TB. The government, which very recently sent out guidelines on notification, requires every private health institution, including laboratories, to provide the personal details of a patient name, address, mobile number and unique identification number (Aadhar or

driving licence). The objective is to provide a support system to patients seeking private healthcare in terms of treatment initiation, adherence, follow-up and default retrieval tasks that are beyond the private sectors capacity.

The goal is laudable but it is quite unlikely that the TB Control programme can achieve all of its highly ambitious objectives in the short term. The most significant obstacle will be the reluctance of patients and some doctors to part with personal data. This despite the fact that such sharing is mandatory in the U.S. and many other developed countries, and that the Medical Council of Indias code of ethics warrants such sharing. Hence, consensus and confidence-building measures have to be undertaken on a massive scale to bring private healthcare providers on board and

make them open to the idea of sharing details. According to the draft JMM report, about one million TB cases per year are not reported. While the National Rural Health Mission has found some innovative ways of increasing manpower, urban areas lack the infrastructure to handle additional cases. This needs fixing. Most importantly, the TB control programme, which uses the interrupted regimen, has to show flexibility and allow the private sector to continue following the WHO recommended daily fixed-dose regimen. October 2, 2012

Lets not overrate foreign investment


With the intention of signalling a strong commitment to reforms, the UPA government has announced a hike in the price of diesel and liberalisation of foreign direct

investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, justifying the measures as growthenhancing and inflation-dampening. They have been termed bold by Indias corporate sector and burdensome by an Opposition united across the ideological spectrum. In his speech to the nation on September 20, the Prime Minister stated that the governments move is motivated by concern for the ordinary Indian. Given the conflicting responses, there is room here for analysis.

Strengthen infrastructure

The interesting thing about public sector pricing, in this case of diesel, is that keeping prices steady as input costs rise would be as political in content as raising them is. As stated in an editorial in this newspaper some days ago, the government need not have waited so long to raise the price. It would seem that the government

had no intention of doing so while Parliament was in session. Be that as it may, there is a strong case for eliminating the subsidy on all fossil fuels and transferring the saving thus made into public infrastructure. Apart from the symbolism of soaking the SUV-driving rich, the building and maintenance of public infrastructure are more likely to help the poor presumably the PMs aam aadmi than the current regime of subsidies.

The creation of infrastructure employs the poor directly as it is they who build it. Secondly, the provision of the producer services afforded by the infrastructure sustains private economic activity which generates employment. The idea that the poor would benefit more from public investment than the present subsidy regime, described by some as welfare state for the rich, has not really been sufficiently debated. For Indias

political class, subsidies are the easiest path to being seen as benefactors while being relieved of the task of managing the process of building and maintaining infrastructure, arguably a nonnegotiable aspect of governance in a democracy. So, even a small hike in the price of diesel can be the beginning of a realignment of government expenditure from consumption subsidies to investment in infrastructure, and the poor may be expected to gain from this. Finally, the gains from macroeconomic stability cannot be legitimately ignored when evaluating the prospects for the poor. Macroeconomic instability spares nobody, and Indias current account deficit by now exceeds the figure for 1991. Fuel subsidies have enormous consequences for the balance of payments, as 80 per cent of our oil consumption is imported.

When it comes to FDI in retail, the beneficial impact on the aam aadmi is altogether less obvious than in the case of lowering the diesel subsidy. What FDI in this sector may be expected to do is to take the shopping experience in India to the next level. Surely, cavernous supermarkets make it easier to shop for those with deeper pockets. Precisely because the supplier caters to this cohort the quality of the groceries may be expected to rise. In fact, we have already seen this happening, even without FDI, with organised retail spreading in India. But those on a daily wage and no ready cash are unlikely to patronise these suburban behemoths. They may be expected to prop up the kirana with its infinite capacity for apportioning their stuff to suit the customers purse and willingness to extend her credit. So the Opposition may well be crying wolf over the imminent disappearance of the corner store.

But the governments claim of a winwin with higher prices for farmers and lower prices for customers with the advent of FDI may be somewhat exaggerated. For precisely because the large retailer must cut through the supply chain to deliver this outcome, there would be some displacement in the middle. The government counters this reasoning by pointing to investment at the backend, in cold storage and such. This is possible of course, but we would want to wait and see the full combined effect once all effects have worked their way through the economy. Some part of the corner-store complex will survive purely because there are too many poor people in this country yet, generating a substantial demand for low quality food with lower mark-ups. But the position that a policy is only as good as its direct impact on employment is surely untenable. To reject outright a move on the grounds

that it does not directly put the poor to work would be folly. Productivity growth is often first employment displacing but it also lowers prices and raises demand. The point is that it not only raises demand for the good in question but for all other goods in the economy, as real income is higher following the rise in productivity. Overall employment in the economy may be expected to expand.

Little to offer

It is when it comes to inflation though that the present round of announcements by the government has little or nothing to offer. The suggestion, first made when the proposal was mooted some months ago, that FDI in retail would dampen inflation is difficult to fathom. The source of the current inflation is a veritable excess demand for vegetables and a manufactured excess

demand for the principal foodgrains. The latter stems from the governments procurement and storage policy. By mopping up almost the entire marketed surplus of grain as it comes into the wholesale markets and then allowing it to rot by unaccountable stock management, the Government of India abets hunger in the name of supporting the farmer. The entire political class is united in not calling attention to this travesty.

The RBIs argument that the fiscal deficit is the source of the inflation may deflect attention from its own incapacity in the present context, but does not do much to enhance our understanding of policy options. The Central governments fiscal deficit is lower today than it was when the present bout of inflation commenced about two years ago. Thus the hike in the price of diesel would have to be justified on counts other than its

presumed impact on inflation via a lower fiscal deficit. The current inflation is rooted less in macroeconomic imbalances than in structural ones emanating, as explained above, in the market for food. As a corollary, macroeconomic intervention via fiscal or monetary policy can have only a limited impact. As an aside, they can only compress output, a sequence of events playing out in the guise of a slowing manufacturing sector. It is by now clear that only microeconomic policy intervention can make a difference to the food situation and thus inflation. In India the cost of producing food is high in relation to per capita income. FDI in retail can make no difference here. It can at best only deliver more efficiently what has been produced at cost. The government can hardly be accused of not knowing of the importance of micro interventions.

For instance, it has been observed that vast sums of money spent by the government on irrigation were not showing up as increase in irrigated area. This was at least five years ago. Now there are reports of an irrigation scam involving Rs 20, 000 crore in Maharashtra, a State for all purposes governed by the UPA. It is quite extraordinary that the current foodprice led inflation has been in existence for over two years now and the government has not been able to come up with a single measure addressing it, even if its impact may be felt only in the medium term. When it is not actually stoking inflation by raising the procurement price of grain it comes up with window dressing in the form of FDI in retail.

It would be appropriate to conclude by asking whether the government makes too much of foreign

investment, desirable as it is. With respect to its heroic recent announcement, there is the issue of the suppliers response. Walmarts Asia President Scott Price is reported to have already stated we are not in any rush to enter India. But there is a query more general than the likely response of foreign investors to the overtures being made presently. In the two decades since 1991, India has not attracted much FDI, giving us an idea of what may be expected in a future with or without FDI in retail. Some perspective is to be had from looking at the Chinese experience. For an idea of the relative roles of FDI and domestic investment in generating growth in that country, note that FDI as a share on the domestic product had peaked in 1993. It was only 6 per cent even then, and has declined progressively since to a figure less than half that. This suggests that Chinas double-digit growth cannot be explained by alluding to the FDI it

attracts. Is our own government overrating the power of foreign investment to transform Indias economy?

(The author is on the faculty of Economics at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. He may be reached at www.pulaprebalakrishnan.in)

The governments claim that it will

dampen inflation, bring higher prices

for farmers and lower prices for

customers may exaggerated

be

somewhat

October 2, 2012

Historian in the Marxist tradition with a global reach


WIDELY READ, INFLUENTIAL AND RESPECTED:In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians such as Hobsbawm have ever commanded such a wide field in such detail or with such authority. PHOTO: WESLEY/KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES If Eric Hobsbawm (June 9, 1917 October 1, 2012) had died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britains most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death at the age of 95, Hobsbawm had achieved a unique position in the countrys intellectual life. In his later years Hobsbawm became arguably Britains

most respected historian of any kind, recognised if not endorsed on the right as well as the left, and one of a tiny handful of historians of any era to enjoy genuine national and world renown. Unlike some others, Hobsbawm achieved this wider recognition without in any major way revolting against either Marxism or Marx. In his 94th year he published How to Change the World , a vigorous defence of Marxs continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-10. What is more, he achieved his culminating reputation at a time when the socialist ideas and projects that animated so much of his writing for well over half a century were in historic disarray, and worse, as he himself was always unflinchingly aware.

In a profession notorious for microscopic preoccupations, few historians have ever commanded such

a wide field in such detail or with such authority. To the last, Hobsbawm considered himself to be essentially a 19th-century historian, but his sense of that and other centuries was both unprecedentedly broad and unusually cosmopolitan.

The sheer scope of his interest in the past, and his exceptional command of what he knew, continued to humble those who talked to him and those who read him, most of all in the fourvolume Age of ... series in which he distilled the history of the capitalist world from 1789 to 1991. Hobsbawms capacity to store and retrieve detail has now reached a scale normally approached only by large archives with big staffs, wrote Neal Ascherson. Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis, so well displayed in that four-volume project, he was unrivalled.

Reading Marx

Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, a good place for a historian of empire, in 1917, a good year for a communist. He was second-generation British, the grandson of a Polish Jew and cabinetmaker who came to London in the 1870s. Eight children, who included Leopold, Erics father, were born in England and all took British citizenship at birth (Hobsbawms Uncle Harry in due course became the first Labour mayor of Paddington).

But Eric was British of no ordinary background. Another uncle, Sidney, went to Egypt before the First World War and found a job there in a shipping office for Leopold. There, in 1914, Leopold Hobsbawm met Nelly Gruen, a young Viennese from a middle-class family who had been

given a trip to Egypt as a prize for completing her school studies. The two got engaged, but war broke out and they were separated. The couple eventually married in Switzerland in 1916, returning to Egypt for the birth of Eric, their first child, in June 1917.

Every historian has his or her lifetime, a private perch from which to survey the world, he said in his 1993 Creighton lecture, one of several occasions in his later years when he attempted to relate his own lifetime to his own writing. My own perch is constructed, among other materials, of a childhood in the Vienna of the 1920s, the years of Hitlers rise in Berlin, which determined my politics and my interest in history, and the England, and especially the Cambridge of the 1930s, which confirmed both.

In 1919, the young family returned to settle in Vienna, where Eric went to

elementary school, a period he later recalled in a 1995 television documentary which featured pictures of a recognisably skinny young Viennese Hobsbawm in shorts and knee socks. Politics made their impact around this time. Erics first political memory was in Vienna in 1927, when workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The first political conversation that he could recall took place in an Alpine sanatorium in these years, too. Two motherly Jewish women were discussing Leon Trotsky. Say what you like, said one to the other, but hes a Jewish boy called Bronstein. In 1929, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. Two years later his mother died of TB. Eric was 14, and his Uncle Sidney took charge once more, taking Eric and his sister Nancy to live in Berlin. As a teenager in Weimar Republic Berlin, Hobsbawm inescapably became politicised. He read Marx for the first time, and became a communist.

Hobsbawm could always remember the winters day in January 1933 when, emerging from the Halensee SBahn station on his way home from his school, the celebrated Prinz Heinrich Gymnasium, he saw a newspaper headline announcing Hitlers election as chancellor. Around this time he joined the Socialist Schoolboys, which he described as de facto part of the communist movement and sold its publication, Schulkampf (School Struggle). He kept the organisations duplicator under his bed and, if his later facility for writing was any guide, probably wrote most of the articles too. The family remained in Berlin until 1933, when Sidney Hobsbawm was posted by his employers to live in England.

The gangly teenage boy who settled with his sister in Edgware in 1934 described himself later as completely

continental and German speaking. School, though, was not a problem because the English education system was way behind the German. A cousin in Balham introduced him to jazz for the first time, the unanswerable sound, he called it. The moment of conversion, he wrote some 60 years later, was when he first heard the Duke Ellington band at its most imperial. Never satisfied to be anything less than the master of anything that absorbed him, Hobsbawm spent a period in the 1950s as jazz critic of the New Statesman , and published a Penguin Special, The Jazz Scene , on the subject in 1959 under the pen-name Francis Newton (many years later it was reissued with Hobsbawm identified as the author).

Learning to speak English properly for the first time, Eric became a pupil at Marylebone grammar school and in

1936 he won a scholarship to Kings College, Cambridge, where at one point he had rooms on a staircase on which his only two neighbours were A.E. Housman and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was at this time that a saying became common among his Cambridge communist friends: Is there anything that Hobsbawm doesnt know? He became a member of the legendary Cambridge Apostles. All of us thought that the crisis of the 1930s was the final crisis of capitalism, he wrote 40 years later. But, he added, It was not. When war broke out, Hobsbawm volunteered, as many communists did, for intelligence work. But his politics, which were never a secret, led to rejection. Instead he became an improbable sapper in 560 Field Company, which he later described as a very workingclass unit trying to build some patently inadequate defences against invasion on the coasts of East Anglia. This, too, was a formative experience

for the often aloof young intellectual prodigy. There was something sublime about them and about Britain at that time, he wrote. That wartime experience converted me to the British working class. They were not very clever, except for the Scots and Welsh, but they were very, very good people.

Hobsbawm married his first wife, Muriel Seaman, in 1943. After the war, returning to Cambridge, Hobsbawm made another choice, abandoning a planned doctorate on north African agrarian reform in favour of research on the Fabians. It was a move which opened the door to both a lifetime of study of the 19th century and an equally long-lasting preoccupation with the problems of the left. In 1947, he got his first tenured job, as a history lecturer at Birkbeck College, London, where he

was to remain for much of his teaching life.

With the onset of the Cold War, a very British academic McCarthyism meant that the Cambridge lectureship which Hobsbawm always coveted never materialised. He shuttled between Cambridge and London, one of the principal organisers and driving forces of the Communist Party Historians Group, a glittering radical academy which brought together some of the most prominent historians of the post-war era. Its members also included Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A.L. Morton, E.P. Thompson, John Saville and, later, Raphael Samuel. Whatever else it achieved, the CP Historians Group, about which Hobsbawm wrote an authoritative essay in 1978, certainly provided a nucleus for many of his first steps as a major historical writer.

First book

Hobsbawms first book, an edited collection of documents from the Fabian era, Labours Turning Point , published in 1948, belongs firmly to this CP-dominated era, as does his engagement in the once celebrated standard of living debate about the economic consequences of the early industrial revolution, in which he and R.M. Hartwell traded arguments in successive numbers of the Economic History Review . The foundation of the Past and Present journal, now the most lasting, if fully independent, legacy of the Historians Group, also belongs to this period.

Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing. Yet he

always remained very much a licensed freethinker within the partys ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained.

Yet, as with his contemporary, Christopher Hill, who left the CP at this time, the political trauma of 1956 and the start of a lastingly happy second marriage combined in some way to trigger a sustained and fruitful period of historical writing which was to establish fame and reputation. In 1959, he published his first major work, Primitive Rebels , a strikingly original account, particularly for those times, of southern European rural secret societies and millenarian cultures (he was still writing about the subject as recently as 2011). He returned to these themes again a decade later, in Captain Swing , a

detailed study of rural protest in early 19th-century England co-authored with George Rude, and Bandits , a more wide-ranging attempt at synthesis. These works are reminders that Hobsbawm was both a bridge between European and British historiography and a forerunner of the notable rise of the study of social history in post-1968 Britain. By this time, though, Hobsbawm had already published the first of the works on which both his popular and academic reputations still rest. A collection of some of his most important essays, Labouring Men , appeared in 1964 (a second collection, Worlds of Labour , was to follow 20 years later). But it was Industry and Empire (1968), a compelling summation of much of Hobsbawms work on Britain and the industrial revolution, which achieved the highest esteem. For more than 30 years, it has rarely been out of print.

The Age of series

Even more influential in the long term was the Age of series, which he began with The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 , first published in 1962. This was followed in 1975 by The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 and in 1987 by The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 . A fourth volume, The Age of Extremes: 1914-91 , more quirky and speculative but in some respects the most remarkable and admirable of all, extended the sequence in 1994.

The four volumes embodied all of Hobsbawms best qualities, the sweep combined with the telling anecdote and statistical grasp, the attention to the nuance and significance of events and words, and above all, perhaps, the unrivalled powers of synthesis (nowhere better displayed than in a classic summary of mid-19th century capitalism on the very first page of the

second volume). The books were not conceived as a tetralogy, but as they appeared, they acquired individual and cumulative classic status. They were an example, Hobsbawm wrote, of what the French call haute vulgarisation (he did not mean this self-deprecatingly), and they became, in the words of one reviewer, part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen.

Hobsbawms first marriage had collapsed in 1951. During the 1950s, he had another relationship which resulted in the birth of his first son, Joshua Benathan, but the boys mother did not want to marry. In 1962, he married again, this time to Marlene Schwarz, of Austrian descent. They moved to Hampstead, and bought a small second home in Wales. They had two children, Andrew and Julia.

In the 1970s, Hobsbawms widening fame as a historian was accompanied by a growing reputation as a writer about his own times. Though he had a historians respect for the Communist partys centralist discipline, Hobsbawms intellectual eminence gave him an independence which won the respect of communisms toughest critics, such as Isaiah Berlin. It also ensured him the considerable accolade that not one of Hobsbawms books was ever published in the Soviet Union. Thus armed and protected, Hobsbawm ranged fearlessly across the condition of the left, mostly in the pages of the CPs monthly Marxism Today , the increasingly heterodox publication of which he became the house deity.

His conversations with the Italian communist, and now state president, Giorgio Napolitano date from these years, and were published as The

Italian Road to Socialism . But his most influential political writings centred on his increasing certainty that the European labour movement had ceased to be capable of bearing the transformational role assigned to it by earlier Marxists. These uncompromisingly revisionist articles were collected under the general heading The Forward March of Labour Halted .

By 1983, when Neil Kinnock became the leader of the Labour party at the depth of its electoral fortunes, Hobsbawms influence had begun to extend far beyond the CP and deep into Labour itself. Kinnock publicly acknowledged his debt to Hobsbawm and allowed himself to be interviewed by the man he described as my favourite Marxist. Though he strongly disapproved of much of what later took shape as New Labour, which he saw, among other things, as

historically cowardly, Hobsbawm was without question the single most influential intellectual forerunner of Labours increasingly iconoclastic 1990s revisionism.

His status was underlined in 1998, when Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, a few months after Hobsbawm celebrated his 80th birthday. In its citation, Downing Street said Hobsbawm continued to publish works that address problems in history and politics that have reemerged to disturb the complacency of Europe.

Later years

In his later years, Hobsbawm enjoyed widespread reputation and respect. His 80th and 90th birthday celebrations were attended by a Whos Who of left wing and liberal

intellectual Britain. Throughout the late years, he continued to publish volumes of essays, including On History (1997) and Uncommon People (1998), works in which Dizzy Gillespie and Salvatore Giuliano sat naturally side by side in the index as testimony to the range of Hobsbawms abiding curiosity. A highly successful autobiography, Interesting Times , followed in 2002, and Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism in 2007.

More famous in his extreme old age than probably at any other period of his life, he broadcast regularly, lectured widely and was a regular performer at the Hay literary festival, of which he became president at the age of 93, following the death of Lord Bingham of Cornhill. A fall in late 2010 severely reduced his mobility, but his intellect and his willpower remained unvanquished, as did his social and

cultural life, thanks to Marlenes efforts, love and cooking.

That his writings continued to command such audiences at a time when his politics were in some ways so eclipsed was the kind of disjunction which exasperated right-wingers, but it was a paradox on which the subtle judgment of this least complacent of intellects feasted. In his later years, he liked to quote E.M. Forster that he was always standing at a slight angle to the universe. Whether the remark says more about Hobsbawm or about the universe was something that he enjoyed disputing, confident in the knowledge that it was in some senses a lesson for them both.

He is survived by Marlene and his three children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. (Dorothy Wedderburn died on September 20,

2012) Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2012

A tribute to a historian in the Marxist tradition with a global reach October 2, 2012

Paralysis is not an option


Deferring a decision on a contentious issue can be a short-term tactic, but never a long-term strategy. If the Centre and the Andhra Pradesh government were looking for further proof of popular support for a separate State of Telangana in the region, it came in the form of the Sagara Haaram rally in Hyderabad on Sunday. As tens of thousands gathered to demand statehood for Telangana, the Congress government reacted as if it were another law and order challenge, nothing more than an

evenings headache for the police. Quite astonishingly, even years after the revival of the Telangana struggle, and evidence of growing support for statehood demonstrated through byelections and mass agitations, the Congress and the governments it heads at the Centre and in the State are still hoping they can eventually wear down the movement by their inaction. The Congress tactic is, of course, engendered by the fear that any decision either for or against Telangana could set off violent reactions, either in Telangana or in Coastal Andhra, where large sections of the people are opposed to any division of the State. But inaction does not guarantee peace; indeed, there is no alternative to dealing with this political issue head-on. Instead of trying to find a consensus on the basis of the B.N. Srikrishna Committee report, which offered various viable options for it to consider, the government was happy doing nothing

at all. However, there is a price to pay for being reactive and defensive. Those on the streets are now the agenda-setters, with the government constantly in crisis-aversion mode.

The Sagara Haaram must be seen as another opportunity to engage with the advocates of Telangana and explore the way to a solution on the basis of a structured consensusbuilding process started with the help of the Centre. But both sides need to give up their maximalist positions. For instance, questions relating to the post-bifurcation status of Hyderabad which is within the Telangana region but is a cosmopolitan city with links to the whole of undivided Andhra Pradesh will have to be sorted out through broad-based consultations. What the Centre and the AP government ought not to do is equally clear: make a solution part of a political deal between the Congress

and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti. Irrespective of whether the offer of TRS president K. Chandrasekhara Rao to merge his party with the Congress in the event of statehood being granted to Telangana is a political ploy or not, the dangers in such a barter deal are self-evident. Political exigencies and electoral compulsions should not be allowed to decide the future of Andhra Pradesh. October 3, 2012

Securing the rhinos future


The bouncing back of the great Indian one-horned rhinoceros from perilous decline is a century-old example of successful conservation. The iconic animal recovered dramatically from a long phase of colonial era hunting and habitat loss. Assam in general and Kaziranga in particular have nurtured the maximum number of rhinos. As per the 2012 census, the population

estimate is of the order of 2,505 animals. The conservation challenge in the 21st century is to protect the rhino during the annual flooding of Kaziranga National Park and its contiguous areas. Recent incidents make it clear that poachers will stop at nothing. The world has seen the shocking spectacle of rhinos being shot as they fled flood waters to safer highlands, and their faces hacked for the horn a compact mass of keratin fibres that commands staggering prices in the international market. The response to this crisis has to be internationally coordinated and twopronged, aimed at choking off illegal trade channels using improved field intelligence and creating secure migration paths for the animals on the ground.

All critically endangered flagship animals need habitats that have viable size, and adequate protection. In the

case of the great Indian rhino, the earliest measures date back to 1908, when 56,544 acres were set apart as reserved forest and hunting was banned. Kaziranga, which harbours the largest number of rhinos, has the reputation of being better-policed than other national parks. Park security was significantly strengthened two decades ago by setting up anti-poaching camps. Armed patrols here make it risky for poachers to enter, as they can be shot. Many have died in such attempts. Unsurprisingly, attacks on rhinos now often take place during the flooding season, when they migrate to areas where ensuring security is difficult. It may therefore be worth examining the possibility of further expansion of the park boundaries, and creation of additional conservation highlands. The Assam Forest Department and the Indian Army built such highlands after devastating floods in Kaziranga killed

many rhinos in 1998. Restoration of wildlife corridors north and south of the Brahmaputra river to provide an escape route for rhinos may also be beneficial. The Wildlife Crime Control Bureaus investigations into the recent poaching incidents should lead to coordinated Centre-State action on smuggling syndicates. The Assam governments move to enhance armed park security is also promising. In the long term, it is crucial to create migratory corridors for rhinos and other animals to use during floods, and secure these pathways. October 3, 2012

Washing off this stain will need more


The Supreme Courts unyielding criticism of the government for not eradicating the practice of manual scavenging was the springboard for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to introduce the

Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012 in the Lok Sabha on September 3. Welcomed as a panacea for the historically iniquitous, casteordained practice of manually handling human waste, the new Bill indicates renewed commitment but lacks a detailed vision for liberating manual scavengers. Such lack of detail in the new Bill is more pronounced when contrasted with a competent 2011 Draft Bill prepared by P.S. Krishnan, former Secretary to the Government of India.

The 1993 Act

The debasing inhumanity of manual scavenging for a living drove Dr. Bezwada Wilson to found the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), of which he is now the National Convener. An unorganised movement (1986) turned organisation (since 1996), the SKA has

relentlessly striven to educate the State governments and courts on the continuance of this practice across the country. The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act was enacted in 1993. The unfortunate condition under this Act was that the States had to formally adopt and enforce it, a process that has taken over two decades.

A few States have remained silent on the matter, notwithstanding the Public Interest Litigation petitions filed by SKA in the Supreme Court in 2003 (with requisite photographic evidence against States and PSUs, including Indian Railways). The PIL litigants sought to enforce their fundamental right against untouchability under Article 17 of the Constitution, read together with Articles 14, 19 and 21 that guarantee equality, freedom, and

protection of life and personal liberty, respectively.

Drafted by the Ministry of Urban Development under the Narasimha Rao government, its legislation under Entry 6 (public health and sanitation) of the State List in the Constitution of India is the major lacuna in the 1993 Act. This is because privileging public sanitation accords only marginal importance to the objective of liberating persons employed as manual scavenging labour. And a tangential focus on manual scavengers explains the other lacunae in the Act: the narrow definition of a manual scavenger and the absence of a clause on rehabilitation for them.

The decision to amend the Act to fill the lacunae was foregone to avoid a lengthy and painful amendment process, since the Ministry of Law is understood to have objected to

amendments to the 1993 Act under any other Entry but Entry 6 .

The new Bill legislated under Entry 24 (welfare of labour and working conditions of the Concurrent List) may be appreciated for: (1) a somewhat broadened definition of a manual scavenger; (2) its clause on prohibition of hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks; and (3) clauses on severe penalties and rehabilitation. However, these provisions stop short of taking the bull by the horns when compared to the 2011 Draft, thoughtfully titled Total Liberation, Comprehensive Rehabilitation & Humanisation of Working Conditions Act, 2011.

Laudably, the opening declaration of the 2011 Draft is a national apology on behalf of the state to the sanitation workers, expressing deep regret for the humiliation and

untouchabilty to which the latter have been subjected over centuries. The Draft subsequently cautions against interpreting manual scavenging thinly and includes within its ambit, sewage and septic tank cleaning (in the wake of egregious human rights violations associated with manhole deaths across India).

Dilution of clauses

In contrast, the new Bill dilutes the significance of the clause that prohibits the employment of persons for hazardous cleaning of sewer and septic tanks. It selectively mandates that a person handling excreta with the help of protective gear shall not be deemed a manual scavenger. This is problematic insofar as such protective gear becomes a mediating technology that helps sustain, if not perpetuate, the employment of persons for hazardous cleaning. It

contradicts the stated intention of rehabilitating these workers out of such dehumanising squalor.

For specific Scheduled Caste (SC) communities that are forced to render manual scavenging labour, it is the burden of caste worsened by casteist mindsets of those who forcefully employ them and aggravated on account of economic necessity and unavailability of alternative jobs. Therefore, the liberation of manual scavengers cannot be conceptualised in isolation (lest they lose their only source of income), without a meticulous roadmap for meaningful rehabilitation.

The 2011 Draft demonstrates sincerity and thoughtful intent in proposing time-bound, universal rehabilitation for manual scavengers. Inter alia , it obliges previous employers to extend

monthly pension to manual scavengers in recognition of the long years of service rendered to society under adverse conditions; and assist in securing alternative employment for such pensioned elderly manual scavengers who are unwilling to be idle. It further recommends rehabilitation (unconnected with sanitation work) as service providers and cooks for anganwadis and midday meal schemes or as railway staff assisting the elderly, the disabled or children.

In addition to training them as caretakers of public parks/gardens, plumbers or electrical repair workers, the 2011 Draft directs the Ministry of Railways to set aside a quota to absorb ex-scavengers as railway catering staff. It also duty binds the Central and State governments to provide proper housing with adequate sanitation, road infrastructure and,

most importantly, quality schools up to Class XII for the children of all SC communities from which manual scavengers are drawn. A remarkably detailed rehabilitation plan in the 2011 Draft is motivated by a threefold realisation: (1) to restore the dignity of life to the entire community of sanitation workers; (2) to secure, through educational opportunities, better vocations for future generations traditionally vulnerable to being recruited as manual scavengers; and (3) to clearly spell out the tasks of every Ministry, PSU, and private sector organisation in order to make them enforceable.

Unlike the 2011 Draft, the clause on rehabilitation in the new Bill is similar to a checklist of items on offer. It is seemingly benevolent in monetary terms but is measly in vision. Moreover, it conceives rehabilitation to be targeted and subject to

eligibility, based on identification surveys in rural and urban areas. Strikingly, it proposes that final lists of urban manual scavengers born out of the survey be displayed publicly to invite objections from general public, further dictating inclusion or exclusion of persons. This is akin to a public pillory, believes independent law researcher Dr. Usha Ramanathan, exposing the workers to public scorn and ridicule, for fear that a few extra might get rehabilitated. The government is relying on the MoRDs Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC), 2011 enumeration for identification of manual scavengers in rural India. The new Bill is silent on the use of SECC (already under criticism from the Right to Food activists for its insensitive methodology and high likelihood of exclusion errors in identifying BPL families).

A truly laudable provision in the new Bill is its unsparing penalty for offence (both cognisable and non-bailable). It imposes an initial fine of Rs. 50,000 or imprisonment up to one year or both. Appallingly, no offender has been prosecuted in the last two decades under the 1993 Act. A stringent penalty clause then ought to entail retrospective punishment for offences committed and not exempt public servants from prosecution. For purposeful enforcement, a body like the National Monitoring and Enforcement Authority, proposed in the 2011 Draft, should be instituted. Besides eminent social workers, including Scheduled Caste persons, this body should also provide representation to the invisible workforce of devoted individuals (members of the SKA, Garima Abhiyan and similar organisations) whose unwavering struggle in fighting for the rights of manual scavengers remains unrecognised.

Not too late to apologise

Different from most other draft legislations, the 2011 Draft achieves a tone of unparalleled sensitivity that is a necessary prerequisite for any legislation seeking to remedy historical exploitation rooted in caste. Such sensitivity in the Draft conveys neither pity nor empathy, but a profound apology for the humiliation faced by manual scavengers on account of our indifference and the illimplementation of the 1993 Act by the past and present governments.

The new Bill was rightly placed in the care of the Union Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment with the intention of privileging not sanitation for public but justice, equality and dignity for the sanitation worker. However, for the new Bill to be

effective, the government ought to look at P.S. Krishnans 2011 Draft as its guiding document and prepare for, without further loss of time, the total liberation and thoughtful rehabilitation of manual scavengers in India.

(The author is an alumna of the University of Oxfords Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and is an independent researcher based in Delhi.)

October 3, 2012

Justice in Maharashtra (local Muslims need not apply)


HEAVYWEIGHT AT HOME:From the number of Gujarat cases transferred out, it has to be concluded thata fair

trial in the State is seen as a near impossibility. PHOTO: PTI Amit Shah, Gujarats former Home Minister, accused in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter killing of 2005, will now stand trial in Mumbai, not Gujarat, the scene of the encounter. His clout in his home state is obviously the main reason for the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) asking the Supreme Court to transfer the case. When you consider that two other major cases of the 2002 Gujarat violence were also sent to Mumbai for trial by the Supreme Court, the conclusion is clear. In Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Gujarat, a fair trial is an impossibility when the accused are Hindu BJP supporters, and the victims are Muslims.

This assumption was proved wrong by the recent Naroda Patiya judgment convicting 32 Hindus. But this was a case monitored by the Supreme

Court. And, it came after nine years of continuous intervention by the apex court after the farce in the name of justice that was being played out in Gujarat immediately after 2002. Public prosecutors sympathetic to the ruling party were making sure that the Hindu accused got away in cases already botched up by communal policemen.

Thus the Best Bakery case, named for the incident during the 2002 riots in which 14 persons were burnt alive, saw all 21 accused acquitted in Gujarat. Tried in Mumbai, nine were convicted. The Bilqis Bano case had 12 of the 20 accused convicted in Mumbai.

It seemed obvious then, that away from the ruling partys malevolent influence, a fair trial was possible. A thrilled Maharashtra Home Minister,

basking in the flattering implications of the cases being sent to his State by the highest court, promised to do everything to ensure justice. And he delivered. In the Best Bakery case, sent here in 2004, he appointed P.R. Vakil, one of Mumbais best criminal lawyers as the public prosecutor. The judge assigned to the case was also one of the best. The Bilqis Bano case was investigated by the CBI, which chose the public prosecutor from Gujarat, and ensured that the main eyewitness, Bilqis, was protected. But the location of the trial was crucial guaranteeing a neutral, nonthreatening court machinery.

The 1990s riots

So why does this treatment of Mumbai as a haven for justice seem like a tasteless joke to Mumbaikars?

In the same city, with its formidable judiciary and lawyers, its own citizens have failed to get justice. The 1992-93 riots that ravaged this city arent history. Some riot cases are still going on. Here too, as in Gujarat, there are politically powerful Hindu accused and helpless Muslim victims. Here too, cases have been botched up by communal policemen and thrown away by indifferent, if not communal prosecutors. Of the riot cases, 60 per cent were simply closed. Maharashtra too had a ruling party determined to shield its wrongdoers. When the Shiv Sena defeated the Congress in 1995, some riot cases were underway, most of them blood-curdling incidents that had the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) (TADA) Act applied to them. Most of the accused were Shiv Sainiks. All were acquitted, without the defence having to do much: the eyewitnesses, all Hindu, turned hostile. In one case where the main witness, a Muslim and the only

surviving victim, stuck to her stand, the TADA judge insisted on corroboration, agreed with the technical objections raised by the defence lawyer and acquitted the Shiv Sainiks. In most of these cases, the defence lawyer was the son of a Shiv Sena Rajya Sabha member.

Only in three cases, were the accused convicted. They were all Muslims. The Supreme Court acquitted them.

In 1998, the Srikrishna Commission of Inquiry submitted its report indicting the Sena and the police. Of course the ruling party rejected it.

This kalyug came to an end in 1999. Secular forces defeated communal forces. The bulk of the riot cases remained to be heard. Sena MP Madhukar Sarpotdar was the most important accused, charged with hate

speech; leader of the Opposition Gopinath Munde and his secretary Pradip Moitra were other important offenders, charged under the Arms Act. Did the Congress government appoint a special prosecutor and fasttrack these cases? Did it reopen the closed cases? Did it vigorously start implementing the Srikrishna Report? You must be joking.

One of the prosecutors appointed in Sarpotdars case resigned after not being paid for six months. As the seven accused took turns not to appear in court, magistrates went through the motions.

Charges were framed in 2000, after a tabloid front-paged the state of affairs. Even then, it took a conscientious magistrate presiding over a special court to try riot cases seven years later, to convict Sarpotdar and two others. Vilasrao Deshmukh,

then chief minister, promised to appoint a special prosecutor to fight Sarpotdars appeal. Four years later, it is a promise that is still to be kept. The appeal meanders from court to court, each prosecutor more clueless than the other. Mundes case died a silent death.

The other VIP accused were policemen charged with murdering innocent Muslims. The minority-loving Congress booked them only when forced by the Supreme Court, and then made sure they went unpunished. Former Commissioner R.D. Tyagi, charged with killing eight Muslims, was discharged thanks to a lacklustre prosecution. The government didnt go on appeal. But for sub-inspector Nikhil Kapse, charged with the killing of six Muslims, the same government ran to the Supreme Court to stay the High Court-ordered CBI inquiry against him.

The CBIs closure report exonerating him is now being challenged by a victim, just as Tyagis discharge was. The ruling saviour-of-Muslims party is nowhere in the picture.

24/7 TV coverage of the violence, a host of NGOs, a proactive National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and Supreme Court, and international attention have ensured justice for Gujarats Muslims. Mumbais Muslims had only a commission. No wonder they laugh when another Gujarat case is sent here.

(Jyoti Punwani is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)

Mumbais victims of communal violence have failed to get justice because

the accused are as politically powerful as those in Gujarat October 4, 2012

Health care is more than access to medical services


NOT ENOUGH:Universal health cannot be achieved by managed care. PHOTO: B. VELANKANNI RAJ Gita Sens article in The Hindu Getting Indias Health Care System out of the ICU (The Sunday Story, Sept. 2, 2012) does an elegant job of masking the technological fix that grips the imagination of those who are redrafting the 12th Plans approach to Universal Health Coverage (UHC). Thus, Sen consistently uses the term health care when actually she means medical care. The latter only

addresses illness, but the former includes the treatment of illness, along with all national programmes and welfare measures that determine health. This makes it convenient to mislead the reader into believing that the public health care system is seriously broken merely because there are no free drugs, lack adequate staff and equipment, and treat patients with scant respect. The deliberate actions of an elitist state for over 20 years in starving the public sector of resources, subsidising the private sector, and promoting the growth of the burgeoning corporate sector, (although partially acknowledged by Sen) have not been linked to the broken state of the public health care system.

Ensuring universal health care is a major concern of governments the world over, may sound good as an apologia for state intervention, but

the fact is that different nations have different visions and contexts. The United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Thailand, Mexico have been mentioned approvingly by Sen, but without comparing poverty levels, the proportion of GDP invested in health, and most critically the fact that costs of health care in these countries are sky rocketing. Through this generalisation, therefore, Sen ignores how the Indian public health system has been commercialised and medical care opened to commercial and corporate medical care providers, merely to add to the revenue of a state driven by a neo-liberal commitment to economic growth, even though the gap between rich and poor widens and health indicators stagnate. It is only by concealing these linkages that an appealing argument can be made that one cannot ignore the reality of the private health sector and it ought to be made to

play its part in the move towards universal health coverage.

Can UHC be provided without prescribing minimum standards for food, drinking water, housing and public sanitation (a point so vividly made almost 35 years ago by the Alma Ata Declaration)? What is the process of defining an adequate package of health care? Will epidemiological priorities and the needs of the marginalised determine health care, or the cost-efficiency of technologies and the need for revenue generation? Why is the Health Ministry opposing the recommendations of the draft chapter on health for the 12th Plan prepared by the Planning Commission, if its objective was that, a strengthened public sector must be the bedrock of reforms? Sen evades these questions by merely highlighting management reforms to back up more investment,

regulation of ad-hoc publicprivate partnerships and land subsidies and tax-breaks to ensure accountability, and independent bodies that would ensure standard treatment guidelines for high quality clinical services through cash-less smart cards! This methodology of clinical medical practice widely known as managed care is the thrust of the 12th Five Year Plan. Designed by insurance companies to optimise their profits and control providers, it has failed globally to provide even good clinical care, what to speak of comprehensive primary health care.

Citizen participation and accountability are the other buzzwords that Sen uses even though, in this regard, the failures of the panchayats and the district health committees in ensuring the rights of the underprivileged are well-known

and the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) report has nothing on social monitoring mechanisms. The reality is that if the public sector service is to be made transparent, responsive and responsible, with a focus on the health-care needs of the most needy, then a relook at its priorities through an epidemiological and socioeconomic lens, a review of its technological choices, and rejuvenation of its demoralised and corrupted personnel are the nonnegotiables. This service may not fully provide the rest of the welfare inputs but it must prescribe objectively the standards for these and demand that these be provided by other sectors if health for the people is to be achieved. Health-care planning has to recognise the complexity of public health and judiciously use clinical facilities to change the history of disease and not to simply use them to enhance medical markets and revenues. It has taken the state over

20 years to undermine what was built in the first 40. To tackle the complexity of health care and ensure peoples right to it will take at least another 10 to 15 years so that a public sector can be rebuilt to act as the most critical regulatory force for the private sector.

To emphasise only the urgency of UHC based on creating access to medical care services is to deny the complexity of public health and peoples right to it.

(Imrana Qadeer is retired professor, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, JNU.) October 4, 2012

Pouring oil over troubled borders

REASON TO SMILE:The two Sudans agreed to resolve all outstanding issues through peaceful negotiations. A file picture of South Sudans President Salva Kiir (right) and Sudans President Omar Hassan al-Bashir (second from right) in Ethiopia. PHOTO: AFP On a cloudy Sunday morning this September, a gaggle of reporters and photographers walked past a large, stuffed lion to sit amid a collection of bone china and assorted curios in a waiting room of the Presidential Palace in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

Somewhere in the vast palace, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, was in conversation with Ethiopias Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, discussing, no doubt, the imminent presidential summit with Salva Kiir Mayardit, the leader of South Sudan.

These are difficult times for the two Sudans. Last year, when South Sudan seceded from its northern neighbour after decades of conflict, it did so with two-thirds of the regions oil, but no oil processing or transport facilities, and barely 100 km of asphalt road. Sudan, by contrast, was bereft of its principal source of foreign exchange, and saddled with $40 billion of outstanding external debt.

Yet the summit was as much a test of the facilitators as of the participants. Hailemariam Desalegn was presiding over his first international summit after taking office after the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who ruled Ethiopia for 21 years and oversaw a muscular and interventionist foreign policy. Meanwhile, Thabo Mbeki, former South African President and panAfrican statesman, was determined to

illustrate that the African Union could contain the fallout of the division of Sudan, till recently the continents biggest country, without external supervision.

Oil deal

The summit was expected to address a number of post-secession issues, most importantly an oil-agreement that would give South Sudan access to northern ports and processing plants. In January this year, a dispute over transit fees had lead to the suspension of all oil production in the South and, as every reporter in the palace had noted, denied South Sudan 98 per cent of its state revenues.

Whats the remaining two per cent? asked a wondering hack as the crowd rushed to observe Mr. Bashir, brandishing an elegant walking stick

inlaid with blue enamel, make his way out of the palace and into an armoured SUV bound for the Sheraton Hotel. The pattern continued for the next four days as reporters watched the Presidents get into and out of cars, conference rooms and hotel elevators even as spokespersons insisted that a deal was likely to be concluded tomorrow. The crucial oil deal had been hammered out in August, granting South Sudan the right to process and transport the oil for between $11 and $9 a barrel depending on the pipeline in use; but the Presidents struggled to find a consensus on the exact contours of a safe demilitarised zone between the two armies or the status of Abyei, an oil-bearing territory claimed by a settled community allied to the south and itinerant Arab pastoralists from the North.

Most evenings, a pianist in the Sheraton lobby played darkly appropriate tunes like Frank Sinatras My Way and the Casablanca classic, As Time Goes By, as delegates and negotiators swapped desultory gossip; in the outdoor Office Bar, an American diplomat shuffled awkwardly as a singer with a peroxide-blonde comb-over sang Adeles breakout hit, Rolling In the Deep, the lyrics ominous for anyone striking a deal on behalf of a country emerging from war Finally I can see you crystal clear./Go ahead and sell me out and Ill lay your ship bare.

And where are you from? a South Sudanese official asked this correspondent, who replied that his family settled in New Delhi after the Partition in 1947. Ah, the British, he replied sagely, Always, they cause the problems. The problem, in this instance, being the opposite of the

subcontinental experience; in Sudan, the ethnically diverse south and predominantly Arab north were united into one political and administrative unit with catastrophic results.

Test for Africa

When the press was finally ushered into the high-ceiling ballroom on the fifth day, the agreements signed offered an insight into the sheer complexity involved in separating two nations. When I arrived here on the 22nd of September, said President Kiir in his address, I thought I would then proceed to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. I came to be surprised that things were really very difficult.

Apart from the expected deal on oil and a demilitarised zone, the

countries hammered out procedures to finalise international boundaries, to interconvert currencies, to share historical and government archives, preserve cultural heritage sites, and pay pensions and retirement benefits to government workers who served one government only to find it replaced by another.

The South also agreed to pay the North $3.028 billion as a one-time transitional financial agreement and the two countries agreed to jointly lobby for a reduction in Sudans $40 bn external debt, failing which the two countries will resume negotiations to agree on how best to apportion the sum.

Perhaps the most heartening agreement, for a region destroyed by civil war, is the Cooperation Agreement that commits both states to resolving all outstanding issues

through peaceful negotiations; yet, diplomats suggested, both sides would first have to overcome half a century of mistrust.

In his closing comments, Mr. Mbeki spelt out the stakes of the past week of negotiations. These two countries are very critical to the future of our continent, he said, If they fail, the continent will fail and if they succeed, Africa will succeed.

The agreements between Sudan and South Sudan reveal the complexity of separating two nations while testing the African Unions ability to contain

the troubles without external help October 4, 2012

Understanding the obligations of ruling India


The year was 2002. Two days after bloody riots erupted in Gujarat, I got a call late in the evening from an Ahmedabad-based officer of the Indian Police Service. The policeman simply said: Sir, I am embarrassed to make this call. I am told that a local BJP legislator in Mehsana district is planning to undertake a massacre of Muslims tonight. And I am ashamed that there is no one here who will listen. The police officer gave me the name of the village and taluka where the BJP leader had invited the village for a feast before the mob could be worked up to march on to a nearby village with a large concentration of Muslims.

Overwhelmed by the enormity of the imminent crime, I rang up my friend Brajesh Mishra. Fortuitously, Mishra picked up his mobile. I simply narrated to him what I had been told from Ahmedabad. He heard me out, noting down the sketchy details, and said: Let me see. Next morning I got another call from the police officer, who was obviously relieved and said: Sir, I do not know what you did or to whom you talked; within two hours, an army posse reached the spot, rowdies were made to stay put, and their bloody plans sabotaged. Over 100 lives were saved. Thank you.

A few days later, when I went over to the Prime Ministers Office to have my weekly tea with Mishra, I thanked him profusely. With becoming dignity and gravitas he observed: Those of us who have the good fortune to work in this office for the Prime Minister of

India can never become indifferent to the obligation of social harmony.

Golden principle

Suddenly it was clear that the man who wore two hats the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister and National Security Adviser was laying down the golden principle for administering India. The state can never abandon its neutrality nor become ambivalent about social harmony. In that moment, Brajesh Mishra revealed himself to be a keen student of P.N. Haksar, another practitioner of enlightened statecraft who served another Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, with great distinction.

Haksar had presciently spelled out a vital link between internal cohesion and our national security: Secularism or its failure affects vitally social

cohesion in our society, without which we cannot discuss our security. The fundamental basis for ensuring security of any state is its inner unity, cohesion and coherence of the society. A society which is torn between conflicting religions is bound to be an easy prey to internal forces of disintegration and external forces of destabilization.

Although Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Partys mascot, had managed to notch up an impressive victory in the 2002 Gujarat election by positing a Mian Musharraf-MadarsasMuslims linkage, Brajesh Mishra (as well as his boss, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee) was profoundly unhappy. It was clear to him that if the BJP had any long-term hopes of ruling the country, surely the Modi prescriptions and slogans were totally unhelpful. Those were the heady days of the post-9/11 war on terror. Indian

statesmanship demanded that the polity be spared the debilitating polarisation of a civil war.

Mishra was convinced that only a Centre able to practise secular values and respect our countrys plural traditions could conduct superior diplomacy and pursue a robust strategy, especially vis--vis Pakistan. And, he was equally convinced that an amicable solution to the Kashmir problem could be attempted only from a higher secular moral ground. The political discourse would have to be detoxed of its Gujarat-centric delinquencies.

It is possible to argue that it was only after the Gujarat carnage that the Vajpayee-Mishra duo embarked on seeking some kind of reconciliation with Pakistan, an effort that culminated in January 2004 in Islamabad. Mishra was painfully

aware that the Advani-Modi faction had so precipitously damaged the social fabric throughout the country that our national security had become vulnerable. Sensible statecraft demanded engagement with Pakistan.

The second principle that Mishra believed in was that those who were fortunate enough to get the privilege of governing or hope to govern this country do not have the luxury of pettiness. History is witness that whenever a Prime Minister allowed his pique to get the better of sane impulses, the outcome has been a morally and politically inferior response. On a number of occasions he would hint how Prime Minister Vajpayee was under pressure from the NDA hotheads to use the states coercive instruments against political rivals; and, how he was able to help the Prime Minister ward off the sangh parivars efforts at dirty tricks. He

once pronounced: A Prime Minister of India has an obligation to decency and decorum.

Like Haksar, Mishra was a great believer in centralisation of resources and power in pursuit of national ambitions and purpose. Just as Haksar helped Indira Gandhi accumulate power of oversight and co-ordination in the Prime Ministers Office, Mishra helped Vajpayee restore the aura and authority of the PMO. Though Mr. Vajpayees circumstances were vastly different from those of Indira Gandhi, Mishra was aware of the toll that two years of the United Front government had taken of our national will. The wobbliness in the PMO had to be corrected and that is precisely what he achieved.

In his autobiography, My Country, My Life , L.K. Advani unwittingly reveals how efforts were made by him and

others to cut Brajesh Mishra to size. The Kargil Review Committee Report was flaunted to argue that Mishra should not combine two roles of Principal Secretary and National Security Adviser. Mr. Advani plaintively notes how Mr. Vajpayee stood by Mishra: We repeatedly urged the Prime Minister to bifurcate the two posts held by Brajesh Mishra. Atalji, however, had a different view and did not implement this recommendation. It was, of course, the Prime Ministers prerogative to do so. In my view, the clubbing together of two critical responsibilities, each requiring focused attention, did not contribute to harmony at the highest levels of governance.

Command structure

Presumably neither Mr. Advanis suggestion nor Mr. Vajpayees

rejection of it was personal. At issue was a certain notion of a command and control structure that should be available to the Prime Minister of India. I remember vividly that within a few weeks of the UPA government coming to power in May 2004, Mishra told me crisply and precisely: If you have any influence with the new crowd of our new rulers, please tell them to dismantle the disastrous trifurcation in the PMO. The Manmohan Singh government had experimented with a three way division of Mr. Mishras responsibilities a Principal Secretary (T.K.A. Nair), a National Security Adviser (J.N. Dixit) and a Security Adviser (M.K. Narayanan).

Mishra would have violently disagreed with Mamata Banejree who recently decreed that India cannot be governed from New Delhi. Inherent in Ms Banerjees formulation is an

emasculated and enfeebled Centre. Mishras, on the other hand, hinged on a national mobilisation, not a fragmentation of political power; on a pan-Indian vision, rather than a region-centric calculus; and, on a summoning of our best civilisational instincts and traditions, rather than the sangh parivars shoddy feudal animosities. The Mishra-Vajpayee duo rescued the exercise of power from the BJPs preference for pettiness and provincialism. It was a six-year long struggle between the two approaches and the balance perhaps tilts slightly against the Vajpayee-Mishra team.

Once the realisation dawned on the country that the BJP was not inclined to abide by the Vajpayee-Mishra approach, it was only a matter of time before the NDA was voted out of power.

(Harish Khare is a veteran commentator and political analyst.)

Brajesh Mishra was convinced that only a Centre able to practise secular values and respect the countrys plural traditions could pursue a robust strategy vis--vis Pakistan October 4, 2012

Five days in Assam


Women and children at a relief camp at Bijni in Chirang district. PHOTO: RITU RAJ KONWAR As the tension and violence in Assam fades out of the media spotlight, there is one key issue to which little attention has been paid.

This is the critical delay in calling out the Army to deal with the acute burst

of bloodshed between July 20-25, when violence peaked especially between Bodo and settler Muslims of Bengali origin, with the latter bearing the brunt of it. Yet, it is an issue that cuts across the gamut of Centre-State relations, raises issues of Constitutionality and the law, and defines the role of the Army/defence roles in situations of civil conflict. The delay arguably led to the death of scores and the largest internal displacement since Partition.

A brief recap: After a set of attacks and counter-killings on July 19-20, the violence was unquenchable until the Army moved in on July 25. By then over five lakh people were homeless and sheltering in relief camps. Nearly two lakh people still remain in these squalid settlements which have been housed in local government schools, more than two months after the first riots.

Procedural issue

The deployment of the Army was delayed because of a procedural issue. After communal rioting nationwide following the Babri Masjid demolition in December 1992, the Ministry of Defence has developed what a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) where the Ministry reviews calls for the Army to come to the aid of the civil administration during communal (read also ethnic and linguistic) disturbances and decide how and when to act. The procedure is coordinated with the nodal ministry for law enforcement, the Ministry for Home Affairs.

A senior retired Army officer says the effort is to stop State governments from calling the Army out at the drop of a hat for the Army must be the

last resort. The Assam therefore, is worth examining.

case,

Operations in Assam

The Army is already in operation in the State where, under the shelter of the Disturbed Areas Act, it can use as much force as it wishes under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) to tackle any problem. All of the following powers cordon and search, destruction of weapons dumps, arrest without warrants or on mere suspicion, searches of private premises and even shooting to kill upon suspicion are available under AFSPA. Although the insurgency situation has vastly improved in the State, the Army remains in a state of readiness groups and there are frequent reports of it apprehending various suspects in different areas of Assam and even encounters there and elsewhere in the Northeast. A

united command structure, where civil and military organisations coordinate, is in place. Significantly, nowhere in AFSPA does it specify that military action is against armed insurgencies: the Act says that the Army will come to the aid of civil authority. If, in relation to any State or Union Territory to which this Act extends, the Governor of that State or the Administrator of that Union Territory or the Central Government, in neither case, is of the opinion that the whole or any part of such state or Union Territory, as the case may be, is in such a disturbed or dangerous condition that the use of armed forces in aid of the civil power is necessary, the Governor of that State or the Central Government declare the whole or such part of such State or Union Territory to be a disturbed area. Thus, AFSPA can be used to combat rioting in aid of the civil power. And it is not the Army which decides that: it is the government,

acting through the Governor, who is bound by the advice of the Cabinet, the Centre or Union Territory administrator.

An appeal by the Assam Chief Secretary, the Deputy Commissioners of Kokrajhar (the worst-affected district) and Dhubri districts to local army commanders requisitioning their services was referred to the Ministry of Defence. This, despite the fact that various major strike formations were located either in Assam or neighbouring States, not far from the areas of strife. The first reference was made to the Ministry of Defence on July 20 and authorisation to deploy was given on July 25. Five critical days were lost as mayhem ruled and groups of fighters, armed with automatic weapons on one side, went on the offensive while large mobs of the other community attacked, with spears and daos (machetes) wherever

they found vulnerable targets. Homes were burned which meant that documents relating to land and property went up in smoke as did money and valuables. For five days, despite the pleas of the State government, Assam burned.

Existing law

There is an existing law, which overrides the SOP; the latter is nothing more than an administrative procedure. The major provisions of law are Sections 130 and 131 of the Criminal Procedure Code read with relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code. It is absolutely clear here that the Army must respond to summons from civil authority which is best placed to decide whether a situation has gone beyond the capacity of local law enforcement forces to deal with it and whether the Army is needed. This is the law of the land, a constitutional

mandate which surely overrides both AFSPA, which is a creature of the night, designed in 1958 (without even naming an insurgent group) or a mere procedural order.

The Army and the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Home Affairs, which at least has acknowledged the delay and wants the Defence Ministry to scrap the SOP cannot take shelter under the plea of procedural delays.

An investigation into this failure must be conducted urgently. Culpability must be fixed: the report must be made public (unlike the Justice Reddy Committee Report which reviewed AFSPA and submitted its report in June 2005 and which the government still hasnt made public). In addition, the State government has to act firmly on the issue of illegal weapons, which continue to strike fear in the Bodoland

areas. Otherwise, normalcy can never return to a region where weapons dictate the law and intimidation is a way of life.

(Sanjoy Hazarika is Director, Centre for North East Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. Email: sanjoyha@gmail.com )

The Armys delayed response to the Gogoi governments pleas for help to deal with the recent episode of communal bloodshed is inexcusable and needs to be investigated

October 4, 2012

Join the party, Mr. Kejriwal

When Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal came together 17 months ago, the air throbbed with magic and hope, the response was sensational, and India seemed on the brink of heady, inspirational change. But like all transient curiosities, the pair that promised to banish corruption from public life has faded from memory even as the scams and scandals it fought against have attained a size and scale unimaginable in an earlier time. This is not all. In an ironic imitation of the politics that Team Anna relentlessly lampooned, it has split vertically, with one faction led by Mr. Kejriwal deciding to enter the electoral arena while Anna himself continues to be implacably opposed to politics, seeing it as a cesspool that only the irredeemably venal would plunge into. Why did the movement not reach its objective? Team Annas maximalist position on the Jan Lokpal Bill, which it projected as a one-stop cure for all problems, scared away

even those committed to probity in public life. Political support which was forthcoming in the early stages of the Bills formulation, disappeared in part because of a genuine concern that the Jan Lokpal was designed to be structurally overarching and in part because of Team Annas vilification of politicians and even politics.

Over the following months, as Annas repetitive rallies and fasts began to attract fewer and fewer crowds, the veteran and his team found themselves hard pressed to answer a hostile counter question: If politics was so dirty, why not assume responsibility and clean it from inside instead of grandstanding from a safe distance? It is to Mr. Kejriwals credit that he did not resist the idea for too long. Annas estranged lieutenant has taken courage in his hand and floated a party with idealistic goals in an environment heavily contaminated by

sleaze money and big corporate interests. As he ponders the next steps, Mr. Kerjriwal will surely experience for himself the challenge of practising politics without its attendant ills. He will also find the going tough in the absence of the charismatic Anna who drew his legitimacy from being seen as a selfless, modern-day savant. And yet Anna often failed to distinguish between sincere supporters who wanted a systemic overhaul and rightwing elements who infiltrated his campaign to further their divisive agenda. Though initially taken with the likes of the hugely popular Swami Ramdev, Mr. Kejriwal realised in time that neutrality was vital for his kind of politics. If he makes even a small difference to the popular perception of politics, he will have done a lot. October 5, 2012

(Mis)treating Ms Gandhi

Politicians should be cut some slack for making exaggerated claims and launching strong and satirical attacks on their rivals in the heat of electioneering. But Gujarats Chief Minister Narendra Modi has displayed shockingly bad taste in making an issue about the money allegedly spent on Congress president Sonia Gandhis foreign travels in recent years, often for medical treatment. First, he repeated, on the basis of an unsourced newspaper report, that the Centre had spent a wildly improbable Rs. 1,880 crore on her overseas trips. When he came under fire for this unsubstantiated attack, Mr. Modi simply changed tack. All right, he argued, if it was not Rs. 1,880 crore tell us how much? And then, in a hugely unconvincing attempt to retrieve a hopeless situation, he demanded the United Progressive Alliance government disclose how much public money was spent on her foreign trips from 2004, or well before

she took ill. With the Central Information Commission clarifying that Ms Gandhi had not sought any reimbursement from the Centre for her medical expenditure, Mr. Modis attack seems even more malicious and insulting. That he chose to score points off a political rivals illness shows the moral depths he is prepared to plumb in his pursuit of power.

It is possible that Mr. Modi simply put his foot in his mouth in levelling this wild allegation. But his recent election speeches suggest that targeting the Gandhi family is part of a larger political strategy. First he attacked Rahul Gandhi for having a mother who was born outside India, saying that he could win an election in Italy if he liked. And now this. Mr. Modi may well believe that identifying the Gandhis as his principal rival is a clever way of signalling his ambition

to climb the national political stage before the 2014 general election. While he must be unreservedly condemned for saying what he did, the likelihood of such a controversy erupting would be far less had there not been such an impenetrable veil of secrecy drawn over Ms Gandhis medical condition and treatment. An individuals medical treatment is private information and, as the CIC has correctly pointed out, any personal expenditure on it cannot be the subject matter of an RTI application. But Ms Gandhi, as Chairperson of the UPA and the National Advisory Council, is a public figure and the degree of secrecy surrounding her medical condition is unusual for a democracy. While her privacy, like the privacy of all citizens, is paramount, the Congress high command should realise it is precisely the absence of any authoritative information that provides fertile

ground for rumours and canards to spread. October 5, 2012

Obama can keep the change?


The young African-American stepped forward as if to make a solemn political statement. And he did pop one that took his audience by surprise. He and his six friends (all African-Americans, ages ranging from 13 to 30) had just held their New York subway audience spellbound with a stunning exhibition of break-dancing.

As they wound up, one of them walked around, not with the usual hat or tin to collect small cash, but with a big bucket. The message, quite rightly, was that they deserved to be well compensated for their show of extraordinary skill.

Then the spokesman said his piece, deadpan: And remember folks, Obama wants change. Pause. We want dollars. Obama can keep the change. As brilliant a line as you could hope for. The White folks in the enthralled audience seemed embarrassed, unsure whether it was politically correct to giggle. The young African-Americans in the audience, however, cracked up in raucous laughter. The irony, the pun, the promise of Mr. Obama and the parody of his performance all of it seemed to hit home at the same time. Mr. Obamas Yes, we can and We need change slogans had swiftly become the fodder of ad jingles and shows by stand-up comics.

That was a year before the presidential campaign debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on October 3 took the parody

further. The Presidents most skilled drum-beaters in the media could not find a generous word on his performance. However, it wasnt just that Mr. Obama did badly in the debate he did. Or that Mr. Romney fared better he did. Nor does it mean that this election is over with this debate. It isnt. What sticks out is how pathetic this debate format is. And how poorly Mr. Obama has delivered on the modest promises he made four years ago.

Its a huge problem when you shill for the same corporate constituency your opponent does only you cant be as clear cut as he can be about it. When you have not punished but rewarded the Wall Street mob that tanked the economy in 2008. When Mr. Obama allows his adversary to get away with some of the worst statements ever made by a U.S. presidential candidate. Till last week, it looked as if Mitt

Romney was shoring up the Obama campaign, so crazy were his mistakes. Take his comment that 47 per cent of Americans paid no income tax, saw themselves as victims and so my job is not to worry about those people.

That should have sunk him. That it didnt is also a measure of how much credibility Mr. Obama has lost in the past four years.

Daunting numbers

As he enters the final lap of his reelection bid, the jobless numbers are daunting, and the unemployment rate is above 8 per cent. No President seeking re-election since Franklin D. Roosevelt has had to contend with such figures. Most of the jobs that have been created in the past several years are low-wage and low-skill ones. About half of the over 12 million

jobless workers collect few or no unemployment benefits at all. And some 40 per cent of those out of work have been seeking it for six months or more. Millions more who want fulltime jobs cant find them.

The latest data from the U.S. Census on income and poverty (out just three weeks ago) are not joyous. Real media household income declined between 2010 and 2011, says the Census report. This is a second consecutive annual decline.

Yet, as economist Paul Buccheit points out in Nation of Change : Based on IRS figures, the richest 1% nearly tripled its share of Americas after-tax income from 1980-2006. Thats an extra trillion dollars a year. Then, in the first year after the 2008 recession, they took 93 per cent of all the new income. Corporate profits doubled in less than 10 years. As Buccheit writes:

Corporations pay even less than lowwage American workers. On their 2011 profits of $1.97 trillion, corporations paid $181 billion in federal income taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state income taxes (2%), for total income tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20 per cent of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state and local taxes.

Yet, the word inequality did not come up in the Obama-Romney debate. Neither in terms of a question from moderator Jim Lehrer. Nor in the exchanges between the two. Mr. Obama even stressed that he and Mr. Romney had similar positions on social security which needed tweaking. He felt they both agreed the corporate tax rate was too high and needed to be lowered. (Though he wanted the better off to give a little bit more for societys wellbeing).

Having agreed the corporate tax rate was too high, both candidates traded clichs on how to protect, nourish and serve the middle class. Neither mentioned that 160 million Americans could see their tax bills soar after January 1. Thats when the temporary payroll tax holiday expires. The hikes that it will bring, says The New York Times , would be about $95 billion in 2013 alone. That change, it quotes experts as saying, could cost the economy a million jobs.

This debate did not extend much to foreign policy (that will come up in another debate). It only touched in passing the two wars that America has fought in the past decade. One in Iraq launched on lies by the Bush administration and which saw that countrys overall mortality rate more than double. (From 5.5 deaths per 1,000 persons before the war began

to 13.3 per 1,000 persons by late 2006). The other in Afghanistan which Mr. Obama portrayed as a good war in 2008, as against the bad one in Iraq. His surge has failed. This is already Americas longest war. And the sheer misery of Afghanistans people is beyond description. No one knows exactly how many civilians have died. The two wars have cost trillions of dollars. No points in the debate, though, on the human and financial costs of the wars.

Non-debates

U.S. presidential election debates, no matter how many millions may watch them, are now a farce. They are more tightly choreographed than a ballet. Pre-scripting by arrangement is the norm. Well before the event, the camps of the two candidates even negotiate which and how many of their family members will join their

stars on stage. After the non-debates, the pundits will debate for days on who looked more presidential. On who had the better lines, the quicker response. And who missed which opportunity to score a point. But theres worse.

In a piece on counterpunch.org on Rigging the Presidential Debates, consumer rights crusader Ralph Nader shows how the debates are set up. Mr. Nader scoffs at a supine media that does not seek even basic facts from the candidates. Such as those on the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns that controls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the campaigns corporate offspring.

In the 2004 George Bush-John Kerry debates, both parties agreed in advance not to seek any further

debates. They also agreed to shut out other candidates. And not to accept any television or radio air time offers that involve a debate format. As Mr. Nader (himself once a presidential candidate) puts it: Were this deal to be between two corporations, they could be prosecuted for criminal violation of the antitrust laws. One unwritten agreement in all such debates, it appears, is to keep off corporate crime. Not a whisper on the guilty of 2008 this time. The one vaguely-related mention of it being from Mr. Obama in terms of reckless behaviour to which he quickly added not just on Wall Street.

Yet, these debates will be minutely post-mortemed by the media for days to come. The Oracles of the airwaves will study the entrails of Wednesday nights engagement and their blah and the opinion polls will feed into each other. In fact, the post-debate

coverage could do more to stir up the voters than the debate itself. The Romney camp, cheered by their mans win, will crow about it. Which makes the likelihood of another giant gaffe from him even greater. The Obama crew will soon launch an offensive, seizing on what it feels were damaging positions that Mr. Romney took. E.g.: I wont put in a tax cut that will add to the deficit. I will not reduce the share paid by high income individuals. (When will they hold him to it after the elections?)

The scripted debates are not over. Nor is the race. Theres a lot yet to rise on the blah barometer.

U.S. presidential election debates are

now a farce, more choreographed than a ballet October 5, 2012

tightly

The message from the north


After decades of dealing with the Indian hand in their countrys domestic affairs, Nepali politicians are now confronted with another assertive neighbour China. Moving from a relatively detached approach to high-profile engagement, Beijing has now started making its views known about Nepals political transition.

In the past, efforts by sections of Nepali politicians to play the China card by projecting China as a stakeholder to counter Indian influence and pressure New Delhi usually failed. Both the former King,

Gyanendra, and the Maoist chairman, Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, tried it the former when he imposed an autocracy against Indian advice, and the latter while stoking an ultra-nationalist campaign.

China made it clear to both that it could not be a substitute for New Delhi. It did not show interest in getting enmeshed in the messy Kathmandu political theatre, was happy to work with any government in power, and stayed away from contentious political issues.

Accumulating influence

But over the last five years, Beijing has also worked to deepen contacts with the Nepali state apparatus, political class, and non-state actors.

High-level Chinese delegations of the Communist Party, government departments, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), business chambers and academics have visited Nepal. Not a fortnight passes without a set of Nepali politicians, bureaucrats, security officials, businessmen or journalists, travelling to the northern neighbour. Chinese development assistance has increased. A Chinese company has signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a major hydro-power project, West Seti, with the Nepal government. Beijing is keen to develop an international airport in Pokhara, and a Chinese non governmental organisation has expressed interest in investing $3billion to develop the greater Lumbini area both projects have however hit roadblocks. Chinese tourists to Nepal have increased, while more Nepali students are going to China for higher studies.

Beijing has used its increasing influence for a clear purpose to ensure zero anti-China, read proTibet, activities in Nepal. In March 2008, free Tibet protests had erupted in Kathmandu. The Chinese government was unhappy with what it thought was Nepals unwillingness, or inability, to come down on the protests ruthlessly.

Since then, China has extracted repeated commitments from all Nepali leaders to the one-China policy. It has also developed links directly with Nepali security agencies and bureaucracy. As a result, longterm Tibetan residents have found it difficult to exercise refugee rights; Nepal has been firm in not allowing any Tibetan political activity; Chinese pressure, among other reasons, led to the exit of the United Nations Human Rights Office, which it saw as being sympathetic to Tibetan protesters.

China also kept vigil in the northern Nepal districts that border Tibet, where communities share linguisticcultural links with Tibetans.

Now, domestic politics

In recent months however, Chinas diplomacy in Nepal appears to have entered a new phase of seeking to influence the domestic political issue of federalism. Several high-level political sources, all of whom spoke to The Hindu on the condition of anonymity, revealed the image of a more interventionist Beijing. Despite repeated attempts, the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu did not respond to requests for an interview.

At the end of June, a month after Nepals Constituent Assembly failed due to differences on the issue of federalism, Ai Ping, a senior Chinese

party official, visited Nepal. Political leaders who met him say that China clearly communicated it had security concerns if Nepal adopted federalism. A very senior Maoist leader told The Hindu : Their message was China prefers a unitary Nepal, but if federalism has to happen, it should not be based on ethnicity. This is the first time that China has intervened so directly in our domestic affairs.

After his meeting with the visiting official, Maoist chairman Prachanda, who supports identity-based federalism, is understood to have been taken aback. He had spent some days with Mr. Ai in Shanghai a few years ago, and both the nature of the message and its curt delivery surprised him. Subsequently he called in the Chinese Ambassador to Nepal, and told him federalism was necessary given Nepals diversity, and

expressed displeasure at the Chinese advocacy against it.

A Nepali Congress (NC) leader, who is close to the influential Koirala family, added: China has told us not to go for federalism. If at all we do so, there must be as few states in the north as possible. They dont want to deal with multiple power centres across their border, in the same manner as India too would prefer as few states in the south *of Nepal+. A similar message was passed to the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), with which Beijing has shared close traditional links. This was music to the ears of NC and UML leaders, who are at best reluctant federalists. Chairman of the radical Maoist splinter outfit, Mohan Vaidya Kiran, also visited Beijing soon after splitting from the parent party. On his return, he told reporters, China is not against federalism but it is opposed to foreign

interference on the issue of federalism. Beijing has been engaging closely with Mr. Kirans outfit, which has kept open the possibility of reverting to violence and has adopted a stridently nationalist read anti-India political posture. Incidentally, the NC, the UML and Mr. Kirans party have recently joined hands to organise a movement against the Baburam Bhattarai-led government.

Two reasons

Observers point to two reasons for Chinas concerns. First, Beijing fears ethnic states in the mid-hills and north could become a base for Tibetan unrest. They also see ethnic politics as funded by western powers, and conclude that politicians from indigenous groups would do their bidding.

And two, China calculates that federalism will result in an increase in the political power of the Madhesis. A senior Madhesi leader, who has dealt with foreign affairs and visited China, says, China is influenced by the old Nepali nationalist mindset which sees Madhesis as Indians. So they think a Madhes state means that Indian influence will expand. China will support royalists, hill chauvinists of mainstream parties, and so-called nationalist leftists.

Political scientist and State Restructuring Commission member, Krishna Hachhethu, responded to Chinas concerns in an article in the English daily, Republica . He noted that Chinese diplomats were getting influenced by those defaming identity-based federalism, by calling it ethnic federalism. Provinces in Nepal would not be created on a solely

ethnic basis and no group will have preferential rights. Instead, he argued, what is being proposed in Nepal is aimed at ending inequality between social groups.

He warned that the failure to address Janjati aspirations that could breed an ethnic conflict in the hills.

Geo-political balance

Chinas entry into the tricky territory of domestic politics could divide the Nepali political class and society right down the middle. Sources say that Beijing is providing political support to groups which are pro-unitary system or territorial federalism, and encouraging an alliance among such forces. But their move is sure to be resisted by another section, particularly the Prachanda-led

Maoists, and marginalised social groups like the Madhesis and Janjatis backing identity-based federalism.

The new Chinese assertiveness has implications for Delhi, which has refrained from getting involved in constitutional debates despite lobbying by contending Nepali factions. In a rare role reversal, as the China card becomes a potent political reality in Nepal, India is watching quietly. But there is a likelihood that the two powers will end up backing rival political groupings.

A highly placed Indian diplomatic source says, We have stayed away from the federalism debate, and have not pushed a line either in public or private. It is for the Nepali people to decide what form this will take. But we recognise the inevitability of federalism, and feel it should happen

quickly if Nepal is to be stable. If there are forces pushing an anti-federal agenda, the risk of a conflict increases.

Chinas attempt to back Nepals conservative forces threatens to complicate the countrys political transition, as well as jeopardise the fragile geo-political balance in the new republic.

After increasing pressure to curb Tibetan activity, Chinas diplomacy in Nepal has now entered a new phase of influencing domestic political outcome on federalism October 5, 2012

Five points on the future of nuclear power in India

In response to my recent article in The Hindu, The real questions from Kudankulam (edit page, September 14, 2012), supporting nuclear power and arguing for an independent regulatory authority, I received much feedback, largely positive, some critical; some of which deserves a response. Many of these points have been made by others, repeatedly, but some are new to me.

1) Independent oversight: Two credible people said that I was too critical of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and particularly the current regulatory authority, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB), which they said has been doing its job without fear or favour. This may be true (indeed, Indias nuclear safety record is outstanding) but, if the Kudankulam mess teaches us anything, it is that perceptions

matter as much as reality. A truly independent AERB successor, the proposed Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority (NSRA), with transparency, significant powers and, ideally, international representation, would also serve the cause of safety in future. That the AERB has acted fairly and independently so far does not guarantee that it will always do so.

Another point is that the NSRA cannot draw on independent nuclear expertise in India because none exists outside the DAE (one reason for international representation). We should encourage investments by the private sector, subject to NSRA oversight, and encourage leading nonDAE institutions, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, to develop programmes in nuclear engineering. Meanwhile, the NSRA will require civil engineers, seismologists, radiation safety specialists, and other experts

besides nuclear scientists, who exist independently of the DAE.

2) Risks and reality: The probability of a nuclear catastrophe may be very low but is not zero. How can we expose people to such a risk? Indeed, statements from the DAE like Kudankulam is 100% safe are not credible and a proper risk assessment is required. But, based on experience, the risk of a catastrophic accident at a nuclear plant seems minuscule compared to a similar risk at unscrutinised chemical factories everywhere: despite Bhopal, which is yet to be cleaned up adequately, there is no demand for bans on such factories. Most nuclear accidents have had few or no fatalities and no leak of radiation. In the past 25 years (since Chernobyl), only Fukushima has resulted in significant radiation exposure to the public. Few industries can claim a better record of safety.

As for nuclear liability: all of us deserve answers on this. It is not consistent to assert safety while denying liability, as the government apparently seeks to do.

What of military or terrorist attacks? Israel attacked an Iraqi plant in 1981 and a putative Syrian plant in 2007, but neither plant was loaded with fuel. An attack on Iran could have graver results. To cause a meltdown, such an attack would have to destroy the cooling system but keep the nuclear fuel confined. This looks unlikely, but Im not a nuclear scientist and the question should be addressed by the DAE. Terrorist threats on the ground look still less likely to succeed. As for a 9/11 type attack: according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations website, no one knows what would happen if a commercial airliner crashed into one of the older U.S.

plants, though many of them are built to withstand impacts from light planes. However, experts rule out a nuclear explosion. A conventional explosion can still spread radiation, but not on the scale of Chernobyl. These are points that, I believe, the DAE should address.

3) Emergency preparedness and liability: In the event of a disaster at Kudankulam, it is impossible to evacuate such an area rapidly, and medical facilities are inadequate. But this is not unique to nuclear power. Cyclones, floods, industrial accidents all occur regularly and we have not learned our lessons. The DAE should take the lead in ensuring disaster preparedness near its installations, but cannot be blamed for our countrys larger failures.

4) Local consent and involvement: In such projects, to what extent is local

peoples consent required? This is perhaps the trickiest point of all. The needs of the many can conflict with the needs (and rights) of the few. The states ability to seize land for public use (eminent domain) is asserted from communist China to capitalist U.S. (where it was upheld by a rightleaning Supreme Court). In a democracy like India, we cannot insist that no private land ever be acquired for any purpose, but we should insist on proper resettlement. And our record is terrible. However, Kudankulam is not a case of forcible dispossessment even the opponents allege only misleading villagers. The land was acquired at fair rates over two decades ago. Perhaps some protesters are suffering sellers remorse, but most come from at least a few kilometres away, and seem motivated by unscientific fears of the plant.

5) The future: Unwarranted scaremongering is a problem on all sides. First, genuine concerns are diluted when bundled with alarmist nonsense. S.P. Udayakumar claims in his Thirteen Reasons Why We Do Not Want the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project (Transcend Media, August 2011) that the radiation from a nuclear plants normal operation is dangerous (this was addressed in my previous article), that coolant waste will affect fish populations (studies show no observable effect), and that the VVER-1000 reactors are untested (the design was developed between 1975 and 1985 and is in use in several countries since 1980, and new safety features in Kudankulam are in addition to, not replacing, existing features). It may be tempting to use these claims to discredit the anti-nuclear activists, but the good points that they make should not be ignored, especially when going forward to new nuclear installations.

Second, this makes it hard to conduct a rational dialogue, or to address genuine worries while dispelling unfounded ones.

In his article in The Hindu , Why Kudankulam dissolved into fission and acrimony (Op-Ed, September 25, 2012), Mohit Abraham suggests that the DAEs new openness and engagement with the public has backfired, because this engagement was half-hearted: previous projects, shrouded in secrecy, saw no protest. One hopes that the lesson drawn for the future is wholehearted public engagement, not an attempted (and futile) return to the secrecy of earlier days.

(Rahul Siddharthan is with the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, an autonomous institute under the Department of Atomic

Energy. The opinions expressed are his own.) October 6, 2012

Premium on regulation
At first blush, the wave of financial sector reforms unveiled by the government on Thursday appears to have pulled off the impossible. The rapturous surge witnessed on the stock market tells us the investing classes are happy, while the somewhat muted reaction of Opposition parties suggests the insurance and pension sector initiatives cannot easily be painted as anti-people. If the entry of multinational retail behemoths raises fears about the potential loss of jobs and livelihoods, insurance and pension reforms hold out the prospect of better social security for the middle class without the immediate danger of a employment displacement effect.

In insurance, at least, the reform being contemplated is also quite modest: foreign insurance companies will be allowed to hold 49 per cent equity in their Indian operations but this still does not make for majority control. The private insurance sector is starved for capital and the increase in foreign equity cap will enable foreign partners to pump in money. Whether they will actually do so is another matter, given their own financial problems and their inability to crack the Indian market. For those squeamish about opening the pension sector to foreign investment, the reform has a silver lining: the regulator for the sector will finally acquire teeth. Banks and some mutual funds have already evinced interest in offering pension fund products and passage of the pension Bill will facilitate this process.

As junior partners restricted to a 49 per cent equity share, foreign pension fund companies may not be the threat some believe them to be. But the pension reforms being introduced are hardly a remedy to the absence of a viable and well-funded system of social security in India. On the positive side, millions of private sector employees and the self-employed most of whom have no viable pension plans to subscribe to today may get new options as a result. Remember, the government is in no mood or position to offer its services here; some of its own employees are now governed by the National Pension Scheme. On the negative side, the Western, especially American, private pension model has not exactly been an unqualified success on its home turf. Millions of Americans are unprotected or their retirement benefits have been compromised because of insufficient regulation and the lack of official oversight. As for

insurance, many of the companies looking to enhance their positions in India were key players in the 2008 global financial meltdown. That is why Parliament needs to focus sharply on the quality of the regulator and regulations that will govern the pension and insurance business from now on, especially since it will increasingly be in private hands. October 6, 2012

There is no right not to be offended


SALMAN RUSHDIE: One of the big subjects in the book is the opposition between hatred and love, between friendship and hostility. And I certainly think I was fortunate in my friends, who both publicly and privately, gave me an astonishing degree of support. PHOTO: SYRIE MOSKOWITZ

OUTRAGE INDUSTRY:A file picture of protesters at New Delhis Jama Masjid burning an effigy of Salman Rushdie. PHOTO: AFP A phone call on February 14, 1989, Valentines Day, altered Salman Rushdies life forever. He was told that Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa calling for his death for allegedly insulting the Prophet and the Quran in The Satanic Verses . His recently launched memoir Joseph Anton is a transfixing account of the nine years spent in hiding that is at once overtly political and deeply personal.

Religion and secularism, truth and falsity, friendship and enmity, hope and despair, bravery and cowardice, love and betrayal, collide in the pages to form a highly-charged battleground of ideas about a world poised for an uncertain future.

In this phone interview, Salman Rushdie talks about the novel that robbed him of a decade and the lessons it has taught him about free speech, religious fundamentalism and the importance of standing up for what you believe in.

It is a coincidence that Joseph Anton is being launched at a time when there is a storm over the Innocence of Muslims film and the caricatures in a French newspaper. But since the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, there has been a virtual explosion in what novelist Monica Ali called the marketplace of outrage this phenomenon of people, not necessarily Muslim, being offended and sometimes violently so. In retrospect, do you see The Satanic Verses as the forerunner of this narrative of blasphemy, insult, indignation and violence?

Yes, of course I do. In fact, I explicitly state in the book that I see this as a prologue rather than an isolated event. In the years that followed, there were attacks across the Muslim world on other writers and intellectuals who were accused of exactly the same crimes these medieval crimes of heresy and apostasy in a language that, in a way, one hadnt heard since the Spanish Inquisition.

For example, the Turkish journalist Ugur Mumcu was killed by Islamic fundamentalists. In Egypt, the philosopher Farag Foda was killed and Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck. In Algeria, the novelist Tahar Djaout was murdered by Islamic fundamentalists and so on. This has been a broadening attack and the combination of fanaticism and this

outrage industry has become a very powerful force in our times.

You have used the expression manufactured to describe this outrage, which you now refer to as industry. This is accurate inasmuch as the protests are usually carefully planned and coordinated. But do you think this ignores the fact that people could also be genuinely upset or hurt by what they construe as religious insult?

Thats their problem. The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and dont try and burn the planet down.

There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesnt exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In

a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, its true about cartoons, its true about all these products.

A question I have often asked is, What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like? What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.

One of the parallels one notices between the nature of the responses to The Satanic Verses and the rage today is the random pattern of the attacks. The U.S. cultural center was attacked in Islamabad back then..

Which had absolutely nothing to do with the book.

Exactly. And the U.S. consulates have been under attack recently thanks to the controversial film. Is there a larger theme running here, something that emerges from a climate of hostility and distrust of the West, particularly America?

I think you could say that some of it is caused by a particular kind of antiAmericanism, which might well be fuelled by recent American military excursions. You could say that some of it is out of a kind of economic despair, where you have a body of young men whose own prospects are very slim and whose hopes of making a good life are very small. And that engenders all kinds of disappointments and anger which can be channelled in this direction. There is a whole series of causes and they are not the same in every place. In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to

an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.

Of course there are geopolitical reasons. But I think there are educational reasons as well. The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the worlds oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam.

The book shows you were opposed, or at least left unsupported, not merely by radical Islamists but also those who would regard themselves as liberal, a number of who were on the Left. What was the main reason for this

this opposition, as it were, from within?

I was always bewildered by it. I confess I am still a little bewildered by it.

Could it be because they felt you brought it on yourself? This idea that you knew exactly what you were doing when you wrote The Satanic Verses , or at least the Mahound chapter?

It is a number of things. I think partly, and I think I say this somewhere in the book, it is this kind of reflex of the old Left that the people cant be wrong. If a large number of people of any community object to a certain person, that person must be in the wrong. Its not possible that there can be an erroneous mass response to an event.

Or was it also because Left-Liberal opinion has become more and more influenced by a moral and cultural relativism? Have we taken respect for other peoples beliefs and feelings too far?

Of course, thats true. Moral and cultural relativism is a very dangerous phenomenon. What you routinely hear from some extremist Muslim pundits, whether religious or political, is a discourse that is anti-Semitic, homophobic, misogynistic. The same Leftists would not tolerate that coming from any other group. But somehow people turn a blind eye to it because it is coming from this group.

The book reveals that many people in Britain openly called for the implementation of the fatwa . I was really surprised to read that this

included Cat Stevens [aka Yusuf Islam]. I mean this was the man who sang of dreaming of the world as one and invited us to glide on his peace train..

Yes, the peace train, I knowwell, I guess the peace train didnt travel to this particular station ( laughs ).

But isnt exhorting people to kill another person a clear incitement to violence? Isnt this an offence under British law? Why werent people who did this prosecuted?

Not one single person in England was prosecuted for any offence even though thousands upon thousands were demanding my death and standing up in mosques every Friday and saying they were ready to do it. I did ask myself, supposing this had been not me but some other figure in

Britain, suppose it was the Queen, for instance. It is impossible to think people would not have been arrested and prosecuted if they were standing up in their thousands and saying We will kill the Queen.

I am only saying the Queen to dramatise my point. But you see what I mean? It seemed very odd that this particular person could be threatened in that way, whereas other people would never have been allowed to have been.

By this particular person, you mean a mere writer?

Or this mere writer. Maybe another writer would have elicited another response.

Hmmmm

Not a brown-skinned writer.

Ah, I was trying to tease that out of you.

( Laughs )

Joseph Anton reads in parts like a thank you work a way of acknowledging the bravery and loyalty of the few who stood by you in those years of darkness.

Well, I certainly think that one of the big subjects in the book is the opposition between hatred and love, between friendship and hostility. And I certainly think I was fortunate in my friends, who both publicly and privately, gave me an astonishing degree of support. We have all sat on these secrets for more than 20 years.

And it has been a pleasure to say, here is what people did, here is how it was done.

Even the British police came to really admire my circle of friends because they saw how determined they were to keep secrets, to be totally dependable.

Your son Zafar recently told the Evening Standard that he had no wish that it (the fatwa ) hadnt happened because it made him who he is underlining that it taught him to deal with adversity. I am sure it taught you to do so as well, but do you still find yourself wishing it never happened even today? Or do you not think about it at all?

Obviously, given a choice, I would be better off if it hadnt happened. I would have had a much more

pleasant ten years. I was in a very good place in 1988, after the publication of Midnights Children and Shame . It would have been much more pleasant to have continued an ordinary literary life and bring up my child in an ordinary way.

Absolutely. But my question was whether you still think about it and wish it had never happened.

You cant regret your life in the end. And that is what Zafar is essentially saying in that interview as well. What happened is what happened and everybody has learnt from it and moved on. One of the reasons for waiting this long to write the book is that I didnt want to be affected by ideas of What if. I didnt want to be excessively possessed by anger, resentment, whatever. I felt I should wait until I was in a calmer and more peaceful place so that I could look

back on this period of my life with tranquillity and objectivity and tell the story as truthfully as possible.

You are pretty hard on yourself about that period when you caved in, apologised and declared you were a good Muslim

Well, its important in an autobiography that the author is selfcritical. Because, otherwise, it reads like an excuse, an apology, or a selfjustification. The reader needs to feel that the person writing the story has a pretty clear or unvarnished idea of himself. I wanted to make it clear that I know there are all kinds of things I wished I hadnt done, or should have done differently, or better. And that there are a few things that I am proud of having done. But I think you need to present this just in the same way as you are creating a fictional character.

You have to present dimensional character.

three-

You describe yourself as having been stupid in your Why I am a Muslim phase. How much of this was a result of sheer despair, of being not in the right mental state? And how much of it was cold calculation the hope of a deal that would end the torment of hiding?

I will tell you what it was. Reading my journals of this period, it was quite clear the person writing them was in a very low state of mind something very like despair. So, there was that internal contradiction. But also externally, there was an enormous amount of pressure on me in those days from the media, from politicians and even from opinion polls being taken in Europe.

The general attitude was that this was my fault and I was the one who needed to find a resolution to it that I broke it, so I should fix it. And when I tried to argue that this was not the case, this was called arrogance. My refusal to withdraw my book was proof of not only my arrogance but also my financial greed. Nobody would see there was a principled reason for doing this.

All of this, over the course of two years, wore me down to a point to which I clutched at a straw. I thought maybe this is a way of breaking the logjam. But of course, this was dishonest, I am not a religious person, and I shouldnt have said I was. I immediately felt dreadful about it and understood it was a kind of selfbetrayal.

But in retrospect, it was a clarifying moment, it made me understand that

it was a mistake to go down that road of appeasement. It made me clearer no more apologies, no more excuses, no more appeasements, no more compromises. I am just going to say my piece, argue my corner, and try and stand up for what I believe in. And if people dont like it, tough.

That moment of failure turned me into a much clearer, much stronger person.

The book reveals how much of your novels the people, the places, the events have been drawn or loosely based on real people, places and events. The novels of imagination are also novels of experience.

If you read the work of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, James Joyce or Marcel Proust, you will probably find there is an enormous amount of personal

experience as source material. Now somebody will say I am comparing myself to those writers, but I am not. I am talking of writers I admire.

But the act of writing a novel is a journey. And the beginning of the journey can often be personal experience. The end product is something else. That journey from personal experience to finished book is the imaginative leap. That is the act of writing.

I thought it would be interesting for people to get a sense of how my writing moved from personal experience to finished work. The grandparents in Midnights Children are not like my grandparents, but they had things in common. They didnt look through a hole in a sheet.

You are pretty critical about some people in your book you dont like. One of them is Marianne [Wiggins, Rushdies second wife+, who is portrayed as almost delusional. I know she has said and written damaging stuff about you. But dont you think people like her are likely to be hurt by some of the things you said in the book? Does this bother you?

What bothered me most was to tell the truth. The things that Marianne said about me were extremely unpleasant and characterised by blatant untruth, including allegations that I was interested to have a meeting with Muammar Qadhafi, which is a ludicrous kind of escalation of untruth.

I think you just have to decide when reading the book whether you feel you are reading the truth or not. In my view, I am telling not just the exact

truth, but truth for which there are many witnesses.

This is how she behaved and this is the reason why our marriage ended. It was something that made my life extraordinarily difficult.

The purpose of writing a book like this is to say what happened. I am not fantasising, not fictionalising, I am actually toning it down. What really happened was even worse than that.

Did you show any of the parts to people you were once close to? Padma [Lakshmi, his fourth wife] doesnt get very good press either.

She knows what is in the book. I rewrote a couple of passages that she asked me to. I think I have tried to show there was a long period in which

we were in love. And that it was a good relationship for a time. But I said to her, I am talking about the end of the marriage and it was not my choice to end. So you are going to get that perspective on it.

There are some satirical passages about her having left you for someone with more money.

Yes, I think that was perfectly reasonable. After she talked to me every day for eight years about how I was too old for her, she left for somebody at least a decade older. So you can draw your own conclusions, as I do.

What next?

Truthfully, I dont know. Obviously, we still have work to do to launch this

book for the next couple of months. There is also the movie of Midnights Children , which is just about coming out now. Ive got this TV project, a 60minute drama series, an idea that I have been developing in America with Showtime Networks called The Next People , which is a kind of political science fiction.

I have some ideas for novels. But truthfully I dont know whether any of them are any good.

mukund.p@thehindu.co.in

no more apologies, no more excuses, no more appeasements, no more compromises. I am just going to say my piece, argue my corner, and try and stand up for what I believe in.

Salman Rushdie on religious insult, freedom of expression and the dark years spent in hiding October 6, 2012

Using hate to challenge modernism


Last month, two men stood on a Mumbai sidewalk, holding up posters to a furious mob that was demanding a ban on a movie said to have blasphemed against the Prophet. The counter-protesters hand-written placards had some simple advice: Dont watch it. For their pains, the men were threatened and then roughed up.

Familiar with the story? Probably not. The counter-protesters go by the name of Dileep DSouza and Naresh Fernandes. The protesters were pious

Bandra boys not the Kalashnikovwaving Muslims who have ably helped television stations rake it in these past weeks. The film in question was Kamaal Dhamaal Malamaal , a Bollywood flop that appalled the faithful because, according to the Vatican news agency Agenzia Fides, a priest is portrayed as a lottery maniac. The church withdrew its objections after cuts were made; to no ones surprise, the Mumbai Police hasnt been falling over itself to prosecute the assailants.

Breakdown

Indias outrage industry has had a busy few weeks. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee has threatened to seek a ban on Harry Potter author J.K. Rowlings new book, which includes a hairy man-woman Sikh character. Hindu priest Rajan Zed, tireless in his pursuit of publicity, has

held out dark warnings about Kevin Limas forthcoming Mumbai Musical , which tells the Ramayana from the point of view of monkeys.

Large swathes of tropical forest have been expended, in recent weeks, to printing commentary seeking to explain Muslim rage the wave of anger that is purported to have gripped believers from North Africa to Indonesia, because of the release of the crude anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims .

From an Indian optic, as this autumns epidemic outbreak of clerical madness demonstrates, it is far from clear that the problem is centred around either Muslims or rage. There is a far larger crisis unfolding in what used to be called the Third World, a breakdown of the modernist project that has empowered a variety of politics based

around narrow ethnic and religious identities.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of Muslim rage is the absence of evidence that it exists; that is, as a force that shapes the political actions of believers, as opposed to a propagandistic tool useful to Islamic neoconservatives, anti-Islam bigots and confused liberals alike. The Innocence mobilisation was propelled, in each case, by reactionary politics, not spontaneous outrage. In Egypt, competition between establishmentarian and revolutionary Islamists, combined with anti-police hooliganism, fanned the riots; in Libya, warlords sought religious legitimacy; in Pakistan, the vanguard was made up of jihadists backed by the military establishment to undermine the civilian order. The bulk of the 23 people reported killed in Pakistan died at the hands of riot

police; their targets included liquor stores.

in

Karachi

Yet, the Innocence violence is hardly exceptional. Ethnic and religious conflicts routinely claim a far larger toll of lives on a regular basis: Sri Lankas Buddhist chauvinists, Indian Hindutva groups, and African ethnic groups all have records rivalling the Islamists. Many of these movements have been as successful as the Islamists in transcending geography. The malaise cannot therefore be seen as something intrinsic to what is carelessly called the Muslim world; there are larger forces at work here.

In 2002, the British Marxist, Kenan Malik, shocked many with this proposition: all cultures are not equal. The real crisis flagged by 9/11, he argued, was not the rise of religious fundamentalism; it was instead growing liberal pessimism

about the prospect of a better world. Mr. Malik argued that scientific method, democratic politics, the concept of universal values these are palpably better concepts than those that existed previously, or those that exist now in other political and cultural traditions. These ideas, he went on, were western but emerged there not because Europeans are a superior people, but because out of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution flowed superior ideas.

Post-colonial radicals of an earlier generation would, more likely than not, have been entirely comfortable with this argument. The radical C.L.R. James, Mr. Malik noted, condemned imperialism, but applauded the learning and profound discoveries of *the+ western civilisation.

Frantz Fanon, despite his trenchant criticism of colonialism, conceded that the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought.

Precisely these emancipatory ideas guided the great tide of change that swept nationalists to power across the world in the middle of the last century. In a magnificent speech now available online, Egypts former President Gamal Abdel Nasser recalled that the Muslim Brotherhood had offered peace in 1953 if only the government made women wear the tarha , or headscarf. Nassers audience laughed uproariously at what then seemed surreal; let him wear one, a man shouted.

Begum Akbar Jehan Abdullah, the wife of the Kashmiri politician, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, urged women

to leave purdah ; her successors, like the Peoples Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti, cannot but seem to endorse it. Jawaharlal Nehrus atheism; Dr. B.R. Ambedkars savage attacks on caste: these are almost inconceivable for a modern Indian politician.

No great insight is needed into why this retreat came apart and the religious right became resurgent. Post-colonial societies have been through an extraordinary rippingapart of their cultural fabric over the past century and more. English steam and English free trade, as Karl Marx noted in his now unfashionable but remarkable 1853 essay on colonial India, had produced a social revolution; post-colonial industrialisation and neoliberalism have accentuated it. In the context of countries like Egypt, Libya and Pakistan, authoritarianism, and its

opportunistic alliances with religion, further de-legitimised the secularnationalist project.

Large doses of metropolitan liberalism, as well as establishmentarian politicians, have confused the inequities of capitalism with the modernist project itself thus legitimising, as scholars like Meera Nanda have pointed out, the worst kinds of political reaction which emerged out of the post-colonial crisis. Instead of building a political vocabulary based on citizenship, the republic degenerated into a series of political claims based on identity. Not giving offence to these identities was valorised as a means of engaging with the tide of hate washing across India. The defenders of M.F. Husain, for example, were compelled to argue that his paintings were deeply respectful of the Hindu tradition

not that he was entitled to offend who he chose.

Veto over intellectual life

Ever since the 1970s, Indian ethnic and religious reactionaries have thus come to enjoy a veto over Indias intellectual life. The Hindu s Hasan Suroor has ably documented the huge volume of literature and knowledge, from Aubrey Menens Ramayana to James Laines Shivaji or the anonymously-authored al-Furqan alHaqq . It is hard to imagine that a mainstream press would today publish a popular version of D.N. Jhas work on beef-eating in Vedic India, or Maxime Rodinsons speculations on the roots of prophetic revelation in epileptic disorders. Each of these acts of censorship represents an act of assault on critical inquiry.

The triumph of this vicious antipolitics has been to comprehensively shape our political imagination and language. There are closer affinities between the upmarket metropolitan liberals who coo over handicrafts and the aesthetic world of the communal terrorist than we care to acknowledge.

Lucius Seneca, the great stoic philosopher and statesman, spoke of the perils of the poisonous culture we find ourselves mired in. He pointed, wryly, to a populace which, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. The relentless march of unreason, he went on, meant a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing.

India desperately needs a new modernist project not the backward-looking search for authenticity which has so impoverished our public life. This ought to be the real lesson of the Innocence riots, though such reflection is improbable; there have been no shortage of opportunities to awake, and none of those was heeded.

praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

The recent violence over an anti-Islam film is part of a wider clash with the idea of

the modern republic October 8, 2012

Awaiting the new foot soldiers of community health care


The Medical Council of India (MCI) has finally given the green signal to a 3{+1}/{-2}year medical course BSc in Community Health. This has the potential of changing the face and functioning of more than one lakh primary health centres (PHC) in the country, especially in remote rural and tribal areas and mountainous terrain.

The move reverses a historic decision taken by Sir J.W. Bhore, chairman of Indias first health survey and development committee in 1952, to abolish the Licentiate in Medical Practice (LMP) and establish a single medical qualification, a university degree MBBS, as the requirement to become a doctor.

Unfortunately, MBBS doctors taught in urban medical colleges have been unwilling to serve in far-flung and inaccessible areas. At present, 26 per cent of doctors live in rural areas, serving 72 per cent of Indias population. The density of doctors in urban areas is nearly four times that of rural areas. This anomaly has long needed to be corrected.

During his visit to China, Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad is said to have seen for himself the effectiveness of bare foot doctors in rural areas similar to our health sub centres, and wanted this model replicated in India. But the process began on February 6, 2010, when experts in medical education and public health who had gathered in Delhi for a two-day national consultation, gave their full backing to the ambitious project of the Union Health Ministry and the MCI to launch

the Bachelor of Rural Medicine and Surgery (BRMS) course.

In September 2011, the Planning Commission and its expert group gave their approval to the 3{+1}/{-2}year long BRMS degree. They even recommended that as a career progression incentive, a BRMS candidate may be promoted to the level of public health officer after 10 years of service.

Finally, a year after that, the MCI has endorsed BRMS under the new name BSc in Community Health. This should not be seen as something substandard dished out to second grade citizens of the country. At the level of the PHC, this medical qualification will suffice. The ideal best should not become the enemy of a do-able good.

Checks and balances

Many hypothetical catastrophic scenarios have been predicted. Will they not be tempted into private practice? Wont they not migrate to urban areas and compete with MBBS doctors? Will they be required to take government jobs in rural areas as a condition of admission? Who will control/ensure the quality of their education?

But there are some precautionary measures in place. BRMS graduates cannot affix the prefix Dr. to their names. The candidates are locally recruited to serve government health institutions under a service bond. They will have a clear career progression path as health officers up to the district level. The course is designed to produce health workers who will be an effective link between basic health workers and the doctor at

the PHC or community health centre (CHC). They will be taught to treat minor ailments, help in delivery and administer first aid; but most importantly, when and where to refer a pateint promptly, in case of complications. They will be used for implementation of national programmes also.

The decisions to accept and implement the course are now with State governments. Chhattisgarh, where this model was adopted in 2001, has shown that it can be successfully implemented with good results.

Aside from the shortage of doctors, it was the point-blank refusal of MBBS doctors to go to remote PHCs that compelled Chhattisgarh to launch a cadre of rural medical assistants (RMA) a decade ago. Opening new medical colleges was not a solution at

that time: it would mean a waiting period of six years with no surety that those who graduated would join government service. Thus, six colleges began training RMAS from 2002 about 150 of them every year. The MCI did not agree to the project, and the Indian Medical Association (IMA) even challenged it in court, but the course and certification survived with a change of name. The graduates got a diploma, not a degree, in modern and holistic medicine even though the course was similar in content to the MBBS programme.

In May 2006, the first batch passed out, and completed a years internship a month in a sub health centre, three months in a PHC, four in a CHC, and four more in a district hospital.

By early January this year, in 18 districts of Chhattisgarh, 1,233 RMAs were posted in PHCs and health sub

centres, out of whom 490 were women. The State had created 741 regular posts out of its own budget in addition to the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) funded contractual posts. Though 361 PHCs (managed by Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy or AYUSH and paramedical staff) did not have an MBBS doctor in August 2008, they all now have RMAs.

Impact

In 2009, a study was undertaken to assess the performance of health-care providers at the PHC level based on the knowledge, attitude, behaviour and practice including community perception. Titled Which doctor is for Primary Health Care? it was carried out by the Public Health Foundation of India and National Health Systems Resource Centre, New Delhi along with the State Health Resource

Centre, Chhattisgarh. It found the prescription ability of RMAs to be on a par or better than that of medical graduates at the PHC level in relation to commonly prevalent diseases based on five clinical case management scenarios on pneumonia, malaria, preeclampsia, diabetes and diarrhoea and one referral case (TB). The study is available online at http://nhsrcindia.org/

Monitoring data shows better utilisation of PHC services after the posting of RMAs. Assam has already replicated this model.

Let the efforts of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare and the MCI take root and show results in four years. The medically marginalised people of rural India should be the judge of its success or otherwise.

October 8, 2012

A controversy we can do without


A national project to study fundamental particles called neutrinos has suddenly been drawn into an unwarranted controversy by V. S. Achuthanandan, the former CPI (M) Chief Minister of Kerala and leader of the Opposition in the Kerala Assembly, in association with an environmental activist, V.T. Padmanabhan.

The project involves the construction of an underground laboratory, called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), to be located in a cavern under a rocky mountain in the Bodi West Hills region of the Theni district, about 110 km west of Madurai in Tamil Nadu.

What are neutrinos? After photons, they are the most abundant particles in the universe. Among the known fundamental particles, they are also perhaps the strangest. They interact very feebly with other particles. Therefore, all forms of matter, including the earth, are nearly transparent to them. About 100 trillion neutrinos from the sun and other cosmic sources pass through our bodies every second without causing any harm.

Rare interaction

As they interact very rarely, they are not easily detected and, therefore, not well studied. The large background flux of other particles in the cosmic rays presents an additional complication in their detection. Neutrino detectors are, therefore,

usually placed deep underground, typically a kilometre or deeper. The large overburden of rock or earth above the detectors reduces the background particles by a million times or more. While almost all neutrinos pass through freely, a few interact in the detectors and can be detected. Many neutrino detection experiments are on in different parts of the world and, with growing interest in neutrino physics, many others are being proposed and built. The INO is one such that has evinced worldwide interest.

It is now known that neutrinos come in three types (electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino and tau-neutrino). Once thought to be massless, they are now known to have very tiny masses. But their individual masses remain unknown. Of the three neutrino flavours, the heaviest has at least one 10 millionth the electrons mass.

Which flavour is the heaviest? The ordering of neutrino masses too is unknown. This is called the mass hierarchy question, which the INO is well suited to investigate.

The strange particles also have the ability to morph from one type to another as they pass through space, people, matter and the Earth itself, rarely interacting with anything in their path. This is called neutrino oscillation. While the details of two oscillations are known fairly well, the third the switching of tau-neutrino to electron-neutrino is not well characterised and forms one of the main objectives of the INO.

The idea for a neutrino observatory in India was first mooted in 2000 at an international conference in Chennai. The proposal was further refined and consolidated at the 2001 Neutrino meeting in Chennai, when the INO

consortium of collaborating Indian institutions was formed. In 2002, a formal proposal was submitted to the Department of Atomic Energy, which has since been the nodal agency for the project.

The project has now been identified as one of the mega science projects in the XII Plan with an investment of Rs. 1,350 crore by the DAE and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). At present, 26 Indian institutions which include Calicut University and about 100 scientists are involved, with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, as the nodal institute.

It is therefore bizarre that Mr. Achuthanandan and Mr. Padmanabhan should allege that the INO is a project of Fermilab, USA, initiated along with the controversial Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. It is a totally

indigenous project, conceived jointly by scientists from many Indian research institutions and initiated long before negotiations for the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal began in 2005. Nor was Fermilab, USA, anywhere in the picture then. The project is a basic science experiment that has nothing to do with radioactivity or any other hazardous nuclear activity. Nor does it have any defence or strategic implications.

A site within the complex of the hydroelectric project PUSHEP of the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board at Singara, near Mudumalai Sanctuary in the Nilgiri Hills, was identified in 2002 as the best option for the project from the geological, environmental and infrastructure points of view. The TNEB prepared the detailed project report in 2007. But, after prolonged delays, the Tamil Nadu Forest Department rejected the proposal in

2010, despite the project being located entirely on the TNEB land.

The reason the site fell in the buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and the elephant corridor connecting the Eastern and the Western Ghats. Interestingly, the notification declaring the area as a tiger reserve was issued only in 2008, six years after the INO project was proposed and two years after the DAE applied to the Tamil Nadu Forest Department for approval. More pertinently, a report by Dr. R. Sukumar, an expert on the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, had clearly stated that the project would not be detrimental to the wildlife and environment of the region. It may be pointed out that, at the same time, there is no serious effort to stop the ever-increasing tourist and vehicular traffic and mushrooming resorts in the region.

The location in Bodi West Hills was chosen as the next best site. The main INO laboratory will be located in a cavern 1.3 km below a mountain peak. There, an entirely indigenously built magnetised iron calorimeter detector, weighing about 50 kilotons, will be used to detect both natural and man-made neutrinos. The cavern will be linked to the outside world by a 1.9 km long main tunnel.

In Phase I, however, INO will study only neutrinos produced by cosmic rays in the Earths atmosphere. In Phase II, it could be used as a far detector for using beams from future accelerator-based neutrino factories in Japan, Europe and the U.S. The INO is expected to become operational in 2017 when the first module of the detector will start taking data.

Contrary to Mr. Achuthanandan and Mr. Padmanabhans accusations of secrecy and lack of transparency, all the details about the project are available on its website www.ino.tifr.res.in. Among other issues they have raised is that, because of the project sites proximity to the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border, permission from the Kerala government should have been sought. In their view, during the rock-blasting for construction, the project could seismically impact the Mullaperiyar dam that is about 100 km away. It is also alleged that neutrino beams from Fermilab would adversely affect the biodiversity of the region.

According to M.V.N. Murthy of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai another key institution involved in the project a proper geotechnical analysis has indeed been done. The measures adopted to

minimise the projects environmental impact have been detailed in the Environmental Impact Assessment report and also briefly described in the FAQ, both of which are available on the INO website. This includes controlled blasting that will be adopted in the initial reaches to dampen noise and vibration. Even this is expected to last only for the initial few months when the first few hundred metres of the tunnel are built.

Minimal vibrations

Blasting for the excavation of the cavern and associated laboratory infrastructure is expected to cause only minimal vibrations. The INO, says the FAQ, will undertake ground vibration monitoring and other rock mechanics studies during the actual blasting. Appropriate blasting pattern and modern blasting techniques

based on the actual site geology will be followed so that the vibration is minimised. But, more pertinently, there are hundreds of granite quarries in the Theni-Idukki region where constant rock blasting goes on throughout the year, which are not known to have had any impact on the dam.

As regards the INO possibly receiving neutrinos beamed from Fermilab, which may happen 10-15 years hence, that has to do with physics and not some ulterior U.S. strategic motive as is being imagined. Also, since neutrinos rarely interact with matter, just as the atmospheric neutrinos, these neutrinos too will pass through without disturbing anything along their path, in particular the biodiversity as is being apprehended.

As it is, the inability to proceed with the project at the original Nilgiris site

has set back the project by at least sixseven years. Consequently, China has upstaged INO in one of its main science goals. Only in 2004 two years after the INO proposal did China propose an experiment to use neutrinos from a nuclear reactor at Daya Bay and a detector located in an underground tunnel under a nearby hill. That experiment started taking data last year and, in March 2012, measured a key unknown parameter relating to oscillation between tauneutrino and electron-neutrino. This was subsequently verified in April by a similar Korean experiment, RENO, initiated in 2006. It also began operation last year.

The already much-delayed and important physics project can do without another needless controversy at this point of time.

Politicians are doing a great disservice to scientific advance in India by whipping up unfounded fears about the neutrino project October 8, 2012

The two faces of Narendra Modi


SIDE BY SIDE:The Gujarat Chief Ministers reputation as an able administrator is linked to his authoritarian approach.PHOTO: PTI As the Gujarat Assembly elections approach, the Indian voter is deluged with two conflicting images of Narendra Modi. The battle lines appear to be drawn between those who glorify the achievements of Modi the administrator, and those who view the Gujarat Chief Minister through the prism of the 2002 carnage. In a climate rife with recurrent scams, lack of governance,

economic slowdown and political instability, the first of the two images is a persuasive one. Without dwelling long and hard on the administrative prowess of Modi for that entails a debate different from this one it is not too difficult to see that Modi presents to the urban Indian electorate, an alternative leadership capable of leading the country out of its morass.

Global examples of development

However, are the two faces of Narendra Modi mutually exclusive? Does a rejection of Modi automatically signal our preference for a politics of corruption and malfeasance? Alternately, do the sympathisers of Modi believe that his politics of development will trump the politics of communal hate, once he is voted to power?

The flaw in both of these propositions lies in the assumption that the two faces of Modi are orthogonal to one another. In fact, not only do they share a close relationship, but also constitute the core of a politics where religious chauvinism or other forms of social authoritarianism become prerequisites for economic development.

There are many examples of rapid economic development under authoritarian regimes. South Korea recorded miraculous growth under a military regime, until democracy was established in 1987. Singapore too emerged as an example of a shining economy under authoritarian rule.

There are also cases of democratic establishments sliding into authoritarianism in times of adversity. There is perhaps no example better

than Germany of the 1920s. Reeling from the adverse economic clauses in the Treaty of Versailles, particularly in the years of the Great Depression, the Germans elected Hitler on planks of anti-Semitism and Pan-Germanism.

Coalition vs. a majority

In a multi-cultural democracy such as India, the presence of a wide array of cross-cutting cleavages means that it is almost impossible to garner majorities along a single axis. The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is a classic example of such a government comprising political parties with widely varying casteist, communitarian and regional agendas. As a result, it functions at a low level of efficiency, and frequently degenerates into chaos. The lack of political stability also engenders corruption, as politicians pursue selfserving agendas in their limited time

in office. The severe maladministration under UPA rule is then a symptom, at least partly, of the fragile political equilibrium in our country.

Conversely, Narendra Modis success as an administrator has much to do with the political majority he enjoys in the Gujarat Assembly. Taking over from Keshubhai Patel in 2001, Narendra Modi reversed the sliding fortunes of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the State, and did so in a lasting manner. It is also a well-known fact that the religious polarisation following the carnage of 2002 was central to Modis electoral fortunes a few months later. Ever since then, he has steadily consolidated his reputation as an able administrator, albeit authoritarian in his approach.

Is there fertile ground for Narendra Modi to replicate the Gujarat story on

a nationwide scale? Viewed objectively, the answer would be, no. The sheer heterogeneity of identities and interests in national politics will probably ensure that polarisation along the axis of religion will be difficult, if not impossible to accomplish. In particular, the upsurge of regional parties in national politics, as well as the emergence of States as the centres of political decisionmaking, will pose considerable challenges to the unbridled exercise of authority by Narendra Modi.

In that case, what promise does a government led by Narendra Modi hold for India? Which of his two faces can we expect to see, should he assume the office of Prime Minister? Given the widespread consensus on Modis authoritarian attitudes, it is not premature to assume that he will pull out on all stops to acquire the mandate necessary to implement his

ideals. The manner in which such a politics will pan out may not be crystal clear immediately; however, if history is an indicator of things to come, the two faces of Narendra Modi will almost certainly parade side-by-side.

(Simantini Mukherjee has completed her PhD in political science from Rutgers University, U.S. and is now based in London.)

His politics of communal hate is not separate from his agenda of development. Together they form the core of a programme in which one becomes a prerequisite for the other October 8, 2012

So many degrees of separation

After a triumphant tour of western Europe in June, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has just completed a coast-to-coast journey of the United States. She met U.S. President Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, addressed audiences at Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other prestigious institutions. Even as her tour unfolded, Myanmars President Thein Sein came calling in New York, fresh from his visit to China. He addressed the U.N. General Assembly and met U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who expectedly announced the U.S. decision to ease sanctions further. Mr. Obama chose not to receive Thein Sein, but the latter is already being hailed as Myanmars Gorbachev.

Now that Suu Kyi has collected her awards and Thein Sein has praised her in public, can they all live happily ever after? Is Myanmar now well and truly

set on the path of reform and progress? Are the changes irreversible? Since the November 2010 elections, Myanmar has indeed changed significantly, but its journey has just begun. The road ahead looks bumpy. Myanmars elite may need to display much wisdom in steering the state in the right direction.

Six differences

It is easy to find similarities between todays Myanmar and South Africas transformation from an authoritarian apartheid regime into a democracy. Suu Kyi and Thein Sein are being compared to Mandela and F.W. de Klerk. While common trends are discernible, differences in the situation of the two countries are more instructive. As an Indian diplomat who served as ambassador in Myanmar and high commissioner to South Africa, I outline here six such

differences. First, the black majority, with support from Indians and many whites and coloureds, was united enough to form a rainbow coalition in South Africa under Mandelas inspiring leadership. In contrast, the Bamar or Burman majority community stands divided, with the bulk being supportive of Suu Kyi while a sizeable section is still beholden to the real power wielder, the army. Further, besides Suu Kyi, three other power centres have emerged the President, the Speaker and the Commander-in-Chief who all may covet the presidency in 2015. When first democratic elections took place in South Africa in 1994, Mandela was the natural choice. Second, the minority in Myanmar comprising at least eight ethnic groups represents 32 per cent of the total population, much larger than the whites in South Africa then at 19 per cent. The latter gave away political power, but retained much of economic power

that they enjoy even now. Ethnic groups in Myanmar, however, suffer from deprivation and alienation. First democratic leaders and then generals tried but failed to eliminate this alienation. Thein Sein is making fresh endeavours, but can he achieve much without involving Suu Kyi and other political forces?

Third, there is no Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Myanmar. Victims of oppression in Myanmar are being asked to forgive without establishing truth and promoting reconciliation. South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission did valuable work, but this is not even contemplated in Myanmar. Suu Kyi is saint enough to forgive, but can others do it? Fourth, the African National Congress was and remains a powerful political organisation, but the National League for Democracy is truly a one-woman party, a car

running on fuel of the ladys charisma. Working from behind her are octogenarian uncles who seem to be blocking its renewal. Where are its future leaders?

Fifth, unlike South Africans who crafted a new constitution through genuine multiparty negotiations, Myanmars constitution is the armys gift. It has failed to satisfy the National League for Democracy (NLD). It bars Suu Kyis election as president. It has certainly deepened disillusionment of most ethnic minorities which resent continuation of a strong central rule under a new garb. Constitutional reform is now becoming a major issue. Finally, new South Africa emerged as the Cold War between U.S. and Soviet Union had ended. Change in Myanmar coincides with the possible beginning of a new U.S.China Cold War in East Asia. The U.S. needs allies, and focusing on

Myanmar makes strategic sense as the latter has been heavily dependent on Beijing so far. The U.S. may now woo the Myanmar military with offers of dialogue, training and more.

Prospects

Suu Kyi has urged the world to distinguish between genuine progress and what is just progress on the surface. She believes that, like life, Myanmar has many shades of grey. Thein Sein agrees, stressing that the transformation process would be complex and delicate that requires patience.

Burman leaders will need to achieve more harmony among them. They should display magnanimity towards ethnic minorities, adopting the essence of federalism with an adequately strong central

government. They may have little choice but to undertake major surgery on the constitution. The leadership must focus on economic progress and inclusive governance that benefit the common man. Myanmar will also need resilient diplomacy to leverage its newly established strategic importance for the West.

As for Daw Suu Kyi, she is and will remain an Asian leader.

(Rajiv Bhatia is Director General of Indian Council of World Affairs. The article reflects his personal views.)

Myanmars reconciliation process is often compared to South Africas but the entirely different conditions make it far more complex October 9, 2012

Bring me my machine gun


INSIDE STORY:As the nation approaches two decades of freedom from apartheid, violence has come to distinguish South Africa. An August 2012 picture of striking miners at the Lonmin mine near Marikana. PHOTO: AP When the time came to march, Siphiwo grabbed one thing before he left his home in the impoverished community near the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana.

His weapon.

The piece in question was a knobkerrie, a long stick. Its a traditional marker of manhood in South African cultures, including Siphiwos own Xhosa group.

Its used to protest, said Siphiwo. Its not violent. Its a symbol.

Siphiwo asked that his surname not be used. But he didnt mince words about what happened next on the afternoon of August 16: he and his friends clutched their sticks powerlessly as police unleashed a barrage of semi-automatic fire, killing 34 protesters.

They did not help, he said of the sticks and spears he and his colleagues held. They shot us with rifles.

At 25, Siphiwo is too young to have been part of the violent struggles against South Africas apartheid government. But its clear that that

legacy lives in him and his young friends, who are citizens of one of the worlds most violent nations.

The Marikana Commission

Violence, either outright or implied like the sticks and spears carried in nearly every protest is everywhere in this nation of 50 million people. And as the nation approaches two decades of freedom from apartheid, violence has come to distinguish South Africa.

About 50 people are murdered each day. A shocking one in four men admitted to committing rape and half of those men said theyd done it more than once.

Why is violence so pervasive in South Africa?

Its one of the many questions that the Marikana Commission of Inquiry will try to answer in upcoming months as it studies the acts that led to more than 44 deaths in those six weeks of violent mine strikes.

The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation devoted years to studying this seemingly simple question. And after exhaustive research, in 2010 they came up with a 66-page study that can be summarised thusly: Violence is cheap. Violence is easy. And violence works.

The report notes how unbalanced South Africas society is, with a tiny group of haves atop a huge population of have-nots. A stunning one-quarter of South Africans are unemployed. Traditional routes to prosperity are not always available

the education system has been rocked by scandal after scandal, including a recent dust-up that saw loads of textbooks dumped into a river in rural Limpopo province.

So for many young men, it logically follows: get what you want by hook ... or by crook.

Failure of institutions

The report also notes that the nations enforcement agencies are weak. At one point, authorities acknowledged that poor police work, a slow system and lack of resources added up to one million unsolved murders per year spectacularly good odds for an aspiring killer.

In the Marikana case, South Africas problems have been compounded by

what appears to be a widespread failure by the government and its institutions which have shown themselves to be prone to missteps and to political backlash.

A court charged some 270 survivors of the shooting with murder of their colleagues under a little-used common purpose law that was used during the apartheid era against black activists. That court decision was widely met with incredulity and anger. But that charge was almost immediately dropped though might be reinstated after investigation after Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Jeff Radebe queried it. Even though the murder charge was roundly condemned, the sudden dropping of the charge declawed the courts.

Violence is also easy to justify. In South Africa, political violence is seen

as legitimate, and has historically been protected. No one justified it better than the father of the nation, Nelson Mandela, when he founded the armed wing of the African National Congress in 1961.

As Mandela said at the time: We felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or take over the government. We chose to defy the law.

But somewhere along the way in the intervening decades, that nuanced and thoughtful defence has been

forgotten. remained.

The

violence

hare

Still, how can one explain the shocking callousness of individual acts, such as the grainy cell phone video that emerged earlier this year showing a 17-year-old, mentally disabled girl being raped by seven men in a Johannesburg township.

In another terrifying incident, robbers entered a home in July and drowned a 12-year-old boy in boiling water. They gang-raped and killed his mother.

Leaving aside the twisted pathology of these criminal minds, the reasoning for these tactics is horrifyingly simple: they work. Who, after all, wouldnt turn over the valuables to save their child?

Violence also gets attention. Journalists everywhere respect that old adage, If it bleeds, it leads.

That adage seems to have been embraced by the nations politicians, who have used violence in their campaigns a sign of how deeply entrenched it is in the South African psyche.

Disgraced former youth leader Julius Malema, who has called on miners to make the mining sector ungovernable calls his movement a revolution.

President Jacob Zuma, even used violence as a tenet of his presidential campaign. During that campaign, he performed and danced to a popular traditional song.

The song was called Bring Me My Machine Gun.

(Anita Lakshmi Powell is an IndoAmerican journalist based in Johannesburg.)

Why is South Africa so violent? Because violence is cheap, its easy and it works October 9, 2012

The Queen and her unwritten writ


The BBC has received some predictably unwelcome publicity about the revelations by its security correspondent Frank Gardner, live on the flagship Radio 4 news programme Today , that the Queen had said, at a private occasion in 2008, that she

could not understand why the radical Islamic preacher Abu Hamza had not been arrested and that she had approached a minister asking why he was still at large. The Corporation has tendered an apology to the Queen for breaching a convention that whatever the monarch says outside occasions of state is off the record, but the fact that the Queen expressed her opinion to a minister could be a breach of the constitutional settlement of 1688, under which the monarchs were allowed to keep their respective heads but Parliament took, and has since kept, legislative sovereignty. The Queens question to the minister might count as unconstitutional lobbying for an action or a policy, but the issues raised are almost insoluble because the United Kingdom has no codified Constitution.

Complicated separation

There has, therefore, never been an uncomplicated separation between the monarch and the executive. When Queen Victorias Whig Prime Minister and royal favourite Lord Melbourne resigned in 1839 following a defeat in the House of Commons, Victoria refused the incoming Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peels request that the monarch, in accordance with convention, replace her Whig ladies of the bedchamber with Tory ladies. Peel resigned over the snub, and Melbourne and the Whigs returned to office. In 1851, having failed a year earlier to get the Foreign Minister, Lord Palmerston, sacked, Victoria took advantage of the latters congratulatory message to Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on his coup in France to ask Prime Minister Lord John Russell to remove Palmerston, which he did.

The present Queen certainly takes what happens in government very seriously. Her schedule includes reading up to 10 boxes of Cabinet and other government papers daily, and she receives up to 60 ambassadors and high commissioners telegrams twice a day; she also grants the serving Prime Minister a weekly audience, which can last over an hour. Yet, while her aides express great admiration for her commitment and energy, not all observers agree that she has no impact on government. As head of state, the Queen ratifies a large number of nominations for high appointments, such as senior judicial posts, bishoprics, colonelships of regiments, certain chairs at the older universities, and national honours, several of which also refer to a longextinct British Empire; in addition, many other honours are exclusively in the monarchs gift.

Inevitably, many of those who covet such things, such as ex-politicians, civil servants, high military officers, and bishops, feel they have to act in ways they think will not displease the monarch; this could be particularly important in respect of honours which only the monarch can bestow, though most aspirants conduct may in practice have more impact on how they are viewed by those who make the nominations, such as the Prime Minister or other Ministers, than they do on the Queen herself.

Equally inevitably, this assemblage of conventions, purportedly traditional customs, and tacit understandings is often criticised. Opponents, including those who want the monarchy abolished, contend that the Queen herself has lobbied for policies, for example by talking at length with the then Prime Minister Tony Blair before a bill to outlaw hunting with dogs was

put to Parliament in 2004 and telling him that ordinary people as well as social elites hunt with dogs. The House of Commons later passed the bill, a Labour Party manifesto commitment, but the Speaker then had to override the unelected House of Lords by invoking the Parliament Acts of 1911, and 1949, with the latter implying the Salisbury-Addison doctrine, a convention whereby the upper chamber does not block legislation enacting the ruling partys manifesto promises.

Several Labour Party members and followers have further reason to be suspicious of the current monarchs loyalties. In February 1974, an inconclusive election produced no outright winner but gave Labour 301 seats to the Conservatives 297, and yet the incumbent Prime Minister and Conservative leader Edward Heath tried to form a government over the

next few days; some Labour supporters were very angry that the Queen had not immediately invited the Labour leader Harold Wilson to Buckingham Palace to give him that task, and saw the delay as confirming a monarchical preference for the Conservatives. It is, in addition, only a convention that the invitation to form a government goes to the leader of the party that wins an election; in theory, the Queen can appoint any of her subjects Prime Minister.

The Queen is not the only current royal to have attracted this kind of criticism, and Prince Charles in particular is sometimes very explicit about policies he favours. The heir to the throne is said to have infuriated Mr. Blair by opposing genetically modified food; he has also had discussions with the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, George

Osborne, and Education Minister Michael Gove.

Jumble of statutes

While secret exchanges between the monarch, or her family, and the executive might perhaps casuistically be described as fulfilling a royal desire to be informed about the issues of the day, the fact that the British Constitution is uncodified makes it almost impossible even to decide what is or is not constitutionally correct, or who has the authority to rule on it. As the former senior Labour MP Tony Wright has said, there is only a jumble of statutes, common law, customs, and guidebooks; moreover, apparently constitutional laws have no special status, and can be repealed by an ordinary vote in Parliament.

That in turn means the system contains some utterly arbitrary elements. The pressure group Republic, for example, is scathing about the monarchs power to dismiss a government at any time for any or no reason; in 1975, the Queens appointed representative in Australia, the Governor-General, did just that, and ended the political career of the then Prime Minister, Labours Gough Whitlam. The Canadian GovernorGeneral also used this power in 2008, proroguing the dominions Parliament for several weeks.

Prerogative powers

Republic also criticises the royal prerogative powers, which are vested in the British government, and are effectively beyond scrutiny or restraint by Parliament. The most notorious prerogative is the power to declare war, which Mr. Blair used for

the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003; he did allow the House of Commons a vote on the war, but the opposition Conservatives overwhelming vote in favour meant that the combined vote for a negating amendment by 139 Labour rebels and all the Liberal Democrats was easily defeated. In any case the prerogative power meant that Mr. Blair would have been under no obligation to resign if he had lost the vote, and certainly under no obligation to cancel the invasion.

Partly as a result, demands arose for publication of the prerogative powers, but Mr. Blairs government resisted, and then published only a partial list. The powers include recognising foreign states, and also keeping the peace within the realm, which a court decision has confirmed include ministerial powers to issue baton rounds to police without the consent of the given forces local authority.

If any wider picture emerges from this tangle, it is the remoteness of the electorate from major decisions on policy and legislation. Rights lawyer Andrew Puddephatt has said that the 1688 settlement was a carve-up between the monarch and Parliament. Such rights as then emerged had only to do with the assemblys rights in relation to the monarchy; since then, party discipline in the Commons has rendered even Parliament progressively more remote from the key decisions. As for Abu Hamza, Vikram Dodd notes in the Guardian that when tried in the U.K. in 2005-6, the cleric told the court of his long contact with the British security services, who had told him his fiery sermons were all right as long as we dont see blood on the streets. According to a secret service infiltrator he was a useful if unwitting source of information on other extremists, even though British

Muslims who reject extremism were already giving the authorities information of their own accord. Perhaps Her Majesty could have avoided a possible constitutional impropriety by asking the right officials why Abu Hamza was allowed to remain in her realm.

The monarchs question to a minister on

Abu Hamza may be unconstitutional but

the issues it raises cannot be solved because

the U.K. has no written Constitution October 9, 2012

Where camp is a fourletter word


MORE BATTLES:While the availability of milk and nutritious supplements for children varied from camp to camp (below), there was no evidence anywhere of educational services. A relief centre in Dhubri district. PHOTOS: RITU RAJ KONWAR, PTI

The latest wave of floods in Assam has affected over a million people in 16 of the States 27 districts. More than two lakh people displaced by the rising waters that submerged nearly 2,000 villages have sought refuge in over 160 so-called relief camps in Assam. Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim are also reeling from flash floods and landslides that have claimed at least 35 lives across the three States.

The question is what happens after the initial drama of rescue operations, evacuations, airdropping of food, et al , ends. After all, the present crisis merely compounds the lingering misery and penury from an earlier round of floods, which inundated more than 5,500 villages in 23 districts from mid-June onwards, caused at least 125 deaths, and devastated the already precarious lives of nearly 2.5 million people, washing away homes, livelihoods, livestock and crops.

On a sunny day just before the onset of the renewed deluge, women in Boramari Kocharigaon, a hamlet in Lahorighat block of Morigaon district accessible only by boat, displayed remarkable stoicism as they told visitors that half their village had been lost to the river. They seemed resigned to the prospect of eventually losing their own homes, too, but may not have imagined that their worst

fears would come true so soon. Many, if not all, of them must now have joined previously displaced neighbours living in makeshift shelters on either side of a narrow mud path at a slightly higher level than the surrounding areas.

Erosion, silent factor

Many such slender ridges host recurrent batches of refugees dislocated over the years by the mighty, magnificent and capricious Brahmaputra, brimming over now, shifting course every now and then. Some have been living in such temporary homes for years. It is difficult to imagine where others currently residing along the crumbling banks of the river and its tributaries sure to be dislodged sooner rather than later will retreat to.

The silent emergency of erosion does not make news but it has reportedly claimed nearly 4,000 square kilometres of land, destroying more than 2,500 villages and displacing over five million people in Assam. According to a recent study by Archana Sarkar of the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) and R.D. Garg and Nayan Sharma of IITRoorkee, 1,053 sq. km. was lost to erosion between 1990 and 2008.

The figures come to life as a young civil servant mentions in passing that his own village no longer exists. Further probing into this astonishing statement revealed that not only his village, South Salmara in Dhubri district, but several neighbouring ones had also vanished. He estimates that nearly 70 per cent of the South Salmara-Mankachar subdivision is now in the Brahmaputra. The NIH/IITR study confirms that on the north

bank of the river Dhubri has lost the maximum area (104 sq. km.) to erosion.

Assams State Disaster Management Authority is reportedly seeking recognition for erosion as an ongoing disaster requiring an urgent, concerted, multi-pronged and sustained response that can address the short- and long-term basic and livelihood needs of the affected population, as well as environmental concerns.

The recent rains must have also worsened the situation in several socalled camps where large numbers of people continue to live in abysmal conditions over two months after being displaced by the conflict that erupted in late July in parts of Lower Assam located within the Bodoland Territorial Administrative District. A substantial section of the nearly five

lakh people who fled to nearly 350 camps then have apparently managed to return home. But close to 40 per cent of them are still in over 200 camps, having lost their houses and assets to arson and looting, or held back by the land verification process initiated by the State government and the Bodoland Territorial Council, or simply too frightened to return to villages in areas dominated by the other community involved in the violence.

A day after the latest downpour began, the camp in Bhawaraguri in Chirang district was already ankledeep in water. Camp is actually a misleading misnomer. People from seven nearby villages, including some Bengali-speaking Hindus, who had sought sanctuary in the village boasting a significant number of educated, professional Bengalispeaking Muslims, have had to vacate

local schools to enable them to reopen. They were in the process of fashioning provisional shelters for themselves in the low-lying school ground, using whatever materials they could somehow secure. Members of the Bodo and Rajbongshi communities still staying at the Mongolian Bazar camp in Noyapara (Chirang) faced the prospect of moving into the slushy school compound as classes were soon due to resume after the extended break. In Gambaribeel (Kokrajhar), the space where temporary housing was to be provided for the Bodo families currently living in and around the local school was also waterlogged. The rudimentary shacks housing well over 10,000 Bengali-speaking people in a huge open field near Kembolpur in the Gossaingaon subdivision of Kokrajhar district were hardly weatherproof either.

Health services

Considering the health hazards posed by such living conditions it was encouraging to learn that delivery of public health services was fairly regular and on the whole satisfactory, though mental health is obviously a neglected area despite the evident trauma induced by violence, fear and displacement. Nutrition is clearly a problem, with official food relief essentially restricted to rice and dal , occasionally augmented by potatoes. While the availability of milk and nutritious supplements for children varied from camp to camp, there was no evidence anywhere of educational services. Local schools are belatedly beginning to reopen but they are unlikely to be able to accommodate all the displaced children, especially from densely populated camps. Residents of Bhawaraguri were worried about the future of older

students, too, with persistent safety concerns preventing them from travelling to attend college. Clothes were also in short supply, with most people having fled homes in panic and few usable garments distributed by way of relief, official or nongovernmental.

No one seems to know if and when the nearly two lakh people still living in camps at least 85 per cent of them Bengali-speaking Muslims will be enabled to return to their villages or provided with decent temporary accommodation elsewhere. Livelihood remains a challenge for many of those who have ventured home but face an unofficial economic boycott. With winter approaching, the issues of housing, clothing, and so on, assume even greater urgency. Clearly there is much to be done long after the water recedes and violence subsides.

(Ammu Joseph accompanied the Oxfam India team visiting areas where the organisation is providing humanitarian assistance to disaster and conflict affected people in Assam. Email: ammujo@gmail.com )

With winter approaching, addressing the issues of livelihood, housing and clothing for those displaced by floods and strife assumes greater urgency in the shelters in Assam October 10, 2012

IAC and DLF: point counterpoint on Vadras deals

DLFs reply: We wish to categorically state that the DLF has given NO unsecured loans to Mr. Vadra or any of his companies.

An amount of Rs.65 crore was given as business advances for the purchase of land as per standard industry practice comprising the following two transactions.

M/s Skylight Hospitality Pvt. Ltd. approached us in FY 2008-09 to sell a piece of land measuring approximately 3.5 acres approximately just off NH 8 in Sikohpur village, district Gurgaon. This was licensable to develop a commercial complex and the LoI from the government of Haryana to develop it for a commercial complex had been received in March 2008 itself.

DLF agreed to buy the said plot, given its licensing status and its attractiveness as a business proposition for a total consideration of Rs.58 crore. As per normal commercial practice, the possession of the said plot was taken over by DLF in FY 2008-09 itself and a total sum of Rs.50 crore given as advance in instalments against the Purchase consideration. After receipt of all requisite approvals, the said property was conveyanced in favour of DLF. The average cost of the licensed property in the hands of DLF works out to approx Rs.2,800 psf of FSI, which was comparable with similar transactions in that area. The price of the said property has significantly appreciated today to the benefit of DLF and its shareholders.

M/s Skylight Group of companies also offered us in FY 2008-09 an opportunity to purchase a large land

parcel in Faridabad and accordingly, DLF agreed to advance Rs.15 crore in instalments simultaneous to the commencement of due diligence of the said land parcel. After concluding that the said land had certain legal infirmities, we decided against its purchase. Accordingly on DLFs request, the Skylight group refunded the advance of Rs.15 crore in totality.

To reiterate, at no stage was an interest free loan ever given to the Skylight group. There were two sets of Business Advances against purchase of property, one of which amounting to Rs.50 crore resulted in a satisfactory conclusion of purchase of commercial land and the second advance of Rs.15 crore was fully refunded.

IACs rebuttal DLF has said that no unsecured loans were ever given. This

is far from the truth for the following reasons:

a. If one looks at the 2009-10 balance sheet of Real Earth Estates Pvt. Ltd. (Robert Vadra (RV) group company), there is an entry called Loan from DLF Ltd Rs.5 crores. This has been declared as an unsecured loan in the return filed by them in Registrar of Companies.

b. In the same year, Rs.50 crore has been given by DLF to Sky Light Hospitality Private Ltd (SLH), which is another RV group company. According to DLF, SLH sold its land at Manesar for Rs.58 crore to DLF and Rs.50 crore was an advance paid to SLH. Interestingly, this Manesar land was acquired by SLH just a year back for Rs.15.38 crore. How did the price of this land soar to Rs.58 crore? DLF claims that DLF made an advance payment of Rs.50 crore and took

possession of this land in 2008-09 itself. This is completely incorrect. The balance sheet for the year ending March 31, 2011 shows that the advance made by DLF as well as the land at Manesar are both still in the possession of SLH. Is it a normal business practice to give an advance of 90 per cent of the amount of transaction and let it remain with the seller for more than two years without even bothering to take possession of land? Is it a normal business practice to let this advance remain interest free? DLF itself borrows money from several sources at quite high cost. Interestingly, SLH used this advance to purchase 50 per cent equity in DLFs own hotel.

c. SLH received another Rs.10 crore from DLF as Advance from DLF Ltd (Land account). This is also interest free. This money was received by SLH

in 2008-09 and remained with them for more than 2 years.

d. DLF advanced another loan of Rs.15 crore in 2008-09 to SLH. DLF claims that this was meant as an advance for some property in Faridabad in which, some legal problems were discovered later. After using that money for about a year, SLH returned it to DLF. DLF did not charge any interest on that. Does that appear to be a normal business practice?

e. What is the difference between the unsecured loans received by Kanimozhi and Robert Vadra?

DLFs reply: ARALIAS

Mr. Vadra purchased one apartment for his personal use in Aralias in September 2008 at the then prevalent

market price of Rs.12,000 psft. The total purchase consideration of Rs.11.90 crore was paid by Mr. Vadra, for which the apartment was conveyanced in his favour. We may also mention that while Aralias was initially launched at Rs.1,800 psft, Mr. Vadras purchase at Rs.12,000 psft is among the highest prices at which the company sold the apartments in Aralias. The alleged figure of Rs.89 lakh as total purchase consideration is completely incorrect.

IACs rebuttal In the balance sheet of Sky Light realty (SLR) Pvt. Ltd. for the year 2009-10, the Aralias flat is shown to have been purchased for Rs.89.41 lakh. However, in the next years balance sheet, there is an increase of Rs.8.57 crore in the property at Aralias. Why did that happen? For how much was this property purchased and when was it purchased? A story appeared in the

Economic Times in March 2011 raising questions about Mr. Robert Vadras properties. Was this amount increased immediately thereafter? DLF in its response has said that the flat was purchased by the Vadras in 2008 for their personal use and it was transferred to them in the same year. Then how is it that the value of the flat is shown at Rs.89.41 lakh in 200910 and suddenly it becomes Rs.10.4 crore (including furniture) in 2010-11.

DLFs reply: MAGNOLIAS

As part of its real estate business, Skylight group had invested in Magnolias apartments at a price of Rs.10,000 psft in March 2008, which was the prevalent offer price of the company for all its customers. The initial launch price was only Rs.4,500 only at which price a large number of customers made their purchases from the company. The Skylight Group also

booked some apartments in the companys Capital Greens project at the then Companys offer price of Rs.5,000/6,000 psft which was availed by more than a thousand other customers.

There is no question of offering, let alone selling, Mr. Vadra or his group companies any property at a throwaway price. The allegation that 7 apartments in Magnolias were sold for Rs.5.2 crore only is also completely baseless.

At NO stage was a property ever sold to the Skylight group below the then offered price to all customers. The gains, if any, made by Skylight group, by subsequent retrading would be similar to the gains made by those customers and in line with applicable market price appreciation experienced by all DLF customers in general.

IACs rebuttal DLF has said that the Magnolias flats were sold at Rs.10,000 psf to Sky Light Group. At that rate, the cost of each Magnolia flat comes to Rs.5 crore. But in the balance sheet for the year 2009-10 for SLR Pvt. Ltd., it is clearly mentioned in Current assets DLF Ltd 7 flats Magnolias Rs.5.232 crore. Did Vadra file a wrong balance sheet with the Registrar of Companies?

DLFs reply:

An attempt is being made to confuse the Magnolias project with an independent project of 350 acres which was tendered by the Haryana State Industrial and Imports Development Corporation (HSIIDC) for

a Recreation and Leisure project by a series of well advertised international tender processes in 2009. DLF emerged as the successful bidder after a thorough technical and commercial bidding process carried out in a highly transparent manner. The project is still at a nascent stage.

It may be clarified that DLF secured the project on its own merits by fulfilling the eligibility criteria through a competitive bidding process and NOT through a discretionary allotment by the Haryana government as alleged. We further state that DLF has not been allotted any lands by the State governments of Haryana, Rajasthan or Delhi.

IACs rebuttal Some of the favours given by the Haryana government in this project:

1. International bids were invited for this project. Three parties applied DLF, Country Heights and Unitech. Financial bids of Unitech and Country Heights were not even opened. They were rejected at the technical stage saying that they did not have experience in constructing and maintaining a golf course. This condition was introduced at the time of evaluating technical bids. Doesnt it raise suspicion whether this was done to reject other parties and to grant this contract to DLF? From news reports, it is understood that the other two bids were much more than DLFs bid. This means that the government suffered a loss by giving it to DLF.

2. Out of 350 acres, 75.98 acres of land was owned by the Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) and 275 acres of land belonged to HSIIDC. HSIIDCs mandate is to

encourage industry in Haryana. It normally uses the land in its possession to carve out land plots for industrial use. HUDA uses its land for residential purposes. However, in this case, they were expected to simply transfer their land to DLF.

3. Out of 275 acres of land with HSIIDC, 91.97 acres of land is forest land covered under the Punjab Land Preservation Act (PLPA). SC has ordered that lands covered under PLPA should be treated as forest land and cannot be used for non-forest purposes. 161.03 acres of land is under Aravali plantation. This also cannot be used for any other purpose. The Haryana government has assumed the responsibility of seeking permissions from all Central and State government authorities to facilitate it for DLF. Interestingly, the Haryana government has given all this land to

DLF without even getting these permissions.

4. No Environmental Impact Assessment was done. The process is believed to have been started but was cancelled midway.

5. As mentioned above, HUDA had to part with 75.98 acres of land for this project. HUDAs job is to develop residential and commercial plots for the common people. They have done so in the past by developing various sectors in Gurgaon. HUDA had acquired this land a few years ago from the farmers of Gurgaon saying that this land would be used for Public purpose for various sectors in Gurgaon, constructing roads, etc. However, now this land was being transferred to DLF, not for public purpose but for private profit. This was a fraud on those farmers who had sacrificed their land earlier.

Source: Press Releases from India Against Corruption and DLF October 10, 2012

More than law, a question of propriety


SHOW THE WAY:Congress spokesmen are likely to dismiss the suggestion outright, but these are difficult times and require radical approaches. PHOTO: SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY The focus of the debate on the Robert Vadra-DLF real estate dealings has been on the legality of the transactions. Congress spokesmen insist that no evidence has come forth to show illegality and, therefore, rule out the need for an enquiry, while the opposition has somewhat mutedly asked for one. Though it is important to ascertain if any laws were violated, it is also necessary to go beyond the

realm of the law and into the territory of propriety.

Notions of propriety have changed since our freedom movement and the early years of our independence. This matter, and the revelations of the past few years, tell us the distance our polity and society have travelled since that time, unfortunately, in the wrong direction.

We live in cynical times and any reference to probity in political and social life evokes only derision and an admonition to get real. Nevertheless, the times demand of us now more than ever before to reflect on what Gandhiji would have thought of all this. Gandhiji had advised those in public life that if they were ever in doubt about a policy or action they should think of how it would impact on the poorest of the poor. What would he have said to public men and

their family members on contacts and dealings with businessmen? He would have certainly not suggested that they give up their trade or profession and take sanyas or not be friendly with them. Perhaps he would have recommended a simple test: that they ask themselves if a proposal or deal would have been offered to them had they not held a particular office or not been part of the family of such an office holder. This is the principal question that Mr. Vadra and his family have to address. The law may demand a direct nexus to a quid pro quo for corruption to be established but propriety makes a greater demand: that no personal benefit of a financial nature is derived on account of such a relationship.

It would be entirely appropriate for Mr. Vadra to become a successful businessman on the strength of his commercial acumen and skills and

venture into new fields including real estate, but in a manner that is manifestly straightforward and transparent. Greater public scrutiny is the inevitable price a family member of those in high places has to pay.

Then and now

There is also little doubt that once apparently credible questions are raised, Gandhiji would have rejected any recourse to claims of privacy and would have demanded full disclosure. Obviously, public officials and their family members have to be protected against frivolous and malicious charges of wrongdoing. But if prima facie, the questions raised are credible, then it is only proper that they clear doubts. Nothing vitiates a polity more than dark clouds of doubt regarding the conduct of public figures and their kith and kin. Clearly these prescriptions apply to all those

in public life and their families and become more rigid and compelling as the office or position in public affairs gets higher. They also apply to Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan. The former must clarify if he adhered to the Civil Services Conduct Rules while he was in service, for criticism of the government is forbidden so long as one is on government rolls. The latter must tell us if his familys property dealings meet the scrutiny not of legality but of propriety.

The lives of our public men immediately after independence were generally austere and frugal. The perks and privileges given to ministers were far less than what they enjoy today. One telling example was in the number of cars given to cabinet ministers. Only one car was allotted and that too only for official purposes. All cabinet ministers possessed small private cars which they and their

family members used for their personal travel. Of course, times have changed and security considerations have to be taken into account. That generation of leaders evoked respect through the strength of their character and their record of public service and not the use of the symbols of state authority such as flashing red lights and noisy sirens.

Acid test

The Vadra-DLF matter is above all an acid test of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. His ministers have spoken of the law. He must rise above this and dwell on propriety. That he must uphold the law and the Constitution is obvious. However, the nation expects more; it wishes that he sets the moral tone of his times. This hope and expectation is often not expressed but it is ever present in the public consciousness. Dr. Singh is also

uniquely placed for he has lived a life of absolute financial integrity. His frugal and austere living is what Gandhiji and our earlier leaders would have applauded. It is all the more creditable because he has so lived in times marked by consumerism. Also, through all the years of his public life no one has ever alleged that his family has taken advantage of his position. The Prime Minister is the formal leader of the country. It is now for him to judge and inform the nation whether the transactions between Robert Vadra and DLF meet the test of propriety or not. There is no doubt that the nation will respect his judgment.

Congress spokesmen and others are likely to dismiss the suggestion outright for they will claim that the Prime Minister is not the authority to take such action and there is no precedent of this nature and nor

should one be set. But these are difficult times and they require radical approaches.

Bhishmapitamah was asked if the times fashion a ruler or a ruler fashions his times. After deep thought he said that it is the ruler who sets the tone of his age. The Prime Minister has put his stamp on the economic and commercial life of our country. Will he do so on its public morality?

(Vivek Katju is a diplomat who retired as Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, earlier this year.)

Can the Prime Minister reassure us that the Gandhi family connection had no role to play in the Vadra-DLF transactions? October 10, 2012

Rising yuan in the land of setting yen


The directors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank return to Tokyo this week for their annual meetings after a gap of 48 years. Its a different Japan. The ageing of the host nation, the rise of China, the shift of the epicentre of global growth to mainland Asia, in more ways than one, have subdued what was in 1964 when the Fund and Bank last met here the land of the rising Yen. The shocks administered to the global economy by the recent trans-Atlantic financial crisis have further accelerated these shifts, and the Yuan now rises where the Yen once shined.

First Asian-origin president

While the Bank arrives in Tokyo with a South Korea-born American as its first Asian-origin president, the Fund arrives with its first Chinese deputy managing director, who got the job as part of a deal with the European Union. This would rub even more salt into the wounded pride of a Japan that tried hard for long to get one of the top jobs and repeatedly failed because the West would not accommodate Asia till China stared it in its face.

Not surprisingly, therefore, while much of Asia celebrates the eastward power shift, Tokyo remains more cautious and concerned. This came through explicitly in a paper that Japans former Defence Minister and now chairperson of the national executive of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, Yuriko Koike, wrote for a conference last week on the theme The Currencies of Power and

the Power of Currencies, organised by the Geo-economics and Strategy Programme of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

China is currently deepening its commitment to the global financial system observed Ms Koike, By gaining experience as a responsible stakeholder, China should be expected to play an important role in working for global financial stability. But that is a test that has yet to be held.

Many at the conference agreed with Ms Koike that the jury is out on Chinas credibility as a manager of the global financial system, but few shared the recent concern expressed by Brazils Finance Minister Guido Mantega that the global economy was being destabilised by currency wars between China and the United States. Two years ago, the former managing

director of the IMF Dominique StrausKahn gave public expression to Mr. Mantegas worries at the Fund-Bank meetings in Washington DC. These worries have been revived by the third round of liberal monetary policy, dubbed quantitative easing (QE3), launched by the U.S.

Participants at last weeks IISS-GES conference seemed less worried than Mr. Mantega or the man who has since articulated this view in an international bestseller ( Currency Wars: The making of the next global crisis , 2011), James Rickards (USA) who was challenged at the IISS conference by John Williamson (U.K.), Surjit Bhalla (India) and Zha Xiaogang (China), who in turn argued that currency wars may be a thing of the past, with China entering a new phase of domestic demand led growth that would ensure sustained appreciation of the renminbi (RMB).

Mr. Williamson, former chief economist of the World Bank to whom we owe the phrase Washington Consensus, questioned the Brazilian view that QE3 was a beggar-my-neighbour initiative aimed at devaluing the U.S. dollar. Rather, he saw it as an effort to boost domestic consumption and global growth. Mr. Bhalla, who has just published a persuasive account of how currency under-valuation provides an impetus to growth, Devaluing to Prosperity: Misaligned Currencies and Their Growth Consequences (2012) asserted that China had in fact won the currency war of the past two decades and has now declared currency peace with a focus on domestic economic growth.

Seeming to go along with these views, Mr. Zha, from the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, underscored

Chinas role as an importing power and a source of foreign direct investment. Mr. Zha was most direct in linking the RMBs future role to Asian geo-politics, curiously echoing Ms Koikes concerns. The internationalisation of the renminbi, especially in East Asia, will strengthen Chinas economic links with its neighbours Mr. Zha believes, and its influence on regional economic and financial cooperation (intra-regional trade, Asian regional capital markets, crisis prevention and management), which is critical for stability in Chinas backyard. (sic)

Therefore, while the Funds directors are unlikely to worry about currency wars at their meetings in Tokyo, and Christine Lagarde can be expected to be more diplomatique in dealing with the issue than her boisterous predecessor, the growing weight of China in the global economy, and

certainly in its backyard, as well as in the management of the Bretton Woods sisters will be on top of the mind of this years hosts of the annual meetings, and many other Asian economies.

The IMF is duty bound by the provisions of its Articles of Agreement to insist that each member undertakes to collaborate with the Fund and other members to assure orderly exchange arrangements and to promote a stable system of exchange rates and that they all avoid manipulating exchange rates or the international monetary system in order to prevent effective balance of payments adjustment or to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other members.

Currency wars

In the past, the Fund has failed to avert currency wars and it remains to be seen whether it will succeed in the months ahead. Ensuring exchange rate stability and discouraging beggarmy-neighbour policies is vital to the stability of global markets as well as to the revival of global growth. It is the Fund that must grapple with this challenge rather than allow some recent attempts to take this matter to the World Trade Organisation to succeed. Stable exchange rates are no doubt a trade facilitator but they are not a matter for trade negotiations. They are the pillars of a stable global economy.

For China to seek a larger role in the management of the global economy it must win the confidence of all, especially Asia, in its policies being transparent and fair. Equally, the U.S. and Europe have to regain their lost

credibility for their management of macro-economic policies.

(Sanjaya Baru is director for geoeconomics and strategy, International Institute for Strategic Studies and Hon. Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi)

China should convince all nations that

its policies are transparent and fair to

gain credibility as a manager of the

global financial system October 11, 2012

History happens sleeping and waking

Nearly some two centuries ago, the heavy-duty Hegel pronounced that India has no history. It is a repeat of the same old majestic ruin.

Marx in his early days concurred with that summation until of course, thanks to his need for money and the willingness of the New York Daily Tribune to make him an offer, his intimacy with India deepened profoundly, yielding some of the most far-reaching commentaries on the nature of the historical process in India.

In America

As we write, if anything, history seems only too rampantly underway in this sanaatan land where all change is thought to be mere mirage and hallucination, and its avid harbingers men and women of wicked

propensities, out to dislodge the timehonoured hierarchies of virtue and value. Conversely, until the recent collapse of Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs in America inaugurated a fresh bout of history in those settled lands, it was in America largely that history seemed to have ended.

I recall some two decades ago, during my last visit there as a Fulbright Fellow, responding to importunate advice that I stay and work there by bemoaning that outside of reading and writing I would not be a part of anything alive and kicking, since few people seemed to want to make any collective effort to change anything. I remember pointing my friends to an insistent trend in Hollywood productions in which, much of the time, only critters, or creatures, or aliens, or robots, or viral beings and other suchlike seemed to hold sway;

as though interest in anything human had long been exhausted and been swallowed in shopping, jogging, and hogging. Activities that, incidentally, seem so quickly to have caught up with an aspirational India.

I remember pleading that back home in India there were myriad histories in the making, often brutal, frustrating, relentlessly prone to chicanery and intellectual and moral abuse, but that I wished to be a part of all those.

Thankfully, the ravages wrought by a blind and blinding capitalism have over the last two years brought the human collectives out on to the streets, as they seek to occupy that one per cent of the globe that bleeds the other 99 per cent. Something is afoot where only a dead and deadening complacence ruled.

Here at home, of course, the renewed history of class antagonism now afloat in the western world is deepened and layered over by struggles that stretch across a plethora of other social indices. And however oppressive states globally bring to bear the full regalia of domination and suppression, these struggles seem for now not to be deterred as conclusively as home-grown and foreign imperialists might wish. Didnt that doyen of democratic poets, Walt Whitman, once say that the grass will grow everywhere, no matter how heavy the cement and mortar? And the grass he thought to be both the handkerchief of the lord and a metaphor for the masses of common people who will not let what is unjust and ossified last?

Unfortunate it is that many of us who live comfortable lives, wherever we be, tend often to conflate history with

our own individual lifetimes. Nothing could be more hopelessly and unforgivably solipsistic. We forget that the man who found out why the apple falls rather than flies, unbeknown to him, made it possible for us to go about in airplanes without the fear of falling. He did his work in his apportioned time and space; we ought to do the same.

(Prof. Badri Raina is a Delhi-based writer.) October 11, 2012

Rid our body politic of communal poison


Though many Hindus and Muslims in India are today infected by the virus of communalism, the fact is that before 1857 there was no communal feeling at all in most Indians. There were, no doubt, some differences between

Hindus and Muslims, but there was no animosity. Hindus used to join Muslims in celebrating Eid, Muslims used to join Hindus in celebrating Holi and Diwali, and they lived together like brothers and sisters.

How is it that around 150 years later, suspicion, if not animosity, has developed between the two major religious communities on our subcontinent? Today, Muslims in India find it difficult to get a house on rent from Hindus. When a bomb blast takes place in India the police, incapable of catching the real culprits (because they have no training in scientific investigation), solve the crime by arresting half-a-dozen Muslims. Most of them are ultimately found innocent in a court of law, but after spending many years in jail.

This has resulted in tremendous alienation among Muslims in India. In

Pakistan, things are even worse for the minorities who often live in a state of terror, scared of extremists and religious bigots.

Watershed

1857 is the watershed year in the history of communal relations in India. Before 1857, there was no communal problem, no communal riot. It is true there were differences between Hindus and Muslims, but then there are differences even between two sons or daughters of the same father. Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully, and invariably helped each other in times of difficulty.

No doubt, Muslims who invaded India broke a lot of temples. But their descendants, who became local Muslim rulers, almost all fostered communal harmony. This they did in

their own interest, because the vast majority of their subjects were Hindus. They knew that if they broke Hindu temples, there would be turbulence and riots, which no ruler wants. Hence almost all the Muslim rulers in India promoted communal harmony the Mughals, the Nawabs of Awadh, Murshidabad or Arcot, Tipu Sultan or the Nizam of Hyderabad.

In 1857, the First Indian War of Independence broke out, in which Hindus and Muslims jointly fought against the British. After suppressing the revolt, the British decided that the only way to control India was to divide and rule. Thus, the Secretary of State for India, Sir Charles Wood, in a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, in 1862 wrote, We have maintained our power in India by playing off one community against the other and we must continue to do so. Do all you

can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling.

Divide and rule

In a letter dated January 14, 1887, Secretary of State Viscount Cross wrote to Governor General Dufferin: This division of religious feeling is greatly to our advantage and I look forward for some good as a result of your Committee of Inquiry on Indian Education and on teaching material.

George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India wrote to Curzon, the Governor General: I think the real danger to our rule in India is the gradual adoption and extension of Western ideas and if we could break educated Indians into two sections *Hindus and Muslims+ we should, by such a division, strengthen our position against the subtle and

continuous attack which the spread of education must make upon our system of government. We should so plan education textbooks that the differences between the two communities are further enhanced.

Thus, after 1857, a deliberate policy was started of generating hatred between Hindus and Muslims. This was done in a number of ways.

Religious leaders bribed to speak against the other community : The English Collector would secretly call the Panditji, and give him money to speak against Muslims, and similarly he would secretly call the Maulvi and pay him money to speak against Hindus.

History books distorted to generate communal hatred : As already

mentioned, it is true that the initial Muslim invaders broke a lot of Hindu temples. However, their descendants (like Akbar, who was the descendant of the invader Babur) who were local Muslims rulers, far from breaking temples, regularly gave grants to Hindu temples, organised Ram Lilas and participated in Holi and Diwali (like the Nawabs of Awadh, Murshidabad and Arcot). This second part of our history, namely, that the descendants of the Muslim invaders, almost all, promoted communal harmony, has been totally suppressed from our history books. Our children are only taught that Mahmud of Ghazni broke the Somnath Temple, but they are not taught that the Mughal emperors, Tipu Sultan, etc., used to give grants to Hindu temples and celebrate Hindu festivals (see online History in the Service of Imperialism by B.N. Pande).

Communal riots deliberately instigated : All communal riots began after 1857; there was none before that year. Agent provocateurs deliberately instigated religious hatred in a variety of ways e.g., by playing music before a mosque at prayer time, or breaking Hindu idols.

This poison was systematically injected by the British rulers into our body politic year after year, decade after decade, until it resulted in the Partition of 1947. We still have nefarious elements that promote and thrive on religious hatred.

Whenever a bomb blast takes place, many television news channels start saying that an email or SMS has been received claiming that the Indian Mujahideen, the Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al- Islamia has owned responsibility. Now an email or an SMS message can be sent by any

mischievous person, but by showing this on TV and the next day in print a subtle impression is created in Hindu minds that all Muslims are terrorists who throw bombs (when the truth is that 99 per cent of all communities are peace loving and good).

During the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, a section of the media (particularly the Hindi print media) became kar sevaks.

Panic in Bangalore

Recently, SMS messages were sent to northeast Indians living in Bangalore and other cities stating that they had killed Muslims in Assam and so they had better get out of Bangalore otherwise they would be massacred. This created panic. When the Muslims of Bangalore came to know of this mischief, they organised a feast for

the northeast Indians and told them that someone had played mischief, and that Muslims are not against the people from the northeast.

It is time Indians saw through this nefarious game of certain vested interests. India is a country of great diversity, and so the only path to unity and prosperity is equal respect for all communities and sections of society. This was the path shown by our great Emperor Akbar (who, along with Ashoka, was in my opinion the greatest ruler the world has ever seen), who gave equal respect to all communities (see online my judgment Hinsa Virodhak Sangh Vs. Mirzapur Moti Kuresh Jamat ).

When India became independent in 1947, religious passions were inflamed. There must have been tremendous pressure on Pandit Nehru and his colleagues to declare India a

Hindu state, since Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic state. It was the greatness of our leaders that they kept a cool head and said India would not be a Hindu state but would be a secular state. That is why, relatively speaking, India is much better off in every way as compared to our neighbour.

Secularism does not mean that one cannot practise ones religion. Secularism means that religion is a private affair unconnected with the state, which will have no religion. In my opinion, secularism is the only policy which can hold our country together and take it to the path of prosperity.

(Markandey Katju is a retired judge of the Supreme Court and Chairperson of the Press Council of India)

Indians must defeat all those elements that promote and thrive on religious hatred October 11, 2012

Grass-root politics, down in the weeds


Women in Tamil Nadus Karur district at a panchayat meeting. PHOTO: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT There are two underlying themes of India Against Corruptions new party: the induction of good people and peoples power through consummate decentralisation. The vision document sets out a quest for swaraj, peoples right to selfdetermination. This ideal of selfdetermination has been conflated with direct democracy. Thus the vision document indicates that as far as possible, decisions will be taken

through gram /ward sabhas , referendums, and local primaries to decide the partys candidate nominations.

No person who professes a commitment to democracy will argue against political decentralisation. However to assume that decentralisation is synonymous with democracy is erroneous. Putting everything local administrative decisions, legislations/policy, electoral candidates to a vote can be majoritarian and hence counterdemocratic. There are also legitimate questions of capacity and practicality. These three main ideas as put forward by IAC require further thought:

People, not party high command, nominating candidates: IAC has suggested having local open primaries to nominate candidates with both party workers and local people eligible

to vote. This is an excellent idea. However more thought is required. First, India does not have a system like the United States where primaries are conducted by the public administration. Therefore voters are not registered for a particular party. It will be thus difficult to control raiding where workers of a political party deliberately vote for a weak candidate of another party. Second, running a credible internal election machinery will require large-scale resources and expertise, and it is unclear if a fledgling party can do so. A closed primary (only registered party workers may vote) may also pose problems of manipulation by local leaders, given that party organisation in large parts of the country is rudimentary/non-existent. Perhaps a better idea at this stage would be to define principles through public consultations and give party tickets in a transparent manner based on these principles.

Referendums: The vision document states that people must be consulted directly on key national decisions. The government must elicit public views on key issues in a democracy; however what entails meaningful and practical consultation is unclear. Complex policy initiatives do not lend themselves to the sort of binary response a referendum will necessarily entail. Team Anna conducted a referendum in Union Minister Kapil Sibals constituency for the Lokpal Bill but the questions consisted of issues where there was disagreement between the government and IAC. The possible options for selection were only two: government and Anna. If a referendum was to be done on the Lokpal Bill, how many questions would one need? A meaningful question would not be whether the Lokpal should be independent of the government or not but how would

this independence be ensured. This question alone would require going into the minutiae of the appointment committee, selection process, financial/administrative autonomy, etc. And there will be tens of such questions. Furthermore referendums are susceptible to majoritarianism, such as the recent ban on minarets in Switzerland and Proposition 8 in California (2008), which amended the definition of marriage to exclude same sex couples. Having the public decide on personal economic policy is also not necessarily a good thing since voters may not be driven by the states fiscal health. Many people trace the Californian budget crisis to the 1978 referendum which severely decreased property taxes. Finally there are concerns that referendums may be manipulated by organised and well-resourced special interests.

Local self-governance: The rhetoric of an aam sabha presumes a homogenous society with no internal conflict. However social hierarchy, imposed by caste in villages and class in urban areas, will impede (meaningful) participation. The consent of the gram sabha is invoked in issues such as displacement, where there is likely to be general consensus however villages themselves become the locus of marginalisation for access to limited public goods. In urban areas, there is often a conflict of interest between immigrants/unorganised sector and the middle-class. In addition the often uncertain legal status of the migrant class can stifle participation. Therefore, mere devolution of powers and resources by itself may not lead to participation or egalitarian outcomes and work is needed on the nature of supportive structures and social conditions needed for functional self-governance.

The purpose of a political party is to articulate a distinct vision for the future of the country, and mobilise the electorate around that vision. For a vision to be credible, one must also define a plausible road map for its attainment. However IACs current pronouncements are a mish-mash of non-cohesive ideas and a preoccupation with procedural points. Decentralisation as defined in their vision document is based on a worldview of adversarial binary division between the state and people, disregarding cross alliances and intra-group conflicts. This doesnt necessarily increase democracy and appears to be motivated by a desire to curb the state. In any case, decentralisation must be contextualised within an ideology if its not to remain an operational goal. IAC has shown courage in entering electoral politics, in a landscape riven by primordial divisions, hijacked by

money and muscle. Their entry has been disruptive in a system marked by complicit silence, and thus there is a great deal of energy and anticipation around their activities. However to go beyond capturing an anti-incumbent sentiment to create a true political alternative will require real vision.

(Ruchi Gupta is affiliated with the National Campaign for Peoples Right to Information. Email: gupta.ruchi@gmail.com )

India Against Corruption should realise the aam aadmi needs not only decentralised power but also a lofty vision October 11, 2012

Include the poor in biodiversity conservation


THE CATCH:Agreeing on ways of governments and markets increasing the flow of ecosystem services for the poor is important.The picture is of the mangrove forests near Pichavaram inTamil Nadu. PHOTO: AP Protecting biodiversity is humanitys insurance policy against the unprecedented biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation which has occurred in recent decades, undermining the very foundations of life on earth.

This is why this weeks 11th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad, which India is hosting, is so important. The thousands of

experts and officials representing nearly 200 countries attending the conference carry the enormous responsibility of facing the difficult trade-offs that lay at the heart of biodiversity management.

In the race to increase national income, countries around the world are over-exploiting biodiversity by failing to integrate environmental measures in fisheries, agriculture, infrastructure and mining. This approach is understandable when governments are trying to quickly raise living standards but the risk of mismanaging biodiversity far outweighs short-term gains, reducing the ability of the environment to sustain the present generation, let alone meet the needs of future generations.

A key theme of the conference is the impact of biodiversity loss on the

poor. Dependent directly on nature for food, clean water, fuel, medicine and shelter, poor households are hit hardest by ecosystem degradation.

Community-based models

In India, where ecosystem services account for 57 per cent of a poor households income and nearly a quarter of the countrys population depends on non-timber forest produce for their livelihood, important community-based models for managing diversity are showing impressive results.

An example of this is the village of Gundlaba in Odisha where the 1999 super cyclone destroyed habitats and livelihoods, mangroves and forests belonging to coastal villages. Fearing that their community may not recover, the village women formed a

Forest Protection Womens Committee. During the past 12 years, the committee has worked together to regenerate mangroves and other forests. Forest cover has gone up by 63 per cent and fish catch has increased from one to five kilograms per family.

The story of Gundlaba shows that the weight of ecosystems in the lives of the poor represents an important opportunity for achieving broader social and economic goals. Proper and intelligent management of ecosystems at the local level can help to turn local economies around and give destitute households a chance to increase their incomes. This is an important lesson to share with the world.

Investing in the protection of biodiversity is another important lesson. A government of India

initiative to increase coral reef cover in the Gulf of Mannar Biosphere Reserve on the Tamil Nadu coast, which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Global Environmental Facility are proud to have supported, has resulted in diversified livelihoods at the local level and increased income. As a result of this programme, more than 24,000 women now have access to more credit from microenterprises and thousands of young people have taken up new vocations after receiving technical training.

Recognising our shared responsibility to promote proper management of biodiversity, the UNDP at the global level has worked closely with partners in 146 countries to develop a Biodiversity and Ecosystems Global Framework to accelerate international efforts to reverse biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. The

framework represents an important shift in focus towards harnessing the positive opportunities provided by biodiversity and natural ecosystems, as a driver for sustainable development.

The framework takes into account the real value of biodiversity and ecosystems to societyin relation to secure livelihoods, food, water and health, enhanced resilience, preservation of threatened species and their habitats, and increased carbon storage and sequestration and calls for innovation to achieve multiple development dividends.

The officials and experts attending this weeks conference will have the chance to debate important issues related to biodiversity management. With so much at stake, we hope that participants are able to establish an effective governance system for

making and implementing decisions on matters affecting biodiversity and ecosystems and discuss candidly the capacity of markets to reflect the real value of ecosystem goods and services and the true costs of losing them. Agreeing on ways that governments and markets can increase the flow of ecosystem services for the poor is equally important.

(Lise Grande is U.N. Coordinator and UNDP Representative in India.)

Resident Resident

Intelligent management of ecosystems can help to turn local economies around and give destitute households a chance to increase their incomes October 12, 2012

Chavez victory will be felt far beyond Latin America


The transformation of Latin America is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order. The tide of progressive change that has swept the region over the last decade has brought a string of elected socialist and social-democratic governments to office which have redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination. In the process they have started to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years and demonstrated to the rest of the world that there are, after all, economic and social alternatives in the 21st century.

Central to that process has been Hugo Chvez and his Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. It is Venezuela, sitting on

the worlds largest proven oil reserves, that has spearheaded the movement of radical change across Latin America and underwritten the regional integration that is key to its renaissance. By doing so, the endlessly vilified Venezuelan leader has earned the enmity of the United States and its camp followers, as well as the social and racial elites that have called the shots in Latin America for hundreds of years.

So Chvezs remarkable presidential election victory on Sunday (October 7) in which he won 55 per cent of the vote on an 81 per cent turnout after 14 years in power has a significance far beyond Venezuela. The stakes were enormous: if his oligarch challenger Henrique Capriles had won, not only would the revolution have come to a juddering halt in Venezuela, triggering privatisations and the axing of social programmes. So would its

essential support for continental integration, sponsorship of Cuban doctors across the hemisphere as well as Chvezs plans to reduce oil dependence on the U.S. market.

Western and Latin American media and corporate elites had convinced themselves that they were at last in with a shout, that this election was too close to call, or even that a failing Venezuelan President, weakened by cancer, would at last be rejected by his own people. Outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick crowed that Chvezs days were numbered, while Barclays let its excitement run away with itself by calling the election for Capriles.

Its all of a piece with the endlessly recycled Orwellian canard that Chvez is a dictator and Venezuela a tyranny where elections are rigged and the media muzzled. In reality, as

Opposition leaders concede, Venezuela is by any rational standards a democracy, with exceptionally high levels of participation, its electoral process more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the U.S., and its media dominated by a vituperatively antigovernment private sector. In reality, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy came in the form of the abortive U.S.-backed coup of 2002.

Re-election formula

Even senior western diplomats in Caracas roll their eyes at the absurdity of the anti-Chvez propaganda in the western media. And in the queues outside polling stations on Sunday in the opposition stronghold of San Cristobal, near the Colombian border, Capriles voters told me: this is a democracy. Several claimed that if Chvez won, it wouldnt be because of manipulation of the voting system but

the laziness and greed of their Venezuelans by which they seemed to mean the appeal of government social programmes.

Which gets to the heart of the reason so many got the election wrong. Despite claims that Latin Americas progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected from Ecuador to Brazil, Bolivia to Argentina, Brazil to Uruguay because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chvez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuelas oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70 per cent, massively expanding access to health and education, boosting the minimum wage and pension

provision, halving unemployment and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chvez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled in other words, the dispossessed majority. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of redshirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there are also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses the Opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and overdependence on one mans charismatic leadership. And the U.S.-financed Opposition campaign was a much

more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as centre-left, despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chvista social programmes.

But even so, the Venezuelan President ended up almost 11 points ahead. And the Oppositions attempt to triangulate to the left only underlines the success of Chvez in changing Venezuelas society and political terms of trade. He has shown himself to be the most electorally successful radical left leader in history. His reelection now gives him the chance to ensure Venezuelas transformation is deep enough to survive him, to overcome the administrations failures and help entrench the process of change across the continent. Venezuelas revolution doesnt offer a model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least

because oil revenues allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that its no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model. They have shown its possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin Americas transformation from recognising its significance. But Chvezs re-election has now ensured that that process will continue and that the space for

21st-century alternatives will grow. (Seumas Milnes book, The Revenge of History: The Battle for the 21st Century, is published next week.) Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2012

Social democracy is starting to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years October 12, 2012

Testing the tensile strength of HollandeMittal


Lakshmi Mittal has decided to shut down the blast furnaces in the ArcelorMittal steel plant in Florange, north-eastern France, a region deeply hit by recession and deindustrialisation. With the automobile industry in the doldrums and a global recession in manufacturing, the

demand for steel has nosedived, he says.

Probably the most disliked and certainly the least trusted man in France today, Lakshmi Mittal is the Chairman of ArcelorMittal, the worlds leading steel manufacturer. In 2006, Mr. Mittal, wrested control of Arcelor, a company that once had a strong French government stake and which, in 2006, had public holdings in Spain, Belgium and Luxemburg.

It was one of the nastiest takeover battles in recent times, not least because it was the first time an Indian, a person from the under-developed south was eyeing a first world plum. Dominique de Villepin, then Prime Minister of France, and Thierry Breton, his minister for Finance and Industry, engaged in some impressive sabre-rattling against these Indians, even though the French state had long

since divested itself of its stake in Arcelor. Now, shades of that same xenophobia are resurfacing in France.

Symbol of worker malaise

On Thursday Mr. Mittal was called to the lyse Palace for a dressing down by President Franois Hollande who told him hed better look sharp and find a buyer rather than close down the plant as he has hinted he might do. Restart the furnaces or put them up for sale, Mr. Hollande reportedly told Mr. Mittal. The steel magnate reportedly said he would do so if a buyer showed up. But in these hard times that is not a serious possibility.

The fate of the blast furnaces at Florange has become a symbol of worker malaise in France and Lakshmi Mittal has inevitably become the villain of the piece. The number of

jobs lost at Florange is unlikely to exceed 600. And yet, with 14,000 job losses and the shutting down of the Aulnay plant near Paris, Philippe Varin, the CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroen gets far less flack and union invective than Mittal, who is invariably described as a rapacious predator.

However, Peugeot and ArcelorMittal are not the only companies to announce job cutbacks. The former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, had reportedly asked several businesses to delay their restructuring announcements to after the election and now there is an entire harvest of cutbacks including at business majors like Alcatel-Lucent, Air France or Sanofi. The bombast of Arnaud Montebourg, the new minister for Industrial Renewal, rings hollow when he declares that the French state will intervene to prevent massive job cuts in companies that continue to post

profits. But in a liberal economy there is little the State can do and Mr. Hollandes impotence in the face of investor logic is adding to the Presidents unpopularity.

In terms of popularity ratings, Franois Hollande has little to envy Lakshmi Mittal. In five months his stock has touched rock bottom with a nostalgia wave for ousted President Sarkozy amongst centrist voters who plumped for Hollande last May. After having assured the French that he would preserve the countrys welfare model, Mr. Hollande has announced austerity measures totalling 30 billion. This is the most austere budget France has seen in the past 30 years and it aims to bring down the countrys deficit from 4.5 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to the acceptable three per cent by 2013 with a balancing of

the books by 2017, when the next Presidential election is due.

Large companies will be taxed 10 billion, the government will cut spending by another 10 billion and wealthy households and capital gains will yield another 10 billion with a higher tax slab of 45 per cent of income for 6.2 million households. The super rich who earn over 1 million per year will see 75 per cent of their income going to the taxman. Capital gains will be taxed like ordinary income and various tax breaks will be removed, including a limit on wealth tax.

There has been a volley of criticism from the Opposition and from business leaders who say the new levies will prove a disincentive for investors or creative and talented people to work in France. A group of start-up businessmen calling

themselves Genopi, an acronym of pigeon (French slang for victim or dupe) said the new capital gains tax will lead to the ruin of entrepreneurs wishing to sell off businesses or start new ones. They argued the measure would lead to a massive flight of capital and forced the government to take its first step back. Finance Minister Pierre Moscovoci hastily announced measures to pacify venture capitalists saying those who reinvest capital gains in new businesses will not be taxed.

As The New York Times put it: Mr. Hollandes problem is that in the middle of the euro crisis and flat growth, with pressure from Brussels and the markets, it is hard to live up to the hopes of his voters for the traditionally Socialist cure of higher public spending.

In short, the President is caught in a cleft stick between pressure from workers asking that their benefits and jobs be preserved and pressure from Brussels which has declared a war on public deficits. Mr. Hollande has very little wiggle room and will have to walk a thin line between two totally contradictory sets of demands and expectations.

The French President is finding it difficult to live up to the hopes of his voters, caught as he is in the middle of the euro crisis and flat growth October 12, 2012

Let grass roots decide on Walmart


There is the United States of America and then there is the idea of USA that exists in the minds of significant

portions of the middle classes all across the globe. How this looks in real life varies slightly according to the region of the world, reflecting specific aspirations and anxieties. In the subcontinent, the latter idea is increasingly not made in a Hollywood basement, given the IT-coolie-fired traffic to the U.S. One important element of the newer idea of USA that flows back daily by television, Skype, photographs, phone conversation and emails is the ease of the consumer experience in multi-brand retail stores as big as football stadia, with the variety of wares on offer seemingly endless from bananas to bikinis and beyond. Walmart is unquestionably the most prominent of these chainstores, a super-brand. Viewed in another way, it is a shop whose name is more famous than the brand names of the things it sells.

The shopping experience

I have been living in the U.S. for the last few years, more or less in east coast cities. The last six have been in the Boston area. Many separate municipal towns constitute much of the Boston area. My location however deprives me of the quintessentially American experience of shopping at Walmart. I live in Cambridge and hence I am at least 10 miles away from the two Walmarts in the vicinity. Given that I use public transport and my bicycle to move around, both these locations are quite inaccessible for me. Walmarts and stores like that cannot exist in the U.S. in the absence of the stupendous subsidy to the highway systems that make the stores viable, not to mention the mass culture of individual car ownership that makes such stores reachable. If one were to look at a map of Walmart locations across the U.S., it corresponds very well with a population density map of the nation.

That said, the absence of Walmart in my neighbouring areas and the preponderance of such stores all over the nation is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

It is not that Walmart did not want to set up a store in my vicinity. In fact, it tried and tried hard. When I was a student, as a part of my on-campus job as a server and bartender for the Harvard University Dining Services, I would be deputed to various addresses around the area to serve at parties, clean dirty dishes and do similar chores. One such assignment was in the neighbouring municipal area of Watertown. When I was going into the house, I saw a sign on the lawn that said No Walmart No more big boxes. Big box incidentally is the nickname for Walmart and other such stores, for that is what they look like. Given that I knew there werent any such stores in the area, I

wondered what this was about. After my working hours, I talked to the house-owner and he told me he was part of the burgeoning local citizens movement, Sustainable Watertown, which was opposing a proposed Walmart big-box store near the central square of Watertown. In the U.S., citizens of towns and villages have a say in what happens to their areas, and elected officials can veto proposals be they of setting up stores, building highways or railways. He informed me that they had been getting a lot of support, which had translated into some elected city councillors getting pressured not to court Walmart.

Fast-forward a few years. In November 2011, the incumbent vicepresident of the City Council came very close to being defeated by a candidate fighting almost solely on the agenda of stopping Walmart from

gaining a foothold in Watertown. In June 2012, Walmart announced it was shelving plans to set up shop in Watertown. At the same time, it also suspended plans to build in a store in the neighbouring town of Somerville.

The Walmart spokesperson said, In the case of the Somerville and Watertown sites, we made a business decision that the projected cost of investment would ultimately exceed our expected return. There was another thing common to these two towns both had popular citizens initiatives opposing the entry of Walmart in their areas. In response to this, Barbara Ruskin of Sustainable Watertown issued a statement that read We, the members of Sustainable Watertown, applaud the news of our campaigns success and pledge to continue to work with town residents and members, supporting neighbourhood groups, taking an

early role in planning and development projects, and providing venues for discussions of sustainability. We will continue to advocate on behalf of the town for a positive vision of a healthy, just and prosperous community.

Gaps in the network

This is not a long-winded argument against Walmart or other large multibrand retail chain stores and their pros and cons vis--vis the local community. This simply is a reminder that there are gaps in the network of stores Walmart wants to establish. Those gaps are populated by real people, who, like most of us, are consumers who love low prices. But at the same time, many of them feel that they would have to pay a very high price in other aspects of life in their community if they bite the low price bait. These gaps, in the shadow of the

glorious network of Walmart, when joined together by an alternative perspective of what really matters, also form a United States. It extends beyond Watertown and Somerville and beyond the faux anti-corporate sensibilities of affluent white hipsters. Among the cities, towns and villages all across the nation which have put a low upper limit to the maximum area that can be covered by a shop, one can count Ashland (Oregon), Oakley (California), Madison (Wisconsin), Ravalli County (Montana), Sante Fe (New Mexico), San Diego (California) and many more. Join the dots and the contours of a nation emerge. This is a USA of Walmart-gaps that few hear about, but it exists nonetheless.

The UPA government has cleared foreign direct investment in multibrand retail. This adds diversity and capital-power to the already existing scene of Indian multi-brand retail

giants. In a rare and cunning gesture to State rights, it has added an enabling rider so that individual States can choose to not permit the entry of foreign multi-brand retail entities in their respective areas. The Centre has made a lot out of this enabling clause, and has waxed eloquent about its commitment to States rights as well as democratic principles. It has also driven home the opposite point that the refusal of a certain province should not hold up the power of other areas to host Walmarts. This is quite reasonable, in my opinion. But what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If the Centre is indeed sensitive to the differing aspirations and development trajectories of different regions, why does it not have such clauses across the board, in all aspects of trade and commerce and beyond that, in much of what are called the Central and Concurrent lists?

The Indian Union never tires to tout its successes in the devolution of power by the Panchayati Raj system. In fact, taking the logic of devolution to its logical end, why does it not allow the lower units of the local government to veto decisions and policies that the local body thinks are inimical to the interests of the area? By feverishly canvassing for the rights of the individual as a consumer, this apparently libertarian rhetoric is exposed when the Centre devolves powers to local bodies without giving them veto powers over most decisions that govern life on the ground, including the right to refuse certain kinds of entities to set up shop in an area. As long as the fundamental rights of the individual citizen are not compromised, what does the Centre fear? If the gram panchayats could decide the fate of what comes up in their areas, future Nandigrams could be avoided. They might choose to have Walmarts. Or not. On being

liberated from Lutyens notions of constitutionality, that is what democracy looks like.

(The writer is postdoctoral scholar in Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

If we are going to buy American, why

not adopt the American way of giving

local bodies the right to refuse entry to

super stores in their area

October 12, 2012

A loo of ones own


BIJLI, SADAK, PAANI ...SHAUCHALYA: The need for toilets is not a trivial issue. A file picture of an awareness campaign against open defecation in Tiruchi, Tamil Nadu. PHOTO: M. MOORTHY Lets forget about what Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh said and focus on what he is trying to do. It is not an easy campaign to launch and run. Imagine someone asking what do you do? And having to answer, I promote toilets toilet construction and toilet use. Most activists would happily say I work on land rights, or housing rights, or equal wages, or the right to education. How many of us would stand up, proud, without batting an eyelid and say, I work on toilet rights? Saddled by both a yuck factor and funny factor, its a tough sell. Dealing

with defecation, and its stench is yes, yucky. And scatological jokes, a dime a dozen.

Also, toilets appear trivial, fairly low down on our list of stated development priorities. Right to food is up there on top. Then the bijli, sadak, paani slogan takes over. Adding house w/toilet seems a stretch. Almost a luxury that poor people somehow do not deserve. At best, middle-class India will accept a toilet rights movement only so it cleans up our streets and roadsides, and we do not have to gingerly step over mounds of fly covered excrement when we take our morning walk. Its the same sentiment that makes us want to remove or cover up slum dwellings and shanties. Remove the eyesore, so we can go about our pleasant lives without having to look at the unpleasant lives of our fellow citizens. And we can defecate every

morning in the privacy of our tiled toilet, fitted with a flush, wondering why on earth those people think open defecation is their birthright.

Anyone who has spent time working with Indias have-nots (in this case those without toilets) whether in rural or in urban areas, will know that open defecation is a bit of a euphemism. For women generally, there is nothing open about it, save for the sky above their heads.

In large parts of rural India, women wake up pre-dawn, and carry a vessel of water to a quiet spot, doing their business under the cover of darkness, managing to retain a bit of privacy and dignity. God forbid nature calls in the middle of the day, just hold it in. Never mind the cramps, chronic constipation, piles and poor digestion that will plague them for life. I recall a stroll at dawn many decades ago,

along a small river in a backward periurban part of Uttar Pradesh. The sloping bank was dotted with squatting women, rows of exposed skin, but every face fully covered with a ghunghat . I understood something about the many ways women held on to their dignity since they had no choice but to expose their bare bottoms for the world to see, they made sure no one could identify their faces. They were, quite literally, saving face.

Assam visit

On a recent visit to Assam with Oxfam India, among the few humanitarian aid agencies working there in both flood and conflict districts, I developed new appreciation for the toilet. When asked just what Oxfam was doing in the relief camps, I learnt it was distributing buckets, mugs, hygiene kits and constructing toilets.

Toilets are their big thing (they have a target of 200 latrines) quick semipermanent constructions taking no more than two days to build, with a deep disposal pit, concrete slabs for squatting, in a plastic-sheeted cubicle. Visiting camp after camp I understood the priority. Imagine a camp with 12,000 displaced people, crowded into scores of tiny tents, in an open field that the incessant rains have turned into a swamp, with everyone defecating where they can. It is a health nightmare. Or, imagine another camp, where people walk to the nearest water body a pond, a lake and defecate in the same place from where they will later draw water for cooking. Sickness in these camps will spread like wildfire.

Women in the camps were the most appreciative of the toilets, for they clearly needed them most desperately. A half-hour boat ride

away, in a flood stricken village partially swallowed up by the Brahmaputra, a woman came up to us. Oxfam had constructed a toilet about 20 feet outside her hut. She meekly asked if they could extend the tarpaulin screen from the side of her hut to the toilet, so that people in the village did not have to know every time she used it. Even in a time of such crisis, having lost everything else, she was trying to hold on to a bit of her dignity.

The fact is that toilets are not a trivial matter. Toilets are a sanitation issue, a health issue, a privacy and dignity issue, and yes, a gender rights issue. Its time we took them seriously.

(Farah Naqvi, a writer and activist, is a member of the National Advisory Council. The views expressed are personal. Email: farah.naqvi64@yahoo.com )

For much of India, toilets are all about an issue of sanitation, health, privacy and dignity, and gender rights October 13, 2012

Black September
Though Bangladesh has a reputation of being a country of harmony, it witnessed a bout of communal violence recently, in which the minority Buddhist community was the worst affected. The incidents, in which fanatics launched a premeditated attack in Ramu, Ukhia, Teknaf and Patiya on September 29 and 30, have no parallel in the countrys history.

Ramu, a Buddhist dominant area was the worst affected, with the attack being well-orchestrated. Seven Buddhist monasteries, some of them over a century old, and three Sima

Biharas were burnt and around 200 houses belonging to the minority community, ransacked and looted. A Buddhist temple and two Hindu temples were vandalised in Patiya.

Not only had the attackers mobilised support holding rallies and processions, but also used gunpowder and petrol in the attack, which has displaced hundreds of people.

The Buddhist religious sites, some of them over a hundred years old, are repositories of an invaluable cultural heritage. As news spread, condemnation, poured in from across the country, with government officials and media personnel rushing to the spots.

Independent reports have suggested unprecedented acts of subversion in minority populated villages, revealing

an unprovoked, premeditated and well-orchestrated operation.

What is however left to be unravelled is the identity of those who masterminded the unprecedented acts of desecration since Bangladeshs independence.

Facebook post

The attack was reportedly sparked off by an offensive Facebook post, allegedly by a young Buddhist man of the locality, although nothing concrete was known about the origin and authorship of the post. Locals have said that the followers of a fundamentalist party, led by several leaders, took out a procession alleging that a photo was uploaded on Facebook to defame the Quran. However, many Facebook users said the man did not post the photo but

had linked it from another Facebook ID, and was in no way responsible. There is a strong feeling that the agent provocateurs may have then jumped in to exploit unfolding events.

Bangladeshs long tradition of harmonious coexistence between people of various creeds, especially in the Coxs Bazar area has been dented by this. Questions are being asked about the failure of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to protect places of worship for minorities and their property despite advance intelligence. Perhaps the unfolding disaster could have been averted had pre-emptive measures been taken.

A couple of days before the incidents, it was reported that a militant Bangladesh outfit was trying to establish its base in the inaccessible hilly area of the Chittagong Hill tracts. Locals say that a section of the

Rohingya refugees, who were persecuted in Myanmar, had played a crucial role. Many are also of the opinion that the motive was to foil the ongoing trial of war criminals of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war.

There is growing demand for an impartial enquiry, identifying the instigators and awarding exemplary punishment.

After visiting the affected areas, Home Minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir said the government would take action through the Speedy Trial Tribunal (STT). A few hundred suspects are in custody.

For the Hasina government, the incidents in Ramu, Ukhia, Teknaf and Patiya are a wake-up call.

The mood in the country is clear: the perpetrators must be punished, victims amply compensated and the monasteries and temples rebuilt. The government has promised to rebuild the structures and ensure the security and rehabilitation of the victims.

(The writer is a Bangladesh journalist and writer. Email: hh1971@gmail.com )

Recent incidents in Bangladesh, which targeted the minorities and their religious sites, have dented its tradition of communal harmony October 13, 2012

Making it for the people again


The one significant question being thrown us by the India Against

Corruption (IAC) movement is this: is the movement for or against the countrys much revered democracy? The answer, as often in questions relating to society or politics, is neither a clear yes nor no. It is antidemocratic in as much as democracy has become the equivalent of the holding of elections and the forming of governments. Once elections have been held and governments formed, any questioning of the rights or, more important, the legitimacy of any act of our elected representatives or of the elected governments, except through the due processes of law, is immediately pronounced antidemocratic. There are institutions and provisions within the democratic structures available to citizens to express their dissent, we are assured; any movement outside of these structures itself becomes illegal, and therefore illegitimate.

But the institutions and structures also have a life and a mutable character. When these have turned, or have been perceived to have turned, into fortresses for the defence of the rights and decisions of those who have been elected and those who find favour with them, never mind through what manner or means, and when these rights and decisions are perceived to be in conflict with the very lives of those who have elected them, the legitimacy, if not strictly the legality, of the institutions and structures lends itself to grave questioning. Let us remember that the declaration of the Emergency in 1975 was perfectly legal; it was its dubious legitimacy that led to the defeat of the ruling party in the elections of 1977.

Today, once again, there are serious doubts about the legitimacy of the whole system of governance which

has spawned unforeseen corruption and, above all, an economy that increasingly concentrates wealth at the very thin upper crust leaving the 99 per cent to fend for themselves. Corruption, while being an issue in itself, is indeed the instrument of the implementation of economic policies that have created, and are constantly creating fissures between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent; and corruption is not merely monetary in nature; it is corruption of the whole system of governance that is at stake. Corruption of the electoral process which sends a third of elected leaders with self-declared heinous crimes like murder, kidnapping, rape and the rest to virtually every Assembly and the Lok Sabha. The judiciary has also been shown to be less than lily white. The democratic institution of periodic elections offers no way out for those at the receiving end, for periodic recirculation of power among the political parties has only brought a

periodic redistribution of wealth among them and their cohorts. They are all quite happy with it.

Not exclusive

Indeed, what is happening in India is not exclusive to it; in some ways the redistribution of wealth and its concentration at the upper end is happening in a major chunk of the planet we inhabit, following the same economic doctrines. The forms of popular resistance to it are also similar outside the framework of the legal and institutional systems. The slogan We are the 99 per cent originated in New York as did the Occupy Wall Street movement, although it did not impact the U.S. polity substantially. But growing awareness of the inequities of the paths of growth around the world is in itself a significant phenomenon denoting a restlessness that is often a

precursor to encompassing metamorphoses. Even now, a different regime of economy is being experimented within parts of Latin America, to an extent in Brazil, but especially in Venezuela.

Is IAC then seeking an overthrow of the system of democracy that has evolved in India over the past 60-odd years? At any rate, is it possible at all to do that? Not quite; neither of these. The fact that a branch of IAC, led by Arvind Kejriwal, will participate in elections and seek the popular mandate to govern, should put paid to any suspicion on that score.

Right from the days of Anna Hazares fast at Jantar Mantar last year, the loud cry being heard was that he is undermining the countrys hallowed democratic institutions, although he would have found the competition to do so with elected representatives

very hard to win. Not allowing Parliament to function when you do not have a majority does not quite enhance the spirit of democracy, and lest we forget, no party has patented an exclusive right to this practice. IACs actions on the streets and in public places, often verging on the absurd, highlight the conflict that has got entrenched between the institutions of governance and the aspirations of the people, contrary to the very premise of democracy which emphasises a symbiosis between the two. The movement is a clarion call to the system as a whole to redefine the polity and the economy to restore the symbiosis so crucial to an orderly functioning; it is a call for reforming from within rather than the threat of an overthrow.

(Harbans Mukhia was a professor of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.)

The movement by India Against Corruption is a call to the system as a whole

to redefine the polity and the economy October 13, 2012

In dubious battle at heavens gate


On September 8, 1962, the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army surrounded a small Indian Army post in Tsenjang to the north of the Namka Chu stream just below the disputed Thagla ridge at the India-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction. The Indian post came to be established as a consequence of the asinine Forward Policy which was adopted by the Indian government

after the Sino-Indian border dispute began hotting up, particularly after the flight of the Dalai Lama to India. The Chinese couldnt have chosen a better place than Tsenjang to precipitate a military conflict with India. For a start, Tsenjang was to the north of the de facto border, which at that point ran midstream of the Namka Chu. The PLA also commanded the high ground. By surrounding Tsenjang, the Chinese had flung down the gauntlet at India. India walked right into it, chin extended.

Government warned

On September 10, the then Defence Minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, conveyed his decision that the matter must be settled on the field, overruling the vehement objections of the Army Chief, General P.N. Thapar. Gen. Thapar warned that the Chinese had deployed in strength and even

larger numbers were concentrated at nearby Le, very clearly determined to attack in strength if need be. He warned that the fighting would break out all along the border and that there would be grave repercussions. But orders are orders and, consequently, the Eastern Command ordered Brigadier J.P. Dalvi commanding 7 Brigade to move forward within forty eight hours and deal with the Chinese investing Dhola. Having imposed this order on a reluctant Army, Krishna Menon left for New York on September 18 but not before slyly conveying to the press that the Indian Army had been ordered to evict the Chinese from the Indian territory. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru too was abroad having left India on September 7 only to return on September 30.

The Indian Army was under pressure but Gen. Thapar was still not prepared

to bow to sheer stupidity. On September 22, at a meeting presided over by the Deputy Minister, K. Raghuramiah, Gen. Thapar once again warned the government of the possibility of grave repercussions and now demanded written orders. He received the following order signed by H.C. Sarin, then a mere Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Defence: The decision throughout has been as discussed at previous meetings, that the Army should prepare and throw out the Chinese as soon as possible. The Chief of Army Staff was accordingly directed to take action for the eviction of the Chinese in the Kameng Frontier Division of NEFA [North East Frontier Agency] as soon as he was ready. It was unambiguous insomuch as it conveyed the governments determination to evict the Chinese, but by leaving the Army Chief to take action when he was ready for it was seeking to pass the onus on to him. With such waffling

skills, it is no small wonder that Sarin rose to great heights in the bureaucracy.

Pressure from MPs

Under the previous Army Chief, General K.S. Thimayya, the Indian Army had developed a habit of winking at the governments impossible demands often impelled by its fanciful public posturing. The posturing itself was an outcome of the trenchant attacks on the government in Parliament by a galaxy of MPs. One particular MP, the young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was particularly eloquent in his quest to put Jawaharlal Nehru on the defensive. He and others like Lohia, Kripalani and Masani would frequently thunder that every inch of sacred Indian territory must be freed from the Chinese and charge the government with a grave dereliction of duty. Nehru finally obliged by

initiating the stupid Forward Policy and resorting to the use of more extravagant language to signal his own determination to the Indian public. A general summed this policy succinctly by writing: we would build a post here and they would build one there and it became a bit of a game, to get there first!

Nehru returned on September 30 and was furious that the Chinese were still not thrown out from the Thagla ridge. He was tired of the Indian Armys refrain of grave repercussions. He shouted at the hapless Army Chief: I dont care if the Chinese came as far as Delhi, they have to be driven out of Thagla. Unlike Gen. Thimayya, Gen. Thapar was possibly a more obedient soldier, probably even less understanding of the governments compulsions and hence took its orders far more literally and seriously than it deserved.

Within the Indian Army, there were serious reservations about the efficacy of the governments orders. The GOC, Northern Command, Lt. Gen Daulat Singh, warned the government that it is imperative that political direction be based on military means. The 33 Corps, which was responsible for the sector, sent its candid opinions on the order. Its Brigadier General Staff, Jagjit Singh Aurora, who later won enduring fame as the liberator of Bangladesh, called up his friend Brigadier D.K. Palit, the then Director of Military Operations, and berated him for issuing such impractical orders. Not only were the Chinese better placed in terms of terrain, men and material, the Indian troops were woefully ill-equipped, illclothed and had to be supplied by mule, trains or airdrops. They were acutely short of ammunition. The objective of evicting the Chinese from Thagla itself was of no strategic or

tactical consequence. The nation clearly needed a greater objective to go to precipitate an unequal war.

Bureaucratic chicanery

The governments reaction was a typical instance of political and bureaucratic chicanery and cunning. It ordered the establishment of the 4 Corps culled out from 33 Corps and appointed Maj. Gen. B.M. Kaul, a Nehru kinsman and armchair general who had never commanded a fighting unit earlier. Gen. Kaul was from the Army Supply Corps and earned his spurs by building barracks near Ambala in record time. He was a creature peculiar to Delhis political hothouse and adept in all the bureaucratic skills that are still in demand there. He had the Prime Ministers ear and thats all that mattered. And so off he went, a dubious soldier seeking dubious battle

and dubious glory that might even propel him to much higher office. Welles Hangen in his book After Nehru Who? profiled B.M. Kaul as a possible successor. The rest is history, a tale of dishonour, defeat and more duplicity about which much has been written.

Fifty years is a long time ago and the memory of 1962 is now faint. But what should cause the nation concern is that the lessons of 1962 still do not seem to have been learnt. If at all anything, the Indian Army is now an even greater and much more misused instrument of public policy. If in 1962, it was a relatively small army with 1930s equipment, it is a million man army in 2012 with 1960s equipment. Let alone the Chinese PLA, almost every terrorist and insurgent in Jammu and Kashmir has better arms and communication gear than our soldiers. Even the Border Security

Force has superior logistics, vestments and small arms. We persist in benchmarking against the Pakistanis when we should be benchmarking against the Chinese, if not the Russians and Americans.

Grandstanding

Governmental decision-making is still characterised by ad hocism and a tendency to grandstand. It was this tendency that cost us so many lives in Kargil when we went into quick battle mostly to assuage public opinion and for domestic political gain, without thinking through the tactics. It is only the unquestioning soldiers of the Indian Army who will still charge like the Light Brigade.

But does anyone of consequence in India, including in the Indian Army, commiserate these days over the

futile and quite unnecessary loss of over 7,000 lives, so much of humiliation as a consequence of so much of foolishness by men holding high offices? In 1962, lyricist Pradeep wrote the now famous song whose first line runs aye mere watan ke logon, zara aankh mey bhar lo paani, jo shaheed hue hain unki, zara yaad karo qurbani . When Lata Mangeshkar sang this to an audience that included Jawaharlal Nehru, it is said that tears flowed from every pair of eyes. The song still has that magical quality, but few now seem to know what train of events caused those poignant words to be written and what emotions put that enduring magic in Latas voice.

If politicians cannot find the time or the attention span to read some of the numerous books and articles written on the subject, they should at least listen to the song and shed a tear

for our fallen warriors. We owe them that much for they have, as Kaifi Azmi wrote in 1964: kar chale hum fida jaan aur tan sathiyon, ab tumhare hawale watan sathiyon !

(Mohan Guruswamy is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. mohanguru@gmail.com)

We seem to have learned nothing as a country from the Indian Armys defeat

and dishonour in 1962 October 13, 2012

English language learning must go hand in hand with multilingualism

WITHIN THE BOARD:English language and literature must be brought into the fold of the literatures and habitat of postcolonial India. PHOTO: M.A. SRIRAM In the classic Odia short story of the late 19th Century called Daka Munshi , Fakir Mohan Senapatis memorable character, Gopal Babu, the English educated postmaster, treats his father Hari Singh as a fool and an imbecile, showering upon him gratuitous English blows for his ignorance of English. It is an iconic tale that is marked by the debate over the English language and its selective appropriation by the emerging bourgeoisie in the colonial State. While education is strongly upheld by the author as a major objective, westernisation, primarily seen propelled through the English

language, is often equated with the colonising agenda of the British.

Colonial tropes

Fakir Mohans dark foreboding about the menace of English, recurrently found in his works, would appear outright apocalyptic in the context of the language scene in the globalised world today. Consider the following statistics: English is used by about 750 million people, only half of whom speak it as a mother tongue. More than half the worlds technical and scientific periodicals are in English; English is the medium for 80 per cent of the information stored in the worlds computers. Three quarters of the worlds mail, telexes and cables are in English. As McCrum and McNeil (1986) state, Whatever the total, English at the end of the 20th Century is more widely scattered, more widely spoken and written than any other

language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language. (Peirce, Bronwyn Norton, 1989).

Sumanyu Satpathys article in The Hindu, Let a hundred tongues be heard (editorial page, September 27, 2012), draws our attention to the baneful dominance of English (and Hindi) at the expense of the Indian languages. In my response, primarily focusing on English, I shall try and map out an alternative scenario to the one Professor Satpathy has outlined.

Demands

I shall, in the first instance, acknowledge the importance of the widespread desire for English in India, Second, I shall argue that this desire, traditionally seen as antagonistic to the interests of indigenous languages

and literatures, need not be so if we were to frame the debate differently, (our postcolonial location offers such a possibility!) and finally, I shall suggest that new techniques and practices must be found urgently to combine English language learning with multilingualism.

The globalisation of the Indian economy in the 1990s seemed to signal the need for a globalised workforce. Academic and ideologue Kancha Illiah notes that since the backward class people of India had no entry to the colonial English world, the new move to teach English in all government schools becomes a welcome one. Illiah disagrees with the upper caste contention that English will destroy the culture of the soil. Logically speaking, he says, the next step would be the abolition of the gap between the prevalent English

medium schools and the government school in terms of both teaching and infrastructure. (Dalit and English, Deccan Herald , September 27, 2012)

New expertise

How can we fulfil the widespread demand for English learning? Could this perhaps be done by the introduction of new variants of English, say of the basic kind that the English critic I.A. Richards had spoken of? Additionally, I would argue that in the given scenario, we must have a national policy for English language learning with matching resources and increased institutional support.

Indian English has come of age, and has been accepted as a legitimate category the world over. Consequently, we must develop our

own expertise suitable to our own conditions. English language and literature must be brought into the fold of the literatures and habitat of postcolonial India. It is here that the teachers of English must address their task in an innovative and professional manner.

Multilingualism

And finally, the question of English and multilingualism: we must develop new paradigms and tools for the teaching of English in India. Instead of an approach that upholds a cordon sanitaire between English and Indian languages, English teaching must not be context neutral. To be effective, it has to take into account factors like learner position, textual implication, assumptions underlying teaching methodology, etc. (Mishra and Murali Krishna, 2007).This could also be furthered by critical bilingualism:

the ability to not just speak two languages but to be conscious of the socio-cultural, political and ideological contexts in which the Languages operate (Walsh, 1991).

Conclusion

What then is our vision of the global English of the brave new world? It is to indigenise and localise the teaching of English language and literatures even as we aspire to play our legitimate role in the global turf. English language learning in India must go hand in hand with multilingualism. By such actions, we will be sensitive to plurality in the classroom situation and relate to the varied language/caste/class backgrounds the students come from. This must be as true of our cultural politics as of English teaching in the classroom.

(Sachidananda Mohanty is professor and former head, Department of English, University of Hyderabad.) October 15, 2012

In defence of the politician


Harbans Mukhias article in TheHindu , Making it for the people again (OpEd, October 13, 2012), has endorsed the campaign against graft led by Arvind Kejriwal as a movement that has the potential to make democracy once again for the people.

He argues that the movement highlights the growing crisis of legitimacy of the whole system of governance and squarely restrengthens democracy and the democratic content of public institutions by making them more

accountable, in tilting them in favour of the 99 per cent. While the article correctly notes that what is legal, like the Emergency of 1975, need not necessarily be legitimate, it assumes, however, that what is popular is unambiguously democratic and singular.

The problem with campaigns such Anna Hazares and now Mr. Kejriwals is that they assume a seamless continuity between social campaigns and political mobilisation. If one is serious about democracy, one cannot afford to overlook the consequences of these two different plains and their implications for democracy. While it is easy to correlate popular will with social activism against corruption, the moment it enters political/electoral politics the dynamics undergo dramatic transformation. It is relatively easy to generate consent and consensus in the social domain

especially against issues such as corruption; every individual and social group can afford to concede the point that corruption is illegitimate, morally degrading and undermines democracy. However, politics has to do with concrete interests and wider social, and cultural beliefs and prejudices of individuals and social groups and does not have the privilege to pick and choose issues. This is where democracy is a far more complex game than what we are given to believe by Mr. Kejriwal, and academics like Prof. Mukhia and Yogendra Yadav.

If democracy is all about articulating and representing popular will, then one needs to be equally concerned about the content of that popular will. When the popular is not democratic in content but popular amounts to democracy, how does one work towards reconciliation between the

two? The recent spate of events in Haryana, and the pronouncements by the leaders of the Khap panchayats, which found resonance in the views expressed by the Ministers in the Congress government, explains the inherent conflict within democratic processes. In this case what is popular and by the people is not necessarily democratic in content, but political leaders are expected to represent the popular will, and to that extent were legitimate in expressing the popular beliefs of the constituency they represent. Politics, therefore, unlike social campaigns, cannot have the privilege of selectively picking and choosing issues that are perceived to be unproblematically and morally correct, and can generate consensus.

Nature of democracy

Politics includes everything from the public to the private, and the nature

of democracy is decided by how politicians respond and negotiate between multiple issues that are often conflicting. It is for this reason that we expect politicians to have an opinion on everything. It is pertinent while talking of democracy to remember that not only is the popular not necessarily democratic but the people are not necessarily united but have conflicting interests. Politics and democracy are essentially an art of generating a consensus-majority amidst these conflicting interests, on the one hand, and negotiating and representing social views that are uneven sometimes democratic but many a time regressive on the other.

Corruption, therefore, has roots not merely in the economy but also in the nature of the polity and society itself. It is in negotiating with what could sometimes be irreconcilable differences between social groups,

and in accommodating interests that cannot be easily accommodated, that corruption finds its place in what we often refer to as populist and corrupt measures, including offering money, liquor, and other imaginative and sometimes unimaginable sops.

Again, while Prof. Mukhia is right in pointing out that we have adopted an economic model that impoverished the majority, even here it has impoverished different social groups to different extents and in different ways. The ways the tribals of Chhattisgarh have got displaced and impoverished is markedly different from the way the backward classes have been treated. People always perceive inequality not in absolute terms but in relative terms, and it is for this reason that even the urban middle classes feel they have had it rough with economic reforms. Democracy heightens and brings into

play these nuances and uneven impacts that are not imagined but real. How to tilt the popular will in favour of the poorest and the most deprived keeping these open, conflicting and representative mechanisms in place is the real challenge and the most effective way of making it for the people again and not in generating a moralistic critique of politics and politicians holding a moral high ground for generating consensus through social activism and around selectively and prudently chosen issues.

Undermining this difference, far from strengthening democracy will actually undermine it. Imagining a simplistic consensus for the people has always given rise to authoritarian regimes, which is what partially explains why all campaigns against graft, even in the past, have tilted towards right-wing modes of mobilisation, including that

led by Jayaprakash Narayan. Politicians of the day need to be critiqued and held accountable but the avocation of politics and the creative image and role of a politician in a democracy need to be avowedly defended.

(Ajay Gudavarthy is at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.) October 15, 2012

A liability for our nuclear plans


In the context of the ongoing debate on Kudankulam, the question of nuclear liability has come to the fore again. As a person who engaged with this question almost 50 years ago, I would like to throw some light on the subject. As a lead member of the Indian team negotiating the Tarapur

contract with the Americans, it fell to my remit to address this matter. General Electric and Westinghouse, who were the serious bidders, explained to us the practice in the United States whereby the owneroperator of the plant assumed the nuclear liability risk. The operator indemnified suppliers of equipment because the financial risk of a nuclear accident, though very remote, could not be reasonably factored in by the chain of suppliers involved in a nuclear project, in their contracts. The owner-operators of nuclear power plant, who were mostly investorowned utilities, were asked to take insurance up to a limit available in the market. The U.S government assumed liability beyond the insurable limit up to another limit set under the PriceAnderson Act, passed by the U.S Congress. The limit set under the Price-Anderson Act has been increased progressively from time to time.

Protection in the contract

General Electric, chosen to build Tarapur, wanted an indemnity protection similar to what it was extended in the U.S. Initially, it insisted that there should be legislative protection. On the Indian side, we felt it was premature to pass a law as we were then thinking of building only a small number of nuclear power units to demonstrate the economic feasibility of nuclear power under Indian conditions. We persuaded G.E. that a protection in the contract, which was in any case approved by the Government of India, would be adequate. When an agreement with the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) was drawn up for building the first two reactors at Rajasthan, a similar indemnity protection was extended to AECL and its suppliers. Since India took up

building nuclear power units of its own design, indemnity protection has been a part of nearly all supply contracts.

One may ask, in hindsight, if India did the right thing in extending such nuclear liability protection in the past. If we had not done so, we would not have been able to import our first two reactors from the U.S., nor the second pair from Canada. There is no doubt whatever that India gained a great deal by building the Tarapur reactors with U.S. collaboration. India learnt early the problems of operating nuclear power units in our grid systems and also in managing a complex nuclear installation with our own engineers and technicians. In the case of cooperation with Canada, India was able to get the basic knowhow of the pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWR). Thereafter, we progressed on our own to design

and build 16 PHWRs in seven locations. Now we are building four 700 megawatt PHWRs of our own design. Four more will follow soon and possibly another four will also be built, thus making a total of 12 PHWRs of 700MW each. Therefore, early cooperation with Canada helped us to become a designer and builder of nuclear power plants.

Let us look at the way an owneroperator manages a nuclear power plant. Even where a plant has been supplied by a single entity under a turnkey contract, many vendors, often running into thousands, would have supplied many components. During operation, the operator incorporates many changes and modifications to improve the reliability, ease of operation and efficiency. They may or may not have been done in full consultation with the original suppliers of equipment. Chances that

sub-suppliers would be consulted on changes are very small. Moreover, nuclear power plants operate for 50 years or longer; our first two Tarapur reactors have in fact completed 43 years. So on objective grounds, the operating entity being solely responsible for nuclear liability is grounded in sound reason. There are about 430 reactors operating in 30 countries the world over. All of them, without exception, have been built under arrangements where nuclear liability flows to the operator. The operator, depending on the political system prevailing in the country, covers the risk to the extent possible by insurance. The government of the country takes up the liability beyond the insurance limit; it may also define an upper limit to its own liability, through legislation. Under the Convention on Supplementary Compensation, a multilateral convention, participating states can

also share the liability risk to a defined extent.

India took up the task of drafting a nuclear liability Act whose primary purpose was to ensure prompt compensation to any member of the public who might have suffered injury, death or damage to property due to a nuclear accident. Much of the debate in India took place in the context of the Bhopal tragedy, which was also being considered by Parliament at the same time. In this atmosphere, the legislation that was passed included a right of recourse for the operator against the supplier in case of latent or patent defects or wilful misconduct. We must remember that for our own projects based on our own technology, we depend on a large number of Indian suppliers. The value of these contracts may run into several hundred crores or maybe as low as a crore or less. These suppliers

cannot be expected to cover themselves for large value risks of long duration. Therefore, under the rules to be drafted, the Department of Atomic Energy has tried to inject realism by defining the duration of the risk to be the product liability period or five years, whichever is less, and a cap on the risk being the value of the contract. We find that long-standing suppliers of DAE and NPCIL are unhappy to go along even with these caps, as they feel that carrying large contingent liabilities on their books hurts their credit ratings. They, therefore, prefer to move to nonnuclear activities, even though they have acquired valuable nuclear expertise on work done earlier.

In much of the debate in the media and in our courts, it is often suggested that the nuclear liability legislation has been written to suit foreign MNCs.

The fact is that after 2008, when India signed nuclear cooperation agreements with the U.S, France and Russia (and some other countries), not even one contract for the import of reactors has been signed to date. With France, discussions have covered technical and safety issues, and commercial discussions are in progress now. In the case of the U.S., the discussions are still on technical and safety issues. Only in the case of Russia was an agreement signed in 2008 for Units 3 and 4 at Kudankulam, essentially as an extension of the agreement covering Units 1 and 2. Prices have been derived for Units 3 and 4 using the earlier price as a basis. The loan agreement also is based on the earlier pattern.

The 2008 agreement

The 2008 agreement provides that India would extend indemnity

protection for Units 3 and 4, on the same lines as Units 1 and 2. I had in fact negotiated the earlier agreement in 1988, in keeping with the prevailing international practice. If India wants the Units 3 and 4 agreement to comply with its 2010 liability legislation, there is a danger that the entire 2008 agreement may be reopened.

Some of our legal experts point out that the law of the land is Polluter Pays. This may be so on paper. In practice, all our thermal power stations are putting out carbon dioxide, which is a pollutant. Are they paying for that? Similarly, all our cities are putting out sewage and solid waste to the environment. Again, sadly, they are not paying for that. In fact nuclear energy poses the least pollution hazard; there is no fly ash, acid rain, or carbon dioxide released into the environment. Units 1 and 2 of

Kudankulam were built under a contract entered into in 1988 (and renewed in 1998), before our liability legislation of 2010. We are finding great difficulty in moving ahead with Indian designed and built projects due to some of the provisions of the 2010 legislation. We must arrive at a solution whereby electric power generation growth is assisted to the maximum extent possible, while ensuring that the safety of the people is in no way adversely impacted. With regards to Kudankulam 1 and 2, the delay of one year has already pushed up the tariff from Rs. 3 per KWH to Rs 3.25 per KWH. Any further delay will similarly increase the cost of power to the consumers.

(M.R. Srinivasan is a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission)

Tough provisions in the 2010 law are

making it difficult to move ahead even

with projects designed and built by India October 15, 2012

Time to play the Gender-card


GILLARDS BLAST:Her speech will resonate around the world, including in India as it is rare for a woman leader to make such a forthright speech on the subject. An October 12, 2012 picture of Julia Gillard (left) and Tony Abbott (right). PHOTO: REUTERS Julia Gillard, Australias first female Prime Minister, recently launched a

blistering attack on sexism and misogyny in Parliament, that should serve as mandatory viewing by all our parliamentarians prior to her forthcoming visit to India. Her epic speech was provoked by Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition, where she told him to look in the mirror if he wanted to know what sexism and misogyny looked like.

The speech was delivered in the course of a debate about whether the Speaker of the House should resign over the publication of a series of sexist and misogynistic texts that he allegedly sent to one of his staffers. The Opposition leader argued that the failure to sack the Speaker would make Gillard complicit in the sexism. The Prime Minister promptly turned to Abbott and declared, I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. She then proceeded to skewer Abbott,

detailing a litany of sexist and misogynistic remarks that had been made by him more generally as well as specifically against the Prime Minister. The list ranged from Abbotts questioning whether it was a bad thing that men have more power than women to his characterisation of Australian women as housewives who are busy with ironing. The Prime Minister accused him of catcalling her in Parliament as well as for standing next to a sign at an anticarbon tax rally that stated Ditch the Witch.

Familial factor

Gillards speech has been hailed as a pivotal moment not only in Australian politics, but also globally as it is rare for a woman leader to make such a forthright speech on sexism in public life. There is often a fear that she will be accused of playing the gender

card despite the statistics in most liberal democracies that gender is a significant issue at the level of both leadership in political life as well as in the workplace. Gillards blast resonates around the world, including in India. While in India, and a number of South Asian countries, there have been any number of women leaders starting most obviously with Indira Gandhi, there has not been any memorable moment when a woman leader has dared to challenge the sexism that is so deeply embedded in the body politics of this region. In order to combat sexism, it is important to name it as that also provides space then to do something about it.

The presence and role of women leaders within the South Asian context have often been cast in familial terms. That is, she derives her credibility as a dutiful daughter of a great fallen

leader, as in the case of both Indira Gandhi or Benazir Bhutto, or as maternal and nurturing, a label sometimes used to describe Sonia Gandhi, or as a dutiful wife carrying out her martyred husbands legacy as in the case of both Sonia Gandhi and Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, who was the first female head of government, and widow of assassinated Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike.

Rife but invisible

Sexism in Indian politics is rife, but it remains invisible as long as womens public roles remain cast in familial terms. Creating space outside of these familial frameworks becomes both a challenge as well as necessary pursuit if the glass ceiling is ever going to be broken. Even in Australia, stepping outside of the familial fold encourages attacks on successful women and

their being viewed with considerable suspicion. Prime Minister Gillard is not married and has a live-in partner. Nor does she have children, which prompted a conservative parliamentarian to describe her as deliberately barren. She challenges what are the accepted norms of gender in her society, which is why her speech resonates for women globally and has gone viral on the internet.

In India, it remains a sad fact that women constitute only 11 per cent of the current Lok Sabha. The Womens Reservation Bill remains a stalled project. Representation of women in the central cabinet over the decades has remained appallingly low, with women put in charge of soft ministries reinforcing Abbotts view that men by philosophy or temperament are more adapted to exercise authority or to issue

command. Implicit is the assumption that the citizenry should feel more secure in the commanding hands of men. Women continue to be poorly represented in the judiciary, where the Supreme Court has seen only a handful of women justices in its entire history. In the public and private sectors alike, women remain underrepresented. It is essential for women leaders to use their positions of power to speak out on sexism and misogyny and not to ignore it any longer. It is a part of responsible leadership and accountability. While it may be a precarious line to tread, and such comments can be put down as being un-statesmen like, they can serve to validate the experiences of many women in public positions who have experienced sexist comments or misogyny in the course of doing their jobs. The forthcoming visit of the Australian Prime Minister is to be welcomed for many obvious economic and trade reasons. But it should also

be welcomed in light of the honest, eloquent and resolute oration, to the attention that she has brought to the issue of sexism in political life. Hopefully her words will reverberate in the Lok Sabha and encourage a more confident and determined stand against the incorrigible sexism that women in leadership and politics continue to face.

(Ratna Kapur is Global Professor of Law, Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat.)

Coverage of the forthcoming visit of the Australian Prime Minister to India must also focus on the attention that she has brought to the issue of sexism in political life October 16, 2012

Prince who danced with the devil


Cambodias Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who died of heart failure on Monday in Beijing at the age of 89, acted for 71 of those years as though he were centre stage of a world drama.

And he was, in a manner of speaking, because that dramas larger themes included the developing worlds struggle against western colonialism, the great ideological clash of the Cold War between the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union, the rise of non-alignment, and the emergence of China and India as global powers.

For many of those years, Sihanouk shared that stage with other Asian players such as Jawaharlal Nehru,

Zhou Enlai of China, U Thant of Burma, and Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong of Vietnam.

He was the last of those leaders, and his death ends an era that began in 1941 when Sihanouk became Cambodias monarch and featured figures whose legacies endure on the world stage. For Nehru, there was the legacy of non-alignment, of a belief that science and technology would help ameliorate the poverty of his nation and other former colonies. Zhou, as Prime Minister, helped temper the ideological excesses of Mao Zedong, and his legacy of moderation later found its way into the playbooks of Chinas contemporary stewards who embraced Communism and capitalism simultaneously.

U Thant is remembered for his attempts albeit ultimately

ineffective to keep the United Nations from being unduly influenced by the U.S. and the USSR. Ho Chi Minh and Pham Van Dong, then of North Vietnam, fought the good fight against French colonialism, and then extended that fight against the American presence in South Vietnam. But what was Sihanouks legacy? After he became monarch again in the 1970s, and up till his death, he floundered in the shadow of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who dominated the Cambodian scene (and still does). Compared to his contemporaries, then, Sihanouk was not a major actor but a bit player in regional politics who seemed out of his depth on international issues.

To a large extent, that was inevitable. Cambodias population is 14 million nowhere near that of the nations of his peers. He is still resented by many in Cambodia for his support of Pol Pot,

the despot who ordered the death of nearly two million Cambodians. Sihanouk paid a heavy price personally for his Faustian pact: Pol Pots Khmer Rouge regime killed five of his children and 14 grandchildren, even as Sihanouk remained as figurehead. In view of this ugly collaboration, its mystifying that virtually every home in Cambodia today displays a picture of Sihanouk. His picture, in fact, had adorned Cambodian homes since 1941, when he was selected by France to be a titular but powerless king to succeed his uncle, Sisowath Monivong. The French were in for a surprise: Sihanouk, in an early display of the ability to shift allegiances that was to characterise his relationship with the United States and China, started clamouring for independence. The French granted it in 1953 around the same that their rule in neighbouring Vietnam was being challenged by Ho Chi Minh, and just

after Sihanouk returned to Cambodia from a self-imposed exile in Thailand.

Skilful player

Sihanouk devoted the years after independence to economic development of his resource-rich but impoverished country. But economics was almost always trumped by politics. He skilfully played the French against the United States; from the latter, Cambodia received nearly $100 million in supplies and equipment, in addition to support for Sihanouks military. (That aid was discontinued in 1963, as the Vietnam War began to heat up, drawing Cambodia into a larger Indochina conflict that pitted the U.S. against indigenous Communist forces.)

Sihanouk said during that time that he did not wish Cambodia to be allied

with either the Americans or North Vietnam. Privately he averred that he was, in effect, practicing the nonalignment preached by his friend Nehru. Publicly, he held that Cambodias French traditions were incompatible with U.S. military doctrine and world perspective, which was to contain Communism.

Even as Sihanouk became increasingly uneasy about North Vietnams military ambitions, Cambodia was being wracked by internal agitation, with reports of bloodshed caused by Sihanouks forces as they fought guerrillas affiliated to the antimonarchist Khmer Serei. (Much later, Western scholars said that during this period Sihanouk reportedly executed more than 1,000 men and women suspected of being members of Khmer Serei.)

Clearly, the domestic situation in Cambodia was becoming untenable. Sihanouk accused South Vietnam of making a land grab in border regions. He established diplomatic relations with China in the belief that it would influence North Vietnam to be less hostile to him.

In early 1970, Sihanouk was deposed by Lon Nol, who immediately pardoned some 500 political prisoners said to be affiliated with Khmer Serei. Sihanouk always held that Khmer Serei was secretly backed by the U.S. (which, of course, it was). Just before he was deposed, Sihanouk had gone to France for medical treatment; in his absence, the Cambodian Parliament voted to kick him out, and the U.S.backed Lon Nol who had been Prime Minister became the countrys new leader, who promised a new era of economic growth and political stability.

But peace and prosperity scarcely came to Cambodia. The region was too engulfed by conflict to permit that. The U.S. expanded its bombing of North Vietnam to include Cambodia on the grounds that it was being used as a conduit for Communist guerrillas headed toward South Vietnam. From his exile in Beijing, meanwhile, Sihanouk announced the formation of Front Uni National du Kampuchea more popularly known as FUNK that would serve as an umbrella group for organisations opposed to Lon Nol. Lon Nol himself had been deposed by Pol Pot, a former schoolteacher whom Sihanouk had befriended and encouraged to create a guerrilla unit known as Khmer Rouge. The ultraMaoist Khmer Rouge asked Sihanouk to return to his homeland in 1975 and made him a figurehead king.

The Khmer Rouge regime collapsed in 1979. Sihanouk, perhaps out of misguided loyalty, continued to support the guerrillas as they were driven into the dense forests of Cambodia and rallied against the Communists of Vietnam and the new Cambodian regime of Heng Samrin and, later, Hun Sen.

Despite such tension, Sihanouk continued to lead a personally varied life, producing movies and composing music. But finally he had had enough, and in January 2004, he went into exile in North Korea and then moved to Beijing. Wracked by cancer, diabetes and heart disease, Sihanouks last years were not pleasant. But those who visited him said that he was always cheerful.

(Pranay Gupte is a veteran journalist and author. E-mail: pranaygupte@gmail.com )

His alliance with the murderous Khmer Rouge and shifting allegiances on the global stage left

a troubled legacy for Cambodia October 16, 2012

Bridge over the river Cauvery


The Cauvery dispute has taken a turn for the worse. Confrontationism prevails, and we seem to be witnessing a return to the spirit of 1992, though not to violence of that order. What has gone wrong? This article is an analysis and an appeal.

Let us go back to 2007 and imagine that on the announcement of the

Final Order of the Cauvery Tribunal, the disputant States did not file Special Leave Petitions (SLPs) before the Supreme Court but only submitted clarificatory petitions to the Tribunal. Alternatively, let us imagine that the States did file SLPs before the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court refused to admit the SLPs on the ground that there was a bar on the jurisdiction of the courts. In either case, the Tribunal would have proceeded to deal with the clarificatory petitions and might have given a Further Report in about six to eight months or perhaps a year, i.e., by early 2008. The Final Order and the Further Report would then have been gazetted. The Cauvery Management Board mandated by the Tribunal would have been set up and might have become fully operational by mid2008. Thus, there would have been a machinery to deal with situations of drought and distress like the present one. Unfortunately, that imaginary

scenario did not happen. The Tribunal was (or claimed to be) unable to deal with the clarificatory petitions because the status of the Final Order itself was plunged into uncertainty when the States went to the Supreme Court with SLPs.

The Supreme Court did two inexplicable things. First, it admitted the SLPs forthwith without any explicit consideration of the bar on the jurisdiction of the courts provided for by Article 262 and incorporated in the Inter-State Water Disputes Act 1956; and second, having admitted the SLPs in 2007, it has unaccountably failed to take them up for hearing in five years time.

Shortage sharing

Turning to the Tribunals Final Order, it failed to include a method or

formula to deal with the crucial problem that lies at the heart of the Cauvery dispute, namely shortagesharing in distress years. In years of normal rainfall, more water flows from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu than the quantum laid down by the Interim Order or the Final Order. The problem of how much should flow from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu becomes contentious only in years of low flows. This should have been central to the Tribunals Final Order, but the Tribunal offered only generalities, and left it to the proposed Cauvery Management Board to deal with the problem. Further, was it really necessary for the Tribunal to take the view that the SLPs to the Supreme Court made it impossible for it to proceed with the clarificatory petitions? Why could it not have heard those petitions and given a Further Report? The view that the pendency of the SLPs prevented it

from functioning was a self-limiting one taken by the Tribunal itself.

Legal positions

The State governments and the State politicians have contributed to the impasse by adopting strident, confrontationist postures and rhetoric instead of conciliatory, solutionseeking approaches; and by rousing and not calming popular anger. Both State governments must be blamed for this; neither has made any effort to see the others case.

It needs to be added that both governments have taken untenable legal positions. Tamil Nadu started by taking its stand on long-established prior use, which is a relevant but not a clinching argument. However, being a lower riparian it had eventually to accept realistically that it must learn

to manage with reduced flows. Karnataka persists in holding fast implicitly to the assumed primacy of upper riparian rights, for which there is no basis in national or international law. There is no meeting point between those two divergent positions.

The institutional arrangements are not working. The Tribunals Award has no sanctity. The Cauvery River Authority, presided over by the Prime Minister, is hardly an Authority. The only institution with any authority seems to be the Supreme Court. Tamil Nadu keeps knocking at its doors, and now Karnataka is reported to be filing a review petition. One hopes that this process will reach finality soon.

The Central government has proved to be a weak and ineffective force, unable or unwilling to play its constitutional and statutory roles.

What can one say about the propriety of Central Cabinet Ministers becoming partisan advocates and implicitly questioning their Prime Ministers decision?

In such situations, one would expect intellectuals and persons of goodwill in either State to give wise counsel to the people, remove misperceptions, calm down excitement and anger, and promote goodwill and understanding. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be much evidence of any such thing happening.

One does not know what advice the eminent Counsel representing Tamil Nadu and Karnataka give privately to their respective clients; that is confidential and privileged communication. One can only hope that they do advise their clients

against holding legally wrong and indefensible positions, against being confrontationist, and against defying judicial and constitutional authorities.

Cauvery family

The one positive element in this entire unedifying spectacle of State against State and people against people has been the Cauvery Family a loose and informal group of Cauvery basin farmers from both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu which is now known internationally. Unfortunately, while it has brought about remarkable mutual understanding and goodwill between the farmers of the two States, it has not so far been able in spite of several meetings to arrive at an agreed settlement, including a distress-sharing formula, which can be presented to the Tribunal and the Supreme Court. Even the understanding and goodwill achieved

by it is under threat in the present situation of conflict and hostility between the two States, at both official and non-official levels.

In the light of that analysis, what needs to be done? I would submit the following set of appeals for consideration:

1. To the Cauvery Family: Please continue and accelerate your work, promote understanding and goodwill and correct misperceptions in either State, and come up quickly with (a) minor adjustments to make the Tribunals award acceptable to both States, and (b) a formula or method for shortage-sharing in years of low flows.

2. To the Tribunal: Regardless of the pendency of the SLPs in the Supreme Court, please take up the clarificatory

petitions and issue a Further Report as soon as possible.

3. To the Central government: In order to enable the Tribunal to function, please fill the vacancies in it immediately.

4. To the disputant State governments: Please withdraw your SLPs from the Supreme Court and press the Tribunal for a Further Report.

5. To the Honble Supreme Court: Please take up the SLPs for hearing without further loss of time (assuming that the SLPs are not withdrawn).

6. To the eminent Counsel representing the two State governments: Please consider advising your respective clients against

adopting legally or constitutionally untenable positions, or going against the spirit of federalism, or taking confrontationist public postures that make the dispute even more intractable than it is already, or persisting in endless litigation. I hope that this appeal will not be considered improper.

7. To the intellectuals and respected public personalities in either State: Please clarify issues, correct misperceptions and errors of understanding, and promote goodwill and friendly relations between the two neighbouring States, both at the governmental and at the people-topeople levels.

8. To the media (print, TV): Please adhere scrupulously to fair and objective reporting norms, and play your part in promoting goodwill and understanding.

It will be noticed that the appeal to the Cauvery Family has been put first in this list of recommendations. That is an indication of the importance that I attach to that impressive initiative. It must not be allowed to fail. It is true that any understanding or formula arrived at by the Cauvery Family will have no legal force; it will have to be placed before the State governments. However, if the farmers of the two States are able to present an agreed formulation, it will surely carry great weight.

(Ramaswamy R. Iyer is a former Secretary, Water Resources, Government of India.)

Amid the grandstanding by political leaders, it is the Basin farmers who must take

the lead in removing misperceptions about the Tribunals award October 16, 2012

A forgotten Hamzanama
The extradition of Abu Hamza alMasri, the convicted rabble-rouser, to the United States after a marathon legal battle one of the longest catand-mouse games in Britains legal history has caused an outbreak of celebration and backslapping. Even Prime Minister David Cameron couldnt resist a shot at grandstanding: he was absolutely delighted that Hamza is now out of this country.

Like the rest of the public, Im sick to the back teeth of people who come here, threaten our country, who stay

at vast expense to the taxpayer and we can't get rid of them, he said.

Facts were, of course, not allowed to spoil a good party. So nobody bothered to ask how come a one-time bouncer in a London nightclub and mocked by Sunday papers as a cartoon character got to assume such Frankenstein proportions in the first place?

Egyptian-born Hamza (real name: Mustafa Kamel Mustafa) and his Jordanian mentor Abu Qatada, who Britain is still struggling to deport, are typical beneficiaries of the British security agencies covert links with foreign extremists Kashmiri and Sikh separatists, LTTE activists, boys from the Muslim Brotherhood, militants from Yemen and Chechnya who flocked to Britain in the 1980s and 1990s claiming to flee persecution at home.

Despite the serious allegations of terrorism against them in their own countries they were allowed to settle in Britain and carry on their activities. Some, such as Qatada, had even been convicted back home and were the subject of extradition requests. The British Governments softly-softly approach to them has been put down to a covert covenant of security in which fugitive foreign extremists were left alone in exchange for an assurance they would not harm Britains national security.

Post-9/11

So, the security agencies looked the other way when Hamza and his goons forcibly seized control of a major London mosque the Finsbury Park mosque in north London founded by Muslim immigrants from India from

its traditionally moderate management and turned it into a base for his militant activities targeting enemies abroad.

Muslim protests were summarily dismissed. MI5 famously described him as just a noisy trouble-maker. It was to emerge later that Hamza had been using the mosque not just to brainwash vulnerable young Muslims but to raise funds to send potential jihadis to terror training camps abroad.

In 2003, when the police finally raided the mosque as part of the post-9/11 crackdown on terror, they found a large cache of arms, forged passports and a pile of inflammatory material. Hamza seemed to have been running a terror cell under the very noses of Scotland Yard and MI5. Even after the mosque was temporarily closed, Hamza continued to lead prayers and

preach inflammatory sermons on the streets outside in full view of the security forces. It took another year before he was jailed for inciting hatred and soliciting murder. By then, he had already been implicated in a series of alleged terror acts in Yemen and the U.S. the reason why the Americans wanted him.

There is a cynical view that security agencies may have continued to ignore Hamza had he not started to bite the very hand that had been feeding him i.e. not launched a campaign against the British state a move interpreted as a breach of the supposed covenant of security. The joke is that the last straw was his description of Britain as a toilet.

Agents claim

Reda Hassaine, a left-wing Algerian journalist who was drawn into the shadowy world of intelligence in the wake of the civil war in his country and later worked as an undercover agent at the Finsbury Park mosque, is on record as saying that Scotland Yard and MI5 ignored his detailed reports about Hamza and Qatadas activities. In newspaper interviews, he has said he personally saw them collect thousands of pounds from their congregations to pay for young British Muslims to go abroad to train as suicide bombers. He calls it astounding that the duo who between them offered the most ugly face of Islamist extremism in Britain were left untouched for more than a decade after he blew the whistle on them.

I told MI5 and Scotland Yard time and again how Qatada and his followers laugh behind their backs.

They hate Britain and want to turn this country into an Islamic state, he said.

Hassaine was attacked and beaten up by Qatadas men after they found out he was spying on him. He wants to sue MI5 for 1million for dropping him like a hot stone and failing in its duty of care to him after his cover was blown. More significant, however, is why he thinks MI5 dumped him: because it did not want to prosecute Qatada.

I gave the British authorities everything they could possibly want about Abu Qatada and for what? he asked in a newspaper interview.

Hamza and Qatada are not the only ones with whom MI5 had cosy links. Two other alleged extremists Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul

Bary extradited to the U.S. along with Hamza have also revealed their contacts with the agency. One analyst wrote that the two men benefited from the reluctance of the British authorities to clamp down on the growing number of Islamist extremists who were using London as a base to advocate violent confrontation with the West.

Khaled al-Fawwazs lawyer told the High Court during a hearing on his appeal against extradition that he was in regular contact with MI5 in the mid1990s. He said when his client asked MI5 if he would be breaking the law by remaining in contact with Osama bin Laden after his 1996 declaration of war on the U.S., he was told it would be okay so long as the two did not discuss any criminal conduct.

The cloak-and-dagger world of spooks has always fascinated writers and

film-makers. British novelist Ian McEwans new book, Sweet Tooth , is a brilliant spoof on the workings of MI5 the cynical ploys it gets up to, the ruses it is capable of pulling off, the webs of deceit it can weave and how for all the bluster and swagger it can often get it disastrously wrong. While McEwans story is about MI5s Cold War shenanigans, perhaps one day someone would offer a literary take on its Hamza project. Suggested title: Sour Taste .

The Egyptian-born London imam who was extradited to the U.S. on terrorism charges was a typical beneficiary of the covert links between its intelligence agencies and foreign extremists October 17, 2012

Iraq suffers from its chaotic foreign policy


Iraq has no national foreign policy. For the past decade, a lack of unity among its ruling elite has failed to allow for a unified approach towards its international relations one that could have protected the country from becoming a playground for outside powers, with disastrous consequences for its political and security stability.

The consequences are particularly telling today. The conflict in neighbouring Syria has placed Iraq in a pivotal position: sitting between Iran and Syria, but also bordering Turkey, it can either help bring the end of the Assad regime or complicate those efforts.

Since the withdrawal of U.S. troops last year, Iraq has certainly become more assertive internationally under the leadership of its Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, who has just purchased Russian arms worth $4.2bn, in defiance of the United States and to the concern of the countrys Kurds, who fear these weapons could one day be used against them.

Yet, despite this assertiveness, Iraqs ability to influence regional events, as well as preserve its own national interests, is hampered by its fractious political process, presided over by comparably powerful factions and figures.

On the one hand, Iraq has become a conduit through which Bashar alAssads regime is propped up and supplied with weapons, funds and in some cases fighters, most notably

from Iran. Like Iran, Maliki and his Iranian-backed Shia allies fear the threat a Sunni Islamist-controlled Syria across the border would pose.

Iraq is thus a crucial vanguard in the effort to maintain Assads rule over Syria and central to the proxy war unfolding in Syria between the Sunni axis of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states ranged against the Shia axis of Iran, Iraq and Hezbollah.

Yet, because divisions in the region are reflected within Iraq itself, the countrys pro-Assad camp, despite doing its utmost to sustain the regime, find their efforts undermined by Sunni Arab rivals in Iraq (backed by Turkey and the Arab world) and the Kurds, whose region to the north has the benefit of a mix of cordial relations with the U.S., Turkey and Iran, largely because of the extensive autonomy it

has and the stability it has enjoyed in contrast to the rest of Iraq.

Role of regional government

For example, much to the dismay of Maliki, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) continues to train anti-Assad Syrian Kurdish fighters, who are being trained by elite Peshmerga forces to prepare Syrian Kurds for the power vacuum in Syria as well as the stabilisation of an autonomous Syrian Kurdish region.

The KRG controls an important border crossing point alongside the Syrian border, through which it has been able to penetrate Syrian territory.

So important was the crossing point that Maliki, possibly under Tehrans orders, recently sent units from the

Iraqi army to take control of the crossing, threatening to spark a KurdArab civil war. In the end, they were stopped by KRG forces and forced to retreat after a standoff. Similarly, Iraqs Sunni-dominated northern provinces along the Syrian border have sent fighters to Syria to join the uprising, essentially returning the favour to brethren who supported and formed a key part of the post2003 Iraqi insurgency.

The problem is not entirely of Iraqs making. Lack of security, exacerbated by neighbours who allowed a flood of terrorists to enter Iraq in the aftermath of the war and in some cases orchestrated the attacks themselves, has stunted the states progress toward maturity. This has allowed regional neighbours to exploit the country for its important strategic location, rich resources and ethnosectarian diversity, to the detriment of

Iraqs broader national interests and efforts to develop a coherent foreign policy. Yet, todays broader instability in the region means that these tougher neighbours find their own politics and stability tested as the war of attrition in Syria continues and the region deals with the aftershocks of the Arab Spring upheavals.

Turkey has for long conducted crossborder attacks on suspected PKK targets in Iraqs Kurdistan region. However, in addition to the irony of defending its own territory from Syrian shelling aimed at Syrian rebel targets, the emergence of an autonomous Kurdistan in Syria means that Turkey must reconsider its policies toward its restive Kurdish population as well as the PKK, the rebel group it has fought over the past 40 years and whose sister organisation, the PYD, has

uncontested control Kurdish region.

over

Syrias

Iraqs elites have had one particularly unified foreign policy approach. Apart from a minority of the countrys political contenders, Iraqs major parties mostly recognise the importance of a strategic relationship with Iran, which has its tentacles rooted in almost every political faction. Efforts have been made to move away from this, but placating Iranian interests remains at the forefront of foreign policymaking.

The Iraqi state, a decade on since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, continues to linger between the moribund and the non-existent. Iraq could be leveraging its strategic location and rich resources by maximising on the vulnerability of its regional neighbours in what has emerged as a critical geopolitical proxy war.

But the decentralised and conflicting foreign policy ambitions of Iraqs autonomous political actors has allowed for the countrys broader national interests to be sacrificed, as they look toward the Syria conflict as an opportunity to weaken opponents within Iraq, rather than beyond. (Ranj Alaaldin is a Middle East political and security risk analyst.) Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2012

Baghdads ability to influence regional events, particularly in neighbouring Syria,

is hampered by its fractious political process October 17, 2012

Make the right diagnosis

I read with mounting concern the Prime Ministers statement lamenting this mindless atmosphere of negativity and pessimism that is sought to be created over corruption which, he holds can do us no good.

My worry, though, is different. For one, this is not our good PMs style. Off target he is often; but acerbic? No, not that. If he has changed his style then our worry is limited. If, on the other hand, some able (sic) speech writer gave him this tautological hyperbole to declaim, and the PM simply did so, then our concern takes altogether a different hue and that shrill epitaph mindless boomerangs to the declaimer, which is not at all a happy consequence.

Political atmosphere

Our countrys polity, Mr. Prime Minister, is comatose and has taken the economy with it. I urge you, therefore, to get Raghuram Rajan, (who features in the same issue of Foreign Affairs ) to do an executive brief of Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and Jame Robinson. The former is an economist like you; his co-author Robinson, a political scientist. They believe that economic development hinges on a single factor: a countrys political institutions, in other words the political atmosphere.

In the context of the prevailing atmosphere, therefore, I invite the PM to reflect on my theory of reverse jurisprudence. Unlike our inherited philosophy of innocent until proven guilty, in public life,

unfortunately, if accused, you will be treated as guilty until you prove yourself as innocent. Decades ago, I had shared this very thought when Bofors had invaded our polity; I am greatly saddened that I have to do so again.

Amongst several I now choose three factors as the prime contributors to our political travails generating this atmosphere, about which the PM complains. But first, Mr. Prime Minister, who has fouled our political atmosphere? The corrupters or the complainants? Then this novel political experiment inflicted by you and your mentor, which is really a mindless diarchy of shallow convenience. It is this that today pushes the country towards negativity and pessimism. As for that rather despairing conclusion it can do us no good, I agree. But the

cure, too, is not so difficult, provided you diagnose as I do.

The other factor wounding our polity is your disconnect with the people of India. Why try and deceive us by these claims of being a resident of Assam? Such prestidigitations rob the head of the government of moral authority, without which you cannot govern.

And equally critical is your neglect of Parliament, as also the institutions that it spawns. Of course, as advocated, the government must have its way, but the opposition, too must have its say. Find an equilibrium. It is your duty, not the oppositions. You are the head of the government.

Which takes us to our second great concern of the day: the state of our economy. There, above all, I make

one request. Please, do not mislead us, the economically uneducated, about what constitutes reform. It is not administrative correctives that can ape the real.

I share, therefore, four concerns on the economic front.

Firstly, the economic philosophy of the Congress party: to what do you now really subscribe? At the 1931 Karachi session of the Indian National Congress, the socialist pattern of development was declared as the goal for India. This lay at the core of Jawaharlal Nehrus economic philosophy. Then, after independence came the 1955 Avadi meet of the Congress and a reiteration of the socialistic pattern of development. A year later, the Indian Parliament too adopted this as official policy. Thereafter, we skip many decades, also many intervening events until the

word socialist got adhesived to the Preamble of the Indian Constitution, in 1976. This was a by-product of that fraudulent Emergency of 1975.

But I move too fast because in between, as the swan-song of our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, came the amendment of the Congress partys constitution, in 1964, in Bhubhaneswar. This is where Nehru suffered a stroke and within four months, his life was over. I was then a soldier, on a tank gunnery training course in the U.K. and learnt of his death, with great sadness, from an Englishman. But this dip into memory is not central to our enquiry. The amended Congress constitution stated: The object of the Indian National Congress is the establishment of a socialist state This is now but memory, despite the addition, at Panditjis suggestion, of a footnote: The (above) amendments

demand a more vigorous party organisation at every level for achieving socialistic state, etc.

We come then to 1991, and late Premier Narasimha Raos coalition government. He fathered the reform process, of which Dr. Manmohan Singh has now become the stepfather claiming sole credit for it. The wags were right, after all: paternity can always be disputed.

Of these reforms, fiscal management of our economy was the obvious and correct priority. No marks for guessing whose profligacy caused it in the first instance. But it was in 1991 that the country moved away from the Congress partys socialistic pattern to a free market economy. Of this transition I am reminded of two aspects. The first was the then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singhs justification amongst others,

on the grounds that the economy then had developed structural faults (which it had); and had become a rentier economy (or words to that effect), generating unacceptable levels of crony capitalism. The other was the great scandal of the Banking and Securities Fraud. I remember, as a member of that parliamentary enquiry, having then commented that freer the markets the stronger must be our regulatory mechanisms; and that free markets are not any excuse for a free for all.

Therefore what, after years of reform, is our state now? No more crony capitalism? Or an abundance of it? You now say reforms have increased corruption. Why? Also please concede that central to this reform process was a moving away of the government from its stranglehold on the economic vitality of the country.

Other aspects of getting the state off the citizens back and vacating space for releasing the citizens energies mandated freedom from the thraldom of petty bureaucracy; drastically reducing discretionary powers of the political and other executives; of sane and non-expropriatory tax policy administered with patent honesty; of encouraging domestic savings, thus domestic investment; and freeing our banking from the States mismanagement; plus attending to our farmers. If we do this, money will flood India as investible foreign direct investment, not hot funds chasing short-term gains. Getting the state out of the business it has no business to be in is true reform; selling assets of the state, for correcting consequences of fiscal profligacy, through misdirected disinvestment is not.

Nazi policy

In any event, as commented upon by Sydney Merlin in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the word privatisation first entered academic literature to describe the Nazi partys policy at facilitating the accumulation of private fortunes by its members This has disturbing similarity with UPA-II policies; witness the proliferation: 2G, Commonwealth G, Coal G and so on. This amounts to stripping the assets of the state, not a healthy moving away of the state from superfluous and inefficient nonactivity.

One more caution about reform. This is not a synonym for unbridled consumerism of a variety which is alien to our cultural ethos. It is distressing in the extreme to witness today, as Avishek Parin has observed, that we purchase to consume incessantly, even as (what we

purchase) consumes us back with its spectacular superfluity. We must not become a consumerist society; Walmart, Sears-Roebuck and their ilk are not our yardstick of economic progress. There are values beyond money and markets, too.

I conclude with a request. Do please heed our cautions, dear Prime Minister; a government, any government, based on this variety of diarchical concentration of power; unchecked privilege and usurpation (destruction?) of our Republic can simply not do good, or survive. I pray that in the process, it would not inflict such wounds on dear India as would take long to heal. For, surely, you recognise that India, despite venerating daridra narayan suffers a wide chasm separating our poor from the rich.

(The writer is Member of Parliament.)

Reform is not a synonym for unbridled consumerism. There are values beyond money and markets too October 17, 2012

Between thin air and firm ground


Two days before Kerala emerged in a blaze of publicity, a parliament was convened under a shamiana outside the Palakkad District Collectorate, bringing environmentalists together with members of the GAIL Gas Pipeline Victims Forum. The pipeline, to be laid by the Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL), is routed through 18 panchayats and two municipalities in Palakkad district. The victims at the parliament on September 11, 2012,

were landowners who had yielded right of use to the government.

The landowners object to two aspects of the project: lack of safety assurances and the way GAIL acquired right of use over their land.

The 900-km pipeline will pipe imported natural gas through Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. It will bring Kerala into the national gas grid, according to K.P. Ramesh, Deputy General ManagerConstruction, who is in charge of pipeline construction in the three States. The stated cost is Rs.3,240 crore. Eventually, tenders will be floated for distribution of gas for cooking.

Tanker explosion

Ramesh says GAIL has sought exemption from the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act 2008 on the grounds that the pipeline is a public utility. Over the past few years, local and State governments have given permission for the pipeline to cut through rivers and roads. But some private landowners were caught unawares when they received notice to state their objections to the right of use within 21 days. The sudden appearance of lorries unloading pipes in Ongallur, Palakkad district, riled many landowners, especially since it coincided with the August 27 explosion of an LPG gas tanker in Chala, near Kannur. The explosion burned vegetation, houses and people up to half a kilometre away. It killed 20.

Following the explosion, residents along the pipeline route became

fixated on its dangers. An explosion can cause 100 per cent fatalities up to a distance of 680 m, according to a study of the Jamnagar-Bhopal gas pipeline by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (a Government of India body). On the other hand, natural gas pipelines have been delivering cooking gas for years in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and other crowded cities. Ramesh says accidents have to be understood in proportion, as with plane crashes and road accidents.

The project, he says, is regulated by the Oil Industry Safety Directorate (under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas), which will conduct precommissioning inspections and audits. It will also be audited for safety by the Chief Controller of Explosives and third parties such as the British Safety Council, apart from the internal auditor.

In Kerala the pipeline runs through farms, villages and towns in seven districts. The GAIL Gas Pipeline Victims Forum was formed in January 2012, as affected landowners began to receive notices. Says Narayanan Nambeesan, Chairman of the Forum, Data is still being collected on how much land will be lost, the number of houses, the residents affected, the schools, churches, temples, hospitals in the route of the pipeline.

Protest often looks like Keralas most active industry, but these landowners are not speaking in rehearsed phrases. Mangalam from Mannur, Palakkad district, voiced her fears at the parliament. We have five cents of land [just over 2,000 square feet] and an ordinary house, she said. We havent plastered it. Its just my husband and me and our two girls. Her voice became wobbly. We dont

want money. We are just frightened something will happen to what we have built with such hardship.

Hearings

For the right of use to lay a pipeline, the landowner is paid compensation at 10 per cent of the governmentdeclared fair price. He continues to pay taxes on the land, and after the pipeline is in place he can cultivate only bananas, vegetables and paddy. He cannot plant trees or dig a well. He cannot erect a fence, compound wall or building. He may sell it, provided he can find a buyer under those conditions.

The first set of hearings, during which landowners can state their objections and grievances, is over, says Ramesh. However, V. Subramanian, Convener of the Forum for Palakkad district,

insists hearings were not held in all the affected areas. He also says that most landowners at the hearing he attended felt the officials were there to persuade them to cooperate, not hear them out. Indeed, K.V. Vasudevan, Additional District Magistrate, described them as conciliation meetings. Subramanian has a copy of a Malayalam flyer that GAIL distributed to residents of Pappadi village. It assures them the pipes will be thick enough to resist rupture, that if houses are demolished owners will be compensated, and that GAIL is not acquiring their land, only exerting right of use. It also promises them cheaper cooking gas.

Safety can indeed be ensured in populated areas by increasing the pipe thickness and by burying it 2 m deep rather than 1.2 m, according to a senior executive of a company who agreed to be identified only as an

expert in the subject of gas pipelines. But the supply to rural consumers is not commercially viable, he says. They *GAIL+ are not in the business of charity.

Farmers will, therefore, lose paddy land and residential land so that gas can be supplied to urban consumers. For Lakshmi Ammal, 78, thats an old story. She and her husband shifted to Akathethara 40 years ago after they lost their four acres in Malampuzha panchayat to the Fisheries Department. Their land, now divided among three sons and three daughters, is planted thick with paddy, coconut, banana, ginger and cheera (greens). The pipeline will leave unusable strips in all their portions, her youngest son says. Weve wandered from place to place and now Im old, says Lakshmi Ammal. Cant I have a quiet place to drink my kanji ?

At an anti-GAIL march on October 3 in Malappuram, close to Kozhikode, the rhetoric was more explosive than in Palakkad three weeks earlier. On and off stage, people spoke of blocking roads and stopping lorries from unloading pipes. They spoke of Bhagat Singh and over my dead body.

Deadlines

K.P. Ramesh says the Government of Kerala has given the project blanket permission for clearances, but the Environment Ministry at the Centre has not cleared the Kerala stretch, according to official central government sources who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject in view of looming deadlines. The pipeline was to be commissioned in March 2013. The Petroleum and Natural Gas

Regulatory Board has turned up the heat, warning that it will scrap the Kerala venture if it does not take off by this December.

The next few weeks will be crucial. If the Prime Minister succeeds in establishing the National Investment Board to speed through infrastructure projects, overruling the ministries that were designed to regulate them, the GAIL gas pipeline may well find a bypass route to completion.

A natural gas pipeline project has raised safety fears and concerns over restrictions on property rights of those in its path October 18, 2012

Pushing boundaries for justice

When the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) held its latest hearing in New York city between October 6 to 7, it once again affirmed that peace was impossible without justice. A civil society initiative, this tribunal documents and exposes the violations of international human rights law against the Palestinian people. Similar sessions have already been held in Barcelona, Cape Town and London on issues ranging from corporate complicity in the Israeli Occupation to the crime of apartheid.

Though the recommendations of the Russell Tribunal are not legally binding on the parties to the conflict, they have played an important role in laying out the context and documenting the evidence of violations of international law by the Israeli government. With a jury of eminent persons such as Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a Nobel Peace

Laureate, Alice Walker, American author and poet, and Yasmin Sooka of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now with the Foundation for Human Rights, the findings of such a tribunal will be hard to ignore. This high profile Peoples Tribunal on Palestine has also initiated a discussion regarding the role played by such unofficial or civil society processes not only to document and highlight serious human rights violations but also provide a larger basis for action against such crimes.

In South Asia

South Asia, particularly India has a tradition of official commissions of inquiry, generally constituted to investigate communal violence, massacres and other forms of human rights violations. The reports of these commissions of inquiries have,

however, repeatedly failed to break away from the legal formalism associated with investigating and reporting crimes by quasi-judicial bodies. Whether it is the Bhagalpur Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate the communal riots of 1989 or the Tewary Commission to establish the violations that occurred during the Nellie massacre in Assam in 1983, the government has avoided implementing even the mild recommendations of these official commissions. The government has not even made these reports public for a debate. Besides, these official commissions of inquiry do not systematically record the testimonies of victims or their families and their demands in their final reports.

With the recent developments in transitional justice and international law, there is growing recognition that victims and their testimonies must be

central while ensuring justice for gross human rights violations. Article 68 (3) of the Rome Statute states that the Court shall permit the views and concerns of victims to be presented and considered at stages of the proceedings. This is why peoples tribunals become important.

Unlike governmental commissions of inquiries, these civil society initiatives have broadened the investigation and documentation processes by drawing from mass movements as well as incorporating testimonies of victims of human rights violations themselves. Moreover, they present final reports that not only reflect the legal violations but also the political or social contexts that may have allowed for these violations to happen. For instance, in conflict situations, torture or extrajudicial killings forms a part of the human rights discourse. However, the impact of militarisation, unfair

land acquisition or the psychosocial aspects may not get adequate attention. A peoples tribunal or civil society-led processes can contribute to understanding the enabling courses for human rights violations and thus assist in formulating an effective mechanism for redressal.

Even though these civil society initiatives cannot hold perpetrators accountable, they create an exhaustive documentation that can be used for subsequent legal processes. In conflict or post-conflict situations, civil society tribunals add to the existing documentation on violations of civil political rights such as torture, collective punishment, or enforced disappearances, particularly when no genuine official commissions are involved in investigation and documentation. Given the lack of accountability for serious crimes in Sri Lanka, in January 2010, a Permanent

Peoples Tribunal conducted investigations, heard first-hand testimonies, and held that the Sri Lankan government was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly during the last stages of the war against the LTTE in 2009.

Communal violence

Moreover, peoples tribunals can also help to disseminate the truth about injustice or ongoing human rights violations at the time. The Iraq war and the subsequent World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) organised by the international civil society is an example. The moral indictment by the WTI through its public hearings helped to substantiate the claims of gross violations and culpability of the American coalition forces in Iraq.

In situations of communal violence, peoples tribunals can push the boundaries of human rights advocacy and justice. In fact, a Concerned Citizens Tribunal was formed even after the Gujarat pogrom, which documented exhaustively transgressions of international human rights and criminal law committed during the riots in 2002, and made concrete proposals to provide justice to the victims and prevent a recurrence of such violence.

Mode of resistance

Finally, a peoples tribunal can also act as a mode of organised or symbolic resistance. A recent tribunal on fabricated cases was organised in September 2012 by an umbrella of civil society groups in Delhi. It heard testimonies from victims and family members of persons from Manipur, Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh

and other States besides lawyers, journalists and activists who have been incarcerated for years without sufficient evidence of their involvement. Peoples tribunals or oral histories can be effective in bringing out these issues and confronting them headlong in situations where State-led official processes are either unwilling or unable to do so.

The history of peoples tribunals in India and elsewhere is replete with interesting and important ways in which they have contributed to advancing agendas of truth, justice and reparations.

When the RToP convened in New York to hear the testimonies of violations of international law and the rights of the Palestinians, its resonance was felt across the Atlantic to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. If Israel or its

supporters, especially the United States, choose to take note of the recommendations this time around, it will provide essential guidance to move forward towards a permanent peace.

At home, the government too needs to engage rather than ignore the legal and policy recommendations of peoples tribunals and the civil society processes because it would only help to deepen and institutionalise justice. For these peoples tribunals are in some ways the upholder of our collective consciousness.

(Warisha Farasat, a lawyer, is currently working with the Centre of Equity Studies on issues of justice and reparations for victims of communal violence in India.)

Peoples tribunals are more effective than official commissions of inquiry in

the investigation of rights violations and in formulating effective redress mechanisms October 18, 2012

Alarm bells ring for RTI


A recent Supreme Court judgment and Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs openly expressed views in favour of privacy have raised concerns that attempts are being made to dilute the spirit of the RTI Act and limit its use. Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, the RTIs movements leading lights, share their worries with Vidya Subrahmaniam .

Seven years after its enactment, has the RTI Act even partially fulfilled its

objectives? Has it been empowering for the common people?

The RTI Act has had, and continues to have a significant positive impact on democratic governance in India. This is because the Act has been owned by the common people. The prime mover of the Act is the ordinary person.

The Act has, in one stroke, delegitimised the norms of secrecy imposed by a colonial and feudal past with its continued legacy in independent India. Equally significant has been its capacity to empower those who use it by changing power relationships between the ruling classes and citizens. Today it has become the most important means by which ordinary people can fight corruption and the arbitrary use of power. While there are obvious shortcomings in the Act and its implementation a fundamental

transformation from a culture of secrecy to one of complete openness is still a long way off nevertheless, in its short history, this Act has built the basic architecture of a transparent regime.

What are your views on the Prime Ministers speech at the recent convention of the Central Information Commission?

The RTI Act needs all the support it can get. Yet, it is unfortunate that the Prime Minister repeatedly speaks of irritants when these have been addressed and allayed several times. At a time when its detractors are looking for helpful signals to dilute the Act, we had hoped Dr. Singh would celebrate the Act as an achievement and promise stronger implementation towards building a transparent and accountable democracy.

Dr. Singh raised three specific issues: frivolous and vexatious applications, privacy, and exclusion of publicprivate partnerships (PPP).

While the Prime Minister did mention in passing that the RTI has strengthened democracy, the focus was on areas of concern. There have been attempts, primarily through amendments to rules, to keep out frivolous and vexatious applications. Since neither can be objectively defined, any such amendment will result in huge rejection, affecting mostly the poor and the marginalised. This issue has been repeatedly deliberated. The Department of Personnel and Training dropped the amendment move after its website was flooded by adverse comments.

The National Advisory Committee too has rejected the amendments. However, the Prime Minister continues to raise the same issue over and over.

The law has adequate provisions under Section 8 to reject applications that are not legitimate and Dr. Singh does not qualify why the exemption for privacy under section 8(1) J is inadequate to protect personal privacy.

Nor has the government laid out those cases in which personal privacy has been infringed because of the RTI Act. The Prime Minister referred to Justice A.P. Shahs report on privacy. However, it is our information that this report has recommended that any privacy law should be in harmony with, and subject to, the RTI regime.

As for excluding the PPPs, this is absolutely unacceptable, as more and more essential public services are being outsourced to the private sector. In such cases, they should be held to a higher standard of transparency as the private sector can easily escape the accountability provisions of the public sector. In fact, many ordinary people see the PPP as a ploy by the government to escape its responsibilities and accountability.

The Supreme Court, in a recent judgment, has mandated two Commissioner-Information Commission benches with the additional caveat that one commissioner must be a judge or judicial officer.

There is no doubt that there were many legitimate complaints about the functioning of the Information Commissions and Commissioners. The

appointment process is certainly opaque and non-consultative. To begin with, the government has a 2-1 majority in the selection committee which enables it to push through a nominee of its choice. Second, while the spirit of the Act calls for commissioners across sectors, the majority of commissioners appointed have been former bureaucrats. The RTI campaign had suggested that a nominee of the Chief Justice be on the appointment committee along with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

The RTI law does not prescribe a process of appointment. Nor has the government framed rules to address the issue. So, it would have been of great value if the court had rectified the defect by suggesting or mandating a transparent and consultative process. This was a great opportunity before the court. But the solution it

has offered only creates more problems. A big problem with the commissions was mounting pendency and delays. This judgment will have the immediate effect of at least doubling this delay. Another problem was the absence of standards and norms and the judgment has failed to address that lacuna.

Our information is that work has halted in a number of State commissions.

Work has halted in many commissions, including in the Information Commission of Rajasthan, where we live. If the Supreme Courts orders are followed, all commissions may have to stop work. The Central government has filed a review petition, and the State governments are disinclined to begin the process of selecting individuals with judicial backgrounds. Chaos prevails.

If the commissions become courts of sorts, isnt there a danger that the common RTI user will be forced to hire lawyers to argue his case which will defeat the purpose of the Act? Wont the stress on judicial adjudication complicate the process of information delivery which must be quick in order to be effective?

The commission was designed to be citizen-friendly. Judicial procedures will usher in a judicial mindset. While this may be very important in administering justice in criminal or civil law, it may defeat the quick and effective delivery of information. The custodians of information who can hire lawyers will benefit, and the ordinary will be placed at a disadvantage.

Dr. Singhs speech and the court judgment have the privacy concern in common. The running thread in the judgment is that privacy must be protected. It emphasises the exceptions under section 8 of the Act and says only a judicially-trained mind can decide when information ought not be disclosed. So, from a situation of not getting enough information are we going towards a situation where information will be routinely denied?

That is certainly a very troubling aspect of this judgment. The emphasis seems to be on the exemptions. The RTI Act has a clear presumption towards disclosure, and even the exemptions contain a proviso of a public interest override.

Actually only about five per cent of the cases go up in appeal to the commissions. But, the commissions set the tone for compliance. This

judgment could pass a message not only to information commissioners, but also to Public Information Officers that a more liberal use of the exemptions under the Act would be permissible.

vidya.s@thehindu.co.in October 18, 2012

Follow the money, find the leader


The point is not whether Barack Obama wins re-election as President. The point is not whether Mitt Romney can win. The point is that you cant dream of contesting without a billion dollars. That figure merely ensures you can run, not win. Especially if the other guy can spend even more. All but the tiniest sliver of the elite stands priced out of the game. A democracy neatly labelled in another context, by

economist Joseph Stiglitz, as: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

The two main candidates, their parties and outside money will likely splurge $2.5 billion by the time the campaign fog clears in November. Throw in spending on the Congressional races, says the Centre for Responsive Politics (CRP) the countrys foremost pollspending tracker and the total would close in on $6 billion. (Thats roughly Rs. 32,000 crore. A sum on which you could run the mid-day meal programme for 120 million Indian school children for three years).

Less than one per cent

If we take it that the two presidential campaigns burn equal sums of money, the campaign that wins will have spent over $1.25 billion, all sources included. Say Mr. Romney triumphs

and hopes to run again in 2016. Just raising the same war chest means hed have to, on average, secure over $850,000 every day of his four-year presidency. That leaves you little time for anything else other than pushing bills your funders want. Ask Mr. Obama. When it comes to the polls, then, its a fraction of that 1 per cent that calls the shots. (Allowing for variances in scale and form, it sounds a lot like the way Indian elections are or will be going).

Being hostage to money power is no myth. As Dave Lindorff points out in CounterPunch.org , the biggest contributors to the Obama campaign in 2008 were mostly financial companies. Apart from other big corporations. These included Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup, who gave him close to $2.5 million via Political Action Committees (PACs).

Another $1.5 million came from two more big banks, UBS and Morgan Stanley, as well as General Electric, which less than a year later bought a bank. GE did that in order to gorge on the governments bailout with billions of rescue dollars from public money.

Mr. Obama repaid those debts, Mr. Lindorff points out. Among other things, he made Tim Geithner his Treasury Secretary. Mr. Geithner, as head of the New York Federal Reserve branch during the Bush era, had ignored the derivatives scandals that brought on the financial crash. Mr. Obama also made Lawrence Summers his top economic adviser. The same Summers who as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, had pushed for the deregulation of derivatives, and for allowing banks to merge with investment banks. There

were other such jobs for the boys, too. Yet, this time around, Mr. Romney has collected more Wall Street money than Mr. Obama.

It might appear that direct spending in 2012 by both presidential campaigns is less than it was in 2008 though not by much. But thats if you look only at what the candidates or parties are doing. Theres also big spending by Super PACs. These are groups that can raise unlimited amounts. Technically, they are not allowed to coordinate their advertising with the candidates. In truth, they act as de facto adjuncts to the campaigns. And after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that threw out the rules on independent expenditures by corporations directly, theres a lot more money flowing.

There are no limits on the sums that Super PACs can raise from

corporations or others. Nor on how much they spend to support or defeat a candidate. (They cannot directly fund a candidate. And must submit details of their donors to the Federal Election Commission).

The CRP reckons that as of October 16: 935 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of over $433 million. And total independent expenditures of close to $375 million in the 2012 cycle.

Most of the millions spent by outside groups went into television advertising, says the New York Times . In Iowa alone, the two campaigns and linked independent groups have run more than 100,000 ads to win the states six electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the pundits are swooning over the energy of the second

Obama-Romney debate. This one was more spontaneous. Whats more, it had a town hall format. Well, yes, if town hall audiences can be handpicked by organisers. And if the town hall audience actually had to have a rehearsal with the moderators (as they did here). Thats apart from submitting all their questions for advance scrutiny not quite a town hall practice.

Once again, neither man mentioned the word inequality at any point in the debate. That is the issue that sparked the Occupy movement in countless towns across the country last year. It is an issue that worries several leading economists in the U.S. It is one that reflects in recent IRS data. It shows up in the Census data on poverty out barely a month ago.

But the word was as taboo as corporate crime. The only mention

of it came from a questioner who wanted to know why women were paid 72 per cent of what men received for the same work. The closest Mr. Obama ever came near it was when he charged Mr. Romney with wanting folks at the top to play by a different set of rules. Neither mentioned the word even in his replies to the question.

Compensation on Wall Street rose by four per cent last year to $60 billion, says the New York Times . Higher than in any year except 2007 and 2008. And the average pay packet of securities industry employees in New York state was $362,950, up 16.6 % over the last two years. Meanwhile, about 25 million people who want full-time jobs cant find them. The number of those on food stamps is at record levels. And 50 million people suffer food insecurity in a nation where, as economist Paul Buchheit

points out: The 10 richest Americans made enough money last year to feed every hungry person on earth for a year.

There were a couple of other things in the debate that should interest Indians. Both candidates agonised over petrol prices speaking to an audience that clearly felt the need to regulate those prices. Even more interesting: In the time given to the energy crisis, Mr. Obama never once mentioned nuclear energy as an option. He did not even club it under clean energy. (Though hes happy with India holding to that belief). Wind, solar and bio-fuels was his mantra. Mr. Romney mentioned nuclear once but gave it no special status.

Setting up debates

And now more on who sets up the debates and how they are run. Last week, we ran Ralph Naders point about the secret debate contract negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns that controls the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), the campaigns corporate offspring. Their grip on the process is stifling, dishonest and total. It wasnt always that way. Till 1987, the debates were sponsored, for over a decade, by the League of Women Voters.

Why did that change? Why did the League, which ran an independent show, lose control over the debates? Why did it feel compelled to walk out, or was it forced out of them, in 1987? I asked the League and received a prompt emailed reply from Betsy Gardner, its Administrative Coordinator. The party campaigns were exerting huge pressures and

control. Whether in choosing a debate format, in picking a moderator, or on the questions to be asked. The League also sent us the 1987 statement of its then President, Nancy M. Neuman. That was the period of the George H.W. Bush-Michael Dukakis race.

Ms Neumans statement of the time says, among other things: Between themselves, the campaigns had determined what the television cameras could take pictures of. They had determined how they would select those who would pose questions to their candidates They had determined that they would pack the hall with their supporters. And they had determined the format. The campaigns agreement was a closeddoor masterpiece. The agreement was a done deal, they told us. We were supposed to sign it and agree to all of its conditions. If we did not, we were told we would lose the debate In

Winston-Salem, they went so far as to insist on reviewing the moderators opening comments.

It turned out that the League had two choices. We could sign their closed-door agreement and hope the event would rise above their manipulations. Or we could refuse to lend our trusted name to this charade.

The League of Women Voters is announcing today that we have no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

The victorious campaign in the U.S. presidential elections will have spent over $1.25 billion by November and the winner will spend his term repaying his funders in many ways

October 19, 2012

Clear the smog around climate change information


The threat of climate change has galvanised the Indian government and industry into action. Every corporate worth its salt is proclaiming that it is doing something to fight climate change. A cursory glance at corporate web pages gives us an idea of its importance. The Tata page says: The Tata group is facing up to the challenge of climate change and making it integral to its processes, while Infosys claims that it is one of the top 25 performers in Caring for Climate Initiative. On the sustainability review page of Mahindra, climate change is linked to productivity and competitiveness. The Prime Ministers Council on Climate Change created the National Action Plan on Climate Change which has

eight missions, everything from energy to agriculture to water and Himalayan ecosystems. Besides the initiatives of the private sector and the government are those undertaken by non-governmental organisations.

The study

So it is interesting to note the results of a study done in India on Climate Change in November-December 2011 and released in August this year. Titled Climate Change in the Indian Mind, the survey sampled 4,031 adults from rural and urban India with the intention of investigating the current state of public climate change awareness, beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behaviours, as well as public observations of changes in local weather and climate patterns and self- reported vulnerability to extreme weather events .

The survey found that only seven per cent of those sampled knew a lot about global warming while 41 per cent said they had never heard of it or replied I dont know. In a follow-up question, when respondents were given a brief explanation of what global warming was, 72 per cent of the total believed it was happening.

A basic question that arises from this data is the role of information dissemination and concomitantly engaging with the population in fighting climate change. And if there is any information sharing, its quality needs to be ascertained for its retention ability in public mind space.

Does leaving the population in the dark have a feudal basis? Not divulging information is one way of retaining power and maintaining

status quo; it also prevents panic among the populace. Could the lack of information on climate change in the public domain be giving the private sector and the government carte blanche to proceed with their plans unhindered increasing the number of coal-fired thermal power plants, pushing sales of sport utility vehicles and diesel cars, etc? Fifty-six per cent of the respondents pointed the finger at human activities when asked about the cause of global warming. This figure indicates that people make the connection between current energy production systems, consumption choices and climate change.

Another interesting number from this survey is about the percentage of 70 per cent the number of respondents favouring a national programme to inform citizens about global warming. This desire to be informed points to an information

deficit between those working on the issue and the rest of the public. It also questions whether it is enough to switch off lights globally in an annual event or sign petitions or use energy efficient lighting without understanding the rationale. There seems to be a distinct lack of causal evidence put forth in the public arena, indicated by respondents acknowledging changes in weather patterns but unable to define it as a scientific phenomena that threatens the planet. Causal evidence can greatly impact consumer behaviour and also force governments to change their policies and companies to manufacture products that have less impact on the climate.

Government and industry need to make note of the findings of the survey because 41 per cent of the respondents felt that the government should be doing more to address

global warming. To another question on when India should reduce emissions, 38 per cent were in favour of India unilaterally reducing emissions without waiting for other countries. This suggests that Indians want the government to play a more proactive and positive role in the climate negotiations.

Other findings

To another question on whether they were worried about climate change, 20 per cent claimed to be very worried while 41 per cent said they were somewhat worried. This worry can then be directed towards creating more informed consumption choices. Products come with a list of ingredients for consumers to make a purchase decision. There are already vegetarian, child-friendly and chlorofluorocarbon free labels that are prominently displayed on many

products. Giving information on a products impact on the climate is another avenue to share information on climate change and making the consumer responsible for his choice.

The recently approved draft 12th Five Year Plan should not only take cognisance of this report but also a relook at its emphasis on climate adaptation. The numbers speak for themselves; people recognise the human causes of climate change and want the government to act more proactively.

Can the fight against climate change be successful without involving or informing the larger public? The challenge that lies before us is manifold; first is understanding the predicament of being in the same boat, then appreciating the fact that many hands make light work and, finally, finding ways to involve

everyone. Putting out more information in the public domain gives more people an opportunity to act collectively to save themselves a fact that the government should recognise.

(Samir Nazareth is an environmental and socio-economic issue commentator. Email: samimazareth@hotmail.com )

A survey reveals that people think government efforts at spreading the word about global warming are inadequate October 19, 2012

For hardy political ethic, a battle of survival

WHEELS WITHIN DEALS:Usually, the media unearths scams and political parties act as amplifiers. Now, civil society activists are taking the lead. (From left) Robert Vadra and Ranjan Bhattacharya.PHOTOS: PTI, ASHOK VAHIE

The civil society formation, India Against Corruption, is a beast most find stunning and enthralling, yet few are able to define its precise nature. The confusion over IACs personality arises from the many simultaneous roles its activists have arrogated for themselves. They are Indias muckrakers, exposing the underbelly of its politics and ferociously working as a democracy watchdog, considered the defining features of the media. They have usurped the role of the Opposition parties, albeit outside Parliament, providing the government no quarter and demanding accountability for its action and

inaction. In fact, over the past two years, they have become the Opposition, launching a popular movement, setting the countrys agenda, and dominating the national consciousness all traditionally considered attributes of a party/coalition waiting to replace the one in power.

Some of their multiple roles are in conflict with each other. They are the Opposition, yet wish to have no truck with political parties classified under the same rubric. In firing salvos against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari, they have simultaneously positioned themselves as both anti-ruling and antiOpposition parties. They are now set to enter the electoral arena, believing they must acquire at least a modicum of power to curb its rampant misuse. Yet the wish to acquire power hasnt deterred them from becoming the

nations conscience-keepers, not just through rhetoric but through audacious exposs that reveal the unconscionable side of Indian politics and the weakening of many institutions.

Vadra and DLF

Take IACs sensational revelation about the business deals between Robert Vadra and real estate giant DLF. It was in March 2011 that The Economic Times featured a story on Vadras entry into the realty business, in a tone bordering on laudatory, yet revealing most of the aspects IACs Arvind Kejriwal disclosed earlier this month. For more than a year, the media ignored the story. They then blithely splashed Kejriwals charges in banner headlines, even as they desisted from providing the precise context of the deal, until first The Hindu and then Business Standard

explained its intricacies. Did we journalists keep silent because of our fear of a possible blowback from the powerful? Or was our silence a consequence of our middle class prejudices which dissuaded us from railing against one of the Gandhis? Do we court silence over allegations of corruption against other politicians, say, Laloo Prasad Yadav, whose wealth was inquired into because of the lavish wedding he held for his daughter?

The medias reluctance to investigate the Vadra-DLF deals prompted political scientist Yogendra Yadav, now a member of IAC, to write that the political class is shaken and stirred because Prashant Bhushan and Kejriwal have violated a code of silence observed in Delhis corridors of power. To bolster his argument, he added, During Atal Bihari Vajpayees regime, everyone knew about (his

foster son-in-law) Ranjan Bhattacharyas role in the PMO, or the late Pramod Mahajans multifaceted adventures. Yet neither the media nor the then opposition spoke about it in public.

Centaur hotels

Outlook magazine , where I worked from July 2000 to February 2012, did feature a story on the complicity between big business and Vajpayees Prime Ministers Office (PMO), but was silenced through raids on its proprietor. In 2005, a year after the ouster of Vajpayees National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from power, journalist Rajesh Ramachandran worked over three months to establish a link between Bhattacharya and the companies to which two Centaur Hotels in Mumbai were sold. The story had been cleared as a cover, but a day before the

magazine was to go to the press, it was summarily pulled out. The editorin-chief displayed ample candour in disclosing to senior editors, of whom I was one, that the story had been withdrawn at the proprietors behest.

Ramachandran handed over the Outlook cover story to journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Prashant Bhushan and CPI (M) MP Dipankar Mukherjee, who as the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Civil Aviation, under the jurisdiction of which Centaur Hotels fell, had then recommended a Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) inquiry into the Centaur Hotel deals. The details of the deals were disclosed by the trio at a press conference on July 27, 2005 in Delhi. You would have thought the ruling Congress party, perpetually sniping at the BJP, couldnt possible forsake the

opportunity to weaken its principal rival.

But the trios press conference didnt set the Yamuna ablaze. The nation now knows why. Congress leader Digvijay Singh declared this week, We dont target people who are not in politics. This is ethicsFor example, Ranjan Bhattacharya was not in politics but he was living with Vajpayee. Have we ever said a word about Ranjan? When told the Congress perhaps didnt have evidence against him, Singh replied, Dont ask me that, we have enough evidencebut we would not (raise it).

The consensus among politicians not to target each others kith and kin is bewildering, particularly as families dominate our democracy and their progeny often deploy parental power to amass wealth. The political class

has its own hierarchy, at the top of which are perched a clutch of families, protected from investigations by media barons, editors and even political rivals. This is precisely why the Opposition parties relinquished the chance of developing the details reported in The Economic Times to pillory the Congress in Parliament. It is into this vacuum that IAC has stepped, turning on its head what had been traditionally the process through which issues are brought into the public domain. Usually, the media unearths scams implicating the dispensation in power; political parties then raise them in Parliament, as also outside it, demanding probes. Precisely the opposite seems to be happening now civil society activists raise issues of corruption and the media and political parties follow it. From initiating a movement to adopt a Jan Lokpal Bill, an issue pending for decades, to making a series of revelations implicating

political bigwigs, IAC appears, as of now, to straddle the entire opposition space.

No wonder then, IAC has also become the nations conscience-keeper, a role normally performed by those outside the matrix of electoral politics. Like them, IAC activists seek to reform the nature of the political class and its ethos, in the process inventing a new political idiom. In a country witnessing an expansion of the urban middle class, to which most IAC activists belong, they seem to have opened an avenue for its most robust participation. They have, inadvertently or otherwise, discovered a new method of building a political party, the direction in which IAC is decisively headed. They are entering the electoral arena not through just rhetoric and promises but through political action that displays their intent and resolve to

extricate India from the cesspool of corruption.

It is said the best advertisement for any publication is the story it publishes. You can now say that the best advertisement for an emerging party is to repeatedly expose, in the full glare of the media spotlight, the sheer hollowness of the existing political class.

(Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist. Email: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com )

India Against Corruption has broken the unwritten code that politicians will not target each others kin, and in doing so has taken over the role traditional Opposition and media should be playing

October 19, 2012

Rage that cannot be wished away


Two trends were visible in the rage in the Muslim world against America and other western countries over the antiIslam film: the hostile, often violent, outbursts will continue; and, the degree of violence is inversely proportional to the state of democracy in a country.

There are enough extremists on both sides to keep the pot boiling. The supply of suicide bombers and militants on the Muslim side seems inexhaustible. On the other hand, the ranks of what the International Herald Tribune calls the hatemongering fanatics in the United States seem to be swelling.

Historical animosity

Thomas Friedman, in his column in the IHT of 21 September, argues that Arabs and Muslims, who hate the West for the anti-Muslim venom, do not say a word against anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda spewed in their countries. He is right, but his argument is in the nature of scoring debating points; it is not going to solve anything. One wrong cannot justify another. While Friedman is not condoning Islam bashing, his argument could be used by the fanatics in his own country to create more antipathy between Islam and other monotheistic faiths. He also ignores the deep historical animosity between the followers of Islam, Christianity and Judaism going back to the Middle Ages and crusades, and the disparaging way in which Islam and Prophet Mohammad were portrayed in the West. If the Jews

could go back more than 2,000 years for their territorial claims, surely a relatively more recent history cannot become irrelevant.

An important plank in the agenda of the jihadis and extremists is the continued denial of justice to the Palestinian people. It is not selfevident that those who invoke the Palestinian cause for their anti-West rhetoric, hatred and violence do genuinely care about the fate of the Palestinian people. It is not clear if even the Arab governments truly worry about the Palestinian cause. Nevertheless, as long as the Palestinians are not enabled to establish their own independent state with east Jerusalem as its capital, it will remain a potent instrument for fomenting anti-West and anti-Israel sentiment.

For the Arabs and Muslims at large, the most conspicuous manifestation of Americas unjust policy is its perceived collaboration with Israel in denying the right of national selfdetermination to the Palestinian people, the very right which America and others invoked while creating the state of Israel. This sense of injustice combined with anti-Muslim actions by the Christian extremist fringe creates and will continue to create explosive situations periodically.

The present Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been consistent. He had opposed the Oslo accords when they were concluded in 1993. He has been relentless in creating facts on the ground in the form of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank to the extent that hardly any land, certainly any contiguous land, will be available for the future Palestinian state. It is

understandable that he does not approve of Barack Obama who tried, unsuccessfully, to pressure him to stop settlement construction. No wonder, Mr. Netanyahu is working for Mr. Obamas republican rival in the American presidential election.

Shaul Mofaz, the leader of the opposition in the Israeli Knesset, recently asked Prime Minister Netanyahu: Which administration are you trying to change? The one in Tehran or the one in Washington? Mr. Netanyahu no doubt realises that the more he tries to unseat Mr. Obama, the more support the latter will get from his people, including American Jews who realise, more and more, that American interests are not the same as the Jewish states. If Mr. Obama does win despite Mr. Netanyahu, he is likely to be more forceful, and hopefully more successful, in his second term in

working for the solution of the Palestinian problem. Mr. Obama certainly cares about his legacy and the aam admi in Israel does not want his country to make an enemy of its most important ally and benefactor.

Ingratitude

Mr. Obama for his part does not see his way clearly through the mess in the Middle East. His biggest challenge is Syria where President Assad is in no mood to oblige by resigning and where the rebels are simply unable to unseat him on their own. Mr. Obama also has new challenges caused by Innocence of Muslims , the extraordinarily scandalous anti-Islam film produced in California. It has rightly aroused the ire of Muslims everywhere just as the killing of the American ambassador in Benghazi has justifiably generated universal condemnation. What is somewhat

incomprehensible is the reaction in America which is best summed up in Hillary Clintons reported remark: How can this happen in a country which we helped liberate? The Americans are genuinely baffled by this display of ingratitude, as they see it, of the Libyans, Egyptians and others, for the huge favour America has done to them by ushering in democracy in their countries.

In Libya, no doubt, Muammar Qadhafi would not have lost power and his life if the West had not intervened because there was hardly any genuine peoples revolution there. The spring in the Arab Spring was present only in Tunisia and Egypt. In both these countries, outsiders made absolutely no contribution to it. Secondly, western intervention in Libya was not inspired solely, or even largely, by democratic impulses; the oil factor had an important role in the exercise

since Qadhafi had stopped being generous in negotiations with oil companies. But even if the West was guided entirely by selfless motives, one does not expect gratitude in international relations.

The American dilemma in the Middle East is real. In view of recent events, should the U.S. disengage from the region? Should it withhold or suspend economic and military assistance to countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, Libya for their ingratitude and inability or unwillingness to prevent attacks on American diplomatic missions? In other words, should America send a clear message to these countries that they need America more that America needs them? It is highly probable that America will avoid taking a clear-cut decision. It will loudly cheer antiAnsar ul Sharia militia actions in Libya in justification of continued engagement in the region. Similarly, in

Egypt, the Administration will adopt a pragmatic or realpolitik approach, given the strategic importance of Egypt in the region, especially the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. The Egyptians also will make sure in not pushing Washington to a breaking point since good relations with America are essential for many sound economic reasons. Pragmatism will prevail on both sides.

Violence and democracy

As for the relationship between violence and democracy, the reactions in various Islamic countries have clearly shown that the most hateful and violent response has come from non-democratic countries. India, which has about 170 million Muslims, witnessed the most peaceful and mature reaction to the film. This is a testimony to Indias genuinely pluralistic nature and to the

integration of the Muslim community with the mainstream of our society, and we can be proud of this fact.

In South East Asian Muslim nations, where democracy prevails, the reaction has been largely subdued. Pakistan has witnessed the worst violence, testifying to the fragility of its democracy as well as the strong anti-America sentiment which goes beyond the offending film. In Egypt, the authorities were able to control the situation after the initial outburst; that Mohamed Morsi is an elected President had no doubt something to do with it.

Democracy allows for small eruptions, for the most part peaceful, to take place from time to time, but it manages to avoid major, violent outbursts. Democratic governments also do not need to tolerate or encourage violent demonstrations

since they do not need to divert attention to external factors away from domestic dissatisfaction; there is enough scope and permissiveness for citizens to express their anger in peaceful ways.

(The author, a former Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations, is a commentator on international affairs.)

As long as Palestinians are denied their right to an independent state, the world will continue to see violent outbursts of anger

by Muslims such as the recent protests over the anti-Islam film October 20, 2012

Building deterrence for peace


Recent demonstrations in China over Japanese claims on the Senkaku Islands indicate a new belligerence and nationalism among the Chinese populace that does not augur very well for India-China relations. While Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and other contested spaces in Chinas immediate neighbourhood occupy pole position when it comes to the dominant nationalistic discourse, a stronger India has started figuring actively in the academic discourse.

From being seen as a mere irritant on the periphery that can be tackled anytime, India is now being seen as a competitor and a spoiler in Chinas quest for total dominance in Asia. Current geopolitical realities offer some space for India to navigate and manoeuvre in the South East Asian

landscape and convince China that it stands to benefit from a reconciliatory, rather than a confrontationist approach towards India. On that count, India has been nimble to diplomatically and militarily engage with a host of countries like Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar in its Look East strategy; not with any aggressive intent, but with a hedging posture that seeks to revive memories of the Bandung initiative of 1954 that attempted to build capacities and propagate peaceful coexistence in the region.

Unfortunately, India has the habit of an either/or strategy vis--vis China that tends to ignore concurrent development of deterrent and coercive capabilities when some success is perceived to have accrued in the diplomatic space. This is fraught with danger and this time around

there cannot be any let-up in building up military capability on our northern and eastern frontiers with China while concurrently seeking diplomatic gains from our hedging strategy in S.E. Asia. Deterrence for Peace could be a posture that merits wide articulation, both within the domestic constituency and the international community.

Then and now

The military lessons of the 1962 IndiaChina conflict have been widely debated and need very little amplification beyond reiterating some important ones that would allow us to introspect. At the strategic level, notwithstanding the success of the Indian military in the 1947-48 conflict, the post-independence politicobureaucratic establishment looked at the military as a wasteful remnant of Indias colonial past whose need was only grudgingly acknowledged. Even

the opposition was guilty of pressuring Nehru in the late 1950s to reduce the defence budget even when there was overwhelming evidence that despite economic woes, China was maintaining a defence budget in excess of five per cent of GDP. There was no attempt to understand war as an extension of politics hence the ill-fated forward policy that overlooked imperatives of mountain warfare like clothing, shelter, suitable weapons, logistics support and air support plans for casualty evacuation and resupply. Given the strong WW II pedigree and battle experience of a number of senior army and air force officers, particularly in the Burma campaign, it is perplexing that the senior military leadership failed to actively participate in a national defence strategy to counter China.

In fact, one of the concerns of Mao was the core fighting ability of the

Indian Army, which is why he interestingly put together an attacking force with a ratio of 5:1 against existing norms of 3:1, which were considered essential for success in the mountains. Inadequate firepower and the complete absence of air power meant that India was lacking in two vital ingredients of modern warfare that have the potential to cause physical degradation and psychological shock in what was primarily an attrition battle in the mountains. The total absence of aerial reconnaissance by the Indian Air Force meant that field commanders had no real time idea of the strength of forces that Mao was amassing for his attack.

The Indian Armed Forces have come a long way since 1962 and are in a consolidation phase in the current Five Year Plan (2012-2017). There has been a slow shift in our politicomilitary strategy from a primarily Pak-

centric orientation, to one that seeks to balance two adversaries on multiple fronts; much more needs to be done to ensure that this strategy is backed with intent and speedy capability build-up. There is a perception that alarmist signals regarding the imminence of a ChinaIndia confrontation in the next five years have been precipitated by vested western interests that seek Indian military build-up as part of a hedging strategy to deflect Chinese attention from the Pacific and South China Sea.

While there may be some merit and an element of realpolitik in this, there is overwhelming evidence of military and infrastructure build-up in Tibet including increased fighter aircraft activity that points at a methodical and typically Chinese chess-like build-up towards supporting and sustaining a modern

high altitude campaign against a strong adversary. While there is no way in which India can currently match the Chinese infrastructure in Tibet, what is the way out in the short and medium term? A high survivability-high visibility-high attrition deterrent strategy that revolves around preserving own forces in the face of a ferocious initial assault and inflicting unsustainable losses to integrated application of firepower, whilst continuing to see what the enemy is doing with near 24x7 recce and surveillance, seems to be the surest way of combating the Chinese threat. India has no territorial ambitions and hence can ill-afford to work on manoeuvre strategies that look at capturing ground as part of any trade-off strategy. Lessons from the China-Vietnam war of 1979 and the subsequent lack of battleexperience of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) makes it vulnerable to

attrition warfare, both in the air and on ground.

Whether the Chinese have the stomach to take high casualties in pursuit of a nationalistic objective on its extreme peripheries that has few tangible benefits is highly debatable. The maritime domain too is a space that can be exploited and contested by India. With both India and China heading for a two-carrier fleet and blue water capability, strategic analysts predict that a future ChinaIndia conflict may not be restricted to only a localised high altitude conflict over desolate terrain. It may well spillover to vital sea lines of communication that run through the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

Final analysis

A militarily strong India that seeks to defend its sovereignty with strength and dignity is not an aggressive or belligerent India. It is an India that seeks peace in the region on respectable terms. China has to be respected as a strong adversary with an emerging penchant for regional hegemony, something that has to be contested by India, should it threaten its national interests. A China strategy, which is short on rhetoric and long on capability, is the only way to cope with an increasingly assertive China. While Mao did pronounce that power flows from the barrel of a gun, India can well twist it to say that peace too can flow from the barrel of two matching guns.

(Arjun Subramaniam is a serving Air Vice-Marshal in the Indian Air Force. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect the views of the IAF or the Indian government.)

A strategy short on rhetoric and long on capability is the only way to cope with

an increasingly assertive China October 20, 2012

Behind the war, a genesis in Tibet


Fifty years on, how the events leading up to 1962 were perceived by China remains almost entirely absent in Indian narratives of the war. Unlike the wars with Japan and in Korea that have a central role in Chinese propaganda about a national revival led by the Communist Party ending a century of humiliation, the conflicts with India and Vietnam, where China was the aggressor, are largely

airbrushed from todays Chinese history textbooks. Few Chinese students are even aware of 1962.

In marked contrast to the current reexamination of the events of 1962 under way in India on the 50th anniversary, the Chinese Statecontrolled media is still largely reluctant to discuss a sensitive chapter in bilateral relations, resulting in very limited insights into the war from Chinese perspectives.

However, declassified Chinese documents, which include internal memos sent from Chinese officials in New Delhi to Beijing and notes detailing negotiations from 1950 until 1962, provide fresh insights into Chinese perspectives and decisionmaking in the decade leading up to 1962.

The Chinese documents provide a far from conclusive history of the war, and are only a reflection of Chinese perspectives some merited and others unfounded and the costly misperceptions that led to 1962. This series of articles will, drawing from the documents, look to simply present, rather than evaluate, the perspectives in Beijing that led to Chinas decision to launch an offensive on October 20, 1962.

As many as 12 years before Chinese forces began their offensive against India on October 20, 1962, Chinese officials, in an internal diplomatic note, expressed concern over the Indian governments long-term designs on the status of Tibet. The note, dated November 24, 1950, reported on talks between India and China that had discussed the continuation of Indian privileges in Tibet, which had been enshrined in

earlier treaties with Britain. In general, the note said, it was exposed that India has interfered in Chinas internal affairs and has hindered China from liberating Tibet. India pretends not to have any ambition on Tibetan politics or land, the note concluded, but desires to maintain the privileges that were written in the treaties signed since 1906.

The November 1950 note marked the beginning of growing Chinese suspicions which were, on occasion, based on slight evidence and driven by Chinas own internal insecurities on Indias intentions towards Tibet, resulting in a turbulent decade during which the Tibetan problem emerged as the central issue in ties between the neighbours.

The occupation of Tibet by the Peoples Liberation Armys (PLA) in

1950 marked a fundamental shift in how the Chinese viewed relations with India. Months after the PLAs occupation of Tibet, as China began strengthening its grip over the region, Chinese officials began to object more vociferously to Indian activities. Even as India voiced support to China on the Tibetan issue in 1950 by not backing appeals at the United Nations, the Chinese, internally, continued to suspect Indian designs to destabilise Tibet.

On July 28, 1952, an internal note from the Communist Partys Central Committee instructed authorities in Tibet to crackdown on Indian business delegations, accusing India of spreading reactionary publications in the Tibetan language. In a meeting with the then Indian representative in Beijing, R.K. Nehru, on September 6, 1953, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear its displeasure with

Indias continued case for privileges, even describing the Indian incumbent government as holding an irresponsible position on Tibet.

Turning point in 1954

In 1954, Jawaharlal Nehru softened Indias stand by recognising the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) as a part of the Peoples Republic of China and giving up privileges, in the likely hope that ties would improve. However, that same year, India, for the first time, printed new maps delineating its northern and northeastern frontiers, which Nehru declared was not open to discussion with anybody a development that ultimately sowed the seeds of the boundary dispute. The documents make clear that Tibet, more than the unsettled boundaries, was by far the fundamental issue that concerned China in the 1950s. They do not, however, shed any conclusive

light on whether Beijing might have been open to a compromise on the former issue in return for Indias major concession on Tibet a question ultimately rendered irrelevant by Nehru deciding not to link the two issues.

The centrality of the Tibetan issue for the Chinese was evident in 1956, when armed revolts broke out across Tibetan areas. With rising tensions in Tibet, the Dalai Lama travelled to India that same year, ostensibly to attend a Buddhist conference but also considering seeking asylum. While Nehru persuaded the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet, he also arranged for two key meetings between the young Tibetan spiritual leader and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who happened to be on a visit to India at the same time.

The meetings appeared to cement in the Chinese perception the status of India as a major actor in any eventual resolution of the Tibetan problem. In the first meeting, on November 1, 1956, the Dalai Lama told Zhou that there was no democracy in the way the Standing Committee of the TAR was operating. Yesterday, we visited their Parliament and saw many representatives were debating, the Dalai Lama said. I think they are doing better than us on this pointOur Standing Committee of the TAR rarely debates and the content of the discussion is only the letter and word problems.

The situation in Tibet continued to worsen ahead of their second meeting on December 30, 1956. Zhou conveyed that Mao Zedong wanted the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet as soon as possible because now some people in Lhasa want to rebel there

while the Dalai Lama is not in Tibet. Accepting the root of the problem was in the Chinese-led reforms in Tibet, Zhou said Mao had decided that reforms would be shelved and reconsidered six years later and only if the Dalai Lama granted his consent.

Zhou also hit out at Tibetan separatists who were active across the border in Kalimpong in India, and warned the Dalai Lama that the Peoples Liberation Army would suppress any dissident activity: They want to be independent and separate Tibet from China; it is betrayal of China. We must not allow it to go on and the PLA will always protect its peoples interests and take selfdefense measures Zhou added he would rouse Nehrus attention about such activities in India.

On October 8, 1962, 12 days before the Chinese offensive, Zhou Enlai reflected on his 1956 talks with the Dalai Lama in a candid meeting with the Soviet Unions Ambassador in Beijing, suggesting that it was a turning point in how he viewed Indias role in the Tibetan question and intentions regarding the boundary dispute. According to the minutes of the meeting, he said India had, in 1956, exposed their desire to collude with the Dalai Lama and attempt to maintain Tibetan serfdom.

At that time, I found Nehru inherited British Imperialist thoughts and deeds on the border issue and the Tibet issue, Zhou said. However, considering the friendship of China and India, we took a tolerant attitude and did not convey this to Nehru. In 1958, serfs in Tibet, Xikang [Sichuan] and Qinghai rebelled. Nehru could not wait and took advantage of the border

issue to interfere with Chinas internal affairs. The Dalai Lama rebelled in 1959 and fled to India, and this was caused by Nehrus inducement. Zhous views largely characterised the thinking in Beijing three years later, when the Tibetan uprising began to unfold in 1959. Chinas leaders, internal documents show, became increasingly convinced on the basis of questionable evidence India was to blame for their own failings in Tibet and that the resolution of their Tibetan problem was inextricably linked to the boundary dispute a conviction that would have fateful consequences.

Recently declassified Chinese documents underscore the centrality of the issue

to the 1962 conflict and to any future resolution of the boundary question October 20, 2012

The Grand Old Man & his miscellanea

The spring of 1901 was a moment of despair for Dadabhai Naoroji, then in residence in London. While struggling to secure a new constituency from where he could attempt to re-enter the British Parliament, the Grand Old Man had to contend with increasingly retrogressive Tory policies toward India and flagging spirits within the Indian National Congress. But on 24 April, Naoroji received news of a different yet equally troubling variety: his toilet was malfunctioning. The plumber has done what he can to rectify the defects of the water waste preventer, & we regret that it is not

now satisfactory, FW Ellis, builder and estate agent in Upper Norwood, London, grimly informed him by post.

Detailed picture

Amidst the reams of important correspondence in the Dadabhai Naoroji Papers a collection of some 30,000 documents held at the National Archives of India in Delhi one regularly comes across unexpected material such as Ellis note. The Naoroji Papers, which I have consulted for over the past 20 months, provide stunning new insight into early Indian nationalism. Additionally, they paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of the life of one of Indias greatest leaders in the pre-independence era. Naoroji, it appears, decided to keep all of his correspondence for posterity. As a result, letters from Indian and British political luminaries jostle alongside

everyday receipts, prescriptions, random newspaper clippings, and the 19th century equivalent of junk mail. Such minutiae are easy to dismiss at first. Yet, taken together, they help us reconstruct the careers of Naoroji and other Indians who lived and worked in the United Kingdom, telling us how they navigated life in a strange and foreign society.

From the Papers, we know a smattering of what is, on the surface, completely trivial information about the Grand Old Man. A receipt, for example, indicates that on 9 January 1897 he purchased hand-made boots from a cobbler in southwest London that cost him precisely one pound and one shilling. We know that his family servant in Bombay was named Baloo. Naoroji might have invested in a company developing the tram system in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as the first garden city in England: I

located share fliers for both ventures early in my research. A newspaper cutting from the early 1900s suggests he took an interest in the llama, the resourceful South American pack animal. And several months ago, I stumbled across his eyeglass prescription from 1894 (a friend of mine, a doctor at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, diagnoses Naoroji as being far-sighted).

Digging a little deeper, it is possible to piece together greater significance from such random and bizarre information. Investments in South America, the United Kingdom, and India show that Naoroji adopted a very international outlook in his personal finances finances that he put to productive use by funding nationalist activity. Even his malfunctioning toilet tells us that Naoroji was privy to some of the latest available technology: the waste

water preventer was a relatively new invention that was revolutionising sanitation in Victorian England.

Since Naoroji was the senior-most Indian resident in the United Kingdom, he was regularly consulted by his countrymen who travelled to the imperial metropole for study, work, or pleasure. There are literally thousands of letters in the Naoroji Papers from such Indians documenting incidents of racism, financial trouble, or plain homesickness and nearly all of them received a prompt and detailed reply from the Grand Old Man. Naoroji functioned as a guardian of sorts for many Indians in Britain. Around 1 am on 2 January 1891, for example, he was awakened by a telegram from a London police constable informing him that a Mr. CK Desai was under arrest for public drunkenness and wanted Naoroji to

bail him out of jail. Aside from such correspondence, there are reams of letters from concerned parents in India who asked Naoroji to keep tabs on their sons (and, increasingly, daughters), making sure that they were being financially prudent and not consorting with Englishwomen.

The Papers also provide an insight into how Naoroji and his fellow nationalists in London adapted and reacted to life abroad. In addition to collaborating on the formulation of various economic critiques of the Raj, Romesh Chunder Dutt used Naoroji as a character reference for securing his flat in Forest Hill in 1898. While Dutt eventually returned to India in 1903, his fellow Bengali, W.C. Bonnerji, the first president of the Congress, took to London so much that he and his family put down permanent roots there, purchasing a house in Croydon that they christened Kidderpore. The

extent of their Anglicisation was evident when Naoroji in January 1893 invited the Bonnerjis to attend, in Indian attire, a function held in Central Finsbury to celebrate his election to the House of Commons. I am extremely sorry to say that we have not an Indian dress in the house, a family member responded.

Others dearly missed the staples of Indian life while in England. In January 1906, the radical nationalist Madame Bhikaiji Cama staying with a family member in North Kensington invited Naoroji and his grandchildren over for a Sunday Parsee lunch, an offer the Grand Old Man must have leapt at given the boiled and bland fare otherwise on offer in London. Some cultural adjustments were easier. Although in his sixties and seventies, Naoroji appears to have taken a fancy to English sports. He was the president of the football club

in his parliamentary constituency, Central Finsbury, and the vicepresident of a north London cricket club. A tantalising clue about Naorojis affinity for the gentlemans game is offered by his campaign secretary, who in 1895 wrote to Naoroji that, One would really imagine you to be a God of Cricket.

But there was one great cultural challenge in Britain that Naoroji had great difficulty in surmounting: people just could not spell his name correctly. In newspapers, posters, and his incoming mail, the Grand Old Man was addressed by creative variants such as Dedabhan Naorji, Devan Novoriji, and Dadabhai Nowraggie. Matters improved slightly once his campaign secretary suggested that he simply go by D. Naoroji. After he won election to Parliament by a mere five votes, he was frequently referred to as Dadabhai Narrow-Majority, which

was presumably easier to remember and spell.

Naoroji and his fellow nationalists, however, were guilty of their own spelling bloopers. The Grand Old Man regularly ended his letters with the valediction Yours truly, adding an unnecessary apostrophe. When the Bengali painter, Sasi Kumar Hesh, visited London in 1899, Romesh Chunder Dutt wrote excitedly of the various pourtraits the artist intended to undertake. Madame Cama loved semi-colons; her letters to Naoroji are simply replete with them. What is particularly striking is how so many of Naorojis correspondents chose to communicate in broken English rather than in languages where they had a shared greater proficiency, such as Gujarati or Hindustani. But English, even bad English, was a status symbol then, as it remains today. The surprisingly few Gujarati letters in the

Naoroji Papers are mostly from his family members.

Common headache

While mastery of English was a challenge to some upwardly-mobile Indians, deciphering one anothers handwriting was a headache shared by all. I have probably done serious damage to my own eyesight by trying to make sense of the scribbles found in the Naoroji Papers. Understanding them was evidently a challenge to the original recipients over a century ago. Naoroji occasionally admonished Behramji Malabari, the prominent Parsi journalist and social reformer, to write neatly. William Wedderburn, one of the British stalwarts in the early Congress, grumbled to Naoroji in August 1891 that he could not read letters from Dinsha Wacha, the longtime Congress general secretary (But you must not tell him this, he

added). And Allan Octavian Hume, while attempting to go through a draft of Naorojis presidential address to the 1893 Lahore Congress, confessed to Naoroji that your handwriting is rather hard to read. Perhaps it is appropriate that, toward the end of his life, Naoroji helped fund a bright Maharashtrian inventor, Shankar Abaji Bhise, who was working on new models of typewriters.

Encountering such unexpected miscellanea is a treat to the historian, providing a moment of levity while sifting through otherwise heavy and complex matter. But these miscellanea also perform an important role in our understanding of early Indian nationalists. Individuals such as Naoroji, Dutt, Ranade, and Gokhale have in both scholarship and our popular conceptions of history too often been cast as staid, unapproachable, and even downright

dull people. The paper trail they left behind tells us quite a different story: it exposes us to the particularities of their lives, their complex characters, their foibles, habits, and everyday routines. It humanises these leaders. Maybe this is one reason why Dadabhai Naoroji, while organising his personal papers during his retirement in Versova, chose to preserve his prescriptions, receipts, and correspondence with his London plumber.

(Dinyar Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard University. Some of the material quoted here will be published in the forthcoming volume, The Grand Old Man of India: Selections from the Dadabhai Naoroji Papers (Oxford University Press), which he is co-editing with S.R. Mehrotra.)

The paper trail leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji have left behind offers a rich insight into the lives of early Indian nationalists and our understanding of them October 22, 2012

From Tibet to Tawang, a legacy of suspicions


Chinas suspicions about Indias intentions with regard to Tibet in the 1950s, unfounded or otherwise, were not Beijings only major consideration in the lead-up to 1962. Declassified internal Chinese documents detail how the Forward Policy, by the summer of 1962, began to be seen in Beijing as an attempt by Nehru to unilaterally grab territory that had to be firmly stopped. The changing dynamics between China, India and the Soviet Union emerged as another factor in Mao Zedongs decisionmaking. Nevertheless, Chinese

internal communications from the time establish that the Tibetan issue emerged as perhaps the most significant driving force behind Chinas decision to launch an offensive against India on October 20, 1962.

Following the March 10, 1959 uprising in Tibet and the Dalai Lama heading to India in exile, Chinese officials began to be alarmed by the political climate in India. In an internal diplomatic note sent to Beijing, Chinese officials quoted a leader of an Indian Opposition party as describing the relationship between India and Tibet as like between a mother and her child. When the son is being attacked, can his mother be a silent passer-by? the leader was quoted as saying. Tibets issues are issues that affect Indias flesh and blood, and it would be wrong to view Tibets issues as Chinas internal affairs.

On March 25, 1959, Mao convened a meeting of top leaders to discuss the situation in Tibet, during which he blamed India for the unrest, declaring that China would not condemn India openly but would instead give India enough rope to hang itself. Outwardly, Chinese leaders continued to affirm good relations with India. The Foreign Ministry, in a note to the Indian government on March 29, said it welcomed a statement made by Nehru of not interfering in Chinas internal affairs. China has never interfered in Indias internal affairs, never discussed Indias internal affairs in its National Peoples Congress or its Standing Committee, and thinks that it is impolite and improper to discuss the internal affairs of a friendly country, the note said.

According to an internal note dated March 30, the Communist Party directed the Peoples Daily newspaper

to publish a friendly observer comment on April 15, declaring that Sino-Indian friendly relations shall not be harmed by the Tibetan problem. While the commentary pointed out that it had been a public secret that Tibetan rebels had established a foreign base in Kalimpong and colluded with Imperialists to plan a rebellion, it added that those who dislike SinoIndian friendliness are attempting to take the opportunity of the Dalai Lama being in India to incite Tibetans.

Indian expansionism

Privately, however, Mao became increasingly convinced of Indian expansionist designs on Tibet. Mao appeared to have little evidence to back this conviction instead, he increasingly began to deflect the responsibility for the unrest in Tibet,

sourced in the colossal failures of the Communist Partys reforms, on to India. On April 19, he directed the Xinhua news agency to issue a commentary which he personally revised, as John W. Garver notes in his essay Chinas Decision for War with India in 1962. The commentary, which finally appeared on May 6, 1959, accused Nehru of encouraging the rebels in India, arguing that Nehru and the bourgeoisie in India had sought to maintain Tibet as a buffer and restore its semi-independent status. Maos suspicions were fed by internal notes from Lhasa. A January 15, 1960 note from the Foreign Affairs Office in Lhasa in great detail reported of Indian expansionist activities in Kalimpong. The Indian expansionists cannot be reconciled to their failure, and have not given up their conspiracy on Tibet, the note said. They have a set of practices such as.. maintaining reserve forces. If the Indian expansionists lose their

relationship with these Tibetan serfowners, all of their plans will have no way out. Therefore, they try every possible way

In April 1961, the Foreign Affairs Office in Tibet in another memo said Indias attitude on Tibet had gotten worse in the two years after the uprising. The note explicitly linked Tibet to the boundary dispute, and put forward suggestions for revising the 1954 agreement on Tibet. The present Tibet has been radically changed when compared with that in 1954, the note said. The Indian attitude is worse; it was friendly to China then and now India opposes China. The Sino-Indian border issueis the pretext India uses to oppose China and has become an essential issue for present Sino-Indian relations.

Chinese suspicions that linked Tibet and the border continued to heighten towards the end of 1961, when the Forward Policy began to be implemented. By then, Zhou Enlais 1960 visit to New Delhi had ended in stalemate. The deadlock was further reinforced by Indias demand for the Chinese to withdraw from the Aksai Chin region before any talks could be held. Nehrus demand further stoked Chinese suspicions. Nehrus insistence on Chinese abandonment of Aksai Chin established a link in Chinese minds between the border issue and Chinas ability to control Tibet, Garver writes in his essay, as the road connecting Xinjiang and Tibet was crucial to China sustaining military posts. Garver concluded that very probably the powerful but inaccurate Chinese belief about Indias desire to seize Tibet led to an incorrect Chinese conclusion that Nehrus insistence on Aksai Chin was

part of a grand plan to achieve that purpose.

East west swap

Chinas concerns on its sovereignty in Tibet continue to cast a shadow on the boundary dispute. As Garver notes in his seminal work Protracted Contest, China twice proposed or at least, hinted at an east west swap to resolve the boundary dispute. The swap involved China giving up its claims to Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh, whose geography is crucial to Indias defence of the northeast. India would, in turn, give up its claim to Aksai Chin, which provides the Peoples Liberation Army the most crucial land link between Xinjiang and Tibet. The first hint was during Zhou Enlais 1960 visit, and the second suggested by Deng Xiaoping in 1980. India rejected the swap offer for Nehru, giving up Aksai Chin in the

political climate of the time appeared politically untenable.

When the sixth round of border talks between India and China began in late 1985, as Garver notes, China for the first time pressed its claims in the eastern sector on Tawang, south of the McMahon Line. The Indian side was stunned, Garver writes. They had assumed that China implicitly accepted that line While the current status and progress on the boundary talks is unclear given the secrecy it is shrouded in, China has appeared to hold on to this position since. One Chinese scholar, who did not want to be identified citing the sensitivity of the issue, said from Beijings point of view, Tawang was now the central question at the heart of the boundary dispute. As long as China fails to arrive at any kind of resolution with the Dalai Lama and remains concerned about stability in

Tibet, China is unlikely to entertain the thought of giving up all its claims on Tawang, the scholar suggested.

With increasingly frequent invocations of Chinas claim on Arunachal Pradesh as south Tibet in State media outlets since the 2000s and harsh denunciations of the Dalai Lama, the Communist Party, the scholar added, would perhaps even find it difficult to sell a settlement that involved conceding its claims in the eastern sector, particularly against the rising tide of nationalism and criticisms of a weak government evident during recent anti-Japan protests. The history of Chinese suspicions on Indias intentions on Tibet, even if unfounded, remains hugely relevant to the boundary question even five decades later.

Chinas concerns about Tibet, a significant force behind its 1962 offensive, continue to cast a shadow on the boundary dispute with India October 22, 2012

A state of criminal injustice


Even criminals, back in 1953, seemed to be soaking in the warm, hope-filled glow that suffused the newly free India. From a peak of 654,019 in 1949, the number of crimes had declined year-on-year to 601,964. Murderers and dacoits; house-breakers and robbers all were showing declining enthusiasm for crime. Large-scale communal violence, which had torn apart the nation at the moment of its birth, appeared to be a fading memory. Bar a Calcutta tram workers strike, which had paralysed the city for three weeks, there was no largescale violence at all.

The sun wasnt shining in the stoneclad corridors of New Delhis North Block, though, where police officials had just completed the countrys first national crime survey the National Crime Records Bureaus now-annual Crime in India .

India, they concluded, faced a crisis of criminal justice. For one, India faced a crippling shortage of police officers. Then, poor training standards meant there had been no improvement in the methods of investigation. No facilities exist in any of the rural police stations and even in most of the urban police stations for scientific investigation, the report went on, there had been a fall in the standard of work. The result, Crime in India, 1953 recorded, was plain: intelligence capacities had diminished; cases were failing; criminals walking free.

Stinging indictment

Last month, the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, a New Delhibased human rights advocacy group, brought out a stinging indictment of policing in independent India. In studies of 16 cases involving the Delhi Polices lite counter-terrorism unit, the Special Cell, the report found evidence of illegal detention, fabricated evidence and torture. Each case, the report states, ended in acquittal but not before protracted trials destroyed the lives of suspects.

Delhi Police officials have responded by arguing that the report cherry-picks cases where the prosecution collapsed. Sixty eight per cent of the 182 individuals tried for terrorismrelated crimes from 1992 have been convicted. In addition, they claimed to have secured convictions in six of the

16 cases of illegal possession of arms and explosives.

This line of defence is profoundly wrong-headed. Even if there was evidence that even one of the 16 suspects was framed or wrongfully prosecuted, that in itself would constitute a scandal. The Delhi Polices failure to initiate an independent review of the cases does the force no credit.

In using the cases to argue that terrorism related prosecutions are driven by communal malice, though, the JTSA study falls into serious errors of its own. The stark truth is that convictions for every kind of crime are in free fall, engendering a state of criminal injustice no republic can tolerate and hope to survive.

Figures on rape prosecutions graphically demonstrate the need for caution before making the deductive leap that the police are simply framing innocents to serve communal biases, or hide their incompetence. In 2003, less than a quarter of alleged rapists were eventually convicted. In most Indian rape prosecutions, the testimony of victims is key. To suggest that the high levels of acquittals are evidence of the framing of suspects by the police would be to suggest that a large percentage of women who file rape complaints are lying a selfevidently ridiculous proposition in our social context.

It is entirely possible that another kind of police bias against women might account for this high level of acquittals; male-chauvinist police officers would, after all, conduct poor investigations. It isnt only alleged rapists, though, who are being

acquitted in record numbers. Kidnapping convictions have fallen from 48 per cent in 1953 to 27 per cent in 2011; successful robbery prosecutions from 47 per cent to 29. In 2003, less than a third of completed murder trials ended in a conviction; in 2011, the last year for which data has been published, the figure remained under 40 per cent (see table).

Thus, a 30 per cent conviction rate in terrorism cases a widely-used figure, albeit of uncertain empirical provenance, that also finds mention in the JTSA report would be entirely consistent with the overall police record. From the NCRBs crime data, this much is evident: if the Delhi Police have indeed secured convictions in 68 per cent of terrorism cases since 1992, it is a sign of stellar competence.

Interestingly, the police have had stellar results in explosives and arms

cases, where cases revolve around material recoveries: half or more of all prosecutions since 1983 have ended in convictions. This points us in the direction of the real malaise. Investigators seem good at sniffing out hidden guns and bombs, sometimes after crudely beating information out of suspects, but not so competent in the complex process of marshalling a chain of credible evidence.

This is not to suggest that there is no bias in policing. In 2010, the last year for which NCRB data on Indias prison population is available, 17.74 per cent of the 125,789 convicts in the countrys prisons were Muslims somewhat higher than their share of population, which the 2001 census put at 13 per cent, and is now estimated to be over 14 per cent. The overrepresentation of Muslims among prisoners facing trial was even more

marked: 22.2 per cent of 240,098 that year shared this religious affiliation.

Evidence of bias

These figures make clear that Muslims are not only disproportionately likely to be convicted for an offence but also more likely to be arrested for a crime for which they are eventually acquitted.

For two reasons, though, it is unclear that communal chauvinism alone accounts for this overrepresentation. First, Muslims were significantly overrepresented among the prison population in some States with a record of non-communal administration. In West Bengal, for example, 5,722 of 12,361 prisoners under trial were Muslims a staggering 46 per cent, against a share of the general population of around

25 per cent. Uttar Pradesh had 15,510 Muslim prisoners under trial, out of a total of 55,872 27 per cent though the religious community made up less than 20 per cent of its population in 2001.

West Bengals numbers were not dramatically different from highly communalised Gujarat. There, 18.3 per cent of prisoners under trial in 2010 were Muslims, who make up just 9 per cent of the population. Even Gujarat did better than Maharashtra, where a staggering 32 per cent of prisoners under trial, and almost 31 per cent of convicts, are Muslims though just over 10 per cent of the population are of that faith.

Muslims, secondly, arent the most overrepresented category in Indian jails. Just over 1 per cent of Indias 365,887 undertrial prisoners and convicts held post-graduate

qualifications; three quarters were either illiterate or had failed to pass the 10th grade. Three-fifths of Bihars 5,260 convicts serving time in 2010, for example, belonged to the Scheduled Tribes, the Scheduled Castes or the Other Backward Classes a pattern evident in many States. Muslims are among the poorest and most educationally deprived segments of Indias population, a fact of significance.

Finally, local factors for example, the historic character of organised crime in Mumbai or Ahmedabad might have played a role in the making of these figures, too. It ought to be no surprise that Hindus would account for a high share of terrorism suspects in Manipur or Assam; nor that Muslims might be overrepresented in Jammu and Kashmir or Sikhs in Punjab.

High quality empirical studies to establish just how much communal bias influences the criminal justice system are desperately needed and their absence is evidence of the chronic deficits in the policing system as a whole.

The bottom line is this: even as far too many innocent people are ending up suffering punishment for crimes they never committed, even greater numbers are walking free after perpetrating hideous acts of violence.

Every word of the authors of the 1953 Crime in India could be republished in a crime survey today without emendation. The police remain understaffed, under-trained and under-equipped to conduct meaningful investigations.

Dismal ratio

Little has been done to address chronic deficits in staffing either. Last year, the Union Home Ministry told Parliament it had pushed up the ratio of police officers to the population to 174:100,000, inching towards the global norm of 250:100,000 or more, and up from a painfully-anaemic 121:100,000. It neglected to note, though, that its claims were based on the 2001 census; adjusted for population growth, the ratio is still an appalling 134:100,000.

Forensic facilities also remain rudimentary and training is cursory: it bears recalling that the forensic evidence that links 26/11 gunman Muhammad Ajmal Kasab to his handlers in Pakistan emerged as a result of work by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not Indias police. The central academy for police

investigation skills proposed in 1953 still doesnt exist.

Ever since 26/11, there has been big talk on police reform but precious little action. The results are evident, scarring the life of every citizen.

praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

The conviction rate for every kind of crime is in free fall, engendering a breakdown of law that no republic can survive October 22, 2012

A lesson in propriety, from one Nehru-Gandhi son-in-law

BTE NOIRE OR ACHILLES HEEL?By the metric of todays political culture, Feroze Gandhi seems naive. Robert Vadra, on the other hand, is anything but a misfit. (Left) Sonia Gandhi and Robert Vadra at Veer Bhumi, New Delhi and (right) Jawaharlal Nehru and Feroze Gandhi in Mumbai. PHOTOS: R.V. MOORTHY, THE HINDU PHOTO ARCHIVES

Among the primary lessons in statistics is that comparisons must be made only of things that are similar in nature. Chalk cant be compared to cheese. But sometimes it is useful to indulge in such a comparison if only to drive home the contrast between the two. In substance, texture and taste.

Like Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, the legendary parliamentarian, Feroze Gandhi, also married into the ruling partys first family. His wife Indira

Gandhi, was the Jawaharlal Nehru.

daughter

of

Feroze, unlike Robert, entered public life very young, participated and led agitations on the street, landed up in jail and finally represented Rae Bareli, from where he was elected to the Lok Sabha, until his death. He did not owe his rise in politics to being Jawaharlal Nehrus son-in-law and his political fortunes did not balloon after marriage. Feroze was not known to have acquired property at any point in his life.

Robert is not a politician and he cannot be blamed for the absence of a glorious movement like the freedom struggle which his wifes grandfather had plunged into as a young man. It is also unfair to blame him for not having entered public life or fought an election. He chose not to. Like Feroze, who could not have imagined he was

marrying the future Prime Ministers daughter when he wed Indira Gandhi, it cannot be anyones case that Robert married Priyanka Gandhi in pursuit of fame and fortune. Their wedding took place in 1997 and at a time when Sonia Gandhi was merely a special person in the Congress party; the party, led by Sitaram Kesri was sustaining the United Front government from outside. In the year of his marriage, this young man simply set up a brass handicraft business; hailing from Moradabad, it was only natural for him to indulge in brassware.

But then, a few years after his mother-in-law became the most powerful person who could instruct the Prime Minister on anything and everything and had the entire Congress party at her beck and call, the son-in-law expanded his business, entering uncharted areas including

real estate and hospitality, two sectors that recorded exponential growth. The huge increase in his assets that occurs during this time has been commented on by Arvind Kejriwal and India Against Corruption, who allege the existence of a nexus between Robert and real estate giant DLF. If DLF was indeed being helpful to him, only the naive will agree that its benevolence had nothing to do with Vadra being Sonia Gandhis sonin-law.

Dalmia, Mundra cases

For Feroze Gandhi, even the whiff of impropriety was enough to set him off on a crusade. Despite being a Congress MP, he emerged as a whistle-blower against the Congress government headed by his father-inlaw. It was Feroze who raised the scandalous ways in which Ramakrishna Dalmia, a leading

businessman then and also a Congress supporter, was siphoning funds collected as insurance premium to further his own business. Neither did Congressmen hurl innuendoes at Feroze nor did Nehrus government shun him. Instead, the government decided to nationalise the insurance industry and thus the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India came into existence.

The Feroze Gandhi saga did not end there. It was his expos, on the floor of the Lok Sabha, that the LIC had, under instruction from the then Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari, indulged in bad business decisions to bail out Haridas Mundra, a businessman known to have been one of the donors to the Congress election funds.

Krishnamachari was Nehrus Man Friday, yet he was asked to quit the

Union cabinet. And it was in this process of exposing the Mundra scandal by Feroze Gandhi that the then Lok Sabha Speaker, Ananthasayanam Ayyangar, ruled that the scope of Article 105 of the Constitution to empower MPs to use as documents even correspondence marked confidential in the course of exposing an act of wrongdoing by a public servant.

It is unfair to compare chalk and cheese. Future chroniclers will note how both sons-in-law reflected the nature of their times. If earlier propriety was everything, property now is king. By the metric of todays political culture, Feroze Gandhi seems naive, an underachiever and a misfit in the world of his chosen vocation. Robert, on the other hand, is anything but a misfit.

(V. Krishna Ananth is Associate Professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, Sikkim University.)

Feroze Gandhi and Robert Vadra couldnt be more apart. But then the times are

so different too. October 23, 2012

Dont shrink the scope of the Mental Health Act


Mental illness, of course, is not literally a thing or physical object and hence it can exist only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

Thomas Szasz

During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing.

Kate Millet

These quotes show how much the world is divided when it comes to mental illness. We see people with mental illness everyday in our own family, neighbourhood, on the streets but the field of psychiatry, involved in the care of this neglected group of patients, faces a lot of criticism. The early history of psychiatry and nonevidence-based modes of treatment that existed before medications made their debut could have been a reason. It could also be due to the political misuse of psychiatry to silence opposing voices, especially by the Nazis and other dictatorial regimes. The most important factor seems to

be the combination of years of negative propaganda and the influence of the media, especially the visual and print media, which have contributed to generating fear and apathy towards psychiatry. It is worth asking if this has helped the most vulnerable, mentally unwell person on the street, neglected by family and walking naked, lost in strange beliefs and perceptual disturbances.

Appropriate treatment helps patients with mental illness get better. Most developed countries have moved away from asylum-based treatments, and have embraced community integrated psychiatry as the treatment model. It also entails treating patients in the acute wards and moving them as soon as possible back to the community, where they would continue follow-up. In providing care, especially in acute settings, and for patients with major mental illnesses

like schizophrenia and severe depression, psychiatrists often face patients with poor insight into their condition and impaired judgment. It is difficult to provide care to the patient who does not have the capacity to decide on getting treated or cannot make an informed choice about the best treatment option. Treatment is then provided involuntarily, keeping their best interest in mind. This doesnt mean a collaborative effort is not attempted.

In Australia and India

As per the Mental Health Act (MHA) in Australia, acutely ill patients are admitted using an Inpatient Treatment Order (ITO), if any doctor feels that the patient requires specialist psychiatric care, but is unable to seek care on his own. The involuntary order is reviewed by a psychiatrist within 24 hours of its

issuance and it is decided if the patient needs to remain on it. Once made involuntary, the responsibility of patient safety and treatment is under the treating team. Another important aspect in Australia is the presence of the Guardianship Board a body with judicial powers that needs to be notified of every involuntary treatment order soon after it is made. Patients, who feel the ITO was uncalled for, can appeal to the board against it. The board conducts a hearing in the next few days. After hearing the evidence from the treating team and the patient, it decides if the ITO is to continue. This prevents the misuse of power by the treating team. Most developed countries have provisions in their MHA to protect patient interests and to make a mental health-care plan after discussing the merits and demerits of the treatment with patients, their family or friends.

In a country like India, where the burden of illness is huge and facilities for psychiatric care are minimal, it is essential that adequate acute care is provided in every district. It is impossible to ensure care for the patient without a suitable MHA, which would simplify access to treatment, and at the same time prevent misuse. The Indian governments plan to integrate mental health care with primary health care is ambitious. However, the role of the private sector and non-governmental organisations cannot be ignored. It is important that all the available treatment facilities (in government and private medical colleges, private hospitals, charity institutions) are covered within the ambit of the act and stringent checks put in place to ensure the safety and recovery of patients.

In this context, it is disheartening to know that the formulation of the new MHA is shrouded in mystery and that various activists are raising their doubts about its possible impact. Any draft MHA, without adequate debate and discussion, and feedback from all concerned, may not be able to capture the actual needs of patients. The experience of countries, where this has already been achieved, should be sufficient to warrant its necessity. Hence, it is time that authorities share information regarding important proposals and changes and convene discussions with the public to dispel misconceptions. Worst-case scenarios do not make the rule, but can be accommodated within the MHA as a means of audit and for checks and balances to prevent its misuse.

(Dr. Jayakumar neuropsychiatrist

Menon at the

is a Royal

Adelaide Hospital, Australia. Email: drjkmenon@rediff.com )

India needs to look at the experience of countries that have moved away from asylum-based treatments and embraced community integrated psychiatry as the treatment model October 23, 2012

For licence to hit and run


It was a perfect scenario. Horrific violence by Muslims against policemen and the media, handled sensitively by a police force known for its anti-Muslim prejudice. The entire community apologetic for the violence of a few. Revulsion against rabid religious leaders. Respect for a courageous Police Commissioner.

This was the scene in Mumbai immediately after a meeting on August 11 called by some Muslim religious leaders turned violent midway. Called to condemn the violence against Muslims in Assam and Myanmar and the inaction of the government, the meeting attracted a 20,000-strong crowd, carrying placards with inflammatory and abusive images and slogans.

Back to square one

Two months later, things are back to square one: Muslims are bitter about the police and the government, all signs of remorse have disappeared, and the Urdu press is at its irresponsible best. If theres any ray of hope, its with the courts.

The blame for this has to be laid at the door of the Maharashtra government. Two days after Raj Thackeray took out an (illegal) rally demanding the ouster of the Police Commissioner and the Home Minister for allowing Marathi policemen and women to be attacked by Bangladeshi Muslims who had come to Mumbai from Bihar and U.P., Commissioner Arup Patnaik was sent packing (to a punishment posting). The message to Muslims couldnt have been clearer no cop worth his uniform can be soft when you guys riot. The second but equally important message was that a known instigator of communal violence like Raj Thackeray could call the shots with the secular Congress.

That wasnt all. No arrests were made at the spot of the violence but Muslims who returned at night with friends to collect their bikes parked there were pounced upon, assaulted,

arrested and charged with offences ranging from murder, to rioting with arms, to molestation. Twenty of them are still in jail, with the police vehemently opposing bail, though by their own admission, they do not figure in the videos of the violence. A magistrate found that 12 of them were so badly assaulted in Arthur Road Jail by jail staff that three days later, their bodies still bore marks of injury. His report, submitted more than six weeks ago, is yet to be acted upon.

It was only after the Bombay High Court observed during the bail hearing of two of these 20, that prima facie charges of murder and attempt to murder were not made out against them, that the new Police Commissioner acknowledged publicly that these charges had been wrongly applied before he took over, he added pointedly. He took over on

August 23. What was he doing since then? The parents of these 20 youth and social workers have since made umpteen trips to the police asking that these particular youngsters be let off on bail. Why didnt the Commissioner order that Sections 302 and 307 of the Indian Penal Code be removed, so that bail could be granted?

Glaring inequity

Then theres the glaring inequity of the rabble-rousers being left untouched. The organisers of the August 11 rally were named as accused in the FIR filed on the day of the incident. They made inflammatory speeches, to which the crowd responded with slogans, says the FIR. It even names the man after whose speech 3000 from the crowd started moving out excitedly. But none of these organisers has been arrested.

Why, ask the families of the youngsters behind bars. They arent unaware of these mens political links. Everyone has seen State Home Minister R.R. Patil of the NCP come calling at the residence of one of them, whose brother is an NCP corporator. Another, a known rabblerouser, heads an organisation involved in another riot in 2006, in which two policemen were lynched in Bhiwandi. Asked to explain their inaction, the police simply reply: We are going through the evidence. Thats the same reply they give when asked why they are opposing bail to the first batch of 20 youth arrested! For one group of accused, that explanation means a licence to roam free; for another, an obstacle to even conditional freedom.

Perhaps it is this typically cussed and arbitrary conduct of the police and the government that makes even the

families of the boys caught in the video footage of the incident, defiant. Some point out that though their sons can be seen in the video, they are just standing there. Others, whose sons can be seen holding a matchbox near an OB van, or a police rifle, or kicking the Amar Jawan Jyoti memorial, are hard put to deny the guilt of their progeny. But their acts are ascribed to other factors: incitement by irresponsible leaders in the month of Ramzan when fasting makes you short-tempered; lack of education and, interestingly, of street-smart guile; even the absence of job reservation for Muslims which would have given their sons regular jobs and made them act more responsibly.

These excuses are perhaps understandable. What is not is the common defence taken by these relatives everyone indulges in violence, but only Muslims get

punished. This comes straight from the Urdu press, which, if one is to believe these families, has now begun to continuously report instances of violence from across the country adding that no one has been arrested for them. The vandalism of Raj Thackerays men tops these reports.

But no one gets away with attacking the cops, you say, not even Shiv Sainiks. Immediately come the counter-questions what about Congressmen attacking cops in Orissa, a female constable being molested during the Ganpati festival in Lalbag? Was anyone arrested? Some people are above the law, you explain, but there are no takers for that argument, as there shouldnt be. Then where is justice? Is this democracy? ask veiled mothers aggressively.

So, the chickens have finally come home to roost. Decades of

appeasement of political Hindutva, and dominant caste rowdies, have resulted in others asking for the same. A community known to stay quiet once it was taught a lesson, now refuses to do so. If vandalism by a select few goes unpunished, why should we be punished for doing the same, asks the new generation of Muslims. This logic, coming from the vandalisers, though repugnant, is perfect. But coming from the press?

Selective reporting

The Urdu press in Mumbai is aware that the Muslim rioters of August 11 werent just attacking the media and police in an outburst of secular pent up rage. It was an outburst of communal mayhem not rage for the videos make it clear those burning the vans were having a great time. The police have shown community leaders and journalists the videos. The

latter have heard the abusive slogans raised by the rioters. Photographers attacked that day can testify to the fanaticism of their assailants. Muslim eye-witnesses have shared experiences of conduct by the rallyists that can only be explained by hatred for all non-Muslims. But the Urdu press has chosen not to report any of this to its community, like the Gujarati press in 2002, which blacked out the violence by many Gujarati Hindus, and focused only on the burning of the Sabarmati Express by some Godhra Muslims.

Like the Urdu press, Muslim community workers too, refuse to engage with this new generation of lumpens, who laugh as they recount how they brandished sugarcane stalks grabbed from stalls (they werent swords, just sugarcane), how their compatriots dived into police vans to pick up rifles and dance with them

(they didnt use the rifles). Most of those caught on video are selfemployed school dropouts, living in large joint families in poor ghettos, doted on by grandmothers (he wouldnt sleep till I fed him with my own hands), namazis who obey their local imam, have no contact with other communities, but own the latest mobiles equipped with Bluetooth et al .

Many of these youngsters belong to the NCP and even Raj Thackerays Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Loyal Congress workers had been asked to stay away from the openly antiCongress rally. Today, neither the NCP nor the Congress can afford to be seen helping even the innocents among these boys. But behind the scene efforts are on to reach Madame in Delhi. Interestingly, its common knowledge that Prithviraj Chavan, the Congress Chief Minister,

had for long resisted ally NCPs demand to replace Commissioner Patnaik with the current incumbent.

Thats one more phrase thrown at you by relatives of the accused Its all politics. Our poor boys just got caught.

(Jyoti Punwani is a Bombay-based journalist and writer)

Appeasement of all kinds of influential

law-breakers over decades has led the Muslim community and Urdu press to demand similar treatment for the Azad Maidan rabble-rousers October 23, 2012

Looking spaceward, feet firmly on the ground


Dr. K. Radhakrishnan , Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Secretary, Department of Space, spoke to Madhumathi D.S. on the national space programmes present concerns and what is in store for it as it grapples with global competition and rising internal demand. Excerpts:

The national space programme faces a double whammy: a transponder deficit on communication satellites and a delay in achieving the capability to launch our own communication satellites. How is ISRO addressing this problem?

First, I would like to stress that applications are our thrust unlike, say, in Russia, the United States or China

which are after human space flights, space stations and such activities. We are very clear about being down to earth.

We have a capacity augmentation plan. Increasing capacity, enhancing capability and creating advanced technologies, these are all taking place in parallel. Thanks to the promotion of satellite communication and new services in it, there is a large demand [for transponders]. One objective is to increase capacity in the Ku and C bands. The other is to enhance capability, for example, with digital multimedia broadcasting on GSAT-6.

To remain state-of-the-art in communication satellites, we are going in for high power and higher frequencies like the Ka band. A multibeam system with 24 footprints and uplink in the high-power Ka band will

come with GSAT-11 in two years. Our target is to be contemporary in this area in five or six years.

Then there are the GSAT-6, 7 and 11 series, and GSAT-15 and 16. In remote sensing, the continuity of services is important for institutional and infrastructure planning, water resources, agriculture, afforestation, disaster management and the like. You need to improve spatial resolution from the present 0.8 metre to 0.6 metre and 0.3 metre. In microwave remote sensing we have to get into L, X and S bands.

We have two established application areas in communication and remote sensing. Now navigation satellites will add a new dimension of locationbased services. Gagan is our spacebased augmentation to GPS mainly for the civil aviation sector. GSAT-10 carries the second of three Gagan

payloads. The first satellite of our own regional navigation system, the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System, will go in 2013.

What is being done to mitigate the transponder shortage on Insat/GSATs for broadcasting and telecommunication purposes? Of the 263 transponders available today, ISRO has leased 95 on foreign satellites.

A [few] weeks ago we released advertisements for leasing transponders because VSAT and direct-to-home (DTH) operators require them. The process may take up to two months.

Today we are not talking about replacements of the leased capacity but about how to meet requirements. We have 168 transponders of our own

[provided by the domestic Insat/GSAT fleet].

If you look at the upcoming satellites, you get more than 100 [Indian] transponders [in the short term]. GSAT-10 [launched on September 29] is going to immediately give us 30 transponders from November onwards. GSAT-14 will give another 12 if [its launch vehicle] GSLV performs well. GSAT-9 will mean another 12 transponders, GSAT-15 will add 24 in the Ku band and GSAT-16 another 36.

With these 100 transponders being added, will the leases go back?

I dont think they will go back but the usage will be more. There is nothing wrong in using [them] provided they are available at a reasonable price.

Has the queue for DTH levelled out? There are seven DTH operators now and these and new players want more satellite capacity.

India is a large market. Today you have some 600 TV channels and DTH has revolutionised the services. Every [broadcaster] is looking for enhanced capacity, because high-definition TV is coming in. This is a worldwide phenomenon. There will always be some gap between what they want and what is available. This is dynamic. The positive thing is, the demand is very high today.

Where do we stand in the launch vehicle programme, particularly the delayed GSLV?

If you look at the queue, the GSLV cryogenic stage has to get ready and fly. The GSLV Mark III cryogenic stage

has to be developed and then the semi-cryogenic stage which is approved. All are progressing. First we have to prove the GSLV. We had problems due to small issues. There is nothing wrong with the vehicle per se, but the problems were attributable to certain components. Of course, GSLV cryogenics have to be developed and tested. The next thing is to improve the reliability of the vehicle which will take us to [a capability to lift] 2.2tonne satellites to geostationary transfer orbits.

Cryogenic testing for the next GSLVD5 vehicle is going on. Two crucial tests have to be completed: testing in vacuum and the endurance of the fuel booster turbo pump. If they are successful we can say it is flying on the ground.

GSLV Mk III is making good progress. It will take us to four tonnes. Its

cryogenics are to be developed fully. During the 12th Plan period we want to do two to three flights of Mk III.

What improvements are happening with communication and remotesensing satellites? Our Insat/GSAT communication satellites, for example, are in the 3,000-kg, 36transponder class, while the world has moved towards spacecraft double and triple that size and capacity.

We, too, have to [do that]. Not [just] larger, it is in terms of power, bandwidth, mass and features like having 100 transponders in one satellite. Whether it is six or ten tonnes is one aspect, how much power it can carry is another.

[Elsewhere] today there are satellites with power levels of 16-17 kilowatts. From the 100-watt Ariane Passenger

PayLoad Experiment (APPLE) experiment [in 1981], we moved on to 5,500 watts of power in GSAT-8 [in 2011].

In 1995 we were the best civilian remote sensing satellite operator with IRS 1C and 1D. TES and the Cartosat-2 series have 0.8 m resolution. We, too, are getting to 0.6 m, 0.5 m and better.

You have spoken of nearly 60 satellite and launch missions in the next five years, planetary exploration and more. What are the plans for infrastructure and manpower to make future programmes possible?

ISRO has to enhance capability for the next five years. We also have to sow the seeds now for what we will do 10 years on; for R&D, for future technologies. We need to identify

groups in the country and within the organisation for such activity.

The Space Research Complex [coming up] on 540 acres in the Science City near Challakere in Chitradurga will be ISROs resource for the next 25-50 years. What we will do there will evolve in one or two years. It could be planetary explorations, space habitat; astrobiology. The Department of Atomic Energy, the Defence Research & Development Organisation, the Indian Institute of Science, ISRO and the Karnataka government are working together there on a township and common amenities.

Right from the 1980s our manpower has remained around 16,000 while the number of missions has grown because of the industry participation. That number will increase by 2,0003,000 to both replace and supplement our people.

Because of the actions taken in the 1970s on partnering the industry, today we have almost 500 firms contributing to the space programme. Where things are standardised and operational one can look for a larger role for industry in realising goals or taking responsibility for it. This is a major initiative that we are working on. October 24, 2012

Everything is at stake at Delhi University


What is the Third Estate? Everything. What is it being reduced to? Nothing. What does it aspire to be? Everything (modified version of questions asked and answered by Abbe Sieyes, France, January 1789).

Currently in the midst of a Delhi University Teachers Association

(DUTA)-led indefinite relay hunger strike, DU, over the last three years, has witnessed agitations by students, teachers and non-teaching employees rooted in anxieties about all that is happening to higher education and our workplace, the university:

1. The terms and conditions of work are becoming worse, more burdensome and increasingly insecure especially for the rapidly expanding number of ad hoc teachers beginning to negatively impact academic activity and even intimately private domains;

2. Our work itself teaching, learning, research is being emptied of depth, creativity, meaning and the possibilities for inspiring critical thought, in a word, quality, as rapidly as it is being taken out of our real control, arbitrarily and thoughtlessly semesterised and variously

reformed from above, and subjected to meaningless and demeaning forms of bureaucratic monitoring, quantitative measurements and accountability; and

3. Our 90-year-old University is being consciously destroyed and dismantled to pave the way for the large-scale commodification of higher education.

It is unfortunate though hardly surprising that apprehensions expressed by large numbers of teachers regarding unmanageable chaos that would ensue and the catastrophic consequences for academic standards and students futures especially of the most vulnerable resulting from major structural changes thrust upon DU in a mad rush in the form of semesterisation for example, are coming true. Students and teachers

have become collateral damage of hurriedly taught, hastily cobbled courses, rampant administrative adhocism, and the collapse of systems of examining and evaluating performance. The next wave of shock and awe is set to hit DU in 2013 as the Administration drags us mindlessly into four-year-study schedules and meta-Universities.

One moment supremely symbolises the destruction and impoverishment being wrought at DU: the decision taken by the VC-in-Academic Council to excise A.K. Ramanujans brilliant essay, 300 Ramayanas from the UG syllabus even at the cost of legitimising prejudice and the politics of hurt sentiments, a politics that has been central to fascistic mobilisation on a world scale.

Teachers and students anxieties are compounded by the fact that the VC

and his team, entrusted with taking on board our fears, suggestions and concerns are refusing to even meet with us, declaring instead that the DUTA, the most important democratically elected teachers body whose struggles have contributed immensely to teachers lives all over the country, is an illegal welfare association.

This is reminiscent of November 7, 1942 when Hitler, rolling through Thuringia on his special train, suddenly saw the awed faces of his wounded soldiers staring in at him from their tiered cots in a hospital train. Angered, he ordered the curtains to be drawn, thereby denying himself the miraculous human moment of reaching over to a wounded soldier. This would have meant Hitler acknowledging the nightmarish results of his military adventure, an intrusion into his reality

that he so dreaded, he preferred pretending it out of existence.

The DU VCs refusal to meet with teachers and their representatives is corroding his own humanity apart from the fact that neither the DUTA nor resentments and concerns will cease to exist for lack of acknowledgement. If anything, this is only fanning the flames of discontent at DU.

An attack on freedoms

In fact, DU continues to be in turmoil above all because the wider restructuring of higher education being pushed through by the Indian state at the behest of Capital has meant an attack on freedoms, democracy and rights, without which no university can hope to flourish. Those meant to ensure that our

institution remains a public University free of violence, harassment and discrimination so that we may read, write, think, love and evolve without fear have been doing their utmost to terrorise and humiliate teachers and non-teaching employees, blanket the university with fear, turn it into a prison and squeeze the life-breath out of it. They continue to crack down on unions and trample upon hard-won rights, including the invaluable rights to organise and protest in a bid to turn DU into a machine, and employees and students into courtiers and slaves.

Let us be clear about the enormity of what is happening. Teachers, tasked with bringing the universe into classrooms, encouraging students to explore, interrogate and debate, teaching them to think critically, act independently and together as equals and discover the meaning of being

fully human, are being told NOT to think, NOT to speak, NOT to participate as equals. Teachers, students and non-teaching employees are, being silenced and robotised, losing control over work and workplace while our university is savaged at the hands of administrators, bureaucrats and Capital.

This is the darker meaning of forced semesterisation, the continuing refusal by the DU Administration to debate further academic reforms, the violation of University Ordinances and democratic procedures by them, and the string of repressive measures, including the cancellation of all categories of leave for teachers on days of protest.

If we allow fear to rule DU, give up the right to organise and protest and allow cultures of democracy to slip

away, we stand to lose everything, including the capacity to fight for improvements in, and increased control over the work-process, to debate and struggle for quality and meaning in academic pursuits, and to demand equal participation in imagining the impossible within the university and beyond. The DU agitation today is driven by the clear awareness that everything being at stake, and the defence of liberties and rights paramount, different forms of protest, including a future general strike may be the only ethical options available. This is what Savio meant perhaps when he said in 1964, Theres a time when the operation of the machinemakes you so sick at heart, that youve got to make it stop, a speech reminiscent of Camus words, There are times when the only feeling I have is one of mad revolt.

It is also driven by the imperative that the right to protest and other rights like the right to take different categories of leave have been fought for and won by generations of women and workers over the past two centuries. We owe it to our past and present as working people to strengthen these instead of allowing an authoritarian administration to take away something they have never given in the first place. Human beings have survived, and the meaning of being human expanded through protest, including through the hunger strike, incidentally the commonest form of protest during the centuries of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Among the messages of these hunger strikes were: we will not be property; we will not be labour power; and we will not let you eat us alive.

Sometimes, as in the present moment at DU, hunger strikes and a general

strike may be the only ways of protecting our rights, keeping alive the Sieyesian imagination and recovering control over work, workplace, our lives and dreams. It is this that will create a university that is inclusive, free and academically, culturally and intellectually rich.

(Mukul Mangalik is Associate Professor of History, Ramjas College, University of Delhi.)

Its shock and awe as administrators, bureaucrats and capital are savaging the institution, destroying teaching, learning and research October 24, 2012

Amenities matter, not size

It is natural for some of those who had attended Eric Hobsbawms lectures to remember him at this time. Most vividly, I remember his The New Century which appeared over a decade ago and in which he discusses problems as they appear today with the Italian journalist, Anton Polito. Their conversation begins with the opening remarks: It is a part of life and business to question ourselves about where the future is leading. Thereby hangs a tale. Whether I like it or not, I have begun to wake up each day with a feeling of dread about where the future is leading. The morning of October 2 was particularly dreadful, for that day, aside from all those reassuring images of Mahatma Gandhi, the papers reported extensively statements of the Minister for Urban Development about the future of Delhi. My own lifelong experience in architecture and urbanism turned irrelevant in the light of the Ministers resolve to determine

the future of Delhi through high-rise multi-storeyed building. I write this therefore as part of ones life and ones business to question oneself as well as the Ministry about where the future of Delhi is heading.

Haute couture

This question could be answered in one sentence or a longer descriptive series of paragraphs. Both are here. For the one sentence answer I have inserted an expression from Hobsbawm Delhi, and much of urban India, is being re-designed a little like haute couture, to a particular political objective in smart clothing, so that the elites, the educated minorities which govern can impose their version of urban living on the rest of the people. Fortunately, the Minister, while making his plea for help, did let slip in some doubts, when

he said: Okay, then what do we do? Give me an answer.

High-rise and low-rise have very little relevance in planning for people who live in a city. The density of people who live there and the public amenities available to them determine the quality of life in a city, not the height of buildings. Densities are crucial to habitations and are measured for countries, states or regions in person per sq. km (e.g. Census 2011), for cities in persons per acre/hectare, and for individual plots in built sq. ft / metres per person or dwellings per acre/hectare. Officials, politicians and builders like their pet planners to talk about Floor Area Ratio (FAR), or Floor Space Index (FSI). This measures the real estate opportunity, the asset potential, and the speculative profit in rupees per sq. ft. of sale. The FAR/ FSI of an area has little to do with the potential quality

of life that the city offers in terms of its public spaces and amenities or the infrastructure it provides. Pathbreaking research findings in a study by Shiresh Patel, Alpa Sethe and Neha Panchal show the long-term damage that is being done to our cities by the officials in charge of planning on the basis of FAR or FSI. They have provided new analytical tools to determine the most critical and the most ignored criteria for planning Indian cities Public Ground Area per person and Buildable Plot Ratio (Urban Layouts, Densities, and Quality of Urban Life, EPW , June 2007).

The average built-up space per person in Mumbai is 7.7 sq. metres. In Manhattan, it is 63.7 sq. metres. If one takes a four floor building in Mumbai where some families are living, each of whom has 7.7 sq. metres of space, and moves all those

families to Manhattan where they could then live like New Yorkers and enjoy 63.7 sq. metres of space each, they would need a building that is 33 floors high. What matters to a city inhabitant is the infrastructure (public amenities, electricity, water, health care, schools, etc.) available, not the building height. Density or the number of people living in the vicinity is the relevant issue. For instance, if the 27-floor Ambani Altamount was to house a host of Mumbai families living at 7.7 sq. metres per person, there would be utter chaos on the ground below and the entire infrastructure would have to be re-laid.

Shirish Patel and others have explained how, in cities, residents need a variety of spaces to share with other known or unknown inhabitants. These spaces include common amenities, recreation, footpaths, roads, public parking, civic amenities,

etc. These requirements are linked to densities of persons who use the area. Night use is different to use during the day, which also needs to be understood. All of this has nothing to do with high-rise or low-rise buildings. What matters in any city, and particularly in India, is the proportion of the total urban area (in a ward or block) that can be set aside for circulation, temples, hospitals, schools, parks, police stations, etc. as a proportion of the available built areas for residence and commercial and industrial activities.

Patel and others have devised the Built Up Ratio as a tool to judge the adequacy of public amenities in any area as a proportion of the number of people who live and work in the area. Using this ratio as a standard, the authors have shown that Mumbai needs one-and-a-half times more public amenities per person compared

to Manhattan. Every time planners increase the built accommodation or commercial space on a plot by making it multi-storeyed, they increase the pressure on the public amenities since FAR or FSI regulates built area alone on a plot and does not link it to public amenities. Generally speaking, we have observed that raising the height of a building and increasing the middle class density in the area without regarding public amenities adequately tends to gentrify the city, drive out its self employed and provides the new high-rise inhabitants with Manhattan like spaces, thus further polarising the urban population.

Meaningless

The process, methods and objectives of urban planning in Delhi, Mumbai and other Tier I cities have become meaningless in the last few decades.

Officials and politicians have been driving a variety of agendas intended to emulate western cities, and now Shanghai. My feelings of dread get further intensified when one realises that the entire process of master planning, the Delhi Development Authority, all urban development boards in Kolkata, Chennai and Bangalore as well as Gurgaon and any other city are dinosaurs that should have been put to grass a decade ago.

One year after Rajiv Gandhi died, Parliament passed the 73rd and 74th Amendment to the Constitution. The first dealt with Panchayati Raj and the second with strengthening municipal governance. According to the 12th Schedule in the 74th Amendment, municipalities are to be empowered to prepare plans for urban development, master plans, land use regulations, building volumes, and economic and social development.

The Ministry as well as all the urban dinosaurian boards have simply extended their patrimony and blocked the devolution of powers to the municipalities. One of the arguments made by their officials is that only they possess the technical skills and specialist knowledge required for planning. But as the work of Patel and others has shown, this behind closed doors possessed technical skill and specialist knowledge are hopelessly and dangerously out of date. They have given us gated communities surrounded by vast stretches of poverty and slums, as well as the unsustainable growth of mega-cities to the utter neglect of smaller cities. My answer to the Ministers dilemma about what he should do is a single sentence response. Implement the 74th Amendment and sleep peacefully at night.

(Romi Khosla is an architect and Editor of Margs Book, The Idea of Delhi .)

In any city, it is the proportion of the

total urban area that can be set aside

for temples, hospitals, schools, parks

and police stations which is crucial October 24, 2012

I have a problem with the makeover of tribal culture


Niranjan Mahawar , 75, is a selftaught ethnologist of Chhattisgarh. He spent almost five decades in southern Chhattisgarh to study the life and art of the Bastar tribes. It was his familys

rice production business that first took Mahawar to southern Chhattisgarhs Bastar region in the early 1960s. At that time, the family was not aware that Mahawar a masters in Economics from Sagar University in Madhya Pradesh had enrolled as a member of the undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) of India in 1955. Later, while administering the rice mill, he started the CPIs first district unit in Dhamtari of Chhattisgarh, eventually joining the CPI-M after the division. While the family finally managed to delink him from the Communist Party, Mahawars love for Bastar especially tribal art and culture kept growing. Today, Mahawar who was made famous in a series of interviews by the writer Dom Moraes is considered an authoritative voice on central Indian folk art, folklore, tribal myths and theatre. He spoke to Suvojit Bagchi extensively on his work. Excerpts.

It was difficult to find out your house in Raipur as nobody knows you here, not even your neighbour

Yes, that is a problem. A woman came from USIS in Mumbai once. She said the same thing.

But in the early 1980s, Dom Moraes wrote a lot on you and possibly you are known since then especially among people who are interested about Bastar art.

Thats correct. Dom came here with a friend as he was planning a visit to Bastar. That was in the early eighties. He came twice and we had a long chat over lunch.

He visited Bastar and wrote a book, Answered by Flutes: Reflections on

Madhya Pradesh . It had two pages on me. He then wrote more on me. Well .after that, the journalists started pouring in and a lot [has been] written on me in mainstream magazines.

So what is there in those articlesor more precisely, what exactly do you mean by Bastar art? The bell metal artefactswrought iron onesthe wood carvings?

Well, everything. But first let me say, I wont call it bell metal but bronze.

Why is it called bell metal?

Bells of temples were made of the metal which is pure bronze. And as you said, besides bronze artefacts, there are wooden carvings, wrought iron, masks, combs I have about 200

combs. They are all Bastar art. They all tell a story.

Like

Like this woman Tallur Muttai ( shows a picture of a woman in bronze, embracing a child with her left hand and holding a stick with a funnel on top with her right ). She, in tribal myth, lives in palmyra fruit trees. To the tribals, palmyra juice is the breast milk of Tallur Muttai. She, therefore, is the earth mother. But then there is the massive Hindu-isation of the tribal myth and the earth mother is made to sit on a tiger as Hindus prefer their goddesses on the tiger. I have a problem with this makeover. If the tribal gods are comfortable on the trees, let them be...why make them a Hindu? Besides, the market forces are also changing the artefacts.

So, in spite of the overlapping of the images of the icons, a tribal is in no way a Hindu?

P.N. Haksar, while heading a national committee on the tribals, once asked that. I said, tribals dont believe in chatur-varna or the caste system that is the basis of Hindu society. Tribals lived with their native tradition and for over five thousand years refused to get dominated by Hindus. Hence they are not Hindus.

So, the difference with Hindus has been there for a long time?

Of course. In the Ramayana , you have the demon. Remember the woman, Tadoka, the demoness. The word Tar or palmyra is in her name too. I assume, she is the same Tallur Muthai and she, like other rakshas, got a snub-nose. The Gonds have a snub-

nose. So while Ram represents the upper caste Hindus, the Aryans, Tadoka and her friends represent the tribal society, the Dravidians. This resistance against the outsiders was documented in modern times by the British gazetteers, anthropologists. They published how the locals resisted them. When the British tried to enter the region, one of the kings of the area, the Raja of Kanker, asked them to refrain. The kings, however, were small and while they also were outsiders, always avoided confrontation with the Bastar tribals.

You mean, Bastar almost always accepted the local rulers, but not the big imperialist forces?

Yes. They will not accept you easily. Even now, you would find tribals while talking among themselves would call you a thug a cheat. They dont trust outsiders. Now, associate this

thought with todays mining. Bastar will resist mining and outsiders.

You mean the State and its mining policies will not be able to penetrate Bastar?

I cannot say that for sure. The Indian state is far more complex and powerful now.

Maybe this has helped the Maoists

Of course. Maoists used this sentiment to their advantage. But I think they are extortionists and not Communists.

You yourself were a Communist. What or who really inspired you?

Yes. I joined the party in 1955. Initially I was influenced by writers like Premchand, Yashpal, Saratchandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore or Gorky. I had a science teacher, Surendra Bhatnagar, whom I met in school in Dhamtari, Chhattisgarh, as we migrated from Alwar. He was a CPI sympathiser and influenced me. Soon I joined the family business and did two things in my factory. Paid women and men equally and asked the workers, who were paid peanuts, to organise themselves. This seriously unsettled my father and uncle ( laughs ). Eventually I went to study at Sagar University, Madhya Pradesh, and met Sudhir Mukherjee, the legendary CPI leader. I joined as a whole timer.

Anything that you did as a CPI activist in the 1950s?

Well.the usual party work. But we used to run a party unit among

students in the university, which grew fast. We started the first party office in Dhamtari. See, it was a time, when we all thought that Communism is around the corner as the Korean War of 1950 was interpreted as Stalins victory. Stalin was a hero even in these remote areas like Dhamtari ( laughs ).

But things changed

Yes. It did. From the early sixties the debate within the CPI started distracting us. I was in the party class in Gwalior in 1960, where different groups, within the party, spoke in favour of and against Nehru. B.T. Ranadive, Homi Daji and Dr. Gangadhar Adhikari were there. I was not really aware of the developments but slowly came to terms with multiple opinions within the party. Finally the split took place, albeit for

different reasons, and after some vacillation, I joined the CPI(M).

Eventually left the CPI(M)?

Yes, but that was not necessarily because I was disillusioned with politics. My family was creating a lot of pressure on memy fatherhe requested me to leave the Communist Party as it was bad for the business. I was upset, took a sabbatical and went to Kolkata. After a brief stay I came back to Chhattisgarh and started working in the rice mill.

And started studying Bastar art?

I have been visiting Bastar and documenting tribal folk lore, tales, music, theatre and every other forms of art in the region even before I left Chhattisgarh briefly.

But you have not written any full scale book other than monographs until recently when you published Bastar Bronze. Why is that so?

Somehow it could not be organised but now I have several books and monographs in the pipeline. I did publish some translations of Verrier Elwins works.

After the formation of the new State of Chhattisgarh, the State government commissioned you to write two major books on the crafts and the performing arts of Bastar. You were paid a fee as well. I assume it was about a decade ago. Why did the government not publish the books, after commissioning?

I dont want to talk about that.

Apparently the department of culture where you submitted the manuscripts, did not even want to return the manuscripts?

Let us not talk about that.

It was only after Governor Shekhar Dutts intervention that the manuscripts were returned is that correct?

Yes, that is right. But let us not discuss that.

I have been told, that you refused to assume the post of the president of Peoples Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) when they requested you recently, even though you were an active activist at one point.

That is because of my health, my kidneys are not fine, I told them.

Is life difficult in Chhattisgarh as an independent academic or human rights activist?

I dont know. I avoid activities as I am not well.

Do you think your Communist identity and love for tribals prevented the government from acknowledging your work?

I dont want to comment.

Maybe that is why you are not even known in your colony

Thank you.

Thank you very much. October 25, 2012

Europe deserves its Nobel

The European Unions receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize has occasioned much scornful laughter, some of it deserved. Yes, there are undoubtedly other worthy laureates, such as Malala Yousafzai, the young and courageous Pakistani peace activist shot this week by the Pakistani Taliban. But it is worth reflecting for a moment on the underlying logic of this award, and making a clear distinction between the grand European project on the one hand, and its troubled outgrowth, the Eurozone, on the other.

Tony Judts brilliant history of the continent, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 , quotes Hegels wistful aphorism that world history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it. The European Union has won the Nobel Prize for a simple reason: its post-war chapters are mostly composed of empty, happy years relative to the preceding centuries of cyclical war and cataclysm.

It may be difficult for newer generations to understand this, but there was simply no guarantee that the continent would come to see prosperity and peace after 1945. It had suffered unimaginable ethnic cleansing, some of which was prosecuted by the victorious allies themselves. Western Europe itself was in tatters. Germany had 20 million people homeless. In France,

vigilante groups would slaughter 10,000 people accused of collaborating with Nazis. Between 1945 and 1949, a majority of Germans held the opinion that Nazism was a good idea, badly applied. Hunger was widespread, and worsened by the vicious winter of 1947. There was no assurance that wartime resistance groups would disarm willingly. As the German joke went, Enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible. And it was terrible but then, more quickly than almost anyone could have imagined, it was not.

It might be argued that, from such an enfeebled position, Europe would likely have grown rapidly anyway. But it might also have torn itself apart before it got anywhere.

Against these uncertainties, the Schuman Plan, which tied together Frances steel industry and Germanys

coke and coal supplies in a resource cartel, and became the foundation of later European integration, was a key moment. It was an ingenious way of calming bitter Franco-German distrust, and it worked spectacularly. There had been customs unions in Europe as early as the 19th century, but this was something else altogether. By 1954, France had dropped its bitter opposition to West German rearmament a remarkable turnaround, scarcely a decade after the Nazi occupation.

The critics argue that Europe is undeserving of these plaudits because the United States played the crucial role. To some extent, this is true. The French would never have tolerated an armed West German state were it not for the protection of NATO, formed in 1949 with American military power at its core. As Lord Ismay famously noted that year, the point of NATO was to

keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

The Alliance may have frayed in recent years, in Afghanistan and Libya, but it succeeded eminently in all three of those core objectives, and could not have done so without U.S. troops, tanks and nuclear weapons sprawled across Europes previously war-torn territory. At its peak, the U.S. stationed 277,342 in Europe more than double the peak numbers in Afghanistan.

American cash was also important. By 1952, when the Marshall Plan finished, the U.S. had spent $13 billion on assistance to Europe, far outstripping all its previous aid spending combined. In current terms, Marshall spending would amount to over $100 billion. All this allowed the sheltered Europeans to build up welfare states, which helped dampen

the extreme populist movements that plagued the first half of the century.

And yet, none of this negates Europes own hand in the process. After all, the United States also kept a major presence in Asia but, there, wounds did not heal as they did in Europe. Compare the pairing of France and Germany, where war is now utterly unimaginable, with South Korea and Japan, two rivals that still view one other with considerable suspicion. Only two months ago, Japan angrily condemned South Koreas illegal occupation of islets in the Sea of Japan.

France and Germany squabble over economic issues, but neither harbours such grievances or suspicion. European fear of Germanys military power is confined to football chants and now politically incorrect British comedy.

Even as American forces trickle out of the continent to turn their attention to the Pacific, this condition prevails. The transformation of Europe is deep and abiding. Europe could not have achieved peace without the U.S., but the European Union and its institutional predecessors still did much of the heavy lifting.

Europes peace was an admittedly ugly one. It accommodated fascists, in Spain and Portugal; allowed colonial atrocities, in places like Kenya and Algeria; and struggled to deal with mass ethnic violence on its doorstep, in Yugoslavia. But, in the final instance, the core members of the European project never went to war to settle their differences, and have now arrived at a point where war is unthinkable. That is a stark exception in world history, and a feat that

vanishingly few groups of countries can claim to have achieved.

(Shashank Joshi is a doctoral student at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute. Email: shashj@gmail.com)

The award is in recognition of a continents journey from wilful selfdestruction to a state where war cannot be imagined

The Schuman Plan tied together Frances steel industry and Germanys coke and coal supplies

The transformation of Europe is deep and abiding and can sustain itself without the U.S. October 25, 2012

When war passes for foreign policy


Take the profit out of war, said Kevin Zeese, one of the more important activists of the Occupy Movement in the United States, and you take out war. His audience was made up mainly of U.S. war veterans gathered in New York to observe and protest the 11th anniversary of the conflict in Afghanistan. That is the longest war the United States has ever waged. The veterans ranged from those who had seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan to many who had fought in Vietnam. There was also one 88year-old World War II veteran.

That link between profit and war sticks out in a recent Center for Public Integrity (CPI) investigation. The U.S. Congress could be spending $3 billion on tanks the army does not want. That includes repairing many M1 Abrams tanks the army wont use. As Aaron Mehta, one of the authors of the CPI report puts it: the army has decided it wants to save as much as $3 billion by freezing refurbishment of the M1 from 2014 to 2017, so it can redesign the hulking, clanking vehicle from top to bottom. Congress disagreed.

Of course, the lawmakers batting for the tanks spoke about jobs. Their concern, in theory, is for the workers involved. If their factories shut down, the workers making the tanks could lose their jobs. But it seems the lawmakers own jobs were the real cause of their worry. The tanks manufacturer, say the reports

authors has pumped millions of dollars into congressional elections over the last decade. A sound move, it seems. The CPI studied spending and lobbying records that showed donations targeting the lawmakers who sit on four key committees that will decide the tanks fate. It also found that: Those lawmakers have received $5.3 million since 2001 from employees of the tanks manufacturer, General Dynamics, and its political action committee.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost anywhere between $2.5-$4 trillion. In a nation with a $16 trillion debt, that should count for something. In the third and final Obama-Romney debate (on foreign policy), it didnt. Those numbers didnt merit the slightest mention by either man. Obama claimed to be holding the line on military spending. Romney promised to raise it. As early

as 2008, economist and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz co-authored a book with Linda J. Bilmes (an expert on U.S. budgeting, at Harvard) titled The Three Trillion Dollar War . That prophecy is pretty much on track. It could even prove an underestimate. As Bilmes pointed out in The Boston Globe , Half of all U.S. veterans from this (Afghan) war are claiming disability benefits, racking up trillions of dollars in long-term support costs.

The link with the economy, apart from with foreign policy, point out Stiglitz and Bilmes, is huge. Spending on the wars and on added security at home has accounted for more than onequarter of the total increase in U.S. government debt since 2001. And this war was pursued without raising taxes. Indeed, with tax cuts for the rich thrown in at the same time, in both wars, during the Bush years.

Human costs

About 6,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thats twice the number of victims in the dreadful attacks of 9/11. Besides, suicides among soldiers on active duty now average one every 24 hours. The death count does not include hundreds of others working for private military contractors. Elsewhere in the world, theyd be called mercenaries. Many dirty chores were outsourced to such forces as the U.S. tried to wind down its presence.

Obama said in the debate that he had come with a promise to get us out of Iraq and we did that. He had, therefore kept his promise of 2008. He failed to mention that in that year, he also ran with the line that Afghanistan was a worthy war. As President, his surge adding 30,000 troops there for a while has

failed. The real task is how to get out without disgrace.

The debate had not a word on the numbers of casualties and deaths. Not a word on the financial costs of the wars and their link to the economy. Not a whisper on the lessons to be drawn for U.S. foreign policy. That, in a debate on foreign policy.

The human costs to others have been awful, too. No one knows for sure how many civilians have died as a result of the two wars. The estimates range from one hundred thousand to several times that number. As reported in these columns in 2008, a little over three years after the war in Iraq began in 2003, over 6,50,000 Iraqis were estimated to have lost their lives. A survey by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and Al Mustansiriya

University in Baghdad had put it bluntly: As many as 6,54,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under prewar conditions. The deaths from all causes violent and non-violent are over and above the estimated 1,43,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion. The survey has been attacked, but few deny the death count has been massive. Iraqs overall mortality rate more than doubled from 5.5 deaths per 1,000 persons before the war began to 13.3 per 1,000 persons by late 2006. Also, many more civilians have died since the time of that study.

By late 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees had come up with other kinds of numbers. Close to 1.8 million Iraqis had fled their country since the war began. Another

1.6 million made up the internally displaced.

What an incredible waste of human life these wars inflict, Paul Appel, a Vietnam war veteran, told us at the October 7 meeting in New York. Looking back, I was having to face that before I even left for Vietnam. I was given the job of letting parents know their sons had died in the war. I had to go along with the army priest. Once, I was left to do it on my own. Appel is a farmer from Illinois. With him was Dud Hendricks, a former sports coach from Maine. And many others from modest backgrounds. A few hours after we met, they were all arrested and led away in cuffs. The vets wouldnt leave the Vietnam War Memorial where they had gathered, by 10 p.m. A highly embarrassed police squad took them away.

None of the four candidates for president or vice-president has ever served in the military. At the debate that night, Romney declared his firm support for using Drones in the way they are now employed in Pakistan. Obama smirked. It was a policy he had driven big time. That these have caused very high civilian casualties did not matter. The drones are now over Libya as well. His trump card, of course, was the killing of Osama bin Laden. His huge foreign policy achievement. Yet several groups associated with Bin Laden were not overwrought by his death. Their disconnected leader had become an embarrassment.

The debaters revelled in clichs. Obama: America is the one indispensable nation in the world. (So there are many that are dispensable?) Ive got a different vision for America. Romney:

America must be strong. Im optimistic about the future.

So where does it go from here? It goes to a zillion more television ads adding even more to this insanely expensive contest. The pundits are already working out in which states the campaigns will cut back on spending in order to push more money into some swing states.

It is not easy to beat an incumbent American President. In the last 112 years, only four elected presidents seeking re-election have been defeated. (Gerald Ford who lost in 1976 does not figure in that list. He was not elected but became President when Richard Nixon quit in disgrace. In 80 years since 1932, only Jimmy Carter (1980) and George H.W. Bush (1992) have been beaten.

Yet, Obama, while having that great edge, does not have it all sewn up. Its easy to forget that in 2008, just before Wall Street hit the fan, John McCain was slightly ahead of Obama in the polls. The meltdown that year transformed the scene. The state of the economy hardly gives Obama a great boost this time around.

Meanwhile, the pundits are back to guessing whose body lingo was better in the final debate. Who looked more presidential. A more cutting response to that process, though, comes from Andrew Levine in CounterPunch.org. What does being a better debater have to do with anything? Presidents dont debate. The candidates might as well compete by jousting or polevaulting.

sainath.p@thehindu.co.in

In the last Obama-Romney debate, there was absolutely no mention of the financial costs, casualties and lessons from Americas military outings October 25, 2012

Crossing the point of no return

Bhai-bhai times:Jawaharlal Nehru with Zhou Enlai in Beijing on October 19, 1954. Three weeks ahead of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlais landmark 1960 visit to India, Chinese officials prepared an internal note discussing how they viewed the political and economic situation in India and its bearing on the boundary issue. The April 1, 1960 note, among documents from 1949-65 that were declassified

recently by the Chinese government, was prepared to brief the Chinese leadership ahead of Zhous April 20 visit.

The note is revealing of how Beijing perceived rightly or wrongly the influence of the political climate in India on driving the tensions on the border. Since the implementation of the Second Five-Year Plan in April 1956, Indias economy has been deteriorating and its economic policy has moved increasingly towards the right, the note observed. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The road of Indian bourgeois reformism has become narrower and narrower.

The U.S.-led Imperialist countries, the note continued, are taking advantage of Indias economic difficulties and tightening control over

India through aid and private investment. In early 1958, the United States provided for the first time a large number of loans to India to buy equipment. The U.S. also colluded with Britain, West Germany, Japan, Canada and other countries to aid India. The note concluded, The strength of the Indian big bourgeoisie has increased and intensified collusion with foreign monopolies and attempted to intervene in the arms industry to reap higher profits by taking advantage of the Sino-Indian border issue.

We came in vain

Chinese officials saw the 1960 visit as a real opportunity to negotiate and reach a settlement. In 1960, we first came to Delhi to negotiate, but it was in vain, Zhou Enlai told the Soviet Union Ambassador on October 8,

1962, 12 days before the Chinese offensive. While Zhou never openly or formally declared that China would accept an east west swap deal where India would recognise Chinese claims on Aksai Chin and China would give up its claims on the eastern sector, he made it clear that Beijing was willing to negotiate. In a meeting with R.K. Nehru in New Delhi on April 21, 1960, Zhou said in the east, a settlement can be found. Our aim, he said, is still to explore ways of a settlement.

The McMahon Line on the eastern section of the Sino-Indian border is illegal and has never been admitted by Chinas governments. Nevertheless, in order to keep peace of the border and help peaceful negotiations, we suggested before negotiations that armed troops do not cross the line, Zhou told the Soviet Ambassador. India never surveyed

the line and only after Indian border defence troops arrived did they know what it was. The topography is favourable for them and thus they drew it on the map.

Zhous meetings with Jawaharlal Nehru on April 25, 1960, however, ended in bitter deadlock. Zhou recounted, according to the October 8 note, that Nehru had rejected out of hand all his proposals. We suggested that bilateral armed forces respectively retreat for 20 kilometres on the borders and stop the patrols to escape conflicts. They did not accept the suggestion. Later, we unilaterally withdrew for 20 kilometres and did not appoint troops to patrol in the area in order to evade conflicts and help negotiations develop smoothly. However, India perhaps had a wrong sense that we were showing our weakness and feared conflicts India is taking advantage that we withdrew

for 20 kilometres and did not assign patrols, and has invaded as well as set up posts.

Chinese thinking

Two revealing internal notes prepared shortly after Zhous trip shed light on Chinese thinking following the visit. One note prepared on May 31, 1960 alleged that the Indian government had distorted the exact words of Premier Zhou in the translations of the press conference held in New Delhi and in the official press releases subsequently circulated. The note listed 11 different ways in which Zhous words had been misconstrued. For instance, it said that Zhou had stated that the dispute in the middle sector was relatively small; the Indian governments version read very small.

Zhou said the eastern section of the disputed area has been Chinas administrative jurisdiction area for long. The Indian version, the note claimed, said China had administered the area for once. The Indian version, it further alleged, deleted Zhous statement that the Chinese government has never accepted the McMahon line. The note said Zhou had also wrongly been quoted as saying that in the eastern section, we are willing to maintain the present status, adding that the words before the settlement of the border had been deleted from the end of the sentence.

The sense of acrimony was clearly evident in Zhous meetings in New Delhi, particularly during his interaction with Morarji Desai, the then Finance Minister, on April 25, 1960. The bitterness of the visit is reflected in K. Natwar Singhs detailed

account of the meeting in My China Diary . Discordance started at the very beginning, Mr. Singh recounts. After trading barbs on Tibet, Desai accused Zhou of being unjust. Zhou told Desai he had said enough. The Chinese Prime Minister said more than enough, the Finance Minister retorted.

The bitterness of the exchange was further evident in a second internal Chinese government note, prepared on July 31, 1960, that reviewed Zhous visit and came to the conclusion that India was not interested in a settlement. The note concluded that the Indian Establishment wanted to provoke the border event so as to oppose China. The Chinese government ultimately linked the failure of the 1960 visit perhaps based on questionable evidence to Indian designs on Tibet. After the Tibetan rebellion was put down, a

series of progressive reforms would be carried out which would have great influence on India, the note said.

The Indian government, it concluded, was afraid of this because Indian people under such influence would complain more about their own governments inability. In addition, the Indian government is facing up difficulties and resembles a mother who lacks milk The Indian people hope to get on with China; troubles are made by the Establishment. K. Natwar Singh, in his book, writes that by the time Zhou landed in India, the point of no return had almost been reached. By the time Zhou arrived back in Beijing, the two notes suggested, the Chinese came to believe that point had already been crossed.

After Zhou Enlais 1960 trip to India ended in acrimony, Beijing concluded that Nehru was not interested in resolving the border dispute October 25, 2012

Polio endgame not immune to politics


Eradicating a disease is a bit like landing a man on the moon, or, as the Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner recently did, parachuting down to the earth from the edge of space and living to tell the tale: its a risky venture requiring single minded determination to succeed, technical expertise, generous funding and a huge helping of luck.

The global campaign to eradicate polio will require all of this if it is to succeed. The polio virus remains stubbornly entrenched in pockets of Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan and

the campaign is set to miss a 2012end deadline to end transmission of the wild, or natural polio virus globally.

Eradication campaigns are the most ambitious and technically complex of global health programmes. Consider what polio eradication involves: it aims to wipe off the face of the earth the virus that causes polio. This virus is one of the most basic forms of existence on earth a sliver of RNA encased in a protein coat, visible only through powerful electron microscopes. This speck of genetic material has to be hunted down and driven to extinction. Because it can only reproduce in human beings, if enough humans are immune to it, the virus will eventually find no place to reproduce and will die out. The polio campaigns strategy is to build enough population immunity through largescale immunisation campaigns to

drive the virus to extinction. But with hundreds of thousands of nonimmune children born every minute in countries where the polio virus still exists, this is not an easy task.

Time critical

Eradication campaigns also have to be time bound. They are expensive, high intensity public health programmes that only make sense if they meet their goals within a defined time. If they drag on too long, they pull resources away from other public health priorities.

The campaign missed its original target of 2000 and it would take a miracle for it to meet its current 2012end deadline. What will happen after that? Will funding keep coming if there are no tangible signs of progress in these countries? Or will the polio

campaign go the way of the vast majority of disease eradication campaigns that the world has seen. Ambitious programmes to eradicate malaria and yellow fever had to be shelved when the technical knowledge of the disease that the campaign had been based on proved to be faulty. Smallpox has been the only successful eradication campaign so far. Will polio eradication go the way of malaria and yellow fever, or will it prove to be successful like smallpox?

The polio eradication campaign argues that all that is required is a greater effort by the governments of Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan to implement their polio immunisation campaigns more effectively so that large numbers of children are not missed.

But it is more than a question of greater effort. Disease control and eradication programmes are not merely about health; they are also about politics and governance. Health and politics are intertwined, and global disease eradication campaigns are where the global and the local meet and often clash.

Caught in the fault lines

One reason Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria are struggling is because the polio campaign has become enmeshed in the geopolitical fault lines of the post 9/11 world. In all three countries, the polio campaign is seen by Islamist militants and clerics as a proxy for western interests. In Pakistan, tribal leaders in North Waziristan have banned polio immunisation teams from entering the province in protest against U.S. drone attacks against suspected

Taliban targets. The use by the CIA of a Pakistani doctor to get intelligence on Osama bin Laden through a hepatitis B vaccination campaign threw a cloud of suspicion over all international immunisation campaigns.

In Afghanistan, many parts of the 13 districts in the south where polio persists are no go areas for polio vaccination teams. The polio campaign hopes that importance of eradicating the disease will triumph over politics and vaccination teams will be allowed to work in the midst of conflict.

Local versus global

This could happen but it does not mean that local communities will embrace the idea of polio vaccination. Polio is not a major public health issue

in the countries it exists in. Malaria, measles, diarrheal diseases, lower respiratory tract infections and malnutrition are the major causes of illness and death in children. Yet when their children suffer from these common illnesses, people often need to travel long distances and pay money to get medical care. In contrast, vaccination against polio is delivered to their doors free. This raises suspicion and anger: why has polio been give such priority, and if it is possible to deliver polio vaccine like this, why cant other more urgent health care also be brought to peoples door steps?

Issues like this tend to be dismissed by the polio campaign as stemming from ignorance, and elaborate communication campaigns have been devised to get people to accept polio immunisation. But those who refuse polio vaccination for their children are

not ignorant; they are pointing to the gap between their health priorities and health priorities set by international organisations. Polio has been difficult to eradicate partly because of this gap between local and global priorities. A key lesson for future global health programmes is to find ways to reduce this democratic deficit between what people in developing countries feel their greatest health needs are, and the kind of programmes that are developed at the global level by the WHO and international donor agencies.

The polio eradication campaign is a crusade, and like all crusades, is eternally optimistic about the chances of success. But with time and money running out, the future of the polio eradication programme is still an open question.

(Thomas Abraham is director of the Master in Journalism programme at the University of Hong Kong. He is writing a book on the campaign to eradicate polio. E-mail: thomas@hku.hk) October 26, 2012

Gadkari and the business of politics


The current shadow of controversy that hangs over Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari has its roots in the distinctive nature of Maharashtra politics, dominated by owners of sugar mills, cooperative banks, dairies, and educational institutions, sometimes by all four at once. Its a trend which might cause alarm elsewhere but which Maharashtras politicians like to present with a benign spin, that there is nothing wrong with padding your political base and bank balances as long as it is

also in the public good. Who knows, perhaps in its early years this formula might have made for a certain kind of progressive politics, absent in the cow-belt States. But 50 years down the line, those same cooperative banks and sugar mills have been milked dry and run to the ground. The States businessmen-politicians have expanded into areas of hard commerce like hotels, malls, and luxury apartments. As a natural corollary, builders and contractors have been made MLAs, MLCs and MPs. Today, Maharashtra regularly makes headlines as the perfect Petri dish for everything that ails contemporary Indian politics: cronyism, conflict of interest and sometimes, outright corruption.

Mr. Gadkaris own business career reflects the perils of that model.

As a late entrant to Maharashtras politician-businessman club, Mr. Gadkari began with a sugar mill in Vidarbha in 2001, ostensibly to encourage the regions distress-hit cotton farmers to turn to a less risky crop. Except he chose to locate his plant on the outskirts of Nagpur, somewhat removed from the cottongrowing, suicide-prone districts of Vidarbha. At any rate, his description of himself as politician-cum-social entrepreneur would apply, if at all, to Purtis early days. Very swiftly, Purti expanded into areas that made it hard to justify outright social benefit, like ethanol and alcohol, which it supplies, among others, to Vijay Mallyas UB Group. When Purti decided to expand into power, Vidarbhas sunrise sector, it brought Mr. Gadkari in conflict with his own party, which opposed the diversion of water from Vidarbhas irrigation dams to a rash of new power projects. On Purti Groups website, one of his group companies,

Avinash Fuels, says it has applied for coal mining in Maharashtra, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. (The website has since disabled all such pages). But it retains Purtis basic description as Vidarbhas leading business group, a Rs. 3000 million company which only shows how far Mr. Gadkari has come from his self-description as a patron of Vidarbhas poor.

While all of this may have opened up Mr. Gadkari to questions of conflict of interest, our investigation has raised more serious questions about the source of the capital that financed Purtis rapid growth.

In its regulatory filings, Purti Sugar and Power Pvt Ltd.s start-up finance came from a paid-up capital of Rs. 68 crore, raised through the sales of six crore shares. About 70 per cent of these shares are owned by 18

companies. Their identity is impossible to ascertain since, as NDTV reporters discovered, none of them have given accurate addresses. For example, Earnwell Traders and Swiftsol India, which own shares for about Rs. 5 crore in Purti, gave their address as Govind Karman Chawl in Malad East. The residents of the chawl had never heard of these companies. Similarly, another set of investors in Purti, Chariot Investrade, Regency Equifin and Leverage Fintrade, also gave a false address in Malad East. One company, Sterlight Fincom, has changed its address three times in five years. And so on.

Evasive

When we asked Mr. Gadkari in studio last week about the identity of his mystery investors, he was evasive. He first said Purti was owned by 10,000 farmers, and he cannot remember

each of their names or addresses. We pointed out that these so-called farmers own only 10 per cent of Purti, and that the rest are owned by 18 companies. He then said he approached many people from the society: industrialists, traders, businessmen and investors ... and also NRI people.

But several of these companies have Mr. Gadkaris personal staff as their directors. Ashwami Sales and Marketing, which invested Rs. 3.2 crore in Purti, has as its director Manohar Panse, Mr. Gadkaris driver. Sterlight Fincom, which invested about Rs. 4 crore in Purti, has as its director Vishnu Sharma, Mr. Gadkaris astrologer. Why would the cashstrapped president of a political party borrow money from his own (presumably even more cashstrapped) employees?

Moreover, Mr. Gadkari has advanced loans to at least one of these companies that he is borrowing from. The balance sheet of Regency Equifin, which bought about 40 lakh shares in Purti, shows an unsecured loan from Nitin Gadkari of Rs. 26 lakh in 2009, which is reduced to Rs. 16 lakh in 2010. So not only is Mr. Gadkari borrowing from companies run by his personal staff, he is also lending money to those companies.

In his defence of the BJP president, senior party leader Lal Krishna Advani has said the allegations *against Gadkari] are about standards of business and not about misuse of power or corruption. But in the words of a chartered accountant, companies that exhibit such features ghost directors and addresses, cross-holdings, cronies as directors fit the pattern of shell companies used to convert black money into white.

According to this CA, somewhere, six layers back, these companies would be making cash deposits into a bank account, most likely in a bank with weak regulatory framework. And while these market practices, however dubious, are not unusual for businessmen looking for quick cashto-cheque conversions, Mr. Gadkari is no ordinary businessman. Congress leader Digvijay Singh was quick to allege that Mr. Gadkari is routing kickbacks via these shell companies.

Mr. Gadkari has vehemently denied this. But one of the early investors in Purti (and the only one whose identity is known) is Ideal Road Builders, a subsidiary of Maharashtras biggest toll road company, IRB Infra Developers Ltd. During Mr. Gadkaris stint as PWD Minister between 1995 and 1999, Ideal Road Builders received six contracts worth Rs. 63 crore. Just a year after Mr. Gadkari

demitted office and started his sugar factory, Ideal picked up shares worth Rs. 1.85 crore in Purti, later increasing their shareholding value to Rs. 2.8 crore. D.P. Mhaiskar, a director in IRB, also picked up Purti shares worth Rs. 4 crore on an undisclosed date. In 2010, Global Safety Vision, a company with Mr. Mhaiskar as director, loaned Purti Rs. 164 crore, which Purti used to wipe out its entire debt. Globals balance sheet shows a paid-up capital of only Rs. 1 lakh. Mr. Mhaiskar told The Times of India this week that he had raised the money by selling a chunk of his personal stake in IRB.

Question of equity

Mr. Gadkari seemed aghast at the suggestion that ex-PWD Minsters should not accept investments or loans from road contractors. He said the tendering process to Ideal Road Builders was above board, a claim

contested by the NCP. Mr. Gadkari also said taking equity is not a fraud. Equity is not a corruption, equity is a shareholding. True. But for a politician and an ex-Minister, it is important to explain the source of equity. Equity from a road contractor to whom he has awarded tenders carries a strong whiff of conflict of interest. Equity from sources whose identity he has not been able to explain carries more serious implications. Mr. Gadkari has offered himself and his companies up for an enquiry. The government has responded with far greater alacrity than it demonstrated in the case of Robert Vadra, ordering enquiries by tax authorities and the Registrar of Companies into Purti and its investors.

Regardless of the UPAs blatant double standards, the very fact that he is being probed will do no good to Mr. Gadkaris political career, poised

as it is at a critical juncture. This is quite apart from the damage any potentially damaging findings would cause. Would he in hindsight agree, as some in his own party do, that business and politics do not make for a healthy mix?

(Sreenivasan Jain is Managing Editor, NDTV. He anchors the ground reportage show, Truth vs Hype on NDTV 24x7. E-mail: vasu@ndtv.com)

The BJP presidents financial dealings reek of cronyism and conflict of interest, and could jeopardise his political career October 26, 2012

Winner takes all in this legal world

Measured for clout and power, Indian citizens fall broadly into four categories. At the very top, and outranking others by a colossal margin, is the creamiest layer from the political-civil service-corporate class. This elite force can prise open the toughest doors, bend any and all rules, and pull off the choicest bargains.

Systemic bottlenecks that torpedo the ordinary folk slink out of sight when a club member wants a wish fulfilled. Whether it is a fancy vacation, one or more luxury apartments, a share in business contracts, or a political favour in return for the contracts, there is no product that cannot be express delivered in this world: Because business here is by compact and networks forged within each segment and across the segments.

It is not beyond the imagination of the velvet set to get an entire hillside for the asking. In a November 3, 2010 interview to DNA newspaper, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar offered a fascinating account of how he came to be associated with the controversial Lavasa project in Maharashtra: It is 100 per cent true that I selected the site for Lavasa, he said, adding that he spotted the picturesque backwaters of the Varasgaon dam while overflying it on a helicopter. Mr. Pawar, who was then Chief Minister, introduced the site to friend and industrialist Ajit Gulabchand, and with permissions and paperwork a mere, internallyarranged trifle, things went swimmingly for Indias first privately built and managed hill station in which his family held and sold lucrative shares.

The point of this narration is not to insinuate illegalities in the project. Indeed, distinguished names have celebrated the Lavasa vision. Yet through last year, the township was engaged in a pitched battle with the Union Environment Ministry over a range of violations. More serious charges were recently levelled by former IPS officer and activist Y.P. Singh. But leaving aside all this, one thing is indisputably clear: When the powerful decide to conjure up magic out of nothing, the laws will conspire to create that magic.

In second place are the salaried people, some of them with comfortable incomes but nonetheless bound within an accountable system that lops off taxes at source and limits opportunity for financial profligacy. The less fortunate in this lot will scrimp and save to buy a home, accepting the punishing lending

conditions of banks, including finding guarantors and paying monstrous equated monthly instalments. If, at the end of this, the dream home vanishes like a dream, there is no recourse because while the buyer is obliged by draconian contracts to pay up on time or face a penalty nothing binds the builder to deliver as promised. In the absence of real estate regulation, the buyer inescapably gets caught in a pincer between the nightmare of his iffy property and the high interests he continues to pay on his loan.

Favouring some

Just how skewed the system is can be seen from DLFs differentiated treatment of its clients those with lineage like Robert Vadra who can get impossible sums as advances and those whose lot it is to be harassed by delays, non-delivery and price

escalation. In August last year, the Competition Commission of India slapped a fine of Rs.630 crore on DLF on complaints from buyers. DLF went in appeal and secured a stay order. DLF home owners were fortunate in that they could mobilise the resources to fight the realty giant, not so the millions of ordinary householders who face ruin because their entire savings are invested with dubious builders.

The third category is formed by the lower rungs of the middle and working class. Aspirationally mobile, these men and women desperately crave a better future, the starting point of which is being able to save minuscule amounts in a bank. Yet opening an account can be an ordeal with banks insisting on address proof and other documentation. A decade ago, I took my domestic help to a nationalised bank assuming my introduction would help her open an

account. The bank manager was livid: his bank was not for ayahs and maid servants. Today, political correctness has ensured that there are standing instructions from the Reserve Bank on allowing the poor to open zerobalance (now basic) accounts with minimal conditions. But the guidelines have been lost on banks, and the plight of the domestic help who has no permanent address and therefore no proof, remains the same. Her only saviour then is the unsafe chit fund with its fantastic penal clauses. As the Sachar Committee found out, banks have designated red zones, among them Muslim-majority and low income colonies, where they dont like to provide services.

Any property purchased by this section can only be in unauthorised colonies because buying a proper home means borrowing and elaborate bank documentation. From where

does a driver or a cook or a menial worker get a salary certificate? But life in an unauthorised colony has its own threats of papers being questioned, of demolition, stigmatisation and being refused services. It is a vicious circle where the victim is first forced to commit an illegality and then punished for committing that illegality. This is the mirror opposite of what happens to the club class whose members get interest-free loans for property which they sell back to the lender for a profit.

And finally, the landless labour class that forms the overwhelming majority of Indias working force. Property and bank accounts can seem surrealistic to a people engaged in livelihood struggles. Consider the unbeatable irony of Mr. Vadra hitting the headlines for his property adventures in the same week that tens of thousands of people set out on a

march to Delhi to demand their right to land.

Gadkari and Vadra

Arvind Kejriwal was dead right when he alleged collusion between the political big bosses. It is a law of nature that those feeling the same threat will unite. Politicians know that their carefully built empires of wealth are models of each other, and if one crumbles so will the rest. Sushma Swaraj, the sharp-witted leader of the Opposition whose tweets are eagerly watched for the political signals they could convey, tweeted every hour on the day the Vadra news broke but on all subjects except on the doings of the First son-in-law. That same day, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Nitin Gadkari was on TV admitting knowledge of the Vadra papers but arguing that they did not constitute evidence.

It is an interesting piece of news that Ajit Pawar, the Union Agriculture Ministers nephew, has turned out to be the common factor in two recent exposs the Maharashtra irrigation scam and Lavasa, both of which happened when the nephew held powerful positions in the State government. So when Mr. Kejriwal charged Mr. Gadkari with wrongdoing in the first, the senior Mr. Pawar rushed to his defence. The BJP chief returned the favour when the Pawars were questioned for facilitating Lavasa.

Since then Mr. Gadkari has landed himself in more serious trouble with allegations that he has set up a maze of dummy and benami companies. But significantly, the sharpest attacks on the BJP chief have come, not from the Congress, but from a BJP faction

that wants Mr. Gadkari replaced by Narendra Modi.

It is not a coincidence that the same justification gets offered each time a new web of deceit is uncovered. The Congresss single defence with respect to Mr. Vadra was that he committed no illegality. Lal Krishna Advani has similarly argued that l'affaire Gadkari is about standards of business and not corruption. This is in fact the crux of the problem: that the standards of business are horribly different for one set of people. Whether or not the charges against Mr. Vadra and Mr. Gadkari are ever proved in a court of law, what has already been proved is the ability of the power elite to lubricate the wheels of delivery to the exclusion of all but itself. If unsecured, interest-free loans are legitimate, why do they unerringly reach only those already powerful? If Mr. Vadra is rich enough to legitimately own dozens

of high-end apartments, why cannot the SPG guard him in one of these locations, rather than in prime government housing presumably paid for by taxpayers?

The pessimism can only deepen when Team Kejriwal too cites legality to defend its members against counterallegations. Whether it is Prashant Bhushan acquiring vast tea estate land via rules relaxed by the Himachal Pradesh government or Anjali Damania admitting to commercial use of farm land, India Against Corruptions fiercest defence has been that its members acted within the four corners of the law.

Cattle class victims would be entitled to ask: why does the law constrict us while it bends and crawls before you?

vidya.s@thehindu.co.in

What stands proved already is the ability

of the powerful to secure express delivery from the system, for themselves October 26, 2012

A last opportunity, missed


On July 17, 1962, three months before China launched its offensive, the countrys Ambassador in New Delhi, Pan Zili, sent a note to the leadership in Beijing discussing the stalemate in negotiations with India, and expressing concern about ties between the neighbours. Pan was of the opinion that Indias unwillingness or inability to negotiate and agree to a settlement reflected internal troubles. In the contacts we

have had these days, we have found that India has reached a deadlock with China on political and military issues because of its own economic difficulties, Pan wrote. The note was among documents from 1949-65 recently declassified by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives in Beijing.

India, Pan added, does not get on with its neighbours and conflicts among its internal factions are fierce, particularly on the issue of Nehrus succession. Pan wrote that the then Defence Minister, V.K. Krishna Menon, in his opinion, showed the desire [to negotiate] and seemingly he considered that once India failed in war, his position would be greatly affected.

Pan noted that handcuffed by domestic pressures, India would not

be able to make any kind of concession that would lead to a mutually acceptable settlement. India, he said, had settled on a dual-track approach: On the one hand, India seemed to be willing to negotiate peacefully; on the other hand, it looked for loopholes on the west border. It went forward into our interior, increased its posts, and changed the settled facts in order to bargain with us. The Ambassador concluded that China needed to strengthen military struggle on the west border and prevent India from going forward. But, he cautioned, we should be careful and not provoke military conflicts. Additionally, we may make more contacts with the India side.

An opportunity and a warning

The Chinese government followed Pans advice, arranging two last-ditch

meetings in Geneva between its Vice Foreign Minister, Zhang Hanfu, and R.K. Nehru, and between Foreign Minister Chen Yi, a vastly experienced former Peoples Liberation Army General, and Krishna Menon. The Chinese leaders saw the meetings as a final opportunity to ask Nehru to halt advancements in the west and avert a military confrontation.

Fruitless

In a July 20, 1962 note, the Foreign Ministry appeared to come to the conclusion that the meeting with R.K. Nehru was fruitless. He did not put forward new issues, the note said. Our side emphasised that the border issue was serious and if India did not withdraw troops, it should bear all the results. Reflecting on his meeting with Zhang, R.K. Nehru later acknowledged the significance of the

warning, as A.G. Noorani recounted in a Frontline article. Nehru said: *Zhang+ said, in their notes they sent to us they had indicated, It is bound to lead to a serious military conflict. May be the nature and scale and magnitude of the conflict was not anticipated, but I am not prepared to say that they did not give us sufficient warning that military encounters might follow. My own interpretation is that as in India, so also in China, there were various schools of thought. May be the military elements, coming on the top, wanted a clash.

Disagreeable breakfast

Three days later, on July 23, Chen Yi met Krishna Menon in Geneva over breakfast. In a note of the meeting, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Chen had complained of Indias continuing advancements in the west. Menon suggested that both

sides make clear western border lines and *regard+ the area between the two lines as a controversial area, the note said. In the area, both sides could establish posts, but they would not attack each other. There should be a distance between posts of each side. Personnel in each post should be roughly equal, and patrols of each side should not cross the border line that it required. Mr. Chen instantly opposed the suggestion and said it was in fact to circle an area in China as an area where Indian border guards could walk freely. China could not agree it. Chen suggested both sides issue a communique stating India and China would negotiate on the border to avoid conflict. Krishna Menon declined.

The two meetings left the Chinese convinced that negotiations would lead nowhere. On August 24, 1962, Ambassador Pan, sent a note to

Beijing attacking Jawaharlal Nehrus unwillingness to negotiate. Nehru made the negotiation door seem open and closed, and overestimated his own cunningness. He suggested to Beijing that the government make efforts to publicise its position more widely. Our aim must be to make the Indian masses and middle classes know that it is actually China that desired to negotiate and ease the tension, Pan said, and that Nehru did not have sincerity for negotiation.

Twelve days before China launched its offensive, Zhou Enlai, the Premier, almost appeared to lay out an explanation for military action in a meeting with the Ambassador of the Soviet Union in Beijing. Without offering any evidence, he claimed India would possibly wage a largescale war on the eastern section of the Sino-Indian border. If they

launch the attack, he said, we will definitely defend ourselves. Zhou also hit out at Soviet military support to India. Indians have used MiG helicopters, made in the Soviet Union, to throw objects on the western and eastern sections of Sino-Indian border and transport military necessities. They sometimes even used transport airplanes from Soviet Union. It affects Chinas soldiers on the front that India carried out provocation by aircraft made in the Soviet Union.

Zhou and the Chinese leadership saw the final three months as making a military confrontation inevitable, and blamed Nehru entirely for the course of events. This serious Sino-Indian border conflict is completely caused by the Indian Governments long-term deliberate attempt, Zhou alleged in a November 13, 1962 letter to Ayub Khan in Pakistan. The failure of the two meetings in July had emerged as

a final turning point. Following his meeting with Krishna Menon in Geneva, Chen Yi flew to Beijing the next day and reported to Zhou Enlai. After hearing Chen Yis report, Zhou commented, It seems as though Nehru wants a war with us, John W. Garver writes in Chinas Decision for War with India in 1962 . Yes, Chen replied. Menon had showed no sincerity regarding peaceful talks, but merely intended to deal in a perfunctory way with China. At least we made the greatest effort for peace, Zhou reportedly replied. Premier, Chen replied, Nehrus forward policy is a knife. He wants to put it in our heart. We cannot close our eyes and await death.

(The series, China Files 1962, is concluded.)

Three months before the war, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Hanfu warned R.K. Nehru of military action if India did not stop its advancements in the western sector October 27, 2012

Media, where is thy sting?


On the face of it, paid news may seem no more than advertising camouflaged as reports or editorials. Naveen Jindals shocking reverse sting aimed at exposing how two editors of the Zee network attempted to cut a shady deal with his company shows that it can be much worse than this. It is a reminder of how easily the culture of paid news can lead, ineluctably, towards extortion. There is only one word for promising to back off on an investigation in exchange for lucrative advertising revenue: blackmail. And that is the essence of Mr. Jindals allegation

against Zee. Of course, the hidden camera recordings, which seem to show the two editors making such an assurance, need to be assessed on many counts, including authenticity and the context in which the conversations took place. The Zee editors have denied all wrongdoing, claiming they were victims of an attempt to bribe them, implying they played along because their channels were conducting their own sting operation. But it boggles the mind why the two should have been discussing an advertising contract with executives of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd at a time when their channels were running a series of investigations on the companys coal block allocations.

While it is for the police and courts to probe, and decide on, the facts of this case a case of extortion has already been filed against Zee Mr. Jindal

has thrown a spotlight on an issue which has begun to darken the Indian mediascape: the increasing number of deals between corporate houses and media outlets, whether in the form of paid news or private treaties, to guarantee favourable press and, whenever required, to black out unfavourable news. If his so-called reverse sting creates a ripple of fear among those in the media industry who think nothing of cutting such extortionary deals, then there will be a positive takeaway from the sordid revelation. Such illegal and unethical practices only serve to strengthen the voices that would like some control over the media in the form of external regulation. It was only this May that a private members bill seeking to regulate the working of the press and the electronic media was introduced in Parliament. The media itself must refrain from conducting itself in a manner that harms its own argument that any regulatory mechanism must

come only from within. One should remember that the ongoing Leveson Inquiry in the U.K. was a result of the phone hacking scandal and the increasing public disenchantment with the ethical standards in the British press. While there is no reason for external control, the Indian media should refrain from giving those who want this, the handle to push in that direction. October 27, 2012

False ceiling that hides nothing


The Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation has rolled out the new estimates of the urban housing shortage in the country. The technical group it had constituted has pegged the current deficit at 18.78 million dwelling units, which is six million fewer than what it was in 2007 and 7.75 million less than what housing

experts of the Eleventh Five-Year Plan had predicted for 2012.

Enthused by the reduced numbers, the cheerful government has claimed that the new figures prove the effectiveness of its housing programmes, improved bank funding and an increase in per capita income. But the question is, do they?

A careful sieving of the numbers reveals that the lower figures have more to do with the changes in the calculation method than in substantial changes in the ground situation. The hard truth lurks behind the apparent reduction: the housing deficit has not been bridged and the poor remain the worst affected. Of equal concern are the recommendations made by the technical group. Their brief prescriptions could encourage the state to indulge in shallow policy tinkering, reduce allocation and

withdraw further social housing.

from

providing

Four categories

Four categories of housing conditions are taken to calculate the shortage: houses that are obsolete; nonserviceable kutcha houses dwelling units with roof and walls made of temporary materials; the number of households living in congested conditions and the number of homeless. Of this, the first three categories are common to both the Tenth Plan calculation and the new estimate. The fourth category the number of homeless is a new addition.

The technical group makes a critical departure from the earlier methods of calculation by omitting the deficit arrived at by subtracting the total

number of households and the total housing stock that is available. As the table shows, this deletion dramatically and instantly reduces the housing shortage by many millions from the 2012 estimates. Otherwise, the number of houses needed remains woefully high.

If we assume that this method is reliable, necessary correction has to be applied to the 2007 calculations as well. In which case, the resultant figure shows that the urban housing shortage has only increased and not decreased in the last five years. What was 17.24 million in 2007 has now risen to 18.78 million. Even if we add the number of homeless to the 2007 calculation it would not significantly alter the status.

Given the fact that the most of the existing government programmes for housing are way off the target, this

could be the correct conclusion. For example, the Interest Subsidy Scheme for Housing the Urban Poor which commenced in 2008 has benefited only 8,734 people as against the 2012 target of 3,10,000. Similarly, only about 40 per cent of houses planned for the poor under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission for the period 2005-2012 have been built.

Using vacant houses

Despite these facts, disappointingly, the technical group concludes that future policy response need not focus on constructing new dwelling units. Its foremost recommendation is to bring the large number of houses that are vacant to use. This would reduce the shortage by half without having to build any new houses, the technical group unconvincingly asserts.

Based on the 2011 census figures, it infers that 9.43 million residential units are lying physically unutilised and concludes that if they are brought to use through taxation and incentive policies, the housing need would tumble to a manageable number.

There are many reasons why this recommendation would not work. The bulk of the shortage 95 per cent pertains to the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) and Low-Income Groups (LIG).

The 9.43 million vacant houses, bought by investors and held back for want of well paying tenants or other reasons, would be beyond the reach of these income groups in terms of price and size. As studies in many cities such as Chennai and Bangalore show, the smallest and cheapest

houses produced by the private real estate market are larger than 500 to 600 sq.ft and priced above Rs.25 lakh.

Going by the Ministrys definition of affordable housing, EWS and LIGs can afford dwelling units priced at or less than four times their annual gross income. By this measure, a person belonging to the EWS, earning less than Rs.5,000 a month, under current market rates, can only afford dwelling units of size 80 to 100 sq.ft. Similarly, an LIG person, earning between Rs.5,001 and Rs,10,000 per month, can afford only 150 to 200 sq.ft.

It is highly unlikely that the large numbers of vacant houses are in the affordable band. In which case, it would be impractical to grossly subsidise the large units through tax incentives and make them available to the poor either to own or rent. The release of vacant houses may at the

most help the middle and higher income groups.

Additional rooms

The second major recommendation of the technical group creating congenial policy environments to enable construction of additional rooms in existing houses would also not reduce the need for constructing new housing units.

More than 12.5 million households are living in houses less than or equal to 300 sq.ft in size. They live in crowded conditions and go through physical and social hardships. As the technical group itself admits, only about 80,000 households have the scope for building additional rooms within their built-up area. In the other units, it would be impossible to construct additional rooms since they

are invariably a part of a multistoried building.

There is no escaping the fact that the supply of affordable housing has to be increased. To suggest that the housing problem could be solved without having to build new houses may appeal to the government, which is keen to reduce welfare subsides. But any scaling down of the allocation for social housing would prove disastrous. Without doubt the policy thrust should still be on increasing housing supply.

Declaring housing as infrastructure or industry to incentivise construction activities may help as the technical group envisions. But it has to be accompanied with caveats. Any concession has to help produce more affordable housing.

srivathsan.a@thehindu.co.in

Behind the new and lower estimates of the shortfall in urban dwellings lie two hard facts the deficit has not been bridged and the poor remain the worst affected October 27, 2012

Whats in a NaMo? A troubling cult


In our puerile preoccupation with the antics of a self-anointed corruptionbuster, not enough attention has been paid to a truly disturbing development in Gujarat. That blessed State now has a new television channel named NaMO, a favourite sobriquet for the leader, Narendra Modi. This is perhaps the first instance of a leader outside Tamil Nadu getting a channel named after him. But the difference is

that while the AIADMK, the DMK and the DMDK whose leaders have television channels named after them are regional outfits, Mr. Modi belongs, at least putatively, to a national party.

It is not known whether the BJPs central leadership was consulted in the Gujarat party channels naamsanskaran , but we do know that the saffron party has for over three decades taken a principled stand against all manifestations of personality cult, a weakness its leaders so damningly attributed to the Congress during the heyday of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi. Now there is quiet acquiescence in Mr. Modis insistently personalised claims.

Tip of the iceberg

The new channel is only the tip of the iceberg. Disquietingly enough, the BJP and its apologists remain untroubled over the in-your-face authoritarian formulations and posturing by the Gujarat Chief Minister. Rather, the inclination is to concede his every single demand or fancy, because he is deemed to be an achiever, a man who has transformed Gujarat and a man who delivers electorally. And, we are now being tempted with the relevance-of-the-Gujarat-model-forthe-entire-country thesis.

Essentially Mr. Modi and his authoritarian model of leadership are first and foremost a threat to the BJP as well as the sangh parivar. The harsh reality is that the Chief Minister has garnered sufficient electoral, monetary, political and administrative clout to declare a kind of functional independence from the national leadership and its legitimate control;

rather, important central leaders are dependent on him to get into the national legislature.

It is now a matter of historical record how, after the 2002 massacre, the Gujarat Chief Minister was able to mobilise sentiments in the BJP against the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his exhortation to Mr. Modi to observe the rites of rajdharma . Since then, the party has continuously found itself trapped in Mr. Modis communal leadership format. And though the Chief Minister has assiduously sought to suggest that he has moved on to a development agenda, there can be no confusion that at the very core Mr. Modi has wilfully marketed himself as a deeply divisive personality, unafraid to summon the instruments and rhetoric of violence. This subtle but essentially authoritarian promise of violence

remains the defining feature of Mr. Modis so-called Gujarat model.

The BJP central leadership finds itself in a bind. It has for long fashioned itself as the embodiment of an alternative political culture and has denounced the Congress partys stifling high command style; unlike the Congress, the BJP has talked itself into encouraging strong regional leaders but eventually found it necessary to tame State-level satraps who grew too big for their boots be it a Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh or Yeddyurappa in Karnataka. Mr. Modi now presents a new test. The uncertain and confused leaders holding court at 11, Ashoka Road, are confronted with Mr. Modis my way or the high way choice. These mealymouthed leaders have already subscribed to Mr. Modis Gujarat asmita mantra, as if the State enjoyed a special status like Nagaland

or Jammu and Kashmir. However, if the BJP wants to be taken seriously as a national party, with a central leadership capable of arbitrating morals and manners among its country-wide rank and file, then it would be interesting to see how it resists a hostile takeover bid from the Modi corner.

Today, the Gujarat BJP is unquestionably Mr. Modis pocketborough. He brooks no challenge to his leadership, his authoritative choices and preferences prevail down to the taluka level. No party leader or activist can prosper without the Chief Ministers blessings. His Cabinet colleagues have been reduced to the status of glorified clerks. In the socalled development model, the Chief Minister relies on the district level administrative machinery to collect huge crowds, which helps in manufacturing the illusion of a mass

following. A leader has emerged bigger than the organisation. And that cannot be very comforting to any democratic soul.

Mr. Modis supreme authority has prospered not just at the expense of the BJP; the sangh parivar too should have reason to worry. The RSS brass will ponder over the fact that today all its frontal organisations the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad have reason to feel marginalised and humiliated by an over-bearing Chief Minister.

But all this is between the CM and his party and the sangh parivar. What ought to be a cause for concern to democratic India is the effortless manner in which Mr. Modi has acquired a monopoly over political truth, a basic requisite in an incipient

authoritarian show. Any individual or group that dares to question the Chief Minister and his ways has been rendered illegitimate and inimical to Gujarat. Dissent has been virtually shut out of Gujarats democratic marketplace.

Recently when that grand old man of the milk revolution in India, Verghese Kurien, died, newspapers recalled a January 2004 confrontation between the Amul Man and Mr. Modi. The two had shared a platform at Anand, Mr. Kuriens karambhoomi . The Milk Man gathered the courage to tell the Chief Minister that the 2002 communal violence had brought a bad name to the State and narrated the adverse observations of a visiting Japanese dignitary. According to newspaper reports, Mr. Modi bluntly ticked Mr. Kurien off: After years of suppression, we have got into the habit of taking certificates from

foreigners. Should we be taking certificate from this lady in Japan who came here only for a few days? It was vintage Modi, massaging Gujarati subnationalism. (Soon Mr. Kurien found himself at the receiving end of the Chief Ministers anger.)

A few months ago, the same Mr. Modi was in Japan. Soon his propaganda machinery was flaunting certificates to his visionary leadership from obscure Japanese functionaries, just as a visit from a British envoy has been tom-tommed as a massive endorsement of the Chief Ministers accomplishments.

Like an old fashioned authoritarian, Mr. Modi has seen to it that he alone has the licence to speak for Gujarat. Admittedly, he cannot be blamed for aggressively dominating the discourse in Gujarat. His political foes within and outside the BJP have failed to come

up with a rival imagination, and other voices have become feeble and ineffective. And, the Chief Minister has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for politics as theatre, using government resources to stage massive spectacles like Vibrant Gujarat Investment Melas, Sadbhavana Uppvas, Vivekananada yatras, etc. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether under Mr. Modis supposedly dynamic leadership, the BJP can better the Congress record of winning more than 140 Assembly seats.

Strongman offer

Gujarat may have nicely got used to the miasma of soft authoritarianism but must the rest of India buy into this thinly disguised strongman offer? Mr. Modis handlers and apologists can be expected to merchandise him

as the perfect practitioner of noble will power, a decisive and seemingly incorruptible leader who will shepherd the country out of the current spell of indecision and drift. The gullible middle classes and sections of the media have already shown a remarkable appetite for the vendors of unorthodox solutions, like the handing over of Gestapo-like powers to some kind of a Lok Pal. Mercifully, there is only small hurdle that Mr. Modi may face in hawking his brand of maha adhinayakvaad, or cult of the great leader: in these last eight years, India has come to cherish its pluralistic values and democratic habits too much to fall for offers of leadership from would be strongmen. L.K. Advani found this out in 2009.

(Harish Khare is a veteran commentator and political analyst.)

Narendra Modis authoritarian model of leadership is a threat to the BJP, the RSS and India October 27, 2012

For U.S. voters, foreign policy needs to reflect immediate economic goals
BROUGHT TO THE TABLE:These observations track closely with a recent report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on U.S. public attitudes toward international affairs. Every year, the top foreign policy goal is the same: protecting the jobs of American workers.PHOTO: AFP The defining image from the October 22 debate between President Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is of the two candidates passionately disputing their prescriptions for the

U.S. domestic economy. The moderator, veteran TV journalist Bob Schieffer, caught the spirit of the evening with his final words before inviting the debaters to make their closing comments I think we all love teachers. A visitor from Mars might be forgiven for not realising that this was a debate on foreign policy.

Schieffers choice of subjects for the debate is revealing, and sheds light on the most immediate voter concerns. Three of the themes had to do with the Middle East: Libya; Syria; and Israel and Iran. Despite Americas political polarisation and Romneys months-long drumbeat for a more muscular approach to Irans nuclear programme, there was striking similarity in the views of the two candidates.

A fourth theme, Afghanistan and Pakistan, extended the discussion of Americas difficult relationships in the Muslim world. Both candidates stressed that the United States was leaving Afghanistan; gone were Romneys earlier hints that he would slow down the departure and consult the military commanders. Despite a provocative question from the moderator, neither wanted to divorce Pakistan. Again, little discernible difference.

Very important goal

The two final themes were broader: a wide open question about the U.S. role in the world, and a final theme combining China and security challenges for the United States. Both themes in practice shifted the discussion back to domestic policy. Indeed, fully 13 pages out of the 36-

page transcript were about the domestic economy. This is more air time than the candidates gave to any international topic. In fact, however, this reflects one of the important insights the debate provided about how American voters look on foreign policy: it matters, but the U.S. economy is a more immediate concern. Both men made the case either implicitly or explicitly that the greatest boost to an effective U.S. foreign policy would come from an economic turnaround.

These observations track closely with a recent report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on U.S. public attitudes toward international affairs. This organisation has covered this subject matter in highly respected surveys every two to four years over several decades. Every year, the top foreign policy goal is the same: protecting the jobs of American

workers. This year, 83 per cent of those surveyed cited this as a very important goal. Respondents still list as top threats international terrorism and Irans nuclear programme, though the majorities are now 67 and 64 per cent respectively, down from 90 per cent plus in 2002. Only 14 per cent still believe that promoting democracy abroad is very important.

Tellingly, the Chicago Council report found Americans weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only 17 per cent thought the United States should keep troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014. Two-thirds majorities believed that neither war had been worth the cost in blood and treasure.

Some respondents were still willing to see the United States engage in military action overseas but fewer than in past years, and on a highly selective basis. Majorities favoured

the use of U.S. troops to prevent genocide, to avert humanitarian disaster, or to secure the oil supply. Less than half favoured using U.S. troops to respond to invasions of Israel, Korea, or Taiwan. There was strong support for diplomacy, including talking with leaders of hostile countries such as North Korea, Cuba and Iran, and surprising support for multilateral efforts.

The percentage of Americans who consider Asia the most important region for the United States is steadily growing. In this report, for the first time, a majority of Americans 52 per cent agreed with this view. Consistent with this was the widely shared judgment that the United States needed to engage with China, and that U.S.-China economic relations were of critical importance. A majority continues to back the U.S. having the worlds strongest

military, but solid majorities oppose military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Turkey.

With a handful of exceptions, views on top foreign policy goals and on threats were widely shared across the U.S. population. Republicans, for example, scored 20 points higher on the importance of maintaining U.S. military strength and in their concern about illegal immigration; by a similar margin, Democrats felt more strongly about ending world hunger. More surprisingly, Independents were less committed to international engagement than those who identified themselves as either Republicans or Democrats. Americans under 30 were the least internationalist of any age group.

Three points

The debate and the Chicago Council report, taken together, suggest a few broad conclusions about prospects for American foreign policy.

First: The U.S. electorate is more moved by short-term issues than by long-term ones. This helps explain the astonishing omissions in that nights debate. No India, no Japan, no Europe, only a cursory mention of Russia, no Korea, China mentioned only as an economic rival, Latin America only as an economic opportunity. Surveys suggest that none of these places is considered unimportant. However, none is now in crisis, and the candidates and debate organisers gave their primary attention to crisis countries.

Second: Among the long-term structural issues in U.S. foreign policy, the broader view of Asia that

this administration has developed President Obama referred to the pivot to Asia is likely to continue. Both the Americans surveyed in the report and the two candidates clearly believe Asia matters meaning both East and South Asia. The electorate and officeholders alike are influenced both by the regions security importance and by its economic prominence.

Third: Despite the profound polarisation of the U.S. political scene, much of the substance of current U.S. foreign policy will carry over even if there is a change of president. However, the tone of the debate and the way the candidates handled broad questions like Americas role in the world suggest that a Romney administration would project a more unilateral and assertive style, and the Chicago survey confirms that this would play well with his base.

(Teresita and Howard Schaffer are former U.S. ambassadors, with long years of service in South Asia. They are co-founders of southasiahand.com. Howard Schaffer teaches at Georgetown University; Teresita Schaffer is a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings Institution.)

The October 22 debate between Romney and Obama offered a perceptive glimpse of the most urgent short-term international worries of the electorate October 29, 2012

In post-war Jaffna, a slow piecing back of life

Pavalochini and her husband Ravikumar make a living selling bicycles. They sell them for Rs.49 a kg, for scrap is what the bikes are: rusted, twisted, bent out of shape, the tyres long gone after three years out under the scorching sun at the bicycle graveyard near Mullaithivu.

From their home in the Konapulam camp for the displaced in Valigamam, Ravikumar sets out once or twice a week on the 95-km journey to the graveyard.

There, Pavalochini said, he goes about collecting every scrap of metal left behind by civilians and the LTTE as they retreated stage by stage to a narrow strip of land in Mullaithivu in the final stages of the war in 2009.

Buses, vans, cars, and thousands of bicycles, damaged by the heavy

shelling and their remaining parts rusted, are still heaped by the side of the road. Scrap hunters like Ravikumar forage for the good bits, especially bicycles, and bring them back home to sell.

There are some Muslim dealers who buy these cycles for Rs.49 per kg, said Pavalochini, as we sit talking in the shade of a mountain of bicycles in her front yard. It might fetch Rs.65 a kg if we took it to Colombo and sold it ourselves in the scrap market, but think of the transporting costs.

Many others in the camp are in the same business. The other day, said Pavalochini, she had to feed the children in the neighbouring house. Both parents went off scrap hunting to the graveyard, and did not return for two days.

The wartime scrap heap is a reminder of how recently the fighting ended. It also underlines how Jaffna and its people are still struggling through a layered past and present to come out of three decades of conflict and war.

Post-war Jaffna is very different from what it used to be. For one, there is no more the blanket of darkness and fear that used to fall at night, the dread of the torchlight-flashing sentry at checkpoints, and the long whistle of shells as they flew in the air before landing on their target with a deep explosive thud.

The hotelier

There are no checkpoints, the physical presence of the Army more discreet now. Shops are open late into the night and people are out on the streets at all hours. In place of the

ubiquitous bicycles and the old Morris cars that ran on kerosene, defying the petrol blockade, all manner of vehicles now clog the streets.

Among the changes is a large hotel opposite Duraiappah stadium. The owner, Thilak Thiagarajah, is perhaps the biggest private investor in Jaffna today. Mr. Thiagarajah left Jaffna when he was 17 years old, and is a realtor in the United Kingdom.

His 42-room hotel, Tilko named after himself and his wife Kokila is a symbol of the hope, at least his, that Jaffna will regain what Tamils like to call its lost glory.

My belief is that to have peace, you have to develop the economy. What we should do is create jobs, create grassroots industry, said the 56-yearold hotelier, who divides his time

between Jaffna and his large suburban home in Chigwell outside London where his chartered accountant wife and two children live.

I want to show that Tamils can make it work in Jaffna, he said, as he recounted his familys struggles in 1970s Sri Lanka, forcing him to leave at a young age.

Military presence

But he does not have much company. Most other diaspora Tamils came in after the war, saw, and flew right back. In the months after the fighting was over, banks rushed to the Tamildominated peninsula to make good on what they believed would be a postwar boom. The expected revival, though, has yet to happen.

A recent hike in interest rates, has put a damper on business across Sri Lanka. Jaffna suffers additionally from a continuing atmosphere of uncertainty. The province continues to be ruled directly by Colombo, and the presence of nearly 18,000 soldiers, and the authority with which the military entirely Sinhalese conducts itself, add to the uncertainty.

Also, after years of dislocation and displacement, people neither have the documentation or the security demanded by banks for advancing loans, for business or even for house building.

Last years grease devil incidents further heightened peoples fears. A number of women in parts of the country, but more so in Jaffna, reported being attacked by a grease coated figure. The incidents got

attributed to the Army, and enveloped Jaffna in an atmosphere more reminiscent of the war years.

So everyone is waiting and watching. No one is investing, said C. Jayakumar, president of the Jaffna Chamber of Commerce.

No industry

The local economy is made up mainly of retail trading. Agriculture and fishing are picking up slowly as people return to their homes. In Achuveli, which boasts Jaffnas famed fertile red soil, farmers who have regained possession of their lands from the security forces are growing vegetables and fruits for the local market. Grapevines are a common, if surprising, sight.

What is lacking is industry, which means jobs are limited. Before the conflict turned into a full-fledged war, Jaffna had a state-run cement factory, in Kankesanthurai. There is no talk of reviving that. A cold storage plant would have given a boost to fisheries, but there are no plans for one.

The only job opportunities are in shops or in the small service sector. There is only one university, which has limited seats. Most students discontinue their education after their A-level exams, which makes jobs harder to get. Young people are not interested in staying. All this makes people suspect it is a deliberate plan to deplete Jaffna of its population, and colonise it with Sinhalese settlers.

Road projects, with Chinese help

Spiralling property prices in Jaffna, and the construction activity all over the peninsula provide a more optimistic picture. Everywhere, people with means which in Jaffna means those with relatives abroad who send them money are repairing properties that were damaged, abandoned and fell into disuse during the years of conflict. Malls and other commercial buildings are coming up.

The thick construction dust over Jaffna, however, is from road construction: armed with $423.9 m from Chinas Exim Bank, the governments Northern Road Rehabilitation Project is building 512 km of roads in the Northern Province.

A large part of the contract was given to the China Railway no. 5 Engineering Group, which in turn has subcontracted the road works to Sri

Lankan companies. China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation is the other main contractor, which has sublet works to Sri Lankan firms.

Already, the A9 highway that connects southern Sri Lanka to the northern peninsula, has been refurbished. Once known as the highway of blood for the deadly battles over it between the LTTE and the security forces, it now eases the passage of goods and traders between Colombo and Jaffna.

But Tamils see roads as a doubleedged facility: it eases their travel but also helps southern Sri Lanka send its goods to the North, while there is not enough in Jaffna to send to the south. Suspicious Jaffna minds see the new road network as preparing the Northern province to be more liveable for Sinhalese.

We never asked for roads. Development is necessary, but we should be able to decide for ourselves, said Mr. Jayakumar, what kind of development we want. For that, what we need right now is a political settlement.

nirupama.s@thehindu.co.in

radhakrishnan.rk@thehindu.co.in

The Tamils in the northern part of

the country are struggling to rebuild their lives after three decades of conflict October 29, 2012

A long journey to peace

Exactly nine years ago, Atal Bihari Vajpayee made the first road trip from the only airport in Nagaland at Dimapur to Kohima, the capital, by an Indian Prime Minister. Reflecting on that journey, Mr. Vajpayee wryly remarked, in his inimitable style, at a public reception: I was told that, of all the roads in the State, this is the best. If this is the best, it is difficult to imagine how bad the worst is. Well, the four-lane highway that the Prime Minister announced at that meeting in 2003 is still being built but the political gaps among the Naga proindependence groups that were enormous when his predecessors P.V. Narasimha Rao, H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral began the process, have substantially shrunk although crucial differences remain.

It is worth remembering here what Mr. Vajpayee said in 2003 because

that set the tone and pace for a possible Naga settlement and it is worth quoting at length because no one in the successor government has that flair for oratory, that touch of sensitivity or compassion. In his public appearances, Mr. Vajpayee emphasised a key phrase: peace with dignity and honour several times, for he had been well advised on the Naga belief in these values and those remarks were greatly appreciated.

Era of peace

For too long this fair land has been scarred and seared by violence. It has been bled by the orgy of the killings of human beings by human beings. Each death pains me. Each death diminishes us. My government has been doing everything possible to stop this bloodshed, so that we can together inaugurate a new era of

peace, development and prosperity in Nagaland. The past cannot be rewritten. But we can write our common future with our collective, cooperative efforts Rather than remaining tied to the past, we have to take care of the present and look to the future This is the time for reconciliation and peace-making. It is true that, of all the States in India, Nagaland has a unique history. We are sensitive to this historical fact.

That sensitiveness was not on display from the 1950s to the 1990s when the state showed that it was prepared to bludgeon the Nagas into submission. This was followed by a recognition that political issues could be resolved only politically, not by military means. As a result, ceasefires and cessation of hostilities and operations began to herald a fresh political process in Nagaland and other States blighted by armed confrontations, including

Assam, Meghalaya and, to a lesser degree, Manipur. Yet, problems remain including the existence of the draconian Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in key States, despite the virtual end of organised violence by armed separatist groups.

It is thus encouraging that negotiators for the Government of India and the principal Naga militant group that goes by the acronym of NSCN (I-M) are hunkering down for what could arguably be the most difficult and decisive phase of over 15 years of dialogue and ceasefire. A range of key issues is yet to be finalised and it would be foolish to discount their importance.

These include the phrasing of the constitutional amendments that will give the Nagas greater cultural and political space without providing territorial gain (the most contentious

issue in the region that affects Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh), giving the former underground groups and their leaders a political role in the State of Nagaland, and rehabilitating the Naga fighting cadre in existing formations of the Indian army such as the Naga Regiment, the paramilitary forces or the State police.

This challenging stretch of talks has begun with efforts to convince the States of Manipur, Assam and, to a lesser degree, Arunachal Pradesh of the need for a settlement and that this will not harm their interests. Officials on either side indicate that efforts are on to enable a package to be announced before Nagaland goes to the polls for a new Legislative Assembly in April 2013 although there have been reports about a Christmas or New Year announcement by the Centre.

The latter appears unlikely despite growing pressure from leaders like Chief Minister Nephiu Rio, whose Democratic Alliance of Nagaland, aligned to the Bharatiya Janata Party and bidding for a third term, has offered to resign along with the other 59 members of the State Assembly to pave the way for the Naga rebels to take charge of the State before the elections.

New actors and factors

All this is also taking place in an environment that has seen the growth of several new actors and factors: one is the emergence of an increasingly articulate civil society that resists being pushed around by one side or the other, especially the armed groups; a second is a clear demand for reconciliation among the factions, a process which is finally taking place led by civil society and church forums

(it should be noted that this is happening after decades of internecine blood letting which at times has been as brutal as the conflicts with the Indian forces); a third is the growth of a younger generation that, while passionate about Naga rights, is not as committed to the larger goals of the older generation; many younger Nagas today also see virtue in living in a larger and more flexible political and economic framework and are visible in universities, professions, the service and other industries.

The developments have been pushed forward by the accession of the main NSCN to a role within the Indian Constitution, although the latter would have to be amended to reflect Naga interests and needs. The 30-odd demands put down by the NSCN (I-M) at the start of a formal dialogue with New Delhi have been narrowed down.

The negotiations have been held in as diverse settings as Malaysia and South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland. And while the Indian interlocutors have changed from Swaraj Kaushal to K. Padamanabhiah, former Home Secretary, and currently to Raghaw Pandey, former Nagaland Chief Secretary who is credited with the Communitisation (greater selfgovernance) Programme that has won international acclaim, the Naga leadership in the NSCN (I-M) has remained the same: Isak Chisi Swu, the chairman of the group, and Th. Muivah, the general secretary.

Those demands have now been narrowed down as both sides have agreed on a separate flag for Nagaland, new names for its Assembly and Governor, and a pan-Naga cultural and social body (that can protect the cultural interests of the Nagas wherever they live). Whether

this body will eventually become a formal political structure, spanning State boundaries, is a difficult and tricky issue. Manipurs response and that of Assam will be critical to this effort, especially as there are major criminal charges against leaders of the Naga organisations in these States. Will an amnesty mean that such cases would be dropped?

In addition, once an agreement is inked, the NSCN (I-M) will have to reinvent itself as a political party for its political goals would have to be changed and its armed cadres would need to serve in Indian units. In addition, AFSPA should be removed from Nagaland and other parts of the northeast as a Confidence-Building Measure.

There are problems within Nagaland itself, not to be confused with the demands for a united Naga homeland

that the NSCN has been making. Thus, the Eastern Nagaland Peoples Organization wants a Frontier Nagaland state to be carved out of four districts inhabited by six tribes, saying they have not benefited economically or politically over the past decades.

These show how tough the road to accord will be. Other militant groups may cry foul but must be persuaded that this is in the best interests of the Nagas at a time of relative peace. The journey has been long in the making, well over 60 years, and obviously an agreement will not satisfy all groups. That is the nature of political dialogue and the process of political resolution. But it should replace the ill-will and lack of understanding that has long characterised relations between the Nagas and the rest of India with goodwill.

(Sanjoy Hazarika is Saifuddin Kitchelew Chair and Director of the Centre for North East Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and founder of the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research in the northeast.)

An agreement on Nagalands status will replace the lack of understanding that has long characterised the relations between the Nagas and the rest of India with goodwill October 29, 2012

Our policy is to reprocess all the fuel put into a nuclear reactor
Post the Fukushima disaster, one of the key issues protesters raise is nuclear waste generated by a nuclear plant and its final disposal. Sekhar

Basu , Director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, has worked extensively on several aspects of nuclear reprocessing and waste management. As Chief Executive of the Nuclear Recycle Board, he is responsible for the design, development, construction and operation of nuclear recycle plants involving reprocessing and waste management. He has designed and built reprocessing plants, fuel storage facilities and nuclear waste treatment facilities at Trombay, Tarapur and Kalpakkam. He has taken up the design of the first Integrated Nuclear Recycle Plant which will take the nuclear recycle programme to maturity. He spoke to R. Prasad about nuclear waste generation, reprocessing and final disposal. Excerpts.

What is the amount of nuclear waste generated compared with coal power plants?

The nuclear energy programme will move in parallel paths. One is to produce power. Since we generate power there will be some waste. And this waste is only two to three per cent of the total fuel we put into the reactor. Entire spent fuel is not waste; plutonium and uranium are recycled which contribute to about 97-98 per cent of the spent fuel. So only the remaining two to three per cent of spent fuel is waste. This is unlike our coal power stations where whatever coal you put into the plant turns into waste (like ash) and other emissions.

The second part is the amount of coal that has to go into a power station for the same capacity. If we compare it with nuclear power plants, uranium requirement is about 30,000 times

less. So the amount of coal we carry to make a power station of some capacity is much more. All I am saying is that in terms of waste volume there is no comparison between coal and nuclear power stations.

But will not nuclear waste remain radioactive for a long time?

Now the problem with nuclear power waste is that it will remain radioactive for a few hundreds of years and even more. Now again you see, this waste can be divided into two parts one where within 300 years, 99 per cent of the waste becomes non-radioactive and the rest is going to remain radioactive for a longer time.

So we are working towards the development of a process where we can separate waste that becomes non-radioactive within 300 years.

At what stage of development is the technology to separate waste which is radioactive for about 300 years and that beyond 300 years?

A pilot plant will become operational [to separate the two types of waste] next year. Process development in the lab was completed some time back. The pilot plant will be followed by a demonstration plant, and then by commercial plants.

Where is the pilot plant coming up?

Tarapur, Mumbai.

When will the demonstration plant come up?

In our case, after the pilot plant is fully operational, we will come up with a demonstration-scale plant at Tarapur. It is at a design stage and will be integrated to the nuclear recycle plant at Tarapur. This will be a large-sized plant. The plant will be designed for reprocessing 600 tonnes of spent fuel.

How do you take care of the waste that will become non-radioactive within 300 years?

Taking care of the waste that remains radioactive for about 300 years is not of much concern. Properly designed buildings and structures can stand for 300 years.

The waste is first vitrified in the vitrification plant operational in India. It will be put in steel canisters, which in turn will be put in steel over-packs. Over-packs will again be put in

another steel casing. So there will be three to four layers of steel casing in addition to vitrification. It will finally be kept in concrete structures/buildings. Concrete buildings are used for structural, shielding and ventilation purposes.

Whereas when it is beyond 300 years some other methods are necessary. That is why we talk of putting them in repositories.

So the waste that becomes nonradioactive within 300 years will not go into repositories?

No, that is not essential if we are able to separate it from the long-lived ones.

There is waste; there is long-lived radioactive waste. But it is a very

small quantity. So taking care of that should not be much of a problem.

Have you identified a location for repositories for waste that will be radioactive beyond 300 years?

If you see the Indian map, we have granite rock formation spread all over the country. So it can come up anywhere wherever the rock formation is suitable.

We need to identify a site and people should be convinced that there is no real problem. Then this will be possible. Today somehow the atmosphere is different. We can only continue our research for identification of a location.

So anywhere you have granite rocks of proper quality, they will be studied.

During the studies, you look for some evidence for lack of migration. So you take a rock sample and see for water or other elements that have stayed over there for a very long time.

Is there another way of handling

long-lived radioactive waste?

We can bombard the waste with highenergy neutrons to kill or burn radioactive elements. This is called transmutation. Transmutation is the way of handling actinides that have long half-lives. It can be done either in faster spectrum reactors where neutrons of higher energy are used or accelerator-driven system (ADS).

What do you mean by burning?

Burning means you bombard radioactive elements having longer half-lives with high-energy neutrons and convert them into some other elements that will have much shorter half-lives thereby mitigating the concerns of long-lived radiotoxicity. So if you have a large reactor programme, you can have a reactor specifically for burning the waste. It can be done either in fast spectrum reactors or an ADS. This is the scientific solution to waste management. India is one of the countries doing a lot of work on this.

How close are we to reaching this goal?

We already have fast reactors, so we will be only extending the technology. The ADS programme is being taken up in a big way in the 12th Plan. We have started pursuing it and

Visakhapatnam is the place for the ADS programme. It will take 15 to 20 years to come up because multiple technologies are involved.

When will the Integrated Nuclear Recycle Plant come up?

Right now it is at a sanction stage; a proposal is with the government for sanction. Somewhere in 2020 the project should come up.

Our policy is to reprocess all the fuel that we put into a reactor. Reprocessing and waste management will follow the main reactor programme. There will be a gap of up to 10 years because the fuel has to take some time to cool. So far, the reprocessing programme was smaller, but we will expand it as the reactor programme is expanding.

Are you expanding the reprocessing plant capacity?

We are almost doubling the [reprocessing plant] capacity at Kalpakkam [near Chennai]. The Kalpakkam plant will reprocess fuel from [reactors based in] South [India] and is likely to be operational by 2014.

prasad.ravindranath@thehindu.co.in October 30, 2012

Northern Europe needs to listen to hardy Greece


In Athens, not just the ruins of the Acropolis or of the Temple of Zeus but the walls of the bustling city also speak. And the writing on them reflects a grand constant in Greek thought individual virtues, not robust bank accounts, make for good

citizens. Whether the right-wing Golden Dawn, the radical left-wing Syriza or the spanking New Democracy has a better appreciation of what constitutes virtue is of course problematic, but it remains a quintessentially Greek discourse. The walls dont echo the financial language of TV channels, of interest rates, exchange rates, growth rates and graphs.

During a short holiday in Greece this October, I could not shake off a throwback to Shakespeares Timon of Athens . Timon, a nobleman of great virtue, generously shared his riches, to a fault, and was reduced to a pauper. Then, hounded by creditors, he went off to a desolate cave, only to discover a treasure of gold with which he repaid them, remaining generous, though somewhat bitter, towards the end of the manuscript.

Merkel visit

Apparently, the play was never completed. Nor is the worst of the present financial crisis in Greece by any means over. In the run-up to German Chancellor Angela Merkels visit to Athens on October 9, news broke that Greek officials had located a list containing the details of some 2,000 Greeks who were account holders in Swiss banks. Apparently, the list was received two years ago from the then French Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, by the Greek government and was delivered to a special prosecutor by the head of Greeces economic crimes unit. Along the streets and cafes of Plaka, the question asked that evening was: could this treasure not suffice for the bailout that the government needed?

Obviously, the treasure is big, but not big enough for the Greek government

debt, reckoned at 346 billion or 179 per cent of its GDP. The financial crisis is unmistakably spilling over into an economic depression that threatens to engulf the euro zone. In the perception of the Greeks gathered at Syntagma Square to protest Ms Merkels visit, it was the portents of the latter, rather than the former, which had propelled her to Athens. They were demanding that their national leadership drive a harder bargain with the troika of the International Monetary FundEuropean Union-European Central Bank (IMF-EU-ECB) that Merkel seemed to represent on this occasion and not capitulate to the power of finance capital. Further austerity cuts in wages, pensions and social security, on which Prime Minister Antonis Samaras had already garnered a parliamentary consensus, were unacceptable to them.

Did the Greeks misread Ms Merkels motives on this mission? Her advocacy of patience with Greece and success in persuading the IMF to allow more time for deficit reduction might suggest it was simply a supportive gesture. However, the German Chancellor runs deeper than that. Most likely, she senses what others in northern Europe do not the longterm bargaining strength of Greece vis--vis the northern countries in the euro zone and the need to work with the people rather than a recently trussed-up government, for the EU to survive.

Displaying grit

What are the strengths of Greeks to tide over the crisis? A young Greek woman in Monastiraki offered me some insights. Her father, she said, was a fisherman who owned a boat and a bit of land in north Greece. He

lamented the fact that 80 per cent of the fish eaten in Athens came from Chile and Argentina. She did not reckon her parents would be thrown out on to the streets as it might happen to families in many north European cities in case of a depression. They would fish and grow crops and survive.

This sounded a bit like the grit of The Old Man and the Sea , but I had to admit that throughout history, the Greeks have shown an extraordinary ability to struggle and survive turns in fortune. Thanks to the 19th century land reforms, most Greeks own small farms and the idyllic climate along with the long coastline supports agriculture. Time and again, they have weathered financial turbulence. During the depression of the 1930s, protectionist policies and a weak drachma helped Greek industry to grow.

The economic miracle from the 1950s on was spectacular. Its glorious islands today attract hordes of tourists. Greece continues to excel in shipping. With bread and fish to eat and olives and grapes to sell, they will survive even if their bloated modern services sector takes a blow. If they were to be thrown out of the euro-zone, they would revert to a very weak drachma, good for their exports, even if useless for any imports. For the rest of the euro-zone, this would mean even greater anxieties about the euro surviving, the collapse of several French banks that routed derivativesdriven loans and a rising spiral of unemployment in the northern cities, with little for them to fall back on.

With 30-odd years of a protesters career behind her, perhaps Ms Merkel looked beyond the negotiating table at the righteous indignation of the

demonstrators on the streets. She may have been astute enough to recognise their economic strength or wonder, at any rate, if the government she was dealing with was at all representative of the public weal, which sang a tune very different from the parliamentary consensus on austerity cuts.

Mirroring Hazare

The outrageous arrest and release of Kostas Vaxevanis, the intrepid editor of Hot Doc , on October 27, for publishing names from the Lagarde list, bear an uncanny resemblance to the ham-handed manner in which Anna Hazare was treated by the Indian government two years ago when he stepped out for his fast against corruption in high places. The high-handedness of government in the case of Anna led to such public anger that Parliament was forced

ultimately to swallow its pride and issue a Sense of the House resolution guaranteeing three essential features of the institution of an ombudsman that Anna had been demanding. The repressive act in Greece not only adds to the public distrust of the newly elected government led by New Democracy, but also thereby, queers the pitch for any meaningful negotiations between the elite troika of the IMF-EU-ECB and the present government whose credibility is at stake.

While the troika needs to realise its own vulnerability and appreciate the difference between the real and the money economies it is dealing with, the government in turn needs to be mindful of the will of the people to reclaim economics as a moral science. Hopefully, the charges of breach of privacy that Mr. Vaxevanis faces will be viewed by the magistrate not only

in the context of the public outcry against tax evasion by the rich and powerful but also in the light of Aristotles famous dictum: Privacy is idiocy, the breeding ground of all criminality.

(Amitabh Mukhopadhyay is a New Delhi-based commentator on social issues. Email: amitabh.mukhopadhyay@gmail.com )

The major financial institutions in Europe should sense the long-term bargaining strength of Athens and the need to work with the people October 30, 2012

A visit Manmohan must make

The pre-condition Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been insisting on for a visit to Pakistan that there must first be something solid to achieve defies the sound rules of diplomacy and is one which the selfconsciously powerful impose unwisely. History has vindicated Churchill and proved Truman wrong in rebuffing Stalins pleas for a summit. Doables are more clearly determined at the summit level itself and Dr. Singh knows what they are. It seems that he has all but abandoned the agenda on which he so bravely worked during his first stint as Prime Minister.

What message is he seeking now to convey to Pakistan and Kashmiris? Expect nothing from me?

Ideal atmosphere

Ironically, the atmosphere for a visit to Pakistan was never better and there is something which he alone, at the highest political level, can accomplish finalise an agreement that settles the Sir Creek dispute. Though it is of limited dimensions, its removal from the agenda of disputes awaiting settlement will provide an impetus to the resolution of the others and improve the atmosphere. Dr. Singh briefed the on-board media while returning from the Non-Aligned summit in Tehran on August 31 that he had told Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari when they met there that there must be a genuine feeling that Pakistan is doing all that it could do to deal with terrorism directed at India from Pakistans soil. The court trial on the Mumbai massacre is a crucial test of Pakistans sincerity.

But he did not stop at that. He added, significantly, I also said Sir Creek,

which we had talked about during his visit to Ajmer *in April+, was doable. Nor is that all. Credible reports have it that when Pakistans Interior Minister Rehman Malik met Indias Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde on the sidelines of the SAARC Home Ministers Conference in the Maldives late last month, he gave a verbal assurance of access to Indian investigators to the accused in Pakistans prisons and the evidence already collected. This is an area which can be fully explored only in frank talks at a high level.

Sir Creek has been doable for at least the past five years. The joint statements issued on May 21, 2011 and June 19, 2012 speak of demarcation of the land boundary in the Sir Creek area and the delimitation of [the] International Maritime Boundary between Pakistan and India. A joint survey of Sir Creek

was conducted in January and February 2007 which resulted in a joint map of the area. It was authenticated by both sides at the fourth round of talks when copies of the joint map were also exchanged.

Boundary-marking and making

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar once remarked, boundary-marking is the task of a surveyor; boundary-making is the task of a statesman. Both countries, parties to the Convention on the Law of the Sea, submitted their claims to the extended Continental Shelf with the U.N. Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. Their claims remain on hold, pending a settlement. If they continue to disagree on the limits of the EEZ or the Continental Shelf, the matter will have to be decided by arbitration (Articles 279-299 of the Convention).

Is that what we want? Why not do the doable?

There are two other matters on which India can take the initiative. One is a no-war pact. Both sides came very close to an agreed draft in May 1984. India had sent an aide-memoire to Pakistan on December 24, 1981 setting out the principles. Pakistan sent its draft on January 12, 1982. In Islamabad, formal talks began in May 1982 when Pakistan presented a complete draft of a no-war pact. India followed up by presenting a draft Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation in August 1982. Indira Gandhi wantonly injected new elements on bases and alliances. Meanwhile, an agreement on a Joint Commission was signed on March 10, 1983.

Talks resumed at Udaipur and Delhi on March 1 and 2, 1984. There was a

breakthrough in May 1984 on the two sticking points. The Shimla formulation on bilateralism and the criteria for NAM membership, adopted at Cairo on June 5, 1961, was acceptable to India on bases and alliances. Pakistan did not send its draft on them as it had promised. The Rajiv Gandhi-Zia-ul-Haq summit in Delhi on December 17, 1985 imparted momentum to the dialogue. Talks were held in 1986 but they petered out.

In 2012, bases and alliances have lost their relevance; but Article 8 of the India-Bangladesh Treaty can be adopted. It used a standard formulation for reciprocal pledges not to enter into or participate in any military alliance directed against the other party nor allow the use of its territory for committing any act that may cause military damage to or

constitute a threat to the security of the other.

The no-war pact proposal was formally revived by Nawaz Sharif when he was Prime Minister, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 22, 1997: I offer today from this rostrum to open negotiations on a treaty of nonaggression between India and Pakistan. He renewed it in a television interview on December 11, 2008 after the Mumbai blasts: We should sign a no-war pact for peace.

Almost there

Existing drafts can be meshed together. Not much work is involved. When this writer asked M.K. Rasgotra, Indias Foreign Secretary during the May 1984 talks, how much time it

would have required, he raised his index finger and said, one hour.

There is another matter on which the summit will help. For some time, the Pakistan Peoples Party government treated the Musharraf-Manmohan consensus on the four-point formula on Kashmir as something the cat had brought in. That is no longer the case. Pakistan is prepared to adopt a constructive line on the formula. Last month, Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar clearly indicated to Iftikhar Gilani of DNA that, we need a relook *on Kashmir], we need to do some homework for that. In an interview to Barkha Dutt of NDTV around the same time, former PPP Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani specified the subject of the homework: There had been some formula earlier which was decided between General Musharraf and the Indian government. But there had been some loopholes which we

wanted to tighten, aur uspe hum kaam kar rahe the [and we were working on it] when there was a change of government here in Pakistan.

Tightening the loose ends would be a more accurate description for the exercise. Only a summit can accomplish that. And, that is where the havoc wrought since 2008 must be repaired. As Churchill said in a historic speech to the House of Commons on May 11, 1953, soon after Stalins death, If there is not at the summit of the nations the will to win the greatest prize and the greatest honour ever offered to mankind, doom-laden responsibility will fall upon those who now possess the power to decide. At the worst the participants would have established more intimate contacts. At the best we might have a generation of peace.

(A.G. Noorani is an advocate, Supreme Court of India, and a leading constitutional expert. His latest book, Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir, was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.)

Only a summit between India and Pakistan at the highest political level can lead to a forward movement on Sir Creek, a

no-war pact, and the Kashmir formula October 30, 2012

Nuclear safety before vendor interests


In 2010, under pressure from multinational nuclear suppliers, the Manmohan Singh government pushed through a law to protect them from

the consequences of a nuclear accident. The law makes it impossible for victims to sue the supplier, even for an accident that results from a design defect. Liability is effectively transferred to the Indian taxpayer, first to the public sector Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) and then the government. Even this is capped at a maximum of Rs.2,500 crore and victims need not be compensated for any additional damage.

However, the law also includes a clause that, under certain circumstances, allows the NPCIL, although not the victims, to sue the supplier and recoup the money it has paid out. It is this relatively minor clause that nuclear suppliers, and their friends in the Indian establishment, have been railing against for the past two years.

The Russian Deputy Prime Minister warned India, on his recent visit, that if the Russian company Atomstroyexport (a subsidiary of Rosatom) was forced to obey this law, then the cost of power from the Kudankulam third and fourth reactors would go up. He must have been hoping that no one would try and square this threat with earlier claims of safety made about these plants.

In a paper, published by Nuclear Engineering and Design in 2006, three NPCIL officials claimed that, in any given year, the probability of a severe accident at these plants was one in 10 million. If Atomstroyexport can persuade insurers that this figure is correct, then to obtain cover even for accidents where the highest possible liability of Rs.2,500 crore is applicable, it would need to pay a premium of only about Rs.2,500 per year. For the 1,000 MW Kudankulam

reactors, operating at an 80 per cent load factor, this should lead to an increase in tariff of about a third of a millionth of a rupee per unit!

This absurdly low figure arises because both the factors in the calculation earlier make little sense. As preliminary data from Fukushima shows, a nuclear accident can cause economic damage that is more than a hundred times larger than the artificial cap on liability in the Indian law. Moreover, empirical evidence in a total of about 15,000 reactoryears of operation, there have been several core-damage accidents including Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island suggests that the probability of severe accidents is about a thousand times higher than what the industry claims.

Suppliers have successfully wielded their influence in other countries to

avoid economic liability for accidents. Their argument that the Indian law will lead to cost escalations is meant to veil the real reason for their worry: the law sets a bad precedent and, in the future, either in India itself or in another country, it may lead to a more rational law centred on victims rather than the industry. In such a law, there would be no cap on liability, and suppliers would be held jointly responsible with the operator for paying out damages.

In fact, the Supreme Court has already admitted a petition, by the lawyer Prashant Bhushan, requesting precisely these changes in the law. Making the operator and supplier share liability is not only fair but crucial from the point of view of safety.

Design and accidents

The history of nuclear power shows that design failures have played an important role in all severe accidents. This is true of Fukushima, where the underlying problems with the Mark 1 design had been recognised many years earlier. The Kemeny Commission, set up by Jimmy Carter, to analyse the Three Mile Island accident pointed out that the suppliers, Babcock & Wilcox, shared culpability. The disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, which was built by the Soviet predecessor of Rosatom, was caused by a combination of two grievous design features: a positive void coefficient of reactivity, and the lack of appropriate containment.

Apart from the untenable claim about higher tariffs, nuclear suppliers and the Indian government have made other disingenuous arguments to get rid of the clause on supplier liability.

One of them is that the law is hurting Indias domestic manufacturers, some of whom are involved in supplying small parts of the plant.

In general, as in other industries, exposing all manufacturers along the supply chain to tort claims helps make them more conscious of safety and quality. Manufacturers who are supplying parts to a hazardous industry need to be more careful about reliability.

Nevertheless, the law does not, as such, prevent the NPCIL from signing subcontracts that indemnify smaller suppliers along the chain. The NPCILs problem is that it is politically infeasible to extend this indemnity to the manufacturer of the plant itself, as it discovered when it tried to provide blanket indemnity to Atomstroyexport for the Kudankulam third and fourth units.

Industry on Indian law

The nuclear industry also argues that Indias current law is out of sync with international conventions on nuclear liability. This is a poor argument because these conventions were all drafted under pressure from nuclear manufacturers who, historically, were in a stronger position than they are now. In the early days of nuclear power, American suppliers exploited this to impose the idea that liability should be channelled to the operator. Later, suppliers from other countries also adopted this self-serving argument.

Until recently, the United States itself never joined any international liability convention, because under its domestic law, called the Price Anderson Act, victims retain the right

to sue suppliers. Economic compensation is channelled through a complicated insurance system, but manufacturers can be found legally liable and this has consequences.

In 1997, the U.S. engineered the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), with a special rider for itself. When Bush communicated the convention to the U.S. Senate for ratification, he emphasised that The United States in particular benefits from a grandfather clause that allows it to join the convention without being required to change certain aspects of the Price-Anderson system that would otherwise be inconsistent with its requirements.

Indias own law is largely borrowed from an annex of the CSC. After showing no inclination to join any of the existing treaties for half a century,

the Indian government rushed to sign this discriminatory convention soon after the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. This shows that it was acting under external pressure, and not out of any concern for potential victims.

Even granting that suppliers should be liable in principle, many well-meaning people argue that India must acquiesce to the demands of the industry because it desperately needs electricity. Leaving aside the debate on the role of nuclear power in general, it is clear that Indias push towards importing reactors has less to do with electricity, and more to do with other factors.

Kakodkar article

Even by the standards of UPA II, the process of handing out multi-billion dollar contracts for reactors to various

multinational companies has been opaque and arbitrary. In Jaitapur, the government has promised to buy up to six European Pressurised Reactors (EPR) from Areva. No EPR is in commercial operation anywhere in the world and in France and Finland, Areva is running into severe construction-difficulties. Two nuclear complexes have been promised to the U.S., again involving designs that have never been built before.

In a rare candid admission, the former chairperson of the Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, provided the rationale behind these seemingly bizarre decisions.

Writing in the Marathi daily Sakaal , in January 2011, Kakodkar explained: America, Russia and France were the countries that we made mediators in the efforts to lift sanctions, and hence, for the nurturing of their

business interests, we made deals with them for nuclear projects.

As the debate on liability continues both in public and in the courts, the question that the country must ask is whether it is willing to compromise on its laws, and the safety and rights of its citizens to protect the business interests of reactor vendors.

(The authors are physicists) October 31, 2012

Pragmatic stance
The second quarter monetary policy review has further reinforced the Reserve Bank of Indias credentials as a pragmatic inflation fighter, not swayed by either market expectations or overt signals from the Finance Minister favouring a cut in policy rates. The traditional monetary policy dilemma of supporting growth versus

reining in inflation has remained. Growth considerations are behind the decision to lower the cash reserve ratio (CRR) by 0.25 percentage points to release Rs.17,500 crore of primary liquidity while leaving the repo rate unchanged. Thus over two consecutive policy statements, the RBI has chosen to influence interest rates through liquidity-augmenting CRR reductions rather than through the more traditional method of policy rate cuts. The expectation is that fresh injections of liquidity will induce banks to lower interest rates. A repo rate cut, on the other hand, might convey the impression that the central bank is loosening its monetary policy prematurely. In the event, the RBI has done well to emphasise the point that managing inflation and inflation expectations must remain the core focus of monetary policy, especially when inflationary pressures have persisted even as growth has moderated. Headline inflation for

September has been at a 10-month high of 7.8 per cent and is expected to ease only by the fourth quarter of the year. Of particular concern has been the stickiness of core inflation due to supply constraints and the cost-push effects of the rupees depreciation. The RBI has raised its inflation forecast for March 2013 to 7.5 per cent from 7 per cent indicated in July.

In line with expectations, the RBI has lowered its growth forecast for the current year to 5.8 per cent. Almost all private forecasters and several international agencies, including the IMF, have already downgraded Indias growth prospects. The slowdown is attributed to the worsening global environment, weak industrial activity and slower than anticipated growth in services. The large current account and fiscal deficits continue to pose significant risks to both growth and macroeconomic stability. The RBI has

obviously not been swayed by the governments recent policy announcements aimed at attracting foreign direct investment. They might have positively impacted sentiment, but need to be followed up with concrete action on the ground to revive investment. Much also depends on how efficaciously the government implements the fiscal consolidation map outlined by the Finance Minister on Monday, according to which the fiscal deficit is to be contained to within 5.3 per cent of GDP by March 2013 and then to 3 per cent over a five-year period. October 31, 2012

It is business as usual in Pakistan

World over, efforts are afoot to ensure that 15-year-old Malala

Yousafzais blood counts for something. Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie suggested her name for the next Nobel Peace Prize and an online campaign to advocate her case is being signed up by government representatives in various countries.

Former British Premier and United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, has declared that November 10 a month after the attempted assassination of Malala will be observed as Malala and the 32 million girls day to help realise her dream of educating the 32 million out-of-school girls across the world.

And, of course, there is pop diva Madonna dedicating a song to Malala and inscribing her name on her lower back; revealed during a striptease routine at a concert. These are just a few examples but, ironically, all help

build the narrative in Malalas home country that she was nothing but a western agent, out to give Pakistan a bad name.

Consigned to news bulletins

A fortnight after the shooting, it is back to business as usual in Pakistan. Malala is now just a mention in news bulletins, a face on posters being brought out by civil society organisations in an effort to keep the issue alive, a hashtag on Twitter Meanwhile, the might of the state has spoken through inaction. No doubt, all concerned gave right-sounding statements but, together, they fell way short of the resolve shown by the young teen in standing up to terrorists.

Malala and her father Ziauddin who encouraged her to hold her ground in

a milieu hostile to speaking out, especially for women can be dismissed as being foolhardy, but the question many are asking is: can Pakistans decision-makers ignore the writing on the wall even now, when children are being marked for just wanting access to education? Another girl from Swat, 17-year-old Hina Khan, is also apparently marked this time on the outskirts of Islamabad for the same reason.

At the risk of parroting the U.S. do more line, many had hoped that the revulsion triggered by Malalas shooting would force the powers that be to abandon their use of terrorism as a tool of statecraft and do more not for Washingtons sake but for Pakistans own survival.

But even as the platitudes were being served out by Pakistans political and military leadership, the counter-

narrative had begun. No one is quite sure how an operation in North Waziristan got injected into the mainstream narrative. But this became the expected response to Malalas shooting and that was enough to generate all kinds of conspiracy theories the sum and substance of which was that the young girl was an American agent and the whole episode was orchestrated to mount pressure on Pakistan to pursue Washingtons agenda.

Now that the International Marxist Tendency has posted a report following the attack that Malala had attended a National Marxist Youth School in Swat in July, another line of conspiracy theories is sure to emerge regarding how she was a communist and la-deen (irreligious). Sometimes, these conspiracy theories are actually inspired by Hollywood flicks for which there is a huge market in Pakistan

despite the Americanism.

widespread

anti-

Sample this. After Queen Elizabeth Hospital at Birmingham, where Malala is currently undergoing treatment, put out a detailed bulletin on the nature of her injuries, including the trajectory of the bullet, people immediately saw a pattern straight out of the movies featuring CIA agents. This is how the theory goes as told by an owner of a restaurant frequented by upwardly mobile children of Islamabad: The hospital said Malala was shot at point blank range, still the bullet travelled underneath the skin along the side of head and neck without penetrating the skull. Only the CIA could have done such a neat job without actually causing too much damage. The Taliban couldnt have done this. This, after the Tehreek-eTaliban Pakistan (TTP) issued not one, not two, but at least half-a-dozen

statements detailing the reasons for trying to kill Malala, and asserting that she would be targeted again should she survive.

Even as die-hard optimists cried themselves hoarse in the hope that this would be the turning point, Malalas shooting just ended up raising Pakistans ability to absorb brutality by a notch or two. No doubt the ranks of those anguished by the state of affairs in Pakistan swelled at the sight of the teen being wheeled in and out of hospitals, but it also brought up close the warped thinking that has come to dominate the nations mindscape.

Pakistans chattering classes often insist that the silent majority is not radical and this may well be true. But in their silence, the other side is gaining in strength and getting emboldened. Emboldened enough for

a policewoman at an airport security post to tell a Pakistani woman that her marriage is not in order because she had married outside the religion to a westerner. Emboldened enough for a doctor in an Army hospital to insist on prayer as medication when a senior officers wife went to him with a medical condition. These can be dismissed as stray incidents but their frequency is growing by all accounts. Together, they reflect a mindset that is no longer peripheral.

Blind to reason

In fact, the entire discourse generated by Malalas shooting showed how blind to reason the apologists are becoming; rather, have become. One of the earliest off the mark was Samia Raheel Qazi of Jamaat-e-Islami (J.I.). Daughter of former J.I. chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed, she is being held responsible for a photograph

circulating on the Internet showing Malala and her father with former U.S. Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke. She tweeted the photograph with the comment Malala Amreeki fauji hukaam ke saath (Malala with American military), insinuating that she was a CIA agent. This photograph was actually from a meeting the American diplomat had with NGOs after the military had taken control of Swat from terrorists. At the meeting, Malala was quoted as saying if you can help us with education, then please do.

Then there was the usual line of thinking which claimed that the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan was a creation of a mix of foreign intelligence agencies, predictably the CIA, Mossad and RAW. Of course, no answers to the counter question why,

then, should the TTP be treated with kid gloves.

Not to be left behind, cricketerturned-politician Imran Khan and his supporters brought in their choice arguments that all this would end once the U.S. left the region and holding out an olive branch was a better option than a military offensive. They completely ignore the historical fact that the Swat Taliban, an offshoot of the TTP which is being held responsible by Pakistan for the attack on Malala, pre-dates 9/11 and the U.S. Armys overt presence in the region. And that successive peace deals have only allowed terrorists to consolidate at the expense of the states writ.

In fact, Khans Pakistan Tehreek-eInsaf (PTI) riding as it does on its steadfast opposition to the U.S. presence in the region amid rising

anti-Americanism truly queered the pitch for the political class as it is wary of upsetting the apple cart ahead of the elections.

As a result, a bid by the government to table a resolution in Parliament calling for action against terrorism got scuttled by the main opposition party that feels most threatened by the PTI since both are eyeing the Punjab electorate.

Barring the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and some leaders in the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Awami National Party, all remained ambivalent in their response condemning the attack without naming the TTP which has links to jihadi organisations working within the country. Reports from Punjab suggest that many mainstream political parties are exploring pre-

election tie-ups with some of these outfits to bag their captive votes.

The military leadership, for its part, lobbed the decision on a North Waziristan operation on to the political class, literally setting the cat among the pigeons. Although the Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani sought to take ownership of the war on terror earlier this year, nothing in subsequent months has shown any change in Pakistans Janusfaced policy on terrorism which, today, is harming the country more than any other.

As the Malala Yousafzai effect fades away, Pakistans response to terror is in danger of slipping into even greater levels of tolerance October 31, 2012

Modi fuels this bizarre convergence


SINGLE PHASE:There is a merger of interests between a Congress determined to silence the corruption issue by simultaneously creating a hype over economic reforms and establishing moral equivalence between Robert Vadra and Nitin Gadkari, and that section of the BJP which wants to deny Narendra Modia national role. PHOTOS: S. SUBRAMANIUM, VIVEK BENDRE

Even before the brutal nature of the Stalinist regime was formally admitted by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, many well-meaning socialists throughout the world were aware that what existed in the Soviet Union was a travesty. Yet, a great many of these idealists chose to look the other way in the belief that criticism would

weaken the socialist state, encourage counter-revolutionaries and weaken the bigger fight against fascism and imperialism.

Having to choose between upholding what the British philosopher Roger Scruton termed common decencies and endorsing the lesser evil has confronted political activists for long. In the past year, this hoary debate has surfaced in India following a spate of corruption scandals that have seriously undermined the credibility of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance-2 government. Far from being celebrated as a mildly progressive dispensation concerned with nurturing socio-economic entitlements for the poor and the marginalised, the magnitude of corruption has created a widespread impression that the apparent concern for the aam aadmi is a cover for riotous crony capitalism.

Vadra and the Congress

Matters have come to a head following the flood of disclosures of the dodgy business practices of Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Media reports indicate that Vadra leveraged his privileged relationship with the Gandhi family to circumvent rules and procedures and make a fast buck for both himself and DLF, one of Indias largest listed real estate companies. It is also alleged that Vadra cleverly anticipated crucial decisions by Congress-controlled governments in Haryana and Rajasthan to make windfall profits what in common parlance is called insider trading.

The details of Vadras entrepreneurship are revealing for

what they tell us about the realty business in Indias boom towns. Politically, however, the issue is far more consequential. For the first time since 1974 when the CPI(M) MP Jyotirmoy Basu infuriated Indira Gandhi by raising awkward questions about Sanjay Gandhis Maruti project in Haryana, the Gandhi family has been directly hit by a money scandal. Sonia Gandhi may have reportedly brushed away the allegations by asserting that Vadra is a businessman but that hasnt insulated her from the charge that she did nothing to prevent her exalted family name to be used for disreputable advantage. Since the tone of a government is set by its leadership, the first family of the Congress may well be accused of embellishing the architecture of Indias all-pervasive crony capitalism.

Without doubt, the business ethics of Vadra, not to mention his sneering sense of entitlement, has created a large hole in the moral edifice of the Congress. This, in turn, is certain to shape popular perceptions in the runup to the general election unless, of course, the UPA is spectacularly successful in shifting the attention of voters away from sleaze.

For the Congress, unflinching loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family is an article of faith and, as such, it occasions little surprise that party leaders have fiercely protested Vadras innocence. For opinionmakers who are loosely supportive of Nehruvian values, the kerfuffle over corruption has raised awkward questions. While they are not inclined towards encouraging venality in public life, there is concern that the erosion of the Congress credibility will benefit the principal Opposition party. In

particular they are petrified that the disgust over economic mismanagement and cronyism will trigger a fascination for Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a leader who, at least BJP supporters believe, combines decisiveness with fierce personal integrity. Since, in liberal eyes, Modi personifies an authoritarian mindset, if not outright fascism, prudent politics demands that the fight against corruption the proverbial lesser evil be shelved till another day.

Gadkari and his defence

Paradoxically, this is a position that has cast a shadow over the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which, as the principal parliamentary Opposition, stands to gain most from the erosion in the Congress support. The plethora of questions over the seed capital of BJP president Nitin Gadkaris business

empire, and the lack of credible answers to these, have both embarrassed and outraged his party. Since the BJP doesnt have dynastic pretensions and still sees itself as favouring value-based politics, there has been less inclination to rush to Gadkaris defence with the same passion that the Congress demonstrated in the case of Vadra. Even those who have proffered the template defence of Gadkari having offered himself to an impartial inquiry can scarcely conceal their disquiet over the immoral equivalence being drawn between the BJP and the Congress. It is significant that apart from L.K. Advani and Sushma Swaraj, few of the BJPs front-ranking leaders and no chief minister have spoken up for Gadkari.

Yet, the scepticism in the ranks over showcasing damaged goods hasnt succeeded (so far) in removing

Gadkari. On the contrary, emboldened by the bewildered ambivalence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Advanis mystifying distinction between business practices and public life, and Swarajs unequivocal support, Gadkari has taken recourse to brazenness as was evident in his show of strength in Nagpur last Monday. To the outside world, Gadkari has successfully managed to convey the impression that, never mind the accompanying ridicule and potential loss of a political plank, the parivar and party are behind him. The BJP president has wilfully overstated the quantum of backing for himself. But he has been able to get away with this hype by craftily exploiting the prevailing uncertainty over what follows a possible resignation. Actually, it is more than uncertainty. There is considerable fear in a small but powerful section of the BJP that the failure of the Gadkari experiment will facilitate a hegemonic

role for Modi assuming he wins the Gujarat Assembly election conclusively. The Gujarat leader is unquestionably the man most BJP activists and BJP-inclined voters believe is best suited to both taking on the Congress and stealing the thunder of the anti-corruption crusaders. Whether unattached voters who are disgusted by the moral decline of the country also agree with this faith in his leadership is still untested. But what isnt in any doubt is that Modi threatens the cosy somnolence of bipartisan deal-making involving the main political parties. For many in the BJP, Modi isnt merely a challenge; he constitutes a threat.

There is an unholy convergence of interests between a Congress determined to put a lid on the corruption issue by simultaneously creating a hype over economic reforms and establishing moral

equivalence between Vadra and Gadkari, and that section of the BJP which wants to deny Modi a national role. As of now, the battle lines are confined to the opinion-forming industry in which the intelligentsia and the middle classes play a disproportionate role. In the coming months, as the general election approaches, the issues are going to percolate the social ladder. Will the aam aadmi also choose to overlook corruption as something inherent in the Indian way? Alternatively, will there be an angry vote, perhaps even for a different way of doing politics? In that case, which is the lesser evil?

(Swapan Dasgupta commentator.)

is

political

The excuses the Congress and the BJP are making for the business dealings

of Robert Vadra and Nitin Gadkari seem driven by a shared fear of Narendra Modi October 31, 2012

Victors justice bedevils the new Libya


The death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 has focused attention once more on the security situation in the country. No doubt, after 42 years of undemocratic rule it is reasonable to expect a slow transition into normalcy. A new government elected in July operates without control of its territory, and with institutions that are not yet fully functional.

The central government based in Tripoli is an island linked to Libyas other towns and cities, where urban militias govern through the armed

force of two hundred and fifty thousand fighters. A U.S. State Department cable from Tripoli to Washington on August 8, 2012 cautions that the absence of significant deterrence has contributed to a security vacuum that is being exploited by various elements, including former regime elements and Islamist extremists. The individual incidents have been organized, writes the embassy official in this leaked cable, but this is not an organized campaign. Rather, the violent incidents amount to a confluence rather than a conspiracy. It was this confluence of violence that escalated the protest in Benghazi that led to the death of the Ambassador.

Attempts to investigate the events of September 11 in Benghazi have come to naught. The Libyan government has not been able to do more than a cursory study of the site. The U.S.

team cannot go to Benghazi, where the security situation remains unsettled. The day that the U.S. investigation team arrived in Tripoli, three separate militia groups attacked the Rixos hotel, where the General National Congress is based. Ahmed Abu Khattala, one of the leaders of the Ansar al-Shariah militia, sat down with journalists in a Benghazi hotel on October 18 to mock the idea of an investigation of the fateful hours at the U.S. consulate. Abu Khattala suggested that he had close relations with the pro-government militias, such as the Rafallah al-Sahati Brigade, which was also on site during the consulate attack. No investigation would take place, he suggested, because there was little that would be found.

Hanging over the Libyan security situation is the lack of accountability for war crimes during the February-

October revolution of 2011. On May 2, 2012, the Libyan National Transitional Council granted blanket amnesty to those who committed crimes during the revolution, including murder and forced displacement. Law 38 (On Some Procedures for the Transitional Period) essentially allowed the militias the confidence of impunity. It emboldened them to disregard the war crimes conducted last year, and to consider that their actions in the present will also be similarly forgiven. The danger of victors justice is that it creates a political grammar that affects the new terrain, allowing the militias institutional support for their lawless behaviour.

Rights report on militias

A new report from Human Rights Watch ( Death of a Dictator: Bloody Vengeance in Sirte , October 2012)

details how the main Misrata-based militias ( al-Nimer , Tiger Brigade, alIsnad , Support Brigade, al-Fahad , Jaguar Brigade, al-Asad , Lion Brigade, al-Qasba , Citadel Brigade and Ussoud al-Walid , the Lions of the Valley Brigade) not only conducted extrajudicial assassinations of Muammar Qadhafi and his son Mutassim, but also killed over 66 prisoners in the Mahari hotel in Sirte on October 20, 2011. Two NATO air strikes had already killed about 103 members of Qadhafis convoy (many of them wounded patients from the Ibn Sina hospital, trying to flee the scene of the battle). Cellphone images and photographs, as well as interviews with survivors, showed the investigators that the dead were killed in custody. Human Rights Watchs investigation is clear that war crimes had been committed at Sirte. The Misrata chief prosecutor balked at an inquiry, saying that it would be too dangerous to carry out an

investigation in Sirte at the time, a situation that seems unchanged.

The Misrata militias are particularly prone to lawlessness. They are accused of the forcible displacement of the 30,000 dark-skinned residents of the town of Tawergha, and in the cellphone images from Sirte, their members routinely use racist epithets (black snake, for example) against their prisoners. There has been little attempt to resettle Tawergha.

The Misrata militia has laid siege to the city of Bani Walid, where there has been less enthusiasm for the new Libya, and whose citizens have been accused of kidnapping and killing Omar Bin Shaaban, a 22-year-old Misratan credited with the murder of Qadhafi. Misratas militias are acting with the authority of the government, which passed Resolution 7 on September 25 to allow them to go in

and capture those who killed Bin Shaaban. The militias are not constrained to simply go and arrest the accused. They want to subdue Bani Walid. As Mohammed el-Gandus, a spokesperson for the militias put it, If we win this fight, Libya will finally be free.

The atmosphere of impunity does not only shroud the activities of the militias. The passage of Resolution 7 and Law 38 demonstrate that the Libyan government has not taken the regime of human rights seriously. The International Criminal Court (ICC), so eager to enter the conflict in February 2011, has also taken a back seat. U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970 gives the ICC jurisdiction over the Libyan theatre at least during the conflict phase; it has utterly failed to honour these obligations. Furthermore, NATO entered the Libyan conflict to protect civilians in the name of the human

rights regime. Nevertheless, NATO and the Atlantic powers have refused to allow any evaluation of their use of firepower against Libya with resulting civilian casualties whose numbers are unaccountable (as I showed in When Protector Turned Killer, The Hindu , June 11, 2012). NATOs casualties include the dead in Sirte. Its drones struck the convoy, leaving them at the will of the Misrata militias.

U.S. presidential campaign

Benghazi entered the U.S. presidential campaign as a proxy for a debate over foreign policy between Obama and Romney. Neither has taken honestly the consequences of the U.S.-led NATO intervention, and neither is capable of understanding the grave situation in Libya where certain militias act with impunity. A U.S. State Department document from August remarks that the Libyan government

has acknowledged the problem of the Militias in torture and detentions, but it admits that the police and Justice Ministry are not up to the task of stopping them. On Tuesday, it sent out a text message on all cellphones, pleading for the militias to stop. The U.S. worries that Libya might become a failed state. What is not recognised is that it is precisely the lack of seriousness toward accountability and law that fuel the failure of new institutions to emerge. Ambassador Chris Stevens was not the only victim of this lawlessness. He is one among many.

(Vijay Prashad, a contributor to Frontline, is the author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, LeftWord, 2012.)

Blanket amnesty to those committed crimes during

who the

revolution is allowing the militias to indulge in lawless behaviour November 1, 2012

Can we stop the language of domination?


In a multilingual postcolonial society like Indias, linguistic hierarchy exists in a layered manner. It does not simply have a two-level hierarchy of Hindi and English versus the rest of the Indian languages. The whole linguistic profile of our country forms a pyramid having multiple broad levels, with English at the top and languages with less than 10,000 speakers at the bottom which are omitted from being reported by the government. In between the two levels fall the 22 scheduled languages, their dialects, the non-scheduled languages and their dialects in that order.

One language, many roles

There is a heterogeneity involved in the relationship Hindi shares with the various Indian languages. With languages such as Brajbhasha , Chhattisgarhi , Haryanvi , Nimadi , etc. which are spoken in the Hindi belt, its relationship is hierarchical because these languages have always been viewed as dialects of Hindi. In the popular discourse, dialects are considered inferior to languages. However, that is not really the case with regard to the other Indian languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam, Kashmiri, etc. because like Hindi, they too are listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution and hence enjoy a similar status. In addition to this, the notions of the mother tongue, first language, and second language have a very fuzzy position in a multilingual society like

ours. In any Indian classroom, a language, for example Hindi, may simultaneously be the mother tongue of some students, first language for some others and second language for a different set.

On the other hand, English has more or less a constant position except in the Northeast and in the elite schools of metropolitan cities where English may be the neighbourhood language for many and mother tongue for a minuscule few.

There is no denying that grouping many languages under one has a repercussion on the identities of these languages and their speakers, leading them to dissociate themselves from or unlearn their native languages in favour of the language dominant in education and in the job market. However, the process of dissociation from ones mother tongue or

neighbourhood language goes on at a much larger scale in a much more intense manner with regard to English.

Of aspiration

Thus, be it Hindi the lingua franca or languages like Tamil, Malayalam, etc. with a rich and ancient literary tradition, or the other scheduled languages of India, all of them become a casualty of peoples aspirations and compulsion to learn the international language, English. The postcolonial mindset of linguistic subjugation has further intensified in the past two decades of liberalisation and English has become a language of opportunities and power not just in India but also in other countries. Technological advancement and economy are some of the major factors that have led to English becoming a super language. In fact

there is a strong correlation between the expansion of Anglo-American powers and expansion of the language. These countries have been investing heavily in English to promote linguistic imperialism, with an agenda of strengthening their economic and political powers globally.

Hindi, on the other hand, is a language of desire in a very restricted domain and sense; in fact, it is rather absurd to equate the two languages in this regard. It is mainly in the Hindi belt that the native speakers of the socalled dialects of Hindi are expected to master standard Hindi, used outside the informal domain. In multilingual societies with a colonial legacy, languages are visibly the markers of class and power. In the hierarchical linguistic structure of such societies, shifting from one level to another level facilitates entry into the higher stratum of society. Also,

linguistic aspirations of individuals are determined by their geographical location in the sense of whether they belong to a metropolitan/nonmetropolitan urban area or rural area. The shift usually is to the next level in the hierarchy; skipping an intermediate level rarely happens. For example, a Pahari or Sadri speaking person from Himachal Pradesh or Jharkhand, respectively would desire to have a command over Hindi first. Her aspiration to acquire English and become a part of the higher socioeconomic class would come later.

Expansion versus promotion

The expansion and promotion of a language may generally be witnessed at three levels: official/administrative, educational and societal. There have been all out efforts to promote Hindi ever since it was declared the official language of the country. Various

departments and commissions were set up to promote the use of Hindi primarily in administration. In addition to this, the mandate of government agencies like the central Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology (CSTT) was to create terminologies in all the major Indian languages , used officially in different States. However, large-scale national level efforts and a major focus have been on Hindi much to the chagrin of many non-Hindi speakers, mainly in the Southern States. As for the promotion in education and society, the story is quite different. The increasing dominance of English in the educational sector at the cost of Indian languages is significantly linked to societys postcolonial outlook towards indigenous languages (and knowledge) that have flourished on Indian soil. Added to this is the disciplinary hierarchy where the only valid language that has some ranking in education is English.

Though there have been no official efforts to promote English, the language has been expanding consistently in urban India. In the past two decades of globalisation especially, its use has increased exponentially, governed by seeming fascination but underlying compulsions in the subconscious of people to survive in the system driven by a market economy and technological advancement. Since the medium and lexicon of market and technology is English-centric, familiarity with it is the route to enter the system and become its beneficiary. Thus, if we juxtapose the two scenarios of English and Hindi, we find that in spite of all the official measures taken to promote Hindi, its use has remained at the free will of the people. On the other hand, the same will of society, born out of compulsion, led to the consolidation of the position of English in education

not only as a subject but also as a medium. In fact government measures have caused serious damage to Hindi by developing a heavily Sanskritised and artificial officialese . This has led to people forming the perception that Hindi is essentially a dull and complex language and not developed enough to be used as a medium of academic discourse. Also, it is not an enabling language in the sense that it does not equip students with requisite skills and smartness to fetch her recognition in society. This hinders the expansion of the language in various domains and it remains a language of the masses, not transcending to classes, a language of informal conversation, not of formal discourse. This probably is the plight of the other major Indian languages as well.

To ensure the coexistence of languages, social acceptability of all

the 1,652 mother tongues in the linguistic hierarchy is a prerequisite, not just from the point of view of equity but because every language indeed has a well-defined structure governed by its own rules. The existence of a language depends on its use in various informal-formal domains. Therefore, opportunities to use multiple languages must be enhanced and knowledge creation must happen in at least the major Indian languages; translated knowledge is not the solution. In education, fresh perspectives need to be harnessed, backed by democratic principles and critical pedagogy. Also, it is absolutely necessary to give students the choice of Indian languages as a medium of education so that an unfamiliar language is not an impediment in enabling equal access to knowledge for all.

(Mukul Priyadarshini is with the Department of Elementary Education, Miranda House, University of Delhi. Email: mukulpriya@yahoo.co.in )

In a multilingual society like India, social acceptability of all mother tongues must be ensured. An unfamiliar language should not be a barrier to enabling equal access to knowledge for all November 1, 2012

Rise of the Libyan resistance


Spin doctors in the United States are finding it hard to explain the September 11 strike in Benghazi that killed Ambassador John Christopher Stevens. Nobody, including powerful lobbyists, politicians, public relations gurus, mainstream media, has managed to present a credible and

logically consistent account of the tragedy. The fog engulfing the assassination is rising from the campaign for the U.S. presidential elections scheduled on November 6. In the heat of an electoral battle where princely sums are paid to create perceptions rather than establishing facts, neither the Republican camp of Mitt Romney nor Barack Obamas legions seem interested in confronting the truth till such time as the votes have been cast and the last ballot box has been sealed.

Intelligence failure

The debate ahead of the elections is not just about who killed the ambassador, and how, but also the context. The Republicans, who may be in striking distance of the presidency, argue that he was a victim of a

planned al-Qaeda attack. The killing was, therefore, a result of either a huge intelligence failure or unforgivable administrative laxity which prevented the authorities from responding to the red flags raised about the possibility of a strike in Benghazi or elsewhere.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged that Ambassador Stevens was the victim of an act of terror. There have been several articles in the mainstream media that quote unnamed intelligence officials as saying that the assailants, who attacked the cluster of villas occupied by the ambassador and his staff, mounted an opportunistic attack, taking advantage of the protests that had been organised in Benghazi against the tasteless b-grade video film that was disrespectful of Prophet Muhammad. The theory of an opportunistic attack is far less damaging to the current

administration. It spares President Obama and his team culpability in inaction, because it shows that the attack was not pre-planned, was difficult to predict and, therefore, harder to prevent.

Neither of the two narratives offered to the American electorate may, however, pass careful scrutiny. The Republicans assertion that the alQaeda masterminded the strike cannot be accepted at face value. Copious reams of material are available which show that jihadist groups with strong al-Qaeda ideological connections were, with American and NATO support, at the forefront of the military campaign that toppled Muammar Qadhafi, the former Libyan leader. Ambassador Stevens, who had famously arrived in Benghazi in April 2011 aboard a Greek cargo ship, became the lynchpin

coordinating the administrations ties with the armed Islamist groups.

The ambassadors bonding with the Islamist fighters was well known. He shifted base from a Tripoli hotel after he escaped an assassination attempt outside its premises to the more secure villas of Benghazi, the hotbed of jihadists. So confident was he about his security that he enjoyed jogging on the streets of Benghazi teeming with jihadi groups many with wellestablished connections to the Afghan Mujahideen and the al-Qaeda.

Opportunistic

The opportunistic attack scenario, painted by Mr. Obamas supporters, in which the assailants weaved their way into an ongoing protest against the blasphemous film and struck when the opportunity arose, appears

equally flawed. It assumes that a protest was under way outside the gated villas in Benghazi, which presented the attackers a smokescreen to infiltrate. However, eyewitness accounts suggest that there was no assemblage of protesters outside the villas on the fateful evening of September 11.

McClatchy news service quotes an eyewitness interviewed on September 13 as saying: The Americans would have left if there had been protesters but there wasnt a single ant. The area was totally quiet until about 9.35 pm, when as many as 125 men attacked with machine guns, grenades, RPGs, and anti-aircraft weapons. They threw grenades into the villas, wounding me and knocking me down. Then, they stormed through the facilitys main gate, moving from villa to villa.

In an article published on the website globalresearch.ca, researchers Mark Robertson and Finian Cunningham identify the eyewitness as a 27-yearold who was one among the eight Libyans involved in protecting the villas used by ambassador Stevens and his staff. He suffered five shrapnel wounds in a leg and two bullet wounds in the other during the course of fighting. If the account is true, the opportunistic attack theory collapses as the assailants did not have the crowds to infiltrate and mount an assault.

Obsessed with the projection that a free and democratic Libya is emerging from 40 years of tyranny of the Qadhafi-era, it appears that no one in the U.S. establishment and NATO is inclined to speak the truth that a green resistance movement of proQadhafi loyalists, systematically targeting the former leaders chief

adversaries, has been mushrooming in Libya. The killing of the ambassador was only the latest act that capped an aggressive and effective campaign of the movement called Tahloob in local parlance. Not headlined by the mainstream media, the Tahloob has carried out a string of attacks including assassinations, chiefly of those who betrayed Qadhafi in his last days.

Its victims include Shukri Ghanem, a one-time celebrated Oil Minister, whose lifeless body was found floating on the Danube on April 29. In a classic betrayal, Ghanem had switched sides, joined NATO, and began living the good life, first in London and later in Vienna. Less than a month after Ghanems death, the movement claimed responsibility for killing General Albarrani Shkal. The former military governor of Tripoli had been accused of demobilising 38,000 men

under his command. His act opened the floodgates for the entry of foreign troops into Tripoli, resulting in the success of Operation Mermaid Dawn, crowned by the unceremonious sacking of the Libyan capital. Another celebrated defector, Special Forces commander AbdelFattah Younis was also killed as was the judge investigating Younis assassination, in June this year.

The killing of Ambassador Stevens marked a sharp escalation in the green movements campaign. The motive was obvious, given Washington role and the critical contribution of the ambassador in toppling Qadhafi.

There were other factors that might have impacted the timing of the attack. Six days before the Benghazi attack, Mauritania had extradited to Libya Abdullah Al Senoussi, Qadhafis

high-profile intelligence chief. This infuriated the resurgent Tahloob. Senoussi had made the ill-fated choice of seeking refuge in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, where he was promptly arrested upon arrival on March 17. At the time of his arrest, Mauritania was firmly in the lap of the western camp.

While the green movement has not claimed responsibility, it will be surprising if it is not on the list of those suspected to be involved in the attempt to assassinate Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz on October 13. For public consumption, the al-Qaeda is being blamed for the attack although the official version states that the President was lightly injured in a friendly fire incident involving his own troops.

There was another reason that could have hastened the green movements decision to target Stevens. A day before the Benghazi attack, two Qadhafi loyalists Abdul Ati Al Obeidi, a former Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Head of State, and Mohammed Zwai, former head of the legislature were put on trial. Both were accused of squandering public funds by paying compensation to the tune of $2.7 billion to the families of the victims of the attack on the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Bitter conflict

In the aftermath of Ambassador Stevens death, a new chapter of bitter conflict seems to have opened up between Qadhafi loyalists of the green resistance and the NATO backed militias which have assumed power in an increasingly fractured

Libyan state. Bani Walid, the city loyal to Qadhafi, which was the last to fall last year, has been attacked and the people of the Warfala tribe, loyal to Qadhafi, who reside in strength in the city, are being subjected to collective punishment. Rumours are swirling that Khamis, Qadhafis youngest son, has been killed and Moussa Ibrahim, Qadhafis one-time spokesman, captured. The resistance offered by Bani Walid under the leadership of the green movement illustrates that whoever occupies the White House next year is unlikely to escape the blowback from Libya, where many reject the regime change engineered under the generic deception called the Arab Spring.

Although the U.S. is in denial, there is

every reason to believe that it was Tahloob,

a movement of pro-Qadhafi loyalists, that killed Ambassador Stevens November 1, 2012

Swinging away from the U.S. voter


The U.S. Declaration of Independence may claim that all men are created equal, but the countrys voters certainly arent. In American presidential elections, states matter, not individual citizens. The archaic electoral college system splinters the national vote into 51 separate elections (the states plus the capital, the District of Columbia). A victory in each of these polls wins the candidate a certain number of electors, an invisible species of political being who seem to exist merely as points on the

television graphs that will besiege the American public on November 6. This manner of electing the president can produce situations, like George W. Bush's victory in 2000, in which the loser actually wins the popular vote; Bush did not have a popular mandate, only the dubious blessing of a majority of the countrys faceless electors. The great absurdity of the system is not simply that it disregards the will of the people, but that it cheapens the very act of voting.

As early as May of last year, pundits were confidently isolating the seven or eight swing states closely split between Republican and Democratleaning voters that would determine the 2012 vote. Predictably, it is mostly in these states the likes of Colorado, Florida, and most importantly Ohio that the election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is being contested. While the

candidates lavish their treasure on a handful of swing states, political tumbleweed blows through much of the rest of the country.

The candidates dont bother wooing voters in safe states. Here, in New York, the election is a fait accompli . New York along with several other dense, coastal states has long been destined to vote for Obama. Some of the countrys most populous areas, including its biggest cities, are therefore entirely overlooked by the campaign (in 2008, 98 per cent of campaign funds were spent on just 15 states). The undecided Midwestern voter looms large in the American imagination, while the denizens of its cities its centres of change and innovation recede into the background.

The system discourages electoral participation in places where one

candidate expects to enjoy a healthy margin of victory. It reduces the presidential campaign to a series of cynical calculations. The votes of people in states leaning strongly in either direction weigh far less than those of voters in swing states still in play, so the former can be safely ignored.

Not representative

Why should the votes of a few count more than the votes of others? Like much else in the politics of this country such as the sanctity of firearms the logic of the electoral college system lies in the early years of the American republic. Politicians and thinkers of the time briefly considered the popular vote as a means to elect the president, but eventually dismissed it. They feared that without proper national parties already in place and with a largely

agrarian electorate, the popular vote would only encourage crude regionalism; voters would rally around familiar candidates, a habit that would inevitably favour the bigger, more populous states at the expense of the smaller ones.

The spectre of regionalism no longer looms over the nation. Both the Democrats and the Republicans, two incredibly developed perhaps overdeveloped national parties, are established in every state. Americans themselves are far more mobile than their late 18th century predecessors. This continent of a country is now bridged by highways of asphalt and broadband.

More than anachronistic, the electoral college system is fundamentally elitist. The founding fathers did not trust the general public. To curtail the full power of a popular vote, they

instituted the intermediary screen of electors. Writing in the Federalist Papers , Alexander Hamilton defended the rationale for the system by arguing that the electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary and violent movements. From its advent, the electoral college system was conceived to keep the people at bay. A popular vote, in the view of the Framers, would only open the door to tyranny and mob rule.

America has changed

Contemporary defenders of the electoral college tend to be rightwing. They may not use the same language, but they too fear the implications of a popular vote. Were a system of popular vote in place, candidates would be forced to spend more time in densely-populated

areas, particularly in multicultural cities like those on the coasts.

If you listen to much of the rhetoric of these presidential campaigns, America can appear as a land of cornfields, church steeples, and sleepy small towns. It is not. A popular vote would encourage a more inclusive politics, and not just pander to the parochial interests of a few states. The concerns of the urban poor, of immigrant communities, and other oft-neglected constituencies would have to be better addressed by candidates of both parties. The tone of American political discourse would shift ever so slightly to the left.

Introducing the popular vote in the U.S. presidential elections is not at all an outlandish possibility. Already, nine states have passed a law that would force electoral votes in each state to be delivered to the winner of the

overall popular vote and not to the winner of the state election. Several more states must pass the law before it crosses the threshold of operability, but it has already stirred the ire of the right wing. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell bloodily urged his comrades to fight its progress: We need to kill it in the cradle before it grows up. If not strangled in its infancy, the popular vote movement promises a more democratic future for a republic stubbornly set in its idiosyncratic ways.

(Kanishk Tharoor is a Writer in Public Schools fellow at New York University. www.kanishktharoor.com )

In the presidential elections, states matter more than individual citizens. The national vote is fragmented by

the archaic electoral college system that is fundamentally elitist November 2, 2012

Govern more, politick less


Deepa Dasmunsi, the new Union Minister of State for Urban Development, seems to be labouring under the illusion that her office is best used to further petty political rivalries rather than delivering good governance to the people of India. While she is entitled to believe her appointment was part of a grand Congress strategy to counter the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, Ms Dasmunsi cannot be allowed to use the powers and resources at the command of the ministry to carry on a political battle in her home State. One of her first actions as Minister was to announce a probe into the West Bengal governments spending under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban

Renewal Mission. Of course, there is an urgent need to tighten the monitoring of the utilisation of Central funds, including those under the JNNURM, but Ms Dasmunsi seems singularly focused on the TMCcontrolled Kolkata Corporation for all the wrong reasons. She described her own appointment and that of two other ministers from West Bengal as a fitting reply to the Trinamool, and made no attempt to hide her intention to use this elevation to strengthen the Congress at the State level. Sure, Ms Dasmunsi may fancy herself as a vocal and fierce political rival to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, but she should not wield the Urban Development Ministry as a weapon in her hand. Governance must not be sacrificed in a game of political oneupmanship.

Disconcertingly, Ms Dasmunsis actions and words seem like a throwback to the era of Congress dominance at the Centre, especially during the period of Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, when States ruled by Opposition parties were constantly under pressure from Union ministers. While no one would grudge the new minister the right to oversee the use of Central funds or to check any misuse, any overbearing Big Brother attitude on the part of Central ministers could have adverse consequences for Centre-State relations and the democratic functioning of political institutions. The message Ms Dasmunsi succeeded in sending out was that the Centres attitude to West Bengal hinges on the relationship between the Congress and the Trinamool, and that she is the one tasked with ensuring the latter behaves in a manner politically acceptable to the Congress. Clearly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh

needs to disabuse Ms Dasmunsi of the notion that her primary duty is expanding the political space for the Congress in West Bengal. If taking on the Trinamool is what interests her, Ms Dasmunsi should opt for organisational responsibilities in the Congress, and not waste her time and effort in the Urban Development Ministry. November 2, 2012

Mental health legislation must be more therapeutic, humane


The article in The Hindu Dont shrink the scope of the Mental Health Act, (Op-Ed, October 23, 2012) on the Mental Health Act, by Dr. Jayakumar Menon, is timely. There are many issues which generate a lot of heat and dust among the stakeholders of mental health and illness. They include psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, the

media, non-governmental organisations, government and, most importantly, patients, their family members and caregivers.

Why is legislation required for mental illness? On the one hand the proponents of holistic health argue for clubbing mental health with physical health so that the stigma is avoided. On the other, social activists do battle for a separate and unique law exclusively for psychiatric disorders; lest they are marginalised and made outcastes.

The fact is that legislation does help in implementing health services provided by the state. The political promises and executive actions function better. Guidelines can be established by the law which would be binding on policy-makers. It would enable funding, accountability and

availability of the services to the needy.

Mental health services: The history of mental health services in India is linked to the history of mental hospitals in the country. Initially, lunatic asylums were meant for European soldiers who were insane. All these asylums were run on the jail model with similar rules being in force. Due to overwhelming criticism about these hospitals, a more humanistic approach evolved, with mental hospitals replacing asylums. The number of mental hospitals has gone up to 45 from 31 in 1947.

The recent shift of providing mental health services from a specialised hospital to a general hospital setting has its advantages. The very model of sickness has turned towards a biological model from one with psychological and social roots.

However, the more important and urgent challenge is in ensuring how soon mental health services reach the community. The ambitious National Mental Health Programme (NMHP) has been a failure if not a non-starter.

The Mental Health Act, 1987: The MHA 1987 is in itself a great effort forward, replacing the century-old Indian Lunacy Act 1912 which was in force for 80 years. The Mental Health Act, drafted by the Indian Psychiatric Society in 1950 received the assent of the President in 1987 but was implemented from April 1993 only. Though the Act is conceptually far ahead of its predecessor, the drawbacks are so many that it needed a revision in less than 20 years. On the positive side, the act presents a more humane approach; clear guidelines were enumerated for admitting various categories of the mentally ill, a proper method of establishing State

and Central mental health authorities was made and discharges simplified. However the Act lacked the direction in providing simpler mental health services at the community level. The role of the family, which is so essential in management, is completely ignored. The boundaries between rehabilitation centres and mental health centres are very blurred, leading to a lot of confusion.

What needs to be changed: The State and Central mental health authorities need to be given both administrative and financial powers. The Act exempts government hospitals in stipulating norms which is absolutely unfair. Does it mean that the government can run the organisation with no staff and infrastructure? It may not surprise many that a few government hospitals have well-trained doctors, nurses and psychologists. Why should a general nursing home be asked to get a

separate licence if it were to admit patients with any mental illness? If an individual with a head injury develops abnormal behaviour, should the hospital transfer such a patient to a nursing home where there are no facilities to deal with head injuries at all but has the licence to admit patients? No word is written about rehab programmes nor is any direction envisaged.

New Mental Health Care Bill: The Mental Health Care Bill 2011 is likely to get parliamentary approval sooner than later. The significant step in the Bill is the exemption of attempted suicide from prosecution, which is welcome. But the Bill takes a retrograde step in legislation of a particular method of treatment. The electro convulsive treatment (ECT) for children and without anaesthesia is barred, much against scientific and logical thinking. Such things are best

left to the experts. Surprisingly the Bill also restricts the period of treatment which should again be a professional case-by-case decision.

The Mental Health Bill, as Dr. Menon hopes, should not shrink the scope of the mental health services. Any mental health legislation should be more therapeutic than legal and more humane than regulatory. Because you are dealing with the sick, not with litigation.

(Dr. N.N. Raju is general secretary, Indian Psychiatric Society, and viceprincipal and professor of psychiatry, Andhra Medical College, Visakhapatnam. E-mail: drnnraju@yahoo.com )

The challenge is to ensure that mental health services reach communities quickly November 2, 2012

The unlearned lesson of 1962


Our extensive retrospection on the drubbing we contrived to suffer in October-November 1962, ought to be as salutary as it is necessary, but the right questions must be asked and by the right people. What went wrong, who were the villains, can there be a repeat, are we better prepared all these carry many lessons but the comprehensiveness of our failures points to an equally comprehensive weakness: we could not behave as a state capable of looking after its affairs. Beyond material strengths, it is how one functions that counts. Without underestimating all that we have since

achieved, we must realise that our bad habits have not improved while the vitiating pressures have become even more alarming.

Assess challenges

Any state expecting to be taken seriously must first organise itself to behave seriously. Assess the challenges you may face, distinguish between the imminent and contingent, inform yourself as fully as possible on relevant data, with specific intelligence on what the sources of challenge might be up to, assess the capabilities of yourself and others calculate whether you have or can develop those capabilities up to required levels, whether you need to temporise or seek external balancing arrangements, not least consider how the global situation might affect your interest; then plan, prepare, implement. These elements

of statecraft are so rudimentary, they shouldnt need enumeration, but statecraft is precisely what we have lacked: 1962 was the culmination of many years of what might most politely be called amateurishness in all these respects.

Just how badly we lacked the two essentials of statecraft careful judgment and appropriate action were underlined by two different authors of our debacle. Jawaharlal Nehru himself confessed to the first, telling Parliament on October 25: We were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world, and were living in an artificial atmosphere of our own creation. Todays realities are no less compelling, but no less lost in the artificial atmosphere we persist in creating for ourselves. Is there any part of our political spectrum in the least interested in learning from any aspect of 1962?

On our second failure, just how unbelievably we acted is brought out vividly, if unintentionally, in B.N. Mulliks Chinese Betrayal . The title itself betrays a fault: the shocked, hurt, accusatory blaming of others, blind to ones own responsibility. What did the Chinese betray, except our folly? They behaved as states do and we did not: work with care and calculation towards chosen ends. In that process, they made fools of us but whether that reflects their duplicity or our ineptitude is quite a question.

Still apparently revered in our intelligence ranks, Mullik, virtually the first Indian head of the Intelligence Bureau, depicts a handful of courtiers milling around as though trying to anticipate what a Shahinshah would like. As in a court, a mere handful of favourites appear to run everything

Defence Minister Krishna Menon, Foreign Secretary M.J. Desai, Defence Joint Secretary Harish Sarin (a fine officer caught in a quandary) and, of course, our ubiquitous author, with the Army Chief and some others periodically roped in. The Cabinet hardly mattered, the Secretary General, External Affairs, and the Defence Secretary had no role, no structured, systematic decisionmaking process was ever attempted the Defence Ministers daily meetings, triggered by September 8, seem to have been occasions primarily for Mr. Mullik to poke his nose into Army affairs.

Mullik records innumerable examples of egregiousness. By August 1962 *Lt. Gen. B.K.] Kaul and Krishna Menon were practically not on speaking terms. On September 17, KM accordingly rejects Mulliks urgings to call Kaul back from leave as CGS. But

on October 1, he somersaults, appointing Kaul Corps Commander against Mulliks professed objections. The only reason the Minister thought it would please Nehru to see a fellow Kashmiri appointed. Then comes surely the most bizarre conduct of battles in history: the front Commander evacuated from the front, issuing orders to it from his sickbed 1000 km away in Delhi, with the Defence Minister, the Army Chief and the great IB Director in nightly attendance.

Confusion in Assam

The episode that would be most farcical of all, were it not the most heartbreaking, was the withdrawal of civil administration from northern Assam. Mullik recalls the Cabinet ordering the civil administration to remain in place. He arrives with Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Tezpur

to learn that, instead, it has been ordered out of all the north. Rushing back to Delhi, he discovers the Assam Governor persuaded Cabinet Ministers to change their original orders but the Prime Minister has no idea how the change was made! To cap it all, our hero decides to leave the IB and return to Assam to organise guerrilla resistance when the Chinese moved in apparently forgetting that a ceasefire and withdrawal had been proclaimed three days earlier.

One day he is recommending various Army appointments, even a new Army Chief, another he is flying off to the front to have his say on operations, shuttling back and forth thrice in the crucial week. As late as two weeks before the Chinese attack of October 20, he is insisting that the only real danger is Pakistan, where Ayub was on the prowl; seven years after being proved wrong, he still insists he was

right. That he had no business being involved in any of these things, but sticking to providing intelligence, never enters his mind.

Let us not just blame individuals: the whole system, if one can call it that, was sheer Alice-in-Wonderland. Every leader specially trusts someone, consulting him/her even on extraneous matters, but such wholesale meddling, or Krishna Menons manipulations and prejudices, which most of all undermined the Army morale and efficiency and corrupted policy, are the hallmarks of old, personalised, court-style government. Lately, the fashion has grown to criticise Panditji for everything that went, or is, wrong with us. Given his surpassing command of the country he cannot, of course, be spared: even allowing for the still underestimated intrigues to misuse the China crisis to unseat him

(with no little encouragement from external sources), his responsibility for mishandling is undeniable. He was so great, we owe him so much, and need his kind of approach to building up India so badly, noting his faults is no diminution of his stature, but that is not our Indian way: our heroes are faultless, our villains wholly evil. Such attitudes leave no scope for objective, dispassionate, impersonal thinking.

Of course individuals matter in India far more than in countries where institutions and methodical processes minimise the idiosyncratic but to let them take over or bypass institutions and run things by whim is to sink back into medieval ways. In that respect, how different is today from then? Despite our successes in consolidating democracy, we have still not accepted the concept of the state as an entity intended to serve all of society and demanding the loyalty of

all citizens above all their other affiliations. For us, the state is the ruler, which readily leads into the habits of the Mughal court habits so prevalent by 1962, that they more than anything else led to our humiliation much as at Plassey. They are now rampant.

Contrast in attitude

There is a lesson even in the contrast between our commemoration of what happened 50 years ago and Chinas studied silence. We are spared the mortification of her celebrating a victory, not because what weighs so heavily on us was a minor episode to the Chinese: enough has come out to indicate how purposefully they planned their major enterprise (though misreading us too). The current show of indifference represents the calculated pursuit of

national ends, as against excitable, ad hoc ways.

our

From misreadings of what might happen, to the north-eastern chaos following defeat, how we handled affairs then displays a state simply not organised to cope with major challenges. Doubtless, we now have more professionalism in many ways. The NSA and the NSC apparatus constitute a vast improvement; there is also an incipient strategic community to guide public opinion. But public opinion has become less open to guidance, political circles have become even more impervious to facts, reality or sense, and our politico-administrative complex is more cumbersome, unproductive and parochial. Whether our military are better equipped, or have the required infrastructure or intelligence inputs, etc., are vital questions but secondary

to our overriding concern: how mature is the Indian state now?

One only has to ask to start worrying.

(K. Shankar Bajpai is former Ambassador to Pakistan, China & the U.S., and Secretary, External Affairs Ministry)

We lacked statecraft 50 years ago. But

we are no better today, as our bad habits persist while the vitiating pressures have become even more alarming November 2, 2012

A pearl in the emerald isle

At the other end from Jaffna, on the map and in every other way, is what some Sri Lankans refer to, only halfjokingly, as Sri Lankas new capital.

Hambantota is located about 220 km from Colombo, on the southern coast that is the islands bulgy bottom. It falls in the parliamentary constituency of Namal Rajapaksa, son of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The constituency has long been in the Rajapaksa family. Still, it bears little resemblance to the small fishing harbour town it was about a dozen years ago, when Rajapaksa senior, elected from here, was a cabinet minister-in-charge of fisheries in Chandrika Kumaratungas government.

Fast track

For one, getting there does not take as long as it used to. On a flashy new four-lane expressway, the 96 km drive from the capital to Galle, takes exactly one hour, one-third of the time it used to previously. From there to the Rajapaksa fiefdom is another three hours.

Built with grants from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Japan by the China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd., and inaugurated in November 2011, the smooth expressway cuts through lush green forests and hills, as scenic in its way as the coastal two-lane Galle Road.

With funding from Chinas Exim Bank, the expressway is proposed to be extended by about 35 km to Matara, and will eventually connect the remaining 70 km to Hambantota. This

time, China National Technical Import and Export Corporation is the builder.

But driving on Sri Lankas first expressway is not cheap. The toll costs SL Rs.400 one-way, one reason it has not yet pulled in enough traffic.

Reflective of Lankan policy

Forget the road though. The government expects people to be flying to Hambantota soon. An international airport is rapidly coming up at nearby Mattala. The contractor is the same as the one who built Hambantotas new inland port China Harbour Engineering Company Ltd.

The Magampura Mahinda Rajapaksa Port itself is meant to be symbolic of what President Rajapaksa wants his

country to be: sleekly modern, confident, proud of itself, and not beholden to western powers, or in his words, a reflection of Sri Lankas nonalignment and friendship with all.

Put another way, Chinas Exim Bank is financing 85 per cent of the cost of the $1.5 billion project, with the balance coming from the Sri Lankan government. Of this, the cost of the first phase, with its four berths and buildings, was $508 million.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the completed Phase 1 dazzled impressively under the blazing sun, the blue of the quay buildings tastefully merging into the colour of the sea.

Kasun Dasantha, the young project engineer assigned to show us around, underlined that China had only loaned

the money, at an interest rate of 6.5 per cent, and that the port will have to start showing results in order to begin repayments by the scheduled calendar of May 2013.

For months after its inauguration in November 2010, residents of Hambantota heard deep explosive blasts from the port, reportedly strong enough to cause cracks in some houses in the town. But the engineer dismissed as gossips reports that a rock had been belatedly discovered at the mouth of the port, and had to be blasted out of the way. The sounds, he said, were from the breaking of the buffer wall, so that the seawater could be let into the port to operationalise it.

From April 2012, ships have been calling at the port. The berths are not equipped yet with cranes. At the moment they offer only roll-on, roll-

off facilities, ideal for car shipments. Hyundai India is also using the port for trans-shipment, given that the charges are near zero.

Unfortunately, the ports opening has coincided with bad times for the economy the world over. In addition, Sri Lanka has slapped heavy taxes on car imports. Late last year, the declining Sri Lankan rupee, and ballooning imports necessitated a series of extreme measures to contain credit growth and curtail imports. Many imports were taxed, among them automobiles. Automobile imports have since slowed significantly. As a result, ships are arriving with fewer cars; and The Sunday Times reported recently that more than 5,000 cars were going to be sent back because they had no takers.

But work at the port continues apace. An Indian sugar firm and a Pakistani cement company, the local trading house Hayleys and a Singapore petrochemical company have been roped in to set up their factories close to the port. They enjoy an extended tax holiday, whose terms are said to be much better than in the export processing zones in India.

In phases

Work on Phase 2 is also ongoing, and expected to be completed by 2014. Phase 3 is still in the conceptual stages and could take as long as a decade more. The completed port is being designed as the largest port in South Asia, with a capacity for 33 vessels.

More than a container terminal, however, the port sees itself as

offering bunkering and ship handling services on a scale unimaginable at Colombo port. A massive oil tank farm has come up at one end. Eventually, it is planned also as storage for aviation fuel to refuel planes that will land at the international airport.

An avant-garde sculpture of a ship in concrete looms at the ports entrance, over the sea view, a massive metal buoy balanced on top of it.

Engraved on the sculpture is President Rajapaksas mission statement: the blessed port bestowed upon the great nation after the glorious victory of the century, which has been constructed in line with the crusade of making Sri Lanka the miracle of South Asia.

Aside from the names of engineers and others who worked on the port, the sculpture also carries prominently

the names of 385 families displaced by the new port.

The government acquired about 4,000 acres of land for the port, and the displaced have been relocated in Hambantota New Town. With its wide roads and massive government buildings, the Nay Pyi Taw-look alike is coming up a little distance from the original fishing town.

The jewels in this crown are a botanical garden, zoned residential precincts, parks, a fast rising stateof-the-art convention centre, a massive modern stadium, already functioning, and a modern auditorium. Shangri La, the Chinese hotel chain, is readying to construct a five-star property soon.

The mind-boggling scale of infrastructure development seems to

be ahead of demand, and compared to the rest of the country, even overthe-top. For instance, it is not clear if there would be enough traffic for an international airport at Hambantota. Some even question the prospects of the port.

But in Rajapaksa country, there can be no half measures. Ask the street lights. Mounted on poles are rotating lamps, with pictures of all the important Rajapaksas on their glass panes, fittingly powered by their own individual windmills and solar panels.

When the port is completed, said Dasantha, the ports project engineer, it would provide direct employment to 5,000 local people. At the moment, that number is about 250. An equal number of Chinese and Sri Lankan workers were involved in building Phase I.

The Chinese are also noticeably involved in other projects in town. A Chinese firm is doing the Hambantota hub development road/project. At a clover interchange in the bypass road junction, Chinese road signs alongside English ones announce detours and work in progress.

If India is concerned at the Chinese involvement in Hambantotas development, it seems keen not to be seen that way. But it now has a consulate in this town (It is the only diplomatic post here.) The consulate issues about 800 visas a year, and hosts well-attended cultural shows in the Japanese-built auditorium.

(The series Letter from Lanka is concluded.)

nirupama.s@thehindu.co.in

radhakrishnan.rk@thehindu.co.in

The planned metamorphosis of Hambantota, from a small fishing harbour to a flashy new city with a modern port with Chinese help is symbolic of what President Rajapaksa wants the country to be November 3, 2012

Garbage as our alter ego


That's the whole meaning of life ... trying to find a place for your stuff George Carlin

The iconic American comedian, and that brilliant dissector of the human condition, George Carlin, had in a

1986 sketch about The Stuff shown us how our tendency to acquire more and more stuff material commodities generates great anxieties about how and where to store them. Even your house is not a home, but a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. What Carlin did not tell us, at least in this sketch, is that much of the stuff does not find a place, it ends up as garbage: as waste, trash and refuse.

If there is one thing that is symptomatic of the modern human condition, but hardly recognised as such, it is garbage. Garbage is capitalisms dark underbelly, its pathological alter ego. That is why we keep disavowing it, refusing to believe it exists.

Vilappilsala standoff

But the more we deny it, it rears its ugly head, as most recently, in Vilappilsala panchayat in Kerala where the standoff between the local people, who are opposed to the reopening of a waste treatment plant, and the State has left 2 lakh tonnes of solid waste lying unprocessed, threatening an environmental disaster.

It is, therefore, remarkable that the current boisterous debate on foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail in India has completely ignored the question of garbage. By focusing only on the supposed virtues of waste reduction in perishable goods (like fruits and vegetables) brought about by the better storage facilities of retail conglomerates, the issue of the latters humongous ecological footprint (for example, in terms of sprawl, increase in driving, and the

proliferation of non-biodegradable waste) has been bypassed.

According to a report from The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Washington, D. C., in the 20-year period from 1990, the same period in which Walmart grew to be a behemoth, the average number of miles that a U.S. household travelled for shopping increased by around 1000. And from 2005 to 2010, despite Walmarts initiation of a reduced waste programme, its reported greenhouse gas emissions shot up by 14 per cent.

Big-box stores dont just improve efficiency in consumption, they also increase consumption manifold, which ultimately results in phenomenal amounts of trash. The garbage generated by Americans annually reportedly amounts to 220 million tonnes, and 80 per cent of U.S. goods

are used only once before being trashed.

In the mythologies of modernisation and development, we sing paeans to skyscrapers and nuclear plants. But there is no accompanying dirge about the costs we have had to pay for them. If there was, then we would have heard of Puente Hills the largest active landfill/waste dump in the United States, which is a 1,365acre monstrosity as much as we have about the World Trade Center or the Empire State Building.

It is ironical, Edward Humes tells us in his book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash , to call Puente Hills a landfill, for the garbage mountain has long ceased to fill a depression in the land and rises now an unbelievable 500 feet above the ground, a space capable of holding 15 million elephants. It takes, of course, a

gargantuan effort, as Humes describes, to keep the toxic substance that leaks out of the 130-million tonne waste (which includes 3 million tonnes of soiled disposable diapers another important invention of modern life) from poisoning groundwater sources.

Nevertheless, waste is seen, in popular development discourse as a third world problem, the ubiquitous mountains of garbage that blight the face of cities and towns in the poorer parts of the world one of the first tasks that the newly-elected President in Egypt had was cleaning up the garbage mess in Cairo. And the citizens of the third world have internalised this discourse, seeing themselves as part of the dirty developing world blissfully unaware of the cost at which a clean developed world is maintained. Thus the story of the Somali pirates plundering the high

seas has become a part of global lore but not that of Somalia being a (cheap) dumping ground for some of the most toxic garbage, including nuclear and medical waste, from Europe for the last two decades and more. As long as the streets are clean in Frankfurt and Paris, does it matter that children are born in Somalia without limbs?

Waste imperialism

It is in this context of waste imperialism that the question of garbage needs to come out of its subterranean existence and occupy centre stage in any discussion on development, including FDI in retail. It is not accidental that dumping grounds, and waste treatment plants are invariably located in places where the most vulnerable and marginalised sections of the population live,

whether in the developed or developing worlds. Not surprisingly, garbage has become an important political tool in the present with garbage strikes and struggles around garbage taking place in various cities in the West and elsewhere. The contestation in Vilappilsala has been going on since 2000 when the waste treatment plant opened with serious ecological impact.

We would be living in a mythical world if we think that the problems of waste can be solved only with better rational planning, management or recycling. In the U.S., even after decades of environmental education, only around 24 per cent of the garbage is recycled with nearly 70 per cent of it going into landfills.

Simply throwing trash into the recycling bin hardly does anything to reduce the production of rubbish; on

the contrary it might lull us into a false sense of complacency as Heather Rogers, the author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage argues. This is because household waste constitutes a minuscule percentage of the total waste produced, the vast majority of which is constituted by waste from industrial processes. As she shows, the mantra of recycling and green capitalism has been adopted by corporations and big business because it is the least threatening of the options to profit margins no wonder, the rate of production of goods and, consequently, trash has only increased. More importantly, in this greenwashing, the responsibility of cleaning up the environment is displaced from corporations to people themselves in their own individual, personal capacities.

Economy of zero waste

To be sure, there are rare examples like Germany, which have nearly eliminated landfills, and recycle up to 70 per cent of the waste. But the fact that the Crbern Central Waste Treatment Plant in Germany, one of the most sophisticated plants in the world (built at a cost of $ 135 million), has been allegedly involved in criminal garbage profiteering by illegally securing solid waste from Italy (to sustain the operations of the plant) shows how tenuous and fragile the economy of zero waste is.

Ultimately, the problem of waste cannot be fathomed without recognising the order of capitalism, which is built on the relentless production of commodities and the philosophy of planned obsolescence, in which goods are built to have short shelf life. As Sarah Moore of the

University of Arizona has pithily pointed out the contradiction: Modern citizens have come to expect the places they live, work, play, and go to school to be free of garbage to be ordered and clean. These expectations can never be fully met, however, precisely because the same processes of modernization that have produced them have also produced a situation in which garbage proliferates.

The golden age of capitalism is thus also the golden age of garbage. Just between 1960 and 1980, solid waste in the U.S. increased by four times. This is the exponential growth in garbage the world over, which has rendered the Pacific Ocean awash with plastic particles thus making plastic outnumber zooplankton at a shocking rate of 6:1. And this is the growth that has ironically made garbage and its disposal a multi-billion

dollar business, and has made the mafia enter and control it, as in Italy.

Developing countries like India, with almost non-existent waste disposal systems, catastrophically seek to move to the next (superfluous) stage of consumption by imbibing the culture of Walmart. In this scenario, if justice for both human beings and nature has to be ensured, the alter ego of garbage can no longer be hidden under the carpet. It has to be confronted head on.

(Dr. Nissim Mannathukkaren is Associate Professor, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University.)

Trash is capitalisms dark underbelly, the product of the very modernisation

that helps create clean spaces. But it is treated as a third world problem November 3, 2012

Steered along, with a little help from Sandy


Both politics and the media follow a cute routine when a natural calamity strikes during a major U.S. election campaign. On the campaign trail, the first step is to express solidarity and anguish. The second is to make swift symbolic gestures (e.g. Romney collecting food bags for Hurricane Sandys victims at what were scheduled as political rallies). The third is to call off major campaign events (or paint them differently) as a sign of sensitivity. The fourth is to express horror at the very thought of politicising natural disaster and human misery. (Subtext: thats what the other guy does. Not me.) The fifth is to go berserk politicising it and

grabbing all the photo-ops it offers. Candidates must look presidential while soothing Sandys victims.

Reporting better

The media did a lot better this time than they did with Hurricane Gustav during the 2008 campaign. Gustav crippled the Republican Convention at St. Paul, Minnesota. The partys leaders tied themselves in knots, speaking of making the event lowkey. And of taking the politics out of many sessions. Worse, the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina floated on Gustavs wings. Which Republican wanted to recall that 2005 disaster? President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney remained on vacation for some days after the disaster (Katrina) struck. And Bush went back to DC before visiting the hurricane-hit region in September. Secretary of

State Condoleezza shopping.

Rice

went

As Gustav approached in 2008, one television anchor declared: This is a good time for a timeout on politics. Then proceeded to the political fallout without batting an eyelid. (While adding the line: Weve got a lot of reporters watching that hurricane.) The dilemma? Openly discussing the politics of the disaster, more so in campaign terms, could seem pretty ghoulish. With Hurricane Sandy, theres been a greater effort to report better. That too by the media within the zone of disaster and also affected by it. Talking heads on television are another story, of course.

The truth is there is no escaping the politics of the disaster. And that politics goes way beyond the campaigns though surely impacting

on them. It goes to big differences on the role of government. (Romney wanted, not so long ago, to privatise disaster response.) It goes to models of industry and employment that work with far fewer skilled personnel than are needed. Models that have gutted skilled gene pools with profitdriven cost-cutting. It brings Climate back into some kind of focus and the Visible Hand of human agency in that sphere. (Former Vice-President Al Gore is already speaking of Dirty Energy leading to Dirty Weather, etc.)

Talking about the climate

Climate Change was almost entirely absent in the presidential debates. But its back in the last lap of the campaign with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsing Obama. The billionaire political independent presides over a city that has lost at least 40 lives in the storm. Bloomberg

believes global climate change has to be taken more seriously now. Even if Sandy may or may not be the result of it. Based on how Obama responded to the storm, the Mayor believes him to be the best candidate to take on global climate change. Obama never once tackled it during the debates. But Bloombergs aye has him excited. The President now finds climate change is a threat to our childrens future, and we owe it to them to do something about it. There are those other issues that the calamity has thrown up. Some of which are a threat to American children in the present. But with the death toll closing in on 100 and millions of people battered by Sandy, it will be a while before those issues figure.

The death toll will go up when the flooded areas are cleared. In New Jersey, close to two million

households are without power (Including this reporters). Across the coast, close to six million homes and businesses are without power. And it is not clear when that will be restored. Phone networks and services have collapsed across all these regions. In its 108-year history, the New York subway has not seen anything like the level of flooding and damage Sandy has wrought. Over 18,000 flights have been cancelled and more might go that way.

Praising Obama

Which way will Sandy impact the race? Obama was in New Jersey on Wednesday, looking presidential and decisive. Thats very important for television. Obama tells New Jersey: We are here for you, run the headlines. It also goes in favour of the President that the states Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, is singing

his praises. I cannot thank the President enough for his passion and concern. I was able to witness it today personally. A staunch Romney supporter, Christie had been trashing Obama not long ago. Simply: in such a crisis, the incumbent does get to look more presidential for TV than the challenger. After all, he is already President and wields that power. Christie does need the funds that Obama is pushing New Jerseys way. And sharing photo-ops with the President in the crisis zone does the Governor no harm either. Christies ambitions run to a second term in his post and beyond. His public praise for Obama has rattled the Romney camp.

Sandy can, however, have other effects. It could affect voting on November 6 as much of the hurricanehit region may not have limped back to normalcy by then. Quite a few

people may be unable to vote on that day. There is already discussion on whether a voting date can be postponed for specific states. And if that could be done legally. There is also the fact that people battered by a major calamity and plunged into darkness and hardship for days can vote in anger against a government or leader. Al Gores campaign against George Bush in 2000 dimmed with the drought of that time. And it does seem that even if the post-storm response favours Obama in the hurricane-hit states, most of these favoured him anyway.

Yet, into the fifth day of Sandys impact, it does seem the Force is with Obama. Hurricanes are strange political players.

sainath.p@thehindu.co.in

When a natural calamity strikes during the intensely media-scrutinised American presidential campaign, there is no escaping the politics of the disaster

November 5, 2012

Kudankulam on shaky legal ground


The debate over nuclear energy will go on, but the issue with the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) is one of the several illegalities on which it is founded.

In 1988, India inked the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant deal with the former Soviet Union. Two key elements in it were: the highly dangerous and toxic Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) would be shipped back to the Soviet Union; and the massive

volumes of fresh water required to cool the plant would be supplied from Pechiparai dam, in Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) formally granted approval on May 9, 1989 on this basis. But there was no further progress until 1997.

In 1997, India signed another agreement, this time with Russia, to revive the KKNPP.

Untenable

Between 1989 and 1997, the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) and Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notifications were issued in 1991 and 1994 mandating compulsory clearances by environmental regulators before any new plant could be set up.

The CRZ prohibited all industrial activity within 500 metres of the high tide line. The only exception to this was industries and projects of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) directly requiring waterfront or foreshore facilities. The KKNPP today claims exemption from CRZ notification. This is untenable. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL), which set up the KKNPP, is registered under the Companies Act as a commercial venture to engage in the business of power projects and to enter into partnerships with any person, including private entity or any foreign investing entity. The NPCILKKNPP is thus, under law, only a Company and not a project of the DAE. The Supreme Court has consistently held that government departments are distinct from government companies. Further, merely because it draws seawater, it does not become an industry

requiring waterfront facilities as per the decision of the Supreme Court in the shrimp farming case. Thus the KKNPP is not exempted from CRZ and the plant has been built in violation of the CRZ notification.

The EIA notification stipulated that for notified industries, environmental clearance is mandatory for new projects or expansion or modernisation of existing ones. Nuclear power is a notified industry and as per EIA notification, an EIA report must be prepared and made public. A public hearing should be conducted to record objections. The entire record would be considered by an independent Expert Appraisal Committee before environmental clearance is granted. Clearances are valid for five years. If the project does not commence within the five-year period, then fresh clearances will have

to be obtained after fresh public hearings.

The NPCIL, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) and the MoEF all claim that the EIA notification is not applicable to KKNPP as it has obtained clearance in 1989. Is this claim valid? An explanatory note to the EIA notification says that in respect of existing projects as of 1994 (the year when the EIA notification was promulgated) only those which have completed the land acquisition process and which have obtained the Consent to Establish from the State Pollution Control Boards are exempt. The KKNPP has not even applied for Consent to Establish from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board; nor was the land acquisition process completed.

Hence the repeated assertions of exemption from environmental

regulations are untenable and seriously compromise environmental safety. The NPCIL started construction work only in 2001. More than 12 years had gone by since the grant of approval in 1989.

Two significant changes

There were two significant changes to the project. The first was that, contrary to the original proposal to ship out the SNF to Russia, the highly radioactive SNF from the nuclear power plant was to be stored, transported and reprocessed within India.

The second change was equally major: the freshwater requirement was now to be met by the construction of six desalination plants instead of sending piped water from Pechiparai dam. The environmental impact of the

desalination plant on coastal ecology and marine life are serious concerns with implications for the livelihoods of the fishing community.

The environmental impact of storage, transportation and reprocessing of spent fuel as well as the impact of six desalination plants on marine ecology were not assessed at the time of initial clearance, and not since.

After launch of construction, the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) prepared an EIA report in 2003. Even in this report the environmental impact of spent fuel and desalination plants was not assessed. It is important to note that generally for all EIAs the baseline data on air, water, flora and fauna in and around the proposed plant are vital to assess the likely impact of the plant on them.

In the EIA for plants three to six, NEERI used baseline data from the Coast of Travancore on the west coast though the KKNPP is located in the east. The NEERI concluded that the heat from the coolant water from the KKNPP on the east will not affect marine life on the west coast, although it doesnt require scientific expertise to arrive at such a conclusion.

The NPCIL and the AERB (the MoEF also agrees) put forward the erroneous proposition that spent fuel is no issue at all; it is actually an asset; it can be safely stored at the plant site for five years, then safely transported and reprocessed safely in a facility at a location which is yet to be decided. What is the supporting material for this assertion? Nothing.

In the U.S., Japan

No country has ever been able to reprocess more than a third of spent fuel. Even that involves significant quantities of High Level Waste which is equally radioactive and has to be stored.

In the United States, licences for nuclear power plants have been subject to the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions (NRC) assurance in 1984 that a permanent storage by way of a geological repository would be available for all SNF by 2007-09 and spent fuel can be safely stored on site at the plants until then. In 1990 the deadline was extended to 2025. In December 2010, it was revised to conclude that a suitable repository will be available when necessary and in the meantime the spent fuel can be stored safely on site. This ruling was challenged before the U.S.

Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In State of New York, et. al., vs Nuclear Regulatory Commission and USA the court ruled that spent nuclear fuel poses a dangerous, long-term health and environmental risk. It will remain dangerous for time spans seemingly beyond human comprehension. The court struck down the NRCs ruling on two grounds. First, in concluding that permanent storage will be available when necessary, the commission did not calculate the environmental effects of failing to secure permanent storage a possibility that cannot be ignored. Second, in determining that spent fuel can be safely stored on site at nuclear plants for 60 years after the expiration of a plants licence, the commission failed to properly examine future dangers and key consequences. In other words, no EIA was done by the NRC before coming to such a conclusion.

The real lesson from Fukushima is not merely on improved technical safeguards at plants from tsunamis and earthquakes. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission appointed by the Japanese Parliament warned that the disaster was man-made. The commission found that it was the government of Japans single-minded pursuit of nuclear power which resulted in collusion between the government, the regulators and the plant operator, TEPCO leading to the practice of resisting regulatory measures and covering up violations.

(The writers are advocates. V. Suresh is also National General Secretary, PUCL. Email: rightstn@gmail.com )

Violations of Coastal Regulation Zone and Environmental Impact

Assessment notifications make official claims questionable November 5, 2012

Pakistans hot nuclear greenhouse


Forty-seven years ago this month, Pakistans then Foreign Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, while on a visit to Vienna, had an unscheduled chat with a young, obscure nuclear scientist called Munir Ahmad Khan. I briefed him about what I knew of Indias nuclear programme and the facilities that I had seen myself during a visit to Trombay in 1964, Dr. Khan was to recall soon after Pakistans 1999 nuclear tests. Indias plans added up to one thing: bomb-making capability.

Less than three months earlier, Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Pakistans

military ruler, had led his forces into the war of 1965: an adventure that began with an ill-planned raid in Kashmir, and ended with Indian tanks massed on the outskirts of Lahore. Dr. Khans meeting with Bhutto led to another meeting the following month at the Field Marshals suite at the elegant Dorchester Hotel in London. I must say Ayub Khan listened to me very patiently, Dr. Khan recalled, but at the end he said Pakistan was too poor to spend that much money.

Civilisational difference

In 1972, his nation torn apart by the force of Indian arms, now Prime Minister Bhutto decided no cost was too high to pay. His concerns were focussed, though, on something far larger than India his nations civilisational destiny. From the death row cell to which he was eventually

despatched, Bhutto wrote: the Christian, Jewish and Hindu civilisations have this capability. The Communist powers also possess it. Only the Islamic civilisation is without it.

The programme Dr. Khan seeded has grown into an extraordinary nuclear weapons greenhouse: Pakistan now has the fastest-growing arsenal in the world, with 90-110 warheads, up from 65-80 in 2008 and ahead of Indias 60100. It has refused to sign the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, which seeks to cap global weapons stockpiles.

Even the capacity to obliterate Indias cities, evidently, hasnt addressed the existential anxieties Pakistan felt back in 1962. The production of warheads in the nuclear greenhouse is suggestive of the existence of a strategic paranoia at the heart of the Pakistan militarys thinking a

pathology that will, if unaddressed, have huge consequences for India.

Pakistans nuclear pursuit is not entirely severed from reason. Indias smaller arsenal gives it the capacity to annihilate Pakistan; Pakistan needs more warheads to inflict proportionate damage. Islamabad fears, moreover, that New Delhi might render its warheads ineffective through pre-emptive strikes, or eventually develop anti-ballistic missile defences. The Pakistan army is deeply concerned about its growing asymmetry with Indias armed forces.

Brian Cloughey, a sympathetic historian of the Pakistan army, has suggested that if Indias two armourheavy mechanized infantry strike corps managed to penetrate to the line joining Gujranwala-Multan-Sukkur and to the outskirts of Hyderabad in the south, then it is likely Pakistan

would have to accept defeat or employ nuclear weapons.

Lieutenant Colonel Syed Akhtar Husain Shah, writing in a Pakistan army publication in 1994, was already noting that in future wars, the probability of the application of nuclear devices at the strategic and tactical level will be high. These strikes may be pre-emptive or reactionary, at any stage of the battle. Much of Islamabads recent nuclear pursuit has been focussed on providing it the nuclear teeth needed to fight just such a war for example by seeking to arm the 60-km range Hatf9 missile with a nuclear warhead.

Experts arent convinced, however, that more tactical nuclear weapons are making Pakistan more secure. In a 2010 paper, A.H. Nayyar and Zia Mian argued that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would be of little use if

Indian armed forces had prepared for a nuclear attack and were able to rapidly disperse. In addition, using tactical weapons even on Pakistans own soil could provoke retaliation something Indias Cabinet made clear, in a 2003 statement, it would be prepared to do.

NATO, whose Cold War tactical nuclear programme appears to provide a template for the current Pakistani thinking, eventually pulled back because of not-dissimilar concerns. However, as analyst Shashank Joshi has noted in a thoughtful commentary, NATOs rollback was facilitated by its technology-driven conventional warfare superiority over the Warsaw Pact. In the India-Pakistan case, though, the gap is increasing, meaning its reliance on nuclear weapons will grow.

This proposition tallies with what Pakistanis themselves have been saying. In December 2011, the Director of Arms Control at Pakistans Strategic Plans Division, Air Commodore Khalid Banuri, stated that the precise number of nuclear weapons Pakistan needed could not be quantified. And in a 2010 letter to The Daily Telegraph , Pakistani diplomat Wajid Shamsul Hassan linked his countrys programme to Indias potential to produce 280 nuclear weapons annually.

Since the early 1990s, it has been repeatedly shown that the threat of one nuclear bomb hitting one of its cities has proved adequate to deter India: in this sense, it matters little to New Delhi whether Islamabad has a hundred nuclear weapons or a thousand. India decided not to retaliate against Pakistani support for the Kashmir jihad, chose not to cross

the Line of Control in 1999, and again held back its forces in 2001-2002.

Asymmetries of power

No other nation, moreover, has reacted to asymmetries of power with an open-ended nuclear pursuit. India is not seeking to grow its nuclear arsenal to outstrip China. Though China is modernising its nuclear delivery systems and technologies, it hasnt sought to rival the arsenals of the United States or Russia.

So just what is keeping the nuclear greenhouse hot? Essays in the Green Books , collections authored by Pakistani army officers for internal debate, offer some insight into the question. Perhaps the first reference to a nuclear weapon appeared in the 1990 Green Book , when Brigadier Mushtaq Ali Khan argued India was

following a policy of destabilising every country in the region and then moving in as the saviour with its armed forces. It had succeeded in doing so because both the superpowers have been silently accepting such ventures. Therefore, he went on, an alternate deterrence measure has to be developed. Put another way, while the immediate military threat might be from India, Pakistans larger concern was the world.

From the invasion of Iraq by the United States, anxieties about Islamabads relationship with Washington became more explicit. Russians bending on their knees on the superpower chess board has made the USA the only actor to play its flip [sic throughout] by unfolding a new world order suiting the American interest and Zionists in particular, wrote Brigadier Sayyed Ifzal Hussain in

the 1991 Green Book . Pakistans nuclear policy is a pinching needle for a master of new world order, particularly after dismantling a potential military titan, Iraq.

Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Farooq Maan, writing in 1992, expanded on this theme, warning of a full fledged air, land and sea attack by U.S. using the Indian Ocean and Indian territory as a base in collaboration with Indian forces and coalition forces such as were gathered against Iraq. It may, he went on, involve the U.S., Israel and India to undertake such an operation.

In the post-9/11 era, these concerns solidified. The West, argued Brigadier Muhammad, believed a nuclear *and Muslim] Pakistan has to be kept in control, lest it leads the Islamic world towards the formation of a new and powerful economic and military bloc

in competition with or antagonistic to the western alliance. Brigadier Khalid Mahmud Akhtar, also writing in the 2002 Green Book , saw an American strategy of economic warfare to force Pakistan to abandon her nuclear programme. Bhutto, clearly, still speaks from his grave: the nuclear greenhouse produces weapons to protect Pakistan from a world hostile to its ideological raison detre .

The nuclear greenhouse will cool down only when Pakistan makes peace with its place in the world. Its strategic fears are unlikely to be stilled even by progress on Siachen or Kashmir: no soldier will be moved to give up his gun by shows of benevolence by adversaries he believes have malign aims.

Pakistans relationship with India and with the world will be shaped by the struggle now under way to shape the

countrys relationship with itself a contestation that has pitted democrats against an alliance of ultranationalists and Islamists with an intensity never seen before.

It is imperative that India continue to do what it can to secure progress in its relationship with Pakistan. It is just as important, though, to remain aware that dtente, until this epic struggle is settled, will stand on a firmament more closely resembling quicksand than bedrock.

praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

The worlds fastest growing arsenal is

being produced not just because of the fear of India but a strategic

paranoia exacerbated by existential anxieties November 5, 2012

The princeling from the grass roots

When Xi Jinping arrived in Liangjiahe, a small village of a few dozen households hidden among the Loess mountains of central China, he was anxious and confused, he recalled in an essay he wrote in 1998. But when he left the Yellow earth of Shaanxi province seven years later, he reflected, my life goals were firm and I was filled with confidence.

Liangjiahe today, its residents say, is not much different from the village that Xi Jinping lived in for seven years, from 1969 to 1975. The village sits at the end of a sandy road that turns off

National Highway 211, an expressway that runs from Yanan, a bustling centre of the oil industry and Red tourism Yanan served as the revolutionary base for the Communists from 1936 until 1948. Liangjiahe is located in a narrow valley sandwiched by sandstone-coloured mountains. Its residents, as they did four decades ago, live in cave homes that have been carved out of the Loess hills. They make a living tending corn fields. The only major difference, 40 years later, is that there are no young hands in sight farmers in their sixties and seventies watch over the fields, while their children are away working in the booming urban centres of Xian and Yanan.

At Liangjiahe

When Xi arrived here, one of millions of young Chinese sent down to the countryside by Mao Zedong during

the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the villagers knew he was no ordinary youth. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of Shaanxi provinces most famous sons a Communist Party revolutionary who rose to the position of Vice Premier after the Peoples Republic of China was founded. The older Xi was sidelined in 1965, and during the Cultural Revolution was made to suffer public humiliation at the hands of Mao Zedongs Red Guards. He was purged in 1969 and sent to prison.

That same year, his son was sent to Liangjiahe. He was no different from the others, recalled one farmer who knew Xi. At that time, even he did not have corn to eat here, and survived eating the skin of wheat! He was like any one of us, added one woman in her eighties. He could eat bitterness, she said, using a Chinese phrase, che ku , that is

used to describe ones tolerance of hardship. The seven years he spent in Liangjiahe, Xi later reflected, profoundly shaped his political outlook. During my seven or eight years in Shaanxi, he said in a 2003 interview with State broadcaster CCTV, I got to know what pragmatism was, what seeking truth from facts was, and what the general public was. It is something that will benefit me throughout my life.

Pragmatism is perhaps the word that best defines the rise of Xi Jinping. Xi, who joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) during his last year in Liangjiahe, has risen through its ranks by crafting an image of a middle-ofthe-road leader, unwedded to any particular ideology, who forged ties across the CPCs many interest groups, from reform-minded liberals to the Peoples Liberation Army.

Sweeping transition on Thursday

On November 8, when the CPCs 18th National Congress opens in Beijing, the party will embark on a sweeping leadership transition to the fifth generation of its leadership. When the congress concludes on November 15, Xi Jinping, as the partys next General Secretary, will lead out on stage at the Great Hall of the People the members of the next Politburo Standing Committee the body that effectively runs China.

Xi will come to power at a time of unprecedented challenges facing the party. In the months leading up to the transition, the CPC has been dealing with the biggest political crisis it has faced in decades, surrounding the fall of Politburo member Bo Xilai. Bo was expelled from the party in September,

and will stand trial facing corruption charges and allegations that he helped cover up the murder of a British business associate of the Bo family, who was poisoned by Bos wife, Gu Kailai. The scandal has underscored the difficulty the CPC faces in taming rampant corruption, even at the highest levels of the party.

The Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao decade has seen breakneck economic growth, but it has also left behind many challenges that Xi will have to grapple with. During the past 10 years, per capita incomes have risen five-fold. The Hu government emphasised sustainable growth, boosting investments in rural areas in Chinas hinterland. Under Hu, China managed effectively the financial crisis of 2008, unveiling a stimulus programme that funded a massive infrastructure boom whose legacy includes the worlds biggest high-speed rail network.

Rebalancing the economy

But a decade on, Chinas export-led growth model is seen to be nearing the end of its shelf-life, increasing the urgency for rebalancing the economy. The Hu decade has also left behind widening income inequalities between rural and urban China a gap that is 68 per cent higher than in 1985. Rising unrest at the grassroots has reignited calls for taking forward stalled intraparty political reforms, while moves to reform State-dominated sectors are mired in debates between various interest groups.

Zhang Chunhou, a political scientist at Yanan University, hoped that Xis time in the provinces would have impressed upon him the urgency of addressing the pressing issue of inequality and unrest at the

grassroots. Moves to expand democracy at the village-level, he said, have stalled in recent years. While the central government continues to enjoy legitimacy following three decades of rapid development, there is widespread resentment at local-level corruption which sparks tens of thousands of mass incidents every year. Corruption, Zhang said, was the biggest threat to the partys legitimacy. Reinforcing its commitment to serve the people, he added, must be Xis priority; doing so would address perceptions of a party elite increasingly out of touch with the people.

Return to Beijing

The seven years Xi spent in Liangjiahe are a central part of the official narrative of his rise that the party has constructed, to portray him as a

leader who, despite his privileged status as a member of the party elite, was in touch with the grassroots. On returning to Beijing in 1975, Xi joined the elite Tsinghua University. He then spent three years working in the General Office of the Central Military Commission, the PLAs top ruling body, forging connections in the military. In 1982, when he could have chosen a high-profile posting in Beijing, Xi instead returned to the countryside, working in a poor Hebei county called Zhengding and further burnishing his credentials as a leader in touch with the grassroots. Xi then served in the booming coastal provinces of Fujian and Zhejiang, establishing a reputation as a business-friendly leader open to economic reforms.

Even in Liangjiahe and surrounding villages, the challenges awaiting Xi as he takes office are evident. Farmers

said in interviews that they hadnt seen the local party chief in years. He lived in Yanan, villagers said, more preoccupied with his business interests than the affairs of the village. One farmer, who lives down the road from the cave home where young Xi lived, complained of corrupt local and county officials. We are living in hardship, the farmer said, holding back tears.

When Xi was staying in Liangjiahe, his lasting contribution to the village, according to his official biography, was a biogas plant that he had installed. Shi Chunyang, the party secretary at the time, said an enterprising young Xi who read a report of biogas being used elsewhere in China travelled to Sichuan and returned with a proposal to set up biogas facilities in the village. Several facilities were subsequently installed. When Xi returned to visit a few years

ago, when he was Vice-President, he spoke proudly of having the technology upgraded in 2007 so as to continue to serve the people.

Today, residents said in interviews, the facility was no longer functioning. It is not working anymore, said one farmer. Just as he was speaking, a car carrying four men, who claimed to be from the county government, drove up the village road.

You are not allowed to visit Liangjiahe without permission, one of them said, telling the farmer to leave and warning he would call the police. This is a special village. November 6, 2012

Race & Money and the money in the race

Its just a few hours to the end of the race, but Race isnt going to end anytime soon. It was pretty ugly in the 2008 presidential poll, too. Yet, 2012 makes that year seem benign. On the last lap, Mitt Romney is running as the Great White Hope, a Captain America against the illegal immigrant from Kenya (which is how many Republicans paint Mr. Obama). Earlier, Mr. Romneys campaign cochair John Sununu accused Gen. Colin Powell of choosing race over country. He claimed Gen. Powell had endorsed Mr. Obamas re-election bid on the basis of colour. Right-wing radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and his crew have described Mr. Obamas health care plans as reparations (compensation to the descendants of slaves). Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has freely used racist slang in attacking the President.

White voters

No surprise, then. Mitt Romney has more White voters, especially males, with him than the last challenger did. But this unfolds in an electorate that is increasingly less White. And the Republican Party is poised to do worse than it ever has amongst Black and Hispanic voters. Race remains a major factor in the U.S. presidential election.

In 2008, when he ran and won against John McCain, the powerful Fox News Network sought to expose the real Barack Obama. It dug up some deadly sins. Mr. Obama, it turned out, had personally known a couple of Pakistanis in his younger days. Worse still, he had once visited Pakistan. (Thats pass now, with Mr. Obamas drones making those visits daily). The other 2008 tack, that he is a foreigner himself, is more in favour. Never mind

the mans been President of the country for four years.

Barack Obamas stunning 2008 victory makes it easy to forget two things. First, in September that year, his rival John McCain had in fact moved ahead in several of the national polls. Race played a role then, too. Then came the financial meltdown. Wall Street did its thing and drowned the Republicans. The second is that Mr. Obamas great win in the electoral college vote 365 to 173 was not matched by his showing in the popular vote. There, his margin was much narrower. Just around 7 per cent. Even though voter turnout was at its highest at 57.48 per cent in perhaps 40 years. Again, race played a role in that. Yet, Mr. Obama got more White male votes then, than he is likely to get now.

There have been worse popular vote margins. George W. Bush actually lost the popular vote (-0.51 per cent) in 2000. He still beat Al Gore on the electoral college count in the dubious election that year. But Mr. Obamas 2008 popular vote margin was far lower than his emphatic win in the electoral college count. This time, it will be hard to improve on it. To see it fall further quite possible, even likely would be an embarrassment.

The kind of polarisation thats emerging, with race so major an element in it, will haunt the United States in elections to come. In the South, it draws on legacies of hatred going back to slavery and the Civil War. It is not that White people as a whole are opposed to Mr. Obama. He couldnt win if they were. But Mr. Romney has been clearly able to draw a lot more White voters in his corner

in a racially-charged situation. On this trend, things can and will get worse.

At the same time, while Mr. Obamas election in 2008 was a huge symbolic moment for African-Americans, its not as if he brought them all on board. Or that all of them agree with him. Voices within the community critical of Mr. Obama have been growing. African-Americans will indeed vote massively in his favour. Yet, most of those who will vote for him were always Democratic Party supporters. That Mr. Obama is one of them (in a limited sense) might give him an edge. But a huge number of them have voted overwhelmingly for other Democratic presidential candidates (like Mr. Clinton) in the past. The sharp polarisation promises another thing. If the result is close CNNs poll suggests a photo-finish that result will be bitterly disputed. There will be demands and fights over

recounts. Get ready for endless lawyering. This is a nation where, anyway, that profession chokes the major institutions. Well over a third of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives are lawyers. In the Senate, thats more than half. Yet other members of both houses may have a law degree but have not declared themselves lawyers. There is also a huge overlap between the legal world and that of lobbyists, making their domination worse.

Impact of Hurricane Sandy

In 2008, the Wall Street meltdown destroyed John McCain. Many believe Hurricane Sandy will do that to Mr. Romney. And indeed, his television presence during the crisis has helped and will help Mr. Obama. Mr. Romney, as one analyst put it, simply found no way to work himself into the news cycle during those days. This

was true. But what lies beyond is not quite simple. Hurricane Sandy can have an adverse effect on voter turnout. And there is also growing anger amongst the affected after the cameras have left. Long lines for, and panic buying of, gasoline continue. There are thousands whose homes were simply blown away. As many as 40,000 people may have been left homeless in New York alone. Wrecked neighbourhoods face a crime wave and looting.

Costliest and most cynical

Meanwhile, were just hours from the conclusion of what has been the costliest and most cynical U.S. presidential election campaign in history. The two main rivals have spent half a billion dollars in just three battleground States Florida, Ohio and Virginia. And nearly thrice as much in the remaining States.

(Counting spending by the candidates, their parties and Political Action Committees).

The country was subjected to its greatest barrage ever of political commercials. Over a million ads ran on broadcast and national television through October. More than ever before. Some 40 per cent more ran in the same month in 2008. Its worth remembering that in 2008, Mr. Obama hugely outspent Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama out-advertised his rival by a ratio of four to one. This time, though, his rival has given him something of a run for his money, overall. If youve raised a billion dollars (as incumbent President) as Mr. Obama has but are still struggling, things arent too bright. But Mr. Obama still held the edge in the ads race. Anything goes in that race, from innuendo to outright lies.

Congressional contests

Then there are the Congressional races. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs. The Center for Responsive Politics the countrys foremost poll-spending tracker had reckoned total costs closing in on $6 billion ( The Hindu , Oct. 18, 2012). That mark will be met and breached. Indeed, of this, the presidential race alone might have seen spending close to $3 billion. The trends are also reflected in the composition of the U.S. Congress. As Occupy DC had pointed out quite some time ago: 1 per cent of Americans are millionaires. But over 47 per cent of members of the House of Representatives are millionaires. So are 56 per cent of Senators. (the median wealth of a Senator, says the CRP, is $2.38 million).

Mr. Obama has had a fight on his hands at all stages, this time around. Two features have been constant for a while. Bad unemployment figures. And a lack of relish and enthusiasm. The zest for the action seemed to be far more in the media. (Which is also the biggest beneficiary of the wild spending). The raw enthusiasm and energy we saw in 2008, spurred in part by the meltdown, has been missing. The kind of blunders that Mr. Romney made take his infamous 47 per cent comment should have sunk him. They didnt. Hes stayed in the fight despite them.

There are also those from all communities who cannot recapture the magic of 2008. They could never vote Mr. Romney. And some could go with the logic put out by one writer: My enemys enemy is my President. But some might not vote at all. They have seen a Corporate-World-Rules-

as-Usual regime for four years. They have wearied of the wars and their costs. They know firsthand that most of the jobs coming up in the recovery are low-skill, low-wage ones.

Mr. Obama has only gained after he gave up playing to a right-wing Democrat gallery and returned to the populism of 2008. That came very late in the campaign, yet, helped him out of a hole. Mitt Romney could find himself in one, that he might blame on Hurricane Sandy. He did have Mr. Obama on the mat, more than once. And while important pollsters speak of a dead heat and say correctly that either can win, its harder for Mr. Romney to do so. Beating an incumbent U.S. President would be quite a feat.

The polarisation that is emerging between the U.S. presidential camps, with colour as a major element, will haunt America in elections to come November 6, 2012

On Iran, the strategists are wiser


The fact that senior security officials in the United States and Israel have publicly opposed an attack on Iran indicates considerable anxiety among them over the intentions of their elected representatives, but it also diverts attention from other very serious issues. To start with, some of the U.S. professionals concerned may be trying to ensure that the advice they give the politicians now is not treated with the contempt President George W. Bush showed them over the cautionary analyses they gave him about the claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or with the indifference the then British Prime

Minister Tony Blair showed his publicservice advisers when they questioned the legality of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This time, the officials have been very explicit. The Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, is only one of a panoply of current and former officers who have stated that an Israeli attack on Iran will only delay Irans development of a nuclear weapon and will not stop it. General Dempsey added that he did not want to be complicit if Israel chose to make an attack. In Israel, Meir Dagan, the former head of the intelligence service Mossad, has said that a pre-emptive attack on Iran was the stupidest idea he had ever heard; many other senior Israeli officers have also opposed an attack until all other means have been exhausted.

Further opposition comes from the British government; the Attorney Generals Office has advised the Prime Ministers Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Ministry of Defence that as Iran is not a clear and present threat, it would be a clear breach of international law for the United Kingdom to assist forces that could be involved in a preemptive strike. Although the U.K. has not ruled out war altogether, it has surprised Washington by resisting informal U.S. lobbying for use of the British islands of Ascension in the Atlantic and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean as bases for war with Iran.

Could escalate uncontrollably

A pre-emptive attack would also present formidable technical difficulties and could easily escalate uncontrollably. The former Clinton administration aide Heather Hurlburt,

now of the National Security Network, writes in the online journal The Daily Beast that the likely targets are much further away than the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, which Israel destroyed in an unprovoked attack in 1981; the Israeli bombers had to be fully fuelled so that they did not need to refuel, and may also have benefited from negligent Iraqi air defence. Hurlburt points out that Israeli aircraft cannot carry the heavier U.S. bombs needed to damage the reinforced Iranian sites, and that the whole of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure cannot be destroyed in a short operation. Furthermore, as in Libya, some of the plants are in civilian areas, though western officials concerns about civilian casualties would ring hollow after the mass deaths caused by sanctions on Iraq and the civilian deaths which followed the invasion.

Many of the critics, however, neglect central political issues. Irans President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that even if Iran had the bomb, no intelligent person with one nuclear weapon would attack a country which had 5,000 of them.

Second, as Glenn Greenwald notes in The Guardian , Thomas Donnellys paper A Strategy for a Nuclear Iran is clear about the real reason for U.S. hostility to an Iranian nuclear weapon: The surest deterrent to American action is a functioning nuclear arsenal. The clear assumption is that anything that prevents the United States from attacking any country is a threat. As if in confirmation, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has recently said, when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you.

Donnelly, one of the authors of the American conservative document

Project for the New American Century , wrote his Iran paper in 2004, when the Iranian uranium enrichment programme which even Israeli intelligence accepts is partly for medical purposes was no doubt far less advanced than it is now. Yet continuing U.S. hostility to Iran is manifest; Democrat Representative Brad Sherman says that if sanctions harm the Iranian people, Quite frankly, we need to do just that.

Cuban crisis

Any U.S. president might hold and act on such opinions. Noam Chomsky, recalling the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis for The Guardian , cites recent work on President John F. Kennedys declassified tapes to show that Kennedy authorised several covert operations against Cuba and that during the crisis he was far more confrontational than earlier accounts

had taken him to be. It was probably through sheer luck and nothing else that nuclear war did not occur. Although Second Captain Vasili Arkhipov of the Soviet submarine B-59 decided not to fire nuclear torpedoes when the U.S. aircraft carrier Randolph started depth-charging his vessel off Cuba, another officer might have acted differently. Chomsky also cites U.S. officers who detail errors, confusions, near-accidents and miscomprehension in the crisis and who state that official commanders had no way of preventing a rogue crew-member from starting a war; many of the U.S. military personnel also held their political leaders in contempt. Today, there is little or nothing to ensure that, irrespective of the security professionals opinions of the politicians, they will not be ignored over Iran, just as they were over Iraq.

arvind.sivaramakrishnan

@thehindu.co.in

But there is no guarantee that politicians will heed the opinion of security professionals in the U.S., Israel and Britain against attacking Iran November 6, 2012

At sea over marine conservation


What does 50 million U.S. dollars get you? The eleventh Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has just concluded in Hyderabad this October. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made the Hyderabad Pledge of $50 million for biodiversity conservation, and enhancing human and technical

capacity for conservation. For the next two years, India is president of the CBD and is expected, both normatively and administratively, to take a lead in seeing through decisions taken at the CBD. Most significantly, India now has a serious chance at reimagining its conservation policies.

Many firsts for COP 11

There are several firsts at this CBD. This was the first conference of parties for the implementation of the time-bound Aichi targets, set to root out biodiversity loss. These targets, decided at the last CBD conference of parties in Nagoya, relate to planning, ecosystem services, invasive species, food security and climate change among others. They are a serious departure from the sort of myopic, single department-centred approach that conservation has had in our country. The 20 Aichi targets set out

to establish that biodiversity conservation has to do with nearly every aspect of our life, and subsequent well-being. Crucially, the Aichi targets are wholly dependent on national action plans made by parties as per their national circumstances.

Several decisions have been made at the CBD which set the tone for domestic action plans. I would like to emphasise some of the decisions most relevant for the Indian context: on marine and coastal biodiversity, invasive alien species and protected areas. Crucially, these decisions have to be looked at through the time frame provided for the Aichi Targets from this year to 2020, which is also two years into the United Nations Decade of Biodiversity. Equally, while this is the closest biodiversity targets have ever got to a deadline-oriented framework, this entire framework also runs the risk of never getting

implemented, being wholly contingent on domestic action.

Existing policies

I really dont know whats down there, a forest department official remarked once, referring to the rich coral reefs of Gujarats Marine National Park. I have encountered other officials who believe that coral reefs are inanimate rock, rather than the sensitive, connected, and alive polyps they really are. But the concern of the official who doesnt really know whats down there is a valid one and should not be discarded. India has almost 8,000 kilometres of coastline, including its islands. India is also the country that took the lead in declaring marine conservation as one of the five themes for the high-level segment for this CBD meeting. It was decided in Hyderabad that marine areas which

are ecologically and biologically sensitive will begin to get identified.

Is this a turning point? For India, it certainly can be. We have accepted voluntary guidelines for keeping biodiversity in perspective while conducting Environment Impact Assessments related to coastal and marine projects; it was India that mooted an open and evolving process at the CBD to begin identifying marine areas of significance through robust, scientific processes.

But the real question to ask is the one posed by the forest official: do our policy implementers know what is down there, and what will they do, since they do know? Is our forest department, historically set up to manage forests, curtail grazing, make plantations and fell timber, equipped to deal with marine conservation? The

answer, clearly, is a no. While we have available science at our disposal for marine conservation, it is not an applied science for our forest department, who have been made the custodians of protecting all manner of wildlife. And that leads us to an even more significant question: are our present conservation policies capable of dealing with marine conservation? What we have in our kitty today is the Wildlife Protection Act, Tree Preservation Acts (at State level) and Environment Protection Act, none of which deal in any comprehensive way with marine conservation. Coral reefs are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea, and sea grass beds are no less life-giving than terrestrial grasslands, which form a primary food base for many species. But it is clear that a tree of the sea, or a grassland of a sea, cannot be protected by terrestrial policies, which have so far shaped our conservation policy landscape.

Just one example is that of dugongs, large marine mammals which feed on sea grass meadows. Nicknamed seacows, they are rapidly disappearing from their ranges in Gujarat and the Andamans. The sea cow nickname is testimony to how we familiarise ourselves with new concepts through terms we know already: here, that of a cow. But the sea-cow, for all the familiarity its name evokes, is fast disappearing, prey to poaching on land and threats in the sea.

What we need today are separate laws for marine conservation. At the cusp of finding new marine Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) for India and implementing targets for marine conservation, what will truly benefit marine conservation is taking marine conservation out of the box it presently is in: protection accorded to

just familiar groups of marine species, and protection through marine protected areas, legally imagined as analogous to terrestrial protected areas.

Alien species and protected areas

On the question of protected areas (PA), the new text makes an important point: it calls for other effective area-based conservation measures. This marks a departure from the heavily guarded and enforced PAs which dot the country and coastline, and, in a majority of cases, have alienated traditional dwellers in and around PAs. Other effective systems can mean biodiversity heritage areas, community reserves and important bird areas, which should call for a management regime approach (seasonal or otherwise), rather than strict protection. Invasive alien

species, like the omnipresent Lantana, have caused considerable economic and ecological damage, sweeping over natural habitats, as well as cityforests. But India has never felt the need to have a policy for alien species, despite the risk they pose to the mainland and the biodiversity hot spot of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The new text on invasive alien species calls on countries to address threats from these species, check pathways and spread. This is especially important for a country as massive and megadiverse as ours: where even native species can be alien the House Crow, for example, is a serious threat to the biodiversity of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Post-CBD, the money is where the mouth is; now comes the allimportant question of creating responsible domestic policy and

action plans for it. As a host country and as CBD president, this is a chance for India to ensure CBD decisions and recommendations dont remain paper tigers. Or just paper.

(Neha Sinha is with the Bombay Natural History Society. The views expressed are personal. E-mail: n.sinha@bnhs.org )

India took the lead in highlighting endangered sea sites as one of the five top-level themes at the Hyderabad CBD. It is odd therefore, that the country does not have any comprehensive law that deals with this important subject November 7, 2012

Yes he should, four years later

Four years ago, almost to this day, I flew to my home in New York from my base in Dubai in order to vote for Barack Obama.

I could have cast an absentee ballot in Dubai, of course, but this was history in the making the first AfricanAmerican president of the United States was about to be elected and I wanted to be able to say that I was there when it happened.

So I voted in New York. On the evening of Election Day 2008, I went to the home of Ted Sorensen, who was President John F. Kennedys closest aide, and his speech-writer. Ted and his wife Gillian traditionally hosted an election-night dinner, and on this occasion there were a number of high-profile guests such as the economist Jeffrey Sachs.

When CNN announced that Mr. Obama had defeated the Republican candidate Sen. John McCain and would become the 44th president of the United States, there wasnt a dry eye in the Sorensens living room. I still recall how Professor Sachs kept saying, Oh my, oh my.

And now it is four years later. Ted Sorensen is gone. Im not sure that the Sorensen dinner has been continued by Gillian. President Obama is about to be re-elected to a second term, if polls are right, and Im in New Delhi, not New York.

Supporting the campaign

I decided not to fly across to vote in person. I decided to stick to my schedule of research and interviews in India for a forthcoming book. The excitement of 2008 had diminished.

After all, you can only vote once to elect the first black president for the first time. The second time around, hed already become what he became.

I kept rooting for Barack Obama, to be sure. As a professional journalist for nearly five decades, however, I should have kept my political views to myself; the rules of the game suggested that I should have been even-handed about the two candidates Mr. Obama, the Democrat, and Willard Mitt Romney, the Republican.

But in my reckoning, there was such a chasm between the two men, such a difference in their respective visions for governance, and such contrary views about Americas role in dealing with the developing world including India, my native country, and the Gulf, my adopted region that it fetched no hesitation

whatsoever to signal my political preference. The rules be damned.

And so I gave money to the Obama campaign not a huge amount, but a figure that nevertheless made a dent in my pocketbook. I posted articles endlessly on Facebook about the presidential campaign. I diligently even obsessively followed the polls. I was even tempted to place a bet on InTrade.Com, the global betting site with a record for accuracy.

Most of all, I kept hoping that decency and fair play would triumph. It wasnt that Mr. Romney was an ogre; it was simply that his candidacy offered little comfort that he would look sympathetically at a wider world constituency consisting of more havenots than haves.

Barack Obama possessed the sensibility that an American president arguably the single most powerful political leader in the world needed for the United States to relate better, to relate more sensitively to that constituency. The days are long gone when America can dominate the global bazaar; it may be the worlds only military superpower, but now it has to contend with upcoming economic players such as China, India, and Brazil. Mr. Romney never really told us how he would deal with this rapidly changing scene; indeed, did he have any thoughts to relay beyond American triumphalism?

In my mind there was little doubt that, although the man elected on November 6, would initially have to make Americas troubled economy a priority, he would need to reassure the bigger international community that the United States cared that it

cared enough to help uplift vast cohorts of people from poverty and ensure that they had a fair chance for a secure and prosperous life.

I felt Mr. Romney wasnt that man. Mr. Obama was in his thoughts, in his general foreign policies, in his temperament. His background was one of personal familiarity with the larger world the Third World nestling outside the shrinking elitist confines of Americas rich and privileged.

This is not to say that the next American president would significantly alter the dynamics of that world in the short run. There are simply too many fissures, too many problems of maldistribution of wealth, malfeasance and malgovernance in the Third World. But I felt that President Obama grasped those realities far better than his opponent;

after all, hed already had four years in the White House.

Four more years, and he would refine his sensibilities about the Third World whose peoples constitute the overwhelming majority of the global population of nearly seven billion.

We will see. As with all things political, the promise doesnt always play out. But I know that Barack Obama has his heart in the right place just as I do in supporting him.

(Pranay Gupte is a veteran journalist. E-mail: pranaygupte@gmail.com )

Americas dominance in the global bazaar is past. The next president needs to reassure the international

community that the U.S. can relate to it more sensitively November 7, 2012

The lost audacity of hope


I had the following items in my soccer ball-shaped backpack that day in June 2010 at JFK airport: a vuvuzela, an envelope full of ticket stubs from the matches I attended in South Africa, and a stack of books about the history of the World Cup.

The last question I expected to be asked by the New York airport security agent was this: What were you doing there?

I was naive hopeful we called ourselves because I thought the election of Barack Obama might end these indignities that I and many

other South Asians face upon entering the United States.

I should have known better.

What were you really doing there?

I wanted to point to the U.S. soccer jersey that my brother Munir was wearing. I wanted to tell the security officer that my brother and I, Indian Americans born and raised in the U.S., had planned our trip to South Africa for years, that we scoured for weeks to find tickets to the U.S. games, that we cheered from the fourth row when the U.S. scored its last minute miraculous goal against Algeria.

But the questions continued: Whom were you rooting for?

I wanted to take out my identification badge issued by the United States House of Representatives, the one with my photo imprinted on it, the card that verified I was a senior foreign policy aide in the U.S. Congress.

But I could not get myself to say these things. I was tired and my stomach tensed up, as it always does when I feel humiliated, and suddenly all I could say was this: I have become very sick in South Africa. Can I use the bathroom?

No, the officer said. We cannot allow that. Security reasons. He pointed to the side and made us stand. We waited there next to Arabs, South Asians and Latinos, with the odd white guy thrown in to make this process look random.

My brother, a cardiologist in San Francisco, pleaded with the security guard to let me use the bathroom, lest my stomach problem worsen.

The guard stood firm. No.

I remember the night of November 4, 2008 so well. I had invited a dozen friends over to my Washington DC apartment to watch the election returns. One of my friends even made cupcakes in the shape of the Obama logo.

The screams from the street were so loud that every time Obama won a state we could hear them eight floors above. When Obama was proclaimed president, we poured on to the streets and stood at the centre of the intersection of 14th and U Streets. It was at that exact spot that race riots broke out after the assassination of

Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. But those racial tensions seemed so distant that night.

White people hugged black people. Gay and straight people danced together. No one cared or asked, as they do on so many other days, if you were a foreigner.

Throughout the campaign, the Obama slogan was Yes we can but we edited it that night.

Yes we did, we shouted.

We were foolish but why not? We had just endured eight years of George W. Bush an administration that brought two wars, a further sullied U.S. image abroad, and a determination to target anyone who was perceived to be Muslim.

How could Obama be any worse, we thought, as we danced the night away.

I wonder what has changed. We have a president who boasts about drone strikes in Pakistan (which have largely targeted civilians), a president who has deported more people than Bush, and a president who is yet to roll back legislation that curtails basic civil rights. This is, after all, the same president who did not show up when seven Sikhs were gunned down this past August in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, but decided to appear at a movie theatre when a gunman fired at moviegoers.

Indeed, Obama is not worse than Bush. Bush set the bar so low that its sort of like that Eddie Murphy joke: when you are used to stale biscuits,

even a wilted piece of bread will taste good. But America needs more right now.

Before I came to Ahmedabad a few weeks ago, I went to the polls in California and checked off Obamas name on my ballot. On the drive to the polling station, I told myself all things I needed to do to justify this decision: he is better than Romney, he has tried to improve the U.S. healthcare system, he is solidly pro-gay rights, he respects a womans right to chose what happens to her body, he knows that daal is a dish and not a country.

As I stood in the voting booth, I kept thinking about that moment at the airport and the questions far too many Americans still ask of me: are you really an American? Really?

When I was in South Africa at the U.S.Algeria game, an African-American pulled out a massive American flag and spread it over the entire cheering section. He did not care who was under the flag. It was big enough, he told us, for all.

I had that feeling when I voted for Obama in 2008. I loved that feeling. I miss it.

But now I know better: it is gone.

(Zahir Janmohamed is a freelance writer living in and writing about Juhapura, the Muslim neighbourhood of Ahmedabad. He previously served as the Advocacy Director for Amnesty International and Senior Foreign Policy Aide in the U.S. Congress. Follow him on Twitter @zahirj )

In 2008, as news of Obamas win spread, racial tensions seemed as distant as that momentous night. But now, the magic is gone November 7, 2012

Sustaining the myth of hostility


There was in India now what didnt exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea, wrote Vidiadhar S. Naipaul in 1990 in India: A Million Mutinies Now , his third book on the land of his forefathers. Sir Vidias construction of the Indian nation, his views on certain major episodes in contemporary history, his interpretation of Islam, and the role of minorities in secular India have always been controversial. Last week, they came under attack again, this time from Girish Karnad.

Since then, some have rushed to Naipauls defence, others to Karnads. As a historian, I too would like to join the debate.

To remind readers, Naipauls ancestors left India in the early 1880s as indentured labourers for the sugar estates of Guyana and Trinidad. He returned to India with An Area of Darkness , advertised as tender, lyrical, (and) explosive. Thereafter, he chronicled the histories of a wounded civilisation and a million mutinies in India. In between, he aimed salvos at Islam not once but twice, in laboured projects.

Indigestibility of Muslims

Naipaul wholly subscribes to the views of Samuel P. Huntington, a controversial American political scientist who earned his reputation by

arguing that the New World Order is based on patterns of conflict and cooperation founded on cultural distinctions and identifications. He talked of the indigestibility of Muslims and their propensity towards violent conflict, which makes them threatening.

Naipaul too warns readers of Islamic parasitism, and endorses the Orientalist belief that Islam as a coherent, transnational, monolithic force has been engaged in a unilinear confrontational relationship with the West. His essentialist reading of history allows him to sustain the myth of an inherent hostility between two antagonistic sides.

I am not qualified to judge Naipauls standing in the literary world, but I have no doubt in my mind that he is ignorant of the nuances of Islam and unacquainted with the languages of

the people he speaks to. He records and assesses only what he sees and hears from his interpreters. In the most literal sense, he finds the cultures indecipherable, for he cannot transliterate the Arabic alphabet. He had known Muslims all his life in Trinidad, but knew little of Islam. Its doctrine did not interest him; it didnt seem worth inquiring into; and over the years, in spite of travel, he has added little to the knowledge gathered in his childhood.

He continues to subscribe to the illogical mistrust of Muslims he had been taught as a child: a particular greybeard Muslim, described in An Area of Darkness , has come to embody every sort of threat. Much like Nirad Chaudhuri, who was guilty of disregarding common sense to feed his own petty prejudices towards the Muslim communities, Naipauls

encounters with them are suffused with a sense of youthful bigotries.

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey is permeated with the sentiment that Islam sanctifies rage rage about faith, political rage, and that Muslim societies are rigid, authoritarian, uncreative, and hostile to the West. In Indonesia, he runs into Imamuddin who confirms him in the stereotype. In Iran, Behzad leaves him convinced that, now in Islamic countries there would be the Behzads who, in an inversion of Islamic passions, would have a vision of society cleansed and purified, a society of believers. In Pakistan, he reminds us of the power of religion and the hollowness of secular cults in a fragmented country, economically stagnant, despotically ruled, with its gifted people close to hysteria.

In most of the description, otherwise nicely woven into a coherent story, there is hardly any reference to the debilitating legacy of colonial rule. The civilised, innovative, and technologically advanced West stands out as a vibrant symbol of progress and modernity, whereas the Muslim societies Naipaul encounters, despite their varying experiences and trajectories, are destructive, inert, and resentful of the West. With Naipaul relegating colonialism and imperial subjugation of Muslim societies to the background, the West appears an open, generous and universal civilisation.

In fact, it is the West that is consistently portrayed as exploited by lesser societies resentful of its benign, or at worst natural, creativity: Indeed, as scholar Rob Nixon points out, Naipaul is so decided in his distribution of moral and cultural

worth between the cultures of anarchic rage and the universal civilization that he ends up demonizing Islam as routinely as the most battle-minded of his Islamic interlocutors demonize the West.

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted People (1998), chooses Islamic bad faith as its theme, portraying the same primitive, rudimentary, unsatisfactory and reductive thesis that the Muslims having been converted from Hinduism, must experience the ignominy of all converted people. In India: A Million Mutinies (1990), the 1857 revolt is regarded as the last flare-up of Muslim energy until the agitation for a separate Muslim homeland. So far so good. But when Naipaul finds the Lucknow bazaars expressing the faith of the book and the mosque, for example Aminabad, a crowded marketplace, serving the

faith, it becomes too much to swallow.

On Babri Masjid

Two years after A Million Mutinies , Naipaul defends the destruction of the Babri Masjid by calling it an act of historical balancing. Ayodhya, he reportedly told a small gathering at the BJP office in 2004, was a sort of passion Any passion has to be encouraged. I always support actions coming out of passion as these reflect creativity. Whose passion? Of those Muslims who, despite the bitterness since December 1992, still weave the garlands used in the temple and produce everything necessary for dressing the icons preparatory to worship?

The fraternity of writers to which Naipaul belongs strongly contests not

only his reading of the calamitous effect of Islam, but also his virtual justification of vandalism in the name of Islam. Salman Rushdie and others have written with infinitely greater sympathy and comprehension, and cultivated a distinctly secular point of view which had grown out of a reaction against Partition. Many others write convincingly about Islam as a living and changing reality, what Muslims mean by it is constantly changing because of the particular circumstances of time and place. They study it in its historical reality, without value judgments about what it ought to be.

There is however no place for these sentiments in Naipauls jaundiced views. To him, Hindu militancy is a necessary corrective to the past, a creative force. He therefore rejects the possibility of Islam, a religion of fixed laws, working out reconciliation

with other religions in the subcontinent. This is, in short, the clash of civilisations theory.

Karnad is right

Girish Karnad is right. Naipaul is as illinformed about India as Huntington was about the world outside the western hemisphere. One more related point. He talks of a fractured past solely in terms of Muslim invasions and conveniently forgets the grinding down of the Buddhist-Jain culture during the period of Brahmanical revival. He fumes and frets even though a fringe element alone celebrates the vandalism of the early Islamists who were driven more by the desire to establish the might of an evangelical Islam than to deface Hindu places of worship. With anger, remorse, and bitterness becoming a substitute for serious study and analysis, Naipauls plan for Indias

salvation collapses like a pack of cards.

Hence the devastating enunciation of his Beyond Belief by Edward Said: Somewhere along the way Naipaul, in my opinion, himself suffered a serious intellectual accident. His obsession with Islam caused him somehow to stop thinking, to become instead a kind of mental suicide compelled to repeat the same formula over and over. This is what Id call an intellectual catastrophe of the first order.

In the recent debate over Karnads remarks, several analysts have considered Naipauls interpretation of Islam as valid. I take issue with them. I believe writers like him widen the existing chasm between the Muslim communities and the followers of other religions. We need writers, poets and publicists who create

mutual understanding and interfaith dialogue rather than create distrust and promote intolerance.

Peter Geyl reminded us that the historian should be interested in his subject for its own sake, he should try to get in touch with things as they were, the people and the vicissitudes of their fortunes should mean something to him in themselves. Let Colour Fill the Flowers, Let Breeze of Early Spring Blow, wrote the Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

If ever Naipaul wants to write a travelogue on Muslim countries, the sense of Islam as something more than words in texts, as something living in individual Muslims, must emerge from his pen.

(Mushirul Hasan is a historian and Director General of the National Archives of India.)

To Naipaul, Hindu militancy is a corrective to the past. He therefore rejects the possibility of Islam reconciling with other religions in the subcontinent November 8, 2012

GM crops should go back to the lab


Some weeks ago, I was addressing students of molecular biology at the Kerala Agricultural University campus in Thiruvananthapuram. During the question-answer session, I asked how many of them would like to take up agricultural biotechnology as a career. To my surprise, only a couple of hands went up.

The answer I got probably points to the future of agricultural biotechnology in India. Most students wanted to go into animal biotechnology and human genetics, but not into crop biotechnology. The reason they gave was that they did not see a future for crop biotechnology, given the social backlash against it. Well, I am aware that this class is not an exact representation of the national mood among students, but surely it tells us a lot about the way society, more importantly the younger generation, perceives genetic engineering.

So, when the Supreme Courtappointed Technical Expert Committee (TEC) recommended a 10year moratorium on all field trials of GM food crops, I was not surprised. The expert panel had merely echoed the concerns and apprehensions that

society at large has towards such crops.

Knowing the casual manner in which large-scale field trials are held across the country, the absence of a regulatory mechanism, and the failure to document the damage transgenic crops have inflicted on humans and the environment during, before and after such trials, the committee has called for invoking the precautionary principle.

Reports recommendations

A few months ago, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture tabled on August 9 its report Cultivation of Genetically Modified Food Crops: Prospects and Effects . After an exhaustive interaction with stakeholders, and considering the impact genetically modified food

crops have on biodiversity, human health, the environment and the future of farming, it recommended: for the time being all research and development activities on transgenic crops should be carried out only in containment, the ongoing field trials in all States should be discontinued forthwith. In a way, the Parliamentary Standing Committee and TEC are saying the same thing.

In support of GM

Three years after Bt Brinjal which, if allowed, would have been Indias first GM food crop was put on indefinite hold, the reports of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture and the TEC are pointers to swelling opposition to the manner in which GM crops are being pushed. Although many State governments have already refused permission for field trials of GM crops, I don't understand why

Food and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar is time and again appealing to Chief Ministers to put GM research back on the agenda. Chairman of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SAC-PM), Dr. C.N.R. Rao, too has lamented the lack of a scienceinformed, evidence-based approach in the debate.

In a desperate bid to support GM crops, it is often said that conventional agriculture technologies may be inadequate to meet Indias food security challenges. The other objection is that the debate is not science-based. Let us look at both arguments. As far as the role of GM crops in boosting food security needs is concerned, this argument is not evidence-based. First, there is no GM crop anywhere in the world which increases crop productivity. In fact, even the U.S. Department of Agriculture acknowledges that the

productivity of GM soya and GM corn in the U.S. is less than the conventional varieties. Moreover, the prevailing drought in the U.S. has conclusively shown that it is only nonGM crops that have withstood the vagaries of weather.

In India, on June 1, a record 82.3 million tonnes surplus of wheat and rice was stored. This surplus existed at a time when an estimated 320 million people went to bed hungry. Mr. Pawar is making all efforts to export a large chunk of food stocks or make open market releases, but no serious effort is being made to feed the hungry. In fact, since 2001-03, India has been holding on an average anything between 50 to 60 million tonnes of foodgrains and yet its ranking in the Global Hunger Index shows no improvement.

Food insecurity

Food insecurity, therefore, is not the result of any production shortfall. To ensure that farmers do not produce more, and thereby add to existing storage problems, the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) has frozen the wheat price at last years level. Paying more to farmers would entail more production. This does not make any economic sense. After all, the farmer too is impacted by rising inflation. Why penalise farmers for the governments inability to handle and store surplus foodgrain?

The fact remains that food production is being deliberately kept low, and only enough to meet basic food security needs. Provide market price to wheat and rice growers, and I am sure production will go up manifold.

SAC-PM is a committee made up of distinguished scientists. Although the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) had given the green signal for commercial cultivation of Bt Brinjal, the SAC-PM should take note of the 19-page submission by the then Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh; the analysis is the best science-based justification for stopping GM food crops.

Findings

Even when the Bt Brinjal debate was hot, I had pointed out the inability of the scientific community to conduct long-term feeding trials on rats. Internationally, the practice is to have 90-day feeding trials, which corresponds to 24 years of human lifespan and thats what the GEAC followed. I had always wondered why the industry as well as the scientific

community was not conducting feeding trials for two years, which means the entire human lifespan. Professor Gilles-Eric Sralini, professor of molecular biology at the Caen University in France, finally did it. He recently published the findings of the two-year study on the long-term toxicity of GM maize NK 603, engineered to resist Roundup herbicide and as expected the industry was up in arms.

In these first-ever long-term feeding trials on rats, published in the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology , Prof. Sralini and his team observed that females developed fatal mammary tumours and pituitary disorders. Males suffered liver damage, developed kidney and skin tumours and experienced problems with their digestive system. The team also found that even lower doses of GM corn and Roundup weedicides

resulted in serious health impacts. Moreover, 50 per cent male and 70 per cent female rats died prematurely. The tumours were 2.5 times bigger than what would normally appear in the control population.

As expected, the study was branded bogus, inadequate and of course unscientific. Sralini answered the industrys main criticism pointing out that the species of rat used was the same that the biotech giant Monsanto had used in its research trials. Moreover, the sample size was as per the recommendations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) protocol for GM food safety toxicology studies. Sralinis experiment has amplified the need for long-term human safety trials, which I think the SAC-PM should be primarily asking the Department of

Biotechnology to focus on. SAC-PM needs to review more scientific literature before making any broad and sweeping assertions.

At a time when GM crops hold no promise of higher crop production, the latest long-term scientific research on the impacts on health warrants repeated trials under all environments. As suggested by TEC and the Standing Committee, more experiments are needed on farm animals.

Since science is answerable to society, and cannot be allowed to operate in a vacuum, this is the least India can do to dispel any fear.

(Devinder Sharma is a food and trade policy analyst. He blogs at Ground Reality. )

As they do not spell increased crop production, new long-term scientific research on health impacts should involve extensive trials November 8, 2012

Talking their way out of war


The recently launched peace talks in Oslo between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government are the fourth such attempt in 30 years. Will they bear fruit this time around? If so, why?

Much is at stake. This is the longest standing armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The FARC were founded in 1966 as part of the wave

of guerrilla movements that spawned in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. Though many of their counterparts in the rest of Latin America were defeated, some were not. The Sandinistas brought down the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, and one of their leaders, Daniel Ortega, is now President. The Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) in El Salvador, after quitting the armed struggle and morphing into a political party, elected their candidate, Mauricio Funes, to the presidency in 2009. Elsewhere, former urban guerrilla leaders who spearheaded the fight against military rule in the Southern Cone (and spent time in prison for it), like Presidents Jose (Pepe) Mujica in Uruguay and Dilma Roussef in Brazil, serve now as elected heads of state.

Yet, a military defeat of the Colombian state by FARC, or the

Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN), the other guerrilla group active in Colombia (and one not taking part in these talks), was never on the cards. With a population of 45 million and a land mass of over one million square kilometres, Colombia is much too big a country to fall prey to a band of armed insurgents that has never been larger than some 20,000 to 30,000 men and women (though, amazingly, they managed to control as much as a third of the national territory at one point in time). The question, rather, is how they have managed to survive for so long.

Geographical factors

One reason is the fragmented and rough nature of the extensive and extreme Colombian geography, marked by the high Andes mountains (the second highest in the world, after the Himalayas) and enormous rivers

like the Magdalena. Vast swathes of land, some of seemingly impenetrable jungle, have never been under the effective authority of the Colombian state. This leaves ample space for insurgent groups to ply their trade, in provinces like Putumayo, Narino and Caqueta in the South, but also in the rest of rural Colombia. On the other hand, the drug trade has allowed FARC to access ample financial resources (hence the term narcoguerrillas). This is supplemented by kidnappings, extortions and other such unsavoury activities, though the latter have been drastically reduced under relentless assault by the Colombian military. Reported kidnappings have dwindled from 3,572 in 2000 to 305 in 2011. The murder rate is at a low of 32 per 100,000 (in Honduras, it is at 82 per 100,000 and in El Salvador it is at 66 per 100,000; the average worldwide rate is 8 per 100,000). Still, according to some estimates, the FARC,

described by BBC as the worlds richest rebel movement, have already stashed away so much money that they could go on for a long time, making do just with the interest on it.

If so, why this renewed attempt at making peace?

As a recent report of the International Crisis Group (Colombia: Peace at Last?) concludes, a stalemate obtains. Thanks to the considerable build-up of the Colombian military (whose numbers have gone up from 132,000 in 2002 to 283,000 in 2010, with the police reaching 132,000) and the U.S.-supported Plan Colombia, which has provided about 7 billion dollars in military hardware and training programmes over the past decade, and their sweeping, nationwide actions, the FARC are on the defensive. Many of their leaders, from Manuel (Tiro Fijo) Marulanda,

to Raul Reyes, el Mono Jojoy and Alfonso Cano, have fallen in the battlefield. Vast numbers of guerrillas have been killed, captured or otherwise demobilised. No more than 8,000 to 9000 FARC members are estimated to be in the field, down from 16,000 in 2001.

For President Juan Manuel Santos, bringing peace would be quite a feather in his cap. A former Defence Minister during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), in his short two years in office, he has shown his mettle (and made the cover of TIME Magazine). Aware that more inclusive social policies are needed to redress Colombias abysmal inequality, he has moved in that direction on a variety of fronts. This includes legislation to provide compensation to over 4 million victims of violence. With a 0.55 Gini coefficient, Colombia has one of the most unequal income

distributions in the worlds most unequal region (in India, the Gini, as measured in 2004, is 0.36 probably higher today in Norway, the least unequal society, 0.25 ). Colombias current economic boom, driven by massive foreign investment in mining and oil exploration projects in lands long considered off-limits because of the armed conflict, would acquire an additional impetus from a successful peace process. In fact, the Colombian economy is doing so well that the country is being considered for OECD membership (the rich countries club).

A detractor

Although 74 per cent of Colombians support the peace process, former President Uribe does not. After falling out with Mr. Santos, he spends much of his time attacking him, often on Twitter, of which he is an avid user (

Twitter has taken off among Colombian politicians; another avid user is Gustavo Petro, the mayor of Bogota, and a former guerrilla himself, sometimes accused of spending more time tweeting than on running the capital city). Mr. Uribe, whose government was blamed for harbouring the paramilitary squads that have taken justice into their own hands in Colombia, leading to many human rights violations, does not consider FARC a legitimate interlocutor but a criminal organisation. He believes peace negotiations only give them time to regroup and get ready to fight another day.

Yet, as opposed to what happened in the past, this time there is no ceasefire on either side. In the early 2000s, under President Andres Pastrana, FARC secured a large sanctuary in Southern Colombia as

part of the conditions for a previous peace negotiation. They used it for enhanced training and smuggling operations. On this occasion, the relentless military offensive of the government continues, and the FARC understand that these are the new rules of the game.

What role does the international community play in all this?

Although the negotiating parties are all Colombians, foreign countries are very much involved. Norway, an impartial and honest power-broker with no axe to grind in a far-away country, is hosting the first phase of these talks, and is one of its guarantors. Another is Venezuela, where the government of President Hugo Chavez has had an off-and-on relationship with FARC. A third is Cuba, where the talks will move to for the second phase. Havana is the only

Latin American capital where FARC leaders feel safe, and the Castro brothers have been advising them for a long time to give up the armed struggle. Chile, as chair of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and whose President, Sebastian Pinera, is a friend of Mr. Santos, is also part of the process.

Santos statecraft

It is a measure of Mr. Santos statecraft that he has not only repaired the frayed state of Colombias relations with Venezuela left to him in a shambles after years of bickering over many issues, from border disputes to how to deal with FARC but also with Cuba. In fact, Mr. Santos owes Cuba big time. The Sixth Summit of the Americas, held last April in the Colombian port city of Cartagena, almost blew up in

the host countrys face. A number of countries questioned the absence of Cuba at the summit, and threatened to boycott the meeting. It was only after a visit by Mr. Santos to Havana and a hurried back-and-forth with Fidel and Raul Castro, that the Cuban government expressed it had no objection to not being invited to Cartagena, thus saving the meeting.

The conditions for a breakthrough in these peace negotiations are there. The ambitious agenda includes integrated agrarian development, political participation; termination of the conflict; solution to the problem of illegal drugs and preparation for lasting peace. The current Colombian government has the standing to offer credible guarantees to the FARC leadership. It must be kept in mind that in the 1980s, when another generation of guerrilla leaders, the M19, gave up their weapons to form a

political party, the Union Patriotica, and ran for office, several thousands of them, including their presidential candidate, and many elected Congressmen, were shot and killed by paramilitaries. In turn, despite the high turnover in their top leadership, FARC retain a significant degree of control of their membership and operations, making them a partner the government can do business with. An orderly transition to peace would be in everybodys best interests, especially the Colombian population, exhausted after half a century of la violencia.

(Jorge Heine is CIGI Professor of Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Ontario. His Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, co-edited with A.

Cooper and R. Thakur, is forthcoming in 2013 from Oxford University Press.)

A breakthrough in the recently launched talks between the Colombian government and FARC rebels raises hopes of an orderly transition to stability November 8, 2012

Obamas eastern pivot, made in Asia


We live in an era that feeds off slogans and lives the clichs. For the Obama campaign it was the rallying cry Forward. And it seems that despite the ruminations of the pundits, who will complicate a straight line, the U.S. has given The President of the United States of America (POTUS) the mandate to march on, without the pressures of having to fight another election. The onus is

now on President Obama to deliver on the many domestic challenges that confront his country and certainly on his vision for positioning the U.S. strongly in a rapidly changing world.

So far, the subtleties of the multipolar world a place where America is a declining Chairman of the Board, beset by new board members with ever-growing market share had not allowed for a bumper-sticker view of what was going on. Obamas first term administration articulated its response to this new world in a verbal shorthand. Discussions on American foreign policy and grand strategy have been punctuated with the liberal use of terms like Asia Pivot, Strategic Rebalance, and Asia Focus, popularised by U.S. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Attempts to truly decipher the underlying motivations of this new focus on the Indian and

Pacific Oceans and what it means practically in policy terms have come to very little in terms of U.S. force posture, budget (and cuts) and doctrinal shift. In other words, beyond the bumper sticker, what are we really talking about here? And how will this pan out in the second Obama administration?

Looking at the region

It must be clearly understood that the Asia Pivot or its various avatars do not signal greater U.S. engagement in and with Asia. It is a powerful historical fact that ever since the country emerged from being an isolated continental island, it has been fundamentally engaged with Asia. The U.S. has been a primary Asian Power since the dawn of the post-WWII world. Its strategic partnerships and security blanket in the western Pacific and in South-East Asia have

underwritten the progress and stability of the region. It is undeniable that U.S. deployments, East of the Suez, in the 1960s, and in the Malacca Straits have secured trade routes, as well as the movement of energy and wealth that have benefited the Asian economies, just as much as it has helped preserve U.S. oil and market interests in the region.

So why the new slogan about Americas interest in Asia now? What does the U.S. seek to achieve? And how will this change the configuration of U.S. engagement in the region? The official American take on this subject reveals very little and certainly does not answer the pertinent strategic questions. But behind this apparent vacuum, something profound is happening.

First, the Asia pivot is all about transitioning from a world where a

single great power reigned, to one where others ascend to great power status. By locking in new and old allies and strengthening its strategic position in the region, America hopes to cushion the blow of a relative global diminution in power. History is replete with examples of premier countries attempting to fight off growing rivals (Edwardian Britain and Wilhelmine Germany come to mind).

Washington is hoping to demonstrate strategic strength as a reassurance to allow for a peaceful realignment, wherein China continues to rise without its ascendancy provoking military conflict. As an American policymaker grandly stated, we are in the midst of a novel experiment where the only Hegemon is allowing the transfer of power peacefully (and grudgingly) to a newly-rising power. The only way this works is for basic

American interests in the region to be reinforced.

Second, a lot of the Asia pivot narrative is about internal American discussions; it is as much a call to action allowing America to rouse itself, as it is a reaffirmation of commitment to its allies and new partners. Such a new strategy does away with the most indelible image of America in the new multipolar world, where it is often seen as Uncertain Sam or The Reluctant Eagle. The pivot to Asia serves as a rallying cry of decisiveness. It is also a blueprint for budget priorities, redeployments and a new and more efficient force architecture that the new administration will need to define given its campaign commitments.

Third, the pivot narrative is a comment on the changed dynamics of the Indian Ocean. Soon there will be

the possibility of two or three new powerful navies (India, China and Indonesia) operating in the region. Doubtless, there will be new contests and competition for the role of commissioner of the seas.

Ranged against this, are declining American oil and natural gas interests in play as the coming fracking revolution in America itself allows for a dramatic new domestic growth in energy production. The Asia pivot at once answers why America should continue to care about what goes on in the rest of the world; America may not get its oil from Asia, but all the countries it finds itself interdependent with do. Thus, the Asia pivot sells continuing American engagement to a weary and economically overburdened American public. So, in the end, this is a bumper sticker that actually says something.

And the response

While all this may explain the American pivot, what is even more interesting is how the region itself will respond. For Asia is, but an artificial grouping of nations painted with one brushstroke. A unified character is indescribable and its evolution is characterised by a mosaic of individual national experiences or, at best, by developments of subregions like Asean.

Today, Asean in a seemingly chaotic manner has accommodated the U.S. as an Asian Power while at the same time economically aligning its path primarily with that of China and some other emerging centres. Asean has in many ways already learnt the fine art of using the U.S. as a strategic balancer; for example during recent Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, Asean drew the U.S. in as a

very useful offshore balancer. Aseans finely-calibrated balancing act is likely to continue.

In the short to medium term, India is a key to the Pivot Paradigm. For India, China is a natural neighbour. Difficult as the relationship may be, trade between the newly emerging economic giants will only increase, whatever the strategic pitfalls ahead. As the relative economic and political weight of China grows, it is the Indian response that could well befuddle most American planners. Proud of its strategic autonomy, the Indian reaction to the pivot will be an outcome of the Chinese approach to and engagement with India. Recent developments show that while China is keen to avoid pushing India to a place where a U.S. partnership seems reassuring, the new-found chauvinism and assertiveness emanating from Beijing is disturbing New Delhi.

Therefore, China itself will ironically determine the contours of the American pivot; the biggest game changer may well be the upcoming changing of guard in Beijing the mood and demeanour of the new leadership led by Xi Jinping. Paradoxically, and the ultimate sign that we do live in a very different era from the preceding one of American dominance, the form and content of the U.S. pivot to Asia may be determined more by Asians than Americans. And this will test the skills and will of Obama 2.0.

(Samir Saran is a vice-president at Observer Research Foundation and Dr. John C. Hulsman is the president of a strategic consultancy firm.)

In his second administration, the form and contours of Americas Asia Focus

will be determined more by Asians than the U.S. November 9, 2012 Lighter wallets and lost contests Luxury Apartments, Kochi - Near CUSAT, Kalamassery. Starts @ Rs 17.5 Lac. Top Amenities. Enquire www.NestInfratech.com Ads by Google NICHOLAS CONFESSORE JESS BIDGOOD SHARE PRINT T+ At the private air terminal at Logan Airport in Boston early on Wednesday, men in unwrinkled suits sank into plush leather chairs as they waited to board Gulfstream jets, trading consolations over Mitt Romneys loss the day before.

All I can say is the American people have spoken, said Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot and one of Mr. Romneys top fund-raisers, briskly plucking off his hat and settling into a couch.

The biggest single donor in political history, the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, mingled with other Romney backers at a post-election breakfast, fresh off a large gamble gone bad. Of the eight candidates he supported with tens of millions of dollars in contributions to super PACs *political action committees+, none were victorious on Tuesday.

And as calls came in on Wednesday from some of the donors who had poured more than $300 million into the pair of big-spending outside groups founded in part by Karl Rove

perhaps the leading political entrepreneur of the super PAC era he offered them a grim upside: without us, the race would not have been as close as it was.

The most expensive election in American history drew to a close this week with a price tag estimated at more than $6 billion, propelled by legal and regulatory decisions that allowed wealthy donors to pour record amounts of cash into races around the country.

But while outside spending affected the election in innumerable ways reshaping the Republican presidential nominating contest, clogging the airwaves with unprecedented amounts of negative advertising and shoring up embattled Republican incumbents in the House the prizes most sought by the emerging class of megadonors remained outside their

grasp. President Obama will return to the White House in January, and the Democrats have strengthened their lock on the Senate.

Top self-financed candidate

The elections most lavishly selffinanced candidate fared no better. Linda E. McMahon, a Connecticut Republican who is a former professional wrestling executive, spent close to $100 million nearly all of it her own money on two races for the Senate, conceding defeat on Tuesday for the second time in three years.

Money is a necessary condition for electoral success, said Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. But its not sufficient, and its never been.

Even by the flush standards of a campaign in which the two presidential candidates raised $1 billion each, the scale of outside spending was staggering: more than $1 billion all told, about triple the amount in 2010.

Mr. Obama faced at least $386 million in negative advertising from super PACs and other outside spenders, more than double what the groups supporting him spent on the airwaves. Outside groups spent more than $37 million in Virginias Senate race and $30 million in Ohios, a majority to aid the Republican candidates.

The bulk of that outside money came from a relatively small group of wealthy donors, unleashed by the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision, which allowed unlimited

contributions to super PACs. Harold Simmons, a Texas industrialist, gave $26.9 million to super PACs backing Mr. Romney and Republican candidates for the Senate. Joe Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, spent close to $13 million to bankroll a super PAC attacking Mr. Obama over federal spending.

Helped Romney stay afloat

Flush with cash, Republican-leaning groups outspent Democratic ones by an even greater margin than in 2010. But rather than produce a major partisan imbalance, the money merely evened the playing field in many races.

In several competitive Senate races, high spending by outside groups was offset to a large extent with stronger fund-raising by Democratic

candidates, assisted at the margins by Democratic super PACs. For much of the fall, Mr. Obama and Democratic groups broadcast at least as many ads, and sometimes more, in swing states than Mr. Romney and his allied groups, in part because Mr. Obama was able to secure lower ad rates by paying for most of the advertising himself. Mr. Romney relied far more on outside groups, which must pay higher rates.

Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor who helped Mr. Rove raise money for American Crossroads and its sister group, Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, said that without a blitz of coordinated anti-Obama advertising in the summer, the campaign would not have been as competitive.

I believe that some of that money actually kept Romney from getting beat down by the carpet-bombing he underwent from the Obama forces, Mr. Barbour said. I did look at it more as us trying to keep our candidates from getting swamped, like what happened to McCain.

Some advocates for tighter campaign financing regulations argued that who won or lost was beside the point. The danger, they argued, is that in the post-Citizens United world, candidates and officeholders on both sides of the aisle are far more beholden to the wealthy individuals who can finance large-scale independent spending.

Unlimited contributions and secret money in American politics have resulted in the past in scandal and the corruption of government decisions, said Fred Wertheimer, the president

of Democracy 21, a watchdog group. This will happen again in the future.

But on Wednesday, at least, the nations megadonors returned home with lighter wallets and few victories.

As the morning wore on at Logan Airport, more guests from Mr. Romneys election-night party at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center trickled in, lugging garment bags and forming a small line at the security checkpoint.

Its going to be a long flight home, isnt it? said one person, who asked not to be identified.

The investor Julian Robertson, who held fund-raisers for Mr. Romney and gave more than $2 million to a pro-

Romney super PAC, arrived with several companions. Mr. Robertson spotted an acquaintance: Emil W. Henry Jr., an economic adviser and a fund-raiser for Mr. Romney, to whom Mr. Robertson had offered a ride on his charter.

Aww, group hug, Mr. Henry said. (Ashley Parker contributed reporting.) New York Times News Service

While the money spent in the U.S. elections merely evened out the playing field, there is the danger of unlimited contributions and secret money bringing back scandal and corruption to the corridors of power November 9, 2012

A Secular Front for 2014

who congregate in Surajkund today for an internal conversation ( samvad ) have a fairly clear-cut task on their hands how to start thinking and behaving like a political party. As it were, the Surajkund dialogue is taking place after the party performed a much-needed rite of democratic mobilisation last Sunday at the Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi. On that day, the Congress did manage to demonstrate an organisational temperament that behoves the oldest political formation in the country. It was arguably the first non-election mass rally the Congress leaders had felt excited enough to organise since the UPAs birth in 2004, and, that too in defence of their own governments policies. Above all, the Ramlila Maidan show sent out an unambiguous message that the party has rolled back its collective self-doubts on its own moral disintegration that was being sought to be imposed on it by a crafty

cabal of civil society activists and sangh parivar conspirators.

Discourage sycophants

At Surajkund, the Congress leaders will do themselves a favour if they were, first, to recognise and acknowledge that after more than eight years in office at the Centre, there is no nor can there be any distinction between the party and the government. The self-styled loyalists and professional sycophants should be discouraged from attributing all political difficulties to the government and claiming all the redeeming impulses for the party leadership. That fiction was perhaps workable in 2009; it will not wash in 2014.

The Congress congregation will do well to remember that a decade in office at the Centre has spawned new

rivals and enemies, who may have sufficient reason and enough resources to join hands with the partys old adversaries. This, however, is a normal democratic process and a smart political party does itself a favour by keeping track of emerging aspirations and discontents in society. And, like any other government, UPA-I and UPA-II have had their share of aberrations and absurdities which did not find approval with the arbiters of political correctness.

Nor can the leaders wish away the simple fact: exercise of power, especially of the governmental kind, inevitably produces political consequences and ethical dilemmas. The UPAs uninterrupted tenure at the Centre has necessarily bestowed undue advantages and benefits to some sections of society, and, similarly visited undeserved unhappiness and disadvantages on

others. There are winners and losers, and there is a political economy of pleasure and pain.

Whether it likes it or not, the Congress will need to answer for the so-called sins of the Manmohan Singh government; the mature and sensible approach should be to assess calmly what the government has accomplished and to claim credit for its achievements. Especially, as a political party, the Congress is obliged to tell the voters how many of its promises it has kept. A government in a democratic context is anchored in public trust and acceptability; the citizens and voters expect to be told honestly and sincerely to what extent a party in power was able to fulfil the terms of its mandate.

The Congress, on its part, can take very legitimate credit for having refurbished the countrys secular

ethos and edifice. The primary reason the sangh parivar has launched such a vicious attack on the party leadership is the UPA governments success on the secular front. It is not only the minorities but also the vast majority in the law-abiding majority community who have reason to be thankful for the Manmohan Singh governments becalming stewardship. Today, India is much more at peace with itself than it ever was in recent memory.

And, if the Congress leaders are inclined to think out of the box, they can toy with the strategic choice of declaring an intent to dissolve the UPA before the 2014 battle and putting in its place a Secular Front. It makes no sense for the Congress to remain overly burdened with too many unattractive allies. A Congressled Secular Front will provide incentive for some sections of the left and other progressive voices to come

together to beat back the challenge of right-wing authoritarian forces, masquerading as untainted performers.

Recover the voice

Meanwhile, Sujrajkund should help the party recover its voice. For too long, the party has allowed the noisy vendors of public morality in the media and civil society to set the discourse. In such a scenario, the advantage inevitably lies with the bogus preacher, hawking apocalyptic moralism. Imagine the Congress silence when a recently retired general, after having presided over the most coercive arm of the Indian state, joins the Anna Mob at Jantar Mantar and recites Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, the great poet of defiance! No one from the Congress had the courage to point out this democratic absurdity.

Admittedly, a marked personal predisposition for decency at the very top of the UPA establishment has discouraged the Congress from joining the political and policy arguments. The unhappy result is that many institutions, especially sections of the judiciary and the CAG, have periodically asserted a maximalist interpretation for their mandates. At Surajkund, the Congress leaders should recognise that their reticence and reluctance have combined to produce an unhealthy and undemocratic imbalance in our constitutional equilibrium.

Moreover, the Congress has so far been reluctant to debate governance issues internally. For too long, bureaucratic solutions have been sought for essentially political problems. Take, for example, the proposed National Investment Board.

Apart from the administrative absurdity of having the Prime Minister preside over clearances for projects, the sticking point is one of political and ideological coherence. Is it not possible for Jayanthi Natarajan, Jairam Ramesh, Kishore Deo, P. Chidambaram, Kamal Nath, and Anand Sharma ALL belonging to the Congress to politically agree on terms of harmony and balance? Both the Prime Minister and the Congress have been unwilling to impose some kind of a balanced solution.

Prioritise party

But, if after eight years of exercising power at the Centre, the Congress Ministers do not have clarity on how to produce a harmonious and honourable trade-off between growth, equity and environment, they have no business seeking another five-year term. Similarly, why is it not

possible to find the words and the courage to tell the nation that Jaipal Reddy, an honourable man, an honest man, had to be moved because he refused to accept the Prime Ministers policy priorities? Or, why is a wilfully indecisive Defence Minister being allowed to slow down national defence preparedness? Maybe at the beginning of the UPA innings these differences, some contrived, some genuine, could have been a source of governmental wholesomeness; now, when the Congress is moving into slog overs, these serve no political or administrative purpose. What is more, none of these honourable ministers has felt strong enough to summon the courage of a believer to resign and walk. The Surajkund exercise will have justified itself if all participants can resolve to prioritise the party above their personal image and the interests of their bureaucratic and corporate cronies.

And, indeed, the most significant strategic dilemma before the Congress remains: how to project the potential of a Rahul Gandhi leadership without debunking the Manmohan Singh achievements and record? This is a delicate and inherently difficult task but the Congress leaders will do well to remember that capturing power for the party and its leadership cannot be an end in itself. Building on the UPA record of achievements and accomplishments these eight years, the Congress owes to itself to clarify its own sense of political purpose and, in the process, renew a shared sense of national destiny.

(Harish Khare is a veteran commentator and political analyst.)

The Congress which is congregating at Surajkund today should think of

dissolving the UPA, and forging a

new unity with progressive forces November 9, 2012

An Afghan exit plan for Obama


One cannot but sympathise with Barack Obama despite the four more years he has just won himself as President of the United States.

Both the wars his country launched in the new millennium the war of choice in Iraq and the war of necessity in Afghanistan have cost trillions of dollars and over 7,500 lives, besides thousands more wounded and tens of thousands suffering from post-conflict trauma. Both wars have gone sour from the American

perspective. Iraq has not only not emerged as a model for democracy, either for its own people or for the region as a whole, it has emerged as a dependable ally of Iran and has openly sided with the Assad regime in the ongoing civil war in Syria in which the U.S. and a host of external powers are firmly in the anti-Assad camp. Iraq, under its Shia Prime Minister Mr. Nouri al-Maliki, is engaged on the Shia side of the sectarian conflict which is now playing havoc in the region, with probable consequences for other parts of the world.

Exit policy

As for Afghanistan, The New York Times admitted in an editorial last month that it was changing its view and advising the Administration to get out of Afghanistan in not more than a year, and as soon as we safely can. Two more years of sending

American troops to die and be wounded is too long, it argued, noting the Afghan army and police would never become an effective counterinsurgency force. The Taliban, far from being defeated, will surely come to occupy many provinces as well as, most likely, official positions in the governing set-up in Kabul.

The twin pillars of the exit policy reintegration and reconciliation have not worked. A very small proportion of the insurgents have integrated which is more than offset by the large number of desertions and green-on-blue attacks. As for reconciliation, the Taliban have always known that the distant power will not stay engaged forever and that time was on their side. They are the ones who set conditions for even talking about reconciliation. The term reconciliation is misleading in the Afghan context. Reconciliation

presupposes the existence of two or more parties which must reconcile among themselves. In Afghanistan, clearly defined or structured parties do not exist. Even the Taliban, obviously one side, is a fractured movement with several groups, but at least they agree on one leader in the person of Mullah Omar whose decision everyone will accept. But on the other side, there is not even this kind of a party. President Hamid Karzai was elected in his individual capacity, not as head of a political party. Does he have the political authority to reconcile with the Taliban? Even the High Peace Council is a nominated body. In any case, the reconciliation talks were to take place between the Taliban and the Americans who do not represent any segment of the Afghan population.

Mr. Obama is a pragmatic leader. He was criticised for prematurely

announcing the date for the departure of American troops, but he was right in doing so. His main, and only concern, is with the lives of his troops. From his perspective, America has done more than its share to help the Afghan people achieve stability and prosperity. If the Afghan leaders and Afghanistans neighbours will not allow the country to remain peaceful, it cannot be the concern of America. If there is aprs nous, le deluge, certainly America and others cannot be held responsible. It is this decision of Obama that made Afghanistan a non-issue in the presidential election. The rest of the international community wants to fight the Taliban till the last American.

Re-election and more flexibility

Having won a second term gives more flexibility to Mr. Obama. He can decide how many, if any, troops he

should leave behind in Afghanistan in four or five camps or bases post-2014. (He did not leave any in Iraq.) The precise function of this force is not clear. Would they want to get involved in the armed unrest, even short of a full-fledged civil war, which might engulf the country following the next election? Would they be stationed to rescue the next President in case he comes under a commando attack? Will they go after the insurgents if the latter make gains in controlling more and more territory? Will they pursue the Taliban on Pakistani soil? Will they be in charge of the drone campaign which is likely to continue and even expand? Since the U.S. has decided to cut its losses and pull out, they might as well not leave any young men and women behind in harms way. Mr. Obama would not be the first President to do so.

The U.S. ought to ponder over what kind of Afghanistan it will leave behind after its withdrawal. As The NYT editorial points out, even most of its downsized objectives would not have been fulfilled. The Taliban will form part of the government at some stage. Al Qaeda, with whom the Taliban are in cahoots, is supposed to have been decimated but is alive and will probably start kicking post-2014. It is very much active, lethally so, in many other parts of the mainly Islamic world. Nevertheless, President Obama, keen as he is on the U.S. evacuating with dignity, might want to try to promote some kind of stability. The one avenue, which he has not explored so far, is to try and promote a regional pact among Afghanistan and its neighbours not to interfere or intervene in one anothers internal affairs.

Principle of staying out

The Bonn agreement of December 2001 recognised the crucial importance of this principle and called upon the United Nations, in an Annexure, to guarantee noninterference, etc in Afghanistans affairs. This provision, for inexplicable reasons, has not received the slightest attention from the international community, including the SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations. The gist of this principle was adequately incorporated in the declaration of the Istanbul conference last year, but not acted upon, in effect abandoned, subsequently. It is not too late to attempt to revive it. All that is needed is for the U.N. Secretary-General to appoint either a single person or a group of persons, all highly respected internationally, to talk to the regional parties to see whether they would agree to conclude a solemn undertaking not to interfere, etc. The Secretary-General would need the

backing of the Security Council which should be forthcoming since it will not cost anything to any country.

It has been argued, with some validity, that the mere signing of a declaration is meaningless without some teeth to enforce it. The teeth can be in the form of U.N. observers with the necessary mandate. The task of the observers will not be to use force to stop interference; that would not be practicable. Rather, it would be in the nature of a complaints mechanism. If any country suspects another of violating its obligations under the pact, it would lodge a complaint, with supporting evidence, with the observers. The country against whom the complaint has been filed must cooperate in the investigations; refusal to cooperate would be tantamount to admission of guilt. A country which refuses to be part of such a pact would also raise

suspicions about its intentions. This idea can be further refined during the course of consultations.

No idea, however impractical it may sound, should be abandoned without at least a serious consideration at the hands of those professing concern for Afghanistans stability.

(Chinmaya R. Gharekhan, a former Permanent Representative of India at the United Nations, is a commentator on international affairs.)

Reintegration and reconciliation have not worked in Americas war of necessity.

In his second term, the President should promote a regional non-

interference pact among Kabul and its neighbours. WASHINGTON, November 10, 2012

At State Department, expect new face but no big shift


In a world boiling over with political and social crises, Team Obama will have little time to sit back and savour its triumph in the U.S. elections. While there is little doubt that the President used his first term to successfully steer the country into a new, postBush paradigm, every burning policy issue from continuing instability in West Asia to Chinas relentless push for economic and political dominance, will call for a rapid but careful recalibration in the White Houses foreign policy calculus and a fresh approach where failure has been imminent.

An important, even critical, factor in this will be the choice of the next Secretary of State after Hillary Clinton who is planning her exit after clocking nearly a million air miles travelling to over 102 countries and laying the groundwork for President Obamas first-term thrust towards multilateralism, regional cooperation, United Nations-focused sanctions and interventions, and, above all, the move away from war.

Will her successor, determined, prove as nimble-footed to avoid in any single regional across the world?

yet to be focused and getting mired entanglement

Once he has put in place his new foreign policy team, the big shift in Mr. Obamas global game will come from the fact that re-election is no longer an issue.

This is not to say he can ignore the fact that American voters continued to place their faith in a Republicancontrolled House of Representatives, or that the popular vote was as much a win for Mr. Romney as it was for him. Paradigm-shifting foreign policy changes are unlikely. For example, a slight increase can be expected in backdoor diplomatic pressure on Israel, but the U.S. would be unlikely to back suggestions that the U.N. be the new platform for negotiations between the conflicted parties.

Similarly on Iran, Obama 2 may continue to remain unreceptive to arguments that a negotiated outcome on uranium enrichment such as the one that involved Turkey and Brazil may deliver success.

The one driving force behind American foreign policy over the next four years that will not change, however, is economics. There is wide support for the view that the loss of its position as the worlds economic superpower will constitute the greatest threat to the U.Ss national security. Mr. Obama can thus be expected to relentlessly keep his boot to the throat of nations that are perceived as lucrative markets for American investment and a source of job creation here.

India will lead that list of nations. Few eyebrows should be raised, then, when both soft diplomatic pressure and strident calls for greater market access in India accelerate over time. November 10, 2012

A reward for Mr. Naipaul

With the Mumbai Literary Festival recently honouring V.S. Naipaul for lifetime achievement, the ironies of rewarding Naipauls work have been resurrected. So have predictable arguments. Naipaul is a great writer. Writing has no room for politics. Great men are eccentric. Girish Karnad should have spoken about theatre, not Naipaul.

A continuum

Girish Karnad was absolutely right to speak up at the venue where Naipaul was honoured. Karnad has reminded us that for writers, all texts, literary debates and political questions form a continuum. As for propriety, why is it that great men like Naipaul are allowed departures from propriety, but not the great and not-so-great writers at home?

Karnad added that Indian writers, especially those writing in English, have not challenged Naipauls views. Like their counterparts in other spheres of middle class Indian life, many writers are wary of making a political statement, or taking on the great especially the great in London or New York in public. But to set the record straight: I am aware of at least three Indian writers in English who have responded to Naipauls statements in public. In a festival session at Neemrana in 2002, the Great Man threw darts at two of his fears: women and Muslims. He said women writers are banal; he finds them boring. In response, Shashi Deshpande said she found Naipauls preoccupation with the loss of an imaginary India boring.

Naipaul cut off Nayantara Sahgal as she spoke of post-colonialism, again complaining of banality. Ruchir Joshi

made a sharp, timely intervention. Naipaul was not just being rude; he felt Sahgal had not gone back far enough in identifying the colonisers of India. When did colonialism begin? he asked, implying that it began with the Muslims. This is exactly what Girish Karnad refers to when he speaks of the questionable assumption of a pristine Hindu past sullied by Muslim invaders.

Writers are not necessarily historians; but they are not precocious children with a knack either. Nor are they hermits. Any intelligent reader knows that the written work is informed by the writers take on history, politics, socio-economic contexts.

Two important questions emerge when we debate an Indian honour conferred on Naipaul. One is on the context in which Naipauls work is located. The other is about the books

and writers we choose to reward and what these choices say about us.

To revisit Naipauls view of the world, I went back to an essay I wrote when Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What I wrote then is relevant to the present debate. On receiving the Nobel in 2001, Naipaul paid tribute to England, *his+ home, and India, the home of *his+ ancestors. Trinidad, where he was born and where he grew up, did not merit a mention though it was home to admirable work such as The Mystic Masseur , Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas . But then Naipaul thinks Trinidad is unimportant, uncreative, cynical *with+ an indifference to virtue as well as vice.

In fact, Naipauls early novels responded to the painful contradictions in these societies struggling to create a coherent

narrative of their postcolonial lives. But the later work, particularly Naipauls considerable body of nonfiction, took his acute eye and graceful sentence elsewhere. This elsewhere, where mutinies abound (not dissent or movements) are chaotic halfworlds. All of them are, without exception, non-western countries. Many of them are yet to recover from their colonial legacies; many still grapple with chauvinist or opportunist rulers, appropriate successors to their colonial masters.

Naipaul places himself outside these struggling worlds. He dissects them fastidiously to arrive at deadly diagnoses. Trinidad is a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure. India is a decaying civilization, where the only hope lies in further, swift decay. Africa has no future. So, uncreative

Trinidad. Wounded India. Future-less Africa.

Caricatured societies

These caricatured societies, so dirty, so anarchic, so full of people lost as soon as they step out of their societies into one with more complex criteria, do serve one purpose. They serve as a perennial foil to the refined, cultivated European ethos. In an earlier time, Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness established this tradition of postulating the other world antithetical to the European one. A 20th-21st century heir to Conrads legacy, a brown heir, seems a cruel anachronism. Just as Conrads European travellers glide like phantoms in Africa, cut off from the comprehension of [their] surroundings, Naipaul glides nervously, unhappily, across the

prehistoric world from the Congo to Bombay.

In the West Indies of 1960, he discovers that the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies. In the Congo of 1965, Naipaul is accosted by native people camping in the ruins of civilization. In Naipauls Africa, the bush creeps back as he stands there.

India is equally threatening. It reduces him to facelessness in the crowd. Everyone in the crowd looks like him. What then makes him distinct? (Conrad echoes from the past: What thrilled you was the thought of their humanity like yours) In A Wounded Civilization , Naipaul writes, An enquiry about India has quickly to go beyond the political. It has to be

an inquiry about Indian attitudes; it has to be an inquiry about the civilization itself, as it is. And the verdict: No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.

By the time Naipaul wrote India: A Million Mutinies Now , he found some redeeming signs of change. He now sees that what *he+ hadnt understood in 1962, or had taken too much for granted, was the extent to which the country had been remade; and even the extent to which India had been restored to itself, after its own equivalent of the Dark Ages after the Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated vandalising of the North, the shifting empires, the wars, the 18th century anarchy The country is full of the signs of growth, all the signs of an Indian, and more

specifically, Hindu awakening. This Hindu awakening struck Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, and has struck other parts of the country since.

It is not surprising then that after terrorists attacked New York and Washington in 2001, Naipaul should describe Islam, (not terrorists of any or no religious persuasion), as calamitous; worse than colonialism much, much worse in fact. Was it an accident that Naipaul finally got his Nobel in the same year?

Small army of faithful

Then and now, a small army of the faithful anxiously explains to us how Naipauls work must be read. I wish we could assure these interlocutors that Naipauls transparent prose makes what he is saying clear to most readers, even if they are Indian; even

if they are women. Less dogmatic admirers have admitted that Naipauls writing and pronouncements often make them deeply uneasy. But writers, they say, must be judged by their writing alone.

How exactly do we do this? Separating what the writer says from her craft makes the work toothless. It is difficult to believe that this is what any writer intends. Why not acknowledge that the writer deals with ideas, with ways of looking at the world, and hopes to do it with skill? Though Naipaul has unkindly cast aspersions on Indian intellectual life, we can recall these axioms when debating the politics of rewarding literature.

If we choose to reward Naipaul for his lifetime achievement as a person of Indian origin, what does this say about us as readers and writers? It

may mean we cant find Indian writers worthy of reward. It may mean we are not confident enough to reward writers unless they are great men in the West. But rewarding Naipaul certainly means affirming, not just his great craft, but also his idea of India, and the world at large.

(Githa Hariharan is a writer.)

Honouring Sir Vidia for lifetime achievement means affirming not

just his great craft but also his idea

of India November 10, 2012

Shadow-boxing with drones and terrorism

A bad marriage, which both partners have no choice but to plod through

With little difference in the positions of President Obama and Mitt Romney towards AfPak in general and Pakistan in particular, there was never an expectation that the election, irrespective of the winner, would improve the course of the relations between the two countries. That much was clear from the last presidential debate on foreign policy when Mr. Romney essentially articulated the current U.S. policy towards Pakistan, only using different words.

Yet, Pakistan emerged as the only country to prefer the Republican candidate over Mr. Obama among the 21 countries surveyed for a poll conducted for BBC World Service. While 14 per cent of the respondents in Pakistan wanted to see a Romney

White House over the 11 per cent who wanted Mr. Obama, 75 per cent expressed no opinion, indicative of the widely held view that status quo would prevail whatever the result.

Though the two governments are working hard to put their blow hot and cold bilateral relationship back on track after it went into deep freeze for seven months following the 2010 NATO bombardment of a Pakistan Army outpost in Bajaur tribal agency killing 24 soldiers, they have failed to cap the anti-Americanism whipped up over the years. It maintained an upward trajectory right through the Obama years, and is still rising.

On Kashmir

For Pakistan, Mr. Obamas first stint was a series of disappointments starting from his reneging on the 2008

election promise of devoting serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in [Kashmir] to figure out a plausible approach. The subsequent years saw him shift to noninterference in Kashmir, billing it a bilateral matter.

If this was not disappointing enough for Pakistan, there was the hyphenation with Afghanistan in place of his original proposal to have a special envoy for Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It needled Islamabad even more because India had managed to work its way out of that formulation and decouple from the India-Pakistan prism through which the U.S. had previously crafted policies towards New Delhi.

Though the Indias dehyphenation from Pakistan had begun before Mr. Obama took charge, the appointment of a Special Representative for

Afghanistan and Pakistan currency to the AfPak coinage.

gave

Worst of all, in Pakistans view, was the U.S. push for India to assume the role of a regional power.

While all this is of interest to foreign policy wonks, on the streets Mr. Obama has become synonymous with drones and is the man who violated Pakistans sovereignty even further by sending in Navy Seals to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the heart of the country. The Obama years have seen drone attacks multiply, making it a major irritant in bilateral relations.

And, he is unlikely to budge unless Pakistan goes after terrorist havens in the tribal areas, especially North Waziristan now regarded by Washington as terror central.

Pakistan has for years warded off pressure to do more in North Waziristan, particularly against the Haqqani network which the U.S. holds responsible for many of the attacks inside Afghanistan. Now, with NATOs withdrawal from Afghanistan imminent, Islamabad is unlikely to shift policy and risk losing its influence in Kabul in the post-2014 scenario by antagonising the Afghan Taliban. As things stand, four more years for Mr. Obama could see more of the usual bickering that goes on in a bad marriage that neither can afford to walk out from at this juncture.

Islamabad will continue to have a blow-hot, blow-cold relationship with Washington

November 12, 2012

When hard times down a Penguin


Deep anguish and nostalgia, but ultimately there is a weary sense of dj vu: so, there goes another British cultural icon. No, not the BBC. Not yet, though with its licence fee frozen and the pressure to find alternative sources of income mounting nobody is betting on its future.

For now, the concern is over the loss of Penguin, Allen Lanes revolutionary paperback invention about which George Orwell said that they were such splendid value for six pence...that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them. It is not, perhaps, widely known that Penguin has a historic Indian connection which pre-dates Penguin (India); V.K. Krishna

Menon was the founding editor of its non-fiction imprint, Pelican, launched way back in 1937.

By this time next year, Penguin would have ceased to be an independent stand-alone imprint having merged with German-owned Random House as a junior partner. Under a deal, announced recently, Penguins current owners Pearson, who also publish The Financial Times , will have a minority stake in the merged company Penguin-Random House while Random Houses proprietors, Bertelsmann, will control 53 per cent.

The official spin is that the two imprints will continue to enjoy independence and the freedom to decide which books to publish and how best to publish them. But even those who understand the business logic behind the merger are not

convinced that Penguins identity will be protected.

Pure guff, is how one prominent critic dismissed the claim even as he acknowledged the pressure on the publishing industry to consolidate the market for printed books as it struggles to overcome increasing competition from digital books, notably Amazon which now sells 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books.

The fears

Fears that Penguin will be swallowed by its bigger partner may be exaggerated, but critics point out that to pretend that nothing will change and it will be business as usual is to miss the point that the aim of the merger is to achieve economies of scale by shedding jobs and streamlining (read cutting down)

editorial output. They reckon that Penguin, as a junior partner in the new company, is bound to lose its identity as invariably happens in an unequal union.

The myth is when you combine two great companies you get one even greater company. This will end up a complete takeover of Penguin. It isnt by chance that every Tesco looks the same, said Andrew Franklin of Profile Books, a leading British independent publishing house. Big publishers, he said, claimed to promote diversity and localism but thats not how it works.

Writers fear that the merged company, billed as the worlds largest consumer publisher with a 25 per cent share of the U.K. and U.S. markets, will reduce competition and result in a narrow range of books being published besides driving

down advances and royalties. There have been calls for competition authorities to look at the deal closely, given the size of the merger.

Commentary on Britain

But what will it mean to Penguin readers? After all, this is not the first time that a popular publisher has been poached. Corporate mergers and takeovers involving some of the biggest names in publishing Jonathan Cape, Secker & Warburg, Macmillan and, of course Random House itself, to name just a few have been going on for years with most readers barely noticing the change. So, why the fuss over Penguin?

But Penguin is different, according to Ian Jack, former editor of Granta .

No other imprint in the world has meant so much to its readers to the point where at one time, the penguin colophon was as big a recommendation as the authors name. It was the first serious attempt to introduce branded goods to the books trade, wrote Edward Young, the artist who drew the Penguin from life at London zoo, and it was a glorious success from the start...Penguin marked their owners out as progressives as well as cultural self-improvers, Mr. Jack commented in The Observer .

If a book was ever judged by its cover, then a Penguin cover was a winner from the moment it rolled off the printing presses. Will it ever be the same again?

But a more important question raised by Mr. Jack and others is: what does Penguins merger with Random House say about Britain?

The move was announced the same week that we were told that Scotland Yard, Metropolitan Polices historic Central London headquarters, was to be sold as part of a 500 million savings plan, and another of Londons tourist landmarks the 100-year-old Admiralty Arch on the Mall just yards from Buckingham Palace was sold to a Spanish investor for 60 million to build a luxury hotel. It is a sign of what the post-industrial decline has done to this once great imperial power that it is busy selling off some of its most precious assets from marquee names in car manufacturing and high street banks to retail stores and premier football clubs. According to the Governments own Office for National Statistics, 41 per cent of British

businesses are now owned by foreigners and, with no respite from the economic crisis in sight, more are waiting to be flogged to the highest bidder.

In England, England , Julian Barness brilliant farce on Britains future, a tourist theme park a replica of the old country in all its past glory goes on to become a thriving independent country while real Britain regresses into oblivion. Although Barness novel failed to win the Booker Prize for which it was shortlisted in 1998, his dystopian view could well yet prove prophetic given Britains current trajectory. With its status as a political and economic power in seemingly terminal decline, a Barnes-style theme park might be a good idea to preserve the memories of a Britain that didnt need a 500,000 global campaign to put the Great back into Great Britain.

The announcement of the publishers merger with Random House came the same week that Scotland Yards headquarters and the Admiralty Arch in London were sold off, a sign of what post-industrial decline has done to Great Britain November 12, 2012

The rise of Americas BRICS


If Barack Obamas election as Americas 44th President in 2008 was historic, as surely it was, with him becoming the nations first black head of state, his re-election marks an epochal transition in the political and electoral landscape of the United States. Demography indeed became destiny on November 6, 2012. Americas receding white electoral

majority continued giving way to a new majority-minority ascendance. The historical significance of this transition and its implications for the future of America and the world should not be underestimated.

White nation

The founding fathers on up to even The Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln were so bent on the vision of America as a white nation that uppermost on the agenda of solving the race problem was: free the slaves and ship them back to Africa (which inspired Liberias founding, burdening the Mano River region of West Africa with an Americo-Liberian settler problem); and exterminate as many native Amerindians as possible. Meanwhile, the fledgling American political system became enthralled to a southern slavocracy, the legacy of

which is only now being overcome through the Obama elections of 2008 and 2012.

Until now, the southern U.S. OlDixie has been the tail wagging the dog of American politics. No longer. What was once a solid South of racially-based, Christian fundamentalist-grounded, and promilitarist reaction has eroded amid a major demographic transition that has been under way in the U.S. for decades beginning with the outlawing of racial segregationist Jim Crow in the 1960s. This happened as a result of a civil rights/black power movement that ushered in an era of national socio-racial and class upheavals and wrought profound changes in the American body politic.

President Obamas ascendant blackHispanic-Asian rainbow coalition joined by women, younger age

cohorts and university educated and professional classes is, in many respects, a legacy of the1960s-70s black movement (black activism having catalysed other American social movements, and the rise of identity politics: womens liberation, anti-war protest, counter-cultural assertion). But this legacy has begun making itself felt in electoral terms only after an extremely costly but unavoidable interregnum of white backlash political polarisation.

The partisan political identity reversals of the two-party system were a dramatic outcome of President Lyndon Johnsons decision to commit the Democratic Party to regional political suicide in dismantling the Souths racial dictatorship. The Republican party of black emancipation from slavery grabbed the Dixiecrat mantle from Democrats

who became the party of civil rights and black political empowerment!

In this political transfiguration, other things happened. As the northern Catholic-southern Dixiecrat alliance underpinning Franklin Roosevelts New Deal crumbled, Johnson ceded the South to a Republican party that was increasingly beating Democrats to the anti-communist punch while assuming the ideological mantle of law and order. This was in the form of white backlash resistance to urban black protest and political assertion, counter-cultural New Leftism and perceived liberal elitism. Republicans discovered a southern strategy to victory in presidential elections, reinforced by a power shift within the GOP from Northeast-Midwestern Lincoln-Rockefeller Republicans to new elites hailing from the southwest in a sunbelt rim extending from Orange County in southern California

through Texas all the way to the Florida panhandle with its influx of anti-Castro Cubans.

The presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and those of Bush the elder and Bush the younger reflected this GOP electoral lock on the White House. Democrats had to adapt to this new sunbelt regionalism in the southern fried liberal presidencies of Jimmy Carter (Georgia) and Bill Clinton (Arkansas). Otherwise, the other part of Johnsons legacy was the Democratic Party becoming the home of the politicisation of AfricanAmerican ethnicity. This regionally polarised northern politics as whites fled the cities for the suburbs, taking their tax bases with them.

Republicans were able to successfully play a racial politics of isolating the black electorate while mobilising a conservative majoritarian white

coalition. That is, until converging demographic forces of black migration back to the South (from where blacks had fled during the racist terror at the turn of the 19th-20th century) and Latino-Hispanic immigration gained momentum. This involved Puerto Ricans moving into the Northeast and Midwest interacting with Mexican immigration into the southwest and the Rocky Mountain west.

Altering social landscape

All combined, the social landscape upon which electoral strategies are built began to alter. This occurred to a point where Democratic strategists began taking another look at the South as a potentially competitive region that need not be conceded to the GOP; this was especially the case in the upper South of the Mid-Atlantic focusing on detaching Virginia (seat of the old Confederacy of Jefferson

Davis) and North Carolina from the Bible Belt of deep southern states: Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Overall, the white American population, in a mirror image of its European counterpart, is both ageing and shrinking. This is really what amounts to notions of the decline of the west amid the rise of the rest. The last census found that nonHispanic whites accounted for 49.6 per cent of all births in the U.S. while minorities blacks, Hispanics, Asians and those of mixed race accounted for 50.4 per cent of all births. This represented a majority for the first time in the countrys history. According to the U.S. Census, in the first decade of the new millennium, the Asian-American population rose 43.3 per cent, the African-American population 12.3 per cent, the Latino

community 43 per cent and the white population just 5.7 per cent.

In electoral terms, this demographic transition is accelerating exponentially with each national election. Thus, according to leading pundit Jonathan Chait, every year, the non-white proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 per cent, a huge amount in a closely divided country.

New majority-minority ascendancy

Combined with the emergence of women and the most universityeducated of all races, the new majority-minority ascendancy within the electorate underpins increasingly prophetic projections of a Democratic Party comeback in what has now

become the liberal guide to strategy formulation: The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (2002).

A take-off on The Emerging Republican Majority by one-time Republican strategist Kevin Phillips (1969) upon which Richard Nixons southern strategy had been based, Judis and Teixeira were a bit ahead of their time given the defeat of Senator John Kerrys challenge to George W. Bush in 2004. Even then, it was apparent that the white electoral base upon which the GOP was banking its fortunes was an eroding one. Yet, Mr. Obama, with his Muslim moniker, seemed an unlikely young-gifted-andblack in the lyrics of the late great jazz soloist Nina Simone prince of prospects to suddenly shoot into the spotlight of Democratic political imagination as the partys new lease of life against what seemed an

interminable right-wing ascendancy in American politics.

What is particularly intriguing about Mr. Obama is that, with his focus on community building in pursuing nation-building at home, he transcends the African-American integrationist-nationalist divide that always retarded black political potential. Yet the black electorate has emerged as his nationalist firewall at the core of the rainbow coalition he has constructed in reconfiguring the American electoral landscape. As a harbinger of things to come, this is where the new majority-minority underpinnings of the Obama presidency bear close watching as a sort of an American BRICS of emerging non-white minorities setting what, over time, will be a new American agenda. For, herein resides the potential for a much less jingoistic

and militarist constituency.

foreign

policy

After all, there are already burgeoning kinship ties binding this new American demographic with BRICS and other emerging economies in the world at large. As White America fades into the sunset, metaphorically, a convergence of the American BRICS within with the emerging BRICS without may hold the keys to the future global order.

(Francis Kornegay is senior fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Johannesburg, South Africa and alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and editor of the forthcoming volume: Laying the BRICS of a New Global Order.)

With the white population shrinking,

the black-Hispanic-Asian coalition

that powered Obamas victory has

the potential to set a new, more

progressive American agenda November 12, 2012

Home-grown western terrorists are new threat to India


The French Interior Ministry has released a report pointing to massive intelligence failures in the handling of Mohamed Merah, the young Pakistani-trained terrorist from Toulouse, south-western France, who killed seven people including three Jewish children last March and who,

according to his conversations with the police, planned to attack the Indian Embassy in Paris. Vaiju Naravane talks to Mathieu Guidre , Professor of Islamic Studies and Culture at the University of Toulouse. Mr. Guidre is also the author of The New Terrorists (in French) and The Historical Dictionary of Islamic Fundamentalism (Scarecrow 2012). He led the Strategic Information Centre at the French Defence Ministry from 2003 to 2007. Excerpts.

According to you there appears to have been a shift in the type of persons attracted by terrorist activity. If Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 attackers were all well-educated, sophisticated young men, the new terrorists come from deprived and often criminal backgrounds. Could you explore that thesis?

The emergence of new terrorists can be traced to the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaeda, when the ideologues of al-Qaeda along with the leaders of some radical Pakistani Islamic movements, reflected on a new strategy that could keep them active, relevant and at the centre of the international scene. They viewed the Arab Spring as a development that could marginalise them and they argued that the best way to remain at the forefront of the Islamic and world stages was to promote what they called global proxy terrorism as against the global terrorism they had practised earlier. Simply put, this means that organisations such as theirs that are unable to carry out attacks far away from home territory use outsiders to perpetrate such attacks for them. These individuals are not an integral part of such terrorist outfits (they could be monitored and traced back to the parent body and

therefore pose a risk) but they are given designated targets so that the terrorist organisation can then claim responsibility for the attacks. So the new trend is towards global proxy terrorism of implanted urban terrorists who are remote-controlled by distant terrorist outfits, mostly in the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan or between Pakistan and India on the Kashmir front. The other aspect of this trend is that many of these home-grown terrorists come from deprived backgrounds and have a history of early criminal activity. So the violence linked to criminal activity is then converted into terrorist activity.

Coming to the recent arrest of terrorists in France, were you surprised that these cells were located in cities as far flung as Strasbourg in the north east, Cannes in the south, Toulouse in the south west or the

Paris region in northern France? Do you find this disquieting?

This is not a new phenomenon at all. The United States has experienced similar developments since 2009 with terrorists there having similar profiles. You might recall the cases of Nidal Hassan, Shazad from Pakistan and most recently the Bangladeshi terrorist Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis arrested in the U.S. All these persons were remote-controlled by handlers in Asian countries. What is new in France is the shift from criminal activities to terrorist activities. Also new is French citizens moving against targets in France (whether French or otherwise), for the benefit of terrorist organisations located outside France.

How does someone who is reasonably low on the social scale, a petty delinquent or a criminal get

transformed into a terrorist? What is the radicalisation process? What, for example, happened to Mohamed Merah?

In this process we should distinguish between the triggers and the motives. These are two different things. The trigger is mostly an international geopolitical event such as a drone attack in Pakistan or Israeli acts in Gaza or French action in Mali or elsewhere. This is the trigger that makes a person shift from being a normal person or a delinquent or criminal to being a terrorist.

As for the motives, they are both psychological and ideological. The psychological motive is linked to the notion of revenge for something or someone. The dynamics of revenge is either for oneself or for lost family members or acts against the Umma.

There is a feeling of resentment, of being wronged.

The ideological motives are articulated against the concept of hegemony. This is based on the terrorists perception that there is a hegemonic power or state that is keeping them down and in a state of subjection India versus Pakistan, U.S. towards Egypt, France towards Algeria. The hegemonic power in their minds can change. Until 9/11 it was almost always the U.S.

If one looks at the new terrorists such as Mohamed Merah and their profile, these are people who come from deprived backgrounds, with low schooling, a history of delinquency and living on the margins of society. Do they reason in terms of intellectual concepts such as hegemonic power or do they simply have a grouse against

society, which finds its outlet in terrorism?

I do not agree with the notion of social determinism as an explanation for terrorism. Many studies, including my own, show that many very poor and marginalised people, whether in France, India, the U.S. or elsewhere, have not shifted to terrorism. Social determinism can be used as an alibi, an excuse for terrorism but its not convincing as an argument. If this was true, it would lead millions of people to radicalism and that has not happened. I also do not agree that these people are intellectually poor, incapable of conceptualising. Police transcripts in the case of Merah show us that although he was marginal, and poorly educated, his level of understanding was very sophisticated. People might not have degrees or formal education, but they read a lot, especially on the internet and the web

plays a major role in how the radicalisation process takes place.

How worried are you about this phenomenon in France? How big is it? After all, France with some five million Muslims has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

In France the problem is probably huge. Its a new phenomenon, we have little knowledge of it and it is growing because the geopolitical environment is not under control. By that I mean that on the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea you have countries like Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya where weak, pro-Islamic governments have come to power after the Arab Spring. They are no longer in control of society and more importantly, they are not in control over the internet propaganda machine. This uncontrolled terrorist, Islamic fundamentalist internet

propaganda is spreading across the world and given the proximity between the two banks of the Mediterranean, this propaganda has begun infecting French society. That is why the influence of this trend is growing and could lead to more radicalisation in the near future.

Given the fact that Mohamed Merah told the police he had wanted to target the Indian embassy, do you think that India could become a target in France or is already a target because of the Pakistan-Afghanistan link? Merah visited both these countries and received terrorist training there.

The security services know that India is already a target here just as it is a target in the U.S. because of the conflict between Pakistan and India on Kashmir. This is not new. What is new is that Indian interests in the

West are being targeted by western people. In the past the perpetrators were either Pakistani/Afghan or Bangladeshi. Now the problem is that certain westerners are joining hands with them to target Indian interests in the West.

How would you describe the cooperation on counterterrorism between India and France? Are the Indians aware of this new emerging threat?

I think the Indian government is not fully aware of the new threat. It knows that Indian interests abroad are targeted by Pakistani services and people but they are not fully aware of the kind of threat posed by western forces here home-grown terrorism in the West. The cooperation on counterterrorism is good. Its really good.

November 13, 2012

Lets not be overoptimistic about Burma


In an interview to Nirupama Subramanian , Myanmars icon of democracy says that she looks forward to rebuilding democratic ties between the two countries. She arrives in India today on her first visit after almost five decades to the country where she spent her formative years. The interview took place in Myanmars capital Nay Pyi Taw on October 31.

In a few days time, you will be going to India, where you grew up, went to school, college. Its going to be 50 years since you were last there. What are your expectations from this visit, at a personal level, and for Myanmar?

On a personal level, Id like to see my old friends again, and, just to talk with them, just to be with them. And Id like to see the old places, the places where I spent time as a teenager; Lady Shri Ram College, see how its doing thats on a personal level. On a political level, I would like to establish closer relations between the peoples of our countries. I feel that perhaps in recent years weve grown apart as peoples, because India took a road which is different from ours, or rather we changed route. At one time both of us were dedicated democracies and we were close together, on the ideological front as well as in other ways. Id like to see a closer relationship between our two peoples, because Ive always felt we had a special relationship India and Burma because of our colonial history, and because of the fact that the leaders of our independence movement were so close to one another.

Did it surprise you that India took a different path?

Well, I have to tell you that nothing surprises me anymore; Ive come across so many twists and turns of fate. I dont think anything will surprise me anymore. Pleased, displeased, happy, unhappy maybe. But surprise, no.

Youve often said Gandhi and Nehru are your greatest inspirations after your father. In your own political battle of the last two decades, were you disappointed that the land of Gandhi and Nehru moved away from you?

Disappointed? Im trying to work out whether Im still capable of disappointment. Yes, to a certain

degree, I was disappointed. But on the other hand, the fact that ones not surprised means that ones disappointment was mitigated. In a sense what it means [is] that you had worked out in your calculations that this was a possibility. Of course, one would rather that it had not been like that. One works out what the possibilities are and of course one would prefer that possibility which is most after ones heart, but that doesnt always happen. And I think, sometimes I think rather than disappointment, sad is the word I would use because I have a personal attachment to India through my friends as well as because of the friendship that existed between my father and Jawaharlal Nehru, because of the closeness that existed between the countries. So rather than disappointed, I was sad that it had to be like that.

How do you expect the political relationship between yourself and India to be now?

I think this depends a lot on how far we can go towards democracy because as we progress towards democracy, I think it would be easier for official relations between the two countries to be more clear-cut. I can understand that India had some problems choosing between the opposition and the government that was in power and that happens very often in international relations. But if Burma is established as a democracy as I wish it to be, that would mitigate problems of not inconsistency deciding between the two sides.

In what specific ways can India help Myanmar at this stage of its political transition?

Its to be able to take a good hard look at what is really happening. Not to be over-optimistic, at the same time to be encouraging of what needs to be encouraged; because I think too much optimism doesnt help because then you ignore what is going wrong, and if you ignore what is not right, then from not right it becomes wrong. And from wrong, it gets worse. So I think good friends sometimes have to be tough. And say this is not on.

Can you be a little more specific?

For example, at the moment of course everybody is mainly interested in Burma because of its investment policies. I think we have to face this fairly and squarely. But investment has to be done in the right way. And also we have to keep in mind that we are just at the beginning of the road to democracy, and as I keep saying, its a road we have to build for

ourselves. Its not there ready and waiting. The Constitution that was adopted in 2008 was not in any way a smooth road to democracy. And we have to do all that building ourselves, and I think this needs to be recognised by India and by the rest of the world that we are not on the smooth road to democracy. We still have to be given the chance to build the road to democracy.

So if there is one message that you would want to give to Indian investors, what would you tell them?

I would like to say, of course we are interested in basics such as job creation, on the job training. But I would like India to focus attention on strengthening local government. We are a union made up of many ethnic nationalities, and I would like wouldbe investors to focus on how to bring us closer together as a union. But at

the same time, to be fully aware of the fact that development is no substitute for democracy. And that the aspirations of our ethnic nationalities go beyond mere development.

There is a tendency to project India and China as competing for influence in Burma? How do you view this triangle?

Its natural that people should see it that way. Theres some truth to it. After all, these are the two giants and both happen to be our very close neighbours. But if you look back, we can take heart from the fact that Burma always retained good relations with both countries after independence, even when China was rigidly Communist and India a working democracy. And we ourselves were a democracy. And in spite of that we managed to maintain good relations

with both countries. And this is something that we will always have to try to do. I always say that you cant move away from your neighbours. You may divorce a spouse, but you cant move away from your neighbouring country. So its very important that you maintain good relations. And again, I think, its people to people relationships which are most important. Its not government to government. Governments come and governments go. But the peoples of the countries, they remain. And if we manage to establish genuine friendship between our peoples, then the future will be good for us. Thats not impossible.

You spoke about not being overly optimistic, and how the 2008 Constitution was not a smooth road to democracy? What remains to be done in that respect, what milestones

would you like to see covered, and in what time frame?

Well, there are so many things to it, but roughly speaking the 2008 Constitution gives too much power to the military. The military may take over the powers of government if they think its necessary; and of course, 25 per cent of all the assemblies, both at the national and regional level, are made up of military nominees, unelected. It doesnt worry me unduly, because it gives us an opportunity to engage with members of the military; but of course, it is hardly what you would call a democratic way of going about it. And then, the regional governments do not actually have real power. Its still a very centralised system and such a centralised system is not going to promote democratic values, but more important than that, its not going to promote ethnic harmony.

Would you like to see all this change before the 2015 election, is that a time frame that you are looking at?

I think some of the most important sections will have to be amended before 2015, if 2015 is going to establish us firmly on the road to democracy.

Would you also aim to change the provision in the Constitution that bars you from running for President?

Yes, not because it bars me from running for the office of President, but *because+ I think its not right that any Constitution should have been framed with one person in mind.

Do you want to be President of Myanmar?

I would like my party to win because it has the people behind it, and in that respect, Id be prepared to take over the position of President. Not so much because I want to be President of a country but because I want the President of the country to be elected through the will of the people.

You are saying you dont want power for powers sake

Oh we need power for the sake of making change. Let us not be pusillanimous about it. If we want to bring about the kind of changes we want, we need power, not power for the sake of power, but power for the opportunity of bringing about the changes we would like to bring about.

In the last few days, theres been concern internationally and in Myanmar that the incidents in the Rakhine region between the Buddhists and the Rohingyas may cause a setback to the process of reforms, and also theres the other fear that it could snowball into a security threat for the entire region if it leads to the radicalisation of the people there. Do you share these worries? Are you concerned? You havent said much about it

Of course we are concerned. I think in many ways the situation has been mishandled. For years I have been insisting, and the National League for Democracy also, that we have to do something about the porous border with Bangladesh because it is going to lead some day or the other to grave problems. But nobody, of course, paid attention because the problems were not there yet. Also we have

emphasised the need for law and order, the rule of law. And again, the perception was these were communal problems.

I emphasise rule of law, one has to emphasise rule of law because communal differences are not settled overnight. In fact, they often take years to sort out. In the meantime, if they had concentrated on rule of law, they could have prevented violence and human rights violations breaking out, and that would at least have kept tensions under control. And until tensions are under control, how can we try to bring about communal harmony? You cant. When people are committing arson, rape and murder, you can hardly ask them to sit together and talk, sort out their differences. Its not practical. So we have to make sure these kind of troubles should not erupt in the first

place, which is why I emphasise the rule of law.

There were those who were not pleased, because they wanted me to condemn one community or the other. Both communities have suffered human rights violations, and have also violated human rights. And human rights have been grossly mishandled in the Rakhine by the government for many decades.

What do you see as the long-term solution to the problem?

First I think we will have to put law and order in place. I hate to use the expression law and order because when the military took over in 1988, they called themselves the State Law and Order Restoration Council; so law and order is an expression we approach with great caution. We

would rather say rule of law, rule of justice that well have to establish peace and security.

How difficult has it been for you to make the transition from being a worldwide hero and icon of democracy and freedom to a politician who has to make compromises?

Im glad you asked this question. I find it surprising because Ive always been a politician. People talk as though I were sort of an icon or on a pedestal, but they seem to forget that throughout, my party and I have been criticised of course, reviled by the military government but criticised even by other organisations, by some countries, because we were, they said, not prepared to compromise. We were always prepared to compromise, and weve always offered to compromise all along the

line. And Im surprised when people say to me that now Ive got to be a politician. I want to ask them what do you think Ive been all these years.

Youve always talked about being true to principles, does it bother you that in the everyday practice of politics you may have to forsake principles for compromise?

Weve never had to forsake principles. Theres no need to forsake principles for compromise, especially in my case because our principles are not rigid. Our principles are very basic principles of, if you like, human and political decency. Weve always been prepared to compromise. Weve never stood on our pride, as it were, or on our vanity. Of course, Ive always said negotiations mean give and take. Give and take means you give sometimes, and they give sometimes. And there are times when you have to give,

times when you take. You cant insist on being the taker all the time. And weve always said this. Actually, the truth is that the world has woken up to our cause only very recently, in general. Theyve been aware of what we were doing, but not really alert to what we were doing, or what our principles were, or what our stand was. Very, very few people know, the times weve tried to compromise with the military regime, or if they know about it, theyve forgotten about it.

Do you think the military is completely on board this process? When you say dont be overly optimistic, do you fear that it hangs by the reformmindedness of one individual, President Thein Sein?

In fact, the President is quite apart from the military. The military is the military, and the executive is the executive. This is what I mean by

saying that the Constitution is hardly democratic. So until we know the military is solidly behind the reform process, because the President certainly does not represent the military, then we cant say this is irreversible.

What is the test of that, for you to believe that it is irreversible?

I think the test would be their preparedness to consider changing the sections in the Constitution that are not democratic.

How much credit would you give to President Thein Sein for his role in this whole process?

I think he needs to be given credit, but I do not think hes the only one who brought it about.

Is it Burma or Myanmar?

Well, I think its up to you. Ill explain why I use Burma. Burma was known as Burma since independence. Suddenly, after the military regime took over in 1988, one day, just like that, out of the blue, without so much as a by your leave from the people, they announced that Burma was going to be known as Myanmar in English from now on officially, and it would be Myanmar at the U.N. and so on. And the reason they gave is this, that Myanmar referred to all the peoples of this country whereas Burma, first of all, is a colonial name; and secondly, it had only to do with the ethnic Burmese.

To begin with, I object to a countrys name being changed without reference to the will of the people,

without so much as the courtesy to ask the people what they might think of it. That of course is the sort of the thing only dictatorships do. So I object it to it on those grounds. And then secondly, its not true that Myanmar means all the ethnic peoples of Burma. I think its just the literary name for Burma, which is the ethnic Burmese [usage]. And thirdly, this business of colonial name, that it is a name imposed by the colonial power, I think that is the kind of reason which is based on xenophobia rooted in lack of self-confidence. Look at India, look at China, look at Japan. The biggest most powerful nations in Asia: none of the names are native to them. And look at Indonesia, look at the Philippines. So I think this is petty and narrow-minded. And some say it was because of astrological calculations, and that of course puts my back up entirely.

There were those who wanted me to condemn one community or the other [for the violence in Rakhine]. Both communities have suffered human rights violations, and have also violated human rights. And human rights have been grossly mishandled in the Rakhine by the government for many decades.

India and the rest of the world need to understand that Myanmar is just at the beginning of the road to democracy, and that its present Constitution does not make the road smooth, says Aung San Suu Kyi November 13, 2012

Controlling the auditor

Sometimes, what separates the seemingly innocuous from the sinister is the context. At another time and in another situation, Minister of State in the Prime Ministers Office V. Narayanasamy could have gotten away with his statement that the Central government was considering making the Comptroller and Auditor General a multimember body. After all, the Centre is sitting on a report by the committee headed by former CAG V.K. Shunglu, which went into the charges of corruption in the conduct of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, recommending such a course of action. But not now, not when the government has been at the receiving end of a series of damning reports by the CAG on 2G spectrum, the Commonwealth Games and coal allocations. After his remark stirred up a national controversy, the Minister did make a feeble effort to distance himself from the news report, saying he was misquoted and that he had

not specifically replied to any question on the constitution of the CAG. But, by then, he had already set off alarm bells in the ranks of the Opposition, and among anti-corruption activists and the rest of the civil society. Not surprisingly, almost everyone smelt a conspiracy to undermine the independent functioning of the CAG, and interpreted the move as directed at the incumbent, Vinod Rai, whose term is not due to end before 2014.

Whether or not Mr. Narayanasamy intended his remarks as a trial balloon to gauge public opinion, the hostile reaction he has provoked should serve as adequate warning to the government against pushing ahead with any such radical restructuring of the supreme audit institution of India. Indeed, any change in the nature and structure of the CAG is unwarranted in the current context. Whether or not a multimember body is better than a

single-member body is open to debate, and any change should be preceded by wide-ranging consultations. An isolated recommendation in one of the reports of a committee is surely no reason to bring about a change that could have far-reaching implications for the CAG. Nothing in the functioning of the current CAG calls for such radical reconstitution. Instead, the government would do well to strengthen Indias premier audit body, allowing it to function with greater autonomy and freedom and with an updated mandate that unambiguously covers public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the use of public monies by non-governmental organisations. If at all there is a case for any change, it is in making the appointment of the CAG more transparent, free from any sort of political considerations. In all else, the government must stay its hand. November 13, 2012

The commanding heights of Nehru


The most admired human being on the planet may be a one-time boxer named Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. To spend three decades in prison fighting racial oppression, and then guide and oversee the peaceful transition to a multiracial democracy, surely ranks as the greatest personal achievement since the end of the Second World War.

For the capaciousness of his vision and the generosity of his spirit, Nelson Mandela has sometimes been compared to Mahatma Gandhi. Like Gandhi, Mandela is both a reconciling figure and a universal figure, admired across the social spectrum in his own land and in other lands too. There are also odd personal details that bind them: Mandela was a friend of

Gandhis second son Manilal, Mandela and Gandhi were both lawyers, Mandela and Gandhi both lived in Johannesburg, Mandela and Gandhi were both incarcerated in that citys Fort Prison. This prison now houses South Africas Constitutional Court, on whose premises one can find permanent exhibits devoted to the life and example of Mandela and of Gandhi.

Appealing and impressive

Mandelas comrade Ahmad Kathrada, his fellow prisoner in Robben Island, once asked why he admired Gandhi. Mandela answered: But Nehru was my hero. To his biographer Anthony Sampson, Mandela explained his preference as follows: When a Maharaja tried to stop him he [Nehru] would push him aside. He was that type of man, and we liked him because his conduct indicated how we

should treat our own oppressors. Whereas Gandhi had a spirit of steel, but nevertheless it was shown in a very gentle and smooth way, and he would rather suffer in humility than retaliate.

In the 1940s, Mandela closely read Jawaharlal Nehrus books, including his autobiography. His speeches often quoted from Nehrus writings. A phrase that particularly resonated was there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, used by Mandela in his first major political speech, made in September 1953. Decades later, the phrase found its way into Mandelas autobiography, whose Nehruvian title is Long Walk to Freedom .

In 1980, Nelson Mandela was given the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding. Since Mandela was in prison, his comrade Oliver Tambo who had left South

Africa to canvass support overseas, while travelling on an Indian passport came to New Delhi to accept the award on his behalf. Nelson Mandelas captors may wish to ponder the fact, remarked Tambo in his speech, that Jawaharlal Nehru, who was no stranger to imprisonment and was in no way destroyed by it, served the world community, including the British, far better as a free man than as a political prisoner. Nelson Mandelas 18 years imprisonment has in no way destroyed him, and will not.

Jawaharlal Nehru appealed to Mandela and Tambo on account of his political views. As a socialist and modernist, Nehrus ideas were, to these South African radicals, more congenial than Gandhis. But there was also a practical reason for their appreciation; the fact that, as Prime Minister of India, Nehru worked

tirelessly to arraign the apartheid regime in the court of world opinion. Thus, as Tambo noted in his speech in New Delhi in 1980, if Mahatma Gandhi started and fought his heroic struggle in South Africa and India, Jawaharlal Nehru was to continue it in Asia, Africa and internationally. In 1946, India broke trade relations with South Africa the first country to do so. Speaking at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru declared: There is nothing more terrible than the infinite tragedy of Africa in the past few hundred years.

Shortly after the Bandung Conference, Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union. When he spoke at Moscow University, in the audience was a young law student named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. Decades later, Gorbachev recalled the impact Nehrus speech made on him.

Obviously, we *students+ were still very far from understanding the principles of democracy, he wrote in his memoirs: Yet, the simplified black-and-white picture of the world as presented by our propaganda was even then considered rather sceptically by the students. Jawaharlal Nehrus visit to Moscow in June 1955 was an unexpected stimulus for me in this respect. This amazing man, his noble bearing, keen eyes and warm and disarming smile, made a deep impression on me.

Thirty years after hearing Nehru speak in Moscow, Gorbachev helped bring about a peaceful end to the Cold War while permitting a transition to democracy in Eastern Europe. Unlike Soviet rulers in 1956, 1968 and 1979, he did not send troops into Soviet satellites whose people wanted an end to Stalinist one-party regimes. It appears the early exposure to

Jawaharlal Nehru played at least some part in the reformist and reconciling politics of the mature Gorbachev.

I quote these appreciations for three reasons: because they are littleknown, because Mandela and Gorbachev are both considerable figures, and because their admiration runs counter to the widespread disapprobation of Nehru among large sections of Indias youth, middle-class, and intelligentsia.

Turning anti-Nehruvian

Greatly admired within India during his lifetime, Nehru witnessed a precipitous fall in his reputation after his death. This accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, when his ideas on the economy, on foreign affairs, and on social harmony all came under sharp attack. There was a vigorous

campaign to free entrepreneurs from all forms of state control and regulation; a major, countrywide movement to redefine Indian secularism by making it more Hindu in theory and practice; and a clamour from the media and business elite to abandon Indias non-alignment in favour of an ever closer relationship with the United States.

India has experimented now with 20 years of anti-Nehruvian policies in economics, social affairs, and foreign policy. These radical shifts have shown mixed results. Creative capitalism is being increasingly subordinated to crony capitalism; aggressive Hindutva has led to horrific riots and the loss of many lives; and the United States has not shown itself to be as willing to accommodate Indias interests as our votaries of a special relationship had hoped.

His ideas remain relevant

Among reflective Indians, there is a sense that these decades of Nehrubashing have been somewhat counterproductive. It is true that Nehru was excessively suspicious of entrepreneurs, yet some form of state regulation is still required in a complex and unequal society. His ideas of religious and linguistic pluralism remain entirely relevant, or else India would become a Hindu Pakistan. And it suits Indias interests to have good relations with all major powers China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States rather than hitch its wagon to the U.S. alone.

Nehrus respect for democratic procedure, his inclusive social vision, and his independent foreign policy all remain relevant. Other aspects of his legacy are more problematic: these

include his neglect of primary education, his lack of interest in military matters, and his scepticism of political decentralisation. However, a balanced appreciation of Nehrus legacy its positive and its negative aspects is inhibited by the fact that the ruling Congress Party is controlled so closely by individuals related to him and who claim to speak in his name.

In a recent interview to The Hindu , Nayantara Sahgal pointed out that it was Indira Gandhi who created the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, not her father. This is absolutely true. In a book published in 1960, the editor Frank Moraes (by that time a sharp critic of the Prime Minister) wrote that there is no question of Nehrus attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career. When Nehru died in 1964, another bitter critic, D.F. Karaka, nonetheless praised his

resolve not to indicate any preference with regard to his successor. This, [Nehru] maintained, was the privilege of those who were left behind. He himself was not concerned with that issue.

Living outside India, insulated in their daily lives from the consequences of the deeds or misdeeds of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, and Rahul Gandhi, both Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev could appreciate the sagacity and moral depth of Nehrus political vision. We who live in India are however inhibited from doing so by the unfortunate accident whereby control of our most powerful political party has passed on to Nehrus descendants.

(Ramachandra Guhas new book, Patriots and Partisans , has just been

published by Penguin/Allen Lane. Email: ramachandraguha@yahoo.in )

The deeds and misdeeds of his descendants prevent many in India from fully appreciating the political vision of

the countrys first Prime Minister November 14, 2012

Primal emotions drive political affiliations


Just one look at the dejection on the faces of Romney supporters or the jubilation of Obama supporters on election night should tell you that politics is first and foremost a very emotional affair.

Ann Romney was crying while her husband delivered his terse concession speech, not because a majority of Americans voted against his economic policy, but because of the personal and highly public rejection of Mitt Romney as their next President.

Nor were President Barack Obamas supporters ecstatic because his health care policy would not be overturned. Rather, both camps were in the grip of powerful emotions akin to the passion of spectators rooting for their team at a sporting event.

Oh, yes, Democrats will wax passionately about social justice and income inequality, and Republicans will carry on about the pernicious nature of big government and the virtues of individual achievement.

But political affiliation is not driven by ideas alone. Most people do not choose a political party by carefully analysing its policies or even its track record for competence. Instead, some social scientists argue that people select their political party in early adulthood the way they choose their friends or social groups: They go for the party that has people who resemble themselves. Once youve selected your party, you are likely to retrofit your beliefs and philosophy to align with it. In this sense, political parties are like tribes; membership in the tribe shapes your values and powerfully influences your allegiance to the group.

So strong is the social and emotional bond among members of a political tribe that they are likely to remain loyal to their party even when they give it low marks for performance. Yankees fans dont jump ship when

their team loses any more than Republicans switch parties when they lose an election.

Research has shown that when a team wins an athletic contest, fans the next day speak about how we won, and feel generally more optimistic, stronger and self-confident. Conversely, the losing side feels depressed, defeated and angry.

Interestingly, some studies found that testosterone levels rose in a group of male fans whose team went on to win and fell in fans whose team was defeated. Testosterone is well known to elevate both mood and aggression. Thus, winning or losing doesnt just change your mood; it changes your physiology and brain function.

Political defeat unleashes similar painful emotions, and there is some

preliminary evidence that it has biological consequences as well. For example, a study in 2009 found that during the 2008 presidential election, a group of McCain voters had an increase in the stress hormone cortisol after the announcement that Barack Obama had won, while those who had voted for Mr. Obama had no significant change in their cortisol levels. Cortisol is secreted by the body in response to acute and chronic stress. The clear implication of the study was that political defeat is a biologically stressful experience.

Not just that, but political contests have an element of thrill and expectation that is a bit like gambling. Intrade, for example, gave real-time market predictions about the probability of winning for each presidential candidate. Everyone who voted essentially bet on a candidate and expected a reward. We are hard-

wired to go after various rewards and get a squirt of dopamine in our brains reward circuit when we get one. This dopamine signal confers, among many things, a sense of pleasure. Conversely, when we dont get the reward we expected, the activity in our reward circuit is suddenly depressed and we dont feel very good.

What makes political loss particularly painful for followers is the defeat of their leader, whose appeal derives in large part from the ability to make followers feel understood and cared for. In this sense, an effective leader arouses feelings in supporters that resemble the feelings children have for their parents. Thats why watching your presidential candidate go down is a bit like seeing your father get fired or beaten up.

But what is the experience of defeat like for the candidate himself? One gets a clue from the work of William Shaffir, a sociologist at McMaster University in Canada, who interviewed defeated politicians who spoke to him on the condition of anonymity. As one defeated official told Mr. Shaffir: It's a sudden stop. Its just like someone shut off the tap. It just ends. Its over. Its death.

The defeated candidate experiences an abrupt and painful loss of social role a classic stressor that can trigger depression. When the election is over, the followers go back to work. But the defeated candidate has to reinvent himself and find a new role in life.

So for those of us celebrating this presidential election, we should not forget that though victory is sweet, it can be short-lived. Sooner or later we will be the losers. A little chest-

thumping is in order and is even good for tribe morale. But we should try our best not to gloat. New York Times News Service

Most people select a party that has followers who resemble themselves and often retrofit their beliefs and philosophy to align with it November 15, 2012

Trade in the ghosts of 1962


Fifty years have passed since the short but ill-fated war between India and China. The anniversary has already prompted several military men, diplomats and politicians to share their views. This is only natural, as they were indeed the principal actors in that tense drama in the high Himalaya. However, a view from a

perch less privileged with insider knowledge, and more distant from the action, may also yield some insights. It is with that objective that I offer these thoughts, viewed from the standpoint of a management professional who has been involved with business and industry for over four decades.

Victory and defeat, success and failure, advance and retreat are all part of the rhythm of life. Business people know this all too well since they deal with risk every day, and feel the results through the ebb and flow of their fortunes. Risks in business are manifold. Less than one in 20 of new product launches, for example, turn out successful. Even smaller is the probability of hitting on a blockbuster product. The best of recruitment methods, interview panels and psychological techniques cannot guarantee that those selected as employees will not fall by the

wayside later. Yet, risk cannot be evaded as it constitutes the very lifeblood of enterprise. What is important is to learn how to manage it. A truly capable business manager would demonstrate poise in adversity, an ability to study and learn from reverses, and the avoidance of hubris in times of triumph.

Closed archives

But can learning from business reverses so different in magnitude from the national humiliation and tragedy of the Sino-Indian war apply to the 1962 case? Indeed, yes, for the difference lies in scale and not in kind. Death through an industrial accident is no less a tragedy than through combat in distant mountains. The displacement of refugees through war and their loss of livelihoods are no more wrenching than jobs lost through factory closures and

bankruptcies. How to experience and learn from defeat may, therefore, hold common lessons.

Learning from a setback is easier said than done. Confronting mistakes is painful, unpleasant and challenges ones self-confidence. So, critiques of poor performance often lapse into easy self-justifications and excuses, however well disguised these may be as astute analyses. To get to the heart of the matter requires openness and a willingness to undergo painful introspection, backed by a determination to get at the truth, so that future generations might learn from our mistakes. Have we truly done this with 1962? That our official archives are not openly accessible provides a dusty and discouraging answer.

Managing a setback

Successful entrepreneurs and wellmanaged companies manage a setback through analysing both its content and process. In the content phase, they distinguish between two distinct sorts of human errors. What we may call Type I mistakes occur when the disastrous event is caused by a lack of knowledge or know-how, or through lapses of motivation, e.g. carelessness, shortcuts, poor application, etc. The second type of mistake the Type II error is caused not by shortages of knowledge or motivation, but by lapses in business judgement. Good businessmen distinguish between the two types of mistake even though their consequences may be similar.

Those who commit the first type of error are certainly taken to task. But, in well-run organisations, their immediate supervisors are punished

more severely. For theirs was the responsibility to equip the people in their charge with the skills and the attitude to do the job well. However, the approach to Type II mistakes is quite different. A company that punishes bona fide errors of judgement will never build a cadre of entrepreneurial managers. Still, an infinite tolerance for well-intentioned but disastrous decisions can drive the best enterprise to the wall. A good company approaches this dilemma through careful career planning, gradually building the risk-taking ability of its people, whilst limiting the damage at any one time.

Yet, it is the process stage of this analysis that is crucially important. The sequence of examining ones errors and learning lessons happens in well-run companies through a highly cathartic method of individual and group reflection, sometimes

moderated by experts, on what went right and what went wrong. It is a painful experience as it exposes others and ones own follies, omissions and attitudes. This cleansing process helps the participants understand and accept what went wrong, and to energise them to rectify the errors. Even more importantly, it stimulates a creative search for new directions and new vistas. Often, breakthroughs happen as a result.

In Europe and South Africa

The literature of business is replete with cases where enterprises that have gone through this cycle have radically changed their business model and their strategies, attaining great success. But so have countries. Take Germany after 1945. A shattered nation resolved to rebuild itself whilst simultaneously shunning militarism

and revenge. Germany reconciled with her age-old enemy, France, and together they laid the foundation for what later became the European Union. Most difficult of all, Germany expressed true remorse and contrition to the Jewish people for her actions during 1933-1945. The contrast with an earlier, defeated Germany in 1918, with its bitterness and revanchism, is striking. Another example is South Africa. If Nelson Mandelas inspired Truth and Reconciliation Commission had not happened, what would the wounds of apartheid have wrought in a free, South African state?

Thus, a genuine search for answers to the questions posed by 1962 means a lot for India. The correctives, when identified, to the Type-I and Type-II errors of 1962, will in themselves be important. But what will be crucial, and what we might miss in the absence of an authentic process of

creative introspection, could be the formulation of a new relationship with China for the 21st century. Here again, examples from business point the way.

Business rivals rarely view each other as enemies. They might compete ferociously in the marketplace, yet they can and do cooperate in many other areas which benefit the industry as a whole. For example, in developing raw material sources, or improving educational facilities for future employees. A favourite is to lobby government collectively to press for pro-industry policies. Companies of standing generally respect and do not demonise the opposition, though their formations battling in the marketplace do give vent to their feelings in no mean measure! Such contradictions are second nature in business indeed, businessmen could be the true disciples of Mao

Zedong, adept as they are at the correct handling of contradictions.

As populous, continent-sized countries, with aspirations to provide their peoples with the basics of a decent living, both India and China face huge challenges in their domestic spheres. Their growing power and influence draws attention regionally as well as globally. So it is only realistic that their relationship with each other will be complex and multifaceted. Great opportunities will coexist alongside problems and irritations. So a return to the navety of the 1950s bhai-bhai type would be foolish. But so would clinging to the Westphalian realist notion of the inevitability of conflict between rising powers. That would only bring joy to the international arms merchants whilst doing a great disservice to the common man. Left to themselves, I suspect that business people in both

countries would rather focus on the huge opportunities and benefits in the potential reconnection of their two giant economies, in the sharing of common concerns, and in cooperative approaches to innovations and new projects where Sino-Indian collaboration could benefit the entire planet. Could the business people of both countries take the lead in breaking free from the past and visualising a new relationship between China and India?

Is this a step too far, an impossible dream? Perhaps not. Businessmen know that whilst having ones feet planted firmly on the ground, without daring to dream there can be neither innovation nor transformation. If we can exorcise the ghosts of 1962, perhaps this may be the lesson that emerges out of that tragedy 50 years ago.

(Ravi Bhoothalingam is a former president of the Oberoi Group of Hotels and travels extensively to China.)

With the growing power and influence that India and China exercise on the world stage, business people in both nations must take the lead in visualising a new relationship November 15, 2012

Last steps in a tight choreography


Xi Jinping Wednesdays closing session of the Communist Party of Chinas (CPC) once-in-five-years National Congress was, like much of the week-long gathering, a tightly choreographed affair. As the carefully selected 2,268

delegates gathered in Beijings Great Hall of the People for one last time, it was apparent that the Party was leaving little to chance while handing over the reins of the worlds secondlargest economy to the sixth generation of its leadership.

Outgoing General Secretary Hu Jintao will continue as President till March, when Parliament will convene for its annual session. This will give his anointed successor, Vice-President Xi Jinping, some time to come to grips with heading the 81-million-strong Party before taking over matters of government. On Thursday, Mr. Hu is also expected to announce whether he will relinquish his third post head of the Peoples Liberation Armys (PLA) Central Military Commission. His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, held on to the post for two more years.

While, in theory, the 2,268 delegates as peoples representatives can contest and question any decision taken by the Central Committee, every resolution that was put forward on Wednesday was passed unanimously, without a single dissenting vote. From approving the work report of the outgoing 17th Central Committee to selecting a new Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) the Partys powerful internal disciplinary body every single delegate raised her or his hand to endorse every decision. When Mr. Hu asked the gathering after every resolution if there were any dissenters, shouts of no! echoed loudly and repeatedly around the Great Hall.

The selection process of the new Central Committee also threw up no surprises: the 10 current Politburo members seen as contenders for

spots on the next Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) which will be unveiled on Thursday morning were all selected among its 205 full members. Besides Mr. Xi and VicePremier Li Keqiang who is expected to succeed Wen Jiabao to the less powerful post of Premier eight Politburo members vying for a spot on the top body were chosen. They included four officials who rose through the Communist Youth League, where Mr. Hu has allies: head of the Organisation Department Li Yuanchao, top propaganda official Liu Yunshan, Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang and State Councillor Liu Yandong, the only female member of the current Politburo. Three officials close to former President Jiang Zemin were also selected Zhang Gaoli, Zhang Dejiang and Yu Zhengsheng, respectively the Party chiefs in the municipalities of Tianjin, Chongqing and Shanghai.

One post on the next PBSC was all but confirmed when Politburo member Wang Qishan, a Vice-Premier in charge of economic affairs and a vastly experienced banker who has championed economic reforms, was named among the members of the CCDI, the internal disciplinary body. Mr. Wang is another official seen as close to Mr. Jiang and, like Mr. Xi, Mr. Zhang Dejiang and Mr. Yu, is a princeling as relatives of former leaders are known in China. The official in charge of the powerful anticorruption body usually occupies a spot on the Standing Committee.

As Mr. Hu announced the end of the Congress and his ten-year term at the helm of the party he hinted at the enormous challenges his successors will face, including rising corruption, social inequality, transforming Chinas economic model and environmental challenges, issues

that were reflected in amendments to the Party Constitution. He called on Party members to keep firmly in mind our sacred duties and strive to be role models. As he bade farewell, the Partys delegates stood in attention and the PLA marching band played the Internationale, the Communist anthem. Led by Mr. Hu, the fifth generation of Chinas Communist leaders, all dressed in identical black suits, shuffled out of the Great Hall for one last time, before being whisked away by a waiting fleet of black Audi cars to their reclusive leadership compound down the road.

The sixth generation of Chinese leadership is taking over in a process that has thrown up no surprises and has left little to chance November 15, 2012

Chasing a chimeric peace


(Clockwise from left) NSCN-IM cadres during the outfits 33rd Republic Day celebration at its headquarters at Hebron camp, about 45km away from Dimapur, on March 21, 2012; NSCNIM leader Thuingaleng Muivah; Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio; and former Chief Minister S.C. Jamir. Photos: Ritu Raj Konwar, V. Sudershan, D. KRISHNAN

Come Assembly elections in Nagaland, orchestrated noises claiming that peace is within reach are bound to get louder. Political actors know that traumatised by decades of external and internal bloodletting, the Naga craves nothing more than peace. The

recent demonstrations of competitive eagerness by Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio and Nagalands legislators to support the peace purportedly being cooked between Delhi and the NSCN (IM) were nothing but drama. In a political two-step, Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has assured the Nagas of a peace gift before the elections early next year.

The Naga public, however, is all too familiar with this periodic show. They know that peace is a distant dream not inherently distant but because Delhi, by design or default, makes it so. They know that by ignoring the crucial stakeholders and pampering a set of gun-toting men who have little resonance with the broad Naga family, Delhi might cobble together a deal one that will bring anything but peace.

The polemics of the fractious Naga politics have been rendered more complex by Delhis reckless interventions. Instead of appreciating the intricacies of the Naga polity comprising over 25 tribes, each a proud owner and inheritor of a distinct culture, language, tradition and geography, espousing a distinct world view, falling within the broad rubric of the Naga family Delhi deals with it as if itwere a homogenous collective with common aspirations. Thus it believes that making a deal with one set would satisfy the rest. How else to explain its abiding faith in the peace process with the NSCN (IM), quintessentially an entity of Tangkhul tribes of Manipur, having little resonance with other Nagas notwithstanding its pan-Naga rhetoric?

Powerful groups ignored

There are other potent Naga militias aligned along tribal lines not in the orbit of the Centres peace enterprise. The NSCN (K) holds sway over almost the entire eastern Nagaland nearly half the State and its people and resonates well with the locals including the Konyaks, the largest of Naga tribes.

The NSCN (KK) essentially a militia of the Sumis, one of the larger Naga tribes control a large swathe of Nagaland adjoining Manipur and also has heavy presence in Dimapur district. The Naga National Council (NNC), the mother of all Naga militias though now a rump of its older self, deeply resonates with the Angamis, the second largest Naga tribe, and their kin tribes in Kohima and adjoining regions. Besides these militias, the traditional bodies that carry much weight with their

respective tribes, are also not in the reckoning of Delhis peace enterprise.

The peace project, thus severely truncated, got further undermined with the exclusion of the Nagaland State government. I.K. Gujral, the Prime Minister who presided over the formalisation of engagement with the NSCN (IM) in 1997, decided to ignore the State government. He did it, in the face of professional advice to the contrary, to placate the belligerent Th. Muivah, the NSCN (IM) supremo. To Mr. Muivah, the popularly elected Nagaland government was illegitimate and S.C. Jamir, the then Chief Minister, was his bte noire . Nagaland and Delhi had different political dispensations at the helm then, making it easier for Mr. Gujral to ignore Mr. Jamir. Subsequent governments in Delhi preferred not to rock the boat and nonchalantly

carried on with the charade.

Having achieved exclusion of the State government from the process, Mr. Muivah insisted on Mr. Jamirs removal. He knew his biggest challenge was not managing a distant Delhi but an inconvenient Naga government at home. In the run-up to 2003 elections the first after the ceasefire he threw tantrums seeking Mr. Jamirs dismissal and holding elections under Presidents Rule. K. Padmanabhaiah, the Centres interlocutor, played along and sought to influence L.K. Advani, the then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. Mr. Advani was not moved, but the Assam Rifles a Central force with the mandate to enforce the ceasefire rules and ensure that armed NSCN (IM) cadres remained confined to designated camps and did not interfere in the elections turned a

blind eye to widespread violations by the outfit.

Tactical alliance

Mr. Muivahs boys had the field to themselves. They targeted candidates not aligned with the NSCN (IM). Popular cries for reining them in went unheard. Mr. Muivah had propped up Neiphiu Rio, a renegade Congressman turned acolyte who had forged a tactical electoral alliance with the BJP, the ruling party in Delhi.

Mr. Rio came to power and his government became a proxy for the Government of the Peoples Republic of Nagalim (GPRN), of which Mr. Muivah is the self-styled prime minister. Many a times it became difficult to determine who ruled the State Mr. Rio or Mr. Muivah.

With the State governments backing, the NSCN (IM) sought to enlarge its footprint in Nagaland. Its manoeuvres provoked a fierce backlash from other Naga militias. Bloody clashes ensued. The State witnessed an unprecedented spike in violence until the rivals undid the military gains of the NSCN (IM) and restored the balance of power in their favour. Over 800 people were killed in about 1,500 bloody clashes with the NSCN (IM). Though constitutionally mandated to maintain public order, Mr. Rio extricated himself from his responsibility on the plea that the State government was not a party to the peace process with the militias and it was for the Centre to rein them in.

Excluded from the peace-process and its obligations, Mr. Rio was free to give currency to the revolutionary

vocabulary of ultra-Naga nationalists. He reversed previous State governments policy of equidistance from all militias and advocated a policy of equi-closeness. He debunked the 16-point agreement between the Centre and the Naga Peoples Convention in 1959 and called the Nagaland State, its product, illegitimate. Indeed, he tried to turn the clock of Naga history back to the 1950s, negating all the gains since then.

Misery in Manipur

Another crucial stakeholder excluded from the ongoing peace project is the Manipur government. Delhis hushhush deal with the NSCN (IM) has devastated Manipur and brought untold miseries to its people. Since the professed objective of the outfit is to dismember the State and take away two-thirds of its territory, a

protracted negotiation with it without the Manipur government on board has given room for wild speculations and stirred visceral existential fears among Manipuris. It resurrected the Metei insurgency. It has turned neighbours the plainspeople and the hill people into bitter enemies.

It is impossible to expect a sustainable peace from the ongoing process between Delhi and the NSCN (IM). An endeavour for peace that excludes crucial stakeholders is a travesty.

(R.N. Ravi is a retired Special Director, Intelligence Bureau. E-mail: ravindra.narayan.ravi@gmail.com.)

Delhis insistence on negotiating with only one entity in a process that has

many stakeholders has driven the wedges deeper in Nagaland November 16, 2012

Rehabilitation faultlines threaten fragile peace


Three and a half months after violent clashes between Bodo and Muslim factions in Kokrajhar and neighbouring districts in western Assam led to the displacement of nearly 4.85 lakh people, as many as 36,576 displaced persons (including 33,147 Muslims and 3,429 Bodos) are still languishing in sub-human conditions at 80 relief camps, desperately awaiting their turn to return home. While violence in July and August claimed 97 lives, six lives have been lost in the past six days as violence has revisited Kokrajhar.

The Assam government is projecting the decline in the numbers in relief camps as a reflection of the progress made in the rehabilitation process and a sign of peace returning to Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) areas under the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC). A closer look at the situation on the ground, however, reveals a different picture one of a humanitarian crisis overshadowing the rehabilitation process and threatening to expose new faultlines in the BTAD areas.

Little relief

A large number of families whose houses were burnt and properties looted or destroyed during the clashes and who have returned to their villages with the hope of rebuilding their lives, are yet to receive the rehabilitation grant of Rs.22,700 for each family and other material

support, including 21 pieces of tin sheeting, six bamboo poles and a tarpaulin sheet for construction of makeshift shelters and one months ration of rice, dal and salt. Those who have received the aid face the problem of making both ends meet as the rehabilitation support is extremely inadequate when compared to the loss of property and livelihood support. With only a blanket and no woollens, the advancing winter has only made matters worse.

As the Assam Relief Manual 1976 is still being updated and the State is yet to formulate an official policy to address the issues of conflict-induced displacement of people, some critical components of rehabilitation like providing livelihood support to conflict-hit families are missing and the official rehabilitation activities have so far remained limited to

handing out cheques and material for makeshift shelters.

The majority of the affected families are farmers who have lost their cattle, ploughs and shallow tubewell pumpsets to looting during the clashes. Though the Assam government promised a scheme to assist affected families, no concrete help could be noticed in many villages. This, despite the fact that more than two to three weeks have already elapsed since the return of the displaced families from relief camps and the current agricultural season is almost going to be missed. Many of these families who failed to sow their fields due to the violence cannot expect any produce for the next six months unless the government quickly intervenes and helps them resume agricultural activities to ensure that the current sowing season is also not missed.

Migration

In the light of this hopeless situation, some of the affected villages are now witnessing the outward migration of people to Guwahati and other urban centres. In the weeks and months ahead, their numbers can only swell, further vitiating an atmosphere that is already toxic with anti-migrant rhetoric.

The BTAD areas are still gripped by tension over rehabilitation of the displaced with the BTC (run by Bodoland Peoples Front, the coalition partner of the ruling Congress in Assam) authorities, various Bodo bodies as well as political parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party, Asom Gana Parishad and student bodies like the All Assam Students Union raking up the issue of undocumented

migration and raising the demand for screening of affected families taking shelter in relief camps before rehabilitating them. They have been alleging the presence of a large number of undocumented migrants among the Muslims displaced from BTAD areas. This led the Assam government to screen the displaced by asking them to produce land certificates to establish their residential status at the time of the clashes. Only those families are being rehabilitated whose credentials have thus been vetted by the BTC authorities.

Fate in the balance

The fate of several thousand displaced who do not have any land certificate ( patta ) is still hanging in the balance as the Assam government and the BTC authorities are yet to agree on alternative documents which these

families can submit for verification of their antecedents during phase II of the rehabilitation process. Another source of threat to the fragile peace is the political campaign now sweeping through the region in which Bodos are being urged to end any dependence on Muslims.

This new faultline must be countered if there is to be hope of permanent peace in the Bodo heartland. And the only way to do it is for the government and peacemakers to ensure the speedy and proper rehabilitation of all those displaced by this summers violence and facilitate dialogue between the two communities all the way down to the village level.

The victims of Bodo-Muslim violence are unable to pick up the pieces of

their lives in the face of poor government aid and malicious political campaigns November 16, 2012

Herald a National vision that little resembles the old


The Associated Journals was promoted by many eminent members of the Congress party in 1937. Its purpose was to contribute to the freedom movement through the vehicle of the National Herald and other newspapers at a particularly sensitive time in our history. The promoters had no desire to gain any personal financial advantage from the enterprise.

It is impossible to believe that the present Congress leadership has restructured The Associated Journals

and handed over control to another company, Young Indian, for personal profit. It would have been preferable, certainly proper, though, if the restructuring exercise was undertaken not behind a curtain but transparently and openly with the party itself issuing a public statement. Political parties are generally opaque in such matters and the Congress followed existing practice. It could have set an example if it had realised non-disclosure breeds suspicion of wrongdoing and puts the party on the back foot. It would also have been a far neater exercise if the revival of the National Herald and the setting up of Young Indian had been kept on separate tracks. Surely Young Indian would have received wide public support for the commendable objectives it wishes to pursue.

Subramanian Swamy, who first brought the issue to the public

domain, will no doubt agitate the matter before the courts and the Congress will have to defend its action on the technical aspects of the restructuring. Dr. Swamy has claimed that the grant of loans by the party to Associated Journals cannot come within the ambit of political activity. The courts may, therefore, have to go into the question of what such activity constitutes.

The Congress has defended the grant of the loan as part of its political work. While addressing the media earlier this month, spokesman Janardan Dwivedi asserted that it was for the party to decide on what will be our political work. Mr. Dwivedi went on to clarify the nature of the political work involved in the partys financial support to the company. He said, To promote Gandhi-Nehru thought is political work and to encourage the people, organisations and instruments

working for the cause. We have discharged our political dharma because Associated Journals worked to promote Gandhi-Nehru thought.

It is one thing to claim that the partys actions were part of its legitimate political activity but quite another to invoke the names of Gandhi and Nehru to defend the loan to the Associated Journals. Nehrus name has been taken because he was the principal founder of the National Herald . But by laying stress on Gandhi-Nehru thought, the party has opened itself to examination over whether it has, in fact, followed the thoughts it desires to promote through a presumably resurrected National Herald .

Sidelined objectives

The common objectives of Gandhi and Nehru on which there was a national consensus are found in the chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy in our Constitution which, taken collectively, emphasise that the State should work to transform India into an egalitarian polity. It is a part of the Constitution which is much neglected and out of public discourse largely because its provisions cannot be enforced by the courts but also because it is simply inconvenient for our political class to be reminded of it. It is of course referred to by the Bharatiya Janata Party, but only in the context of the Article on a common civil code. The fact that the Directive Principles cannot be enforced does not absolve those who hold political office from not following them, for they take an oath to follow the Constitution and not selective parts of it. In fact, Article 37 specifically states inter alia that the Directive Principles are fundamental in the governance

of the country and it shall be the duty of the state to apply these principles in making laws.

The vision of an egalitarian social order was further emphasised by Nehru when the Congress in 1956 adopted the aim of ushering in a socialistic pattern of society with equitable distribution of wealth and income. In doing so it was only reiterating the instructions contained in Articles 38(2) and 39(c) of the Constitution. The former prescribes, The State shall, in particular, strive to minimise the inequalities in income and endeavour to eliminate inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities not only amongst groups of people residing in different areas or engaged in different vocations. The latter demands that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of

wealth and means of production to the common detriment.

Ever since the Congress decided to reduce the role of the state in the economy (while the states role was a crucial part of Nehrus thinking) the very words socialist or socialistic seem to have passed out of its lexicon. It also perhaps associates them with the license-quota-raj and the corruption which flourished under it. And it certainly does not want to send wrong signals to Western companies which are being wooed so vigorously. Thus, while outlining the objectives of the Congress in the wake of the Associated Journals controversy, Mr. Dwivedi, if newspaper accounts are correct, coined a new term social state instead of socialist state. This was a departure from the term inclusive growth, which has become the new mantra. It is being used

extensively in official literature and by our present political leadership.

Inside inclusive growth

The policies within the rubric of inclusive growth are capitalist with a desire to improve the lot of the poor and the marginalised. They have inevitably led to an increasing concentration of wealth and vast and growing disparities in income. In the present situation, it is inconceivable that the government will even think of seeking to reverse these trends. The thinking is that growth is essential for the removal of poverty and can only be achieved through the present model. If in the process, the ideal of an egalitarian society is to be sacrificed then so be it. Regrettably, it also seems that the political class and a large section of our elite think a high degree of corruption has also to be

accepted in the pursuit of high rates of growth.

Times change and so do ideas and language as well as objectives. New realities emerge, requiring new thinking and action. Thus, there would be nothing wrong for the Congress to claim that the steps taken by it in the Associated Journals matter are to pursue its current political activity.

However, it is untenable for it to say that these activities are in line with Gandhi-Nehru thought. It moved away from crucial components of their thinking a long time ago. It now pursues Manmohan Singh thought and should openly acknowledge so.

(Vivek Katju is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer and grandson of one of the promoters of the Associated Journals company.)

The egalitarianism of Gandhi-Nehru thought has made way for Manmohan Singh thought, and the Congress should not seek to hide the fact

Ever since the Congress decided to reduce the role of the state in the economy (while the states role was a crucial part of Nehrus thinking) the very words socialist or socialistic seem to have passed out of its lexicon. November 16, 2012

What Shunglu report? Its plain anger


During the last few days there have been many comments on the report that the government of India was

considering a proposal to make the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) a multimember body. The move has been widely seen as a maladroit one. Most of the points that need to be made in this regard have been made succinctly in the excellent editorial in The Hindu on November 13, 2012 *Controlling the auditor+. This article will deal with some of the issues not covered in the comments that have appeared so far.

If one looks at Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) around the world, one will find both single-member SAIs (e.g., the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, etc) and multimember bodies such as Audit Commissions or Courts (France, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, etc). Both forms seem to be working well. There seems to have been no general or widespread debate on the form of the SAI. Single-member or multimember,

whichever form a country starts with seems to stay unchanged. There seems to be hardly any basis for supposing that the SAI works better in countries with the multimember form than in countries with the singlemember form.

Hypothetically speaking, if in India we had started with a multimember SAI, we would probably have stayed with it. As it happens, the U.K., the U.S., Canada, etc, have single-member SAIs, and we adopted that pattern. One has not heard that there has been dissatisfaction in England or America with the form of the SAI and a desire to change it. Why then should we depart from that well-established pattern? It cannot be said that the Indian Audit Department has not been functioning well. It is internationally well regarded, is a highly respected member of the International Organization of Supreme Audit

Institutions (INTOSAI) and its Asian counterpart, the Asian Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI), and is performing an important role as auditor of several United Nations bodies. What then is the need for a structural change?

Case of the Election Commission

If the idea of making a change has emerged in India from the feeling that there has been an overreach by the CAG, the critics should take a look at the subjects of the audit reports of the National Audit Office in the U.K. and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the U.S. Their scope and range are breathtaking.

The important change in the history of the Election Commission (EC) was its greater public visibility after T.N. Seshans tenure. He made it fully

aware of its own strength. This has nothing to do with its structural form. The EC has continued to function reasonably well after the change to a three-member body, but quite possibly, it would have done so even if it had continued as a single-member body. It is very difficult to say that the conversion into a three-member body has meant a marked improvement in its functioning. This is largely a question of the functioning of the individuals constituting the commission. On the other hand, there have been reports of dissensions within the commission from time to time. One can at the most make the negative claim that those dissensions, which must have made the functioning of the commission difficult, did not succeed in paralysing it. The history of the EC provides no clear answer as to the comparative merits of a single-member body and a multimember body.

Theoretically it could be argued that a collegiate form is better, but in practice there seems to be no compelling or urgent reason for a change. Assuming that there is a case for a collegiate form, that is not the most urgently needed reform, if it is a reform at all. What is more important and urgent is the need to respect the CAG as a constitutional functionary (the most important constitutional functionary according to Dr. Ambedkar); refrain from denigrating it in an unseemly fashion merely because its reports make the government uncomfortable; accept the accountability that it enforces as mandated by the Constitution; strengthen its hands in every way; take its reports seriously and respond with due corrective action; ensure that the selection of this high functionary is based on proper criteria and procedures; make the selection transparent and bipartisan; and so on. To ignore all this and advocate

structural change is frivolous if not disingenuous.

It has been stated that the Shunglu Committee has recommended it. One wonders whether that committee had any business at all to recommend structural changes in the CAGs organisation. Be that as it may, the fact that Mr. Shunglu made some recommendations is of no great consequence. (One recalls his controversial reports on IIM Ahmedabad and on the rehabilitation issue in the Sardar Sarovar Project.) The case for a multimember SAI needs to be examined carefully. As has been argued above, it is not established, and is far from being urgent.

It is clear that what lies behind this move is not the Shunglu Committees report but anger with the present CAG and a desire to clip his wings, just as it was the desire to hamper Seshans

functioning that led to the conversion of the single-member Election Commission into a three-member body. This has been recognised by all, and need not be laboured.

The analogy with the Election Commission is imperfect. The Constitution provided for the possibility of a multimember Commission, and left the choice to the government. The EC started as a single-member body and continued so for many years, and then was made into a multimember body, under the existing constitutional provisions . There is no parallel enabling provision in the Constitution under which the CAG can be made into a multimember body. Such a conversion would require a constitutional amendment. With a hundred things on its hands, why should the government even think about undertaking a major constitutional amendment of this kind

at this stage? This in itself is sufficient ground for suspecting the motivations behind this idea.

Further, the danger of initiating fundamental structural changes in this hoary institution is the opportunity and the temptation that it would provide to wipe the slate clean and rewrite the CAGs charter, downgrading and diminishing the institution. One suspects that that is not just a danger but is in fact the intention. If that suspicion were true, what a travesty it would be of the noble vision of this institution entertained by Dr. Ambedkar, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Radhakrishnan, C. Rajagopalachari, T.T. Krishnamachari and others.

Questions

Finally, three questions constitutional experts:

for

1. It was surely not through inadvertence or forgetfulness that the Constitution provided an option of a multimember Election Commission but did not do so in the case of the CAG. We must presume that this was a deliberate distinction. If so, would it be right to obliterate that distinction by an amendment?

2. A constitutional amendment that would convert the single Comptroller and Auditor General of India into the head of a multimember body (whatever the name) will be a major structural change. If so, presumably it can only be brought into effect for future appointments and cannot be made applicable to the present incumbent appointed under the existing provisions. If so, would the

government still be interested in the amendment?

3. The sections relating to the CAG are not specifically mentioned in Article 368(2) of the Constitution which requires ratification of amendments by not less than half the State legislatures, presumably because the Constitution-makers did not expect those provisions to be amended. However, would not any constitutional amendment affecting the institution of the CAG (who is CAG for the States as well as the Centre) require consultation with the States, even if 368(2) does not apply?

(Ramaswamy R. Iyer is a former Secretary, Water Resources, Government of India.)

The intention behind the move to make

the CAG a multimember body is not to activate the Shunglu Committees report

but a desire to clip the auditors wings November 17, 2012

What lies beyond this Uturn?


Khaleda Zia, Bangladeshs leader of the opposition in Parliament, made some significant statements during her October 28-November 3 visit to India that deserve scrutiny.

As far as her Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is concerned, the visit had a dual purpose: one, to establish a stronger relationship between the two countries, and two, to remove the

mistrust that India perceivably has towards the BNP.

One of Ms Khaleda Zias close aides who accompanied her to New Delhi, said the high-profile visit, roughly a year ahead of the next general election, dispelled the perception that India favours one political party in Bangladesh.

During the visit, which was closely watched in both the countries, Ms. Khaleda Zia met key Indian leaders including President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj, senior BJP leader L.K. Advani, BJP president Nitin Gadkari, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai.

In her meetings, Ms Khaleda Zia, for the first time, appreciated Indias security concerns and gave an assurance that terrorists and antiIndia insurgents would not be allowed on Bangladeshi soil if she comes to power again.

The former Prime Minister, who was a staunch critic of the present Sheikh Hasina governments improved relations with India, also reportedly supported Indias transit and transshipment through Bangladesh, and also Indias participation in a consortium with China to build a deep-sea port at Bangladeshs Sonadia.

Like Ms Khaleda Zia, Jatiya Party chairman General H.M. Ershad and Awami Leagues general secretary Syed Ashraful Islam had also visited India in recent times on New Delhis invitations. Reportedly, the main

thrust of Indian interactions with Ms Khaleda Zia was sustaining the relations the two countries had built in the last four years.

This visit was certainly more important than her tour of India in 2006 as the Prime Minister; and is reminiscent of a similar high-profile visit to New Delhi by the then opposition leader, Sheikh Hasina, in 2006.

Happy host

The Indian External Affairs Ministry was also happy with the outcome as its spokesman quoted Ms Khaleda Zia as saying that the visit marked a new beginning and lets look forward and not look in the rear view mirror.

There are varying interpretations of the visit. Some say it is in the interest of both India and BNP to build ties ahead of the next general elections in which the ruling Awami League may face a debacle due to antiincumbency factors. According to proKhaleda analysts, the positive changes in the BNP were being closely watched by India, and these were first underlined when the then Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee visited Dhaka in May this year. After a meeting with Ms Khaleda Zia, he said India was interested in building relations with Bangladesh and not just with one party.

Also, the visit took place at a time when international politics has changed. Myanmars willingness to come out of the cold and the United States overtures towards it have made Bangladeshs geopolitical location of immense importance.

Watch the curve

A secular-democratic Bangladesh has no reason to be perturbed with Ms Khaleda Zias radical postures towards India. But it must keep a watch on the U-turn that she is making on her longheld policies.

It is possible that, in the run-up to the 2001 election, Ms Khaleda Zia is trying to sell the line that a government led by her, despite its Islamist orientation and pronounced anti-India bias, is better suited to deliver on promises made to India than Sheikh Hasinas secular Awami League. Arch rivals can turn friends, and true changes of heart are welcome. However, those on the vanguard of a seculardemocratic Bangladesh doubt Ms. Khaleda Zia can follow through on her assurances while keeping parties like

Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamists in the fold. Therefore, the question remains: Is this a genuine change of heart or posturing ahead of the next general election?

Bangladeshis would recall her repeated statements when she was Prime Minister, calling Indias northeast insurgents freedom fighters. It was during the BNP-Jamaat alliances rule that a massive arms haul was made in Chittagong in April, 2004. The then Prime Minister reportedly had full knowledge of these arms, which were unmistakably meant for insurgent outfits like ULFA.

Bangladesh, which had enjoyed a liberal polity, also turned a happy hunting ground for religious extremists during her regime. Therefore, secular democrats would like to see verification of such pronouncements in action.

One would remember that on return to power in 2001, BNP and Jamaat-eIslami went about implementing with full vigour their communal agenda, resorting to minority cleansing on a scale that Bangladesh had never witnessed except for 1971 and turned the country into a sanctuary for international Islamist terrorist groups.

The present dispensation

When Awami League swept into power in the 2008 general elections, one of the priorities of Prime Minister Shiekh Hasina was to visit New Delhi to extend a warm hand of friendship. Despite stumbling blocks, it was Ms Hasina who boldly initiated a new beginning in India-Bangladesh ties a first since the two joined hands in the 1971 war for independence of East Pakistan.

Indeed, the Hasina government has initiated a new era of regional connectivity and has also removed a vital security concern of India by bringing north-east insurgents to task.

All these actions, until her recent visit to New Delhi, were persistently challenged by Ms. Khaleda Zia and her Islamist allies, who termed the Hasina government, as usual, an Indian stooge.

Given the anti-incumbency factor, the government led by Sheikh Hasina may not be in a commanding position in the coming general election, especially in urban areas. But there is no credible sign that the ratings of the BNP and its Islamist allies have had a substantive rise. Therefore, the perceived defeat of the Awami League may be too hasty a conclusion.

Bangladeshs politics is fundamentally linked to its Liberation War, and the ongoing trial of war criminals initiated by the Hasina government represents an effort to come to terms with the past. It is in the interest of a strong, secular Bangladesh that justice be done. But the BNP, a staunch ally of the Jamaat-e-Islami which has many of its leaders among the top accused, has demanded the trial be suspended and the accused freed.

Ms. Khaleda Zias high-profile visit to India has also sent confusing signals to the secular parties and grouping. Rhetoric apart, the confusion can be judged from a recent remark by Awami Leagues spokesman Mahbubul Alam Hanif, who said that having failed to get support at home, the BNP was trying to get back to power with Indian support.

Despite all the debates, the fact is that Ms. Khaleda Zia has announced a considerable shift from what she and her party have stood for ever since she took over the reins of BNP in the early 1980s. If this change of heart is real and durable, it is welcome in the interest of restoring a healthy regional environment based on understanding and cooperation.

There is every possibility that Khaleda Zias recanting of her long-held antiIndia views is mere pre-election posturing November 17, 2012

Where whistleblowers are hounded out


When Haryanas top land registration official, Ashok Khemka, decided to probe Robert Vadras land deals in the

State, he perhaps never anticipated the kind of animosity that his actions against Congress president Sonia Gandhis son-in-law would generate within the government. Or, maybe he did, but went ahead nevertheless, hoping that a proactive media would serve as his force multiplier and help him take on the opposition. In all the 40-odd postings that he has had so far, Mr. Khemka never got the kind of wild publicity that his investigation of Robert Vadras property empire did. Conversely, never before did he encounter the almost immediate threatening calls and complaints against him from obscure employees and their relatives, against whom he had initiated disciplinary action years ago. He believes the complaints are motivated and at the behest of vested interests who have been harmed by his actions.

Because before Mr. Khemka, there was Sanjiv Chaturvedi in Haryana. An officer of the Indian Forest Service (IFS), his saga of unearthing scams in every place of posting and the inevitable repercussions has become a case study in leading officer-training academies of the country. Today he is a sought after speaker on Anticorruption Strategies for probationers at the IAS, IPS and IFS training academies. But some of the cases registered against him, after he began taking action against questionable activities in the Haryana Forest Department, continue to dog him.

Mr. Chaturvedi started out with the 2nd rank in the all-India IFS examination and two special medals for excellence in training. He ran into trouble in his first posting in 2005, in Kurukshetra, when he objected to the digging of a canal and destruction of

habitat in the Saraswati Wildlife Sanctuary, because a Supreme Court ruling of 2000 bans construction of canals inside a sanctuary without its permission. He was given a severe warning and posted out. At his next posting, in Fatehabad, he stopped the flow of public funds to a herbal park being established on private land belonging to an associate of the then State Forest Minister. He was suspended in August 2007 for insubordination and also served a charge sheet for dismissal from service. This was reversed five months later, by a Presidential order that termed the grounds for his suspension as unjustified.

In 2009, Mr. Chaturvedi went on to expose large-scale bungling in plantation projects funded by the Centre and international agencies in Jhajjar and Hissar divisions. On the basis of his evidence, around 40 field

staff were chargesheeted and since the scandal broke in the midst of the 2009 Lok Sabha election campaign, Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hoodas son, Deepender Singh Hooda, in whose constituency Jhajjar falls, was hugely embarrassed.

Mr. Chaturvedi was again chargesheeted but was cleared by a rare intervention by the President in January 2011. And on the recommendations of the CBI and the CVC, the Ministry of Environment and Forests asked the Haryana government to hand over the matter to the CBI for investigation. This has not been done so far.

However, five months after Mr. Chaturvedi suspended the foresters, one of them, a range officer named Sanjiv Tomar, was found dead at his home in Jhajjar. The police lodged a case against Mr. Chaturvedi for

abetting suicide, even though Tomars father, Ram Pal Tomar, in his complaint before the police had recorded that his son had died due to other reasons. An internal police inquiry too found no evidence to implicate Mr. Chaturvedi but the inquiry report was not filed before the trial court. In January, at around the time that the Centre recommended a CBI enquiry into the Jhajjar fake plantations, Ram Pal Tomar did an about turn and stated before the IG of Police, Rohtak that his son had committed suicide because he had been suspended by Mr. Chaturvedi. The case was reopened.

Mr. Chaturvedi was, meanwhile, cleared for Central deputation, but the State government did not relieve him on the ground that criminal cases were pending against him. He was relieved by the Central government against the wishes of the Haryana

government, and in June took over as the Chief Vigilance Officer of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences at Delhi.

There are six Vigilance enquiries and police cases that he is still battling in Haryana. With his case as a precedent, the perception that the Haryana government is harsh on whistleblowers has strengthened.

It also explains why Mr. Khemka, when asked whether he would like the government to provide him security against the threats that he is getting, replied, I do not need security, but would like a fair and quick investigation into these threats and an in-depth probe to find out if a conspiracy is being hatched against me by instigating people to lodge complaints.

In the past few days, Mr. Khemka has received two threatening calls from Umed Singh, a former employee of the Haryana Housing Board who was dismissed by him in 2006 when he was administrator of the Board. On his complaint, the police arrested Umed Singh from Gurgaon. The man is a history-sheeter who was penalised once before for beating up an executive engineer. Mr. Khemkas own order of 2006, dismissing him from service, sheds more light on the clout and reach of the man. Three senior officers of the board made excuses to avoid conducting an inquiry against Umed Singh due to his ill-reputation. One of them even preferred to pay a minor penalty for not doing the assigned duty of conducting an inquiry against Umed rather than being a party to record inquiry against him There is mortal fear of Umed among senior supervisory officers of the board due to his volatile propensity. His order

also noted, It is unlikely that any officer of the board would tender evidence against Umed due to his infamy of misbehaving and assaulting senior officers at the slightest pretext and then getting away with it.

Soon after that, a woman complained to the DGP that her husband Jaswant Singh, who had gone missing five years ago after losing his mental balance, had done so because he was dismissed by Mr. Khemka from the Haryana Housing Board. Her unemployed son, Nitin, followed it up with a press conference in a posh hotel run by the Haryana Tourism Development Corporation, where he repeated these allegations.

Mr. Khemka is also facing the ire of his IAS fraternity, as many of them feel that he has violated the rules of conduct that prevent an officer from talking to the media about

government action and policy. The other grouse of his superiors is that his action of ordering the cancellation of Robert Vadras mutation after transfer orders had been served on him was morally incorrect.

The jury is still out on both these questions, even as it raises some more. How did the media, for instance, become an essential weapon in the arsenal of the present day muckraker? Is it because the inbuilt mechanisms within the government machinery that enable an officer to do his or her job with integrity have become rusted and dont work anymore? In Haryana, the answer is mostly in the affirmative.

The trials and tribulations of

Ashok Khemka and Sanjiv Chaturvedi

expose Haryanas intolerance of

upright bureaucrats November 17, 2012

Pragmatic road to reconciliation


Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmars champion of democracy, is on a landmark visit to India, the country where she spent several formative years as a student in New Delhi. The visit has dominated the headlines about her expression though understated of sadness at Indias decision to engage with the military rulers of Myanmar who kept her under detention for the better part of two decades. It has also been an opportunity for her to express what

expectations she has from India, both as an opposition politician and as someone who is soon expected to lead her country. That calls for an objective assessment of her political role in Myanmar. Some have expressed feeling let-down that she is no longer a firebrand political activist, and that she has neither condemned the recent incidents of rioting in the Rakhine, in which the Rohingya suffered the most, nor spoken out against Myanmars institutionalised discrimination against the community. But considering the historical changes that are taking place in Myanmar and the challenges that lie ahead, her present approach is that of a pragmatic political leader who has eschewed confrontation to play a constructive role in the incremental political transformation of the country.

Long years of house arrest and isolation from the outside world, including from her own family, have transformed her into a seasoned politician. When the regime showed signs of reconciliation, she came to realise that a rigid and a confrontational stance with the regime could not just reverse the limited reforms the government had initiated under its road map to democracy, but could even make her politically irrelevant. Her pragmatism made things easier for the reformist President to take the next step allowing her and her party the National League for Democracy (NLD) to take part in the electoral process, without which the reforms will not enjoy popular support or domestic legitimacy, nor receive the international recognition that the regime badly needed to come out of its isolation and scourge of sanctions. Or put differently, without the cooperation between her and the

government, the regime would have never undertaken the political and economic reforms that it has, nor would the West have lifted the economic sanctions against Myanmar; the country would have remained in the international doghouse.

The obstacles

Suu Kyi is conscious of the lack of national capacity to transform Myanmar into a democratic state in the near future. Political institutions are in their infancy. The existence of Hluttaw (parliament) is not enough to usher in democracy in Myanmar. Parliament and Assembly members are inexperienced and ignorant about procedures. Most do not even know how to introduce a bill and table a resolution. The NLD is not in good shape as the party infrastructure she had built before the 1990 elections was all but destroyed by the military

junta. Its overwhelming victory in the by-elections early this year was due to her own charisma and that cannot see her through all the time, particularly in the next elections in 2015. The NLD is now controlled by old people, some in their eighties, while younger party members are impatient to be inducted.

Some smaller parties including a breakaway group from the NLD which fought the 2010 elections as the National Democratic Front (NDF) and received a few seats in parliament, could not win a single seat in the by-elections of 2012. They are apprehensive of being wiped out by the NLD in 2015, and have recently floated the idea of having a proportional representation system so that they can still maintain a presence in the future electoral process. The regime has shown willingness to accommodate their demand. The

ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), is reported to be nervous about the challenge it might face from the NLD in 2015 and would like to play the smaller parties against the NLD.

Independent judiciary needed

Myanmar has a long history of failure in state and institution building. Today the military machine is all there is, with only the shadow of other institutions remaining. Civil society was completely debilitated, but now seems to be growing again, though on a smaller scale and under difficult circumstances. The problem lies in creating state institutions from scratch that can replace the military state that exists, not just in governance and administration, but also in the economy of the country. An independent judiciary is another precondition for the restoration of

democracy in the country. In the absence of institutions and the vision of a new Burma that includes concerns of the ethnic groups in the country, any political change, even with a new civilian government, will be meaningless, for the army would still be there, lurking in the wings and waiting to overturn everything through a coup as it did in 1962.

Aware of these difficulties, Suu Kyi knows that she cannot afford to be impatient and push things through. She believes that President Thein Sein is sincere in his intent to bring about change in the country even while he faces formidable challenges from the hardliners in the armed forces and therefore needs her help in steering those changes. Thein Sein has even declared that he was prepared to accept Suu Kyi as the next president if the people of the country wanted it so. That will, however, require

amendment to the present constitution that bars her from occupying the highest position in the country because of the foreign origin of her children. Suu Kyi herself has demanded the amendment, and going by the past when the constitution was amended to allow her to fight the byelections, it may not be an unlikely possibility.

It is the same caution and pragmatism that has prompted her not to criticise the government and take sides on the sensitive Rohingya issue even though she has emphasised the necessity of restoring the rule of law and dealing with the root causes of the tensions. On November 7, Suu Kyi and lawmakers from ethnic minority parties called on the government to deploy more troops to restore peace and stability in the Rakhine state hit by recent violence and stressed that the concerns of both groups the

Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslims should be addressed. She may have disappointed some by not taking sides in a very critical and sensitive issue, but one cannot be both a politician and an activist.

(Baladas Ghoshal is distinguished fellow, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, and former Professor and Chair, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.)

Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen the path of constructive realism to achieve democracy in Myanmar November 19, 2012

Why I cant pay tribute to Thackeray

Muppadhu kodi mugamudayal

Enil maipuram ondrudayal

Ival Seppumozhi padhinetudayal

Enil Sindhanai ondrudayal

(This Bharatmata has 30 crore faces

But her body is one

She speaks 18 languages

But her thought is one)

Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi

Bhedad gana vinauyanti supajapah paraih

bhinnah

Tasmat samghatayogesu prayateran ganah sada

(Republics have been destroyed because of internal divisions among the people;

Hence a republic should always strive to achieve unity and good relations among the people)

Mahabharat, Shanti Parva, chapter 108, shloka 14

Tesam anyonyabhinnanam svauaktim anutisthatam

Nigrahah panditaih karyah ksipram eva pradhanatah

(Therefore the wise authorities should crush the separatist forces trying to assert their strength)

Mahabharat, Shanti Parva, 108:26

Political leaders, film stars, cricketers, etc. are all falling over one another to pay tribute to the late Bal Thackeray. Amidst this plethora of accolades and plaudits pouring in from the high and mighty, I humbly wish to register my vote of dissent.

I know of the maxim De mortuis nil nisi bonum (of the dead speak only good), but I regret I cannot, since I regard the interest of my country above observance of civil proprieties.

What is Bal Thackerays legacy?

It is the anti-national sons of the soil ( bhumiputra ) theory.

Article 1(1) of the Indian Constitution states: India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.

Thus, India is not a confederation but a union.

Article 19 (1) (e) states: All citizens shall have the right to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India.

Thus, it is a fundamental right of a Gujarati, south Indian, Bihari, U.P.ite, or person from any other part of India to migrate to Maharashtra and settle down there, just as it is of

Maharashtrians to settle down in any part of India (though there are some restrictions in J&K, and some NorthEast States, due to historical reasons).

The bhumiputra theory states that Maharashtra essentially belongs to Marathi people, while Gujaratis, south Indians, north Indians, etc. are outsiders. This is in the teeth of Articles 1(1) and 19(1)(e) of the Constitution. India is one nation, and hence non-Maharashtrians cannot be treated as outsiders in Maharashtra.

The Shiv Sena created by Thackeray attacked south Indians in the 1960s and 70s, and vandalised their restaurants and homes. In 2008, Biharis and U.P.ites living in Mumbai (the bhaiyya s who eke out a livelihood as milk and newspaper vendors, taxi drivers etc.) were described as infiltrators and attacked,

their taxis smashed, and several beaten up. Muslims were also vilified

This, of course, created a vote bank for Thackeray based on hatred (as had Hitler, of whom Thackeray was an admirer), and how does it matter if the country breaks up and is Balkanised?

Apart from the objection to the sons of the soil theory for being antinational and unconstitutional, there is an even more basic objection, which may rebound on Thackerays own people.

India is broadly a country of immigrants (like North America) and 92-93 per cent of the people living in India today are not the original inhabitants but descendants of immigrants who came mainly from the north-west seeking a comfortable

life in the sub-continent (see the article What is India? on my blog justicekatju.blogspot.in and the video on the website kgfindia.com ).

The original inhabitants (the real bhumiputra ) of India are the preDravidian tribals, known as Adivasis (the Bhils, Gonds, Santhals, Todas, etc.) who are only 7-8 per cent of our population today.

Hence if the bhumiputra theory is seriously implemented, 92-93 per cent of Maharashtrians (including, perhaps, the Thackeray family) may have to be regarded as outsiders and treated accordingly. The only real bhumiputra in Maharashtra are the Bhils and other tribals, who are only 7-8 per cent of the population of Maharashtra.

Several separatist and fissiparous forces are at work in India today (including the bhumiputra theory). All patriotic people must combat these forces.

Why must we remain united? We must remain united because only a massive modern industry can generate the huge wealth we require for the welfare of our people agriculture alone cannot do this and modern industry requires a huge market. Only a united India can provide the huge market for the modern industry we must create to abolish poverty, unemployment and other social evils, and to provide for the huge health care and modern education systems we must set up if we wish to come to the front ranks of the most advanced countries.

Hence I regret I cannot pay any tribute to Mr. Bal Thackeray.

(Markandey Katju is Chairman, Press Council of India.)

His bhumiputra theory flies in the face of our Constitution and works against the unity needed to ensure development November 19, 2012

Lest death do us part


The death of Savita Halappanavar in a hospital in Galway, Ireland was untimely and tragic. While septicaemia has been identified as the official cause of death, the entire set of circumstances that led to it can only be confirmed subsequent to a probe by the Irish authorities. Irrespective of the results that the probe throws up, the conclusion that

Savita was failed by Irelands legal regime governing abortion is inescapable. A legal regime that requires medical practitioners to engage in constitutional interpretation in order to treat their patients, that is pervaded by religious dogma disrespectful to non-believers, and that proclaims to protect the family while demonstrating wanton disregard for the life of the mother, is a regime that is confused, intolerant and hypocritical and must be reformed.

Prohibited, but not quite

Article 40.3.3 was introduced through the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution in 1983. It says:

The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the

mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

The Eighth Amendment was brought in to expressly provide a right to life of the unborn, implicitly restricting abortion to only those limited circumstances when the equal right to life of the mother was at stake. Once such a constitutional right to life of the unborn was created, balancing such a right with the right to life of the mother was an onerous task. This question confronted the Irish Supreme Court in Attorney General v. X ([1992] 1 IR 1]. In construing whether a girl who was pregnant as a result of rape could travel to the United Kingdom to get an abortion the failure to get which had made her suicidal (a fact that a psychologist had certified) the Court held that Article 40.3.3 permitted abortion when

there is a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother which included a risk of suicide. Subsequent to this case, a reactionary constitutional amendment which prohibited suicide from being considered a factor causing risk to the life of the mother was rejected by referendum, whereas two other amendments allowing women to travel to other countries for abortions and having information of the availability of such services were passed.

But the larger question of what constitutes substantial risk to the life of the mother has till today remained unclear. What are the factors that cause such risk? Is such a risk to be determined against an objective checklist or will the subjective satisfaction of the attending doctor be sufficient? If death does not have to be immediate or imminent (in X the

Court rejected such a test) then is there a time limit within which it is expected to occur, to prevent which abortion is permissible?

In the absence of appropriately clarificatory legislation by the Dil, Irelands Parliament, medical practitioners are faced with such harrowing questions in each and every case when the right to life of the mother conflicts with that of the unborn. Caught between the Scylla of a charge of medical negligence if the failure to terminate leads to the death of the mother, and the Charybdis of an abortion that is retrospectively deemed unlawful by the court for violating the right to life of the unborn, it is unsurprising that they have made questionable decisions that have led to death, such as in Savitas case, of both mother and child. While the results of the probe are necessary to determine whether

indeed the decisions made by the doctors in this case amounted to medical negligence, it is certain that the nebulous legal regime that puts them in the position where they have to interpret the Constitution before deciding whether and when to save a life, itself requires an urgent rethink.

Moving away from dogma

While the Dils failure to legislate and clarify the meaning of substantial risk to the life of the mother is unfortunate, concentrating on this alone would be missing the wood for the trees. The nub of the issue is the overriding influence of religious dogma in the formulation of the Eighth Amendment and its popular interpretation. Both the genesis of the Amendment, subsequent to a political campaign to prevent a judicial decision permitting abortion in certain circumstances in Ireland as happened

in the United States with Roe v. Wade , (410 U.S. 113 [1973]) and the alleged statement of a hospital official in response to the Halappanavars request to abort the child, that Ireland is a Catholic country, demonstrate the pervasiveness of religious belief in the Constitution and its interpretation. For the Irish Constitution to foist the burden of a provision that is seemingly derived from religious dogma on a person who does not share the same belief, and many more like her, demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for alternative religious beliefs. It also fundamentally defeats the purpose of a constitutional document as a counter-majoritarian check and balance on the predilections of the popular majority. When the Constitution itself fails to distinguish itself from ordinary parliamentary legislation in this regard, is based on religious belief that is discriminatory, not universally accepted and leaves no room for

rational argument, it requires urgent reform. If this were not reason enough, the provision seems oddly anachronistic in a country, where according to a study commissioned in 2004 by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, a governmental body, 90 per cent of women support some degree of choice in the question of abortion and a majority of women have found supporting family and friends when they have decided to abort.

Needless to say, Savitas poignant response to being told that Ireland is a Catholic country thereby denying her request of aborting the child, that she is neither Irish, nor Catholic has stoked passions in India of a fellow citizen having been maltreated in an alien state. Beneath the rhetoric that accompanies such passions lies a real point: religious dogma passing for constitutional law governing non coreligionists is perceived to be

disrespectful. This is not to suggest that laws deriving ostensibly from religion are either a phenomenon unique to Catholicism, or limited to abortion, but that any such law in any country irrespective of how wellfounded in religion it may be, is anathema in vibrant democratic states based on equal respect for all.

A final problem of legal provisions derived from religious viewpoints is the problem of reconciliation with other similar legal provisions. In the Irish Constitution, by Article 41, the State recognises the Family as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights which the State guarantees to protect. Central to the Family, by the Constitutions own admission is the woman. How is the states guarantee of protection of the Family as a fundamental unit of society, a view unambiguously based on natural law,

to be reconciled with recognising the right to life of an unborn whom the woman does not choose to have? This is a fundamental conflict that is internal to religion and resolved by an appropriate religious diktat. But by placing such provisions in the Constitution, such conflicts are left to judges to resolve, resulting in the usage of legal techniques of reconciliation, which are fundamentally unsuited for the purpose. It also means that they apply, quite counter-intuitively to situations such as Savitas, a woman who was delighted at the prospect of starting a Family, rather than attempting to terminate a genuinely unwanted pregnancy.

Justice and reform

In death, Savita Halappanavar deserves justice. Specifically, the probe into her death by the Irish

authorities must be fair and independent, and must make its findings publicly available. Based on the findings, legal action against the relevant doctors for medical negligence either for failing to detect a substantial risk to Savitas life necessitating abortion, or for negligently allowing septicaemia to develop, may be considered. At the same time, a concerted movement to reform Irish abortion law, making the choice of the woman the default position in abortion decisions or at the very least considering the health of the mother as the most relevant factor in deciding whether to abort, must be launched. The Irish people have twice showed their determination in this regard in the past, refusing to rollback the hard won fruits of the decision of the Supreme Court in the X case. It is time for a third such movement, in Savitas name, lest death do us and Savita

part. The Irish people, and all of us, owe her at least this much.

(Arghya Sengupta is a stipendiary lecturer in administrative law at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.)

Savita Halappanavar was failed by the Irish Constitution, which is based on religious dogma that is discriminatory and leaves

no room for rational argument. It is in need of urgent reform November 19, 2012

Getting to know Indias other neighbours

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Tan Dung applaud as their Commerce and Industry Ministers Anand Sharma and Vu Huy Hoang exchange documents during the 15th Asean Summit in Hua Hin, Thailand in 2009. Photo: PTI The recently redesigned website of Indias External Affairs Ministry (mea.gov.in) has a link right on top of its home page, just below the photograph of the new Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid, to India and Neighbours. Sadly, the neighbours listed are only her socalled South Asian neighbours, the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent.

One cannot blame just those who have constructed this website for this myopic view of what constitutes Indias neighbourhood. The occupants of New Delhis Raisina Hill have for

long seen only the Himalayas, the deserts and the Gangetic plains around them. When one thinks of the ocean as a barrier rather than a bridge one cannot come around to thinking of countries on the other side of the waters as neighbours.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has never been a victim of this common Delhi affliction. Why, only earlier this year he told the chief guest at Indias Republic Day celebrations, Thailands Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, that India and Thailand are maritime neighbours. That is a message that Dr. Singh has proudly carried in recent years to Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

However, in repeating that message to his hosts at the Asean-India Summit on Monday Dr. Singh must remember

that Indias eastern maritime neighbours expect a little more attention than they are getting. Over the past couple of years I have heard South-East Asian members of the Asean-India Eminent Persons Group (AIEPG) lament the slow pace and the low profile of Indias engagement of the region. Sensitivity on this score has reached a new height as many Asean (Association of South-East Asian Nations) members have become wary of Chinas assertiveness in the region.

Lend a helping hand

Meeting in Phnom Penh over the weekend, Asean leaders are unlikely to forget what happened at their Foreign Ministers meeting this July when disagreement on how to refer to the South China Sea dispute involving China and Asean members resulted in the meeting ending, for

the first time ever, without a joint communiqu. Caught between ChinaU.S. and China-Japan rivalry in the region, Asean is gasping for life. This gives India an opportunity to be the good neighbour, stepping in to boost Aseans confidence and relevance to Asia.

No one can do this with greater conviction than Prime Minister Singh. Taking forward former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Raos Look East Policy, Dr. Singh has done more to cement Indias relations with SouthEast Asia, for a long time referred to as Indo-China, than any other Prime Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru.

Analysts of Dr. Singhs foreign policy initiatives tend to focus mainly on his initiatives with the United States and Pakistan. In both cases, it can be said, he was picking up the threads from where his immediate predecessor,

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had left the relationship. Indeed, on the India-U.S. civil nuclear agreement he even told Mr. Vajpayee, I have completed what you began.

PMs personal interest

If there is one relationship that Dr. Singh has pursued with great personal interest, it has been the relationship with Asean nations. The first time a difference of opinion between Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Singh came out into the open was when a party functionary, now a Cabinet Minister, leaked a letter that Ms Gandhi had written to Dr. Singh expressing concern about the provisions of the free trade agreement (FTA) India was then negotiating with Asean. Her concern was that the FTA may hurt some Indian interests.

Assuaging her concerns and making his reply also public, Dr. Singh said: Our approach to regional trade agreements, in general, and FTAs, in particular, has been evolved after careful consideration of our geopolitical as well as economic interests. By drawing attention to geopolitical considerations in defending the Asean-India FTA, Dr. Singh was providing a wider context to a purely trade agreement. It is this approach that both Asean and India have since adopted in defining the scope of the relationship.

A few weeks after Ms Gandhis letter to the Prime Minister, the then Chief Minister of Kerala, V.S. Achutanandan, led a delegation comprising his bright and articulate Finance Minister Thomas Isaac and the sagacious ViceChairman of the Kerala State Planning Board Prabhat Patnaik to lodge a

complaint against the provisions of the Asean-India FTA that they alleged would hurt Keralas farmers. An unflustered Dr. Singh replied in his characteristic soft voice, But, comrade, I am told the beneficiaries would be poor farmers from the fraternal socialist republic of Vietnam! Everyone broke into laughter, enjoying the Prime Ministers understated rebuff.

After the resistance from farm interests came the resistance from industry. The then Union Minister for Commerce and Industries, Kamal Nath, succeeded in delaying negotiations on the FTA in goods, pandering to domestic business lobbies. When Dr. Singh returned to office in May 2009 he handed the Ministry over to Anand Sharma with the explicit instruction that the signing of the Asean-India FTA in goods should be his first task. Mr. Sharmas

first foreign visit was to Singapore in June 2009 and the FTA was signed in August.

The third decisive intervention of Dr. Singh that has shaped the Asean-India relationship was his categorical statement at the Asean-India Summit in October 2009: Indias engagement with the Asean is at the heart of our Look East Policy. This was a reassurance that Asean members were seeking at a time when they felt India may pay greater attention to its bilateral relations with Asias major powers, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia, at the cost of Asean as a group.

Perceptions and visions

In travelling to Phnom Penh, Dr. Singh has once again put his weight behind an early conclusion of the Asean-India

FTA in services. He is seeking a wider, comprehensive economic cooperation agreement. Despite all this effort, there is still a perception in South-East Asia that India is not as actively engaged with the region as it ought to be.

On the other hand, some in India believe that Asean has been unable to function in a cohesive manner, has become internally far too divided and, therefore, is unable to deliver on its commitments.

This weeks summit will be followed up by next months Asean-India Commemorative Summit, marking two decades of dialogue partnership between Asean and India. A vision statement for future cooperation and economic integration contained in the report of the AIEPG will be made public and a road map for the creation

of an Asian Economic Community is expected to be unveiled.

Whatever the hurdles and the gaps in communication, India has to pay greater attention to its relations with her maritime neighbours. A first step would be to recognise the fact that they are, indeed, our neighbours not just geographically but also civilisationally! Neighbours are defined purely by geography, but a neighbourhood is defined by economic, social, cultural and political factors. A community is born of an interactive neighbourhood. Any which way, Asean and India are neighbours, as indeed are India and the Gulf. Time for MEA to update its website!

(Sanjaya Baru is a member of the Asean-India Eminent Persons Group and Hon. Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

Todays Asean-India Summit is an opportunity to engage with a grouping that needs more attention from New Delhi November 20, 2012

Green shoots in India Myanmar ties


In her wide ranging interview to The Hindu, published on November 13, 2012, Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has rightly stressed, I would like to see a closer relationship between our two peoples, because I have always felt we had a special relationship. In the past, this special relationship existed not only at the political and cultural levels, but also in the areas of agriculture and food security. When I was a school boy in the 1930s, my mother used to say that we were eating Burmese rice. The

serious rice shortage experienced during World War II was partly due to the Japanese occupation of Myanmar and the consequent end of rice exports from that country. The severe loss of life during the Bengal famine of 1942-43 could have been avoided, had the food supply line from Myanmar remained open.

Today, the wide gap between demand and supply in the case of pulses is being bridged to a great extent through import from Myanmar. It has therefore been wise on the part of the Ministry of External Affairs and our Ambassador to Myanmar, V.S. Seshadri, to have chosen agricultural research and development as a priority area in the new phase of India-Myanmar collaboration.

Identifying needs

In 2011, I was invited by the government of India to lead a team to Myanmar for identifying areas where there could be symbiotic partnership between our two countries. In the 1980s, when I was the Director General of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Philippines, I started strengthening the rice research capacity of Myanmar. As a part of this process, I helped to establish a Rice Research Institute at Yezin. Also, with the help of the Army and local officials, I organised a movement for the collection and conservation of the rich rice genetic resources of Myanmar, particularly in areas affected by ethnic strife. This collection proved to be a veritable mine of valuable genes, which helped to accelerate progress in rice improvement in Myanmar.

Another area to which I paid attention was post-harvest technology, since

the rice mills which were then in operation were extremely inefficient.

During our visit to Myanmar in July 2011, we concentrated on identifying the felt needs of the agricultural scientists of Myanmar in research, education and extension. The Yezin Agriculture University has a reasonably good infrastructure for applied research in agriculture. Several new laboratories are coming up in the fields of biotechnology and animal sciences.

Myanmar is a predominantly rural and agrarian country. Agriculture contributes 32 per cent of GDP and 18 per cent of the export earnings. Nearly two-thirds of the population depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Women play a particularly important role in the production of rice and horticultural crops. Rice and

pulses constitute the dominant food crops.

The highlight of our visit was an opportunity to study the Model Integrated Farm set up at Nay Pyi Taw under the direct guidance of President Thein Sein of Myanmar. The Model Farm is used as a demonstration-cumtraining centre with particular emphasis on farm mechanisation and integrated crop-livestock farming system. Most of the farm implements have been gifted by China.

Based on detailed discussions at both the political and scientific levels, it was decided to assist Myanmar in the following two areas.

Setting up an Advanced Centre for Agricultural Research and Education at Yezin, both for capacity-building and for solving problems which

require multi-disciplinary research.

strategic

Setting up a Rice BioPark to demonstrate the opportunities available for preparing value-added products from every part of the rice plant like straw, bran, husk, roots and grain.

President Thein Sein was particularly fascinated by the concept of the BioPark and requested that one such park may be developed at the Model Integrated Farm which he has set up with much love and care. The BioPark was to serve as a window into the new era of rice farming based agricultural transformation in Myanmar.

Riches in paddy

When I was at IRRI in the 1980s, I had set up a Demonstration-cum-Training Farm titled Paddy and Prosperity with financial support from the Asian Development Bank. The normal saying in Asia is Paddy and poverty go together. The aim of the BioPark is to reverse this perception and make paddy an instrument of multiple sources of income. The components of the Rice BioPark include a demonstration of the potential for using the rice straw for a wide variety of purposes like mushroom production, paper manufacture, and ethanol extraction. To give an idea of the importance of biomass utilisation, we produce in India over 250 million tonnes of rice biomass. However, in States like Punjab and Haryana, rice straw is burnt in order to prepare the field on time for wheat sowing. As reported in the media, one of the causes for the early onset of smog in Delhi is the practice of burning the rice straw in the field, leading to

considerable air pollution and loss of valuable cellulosic material.

The Myanmar Rice BioPark will help to create an awareness of the importance of value addition to every part of the rice plant. For example, after a visit to the Paddy and Prosperity Farm in IRRI, the then Philippines President, Corazon Aquino, placed an order for the entire quantity of rice straw paper needed for printing all her Christmas greeting cards in 1986.

As in India, the emphasis in the agricultural strategy for Myanmar should be on increasing the productivity, profitability and sustainability of small-scale rice farming systems.

The BioPark will demonstrate methods of rice milling which can help

to avoid the widespread loss now occurring in that country in the conversion of paddy into rice. The Advanced Agricultural Research and Education Centre will be set up with the help of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, while the Rice BioPark will be set up by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation with the help of an eminent expert, Dr. Pillaiyar.

I hope the visit of Aung San Suu Kyi will lead to the renewal and revitalisation of the historic relationship between our two countries in agriculture, which is the backbone of the livelihood security system of both our countries.

(M.S. Swaminathan is Member, Rajya Sabha.)

The agricultural research centre and BioPark that India is planning to set up in Myanmar will go a long way in revitalising its paddy farming November 20, 2012

An authentic Indian fascism


Selling masculinity:Thackeray offered violence as liberation to educated young men without prospects. Photo: PTI Fascism, wrote the great Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, in a treatise Balasaheb Keshav Thackeray likely never read but demonstrated a robust grasp of through his lifetime, has presented itself as the anti-party; has opened its gates to all applicants; has with its promise of impunity enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpourings of passions, hatreds and desires with a

varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals. Fascism has thus become a question of social mores: it has become identified with the barbaric and anti-social psychology of certain strata of the Italian people which have not yet been modified by a new tradition, by education, by living together in a well-ordered and well-administered state.

Ever since Thackerays passing, many of Indias most influential voices have joined in the kind of lamentation normally reserved for saints and movie stars. Ajay Devgn described him as a man of vision; Ram Gopal Varma as the true epitome of power. Amitabh Bachchan admired his grit; Lata Mangeshkar felt orphaned. Even President Pranab Mukherjee felt compelled to describe Thackerays death as an irreparable loss. The harshest word grovelling

television reporters seemed able to summon was divisive.

It is tempting to attribute this nauseous chorus to fear or obsequiousness. Yet, there is a deeper pathology at work. In 1967, Thackeray told the newspaper Navakal : It is a Hitler that is needed in India today. This is the legacy Indias reliably antirepublican elite has joined in mourning.

Thackeray will be remembered for many things, including the savage communal violence of 1992-1993. He was not, however, the inventor of such mass killing, nor its most able practitioner. Instead, Thackerays genius was giving shape to an authentically Indian Fascism.

His fascism was a utopian enterprise but not in the commonly-

understood sense. The Left, a powerful force in the world where Thackerays project was born, held out the prospect of a new, egalitarian world. The Congress held the keys to a more mundane, but perhaps more real, earthly paradise: the small-time municipal racket; even the greater ones that led to apartments on Marine Drive. Thackerays Shiv Sena wore many veneers: in its time, it was anti-south Indian, anti-north Indian, anti-Muslim. It offered no kind of paradise, though. It seduced mainly by promising the opportunity to kick someones head in.

Nostalgic accounts of Mumbai in the 1960s and 1970s represent it as a cultural melting pot; a place of opportunity. It was also a living hell. Half of Mumbais population, S. Geetha and Madhura Swaminathan recorded in 1995, is packed into slums that occupy only 6 per cent of its land-

area. Three-quarters of girls, and more than two-thirds of boys, are undernourished. Three-quarters of the citys formal housing stock, Mike Davies has noted, consisted of oneroom tenements where households of six people or more were crammed in 15 square meters; the latrine is usually shared with six other families.

From the 1970s, Girangaon Mumbais village of factories entered a state of terminal decline, further aiding the Sena project. In 1982, when trade union leader Datta Samant led the great textile strike, over 240,000 people worked in Girangaon. Inside of a decade, few of them had jobs. The land on which the mills stood had become fabulously expensive, and owners simply allowed their enterprises to turn terminally ill until the government allowed them to sell.

Thackeray mined gold in these sewers building a politics that gave voice to the rage of educated young men without prospects, and offering violence as liberation. It mattered little to the rank and file Shiv Sena cadre precisely who the targets of their rage were: south Indian and Gujarati small-business owners; Leftwing trade union activists; Muslims; north Indian economic migrants.

The intimate relationship between Mr. Bachchan and Thackeray is thus no surprise. In the 1975 Yash Chopradirected hit Deewar , Mr. Bachchan rejects his trade-union heritage, and rebels by turning to crime. He is killed, in the end, by his good-cop brother. The Shiv Sena was a product of precisely this zeitgeist; its recruits cheered, like so many other young Indians, for the Bad Mr. Bachchan.

Like the mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar which, it ought to be remembered, flourished in the same Mumbai the Sena offered patronage, profit and power. Its core business, though, was the provision of masculinity. There are no great Senarun schools, hospitals or charities; good works were not part of its language.

The fascist threat

Fascism, Gramsci understood, was the excrement of a dysfunctional polity: its consequence, not its cause. Liberal Indias great failure has been its effort to seek accommodation with fascism: neither Thackerays movie-industry fans, nor Mr. Mukherjee are, after all, ideological reactionaries. The Congress, the epicentre of liberal Indian political culture, has consistently compromised with communalism; indeed, it is no

coincidence that it benignly presided over Thackerays rise, all the way to carnage in 1992-1993 and after.

This historic failure has been mitigated by the countrys enormous diversity. The fascisms of Thackeray, of Kashmiri Islamists, of Khalistanis, of Bihars Ranvir Sena: all these remained provincial, or municipal. Even the great rise of Hindutva fascism in 1992-1993 eventually crashed in the face of Indian electoral diversity.

Yet, we cannot take this success for granted. Fascism is a politics of the young: it is no coincidence that Thackeray, until almost the end, dyed his hair and wore make-up to conceal his wrinkles. From now until 2026, youth populations will continue to rise in some of Indias most fragile polities among them, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh,

Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jammu & Kashmir.

In a path-breaking 1968 essay, Herbert Moller noted how the emergence of children born between 1900 and 1914 on the job market a cohort, he noted, more numerous than any earlier ones helped propel the Nazi rise in Germany. Historian Paul Madden, in a 1983 study of the early membership of the Nazi party, found that it was a young, overwhelmingly masculine movement which drew a disproportionately large percentage of its membership from the lower middle class and from the Mittelstand [small businesses+.

For years now, as economic change has made it ever-harder for masses of people to build lives of dignity and civic participation, we have seen the inexorable rise of an as-yet inchoate

youth reaction. From the gangs of violent predators who have raped women in Haryana, to the young Hindu and Muslim bigots who have spearheaded the recent waves of communal violence, street politics is ever more driven by a dysfunctional masculinity. Thackerays successes in tapping this generations rage will, without doubt, be drawn on in years to come by other purveyors of violence.

India desperately needs a political project that makes possible another, progressive masculinity, built around new visions for everything from culture, the family and economic justice. No vanguard for such a project, though, is yet in sight.

The Shiv Sena chief gave voice to a Nazi impulse in Indian politics one

that poses an ever-growing threat to our Republic November 20, 2012

Dont forget the heroes of Rezang La


The greatest acts of heroism and valour often happen when the odds are hopeless and death and defeat are inevitable. Throughout history, nations have always glorified such episodes in ballads and poems, by honouring heroes and commemorating such events. It is the common perception of such episodes in a peoples history that forge a sense of nationhood. Why else would we celebrate the deaths of a Prithviraj Chauhan or a Tipu Sultan? Or a Porus or a Shivaji who battled great armies with little more than a handful of brave comrades and immense courage? Of course we rejoice in the triumphs of an Ashoka or

Chandragupta or even an Akbar, but that is about greatness and not heroism.

Even if it is true that the end of history is at hand, we can be sure that the annals of heroism will never cease being written. However endless these may be, the heroic stand of C Company of the 13 Kumaon at Rezang La on November 18, 1962 will always remain a more glorious chapter. The monument that stands at Chushul asks: How can a man die better/Than facing fearful odds/For the ashes of his fathers/And the temples of his gods. C Company was fighting for neither ashes nor temples, for there were none at Chushul. The loss of Chushul would not even have had much bearing on the ultimate defence of Ladakh. But in those dark days of 1962, Chushul became a matter of national honour.

Pivotal frontier point

Chushul is only 15 miles from the border as the crow flies and had an all-weather landing strip. It was the pivotal point of our frontier posts in this sector as it was astride the second route into Tibet from Leh about 120 miles further west. The road built after 1962 rises to nearly 17,000 feet, crossing the Ladakh range at the desolate and windblown Chang La pass, steeply descends into Tangtse and then goes on to Chushul. Between the Chang La and Tangtse, the road traverses beautiful scenery with dramatic sightings of wildlife. Golden marmots dart in and out of their holes and in the distance you can sometimes spot a snow leopard warily keeping an eye on man as it stalks ibex on the craggy heights

Chushul is at 14,230 feet and a village in a narrow sandy valley about 25

miles long and four miles wide, flanked by mountains that rise to over 19,000 feet. At the northern end it touches the Pangong Tso, a deep saltwater lake nearly a hundred miles long and which makes for a glorious sight. Also near Chushul is a gap in the mountains called the Spanggur Gap that leads to a beautiful lake, the Spanggur Tso that, like the Pangong, extends well into Chinese territory. China had built a road from Rudok in Tibet right up to the Spanggur Gap capable of carrying tanks. In the first phase of their assault on Ladakh in October 1962, the Chinese had overrun Indian border posts on the line between Daulat Beg Oldi near the Karakoram Pass to Damchok astride the Indus on the border with Tibet. Chushul was the solitary Indian position east of the Ladakh range. Geography favoured the Chinese and they were able to make a major concentration of men and material for an attack on Chushul.

Till September 1962, the defence of all of Ladakh was vested with 114 Infantry Brigade commanded by Brig. T.N. Raina (later General and Chief of Army Staff). It consisted of just two infantry battalions, the 1/8 Gorkha Rifles and 5 Jat. Initially, only the Gorkhas were deployed in the Chushul sector and when the gravity of the Chinese threat was realised, 13 Kumaon, which was at Baramulla in the Kashmir Valley, was sent in to reinforce 114 Brigade. In the first week of October, the 3 Himalayan (later Mountain) Division was formed for the overall defence of Ladakh and the Chushul sector was entirely left to 114 Brigade. On October 26, 114 Brigade set up its headquarters at Chushul and braced for the attack.

The newly arrived 13 Kumaon began deploying on October 24 in the lull that followed the first phase of the

attack. The forward defences of Chushul were on a series of hill features that were given evocative names such as Gurung Hill, Gun Hill and Mugger Hill. But C Company of 13 Kumaon got Rezang La which was about 19 miles south of Chushul. Rezang La, as the name suggests, is a pass on the southeastern approach to Chushul valley. The feature was 3,000 yards long and 2,000 yards wide and at an average height of 16,000 feet. Digging defensive positions and building shelters was hard going, for the men were still not acclimatised. Wintry winds made life even harder. At this altitude it took hours to bring a kettle to boil for tea. Whatever fruit and vegetables that came were frozen hard. Potatoes, even oranges, acquired weapon-grade hardness. More than the thin air and cold, the location of Rezang La had a more serious drawback. It was crested to Indian artillery because of an intervening feature. This meant

defenders had to fight without the protective comfort of artillery. Both sides prepared feverishly, mostly within sight of each other, for the next attack, which came on that cold Sunday November 18.

Most Kumaon battalions are mixed formations made up of hill men from the Kumaon Hills, Ahirs from Haryana and Brahmins from the northern plains. 13 Kumaon was the Kumaon Regiments only all Ahir battalion. The Ahirs, concentrated in the Gurgaon/Mewat region of Haryana, are hardy cattlemen and farmers. When the order to move to Chushul came, its commanding officer Lt. Col. H.S. Dhingra was in hospital. But he cajoled the doctors into letting him go with his men. Maj. Shaitan Singh, a Rajput from Jodhpur commanded C Company of 13 Kumaon. C Companys three platoons were numbered 7,8 and 9 and had .303 rifles with about

600 rounds per head, and between them six light machine guns (LMG), and a handful of 2 inch mortars. The Chinese infantry had 7.62 mm selfloading rifles; medium machine guns and LMGs; 120 mm, 81 mm and 60 mm mortars; 132 mm rockets; and 75 mm and 57 mm recoilless guns to bust bunkers. They were much more numerous and began swarming up the gullies to assault Rezang La at 4 a.m., even as light snow was falling.

The Ahirs waited till the Chinese came into range and opened up with everything they had. The gullies were soon full of dead and wounded Chinese. Having failed in a frontal attack the Chinese let loose deadly shelling. Under the cover of this intense shelling the Chinese infantry came again in swarms. C Company, now severely depleted, let them have it once again. Position after position fell fighting till the last man. C

Company had three junior commissioned officers and 124 other ranks with Maj. Shaitan Singh. When the smoke and din cleared, only 14 survived, nine of them severely wounded. 13 Kumaon regrouped and 114 Brigade held on to Chushul. But the battalion war diary records that they were now less our C Company.

Ceasefire and after

The Chinese announced a unilateral ceasefire on November 21, but little more than what the survivors had brought back was known about C Company. In January 1963 a shepherd wandered on to Rezang La. It was as if the very last moment of battle had turned into a tableau. The freezing cold had frozen the dead in their battle positions and the snow had laid a shroud over the battlefield. Arrangements were then made to recover the dead under International

Red Cross supervision. Brig. Raina led the Indian party, which recorded the scene for posterity with movie and still cameras. This tableau showed what had happened that Sunday morning. Every man had died a hero. Maj. Shaitan Singh was conferred the Param Vir Chakra. Eight more received the Vir Chakra while four others the Sena Medal. 13 Kumaon received The battle honour Rezang La, that it wears so proudly.

Few events in the annals of heroism can match this. C Company gave its all to defend Chushul, a small Ladakhi village, which for one brief moment in our history came to symbolise Indias national honour. At Thermopylae on September 18, 480 BC, 1,200 Greeks led by King Leonidas of Sparta died fighting the Persian King Xerxes mighty bodyguard called the Anusya or Companions. But Leonidas was fighting for a great prize. In July 481

BC, the Oracle of Delphi told him that in the next war with Persia either the King would die or Sparta be destroyed. Leonidas chose to die to save Sparta.

But C Company willingly sacrificed itself to save a little village and that makes its sacrifice all the more glorious. That is why we must never forget Rezang La.

mohanguru@gmail.com

Few events in the annals of valour match

the battle fought by 13 Kumaons

C Company to safeguard a Ladakhi village during the 1962 India-China war November 21, 2012

In praise of an old friend


Former President of Brazil Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula, returns to India today to receive the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development. He has been in India twice as President in the last decade and is credited as the Brazilian most responsible for elevating the IndiaBrazil relationship to a qualitatively higher level. His selection for the prize in 2010, during the last year of his presidency, was a fitting gesture considering his stature in Brazil, his profile as a global statesman and in recognition of his role in bringing our two countries closer.

Fate intervened, however, when Lula was preparing to come in November 2011 to accept the award. He was diagnosed with throat cancer shortly before his intended visit. A passionate speaker, he was told by his doctors to stay silent. He began his chemotherapy and temporarily his voice and his other characteristic feature, a thick unkempt beard. Now, he has recovered fully and is back in public life. As the Indian Ambassador, I was delighted to get the news from his office of his keenness to travel to India to receive the honour.

Three point change

Lula is a transformative figure in Brazilian society and is the most popular Brazilian public figure hitherto. There are at least three distinctive ways in which he changed the nature of Brazilian politics:

First, in all of Brazils history he is the first common man to ascend to the status of President. Before him Brazilian leaders came from the military, or during democratic periods, from privileged families or aristocratic elites. In contrast, Lula came from an impoverished background, a broken home in a backward region. He is virtually self-taught, not having studied beyond school. He started as a factory worker and his biography invariably refers to his losing a finger while working on a lathe machine in an automobile factory. Later, he became a trade union leader and subsequently founded the Workers Party, which came to power with his election as President in 2002. He is thus entitled to joke as he once did during a G-20 meeting that we are all talking of hunger. Perhaps in this gathering, I am the only one who has experienced it!

Having fought unbridled capitalism all his life, Lula became a pragmatic leader as President. Fears about nationalisation or the flight of capital soon dissipated and sensible economic policies with an emphasis on poverty reduction were adopted. By the end of his term, Lulas popularity was soaring, with an approval rating of roughly 80 per cent. Today his political legacy is that of having brought the neglected and unrepresented classes in Brazil to the forefront of a vibrant and stable democracy.

Second is Lulas impact on the socioeconomic transformation of his country. With its abundant natural resources of every kind land, water, agriculture, minerals, and oil Brazil has always been prosperous. But the disparities and inequities have been staggering, in terms of both regions

and individuals. Much like in India, there are large States in the north or north-east which have lagged behind and are vastly backward compared to the industrial areas of Sao Paulo or Rio. Again, like in India, there are the super rich with control of vast tracts of land or industry and the impoverished in urban slums or remote rural regions. There is also significant ethnic and racial diversity with a large segment of the population with African ancestry. The transformative aspect of the Workers Party and Lula has been to design and implement policies for effective intervention to help the disadvantaged. Brazils now-famous social welfare programmes such as Bolsa familia (family benefit package) had started even before Lula, but were consolidated and expanded during his period. The result has been one of worlds most successful conditional cash transfer programmes that have resulted in zero hunger

and a reduction in the level of destitute poverty to less than five per cent. Corollaries are near-universal education and better health for all. The current President Dilma Rousseff proudly declares that her aim is to make Brazil a country of the middle class, a realistic goal.

Third, Lula also changed the orientation of Brazils external engagement. Brazil is fortunate to live in a benign security environment in South America, this being a major difference between Brazil and India, otherwise similar in so many ways.

Brazils traditional priority and interest has been in Europe, countries like France, Italy, and Spain apart from the neighbourhood. Lula has a world view of solidarity and empathy with the developing countries. He is conscious of Brazils historical connection with Africa and initiated

energetic exchanges with countries of that continent. He also intensified dialogue with large emerging economies like India and China and was an enthusiastic supporter of new plurilateral groupings such as IBSA and Brics. In the last 10 years, Brazil thus raised its profile as a global player and became an aspirant for a place in an expanded U.N. Security Council.

The commonalties and convergences between India and Brazil would be discernible from the account above. For an observer like me, the key to the personal friendship and chemistry between Lula and Indias Prime Minister Manmohan Singh one a trade union fighter and an exuberant extrovert, the other an erudite economist and a quiet intellectual is simple: a belief in inclusive growth for countries with huge social challenges.

What of Lula now? It is a tribute to Brazilian democracy and also to Lula that he stepped down readily at the end of his two-term presidency of eight years. Dilma, his erstwhile protg and current President is a very different person, even while having an excellent relationship with Lula. She is a no-nonsense, tough manager with a focus on the economy. Whether Lula will return to active politics is a question perennially discussed in Brazil. The political sport will also depend on the success or otherwise in another big sport, the hosting of the FIFA World Cup by Brazil in 2014.

(B.S. Prakash was Indias Ambassador in Brazil till recently and is a regular contributor to Gateway House.)

As a transformative figure in Brazil, former President Lulas reengagement with India recognises a shared belief in inclusive growth for countries with big development challenges November 21, 2012

Sh*t, caste and the holy dip


Everybody declares with a full heart, and in a low voice, that it is a national shame. From Manmohan Singh and Pratibha Patil to Mukesh Ambani and Aamir Khan, the last mentioned a new convert to the Dalit cause, there is no dearth of people queuing up to take a holy dip in this sea of sorrow. However, the weight of this shame has done nothing to reduce the weight of the basket carried on the head by the scavenging community.

National shame

A national shame is a national responsibility but nobody wants to own up this responsibility. Three decades ago, when we started our fight for dignity, we had thought that most people were unaware of the prevalence and extent of this inhuman practice; they couldnt possibly know that it was happening in their own backyard, that every day, lakhs of men and women manually cleared, carried and disposed of human excreta. We thought we could make people sensitive to this barbaric ritual. That remained the focus of our campaigns. Tragically, nothing has changed though awareness has supposedly spread among a vast swathe of people the political class, policymakers, legal practitioners and the intelligentsia. Our goal to wipe out scavenging remains the same and nothing has changed on the ground.

Thanks to census data, we now have the actual statistics on dry toilets. But the wheels of change have not moved for those who continue to carry other peoples waste, compromising their health, honour and dignity. It is no longer about general ignorance; it is about awareness being defeated by the persistence of a casteist mindset that is rooted in patriarchal values. Jobs continue to be seen as clean and unclean with sections at the bottom of the caste ladder perceived to have been assigned by destiny to the unclean jobs.

Presumably we can change our toilets only when we change our mindsets. That is the reason no concrete action has followed assurances by successive Presidents and Prime Ministers. Till today, the Indian government has not said when we can finally expect to be free of manual scavenging. We have continuously overshot the deadlines

without ever feeling ashamed about it. This nation has failed in its duty to provide a life of dignity to lakhs of its citizens.

The only difference between now and earlier is that in the past we didnt want to talk about it. Today manual scavenging is in the news; it is part of discussions on TV shows. Even the governments are expressing intent of seriousness. But all this adds up to nothing more than lip service. How else can we explain the fact that although the Union government had allocated Rs.100 crore in the financial year 2011-12 for the eradication of scavenging and rehabilitation of manual scavengers, not even a single rupee was spent out of this budget? Worse, funds for the scheme to provide pre-matric scholarship to children of scavengers and persons involved in unclean occupations remain either unutilised or have been

diverted to other schemes. The Planning Commission has refused to enhance the budget for the schemes citing lack of demand. No ripples caused, no questions raised how well the system works towards maintaining the status quo and the casteist order!

1993 law

We already had a Central law dating back to 1993 against the employment of manual scavengers. Today, 19 years later, we have placed a new law in Parliament. What happened in these 19 years? Not a single person was prosecuted under the law. Admittedly, the law had many lacunae. But surely that cannot be the reason why not one person was prosecuted under the law. Why was no rehabilitation provided to scavengers? The simple truth is our

lawmakers lacked the will and the conviction.

There is no doubt that we need a strong deterrent against a practice that forces people towards extreme indignity. A strong pro-people law will help in changing the ground reality. But first our governments have to stop being in denial. The governments at the Centre and the States must together announce a time-bound action plan. In 2003, various State governments reported to the Supreme Court in response to a petition filed by the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) that there were no manual scavengers and no dry latrines in their respective States. This was a blatant lie and they stuck to the lie until 2010, when SKA presented in court authentic evidence to prove that this practice continues in as many as 252 districts of the country.

It was then that the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MSJE) decided to have a nationwide fresh survey to assess the prevalence of manual scavenging. The ministry constituted a task force to formalise the modalities of the survey. But it was wrong to infer from this that the government was being serious. Four ministries were involved in the task force. After the report was submitted, the Finance Ministry allotted Rs.35 crore to identify scavengers across the country. So far so good, but 13 months later the reality was that not one paper had moved. Finally, the government announced that it had dropped the survey because it could not find an eligible technical agency for the job. The government dropped the first and most important step to find out the number of scavengers in the country.

And now, suddenly, the government has discovered Census data. This is stranger still because the census figures are only for insanitary latrines: 7,94,390 dry latrines across the country where human excreta is cleaned by humans. Of these, 73 per cent is in the rural areas and 27 per cent in urban locations. In another 13,14,652 toilets, human excreta is flushed into open drains. Incredibly, the census adds that there are 4,97,236 toilets where the job of cleaning human excreta falls to animals.

Now how can we estimate the number of manual scavengers from this data? As if this anomaly was not enough, the governments of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand filed fresh affidavits in the Supreme Court in October-November 2012 stating that the census data is not accurate (i.e.

they dont have as many dry latrines). Presumably, no data is accurate not what the SKA provided in 2010, and not what was collected by the Census of India. If the States also do not have their own numbers, then, what after all, is the correct number? How should we collect the actual figures? What should be the basis of rehabilitation? All this has left organisations such as SKA fighting pitched legal battles with the State governments just to establish that scavengers do exist in their States.

Gender insensitive Bill

It is against this background that the new Bill has been placed in Parliament. How is it different from the old one? Will it help? Not likely. The Bill is terribly gender insensitive, its language assumes that all manual scavengers and public authorities are men. In a context where the majority

of manual scavengers are women, this is absurd. The rehabilitation schemes must respond to the needs, problems and issues of women in the Safai Karmachari community.

Secondly, the Bill delegates the responsibility of identifying manual scavengers, or conducting a fresh survey, to the local bodies. These local bodies have always been in denial and have in fact filed false affidavits in the Supreme Court. Does it make sense to assign the job of fixing the numbers to State governments and local bodies that have challenged the existence of manual scavenging and insanitary latrines in their areas? This task should be given to an independent agency working closely with the MSJE as well as civil society members and local authorities. The ministry has already approved a format and methodology for a survey which

should be carried out on a warfooting.

The focus of the Act must be on liberating manual scavengers. The identification, demolition and conversion of insanitary latrines must be from this perspective. The nation owes an apology to the Safai Karmachari community for the heinous injustice done to it for centuries. Without this there cannot be justice in the real sense. No new law can function without an urgent, proper and comprehensive survey. Once this is done, the government should announce a time-bound action plan to rid this country forever of its shameful casteist legacy.

The liberation of manual scavengers should begin in the spirit of the final words of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar: ours is a battle not for wealth or for power. It is a battle for freedom. It is the

battle of reclamation of human personality.

(Bezwada Wilson is national convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan, Bhasha Singh is a journalist and author of Adrishya Bharat )

For any law to truly liberate those trapped in manual scavenging, their numbers must first be established by a comprehensive survey November 21, 2012

The government is on the wrong wavelength


When one read about the failure of the 2G auction, one knew immediately that the UPA government and the Congress party would be jubilant at the opportunity of claiming the Comptroller & Auditor

Generals (CAG) report on 2G spectrum was wrong as they had sais so all along. Sure enough, Congress leader Digvijay Singh was quick off the mark: he observed that the CAG should re-check his figures of notional loss. Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal was more guarded but his glee unmistakably came through. The new Information & Broadcasting Minister Manish Tiwari, is not a man for subtleties. He declaimed: Where is the loss of 1.76 lakh crores, Mr. CAG?

It is almost as if these gentlemen were delighted at having put the CAG in the wrong (as they thought or pretended to think), rather than unhappy at the failure of the auction. They should have been more guarded; soon they may be laughing out of the other side of their mouth. The Opposition and the Left are not easily taken in by disingenuous debating points.

Three questions

Was the CAG wrong? His officers must be preparing a detailed data-based answer to that question, but let us consider this in general terms. The question can be broken down into three sub-questions: 1. What did the CAG really say? Did he say that 2G spectrum should have been auctioned? 2. Were the CAGs concepts of presumptive or notional loss and of windfall gain fallacious, and were they wrongly calculated? 3. Have his calculations been retrospectively invalidated by the failure of the 2G auction?

The recommendation that the allocation of scarce natural resources, where necessary, is best done through some form of public bidding (in the interest of discovery of the market price, fairness/equality of opportunity to all, revenues to the government

and public interest) was not a new point of the CAGs; it is a general proposition that many would accept in relation to most natural resources (except water or forests, of course). The point is that discretionary allocations are fraught with the risks of corruption and/or violation of the equality principle. In the 2G case, the Finance Ministry had raised the question of competitive bidding at one stage. The CAG took his cue from this. Later, the Chawla Committee on the allocation of natural resources said something similar in general terms. The Supreme Court said so in its 2G judgment. Still later, in reply to a Presidential reference under Article 143 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court clarified that this was not a blanket statement applicable across the board to all natural resources under all circumstances, but it reaffirmed the 2G judgment in so far as spectrum was concerned. Subsequently, the Supreme Court

went so far as to caution the government against playing with its order. If the government now thinks that the CAG stands discomfited by the outcome of the 2G auction, is it prepared to say that the Supreme Court also stands discomfited? In mocking the CAG, is it also cocking a snook at the Supreme Court?

Coming now to the concepts of presumptive or notional loss or of windfall gain, the debate has got unnecessarily side-tracked by references to the Income-Tax Act. They are commonsense notions. Faced with an arbitrary or discretionary or opaque executive decision, the question arises: if proper procedures had been followed to ensure equal opportunity to all interested parties (which generally would mean competitive bidding in some form), would the government have realised more revenue, and/or

would windfall gains to some arbitrarily selected parties have been avoided? These are entirely legitimate audit questions. A linked question would be whether the nontransparent procedure actually followed might have facilitated corruption; this would be a matter for investigation by the appropriate agency. All this is self-evident; it was valid earlier and continues to be valid now. No specious arguments can undermine that validity.

The difficult question is that of quantification of that presumptive or notional loss or windfall gain. The safest course for the CAG would be to state the point without putting a number on it. However, the problem with that course is that Parliament and the people might fail to recognise the seriousness of the matter. The full implications of the audit criticism are best brought out through numbers. At

the same time, those numbers are bound to be hypothetical and not real, and therefore challengeable. It follows that they must be very carefully calculated, and that the assumptions made and the methods adopted must be clearly stated.

Credible basis for suspicion

This is exactly what the 2G Audit Report does. It makes three different calculations under different assumptions and through different routes, all of which are made clear. At the end of it all, what matters is not the number but the underlying opacity, lapse or impropriety, and the probability that if the decision-making had been more open and based on proper procedures the outcome would have been fairer, more equitable and more in the public interest. Unfortunately, once a number is mentioned, particularly a

large one, the attention of the media and the general public gets riveted by it, and the discussion gets derailed. This suits the government and the ruling party. They can sanctimoniously express concern at sensationalism and bypass issues of opaque decisionmaking and possibilities of corruption.

The question of whether the three types of calculations made by the CAG were based on reasonable assumptions and methods was extensively debated during the controversy on the 2G report last year.

None of the three figures was an arbitrary number pulled out of the air; there was a method behind each. At the same time, none was definitive. The point is that they provided a credible enough basis for the suspicion that if the government had invited public bidding for 2G spectrum

in 2007-8, it might have realised more revenue; or alternatively, that if the government had decided not to maximise revenue but promote the growth of the industry, the inevitable windfall gains to the allottees would have been more equitably distributed, and the potential for corruption would have been reduced.

Does the recent failure of the auction retrospectively invalidate those calculations in the audit report? From what has already been said it should be clear that the answer is a resounding No. Indeed, it is obvious enough that market conditions in 2012 are vastly different from those prevailing in 2007-8. This point has been made by several politicians, and also in The Hindus editorial of November 16, 2012.

Besides, if market conditions had been as bad in 2007 as they seem to

be now in 2012, who would have paid bribes to acquire 2G spectrum, and why would the Central Bureau of Investigation be investigating corruption cases? That by itself provides indirect support for the criticisms of procedural lapses and flawed decision-making in the Audit Report.

Finally, why did the recent auction fail? There appear to have been some predictions by the industry that the auction would fail. Was the government aware of this? Did it make a comparative evaluation of market conditions in 2007 and in 2012? Did it fix too high a reserve price as some have stated? Did it plan the auction properly, and did it take steps to see that it succeeds? These are the questions that need to be examined. Instead, the ministers concerned are celebrating the failure and trying to score debating points.

(Ramaswamy R. Iyer is honorary professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

What matters is not that the 2G spectrum auction fetched far less than the CAGs estimates of notional loss but the underlying opacity, lapse and impropriety of

the allocation process of 2008 November 22, 2012

Chasing a name in jihadi heartland


Ajmal Kasab was an enigma back in November 2008. Was this superman terrorist, dressed in combat trousers and a T-shirt, wielding a machine gun

like a veteran commando, really a poor Pakistani villager?

The idea that he was part of an elite squad of terrorists who had gone from Pakistan, by boat, and caused so much carnage in India, was met in Pakistan with public and official disbelief and blanket denial. Even to a journalist, the story seemed like a fantasy.

The other gunmen were dead, so all focus was on Kasab. His capture and interrogation threw out nuggets of information about his origins, which appeared in the Indian media, but these were unclear and inconsistent. The most useful bit of information was the name of his home village, Faridkot, and the names of his parents, possibly Amir and Noor, though both appeared in various mangled and vague forms. Even the gunmans name was not certain, given variously as Mohammed Amin Kasab,

Azam Amir Kasav, Mohammed Ajmal Amir, Ajmal Kasab.

There was also information that Kasabs father may have earned a living selling food on the street from a cart.

India had immediately blamed Pakistan and Pakistanis for the attack. But where was the proof? Pinpointing where Kasab came from became crucial. If he was from Pakistan, then surely he must have a family there who would recognise him and confirm the story.

Locating Faridkot

Among foreign journalists in Pakistan, the race was on to figure out where Faridkot was. Indian media reports

kept giving different locations within the Pakistani province of Punjab for Faridkot, as intelligence leaked out of the Indian investigation. It later turned out that Faridkot was a popular village name in Punjab.

There was a Faridkot village outside Multan, a large historic town in the southwest of Punjab. The Indian media stories pointed there.

On the plane with me to Multan from Islamabad was a crew from the BBC; neither of us acknowledged to the other what mission we were on. I, a British journalist of Pakistani origin, had moved to Pakistan a year earlier and was working at the time for The Guardian , the British newspaper.

The BBC and I turned up separately in Faridkot, Multan, and excitedly asked villagers about Ajmal Kasab. I

had a copy of the already iconic picture of the gun-toting young man, taken as he rampaged through Mumbais Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.

No, no, never heard of him, what are you talking about? said villager after puzzled villager. But each insisted I come in for a cup of tea and a nice chat. The village had never received such outside attention.

I then heard of a Faridkot near Khanewal, another town close to Multan. Nearby was a radical madrassah: perhaps they would admit some link. But, no. At the village, the same perplexed reaction and many cups of tea later, nothing.

Returning to Islamabad

Dejected, I returned to Islamabad. Then information started to leak out of India which placed the village on the other side of southern Punjab, near Okara, close to the Indian border. More dusty villages beckoned.

There were two Faridkots near Okara. I headed to the bigger one first. At Depalpur, just outside the village, to my amazement, there was a banner on the roadside which carried the name of Lashkar-a-Taiba. This looked promising.

It was a dirt-poor place of narrow lanes and little houses tucked behind high walls. When I started showing the picture around, I was immediately aware of hesitation, contradiction and an apparent recognition of the picture, and also a hostility to my questioning a sharp contrast to the warm but puzzled welcome I had received elsewhere. Some told me of

houses where an Ajmal or a Kasab lived. I visited some. It was getting dark and I had to leave, still unsure if I had found the right place.

Two days later I returned to the same village, and tried to visit some of the other houses where I had been directed. I pushed my way into one such house. Immediately, I saw a food cart in the tiny courtyard of the humble little house. There, I found an old man and woman, apparently Kasabs grandparents, who at times would seem to confirm being related to Ajmal Kasab and other times, deny it. The gunmans parents were not there the grandparents claimed they had gone away to a wedding. The flustered and clearly scared grandparents seemed to be directed into the denials by a plain clothes official present, as well as a uniformed police officer.

Still uncertain whether I was in the right place, I visited the other Faridkot nearby. There was graffiti all around extolling the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In that tiny village, a local admitted to me that they send many young men for jihad but nothing specific to Kasab turned up.

I went back to the first larger Faridkot. It seemed as if intelligence agents were all around. Someone eventually took me aside and whispered that the villagers had been lying to me and that this was indeed Ajmal Kasabs village. He was furious that young men were being recruited from there and led into the ways of jihad

I surreptitiously checked the local electoral record. There was a Mohammad Amir married to a Noor Elahi. From there I also got the numbers of their national identity cards. I had enough to run the story

a report that was picked up with glee in India but ignored totally in Pakistan.

(Saeed Shah is a journalist covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Economist and McClatchy Newspapers. Email: saeedshah@hotmail.com )

The reporter who established to the world that Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani from Faridkot

in Okara district looks back on the challenge of those crucial days November 22, 2012

Keeping the nation in the dark

President Pranab Mukherjees decision to reject the mercy petition submitted by the lone convict in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack, Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, is an instance of how public perceptions about a convicts guilt can camouflage the governments duty to explain the decision. The Presidents decision is shrouded in secrecy, throwing little light on the principles which guided it.

Under Section 4(1) (d) of the Right to Information Act, every public authority shall provide reasons for its administrative or quasi-judicial decisions to affected persons. This provision has no exemptions. The government erroneously denies information to RTI applicants seeking reasons for its mercy decisions, taking shelter under Article 74 (2) which only bars inquiries by courts into Ministers advice to the President.

Significant

The reasons for rejecting a mercy petition are significant, not only from the point of view of the convict who has sent it, but for other convicts who may use them as precedents while drafting their own.

Non-speaking rejections render the object of the Presidents mercy power in a democracy meaningless, and its exercise arbitrary. They only leave the field open to uninformed commentary in the media about the Presidents record in disposing of mercy petitions.

There was much misconceived criticism in the media of the former President, Pratibha Patils commutation of death penalties of 35 prisoners during her term forcing her to come out with a press release, while in office, in her defence.

Article 72 of the Constitution which enables the President to grant pardons, etc., and to suspend, remit or commute sentences has its parallel provision in Article 161 which enables the Governor to exercise similar powers with regard to matters to which the executive power of the State extends. The President or the Governor acts on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers, while exercising the powers under these provisions. Unlike the Governor, however, the President may require the Council of Ministers to reconsider such advice, and the President shall act in accordance with the advice tendered after such reconsideration.

Scholar Bikram Jeet Batra has found that Indias first two Presidents, Rajendra Prasad and Radhakrishnan, stretched the limited powers available under the Constitution, and tried to

assert their moral authority over the executive, by persuading it to reconsider its initial advice to reject mercy petitions in several cases.

Their successors with the exception of R. Venkataraman and S.D. Sharma by and large followed this legacy. Implicit in this legacy is the valid assumption that the pardon power can be exercised if there are compassionate grounds which may favour the convict, whatever the horrible nature of the crime found to have been committed. A corollary of this assumption is that the Supreme Courts findings which resulted in the conviction and sentencing of the appellant convict would hardly matter to the President, if the compassionate grounds are sufficient to accept a mercy petition. The President and the executive sometimes differ on this, and the resolution of this difference often takes time.

When it appeared that the executive was not likely to revise its initial advice to the President, the Presidents used the option to delay the rejection of a petition as long as they could, even by not acting on it till the completion of their tenures. Presidents K.R. Narayanan, Abdul Kalam, and Pratibha Patil used this option, as the Constitution does not impose any time limit for the President within which a mercy petition must be disposed of. Silences in the Constitution also convey significant messages, and an unstated discretion to the President, when he or she disagrees with the advice tendered by the government, to delay the decision can be easily inferred.

Experience shows that successive Presidents stand vindicated by their pursuit of this legacy. Most of the 35 commutations decided by Ms Patil

were part of the backlog left by Mr. Narayanan and Mr. Kalam. In many cases, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), acting on behalf of the Council of Ministers, had initially advised the President to reject the petition. However, when the President asked the successor government and a new Home Minister to reconsider the earlier advice, it resulted in commutation.

Sometimes, even after the President rejected a mercy petition, hanging of the convict was stopped, on the basis of a fresh mercy petition, which was later accepted by the same President or his successor.

Case of Parmatma Saran

The earliest example of this is that of Parmatma Saran, whose mercy petition file is preserved in the

National Archives. Sarans was a unique case in the entire history of mercy petitions in India. The Supreme Court, like the courts below it, found him guilty of killing his wife by burning her, and did not find any mitigating factor in his favour. The Home Ministry first concurred with the Court, and President Rajendra Prasad rejected his mercy petition on January 10, 1962, on the basis of the Ministrys advice.

However, before Saran could be executed, the MHA received a fresh mercy plea from Sarans father-in-law in the interest of his five-year old grandson, born out of his deceased daughters marriage with Saran. This tilted the views of both the Home Ministry and the President in favour of commutation, as they found it rare that a victims relative could plead for mercy.

The commutation of the death sentence of R. Govindasamy to life imprisonment offers a dramatic example of how a flip-flop can happen after the President duly rejects a mercy petition. President Narayanan rejected his mercy petition, on the basis of the then NDA governments advice, in October 1999. The same NDA government, however, stayed his execution, following various appeals from Tamil Nadu favouring commutation of his sentence. Govindasamy was the first convict to get relief from Ms Patil, who commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment on November 18, 2009 following the receipt of a fresh mercy petition. Satish was another recent case. The former Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, had recommended rejection of his mercy petition to the President in July 2008. But Ms Patil, on the basis of a fresh advice from Shivraj Patils successor, P. Chidambaram, commuted Satishs

death sentence to life imprisonment on May 8 this year.

Ms Patil left the mercy petitions of 16 convicts undecided. This suggests that she might have disagreed with the governments advice to reject the mercy petitions of these convicts. One of these is that of Saibanna, who the Supreme Court admitted it had erroneously sentenced to death, by following a wrong legal precedent.

The Supreme Court admitted similar error while sentencing to death 12 other convicts. Fourteen former judges have, in a recent appeal to the President, justified the commutation of the death sentences of these 13 convicts, to life imprisonments.

Of these, five have already got their death sentences commuted to life sentences by the Governor or the

President. The President will, hopefully, examine mercy pleas of the remaining eight, in the light of the former judges appeal.

The last hanging in India was that of Dhananjoy Chatterjee in 2004. Batra has found from MHA files under the RTI Act that the briefs prepared for President Kalam provided an inaccurate and incomplete view of the 10-year delay in his execution, ignoring official negligence. He suggests that a reasoned and transparent decision could have made it easy for the Supreme Court to intervene on the ground that relevant material was not placed before the President, before executing Chatterjee.

President Pranab Mukherjee missed an excellent opportunity to contribute to the rule of law, by not publicly disclosing the reasons for his decision

on Kasab. Every death row convict has an inherent right under Article 21 even if so far untested by the Courts to be apprised of the reasons for the rejection of his mercy petition, which would deprive him of his life. Others are entitled to know the reasons as well under the RTI Act.

By not publicly disclosing the reasons for rejecting Ajmal Kasabs mercy petition, Pranab Mukherjee missed an excellent opportunity to contribute to the rule of law November 22, 2012

Ticket to paradise in a brutal world


Kasab, the world came to call him, the butcher: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle,

but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. For millions of Indians, the man caught on closed circuit television cameras as he walked through the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus on the night of November 26, 2008, became the face of evil. The images dont tell the story, though; at least not the important one the story of how banal his evil was.

The man with the Kalashnikov didnt kill because he wanted to change the world, or sought revenge or fame or money or even something resembling a cause. He killed because spilling blood was the only thing in a fifthrate, inconsequential life that held out some prospect of power and agency and, as bizarre as it sounds, a life of some dignity.

Extinguishing Kasabs life does not change the fact that there are

thousands of young men just like him which makes understanding his story that much more important.

The grind of poverty

Born on July 13, 1987, at the small village of Faridkot in Pakistani Punjabs Okara district, Kasab was born into a landless peasant family. The seven major clans of the Punjabi Kasab caste claim descent from the great Bhatti or Khokhar tribes; like their caste counterparts in Rajasthan, however, they have been on the wrong end of property. Muhammad Amir Iman, Kasabs father, was last known to run a snack-cart, selling dahi puri s in the village. His mother, Noori Tai, was a homemaker mother of four other children, 29-year-old Afzal, 26-year-old Rukaiyya Husain, 18-yearold Suraiyya and 15-year-old Munir.

Like so many other poor South Asian families, the Imans lavished their meagre earnings on educating their oldest son. It didnt pay off. Having finished his primary education, Afzal Iman moved to Lahore, where he lived in a tenement near the Yadgar Minar and worked as a labourer. The Imans could not, however, afford to educate their second son, an indifferent student, past the fourth grade. Ajmal Kasab dropped out of the Government Primary School at Faridkot in 2000 when he was 13, and went to live with his older brother. He never settled in a trade, and would frequently shuttle between Faridkot and Lahore.

Then, on a visit home in 2005, Kasab had a bitter fight with his father. He had asked me for new clothes on Eid that I couldnt provide him, Mr. Iman told the Karachi newspaper Dawn in a December 2008 interview. He got

angry and left. No longer welcome in Afzals home, he stayed at the shrine of saint Syed Ali Hajveri until he could pick up some work. He began working as a labourer and by 2007 his work brought in Rs.200 a day.

Kasab, unlike his older brother, had big dreams. He soon began spending time with small-time criminals in Lahore. Along with a friend, a onetime Attock resident named Muzaffar Lal Khan, Iman decided to launch a new career in armed robbery. On Bakr Eid day in 2007, he told the Mumbai Police, the two men made their way to Raja Bazaar in Rawalpindi, hoping to purchase weapons.

To a different school

In the market, though, the two men saw activists for the Jamaat-ud-Dawa the parent organisation of the

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) handing out pamphlets and posters about its jihadist project. After a discussion lasting a few minutes, both men decided to join not because of their Islamist convictions but in the hope that the jihad training they would receive would further their future life in crime.

The story tells us not a little about the world of Pakistans ever-growing jihadist rank and file. In a nuanced 2009 essay, the Pakistani scholar Ayesha Siddiqa wrote of the rural despair that underpinned jihadist recruitment. A few years ago, Dr. Siddiqa wrote, I met some young boys from my village near Bahawalpur who were preparing to go on jihad. They smirked politely when I asked them to close their eyes and imagine their future: we can tell you without closing our eyes that we dont see anything.

From the Fathul Jawwad, jihadist leader Muhammad Masood Azhar Alvis disquisition on four Koranic verses dealing with jihad, it is clear jihadists understand the opportunity the countryside offers them. The text is designed for a peasant audience. The light of the sun and water, Azhar writes, are essential for crops; otherwise they go waste. In the same way, the life of nations depends on martyrs. The national fields can be irrigated only with the blood of the best hearts and minds. The jihadist movement promises something better than the earthly paradise Pakistans corrupt elite deny the poor entry into: as we fly in aeroplanes in this world, the souls of martyrs, entering into the bodies of green birds, fly in Paradise for recreation.

Having no alternative ideology like Marxism or Liberalism or even

language symbols which may challenge the feudal stranglehold, social scientist Tahir Kamran has explained, militancy remains one of the few ways to counter it.

Life in the Lashkar

Mumbai police officers first questioned Kasab on his hospital bed, just hours after he was captured. He was asked, in a videotaped interview, why he had come to Mumbai. The police officer didnt quite catch the mumbled answer. Shabaab, he asked incredulously, misunderstanding the reply to be a Urdu word with special connotations in Mumbai street-talk, you came here for women? Shahadat, the injured terrorist answered slowly, martyrdom. Pressed further, though, Kasaab couldnt explain just what that was. It had something to do with paradise.

Kasabs worldview had been shaped by the Markaz Taiba, the LeTs learning centre for new recruits. Films on Indias purported atrocities in Kashmir, and fiery lectures by preachers, including Lashkar chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, led him to believe that the Lashkars cause the greater glory of Islam, as the organisation presented it was worth giving his life to. Yet, a senior police official involved in the investigation told The Hindu , Kasab couldnt recall or name a single ideological tract or religious book that had influenced him. He had no sense at all of the LeTs dogma. Instead, the officer suggested, the atmosphere in the jihad camp gave him the sense of family he had lacked for much of his life.

Following two 21-day training stints with the Lashkar in Pakistan-

administered Kashmir, Kasab returned home for a two-month break after his indoctrination at the Lashkar base camp. He found a respectability within his community and family that had eluded him most of his life. Where Kasab had earlier been seen as a burden, he was self-sufficient and bore the halo of religious piety. He was, in other words, finally the man his family had hoped he would become.

Later that year, Kasab was chosen for the Lashkars advanced training at a camp near Manshera, a course the organisation calls the Daura Khaas. Finally, he was among an even smaller group selected for specialised marine commando and navigation training given to the fidayeen unit selected to target Mumbai.

Lakhvis final instructions, Kasab said, were to begin firing at the train

station at peak hour, take hostages and then shepherd them up to the terrace where further instructions were given. Those instructions never came. Kasab and his fellow-attacker, Muhammad Ismail, failed to locate a way upstairs and were then intercepted by police officers Hemant Karkare, Vijay Salaskar and Ashok Kamte. Though the three officers were killed, Kasab was injured and the hostage-taking plan collapsed.

Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, a LeT commander now being tried in Pakistan for his alleged role in the attacks, promised Kasab that his family would be rewarded with Rs.1.5 lakh for his sacrifice. A credible Pakistani journalist contacted by The Hindu said the family had received somewhat more than that but that its fortunes hadnt changed significantly. The Hindu has no way of

independently information.

corroborating

the

praveen.swami@thehindu.co.in

Behind the growing numbers of jihadi rank and file lies a life of rural despair,

which makes understanding Kasabs story that much more important November 23, 2012

Going from Pillar to truce


On the eighth day of the bombardment of Gaza, the Israeli government agreed to sit down with the Hamas leadership and the Egyptian government to come up with a ceasefire agreement. Hamas and Egypt had called for a ceasefire from

early into the conflict, but the Israelis had refused. An early Israeli draft indicated that they wanted Hamas to accept a 15-year hudna or truce, which would be tantamount to asking the Palestinians to accept their occupation without any resistance. When the escalated bombing did not break the will of the population of Gaza, and of the Hamas leadership, Israel agreed to much narrower ceasefire terms.

What did Operation Pillar of Defense, as the Israelis called it, accomplish for Tel Aviv? It certainly allowed the Israelis to test their missile defence shield (Iron Dome) and it allowed them to use their heavy weapons against the Palestinian population. But it did not change the political equation. Instead, Hamas comes out of this bombardment strengthened. The ceasefire agreement after Israels 2009

Operation Cast Lead insisted that aid go through the Palestinian Authority, which is run by Fatah, Hamass rival amongst the Palestinians. This time there was no such stricture. Fatahs Mahmoud Abbas has been weakened by his inability to call for even non-violent demonstrations in the West Bank, and he seemed a shill for the United States with his photo opportunity with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Strikingly, Abbas did not go to Gaza during the conflict. Free people are not deterred, Hamass leader Khalid Mishal said in Cairo when the ceasefire was signed. What has happened is a lesson that the peoples choice is the resistance, which earned him plaudits in the Palestinian world.

Israel finds itself more isolated politically, which would have been made manifest by a U.N. Security

Council rebuke had not the U.S. threatened to veto the Moroccan draft on at least two occasions. The ceasefire document not only did not earn Israel what it wanted, but suggests that Israels embargo of Gaza must be reconsidered (it calls for opening the crossings and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods and refraining from restricting residents free movement and targeting residents in border areas).

In his Cairo speech, Mishal said, The martyrs of the Egyptian revolution have their fingerprints on the *ceasefire+ document. It is certainly the case that this bombardment has revealed that however constrained Egypt might be, it is certainly not a client state of the U.S. (as it was under Mubarak). The restive Egyptian street came out in support of Gaza, as it had during the second intifada, and the

governing Muslim Brotherhood, which has ties to Hamas, put immense pressure on the Egyptian government of Mohammed Morsi.

Morsi could have abrogated the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 as a way to put pressure on Israel to desist from its use of asymmetrical power against the Palestinians. But Morsi is not a radical; he was mocked on the Egyptian Street, he is constrained by his militarys ties to the U.S., and the neo-liberal economic agenda he is pursing (anchored by the new International Monetary Fund agreement). Nonetheless, Egypt has returned as a major regional actor, setting aside Iran and Syria as Hamass main external supporters.

Qatars stance

Hamass political bureau was based in Damascus, Syria until Mishal decided to break with the Syrian regime over its killing of civilians. Hamas decamped to Doha, Qatar, welcomed by the Emir who had himself taken a forward policy against Syria. The Emir of Qatar visited Gaza in October and pledged to support the territory with economic aid. But as Israels bombing began, the Qatari support seemed less valuable. Qatar was allowed to make statements about arming the Syrian rebels, a position that was endorsed by the U.S. tacitly, but it was not permitted to make similar statements about arming the Palestinian resistance. This has dented its reputation. Mishal anaemically thanked Iran for its logistical support, but pointedly noted that Hamas disagreed with Iran on Syria. The older, clearer lines of support that ran from Tehran through Damascus into the arsenal and arteries of Hamas are no longer as clear. Time will tell how

Hamas, and the Palestinian resistance in general will calibrate its links with these countries.

As the smoke clears in Gaza it is clear that the destruction has been immense. After the last bombardment in 2009, the U.N. empanelled a commission to look into the conflict. The Goldstone Report was very critical of Israel. But none of its recommendations could be pursued even though they intimate that Israel had committed crimes against humanity (perhaps even war crimes). Nor was Israel enjoined to pay reparations for the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Such impunity against the occupied territories suggests that once more Israel will neither face scrutiny for the conduct of its war nor will it have to consider the economic toll. Israel will go scotfree (in fact, the U.S. has promised to rearm Israel, including its missile

defence shield). The Palestinians, meanwhile, will have to pick up the pieces, with aid from the U.N. and from the Arab states, and from their own resilience. It is a testimony to the human spirit that the Palestinian people remain resilient and hopeful, looking beyond the last sky for a chance to live dignified lives.

(Vijay Prashad is a U.S.-based commentator and author of Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , LeftWord, 2012.)

After bombing Gaza, Israel is more isolated, Hamas has emerged stronger and Egypt, which helped broker a ceasefire between the two, has returned as a major regional actor November 23, 2012

An act of constitutional impropriety


The hurried and secretive hanging of Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab is both an administrative wrong and a constitutional impropriety. The Manmohan Singh government and the UPA chairperson, Sonia Gandhi, owe it to the nation and the whole world to explain why their Home Minister recommended the rejection of Kasabs mercy petition by the President. To claim this secret execution as a success is immature and shows up the constitutional ignorance of the government and its spokespersons. It leads to the inference that the Congress had strong political interests in Operation X and wanted to use it to project itself as a courageous administration in preparation for the next electoral contest.

Incorrect

Why was Ajmal not informed about his constitutional right to seek a judicial review of the rejection of his mercy petition? The non-disclosure of vital information that could have saved or extended his life is a serious wrong on the part of the government. It is incorrect to say all legal avenues were closed for Kasab after the rejection of his mercy petition. The judiciary has every power to review and even invalidate the Presidents decision (taken on the basis of the Home Ministers recommendation) if vitiated by bias or for any other wrongful reason.

Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde claimed that it is my nature that I maintain secrecy on such things. I am trained to be a policeman. It is

unfortunate that Mr. Shinde does not know that he is not a policeman any more but a Cabinet Minister with the constitutional responsibility of leading the Home Ministry. Some sections of the media have quoted him as saying that even the Prime Minister and Ms Gandhi did not know in advance of Kasabs execution. His statement that they would have heard the news of the execution only when television channels started reporting it implies he did not share this vital information with his Cabinet colleagues. Had he done so, he might have got better constitutional wisdom, or the Prime Minister might have ventured to seek legal opinion from the Attorney General of India, which is his power and duty under the Constitution. In fact, such a serious matter with international implications and constitutional complications should have been discussed by the Cabinet and also by the UPA, at least for political reasons.

The governments secret operation prevented Kasab from exhausting all legal remedies available to him to escape or delay his execution. Article 21 that guarantees the right to life is equally applicable to foreign nationals it is provided to persons and not to citizens as some fundamental rights are, such as Article 19. As per this right, the state cannot deprive life or personal liberty except according to established procedure of law. It is established in law that the Presidents rejection of a mercy plea can be judicially reviewed to examine the material based on which the decision was made.

The Constitution provides the power of judicial review in order for courts to examine the reasons for the rejection of a mercy petition by the President. There are numerous cases in Indian history, where even after the rejection

of a mercy petition, courts have exercised this power.

Kehar Singhs case

In Kehar Singh v Union of India (AIR 1989 SC 653) , the Supreme Court asserted that the question as to the area of the Presidents power under Article 72 falls squarely within the judicial domain and can be examined by the court by way of judicial review. Judicial review is part of the basic structure of the Constitution which even Parliament cannot interfere with. Kehar Singh was convicted for murder and conspiracy for the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, and was sentenced to death. After his appeal to the Supreme Court was dismissed, his son presented a petition before the President of India for grant of pardon to his father under Article 72

which deals with the Presidents power to grant pardon, suspension, remittance and commuting of sentences in certain cases. The President rejected the petition. Kehar Singh wanted a personal hearing which was not accepted by the President on the ground of not being in conformity with the well established practice in respect of consideration of mercy petitions. The President, in his reply to a letter from counsel for Kehar Singh, said he could not go into the merits of a case that had been decided by the highest court of the land. True. The President does not have appellate powers over and above the Supreme Court. He can only go into areas not within the judiciarys domain in deciding the grant of pardon. He cannot decide any question regarding guilt or quantum of sentencing.

After the rejection of the mercy petition, Kehar Singhs son wanted the Delhi High Court to restrain the state from executing his father. His plea was rejected. He approached the Supreme Court. A Bench of five judges considered the question whether the President can scrutinise evidence while exercising pardoning power. The apex court took a liberal view and held that the President, in the exercise of the pardon power vested in him under Article 72, could scrutinize the evidence on the record of the criminal case and come to a different conclusion from that recorded by the Court in regard to guilt of and sentence imposed on the accused.

However, as explained by the apex court, the President had no power to amend or modify or supersede the judicial record. The nature of the constitutional power exercised by the

President in this regard is totally different from the judicial power. Without altering the judgment, the President could remove the stigma of guilt or remit the sentence imposed on him. Thus, the President can go into the merits, examine the record of evidence and determine whether a petitioner deserves mercy or not.

By giving Kehar Singh a hearing, the court also asserted that the function of determining whether the act of a constitutional or statutory functionary falls within the constitutional or legislative conferment of power, or is vitiated by self-denial on an erroneous appreciation of the full amplitude of the power, is a matter for the court to decide. And the court decided that Kehar Singhs petition seeking mercy be considered as still pending before the President to be dealt with and disposed of afresh. The President then again considered Kehar Singhs

petition for mercy and rejected it saying he did not deserve any mercy.

R.S. Pathak, then the Chief Justice of India, explained in the Kehar Singh case that *p+ardoning power of President is [a]constitutional responsibility of great significance, to be exercised when occasion arises in accordance with the discretion contemplated by context. The CJ further explained the reason: to any civilized society, there can be no attributes more important than life and personal liberty of its members recourse is provided to the judicial organ for its protection There is always a possibility of the fallibility of human judgment. The Constitution has provided checks and balances for almost every conceivable situation. If the judiciary is fallible, the President has a chance of making a correction under Article 72. And if the President s exercise of his power was

questionable, the higher judiciary may ask him to reconsider.

This is how the three convicts sentenced to death in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, Santhan, Murugan, Perarivalan, secured a reprieve from the Madras High Court after the President dismissed their clemency petition in 2011. Similarly, in the same year, the Supreme Court admitted a plea by Devinder Pal Singh Bhullars wife. He had been sentenced to death for a 1993 terror attack in Delhi, and his petition for pardon had been rejected. The wife of another condemned prisoner, Mahendra Nath Das, also questioned the rejection of her husbands mercy petition. Through the Supreme Courts intervention, his hanging was suspended. Even in Dhananjoy Chatterjees case, the Calcutta High Court examined a petition seeking a review of President Abdul Kalams

decision turning down his mercy plea. But it was ultimately rejected and he was executed in 2004.

Violation of rights

Thus, in Ajmal Kasabs case, he should have been informed so that he could have exercised the last option of seeking a review of the basis of the Presidents decision rejecting his mercy plea. The chance of examining whether the Presidents action was vitiated by self-denial on an erroneous appreciation of the full amplitude of power has been lost because of Operation X. It is undoubtedly a violation of the rights of the convict. Even capital punishment retentionists advocate the exhaustion of all possibilities of survival, as a greater principle of precaution, before committing legal homicide. It is now the statutory duty of the Executive Head and also the Union Home

Minister, under the Right to Information Act, 2005 to give reasons for their decision in killing Ajmal Kasab. Darkness and secrecy not only breed disease and corruption but also hide them.

(Madabhushi Sridhar is Professor and Coordinator, Center for Media Law and Public Policy, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad)

By not informing Ajmal Kasab of his right to seek a judicial review of the rejection of his mercy petition, the UPA government has committed a serious wrong November 23, 2012

Two deaths and a common chorus

Generalisations about India have to be wrong. But we simply have to be the worlds best mourners. And the worlds only death-revellers. In one way or the other we have to make an occasion of it.

A funeral is about remembering but, in India, it is equally, about forgetting. The courtesies around death in India dissolve differences, make past acrimony seem meaningless.

To feel, let alone express, an ungracious thought about someone who has just died, is simply not done. Only in the half-lit world of bullet clickers and knife grinders are expletives spat upon the dead.

In the larger, open spaces of life where feeling is instantaneous and instinctive and courtesy ingrained, death is an occasion for grieving or

sharing grief, receiving or offering sympathy. It takes on aspects of a festival. A festival of mourning.

Irrespective of whether the passing bier is of one known or unknown, one holds oneself in silence. Ram nam satya hai , is chanted by the pallbearers but repeated in the mind by onlookers as well, invariably in an inward sweat over its post-dated applicability to themselves.

The funeral

When someone idolised by millions of Indians dies, one can be sure of a collective paroxysm. We have seen this happen time and time again. The grief is genuine, the sense of loss real.

To members of Balasaheb Thackerays family and to those who saw in him a

father figure, the First Citizen of India himself has offered condolence. He has described the death as an irreparable loss to the nation. He speaks, by constitutional definition, for India.

Yet who can deny that there are those, and they are not few, who do not feel like grieving for him. They do not feel like joining the obsequies. Should they have been obligated to? This is a death, not a drill.

Unlike Indian bystanders at a funeral, Time does not stand still for anyone. Leaders legacies are judged by history and judged rather differently from what their followers, especially consanguineous followers, would like it to. They should not just be prepared for appraisals and reappraisals of Balasaheb and for consequent alterations in their own perspectives and attitudes.

Those of our political class who do not share the political ideology of the Shiv Sena but who went to the obsequies went not to condole in spontaneous sympathy but to be seen condoling. Their flower offerings garland came not from courtesy but craftiness. For them this death was an occasion for political consolidation. To warm political palms at a pyre, picking a funerals pocket is crass.

To millions of his followers, Balasaheb Thackeray was an icon. But who can deny the fact that to millions of others the same icon symbolised an in-thestomach fear.

His death has to mean one thing to those for whom his life spelt a kind of courage, and something else to those it meant a kind of fear.

If I am a Muslim in Bhiwandi, Byculla or Borivli I should be able to move about without seeking strength in fellow-numbers during this mourning period. I should not feel I better stay indoors. This is a death, not a conscription.

If I have been appalled by Balasahebs political philosophy, found his pointed targeting of South Indians, Biharis and outsiders in Mumbai unacceptable, and if I have been revolted by his hate-speeches against Muslims, I should not have to gulp my views for fear of funereal vengeance.

The worlds largest democracy is kind to the worlds best-hidden fascists.

After going through the public mourning of a death, we have moved seamlessly into the public revelling in

another. The chorus was common to both.

And execution

The kin of those slain, especially those who were killed fighting the terrorist attack, have reason to feel vindicated. A sense of justice having been done is one thing, gloating over the killers hanging belongs to an altogether different register of human reactions.

In an astonishingly objective response, K. Unnikrishnan, father of the gallant Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan who was slain in the 26/11 attack in Mumbai, said Ajmal Amir Kasabs execution was a legal necessity, but added I dont rejoice over it.

I also believe there was an inevitability to the hanging. President

Mukherjee had little choice. If he wanted to (and there is no reason for his wanting so to) he could have returned the recommendation to the government for a reconsideration, just once. If it came back with the same recommendation, he would have had to concur. Nothing could have kept Kasab from the gallows once the highest court ruled he must hang and the government, as it could only but have, concurred.

Rejoicing over the hanging however, something else.

is,

It is not about the law. It is about decency.

Decency? To whom? one can see the admonitory finger jab the air at once, to mass murderers, terrorists, killers of innocents?

I would put to them: I am not talking about the execution, which was determined by the law of the land. I am talking about the gloating over the execution.

We have seen rejoicings, loud, vulgar, tawdry rejoicings on the streets, with firecrackers exploding, sweets being distributed.

One death had people mourning on the streets, seen mourning, with some forced to mourn. And within the same week, another death had people celebrating, seen celebrating, with some obliged to celebrate.

Fear was a guest at the mourning and the celebration of the two deaths.

We are the worlds largest democracy. Fear is an honoured guest in its congregations, a very VIP.

Death Be Not Proud is the title line of Donnes famous Divine Poem. It puts death down, by pitting it against immortality.

What does one say about the two luxuriatings in death that we have just seen?

Death be not you insolent.

Put not a sullen face on, no, nor a

haughty one.

Look me in the face and say if you

really mourn, truly grieve, for the one

you have taken.

And, yes, tell me if you take one in

love and another in hate.

One in sorrow and another in penalty.

And say, time giving you leave, if you

split a mothers woe

From the one who the killer bore and

the one who bore the killed .

(Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former Governor of West Bengal.)

People welcomed and were also forced to revel in Kasabs hanging just as they mourned Thackeray and were forced to grieve too November 24, 2012

Conversation flows, ideas dont


Almost every leading newspaper and magazine in India these days seems to think it is necessary to organise an intellectual event. They call these events summits, conclaves or conferences. The organisers project these events so as to appear on the side of thought or ideas, as if seeking credibility and justification for their existence. But these gatherings are nowhere close to the brainstorming sessions they are

cracked up to be. Basically, they are huge talking extravaganzas in which every participant is a performer before an audience, and like any other performer, craves its approval. To hand it to them, the performances are quite extraordinary, and those who anchor them are equally skilled in the art.

Speakers are drawn from politics, cricket, Bollywood and a variety of other arenas, not to forget the smattering of international personalities, without which no conclave is considered worth its salt. Of course the activist who is the flavour of the season has to be included and given a prime spot, so that the social-political-cultural spectrum is covered. We also need to bring in the gossip and romance, which is provided by at least one wellknown Bollywood star. If his or her film is being released at the same

time, it is only a coincidence. The audience consists of the usual suspects from politics, bureaucracy and media, with some socialites in tow; among them will be those who can ask intelligent questions, playing to the script, to bring out the best performance from the lead characters. Everyone looks serious. The clothes are appropriate. Nobody is overdressed such that the event is misconstrued as a social gathering. But everyone is still distinctive enough to be noticed. So what we have is a well-scripted film with abundant funding, which also exudes a sense of social responsibility.

Why are such events needed? This basic question must be answered to assess their efficacy. Presumably, the concept is to provide a platform where thoughts are expressed, initiated, exchanged and discussed, leading to some kind of ideation. If so,

such events must leave us with perspectives that are incisive and important.

Question of integrity

But what are the speakers saying? Nothing new, nothing thoughtprovoking, nothing that changes your life, or even makes you think about life. Its nothing. Its just talk yes, loaded with wit, drama, controversy and intrigue, but beyond that, nothing. Content, if it is present, is often lost; if there is one speaker who brings out an important issue and deals with it seriously, it is but an accident.

Lets not forget that a lot of money is involved in these events. Why should we care so long as it is private money? But we should, as these are the same institutions that question the way

public money is being spent. When such questions are being raised, every citizen has a right to question private practice too. Huge corporate houses back many such events and some speakers are chosen due to the financial support available for them, bringing into question even the basic integrity of such events. Are thoughts being manipulated? Are speakers succumbing to corporate pressure? These are serious ethical issues that need to be addressed.

I wonder why there cannot be a televised conclave with the same aam aadmi that the politicians, bureaucrats and media houses love to talk about. Perhaps they are not intelligent enough to add to or receive the wisdom that is being purveyed at these events. The aam aadmi seems to have only two roles: to make a noise about the issues that hurt him most and provide a foundation for a

discourse at a summit by the chosen people; and, to cast a vote that gives the same people an opportunity to continue to be a part of the discourse.

This way we can conveniently forget the person on whom most of these discourses are based. But if anyone needs to speak and talk about real issues, it is this aam aadmi . I havent seen a single event excluding award ceremonies or political events organised by the power houses where the speakers as well as the audience consist of this section of society. Such a summit would not sell. Economics finally decides even the basic format of discourse. We need television to partner such events, but it wont unless we have the same people who say the same things in the same way, and we consume exactly as we have, always.

Such events are thus no different from anything else that we consume. Those who expect something different from such platforms are bound to be disappointed. We need serious dialogue with serious people who will change the way we think. Conclaves must trigger change but that will not happen unless the intentions change. This will in turn influence the curation and quality of the engaged audience. At the same time we need to provide the farmer, carpenter, household help, clerk, craftsman and everyone else we refer to as the aam aadmi a national platform to speak. They should be speaking not just to the politician, bureaucrat and media but also to people like themselves, other aam aadmi . Only this can integrate society in the search for answers to our problems.

(T.M. Krishna is a Carnatic vocalist.)

Conclaves, all the fashion now, are no brainstorming sessions as they consciously exclude the very people they discuss the aam aadmi November 24, 2012

Only crammers need apply


The Union Public Service Commissions Civil Services (Main) Examination, 2012, just got over. The results for this phase of the multitiered examination will be declared around March/April, 2013. Based on the marks scored in this examination, candidates will be shortlisted for the Personality Test, also known as interview, to be conducted around April/May, 2013. Based on their performance in the main examination and the interview, candidates will be

recommended for All-India Central government services.

and

The Constitution has tasked the UPSC with preserving the merit system in the country. The merit system, as opposed to the spoils system, may be defined as one in which recruitments are made on the basis of objective evaluation of skills and knowledge through open examinations. No one doubts the objectiveness of the Civil Services examination in which candidates go through a three-level test. Those who make it to the final list are annually feted as the best and brightest minds on whose hands will rest, for all practical purposes, the governance of India.

Required merits

The merits that UPSC looks for in the candidates are mentioned in its

Notification for the examination, where it is emphasised that no marks will be allotted for superficial knowledge, and that credit will be given for orderly, effective and exact expressions. The main examination intends to assess, according to the UPSC, the overall intellectual traits and depth of understanding of the candidates rather than merely the range of their information and memory.

Even a brief analysis of the huge number of questions asked, length of answers stipulated and the three-hour time limit raises doubts about whether it is possible to find a candidates overall intellectual traits and depth of understanding through this type of examination. In fact, it seems the examination system and the stated desired outcome are quite incompatible.

For instance, the General Studies papers are common for all candidates. This years GS Paper I contained 33 questions requiring answers ranging from 250 to 10 words. In other words, candidates are expected to write a total of around 3,000 words within three hours to answer 33 questions.

For popular optional subjects like Political Science or Sociology, there are around 20 questions (depending on the questions chosen) to be answered in three hours with a total word count of around 3,750.

How realistic is that? A normal student may struggle to put together 3,750 words, legibly written, on a preselected subject within three hours. It should be noted here that these 3,750 words are to be expended not on one question, but on 20 very different questions with no time given to think through them. It is unrealistic to

expect candidates to show their true intellectual traits and depth of understanding in the answers they write in the short time given, on so many tricky questions. Not surprisingly, even those who got as low as 800 marks out of a total of 2000 at the Mains were called for interview in 2011.

Some samples

Let us sample some questions asked. In GS I, a 250-word question asks for a critical examination of the issues involved in the context of the growing demands for the ban of Endosulfan in the country. What, in your view, should be done in the matter? Another question asking for a 150word answer is: There is an urgent need for the Planning Commission to revise the chapter on health in the 12th Plan document. Comment.

In Political Science II, here goes a question requiring a 150-word answer: Do you agree that liberal international theories are essentially Eurocentric and not necessarily imperialist? Another question, for a 250-word answer, asks: Is power a zero-sum or variable game in international relations? Can zero-sum game explain the mixture of conflict and cooperation of the present dynamics of international relations?

As should be evident, these are not very easy questions. Good answers to these questions require nuance and complex arguments, which in turn require thinking and time, even for someone well-versed with the subject. Framed with more time at hand, the answers to these questions may indeed help analyse a candidates intellectual traits and depth of understanding. But the problem is

that the three-hour time limit does not allow for thinking, or even for basic organisation of thought. In the Civil Services (Main) examination, time is such that if you start thinking, you are in trouble.

How do candidates cope? Given the severely limited time given, one often has no choice but to cram and mug up so that you have as much information as you can on your fingertips. You practise writing continuously for speed and flow. You make notes and diagrams, or buy material from coaching centres. As someone said, what matters here is not how much you know, but how much you can put in within those three hours. In the process, candidates go for the most commonplace arguments that they get ready-made from guidebooks or Wikipedia, with hardly any chance to exercise their analytical skills or critical thinking capacity. Weighted

down by the clock, candidates usually write whatever comes to their mind. Some say that they gave opinions in their answers that on second thought, they would have reversed. That means the candidates answers often do not reflect his or her considered opinion.

Severely limited time

Hence, while the questions may be good, the circumstances, especially the severely limited time relative to the number of words required, do not allow for proper answers to be given. The answers, written in a hurry, often give a misleading and deceptive account of the candidates intellectual traits. Add to this the requirement of mastering not one but two subjects, as part of two optional papers. All this load of work makes a mockery of the Commissions pious demands for depth of understanding

from candidates. It all boils down to hard work, perseverance, tenacity, consistency, good memory, and good coaching notes.

As in previous years, around 1,000 candidates will eventually make the cut in this years examination cycle, counted from the highest mark until the vacancies are filled. They will be put through a gruelling training regimen and inducted into service. Some will shine. Others will be just mediocre, jack of all trade-types, good for gruelling routine, file-shuffling work. As for the deep-going, analysing, intellectual types that the UPSC professes to want, they would be lost in the rush.

(T.K. Ngaihte completed his M.Phil in Political Science from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2010. He wrote the Civil Services Examination (Main) thrice. ngaihte11@yahoo.co.in)

The pattern of the Civil Services examination makes a mockery of

the UPSCs demand for depth of

understanding from candidates November 24, 2012

A Parliament that vetoes more than it votes


Many Indians are dismayed at the logjam in Parliament, and disgusted at what they see as politicians selfserving attitudes. They are right, of course, but only partially. In addition to MPs attitudes, a large part of the problem is due to inherited systemic flaws that need to be addressed. Few Indians recognise that even today, 65 years after independence, Indias parliamentary rules contain vestiges

of the British Raj that are now unworkable.

Indias Parliament was founded in 1919, almost 30 years before the country gained independence, in an atmosphere of rising nationalism that worried the Raj. It was created not with the full authority that a free nations legislature deserves, but rather to provide a limited selfgovernment for India, to be elected by a tiny elite.

That was Whitehalls way of buying time and fending off the more strident demands for full independence. Accordingly, although it was based on the British Parliament, it was clearly designed as Westminster-lite, where the natives got a platform to express themselves, and even pass some laws for routine governance, but all within limits. The Viceroy retained the ultimate authority.

At the root of disruptions

Despite a much-lauded postindependence constitution, some of the rules of parliamentary functioning did not change. One big example, and the one that is at the root of most disruptions in Parliament today, has to do with how debates and other motions, like censures, are admitted. The carry-over, colonial-era rule leaves it to the prerogative of the Speaker; in reality, all of the Speakers decisions on such matters are based on the consensus arrived at by the Business Advisory Committee, which includes the leaders of all major parties in Parliament.

The operative word is consensus. Invariably, the ruling party of the day withholds its consent to admit topics that might embarrass it.

A further twist is that the ruling party often agrees to admit a plain vanilla discussion (where it can smile away even compelling arguments), rather than one that entails a vote (where it could get embarrassed at getting less support than it had claimed).

This requirement of consensus essentially gives a veto to the government over what can be discussed or voted upon in Parliament. What was originally designed as a veto for the British Viceroy to keep pre-independent Indias proto Parliament in check, is now misused in free India.

Ironically, the British themselves dont follow this system, nor do most other democracies, which have rules clearly stipulating the minimum number of legislators required to admit various

kinds of debates, motions and votes. In the United Kingdom, for instance, 40 MPs are required to admit a discussion. In the United States, 60 Senators are required to overcome the filibuster, which otherwise permits members to speak endlessly in order to avoid voting on an issue. In India itself, it only takes 55 MPs to admit a no-confidence motion against the government; but no amount of MPs demanding a voting discussion on important national issues can get those admitted without the governments consent.

The world over, voting debates are commonplace in free legislatures. But in India, they are more likely on television (from audience participation) than in Parliament. In fact, there are some who believe that their rarity in Indias Parliament is a blessing in disguise. They are wrong. More voting in Parliament would

make the government to do more of something it shirks: sell its agenda to its own MPs, allies, sections of the Opposition, and most of all, to the public.

(Baijayant Jay Panda is a Biju Janata Dal MP in the Lok Sabha. @Panda_Jay on Twitter.)

The requirement of consensus before admitting topics for debate gives the ruling party the power to withhold consent over subjects that will embarrass it November 26, 2012

R.P. Singhs doublespeak on CAGs 2G report


Former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) official, R.P. Singh has

been singing a different tune to the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) on 2G which contradicts his statements to media that he is in disagreement with the Rs.1.76 lakh crore and other loss figures in the CAGs 2G scam report and its procedure, and that he was forced to sign it. It turns out that Mr. Singh told the JPC that he neither disagrees with the final CAG report nor was he forced to sign it.

In the last 72 hours, supporting Mr Singh, senior Congress politicians, including those who are members of the JPC, told multiple media channels that Mr. Singhs public disclosures since Friday are consistent with his deposition to the JPC a year ago on November 14, 2011. Since Mr. Singhs deposition in the JPC was made under oath, this support from Congress members on the 2G JPC becomes significant as it helped lend greater

credibility to Mr. Singhs statements over the weekend which went viral.

Not forced to sign

Most of Mr. Singhs confessions to the JPC came after sustained questioning by Mr. Gurudas Dasgupta and Mr. Yashwant Sinha. Mr. Singh, when asked the truth of whether he was forced to sign the report by Mr. Dasgupta, denied having done so in no uncertain terms. He was asked why he signed the report if he had a difference of opinion over the loss figures. Mr. Singh responded by saying that he had rejected presumptive loss figures due to lack of evidence, but had signed the report because this was a CAG report and the CAG was the final authority. When Mr. Dasgupta asked him if he could have refused to sign, Mr. Singh said he was bound to sign because he was a subordinate and government

functions through a hierarchy. However, he plainly admitted that had he not signed, some other officer would have signed the final report.

Only part audit

Mr. Singh, who has been raising questions about the three loss figures in the CAG report and complaining about the issue of guidelines, inferring victimisation, has never revealed to the media the real truth about his limited role and access to information. Under persistent questioning, he disclosed to the JPC that he was only responsible for one part of the audit which related to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in his role as DG, Post & Telegraph. There were at least two other simultaneous audits that were conducted on the Finance Ministry and the Ministry of Corporate Affairs by separate audit teams, which were reporting to

separate functionaries, under the supervision of the CAG headquarters, within the overall ambit of the 2G scam audit.

This implies that any objection that Mr. Singh made would only be on account of the limited information that his three-member team auditing DoT would convey, since the final CAG report, as he informed the JPC, was a culmination of the audit conducted in three different places. This clearly left him in no position of authority or knowledge to cast aspersions on the cumulative report, its contents or final loss figures a vital fact that Mr. Singh has failed to reveal in his over two dozen newspaper and TV interviews.

Rather, it is clear from Mr. Singhs letter of May 31, 2010, that he himself acknowledged that the audit probe needed to go beyond his limited

scope, which was confined to the DoT. He wrote, it is the privilege of Headquarters if deemed fit to obtain views from CVC, CBI, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Company Affairs, TRAI, etc, thereby admitting that the information needed to be accumulated by several different teams within the CAG system before arriving at loss figures.

Moreover, several other officers of his rank conducting parallel part audits and those senior to him would have to take ownership of the final CAG report. When directly questioned by JPC members whether he believed that the CAG report had given unrealistic figures or whether the CAG had gone beyond its mandate, Mr. Singh did not record any agreement with such contentions last year.

Since the JPC members knew Mr. Singh was only responsible for a portion of the final report, they further quizzed him about the other parts that may not have come from his department. Mr. Singh acknowledged that the audit report was a collective effort and that nobody can disassociate with it or disown it. He further confirmed to the JPC that he did not even disagree with those aspects of the report for which he was not responsible.

Rejected field teams

Mr. Singh has been busy impressing on the media that he had only indexed the Rs.1,658 crore entry fee of 2001 which was used to award spectrum in 2008 to Rs.2,645 crore and rejected the Rs.1.76 lakh crore loss figure (based on Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recommendations that 2G should be

equated with 3G auction prices), which he accused the CAG of mysteriously reinstating. However, he has failed to reveal that the 3Grelated losses had been put up to him independently by his own threemember audit team which was auditing DoT, and not by CAG Vinod Rai. Based on the DoT reply and other evidence, the three-member audit team had presented various figures which included loss figures Rs.2,645 crore, Rs.48,374 crore, Rs.65,725 crore (S Tel) and Rs.1,02,497 crore (3G comparison for Rajas 122 licences). It is rumoured that there was even a loss figure of Rs.4.19 lakh crore given in the early stages of the audit.

Mr. Singh told the JPC last year that he had rejected the loss figure of the audit team based on his perception that there wasnt sufficient evidence. Having done that, he then, in May 2010, proceeded to use an indexation

methodology to substantially whittle down the loss figure.

These contradictions raise several questions, most importantly, whether what Mr. Singh said in the JPC under oath, or his recent media interviews, are the real truth.

shalini.s@thehindu.co.in

Tells JPC he does not disagree with the auditors final report, but spins a totally different story to media a year later November 26, 2012

A civil war set to escalate


Now that there is a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the international

community will focus again on Syria; it cannot pay attention to two crises at the same time, just as a state, however mighty, cannot wage successful wars on two fronts simultaneously.

The externally induced National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces is almost guaranteed to lead to two outcomes: the conflict will suck in Syrias neighbours, making the region even more volatile. For once, it is the regional powers that are calling the shots. The extra-regional powers have allowed themselves to become allies of the regional players, unlike the more familiar scenario of regional states being used as allies of the West. Secondly, the civil war in Syria will intensify and extend well into the future with the Syrian people condemned to suffer and die in large numbers in the months ahead.

Role of international community

Is this what the international community really desires? There is no dearth of expression of concern, even of sadness, at the loss of lives in Syria. But if this concern for human lives was genuine, should there not have been a serious effort towards a political solution? No one can honestly say that the Assad regime never gave the slightest hint that it was ready to explore the possibility of reaching a peaceful denouement. On the other hand, the rebels and those backing them made it clear ab initio , that there was no question of even talks about talks unless Bashar al-Assad was first eliminated, politically at least.

The obsession with regime change has come in the way of a search for

political dialogue. Negotiations have to include those whom one regards as ones enemies. Not inviting Iran to the Geneva conclave was clearly wrong, given the fact that Iran was a most interested as well as influential player in the great game. If the demand is only for Mr. Assad to leave, and not regime change, a senior figure in the Assad regime, Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil, had said publicly in Moscow on August 12, 2012, that everything could be discussed in negotiations around a table, including the resignation of President Assad, but Mr. Assads departure could not be a precondition for talks. This was a reasonable offer. Why was it not followed up? Why was no effort made to ascertain its seriousness?

If wholesale regime change is what is sought, there is no incentive for any side there are certainly more than two sides in this tragic conflict to

stop the fight. Mr. Assad is not going to surrender, exposing himself, his family, his community and the various minorities to a certain bloody backlash. The regime has committed atrocities, no doubt, but the rebels are not angels as has now been conclusively established. The rebels, for their part, have a significant number of extremist elements in their ranks, including Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood, as well as al- Qaeda, all of whom have a radical agenda and will not settle for anything less than a complete overthrow of the Baath regime. The rebels have a vested interest in continuing the civil war; if peace talks succeed, they will lose all relevance particularly because the Syrian people, including the Sunnis, are unlikely to vote for the Brotherhood and its allies. Those supporting the rebels do not seem to have given sufficient attention to what might follow the regimes fall; the token assurances they have

received from some of the rebel groups on this score cannot be taken at face value.

In any case, Mr. Assad is not going to give up without a stiff fight. He has the means to carry on, given the fact that the bulk of his large army is still with him. The number of deserters and defectors is not alarming from his perspective, despite huge monetary incentives offered by some states. His air force has enough firepower to inflict significant damage. Importantly, he has the support of regional powers that will go to almost any length to ensure his and his regimes survival and of influential external powers that will ensure that the United Nations Security Council will not lend legitimacy to a no-fly zone or any form of international military action.

The Syrian national council, based in Turkey, would have been reluctant to

merge with the National Coalition, but it had very little choice in the matter once Secretary Clinton criticised it as not being representative enough of the Syrian opposition. Now that the National Coalition, supposedly more representative of the Syrian people, has been formed, it will expect, and will surely receive, increased financial, intelligence and military assistance from its patrons making the civil war even bloodier. It will also expect to obtain diplomatic recognition in the near future as the government in exile, which also will be forthcoming from some western countries and most of the regional powers, with the certain exception of Iran and, most likely, Iraq. The sectarian divide will be complete. No one should be surprised as and when the National Coalition demands Syrias seat in the United Nations as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. It would be interesting to follow how that drama will unfold.

Regional dimensions

The regional dimensions of the Syrian war are becoming apparent by the day. Lebanon has already suffered shocks, which could threaten to drive it into a civil war situation of its own. Jordan is fragile, with demonstrators calling openly for a change of regime there. Turkey which has played a very proactive role in the Syrian situation is not immune from problems of its own, particularly with its Kurdish minority, which, with Syrias support will do its best to cause instability in the country which, in turn, would lead to more direct confrontation between the two countries. If Patriot missiles are deployed along the Syrian border and NATO gets involved, Russian and Chinese attitudes will harden significantly.

And there is always the decades old Arab-Israeli dispute. Already Syria and Israel have exchanged fire. It is not clear who on the Syrian side was responsible; it is possible that rebels and the regime could in fact implicitly agree on dragging Israel into their conflict for different reasons. On the Palestinian front, Hamas has succeeded in bringing the Palestinian issue to the fore. Hamas is in a winwin situation. It has compelled the Arab states in North Africa, which is where the Arab Spring has occurred, to come out strongly in its support, unlike in previous times. The Arab League will have to express solidarity with Hamas even if Hamas will remain more beholden to Iran than to the Arabs. President Abbass position has weakened after the recent events in Gaza and he will come under increased pressure from his own Fatah faction to adopt a tougher, almost belligerent, posture to retain Fatahs support base in the West

Bank. Hezbollah, which has thousands of upgraded missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, is waiting in the wings and might be tempted to join the fray at some point in time.

The Middle East has rarely been so volatile, complex, conflicted and conflict-connected.

(Chinmaya R. Gharekhan served as Indias special envoy to the Middle East and is a former U.N. Under Secretary General.)

The regime change obsession of the

West and the coalition of rebels it is propping up has obstructed the search

for a peaceful solution in Syria November 26, 2012

Saving free speech from the police

The reprehensible treatment meted out to Shaheen Dhada and Renu Srinivasan by the police in a response to their Facebook activity has brought into focus the conflict between the fundamental right to free speech and the ambiguously worded Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. However, what is underemphasised is that Shaheen and Renu would probably have undergone the torment even if there were no Section 66A on the statute books.

Their case is, in fact, symptomatic of a larger problem namely, that the coercive machinery of criminal law is being set in motion on flimsy and tenuous statutory interpretations by the police. Addressing this larger systemic problem calls for a lot more than just striking down Section 66A as unconstitutional.

The Constitution of India protects the fundamental right to free speech by proscribing the State from enacting any statute or regulation which unreasonably restricts the right to free speech. Several provisions of the Indian Penal Code such as Section 124A (proscribing seditious speech), Section 292 (proscribing obscene speech), Section 295A (proscribing speech engendering religious hatred) have been restrictively interpreted by the Supreme Court to ensure that these sections do not act as

unreasonable intrusions on the right to free speech.

For instance, Section 124A (proscribing seditious speech) was held to be constitutionally valid by the Supreme Court in the Kedar Nath case on the strict understanding that it only criminalised speech intended to, or having the tendency, to create disorder or disturbance of public peace by resort to violence. The Supreme Court couldnt have been more unequivocal in insisting that Section 124A is not meant to criminalise mere criticism of the government, however strongly worded. Despite these clear guidelines, the police have perversely invoked Section 124A in cases where no offence of Sedition could be thought to be constituted on any reasonable interpretation of that provision. Aseem Trivedis case is the most recent illustration of such

frivolous invocation of Section 124A. Similarly, other provisions (such as Sections 295A and 505) which criminalise speech have been perversely invoked by the police to muzzle what the Supreme Court has clearly recognised as a legitimate exercise of the right to free speech.

Deters individuals

The Constitutional structure in place to protect free speech presupposes that any action by the police is strictly in pursuance of the statute or regulation reasonably restricting free speech, as interpreted by the courts. However, cases such as Shaheens and Aseem Trivedis which are in no way mere aberrations seriously undermine the soundness of this presupposition. To be sure, the citizen is not bereft of remedy in such cases. The right to free speech in such cases is likely to be vindicated by the

judiciary after the criminal law has been set into motion either at a trial or in a quashment proceeding. Furthermore, the victims in these cases could also, in principle, subsequently sue the police for wrongful prosecution. However, it is feared that this protection is too little and comes too late for two reasons: First, the very fact that individuals are called to the police station, and are subject to interrogation on flimsy and tenuous grounds amounts to harassment and subsequent remedies do not adequately mitigate or vindicate this harm. Second, such unjustified invocations of penal provisions have a chilling effect on free speech, that is to say, they severely deter individuals from exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech for fear of frivolous prosecution and police harassment. The wronged citizens right to free speech may be eventually vindicated by a court but not before

countless others are disincentivised from exercising theirs. The constitutional protection of free speech thus stands the risk of being eroded unless measures are put in place to insulate it. This necessitates two innovations.

Two innovations

First, it is time to recognise that setting the machinery of criminal law in motion (either by inquiry or interrogation) for a putative contravention of a constitutionally valid law on tenuous and flimsy grounds is in itself a violation of the fundamental right to free speech.

Second, it is imperative to introduce a safety valve at the threshold, before the criminal law can be set into motion, in matters of free speech regardless of the gravity of the

offence. This safety valve could take the form of a requirement that any invocation of the criminal law machinery in response to any expression of ideas, is conditional upon the approval of a responsible judicial official. This can ensure that the criminal law machinery will not be used on frivolous or tenuous grounds. Had this safety valve been in place, it is very likely that Aseem Trivedi, Shaheen Dada and Renu Srinivasan would not have been arrested.

It could plausibly be argued that Section 66A, as it stands, is unduly restrictive of free speech. However, even if the Supreme Court reads down Section 66A so as render it free speech compliant, it wouldnt in itself make India more free speech friendly unless the larger systemic problem highlighted is remedied. The judiciary may lay down the clearest guidelines but unless there is a mechanism for

ensuring that the police adhere to them before setting the criminal law in motion it is feared that the right to free speech will continue to remain imperilled.

(Shivprasad Swaminathan is doctoral candidate in jurisprudence, University of Oxford, and assistant professor, Jindal Global Law School. Neha Tayshete is assistant professor, Jindal Global Law School.)

What the outcry over Section 66A of the IT Act misses is the need for a mechanism to prevent arrests on flimsy interpretations of criminal law provisions November 27, 2012

Striking at the root of corruption

Corruption is nothing but a reflection of the distribution of power within societies. The country is where it is because the political system is selfperpetrating and no party is accountable to anyone except a coterie of people that dominates all decisions. Unless the political system is accountable, going after individual cases of corruption will achieve little.

Slew of anti-corruption bills

By making a single point demand for a Jan Lokpal, to the exclusion of all else, Anna Hazares agitation became circumscribed by its own rhetoric. Expectedly, the government response was a slew of anti-corruption bills that have been introduced in Parliament, unheard of in the annals of the past six decades. From 2010, in a span of just two years, as many as 10 anti-

corruption bills have been tabled including the disputed Lokpal bill, the forfeiture of benami property, foreign bribery, money laundering, and whistle-blowing bills plus five more all aimed at deterring specific acts of corruption or purporting to give corruption-free public service as a right. And it was not just the Central government that showed this eagerness. Bihar, Rajasthan, Jharkhand and Odisha have actually enacted laws which can result in the attachment of ill-gotten property of public servants sometimes pending investigation.

Undeniably, the citizenry will applaud such measures, frustrated and angry as people are about corruption. But wittingly or unwittingly, this response has deflected attention from a much larger issue. None of the bills or laws addresses the fountainhead of corruption the opaque

management of political parties which includes the source and deployment of their funds.

The second Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC 2009) underscored the large-scale criminalisation of politics, illustrating how the participation by criminals in the electoral process was the soft underbelly of the Indian political system leading to the flagrant violation of laws, poor quality of services, protection from lawbreakers on political, group, class, communal or caste grounds, partisan interference in the investigation of crimes, the poor prosecution of cases, inordinate delays that last for years, high costs of the judicial process, mass withdrawal of cases and indiscriminate grant of parole.

What is of great importance is the open admission that votes are in fact

secured through large, illegal and illegitimate expenditure on elections. This has been termed as the starting point of corruption making cleansing elections the most important route to bringing principles into politics. The Lokpal brouhaha has deflected attention from issues infinitely more important for going after dishonest politics, which seems to be allpervasive.

And the context matters too. Much of India lives in as unequal a world comparable in fact to pre-industrial Britain. Feudal mindsets prevail and the exercise of patronage is expected. In addition, in India, money power can control decisions the voter makes. Bound by the mores of a largely agrarian way of life, the poor remain simultaneously protected and penalised not by the law and the police as much as by feudal lords, often having criminal records. Indian

political parties had long used these local sardars and strongmen as trusted allies for defeating opponents. But the latter have moved up in life by increasingly joining the political fray as candidates not just supporters, and they have joined to win.

According to the Annual Report of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), among 543 elected Members of Parliament who were elected in the 2009 election, 162 (30 per cent) had criminal cases pending. Five years earlier, that figure was 24 per cent. Meanwhile, the votes needed to win a seat have fallen to as low as 15 per cent. Criminal elements that once pulled in votes for party candidates are now getting voted to power themselves, gaining social respectability and public esteem in the bargain. Meanwhile, campaignspending limits being easy to flout, buying the voter is easily managed.

More worrisome than individual corruption is the widespread concern that funds are collected by political parties and parked in secret bank accounts abroad to be ploughed back to finance elections often by hook or by crook. Since fund management is confined to a handful of people in each party, it gives enormous power to the top leadership which controls the deployment of funds and all that accompanies it. When the choice of candidates is intrinsically linked with money power, quid pro quo s, and IOUs, clean candidates without money or political pedigree do not stand a ghost of a chance. And it goes without saying that once illegal and illegitimate expenditure is incurred on winning elections, there can be no prospect of honest dealings thereafter.

In the OECD countries with which we frequently draw comparisons, three qualities on a scale of eight, considered the most important attributes required from members of the political executive are objectivity, impartiality and neutrality. In those countries, a Minister is expected to publicly commit himself to observing ethical principles if he is to set an example to public servants.

In India, talk of ethical conduct is laughed at; civil servants take their cue from the standards of probity they are witness to superiors in the service and their political bosses. Until political parties field clean candidates and promote and reward them, a climate of ethical dealings simply cannot emerge.

Expecting the clean up to come only by reinforcing anti-corruption laws though necessary, will divert attention

from the real issue of corruption how political parties collect funds and give tickets. The only way this can change is by educating voters on the dynamics behind the power play. Simply put, it means having knowledge about the origin of party funds to provide insights into the interests that back a political party. Equally how such contributions might influence future policies including the future outlook for using public funds and natural resources.

It should come as no surprise that when ADR sought information on political party funding, using RTI, all political parties with the exception of the CPI (M) responded that they were not bound to provide such information. This, when income tax exemptions worth hundreds of crores of rupees, land and accommodation at nominal rates, and free airtime, are all provided at public cost. A full bench of

the Central Information Commission (CIC) met in September to take a view on this. But major political parties shied away.

The key issue

Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely that the sources of party funding would be declared in the foreseeable future. But that is the key to understanding the compulsions of political parties and the decisions they make. One way of overcoming the clandestine collection of election funds would be to introduce state funding of elections as so many countries have done. More importantly there is a need for laws that mandate transparency in the deployment of political party funds coupled with rules that democratise inner party functioning. Unless the monopoly that a small clique that holds the reins of power in almost

every party is freed, new blood can never transfuse into the political arena.

A Bill called the Registration and Regulation of Political Parties (2011) has been drafted by a committee chaired by Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah, former Chief Justice of India. The bill includes a democratic process for selecting party officebearers as well as those given the ticket. It talks of limits on donations by individuals and corporations, suggests penalties for non-compliance and addresses the vexed question of how to deal with support groups that spend money that remains unaccounted for in the candidates election expenses.

It is legislation like this that the country needs. Much more than a Lokpal. It is only when political parties become answerable that clean

candidates will emerge. Then alone might the use of public funds for private gain halt.

(A former civil servant, Shailaja Chandra is the Vice President of Initiatives for Change-Centre for Governance, a think tank that supports social reform.)

Cleansing elections

political

parties

and

of illegal money is the first step towards tackling the evil of graft November 27, 2012

Why serving Barfi! at the Oscars leaves a bitter aftertaste

Philosophers tend to say that art imitates life though Oscar Wilde would beg to disagree. He thought it worked the other way around. Whichever way you may look at it, one fact is inescapable: the symbiotic relationship is nowhere as sharply defined as it is in India. This is true especially of the film industry. The selection of a film called Barfi! as Indias official entry to the Oscars highlights in capital letters the same deficiencies that hobble governance and give Indian industry such a bad reputation.

Indian cinema is a booming industry and despite the numerous logistical hurdles and business uncertainties, doughty financiers much like the innumerable intrepid Indian entrepreneurs keep braving the odds to back nebulous ideas and dubious scripts. According to data on the website of the Film Federation of

India (FFI), a total of 1,255 Indian feature films were certified by the Central Board of Film Certification during calendar 2011. This is a proxy metric for estimating the number of movies completed during a year.

Number of films made

This number includes movies made in India in all the regional languages. Topping the charts is the number of Hindi movies released during the year at 206, followed by Telugu (192), Tamil (185), Kannada (138) and Bengali (122). Surprisingly, six movies in English also received certification during the year.

The Indian film industry can, therefore, rightfully boast of tremendous diversity, vitality and depth. But, going by all the movies selected as Indias official entry to the

Oscars, it would seem that Indian filmmaking is still trapped in infancy. There are two valid reasons why selecting Barfi! might send all the wrong signals to the international business community.

Film federations role

First, like many decisions involving the Indian government, the selection process for shortlisting Indias official entry is shrouded in opacity, random discretion and arbitrariness. The rules framed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation which hands over the fabled statuettes, stipulate that Selection of that picture shall be made by one organization, jury or committee that should include artists and/or craftspeople from the field of motion pictures. In India, the FFI is the body authorised to select that one film.

The FFI is studiously silent about the composition of that selection committee. Nobody knows the background of the committee members whether they are film professionals with knowledge about the art and history of the craft, film theorists, students or film distributors or exhibitors (who actually occupy most of the FFI posts). The FFI has to submit to the Academy a list of the screening committee members even before they shortlist the movies. Therefore, the federation probably ensures that the one eligibility criterion mentioned in the rules (...should include artists and/or craftspeople from the field of motion pictures) is scrupulously followed, even though the rules leave enough wiggle room.

The FFI website is also uncommunicative about the other

films that were in contention, why they were jettisoned, or the reasons behind choosing Barfi ! to represent Indian films at the Oscars. The FFI website only outlines its own rules: FFI is authorized to select one film for the consideration of Oscar Award in the category Best Foreign Language Film Award. The selection committee set up for this purpose will view the films entered for selection from 15th September in Chennai as we have to submit the film to the Academy not later than October 1, 2012.

The choice of Barfi! has obviously triggered a howl of protests, especially on why a Bollywood movie should get selected almost every time. Thats a good point, because while Bollywood accounted for close to only 10 per cent of all certificates granted last year, Hindi language movies have been monopolising Indias Oscar

entries ever since the Academy began awarding a Foreign Language Film Award. In fact, of all the entries submitted by India since 1957, only three have been nominated by the Academy so far for the final stage Mother India , Salaam Bombay and Lagaan and not a single film has won the award till date. This is rather unfortunate because the Indian film industry has constantly claimed that its scale is industrial, which would automatically imply a minimum quality and aesthetic matrix. It is also rather paradoxical that, despite enormous diversity, the FFI tends to end up favouring Bollywood, without having to explain its position. This is all the more ironic since FFIs seemingly private decisions are sent as the nations official entry.

FFI and the Bollywood fraternity can argue that the Academy is probably biased against non-European movies,

especially since Asian movies have won the award only five times. There could be a grain of truth in that allegation, but that still doesnt take away from the fact that the Oscars represent a splendid opportunity for showcasing the best of Indian cinema, irrespective of whether its a commercial success or not.

Scant respect for IP rights

The second reason why the choice of Barfi! represents the worst of Indian business ethos is related to intellectual property rights. Indian businesses across the industry spectrum, including Bollywood, have shown scant regard for intellectual property and that gives businesses across the globe the heebie-jeebies.

It might be justifiable though even this is open to debate to relax the

IP regime at the intersection of justice, morality and ethics, especially where lives of human beings are involved. But, unless it is markedly part of the creative commons, artistic works whether they are movies, songs or plays remain out of bounds for copying.

Social media has been atwitter about how several scenes in Barfi! have been lifted from different movies across the globe. While some of it may not amount to copying, and some of it might actually have been inspired by the works of great masters, the tsunami of status reports and microblogs ridiculing the originality of the film is definitely going to give the Academy second thoughts. The Academy views its role as a custodian of Hollywoods output quite seriously and to thumb ones nose at it might not be the best strategy.

Media companies across the globe view the subcontinents IP regime, its implementation and the regulatory framework with a bit of trepidation. Therefore, any creative endeavour from India which attempts to disregard that anxiety is not only shooting itself in the foot but is seen behaving like a petulant teenager. Its definitely time for the Indian film industry to emerge from this extended period of adolescence.

(Rajrishi Singhal is a Mumbai-based business journalist.)

Through an opaque selection process, India has sent to the Academy Awards

a Bollywood film of dubious originality, once again losing the

chance to showcase the best of its diverse cinema November 27, 2012

Myanmars census a crucial democracy test


Myanmar is getting ready for a population census in 2014, its first in three decades. The headcount is also expected to prepare the ground for the countrys next general election in 2015, which, it is hoped, will usher in a genuine peoples government. The previous military regime did not feel the need for a census. The last census was in 1983, and Myanmarese born after that have never been enumerated. An accurate count of the population would both be a critical part of the governments political reforms, as well as one of its main drivers.

The census will enable an accurate estimate of key economic indicators such as GDP, per capita income and other socio-economic data of the country for national development, economic planning and balanced assessment. It would be crucial to several key policies relating to education, health care, housing, employment, sanitation, transport and communication, to name just a few. The process also becomes necessary for delimitation of constituencies and ensuring a fair representation of all the ethnic nationalities in the national and regional legislative bodies. The project will start in April 2014, ahead of the next general election. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has agreed to support Myanmars proposed 2014 population and housing census.

After 1931, 1983 census

For years, economists and academics studying Myanmar have been forced to use the government's notoriously unreliable data. The 1983 census failed to count people living in areas where insurgencies were raging. Before that, the last credible census was conducted in 1931, during British rule. The countrys first nationwide census took place in 1891, which was five years after the British annexed Upper Burma. The biggest challenge that faces the reforms process is the ethnic issue. The government has signed some 18 ceasefire agreements with various ethnic militias. But the resolution of these would require addressing the underlying political issues.

Already, there are apprehensions that the census exercise could be used to marginalise ethnic nationalities,

especially those in conflict with the government.

Issue of Rohingyas

However, the immediate question in any discussion of the Myanmar census is about the Rohingyas. There are approximately one million Rohingya Muslims living in Rakhine State. They are not counted among the 135 national races and hence are not citizens. They were excluded from the 1983 census. Their statelessness has resulted in their persecution. Some 200,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar and are now living in Bangladesh.

Myanmars 1982 Citizenship Law has designated citizens into three categories: 1. full citizens, 2. associate citizens, and 3. naturalised citizens. None of the categories applies to the Rohingya who fall in the category of

non-national or foreign residents. But Rohingya groups insist they have lived in Myanmar for generations. In the recent violence in the Rakhine state clash between the Buddhists and the Rohingyas, which also affected other Muslim groups in the state, more than 200 Rohingya were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Persons of Indian origin

The government appointed an investigation commission into the incidents, but it has not been able to finish its task yet though two deadlines have passed. President Thein Sein has pledged to consider new rights for the stateless Rohingya, but the promise falls short of any commitment towards full citizenship rights. The expectation that Aung San Suu Kyi may give strong voice to the problems of the Rohingyas has been belied.

Aside from the Rohingyas, there are about 1,00,000 Chin, who have fled persecution and settled in the areas bordering Indias Mizoram. Several hill tribes live in remote and inaccessible areas and will need to be counted. There are also a large number of native born but non-indigenous people, such as Indians, who are yet not counted and registered. The 1983 census reported approximately 4,28,000 persons of Indian origin (PIO) in Myanmar. It has been estimated (unofficially) that as many as 2.5 million PIOs could be living in Myanmar. Although they have lived in Myanmar for more than four generations, they lack documentation required by the 1982 Burmese citizenship law and are therefore stateless. However, many of them have registered for naturalised citizenship after the government made available this option in the wake of the 2010 elections.

Over and above all this is the challenge of training people to execute the census. If conducted properly, it will help in empowering Myanmars ethnic nationalities, provided it is inclusive and conducted according to international standards.

According to U Khin Yi, Chairperson of the National Population and Development Commission, a successful census will require broad and effective partnership involving various government sectors, parliamentarians, civil society, the private sector and international organisations.

In order to ensure that the census is universal and inclusive of all national races, Myanmar may even need to review the 1982 citizenship law to bring it in conformity with

international conventions, international custom and principle generally recognised with regard to nationality. In addition, it should be brought in line with the principles embodied in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness of 1961.

Transformation from procedural to substantive democracy has to be inclusive. Conducted in the right spirit, Myanmars census would have a big role to play in ensuring that majoritarianism does not get in the way of this.

(Sonu Trivedi teaches Political Science in Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi.)

If conducted properly, the 2014 headcount will both help to consolidate

the countrys political process, and drive it November 28, 2012

reforms

Hyping one threat to hide another


A lot of global attention right now is focussed on the World Conference on International Telecommunications of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which will get under way in Dubai next week. This meeting is taking up a review of International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs). When the ITRs were last reviewed in 1988, the Internet was not commonplace and, therefore, did not find mention. In 2012, it is difficult to think of global communication

without the Internet. The key question today is whether the remit of the ITU should extend to the Internet or not, and if indeed it should, to what parts and aspects of the Internet, and in what manner.

One summary view, quite popular in many quarters, is that with the Internet taking over global communication systems, there is no role for the ITU anymore. Unlike traditional telecommunication largely, telephony global Internet traffic is mediated entirely through commercial arrangements among private players with almost no involvement of a regulator. Free market proponents, having greatly dominated the discourse so far, hold that the free market has fully triumphed, and delivered, in relation to the Internet. This model should not be disturbed. There is, therefore, no

need for any kind of regulation of the Internet.

Free market view

This free market view has found a powerful ally among freedom of expression groups, so much so that the debate about the future of the ITU is almost entirely fronted by evocative appeals about preserving the Internet as the ultimate domain of free expression. Unlike market fundamentalism, there are no two views about freedom of expression among most groups and people, and thus such a strategy is understandable. Perhaps for similar reasons, Hillary Clinton has spelled Internet freedom as a key U.S. foreign policy agenda. It may, however, need deeper thought and analysis to assess whether the real agenda here is to use the new

Internet-based global communication realm with the unprecedented domination of U.S. companies in it as the key means for global economic, social, cultural and political domination in the post-industrial world. Any kind of global regulation of the Internet, or even articulation of global principles of public interest, does not serve this agenda.

The issue of freedom of expression vis--vis regulation of the Internet is of course very real. States are quite nervous about the transformational new means that allow citizens to exercise voice and associational power as never before. They are scrambling to get their hands on some lever or the other to prevent the potential damage. And it is not only the developing countries that are busy in this regard, so are the developed ones, greatly enhancing their surveillance capabilities. Nevertheless,

at the ITU very few countries have floated proposals that could increase governmental control over Internet content. These proposals mostly pertain to subverting the current globally managed Internet names and addresses system, and the globally configured Internet traffic routing, to create more controllable national Internet spaces, or national segments of the Internet, as one proposal calls them. There is very little support for these proposals. Almost all developed countries and most developing ones, including India, have not supported these.

At the recently concluded U.N. Internet Governance Forum at Baku, a reporter asked Terry Kramer, the chief U.S. delegate to the upcoming ITU conference, what the whole fuss is about when decisions can be taken only by consensus and there is so much opposition to these problematic

proposals. Mr. Kramer was disarmingly honest in his response. He agreed that there was not that much real danger of anything happening at the WCIT itself. But, he said, this is a long-haul thing. What is at stake are the principles that will guide Internet regulation/governance in the long run. And in this regard, he continued, Dubai was just one of the many forums/meetings/crossroads, and many more are yet to come.

The U.S. and the dominant global Internet companies, which are at the forefront of the anti-ITU campaign, know their game and objectives quite well. It is important that others do so too. This is about the new paradigm of global governance/regulation of the communication realm . Most hype around the WCIT seems to be missing this point, largely because it is to a considerable extent orchestrated and misled by the dominant powers.

The paradigmatic issue here is whether the Internet, as the centrepiece of the new global communication realm, should be regulated at all. Freedom of expression is just one side of the story. The other, rather well disguised side is about the political economy of the global communication realm. It is about the division of resources within the communication realm, and, even more importantly, the larger global and sub-global division of resources economic, social, and political which is fundamentally impacted by the nature of regimes that govern the global communication realm.

Closely regulated

The communication realm or more descriptively, the information and communication realm, and its

technologies has always been closely regulated in public interest. It is generally understood that it is of vital and extraordinary public interest, and cannot just be subject only to normal commercial regulation, that for instance governs trade in white goods. Every telephone company is obliged to carry the traffic from every other company in a nondiscriminatory manner, which is called the common carriage rule. One can well imagine what it would be like if this rule is not enforced. Long back, there was a time when there was no such rule. The telephony revolution was made possible because regulators forced common carriage regulation on big companies in the U.S. and other places. Similarly, the IT revolution began when regulators in the U.S. forced software to be unbundled from hardware, whereby an independent software industry could develop. The rest is history.

There are universal service obligations in the telecom sector whereby every telecom provider must service every person/ household, etc., whether it serves its business model or not. And then there are regulations on tariffs, quality of service and so on. Telecom providers are forced to comply with disability friendly features, and they also contribute to Universal Service Funds that are used to universalise communication services. All of this, and much more, will disappear in an unregulated communication system. In taking a collective political decision on whether the Internet is at all to be regulated or not, we need to understand that we are taking decisions on all these issues, and not just on freedom of expression.

In order to understand the real stakes in the regulation or not debate regarding the Internet, it is best to look at what is happening in the U.S.

right now. The U.S. telecom market is dominated by two players, Verizon and AT&T. Verizon has challenged the Federal Communication Commissions authority to enforce net neutrality (the Internet equivalent of the common carriage rule), arguing that the Internet is not telecom and thus outside the FCCs mandate. AT&T went a step further. It claimed that since even traditional telecom services, like telephony, increasingly work on Internet Protocols (IP), the FCCs remit should not cover even telephony. In essence, more or less, the claim is that no regulation of the communication systems is needed at all. The FCC can close down! Markets have taken over, and are their own arbitrators!

California recently became the latest of many States in the U.S., mostly Republican-ruled, which have deregulated Voice-over-Internet-

Protocol, effectively removing regulatory control over telephony service, disregarding the concerns expressed by many public interest groups. There are many deep implications of such changeovers. To give just one illustration, unlike traditional telephony systems that are obliged to have their own powersupply to account for emergency situations, the new IP based systems do not have such obligations. When most new systems failed recently in the aftermath of Storm Sandy, unlike earlier times, the FCC found itself unable to question the disaster preparedness of the companies providing much of the communication infrastructure in the U.S. today.

What is happening at the ITU today, in good measure, is this game of freeing our communication realm from all public interest regulation. As mentioned, it is about a new

paradigm of complete nonregulation. And once the victory is achieved at the ITU, whereby the Internet and other IP networks, which would soon be the basis of all communication infrastructure, are considered out of any kind of regulatory oversight, the game will then be replayed at the national level, citing global norms. In fact, during an on-the-side chat at a recent Internet governance meeting in New Delhi, a telecom company representative made a significant give-away remark. He said to an official of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), but isnt net neutrality about the Internet, and therefore TRAI should have nothing to do about it.

In presenting a view on whether or not the Internet should be subject to the remit of the ITU and the ITRs, India may be taking a position on whether it seeks to free the Internet

from all regulatory control, which logic would then perforce also extend to TRAIs remit at home. The least one can say, and appeal to the government and other actors in the space, is that this should be a considered decision after thoroughly assessing all sides of the story.

Freedom of expression is not the only issue that is involved here. There are so many other issues, involving significant economic, social and cultural considerations, that are at stake with regard to regulation of the Internet. It may not be wise to throw out the baby with the bath water.

(Parminder Jeet Singh is Executive Director of Bangalore based NGO, IT for Change. Email: parminder@itforchange.net)

The U.S. and dominant global Internet companies fear regulation because it will adversely affect their control over the communication realm November 28, 2012

In French steel town, anger against Mittal, hope for bailout


There is a sea of red and blue trade union jackets on the picket lines outside the gates of the ArcelorMittal plant in Florange, the only business that allows this steel town, some 280 kilometres northeast of Paris to live and survive. The plant employs 2,800 workers, 630 of whom are off work since the plants blast furnaces were closed in October 2011 because of a worldwide slump in demand. Workers are worried that Lakshmi Mittal, Chairman of ArcelorMittal, might just decide to close down the plant altogether. Today the Florange plant

and its possible nationalisation by the French state, is all the news and workers at the plant are both angry and hopeful. Angry because unemployment looms large on the horizon. Hopeful because the French state has waded into the dispute with threats of nationalisation, apparently with a view to selling the plant to someone who will commit to restarting the furnaces.

For over a year now I have been eating Merguez sausages cooked on a spit out here on the picket lines in the cold and rain and Ive begun to s*** pebbles, laughs Edouard Martin of the CFDT trade union repeating his favourite joke. Warming his hands around a fire lit inside a large tin drum, he applauds Arnaud Montebourg, French Minister for Industrial Renewal, with both hands and both feet.

Frontal attack

Earlier this week the Minister on Monday launched a frontal attack against the Mittal family, which holds a majority shareholding in the company. We do not want the Mittals here because they have not respected France, he said. He later clarified that the Mittals methods were unacceptable in France the methods that fail to respect commitments made, methods of blackmail and threats. Workers at the factory are watching every tiny development in the conflict like hawks. Mittal, said Edouard Martin, the worker outside the factory, will stop at nothing. He will not restart the blast furnaces at the Dunkerque plant in northern France which were temporarily closed for maintenance and repairs, and there is no question of restarting them here at Florange.

The results of Mr. Mittals meeting with President Franois Hollande late Tuesday are also eagerly awaited. Last October Mr. Mittal promised Mr. Hollande he would try to find a buyer for the blast furnaces. The deadline runs out on November 30. The State says it has two buyers in line. But they would like to buy the whole plant, not just the blast furnaces. There is a stalemate.

We produce a good product. Some of the most sophisticated steel comes from this very steel plant where I have worked for the best part of my life. We cannot and will not be put to pasture this way, Pascal, a 45-yearold steel worker told this correspondent on a grey morning drenched with drizzling, powdery rain.

Despite the weather, the workers have been out demonstrating, calling

on the government to accept the recommendations of a report on the plant that advises temporary nationalisation.

I belong to the FO (Workers Force) trade union and we have implored President Hollande to proceed with the nationalisation of the entire Florange plant, the blast furnaces as well as the cold steel activity. This is a strategic activity for France. We cannot allow the steel industry to just die out this way just because an entrepreneur places his own very fat profits before the welfare of the region and the lives of the workers. This industrial basin must not be allowed to perish the way the North was allowed to go when the coal industry died, said Pascal bitterly.

Some disagreement

His words echo those of Minister Montebourg who once again said that a takeover by the State was a perfectly acceptable solution.

The state would of course have to pay the Mittals compensation for the takeover, but it would be a totally legal move given that the factory is registered at the commercial court in Nancy and is, as such, a French company. We have already found an industrialist prepared to take over the plant and who is willing to enter into an agreement with the State. Which means that the blast furnaces, which Mr. Mittal says he shut down because they were not profitable, are in fact workable and viable, Mr. Montebourg said.

However, not everyone trade unionist in Florange agrees with Mr. Montebourgs loudmouth tactics. I am not sure that Mr. Montebourgs

remarks are helpful or that they go towards resolving the problems at Florange. His remarks threaten the employment of the other 18,000 employees of ArcelorMittal, said Xavier Le Coq who represents the CGT trade union. Mr. Mittal has threatened to withdraw from France altogether if the French State makes a move to nationalise the Florange plant.

Ever since Mr. Mittal acquired Arcelor, wresting control of the company after a bitter takeover battle, he has had several run-ins with the French government. This is the second time Mr. Mittal has been called in by President Hollande in the space of a few months. Mr. Mittal has stubbornly refused to sell the plant and has equally stubbornly refused to restart its blast furnaces.

The furnaces were shut down in June and October 2011. Of the 2,800 workers in the Florange plant, some 630 work on them. Mr. Mittal says he wishes to reduce overcapacity. On October 1, 2012, he announced the complete and definitive shutdown of the blast furnaces in Florange and assured Mr. Hollande he would find another buyer for them. That promise has not materialised. Prospective buyers wish to acquire the entire plant or not at all and Mittal refuses to sell all of it. The deadline expires on Saturday and ArcelorMittal workers as well as a majority of the French left, which sees the Florange plant as an example and symbol of predatory tactics by Mr. Mittal, have made this a rallying cause. In retaliation Mr. Mittal has threatened to shut down all ArcelorMittal plants in France.

Is this a game of high stakes poker or can both parties take steps that are

likely to salvage the livelihood of thousands of workers whose major worry is the prospect of unemployment and redundancy?

Mr. Mittal prefers to believe that the ebullient Montebourg is engaged in empty sabre rattling and that better sense will be forthcoming from President Hollande when the two meet on Tuesday. Mr. Mittal, his entourage said, expects to engage in a serious dialogue with the President on the delicate question of the northeastern industrial basin and the future of the steel industry in France. Having gone so far in his calls for the reindustrialisation of France, Mr. Hollande is likely to further damage his popularity if he allows Mr. Mittal to allow the deadline to expire before the deadline for a buyout expires.

As the November 30 deadline approaches, workers are expecting that the Indian steel tycoon and the French government can resolve the standoff through negotiations November 28, 2012

Only crammers need not apply


The article Only crammers need apply, by T.K. Ngaihte (Editorial page, November 24, 2012), provides a highly distorted picture of the Civil Services examination.

Lets begin by spelling out the meaning of Cramming. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary it means to prepare hastily for an examination. Even a cursory glance at the nature of the questions asked in this years compulsory General Studies (GS) papers belies the

assertion that this examination is for crammers (given the large number of optional papers, I am only considering for the purposes of my argument the compulsory papers common to everyone).

Why its not for crammers

Sample these questions:

Why have the resource rich African and South Asian countries remained poor for decades?

Domestic resource mobilisation, though central to the process of Indian economic growth, is characterized by several constraints. Explain.

Do you think that Chinas emergence as one of the largest trading partners of India has adversely affected the settlement of the outstanding border problem?

It is evident that none of these questions (and many more in the question paper) is concerned with any one particular event or theory.

To answer them, knowledge and depth of understanding are required; neither can be acquired overnight by cramming. Superficial knowledge will, expectedly, produce only substandard answers.

Beyond the books

Can a crammer be expected to have an informed opinion i.e. one that is formed after careful consideration of

various aspects of an issue? Heres how this exam was a crammers nemesis on this front.

Lets take the question that demanded a critical examination of the issues involved in the Endosulfan ban and asked for the candidates view on what should be done in the matter. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the country has been debating the issue of Endosulfan ban for the past many years with the National Human Rights Commission, Central government, State governments, the Supreme Court, civil society, academia, and international bodies, all being a part of this debate (which is still ongoing, by the way). A quick online search on The Hindus website with the keyword Endosulfan between January 1, 2011 to November 24, 2012 threw up as many as 1,137 results!

Similarly, another question that asked candidates to comment on the need for the Planning Commission to revise the chapter on Health in the 12th Plan document was very straightforward because the debate was at the forefront of national discourse on health continuously for months prior to the exam. Innumerable articles appeared in various daily newspapers and elsewhere, including in this very newspaper (Op-Ed, Setting up Universal Health Care Pvt. Ltd, September 13, 2012).

Three changes

There were three marked changes in this years General Studies papers that Mr. Ngaihte completely missed writing about, and these need to be highlighted (and the Union Public Service Commission or UPSC needs to be applauded for them).

First, there were hardly any questions about specific Articles of the Constitution, or about specific events and names of personalities from history. These were a staple in previous years, and a candidate could score almost 30-50 marks purely on the basis of cramming such details. This change should be welcomed as it makes the exam repeater-proof (i.e. advantage that accrues by writing this exam year after year through becoming familiar with the pattern).

Second, there was also a clear shift this year in favour of a greater number of 25 marks and 15 marks questions (76.66% and 58.33% of questions in GS I and GS II respectively) , which would make it difficult for any candidate to hide behind superficial knowledge and mere rote-learning, alongside giving ample scope to those who were well-

prepared to display deeper understanding of the subject.

Third, a large number of questions specifically sought candidates own views on the issues, giving them an opportunity to make new arguments and display intellectual creativity. This also implies that there were no readymade answers to these questions which could be crammed up right before the exam (least of all to be found on Wikipedia or in guidebooks that enrich the coffers of the coaching industry).

And heres something more it isnt as if such questions were not to be expected in the examination, least of all by anyone who browsed through the syllabus released by UPSC nearly eight months before the exam. This is what a few lines from the General Guidelines under GS syllabus said: The questions will be such as to test

a candidates general awareness of a variety of subjects, [with relevance] for a career in [the] Civil Services. The questions are likely to test the candidates basic understanding of all relevant issues, and ability to analyze and take a view on conflicting socioeconomic goals, objectives and demands. The candidate must give relevant, meaningful and succinct answers.

When the UPSC syllabus is so clear on what is expected from candidates, it is unfair to blame the questions for not being easy and demanding nuanced and complex arguments. Simply because learning how to answer such questions is precisely what the syllabus prescribes us to do before we attempt this exam.

An eye on the time

No examination can please all its takers. But criticising the examination for its time restriction is not on. It is also puzzling why Mr. Ngaihte chose to criticise the examination over the absolute scores of finally selected candidates when the selection itself is relative and there is no other cut-off that is prescribed by UPSC.

There is an insane amount of competition for a place in the Civil Services, reflected in the fact that out of 2,43,003 candidates who appeared in the preliminary examination in 2011, only 910 were finally recommended for appointment (roughly one out of 267 candidates!).Yes, to be one out of 267 does require perseverance, hard work, practice of writing answers, as rightly pointed out by the author among host of other factors. But heres what the author missed out: it also requires time management (both

during preparation and while writing the exam), an awareness of critical debates at the national and international level, an ability to form ones own opinion and take a stand, and an ability to express ones views lucidly. Will anyone disagree that these are qualities one naturally expects the future administrators of the country to possess?

(Ruchika Sharma, a civil services aspirant, appeared for the recently concluded UPSC Civil Services Mains Examination in October 2012, her first attempt. Email: ruchikasharma1388@gmail.com ) November 29, 2012

Two-state solution on the line


BINATIONAL:A failure of the resolution will mean moving even

closer to a one-state outcome, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic consequences for both Israelis and Palestinians. The pictures are of the southern Gaza strip at Rafah after Israeli air strikes (above) and a damaged school in Gaza city. PHOTOS: AFP

If the recent rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli air strikes on Gaza tell us anything, it is that the status quo in the Middle East is not a safe choice for Israelis or Palestinians.

In the current political climate, it is highly unlikely that bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians can restart. Action is needed that will alter the current dynamic. As Elders, we believe that the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations is such a moment.

On November 29, United Nations member states will be asked to vote on a resolution to grant non-member observer state status to Palestine, a significant upgrade from its current observer entity status. We urge all member states to vote in favour.

In going to the General Assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is not carrying out a provocative act. Nor is he undermining trust and distracting from the pursuit of peace, as his critics have said.

This is a vote for human rights and the rule of law. It is completely consistent with decades of commitment by the United States, Europe and the rest of the world to peace in the Middle East based on the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel. It is a lawful, peaceful, diplomatic act in line with

past U.N. resolutions international law.

and

One-state outcome

Yet this is a sensitive vote, and we know that many countries are considering abstaining or voting no.

If this resolution fails, it will probably mark the death of the two-state solution and move us even closer to a one-state outcome, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic consequences for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Let us articulate what a one-state outcome means: it either means that Israel will annex the West Bank, and give Palestinians full, equal rights as citizens of Israel which seems unlikely eventually eroding the

Jewish majority in the country, or it means that Israel will deny equal rights to its non-Jewish population. Neither outcome gives the Palestinians the state of freedom and dignity that is their right, nor does it provide a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people.

On the other hand, wide support for this resolution would affirm what an overwhelming majority of people around the world including Israelis and Palestinians believe: that the two-state solution remains the surest path to peace in the Middle East.

A month ago, we stood together on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, on the grounds of the Augusta Victoria Hospital. This medical facility is a Palestinian model of excellence for cancer treatment and is only a few miles from the rest of the West Bank, yet Palestinians face enormously

complicated Israeli permit requirements simply to access care.

From the hospitals vantage point we looked over vast Israeli settlements spreading across the West Bank, as well as the wire fences, high walls and roads that increasingly separate the Jewish and Arab populations.

The rate of settlement growth in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is staggering. There are now more than 500,000 Israeli settlers living beyond the Green Line, in violation of international law. Their numbers have doubled since the Oslo peace accords of 1993. Thousands more settlement homes are planned or under construction.

The peace process established by Oslo has not just stalled; it is going backwards fast. With every Palestinian

family evicted or home demolished, with every new Israeli settler home built, the integrity of the territory promised to the Palestinians becomes further compromised.

A vote for the resolution will help to safeguard the two-state solution and enhance prospects for future negotiations. We further hope that threats to punish the Palestinians financially or otherwise for exploring this option, using an avenue to which they are entitled, will be withdrawn. Some are calling for the vote to be delayed but this is simply a bid to do nothing.

The disillusionment and fatigue we found among Israelis and Palestinians compels a bold act of international leadership. We know that there are many Israelis who share our view that to re-engage with the two-state solution is to revive the very feasibility

of peace, and is therefore in Israels fundamental interest. We especially urge the nations with the greatest influence on the parties the United States, European Union and the Arab states to vote together in favour and save the two-state solution before it is too late. New York Times News Service

(Gro Harlem Brundtland was Prime Minister of Norway when the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in 1993. Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the United States and negotiated the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. They are both members of The Elders, a group of independent leaders working for peace and human rights.)

All U.N. member states must vote on the resolution today, as it commits to

peace in the Middle East based on the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state November 29, 2012

Cashing in on schemes for poor

In getting its ministers to endorse the shift to cash transfers from the AICC office in New Delhi, the Congress has highlighted the political nature of the move. The party clearly expects cash transfers to play the same role for it in 2014 that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act did in 2009. By pouring money directly into the bank accounts of voters across the country, it expects to be paid back with additional seats in the Lok Sabha. But the politics of cash transfers is not the same as that of the MGNREGA. And even if there is political gain for

the Congress from this move, it will come at a great social cost.

Then and now

The fundamental difference between the political economy of the NREGA in 2009 and the cash transfers today is in the impact on inflation. The NREGA was launched at a time when the macroeconomic goal was to provide an impetus to the Indian economy at a time of a global slowdown. The impetus took the form of raising the fiscal deficit substantially, thereby providing the resources for the NREGA. Since the economy needed the additional expenditure there was only a limited immediate impact on inflation.

This is not the macroeconomic situation today. With inflationary pressures remaining a concern there

is need to be wary of any massive transfer of cash to voters. The politicians in the Congress possibly believe they have got this covered since they are simply changing the way of delivering existing subsidies. As there is no additional expenditure involved, they seem convinced there will be no inflationary pressure from the move.

The economist in the Prime Minister must however know otherwise. He will be sensitive to what economists call the multiplier effect. Simply put, when cash is paid out to an individual she saves some of it and spends the rest. What she spends becomes income to someone else. The next person again saves some of this income and spends the rest, thereby creating income for a third person, and so on. The overall effect of putting cash into the economy is then several times greater than the original

infusion, the exact multiple depending on the proportion of income that is spent.

In the case of a transfer of welfare in kind, there is little scope for this multiplier to take effect. When a beneficiary receives food from a ration shop her family consumes the food without creating additional income for anyone else. The multiplier comes into play when the supply of subsidised food from the ration shop is replaced by cash. And if the government were to try to control the inflationary pressures by curbing money supply it runs the risk of going to the next elections with the economy slowing down. It is therefore no surprise that the food subsidy and the fertilizer subsidy have been kept out of the initial shift to cash transfers.

The 29 schemes that are to form the initial round of cash transfer from January 1, 2013 focus primarily on reworking cash based welfare schemes such as pensions and student loans. The apparent political potential of this move, in the current system of patronage politics, explains the glee in the AICC office when the shift to cash transfers was endorsed. The entire transfer of the cash value of welfare schemes will now be seen as coming from the Congress. The old process, in which a local politician was the link between a scheme and its beneficiaries, thus earning loyalty and building constituency, will no longer be valid. This would not only hurt opposition parties but would also weaken the grass root Congress worker, while strengthening the party high command.

The social costs of this move are however quite evident when we

consider the precise mechanism through which the shift to cash transfers is to take place. The beneficiaries are to be identified using the unique identification of Aadhar. There may be those who challenge the claims to perfection of the Aadhar process, but that view is unlikely to overcome the widespread Indian belief that what is technologically done must be perfect. Even if we grant Aadhar perfection, though, we must keep in mind that it is only a system of unique identification, nothing more. All that it does is to ensure that once a person says she is X, she cannot later say she is Y.

Such a unique identification does not even guarantee that the person is in fact an Indian. It is quite possible for a person from, say Bangladesh, to cross our porous borders, go up to an Aadhar office and get a card. Aadhar does not believe it is its business to

guarantee the nationality of the individual. With a convenient Indian address she could then be eligible for direct cash transfers. This can make a significant difference to the working of cash transfers in some regions where borders are porous.

Overreliance on Aadhar

Moving away from the northeast there is an even greater challenge in an overreliance on Aadhar. The proof that the person has once identified herself as X tells us nothing about whether X is, in fact, poor or eligible for the subsidy. The problem with ration cards today is twofold: there are multiple cards issued to the same households, and the Below Poverty Line cards have been issued to those who are not poor. Aadhar could help solve the first problem, but not the second. Even with Aadhar based

identification, the non-poor can be classified as poor.

What should cause greater concern is that there is little attention being paid to the transaction costs of the poor and illiterate accessing the bank accounts. In a study of the working of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in Karnataka, it was found that the poor did not always get their full wages. In the more backward districts of the State, there was a significant difference between the wages paid out according to the MGNREGA records and the wages the workers said they received. And it is not difficult to imagine how this could happen. The poor, especially if they are illiterate, are dependent on bank officials to tell them whether the money has been credited into their accounts. And if they seek the help of

others in the village that too can come at an economic, if not social, cost.

Even in cases where the money reaches the right bank account and the right person, there could still be leakages in terms of how that money is spent. In some schemes this would not matter. A pension has served its stated purpose the moment it reaches the beneficiary. But there are other schemes such as student loans where a mechanism is still needed to ensure that the money that is transferred to the bank account is actually spent on education. When the cash transfer is from a distant source and the expenditure to be made is local, monitoring how the money is spent is no easy task. And if the money is not used for the stated purpose, it is a leakage of another kind.

The experience of MGNREGA tells us that preventing this leakage could

cause greater pain to the beneficiaries. In some States by the time the work done is measured and the payments are released, the workers could end up waiting for months to be paid. In the case of cash transfers too while the actual transfer of funds into bank accounts may be instantaneous, the process of ensuring the money is spent on the stated purpose could cause either leakages or substantial delays.

It is here that the gap between the political interests of the Congress and the social interests of the country is the widest. If the cash transfers are to be politically viable the government must transfer the subsidies on time. And it would be in the Congress partys interest for the cash to be transferred without worrying too much about whether it is being spent on the stated purpose. If its record is any guide, it would not mind

transferring cash for a student loan even if the money is spent on a school or college that is unworthy of that expenditure.

Faced with a choice between a possible political benefit in 2014, and a further reduction in the effectiveness of the social welfare schemes, the Congress has made its choice public. And in a country where we celebrate our economic growth even as over 40 per cent of our children remain malnourished, it is a choice that is unlikely to cause much consternation.

(The author is Professor, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore)

Any political benefit the Congress

hopes to reap in 2014 will come at

the cost of reducing the effectiveness

of social welfare schemes November 29, 2012

From Gandhis last testament, a lesson for the Congress


Earlier this year, Harish Khare put forth a powerful plea in his article in The Hindu (Editorial page, Time for house-cleaning in the Congress, April 4, 2012) for the Congress to rebuild itself and find the verve and the energy to live up to its historic role of sustaining the centre. Anchored in the earnest conviction of Madhu Limaye, the veteran socialist theoretician and an architect of the

Janata party regime of 1977-79, and fortified by later experiences, the writer went on to offer practical suggestions for house-cleaning in the Congress. Six months have gone by but the encircling gloom has only worsened and appears well on its way to engulf the Congress in 2014 and plunge the country into chaos without precedent since 1947. Silver linings are few and far between.

Other solutions have come forth from thinking minds including one advocating a modified Kamaraj Plan (Editorial page, The Hindu , Aug. 29, 2012). Predictably enough, these have made virtually no impact in the face of a continuing crisis that escalates with each passing day.

Should we not pause here and hark back to the real resources of our greatness? Fortunately we may not have to wander far afield to seek a

way to turn the tables decisively if only we can grasp the inspiration behind Gandhijis parting gift, his last testament. Reproduced in Pyarelals Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase and many other publications including The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi , the document delineates the framework of panchayati raj. But it is to the centrality of Gandhijis thoughts, to the spirit behind that which we need to focus on: that the Congress can lay no claim to a monopoly over patriotism and high character.

Responding to corruption

The job of winning political freedom was almost over. Even amidst the Partition conflagration raging on all sides, Gandhiji found time to respond to the first faint rumblings of corruption in the administration. A telling letter from a very old veteran

from Andhra (reproduced in Pyarelals Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Vol.II ) spotlighted the problem for him. With unerring prescience he could see that the corruptions of absolute power would one day overwhelm the state and went on whole hog in his uncompromising way to propose dissolution of the 63-yearold Congress and its rebirth as a nonpolitical Lok Sevak Sangh. One needs to pause and try to figure out: was he advocating hara-kiri or was it a passing thought or was it a characteristic Gandhian stratagem of stooping to conquer dont we remember the occasion when he said he was not even a four anna member of the Congress and remained its most powerful voice?

Another 64 years have elapsed. Time indeed to grasp the essence of that vision and give it flesh and blood and adapt it to the here and now the

most far-reaching consequence is the recognition of merit, character and calibre outside the ranks of the Congress. This would mean that the Congress should not contest against candidates of outstanding character and calibre belonging to any party.

Steps to be taken

A well orchestrated campaign to underline the sincere quest of the Congress for high character can mean that lesser causes cease to monopolise everyones time and attention. Quietly and unobtrusively, yet decisively, the tables can be turned and the national preoccupation with the elimination of corruption turned to advantage and to lead onto an all-embracing and balanced approach.

I would like to outline one possible sequence of steps for immediate adoption:

a. The election manifesto for the next series of State Assembly elections can be issued as early as possible. Traditional election manifestos, usually brought out a short while before the elections, set forth a review of past promises and performance and promises for the future. Inevitably elaborate, in practice, the manifesto tends to become just one more statue put on a pedestal and conveniently forgotten.

b. The manifesto will stand as a powerful document that means business if it lays the utmost emphasis on character and calibre. Elections present an opportunity to renew and strengthen the foundations for probity and honesty in public life. No efforts can be spared in that direction.

When we open and reach out to people, there is every likelihood of making remarkable finds and drawing into the net, persons of integrity who have kept aloof and shunned politics. Ones mind goes back to 1940 when Gandhiji chose Vinoba Bhave as the first Satyagrahi in the individual Satyagraha movement launched as a symbol of resistance to imperialist rule and decision to engage India in the war effort without the consent of the Indian people. Spotless character and wholehearted dedication to truth and non-violence were the criteria for the choice. The country took in its stride this transition of the chosen ashramite from near obscurity to centre stage. Veneration for high character is deep set in the Indian psyche character worship in contrast to success or go getter worship.

c. MLA aspirants (and in due time ministerial aspirants) will be expected to conform to a code of conduct that befits the first servants of the people. They have first to furnish complete and truthful information about their assets and liabilities and those of their immediate relations in a prescribed format. These lists will be made available to the public long before the election. The object is to ensure that all aspirants realise that success confers only an opportunity for service and is not for personal aggrandisement and they are accountable five years hence for any illegitimate acquisitions during their tenure as MLA or minister.

d. If a person of irreproachable integrity offers himself as an independent candidate on his own steam or even as rival party man, the Congress may prefer not to contest the seat. There can hardly be any

condition more calculated to elevate the standing and character of future Assemblies. The underlying expectation is that any person animated by high moral principles owes his loyalty not to individuals. His loyalty and devotion run along lines parallel to those of others of his calibre and there is no conflict.

This concept is the closest approximation in practical terms to Gandhijis final message to the Congress to convert itself to a Lok Seva Sangh rather than be just one other political party in a democratic set-up. After all, patriotism and high character are no monopoly of the Congress. Past elections have thrown up a few persons of sterling worth from other parties too who believed in plain living and high thinking and rose above the corruptions of office. The very recognition of this idea is bound to ennoble our vision,

transform the electoral scene and set a premium on character and image even if cases that genuinely qualify for unopposed returns after rigorous scrutiny of credentials are few and far between.

The citizens right to be heard is paramount. The interpretation of the immediate practical consequence of Gandhijis last testament is of urgent topical relevance for our future.

(A.M. Mahmood Husain is a retired civil servant who lives in Chennai.) November 30, 2012

In Ethiopia, trial of Muslim leaders reveals simmering unrest


Last month, in a courtroom in Addis Ababa, 29 defendants listened intently as the prosecution

summarised charges. The accused were Muslim men in their thirties, elderly sheikhs in religious attire, and Habiba Mohammed, the wife of Junedin Sado, Ethiopias Minister for the Civil Service and Chairman of the Board of Addis Ababa University. The crime? Organising protests against the government and participating in a farreaching conspiracy to dismantle the constitution and establish an Islamic state in Ethiopia.

The trial has: exacerbated existing tensions between Ethiopias Muslim community who make up about 34 per cent of the population and the national government; has claimed high-profile victims like Mr. Junedin, a once-powerful regional politician who has disappeared from the public eye; and revealed the tangled nexus between religion, politics and public life in Ethiopia.

Temam Ababulga, the lawyer for the accused, said his clients were being persecuted for opposing the government and had been tortured in prison. Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom have criticised the governments heavyhanded treatment of its Muslim minority; charges that the government denies. Government spokespersons did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

Ethiopia has served as the incubator for both Christianity and Islam; the Christian majority traces its lineage back to the fourth century reign of Emperor Ezana, while Muslims speak of the First Hijra when Prophet Mohammeds followers fled persecution in Arabia and sought refuge here in the seventh century. A Christian monarchy ruled the country

up to 1974 when Emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a secular communist military regime that gave way to the current dispensation in 1991.

The 1994 constitution established the secular nature of the state, but many Muslims feel that the government has consistently marginalised their community and restricted their freedom of worship in the guise of enforcing secularism. Ethiopia has no history of sectarian violence, and Muslim leaders have emphasised that their ire is directed at the government, not the Christian community.

Influence of radical groups

In background interviews, government officials who did not want to be named said they were

concerned by the influence of global radical Islamist groups like the Al Qaeda affiliated Al Shabab in neighbouring Somalia, and that wealthy Islamic charities in the Middle East were funnelling money into Ethiopia in a bid to radicalise Muslim youth. There is a very real concern amongst the people that radical Wahhabi groups are establishing themselves in Ethiopia, and that the government is not doing enough to stop them, said an official. In this particular case, for instance, the government accuses two nongovernmental organisations the Albir Development Cooperation and Association and Nema of providing material support to the defendants.

Albir was established in 2005 by Sheikh Sultan Haji Ahman, who lived in Saudi Arabia for several years before returning to Ethiopia. He is one of the 29 defendants currently in jail.

Albir is not a religious organization. It is a registered NGO that works on water and sanitation, provides cash assistance and educational support for 1,401 destitute families in 21 sites across Ethiopia. About 50 percent of the families are Muslim, said an Albir representative. While Albir used to get money from Saudi Arabia, the representative said that, for the past three years, the NGO received all its money from Turkey and was working on a health project funded by the Islamic Development Bank. Activists, academics and Muslim elders interviewed by The Hindu said that government was wrongly conflating legitimate protests against the ruling party with terrorist acts directed at the state. Most requested anonymity as they feared harassment, and pointed to the arrest of Habiba Mohammed as proof that the entire community was under siege.

Conflict began in 2011

The current conflict began in September 2011 when the government withdrew the licence of the International Islamic Relief Organisation, a Saudi NGO funding the religious school at the Awolia Mosque in Addis Ababa. We wanted confirmation that they would not engage in religious affairs, which they could not provide, said a government spokesperson. Under Ethiopian law, the official said humanitarian organisations cannot run religious institutions.

While the withdrawal of the Saudi NGO was not contested in December 2011, the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council (EIASC), a body that claims to represent the countrys 30 million Muslims, removed the Arabic

language teachers at Awolia and dismissed several administrators. They dismissed 50 teachers *in total+ without any reason, and closed the college. The council is not authorised to do that, said a Muslim activist, The students began protesting against the council.

The protestors questioned the legitimacy of the EIASC, accused the body of acting on the behest of the government, and noted that the council had not held elections in over 10 years. They also accused the council of promoting a particular sect of Islam, known as Al-Ahbash, by dismissing imams who refused to preach Ahbashi doctrines at their mosques.

Al-Ahbash was established by Shaykh Abdallah Muhammad al-Hariri, an Ethiopian imam who left Harar for Lebanon in the 1940s after he fell foul

of Emperor Haile Selassie. In Lebanon, the Shaykh preached a non-political reading of Islam, opposed the Wahabi school promoted by the Saudis, and urged his followers not to oppose lawfully established governments. Prominent Wahabis and Al-Ahbashis have each accused the other of heresy.

The Ethiopian government brought 15 Lebanese Al Ahbash ulama during the summer of 2011 to help spread the moderate version of Islam in Ethiopia, writes anthropologist Dereje Feyissa, in his paper Muslims Struggling for Recognition in Contemporary Ethiopia , The coming of Lebanese ulema and a series of subsequent trainingconducted during the fall of 2011 for religious authorities and students angered many Muslims who have condemned what they consider an imposition of an alien religion.

The protests against Al-Ahbash reached a head in July this year when the police opened fire to disperse a crowd gathered at Awolia mosque. The mosque suffered significant damage and is yet to be reopened. Several people were injured and many were arrested in connection with the summer demonstrations, including the 28 men currently on trial for allegedly trying to set up an Islamic state in Ethiopia.

Habiba Mohammed was arrested when the police found a large amount of money and several copies of the Quran in her car as she drove out the Saudi Embassy. The police have accused her of using the money to fund the protests. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to requests for an interview.

In an open letter to the press, Mr. Junedin explained that the money was in fact intended to build a mosque in his village in accordance with his mothers dying wish. He has retained his ministerial post thus far, but has been expelled from the Executive Committee of his political party. You cant build mosques with undeclared money from the Saudis if you are a senior minister in the government, said a senior official, suggesting that Mr. Junedin had acted irresponsibly. Mr. Junedin has been forbidden from travelling abroad until the case is resolved; he was unavailable for comment.

Ministers interview

In an interview this September to The Hindu , Ethiopias Minister of State for Communications Shimeles Kemal said there was no move to promote Al Ahbash. This is wide propaganda,

there is no such sect *in Ethiopia+, he said, The Islamic council has started to educate with the view to issue certificates for imams and other religious preachers to prevent any extremist creeds from being circulated in the mosques.

This month, the EIASC finally succumbed to pressure and held elections for a new group of leaders. However, the voting was held in local government offices, rather than in mosques. Muslims activists across the country responded by calling for a boycott of the elections. The government has already decided who will win the election, said a protestor at one such demonstration, Those living in government houses are threatened that they will be forced out if they dont participate in the election.

In the September interview, Minister Shimeles denied these allegations, and said that the community was coming out in full force to vote.

Ninety three per cent of the 7.5 million registered voters participated in the elections, said Rachid Mohammed, According to the bylaws, elections should be held every five years. Due to certain mismanagement and incompetence, the previous Majlis missed one cycle. Apart from that, there were financial problems as well. Mr. Rachid, who described himself as a professional management consultant providing technical assistance to the EIASC, said the new executive would do a much better job in serving the Muslim community. He dismissed the divisions over Al-Ahbash, claiming that Ethiopian Muslims didnt see themselves as belonging to any particular sect, We are all Muslims,

he said, everyone has their own individual ideas and thoughts.

Community claims government conflating legitimate protest with terrorism November 30, 2012

Poverty amid prosperity


There is a widespread belief that Gujarat is a shining star on the Indian growth horizon and that all other States would do a great service to Indian masses by emulating the model of development that Gujarat embarked upon under the stewardship of Narendra Modi. A recent study, Poverty Amidst Prosperity: Essays on the Trajectory of Development in Gujarat (Aakar Publication, forthcoming), by 10 independent researchers (including

this author) suggests that when it comes to Gujarat, we have not one but several things to worry about. Carefully reviewing the cardinal principles of the development experience in Gujarat through the analysis of data and information provided by official sources, the study tells us how goals like social equality, sustainable livelihoods, access to education and health, justice and peace have been abandoned in the race for growth in the high-speed lane.

GDP growth in Gujarat has been notable in comparison to the all-India level in the last two decades. Other States that have grown at similar rates in the last decade are Maharashtra, Haryana and Tamil Nadu. Unlike these States, the high growth rate in Gujarat is more balanced; it is the result of enhanced performance of almost all sectors, particularly the agricultural

sector. However, only a careful look at the performance figures, in terms of employment, wages, consumption, poverty, inequality, and outcomes in health and education, reveals that this broad based growth has resulted in worrisome outcomes.

Biggest casualty

The biggest casualty of the successful growth in Gujarat (and least discussed) is employment. The aggregate employment in Gujarat has remained stagnant (NSSO data shows growth in employment for the period 1993-94 to 2004-05 was 2.69 percentage per annum, whereas for 2004-05 to 2009-10 it came down to almost zero). The stagnant employment growth in the last five years in Gujarat is better than the decline in employment experienced at the national level but lags far behind Maharashtra, for instance. During the

last 17 years (1993 to 2010), growth rates of employment for rural Gujarat and rural India have been on a par, while urban Gujarat performed slightly better compared to all-India. In the last five years, employment in rural Gujarat has declined in spite of exceptionally high growth in the rural sector. The loss in rural employment has occurred along with reduced participation of small farmers in the fast growing, high value crops and reduced access to cultivated land because of changes in the norms for sale and purchase of land. Marginal growth in employment in recent years has occurred mainly in the services sector, especially in the urban areas. Mostly, this job creation is casual in nature.

Gujarats contribution to Indias manufacturing employment has also remained almost stagnant over the three decades, in spite of doubling its

share in Gross Value Added. In addition to poor gains in employment, the manufacturing sector in the State is also characterised by slow growth in wages (1.5 per cent in the decade of 2000 when the all-India wages grew by 3.7 per cent), increasing use of contract workers ( from 19 to 34 per cent between 2001-08), and overall reduced position of workers in the manufacturing sector (with the lowest share of wages in Gross Value added in the decade of 2000 in comparison to Haryana, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu). Paradoxically, this worsening condition of workers in the manufacturing sector is accompanied by increasing profitability and growing investment in the sector. While there is a growth in the manufacturing sector, Gujarats Scheduled Tribes dependence on agriculture has increased, particularly during 2005-10 period. The share of STs in regular employment remains stagnant it was 7 per cent in 09-10, same as in

1993-1994 and, for Muslims it is 14 per cent today, while it was 15 per cent in 1993-94.

In the last five years, the rural and urban per capita monthly consumption expenditure in Gujarat grew at much lower rates, compared to the national average and growth in other comparable States. In 2009-10, the average monthly per capita expenditure in Gujarat was Rs. 1,388, much lower than Haryana (Rs. 1,598) and Maharashtra (Rs. 1,549) but higher than the national average. The relatively superior position that Gujarat had in consumption levels in 1993 was lost by 2010.

Rural poverty

The decline in rural poverty, at the rate of 2.5 per cent per annum in the last five years in Gujarat is better than

the national average but slower than Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. By the end of 2009-10, the number of poor in rural Gujarat was still higher than Haryana and Tamil Nadu, and the relative ranking of the State vis--vis other States has not improved much compared to its position in the early 1990s. The changes in urban poverty levels in Gujarat are also lower compared to the national average and other States between 1993-2005 and 2005-10. The situation in inequality levels is also not superior. Reduction in rural inequality in the last five years has been much slower in Gujarat as compared to Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Haryana. In urban areas, inequality increased in Gujarat at slower rates than the national average but increased nonetheless.

Gujarat today is a rich State with poor education and health outcomes. An evaluation of key education indicators

over time reveals that the improvement of Gujarat in literacy rates is sluggish as compared to the rest of India. Gujarats ranking in terms of literacy rate deteriorated from the fifth to the seventh for both 6 years and above, and 6-14 years age group among 15 major States between 2000 and 2008. In terms of proportion of the people who are currently attending any educational institution, Gujarats rank has deteriorated from the 21st to the 26th (6th to 10th among major 15 States) for the age group of 6-14 years during this period and the gender gap in literacy levels of 20 per cent and those currently attending school (13.3 per cent) in the age group of 11 to 14 is also higher in Gujarat in comparison with other States. Furthermore, in Gujarat the disparity in literacy rate (and among those currently attending school) of the general category and the overall literacy rate is higher than the national average; it is also higher

than other States of comparison, namely, Haryana and Maharashtra, though marginally less than Tamil Nadu.

In health, Gujarat ranks 10th in the rate of decline in infant mortality. The rural-urban IMR gap remains unbridged with no change in the ratio between 2000 and 2010. The gains in reducing the gender gap in IMR are poor and the disparity ratio between the SCs, the STs and others has actually increased between 2000 and 2010. Incidence of under-nutrition in the State for the year 1998-99 was lower than the national average across all social groups. Disturbingly, in 2005-2006, under-nutrition in Gujarat worsened in comparison with the national average. The level of under-nutrition for the SCs in Gujarat is close to the national average and, for the STs, it is higher than the national average. Immunisation of

children in Gujarat was above the national average in 1999 and, also in 2006. However, between 1999 and 2006, the social gap in ante-natal care increased. The State ranked 9th in 1990-95, it ranks 11th in 2005-2010. All this when the overall growth rate continues to soar!

It is significant to note that the State expenditure in social sectors, both as a percentage of GSDP and as a percentage of total expenditure, has declined more than the average decline in other comparable States and stands below the national average pointing to a clear shift in the priorities.

Exclusionary growth

How do we explain these socially exclusionary outcomes of growth?

Gujarat provides a window to understand the limits of market-led growth and an insight into a policy regime that does not attempt to mitigate the most brutal consequences of this specific mode of production. The paradoxes of this development model are writ large. They are a precursor for things to come in other parts of India unless there is a change in policy direction at the Centre or, alternatively, the States begin to negotiate the growth agenda in a substantially different manner.

(The writer teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

While Gujarats GDP growth in the last two decades has been notable, it is not reflected in employment, wages, health or education

November 30, 2012

We need to control migration into U.K.


British Home Secretary Theresa May says that the immigration restrictions are meant to stop abuse of the system and help genuine students who want to study in the United Kingdom.

Ms May, who was on a visit to Hyderabad, said in an interview to The Hindu that at least 20 per cent of foreign students were overstaying their visa tenure. She said a large number of private colleges that claimed to offer education were not doing so. As many as 350 private colleges were used for backdoor entry to seek work in the U.K.

But she was emphatic that genuine students were welcome in the U.K. and its doors were open for the best

talent to pursue higher education, scientific research, arts, music, drama and dance. She said the British government was working with the universities to check misuse of the system.

On the demand for excluding students from Net immigration statistics, she said that it was an internationally agreed measure. Anybody who moved for more than a year would be counted as a migrant. We need to control migration into U.K., she added.

Under the immigration rules that came into force earlier in 2012, nonEuropean Union students, who wish to stay on in the U.K. after completion of their studies, will need to have a firm job offer of a minimum 20,000 a year from a government-approved employer. A number of changes were also made in the immigration rules in

relation to non-European Economic Area nationals applying to enter or remain in the U.K. under the family migration route.

Ms May denied that the Net immigration policy was target driven with a view to bringing down the number to 1,00,000 by 2015. She maintained that there were issues with non-EU immigration and that it should not be misunderstood. We want the best and brightest in U.K.. And that is what the system is intended to enable.

She disagreed that the immigration rules would affect the U.K.s economy and said trade with India would double by the year 2015. The government was also listening to businesses on what they want. New routes have been opened for investors and entrepreneurs, she added.

On terror threats

The British Home Secretary said that both the U.K. and India faced common threats on terrorism and organised crime. Both nations were cooperating on security matters and it could be enhanced further in the areas of intelligence-sharing, technology and in identifying and dealing with threats.

Counter radicalisation was another area where Britain could share its learning with India, she said. Counter radicalisation focuses on preventing terrorism, by engaging moderates within a religious community and involving people at various levels instead of depending only on community leaders.

Ms May said the U.K. was looking forward to working with Indian authorities on cyber security. In the U.K., a significant amount was committed to cyber security. The British government also proposed to create a national crime agency by next year.

Ms May dismissed the view that the British governments proposals on internet monitoring amounted to an intrusion of an individuals privacy. She asserted that it was a misreading of what the government intended to do. It was not the content which would be monitored but information about communication like who phoned whom, and when and where they were. Only the law was being updated.

venkateshwarlu.k@thehindu.co.in

mallikarjun.y@thehindu.co.in

British Home Secretary Theresa May says the government is working with universities to check visa misuse

December 1, 2012

In the world of foreign policy, a rare idealist


It was the small town of Baden-Baden in Germany that External Affairs Minister Inder Kumar Gujral chose as the venue for a meeting of Indian envoys in Europe. As High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, I attended it. During the discussion, Gujral wanted our comments on the future of relations between India and Pakistan. I said the resolution of Kashmir was important. Gujral

snubbed me. Yet when he was the Prime Minister in 1997, he announced at Srinagar that India was willing to accept a solution outside the Constitution. There was so much pressure on him that he retracted the statement. But he remained steadfast in his proposal of a status for Kashmir outside the Constitution, though as part of the Indian Union.

A fighter for lost causes

Gujral constituted a Kashmir group and we visited Srinagar many times. There came a time when the Hurriyat leaders were willing to sit across the table with Indian leaders to settle the issue. But despite Gujrals efforts, New Delhi did not change the policy of a military solution.

Sympathetic to all minorities, Gujral had also floated a Punjab group. The

purpose was to bring round the Akalis, representing the Sikhs, to renounce their demand for the Anandpur Sahib resolution which sought Punjabs autonomy. Once again we were able to persuade the Akalis to give up the demand which had in it the seeds of separation. The government let us down at that time also. We were told to find a solution to all problems with the Sikhs at one go, while the government was preparing for Operation Bluestar. Gujral felt betrayed.

In fact, I know from my long association with Gujral that he fought for many lost causes and derived satisfaction just from the fight. People in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kashmir recognise him as a friend. His tenure as Prime Minister, although only for one short year, shows how he went out of the way to accommodate neighbouring countries. Towards the

end of his life, he was disillusioned with Pakistan. He said that he wasted his life pursuing the mirage of building bridges with Islamabad and had realised rather late in the day that Pakistani leaders were anti-India to the core, never wanting to bury the hatchet.

Bringing Moscow closer

Gujral always took pride in having brought Russia and India closer. As the Indian envoy, he was in Moscow for a long time, first serving Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and then Prime Minister Morarji Desai. That the nonCongress regime retained him in Moscow spoke volumes about his outstanding contribution in making Soviet leaders appreciate Indias problems, although with no substantial result. He was on firstname terms with all the top shots in

the government and the Communist party.

Gujral understood communism and its drawbacks well. As a young man in Lahore, he was a member of the Indian communist party. After Partition, he had strayed away from it to join the Congress. But he remained a leftist. Some said this was why he gave civil servants an abnormal pay hike when he was Prime Minister. The States vehemently criticised him but had to follow suit. When I conveyed to him the angry comments made by members of the government, he said: The bureaucracy is the backbone of the government and it should be kept happy.

His finest hour

Gujrals finest hour was probably when he refused to continue as

minister of Information and Broadcasting during the Emergency. A spar with Sanjay Gandhi ended his agony. When Sanjay gave him instructions on the telephone on how to tackle the press, Gujral said he was his mothers minister, and not his errand boy. Indira Gandhi sent him to the Planning Commission where he had P.N. Haksar, already shifted from the Prime Ministers Office for his leftist views, to share his grief with.

I recall travelling with Gujral to South Africa to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhis early days of struggle. Gujral had another purpose: meeting Nelson Mandela whose photo he had on his table. Mandela took Gujral to the dance floor and made him dance during a banquet in his honour. He travelled by car some 17 hours every day to touch all the places where Gandhiji had lived. He was particularly moved when he visited the railway

station at Pietermaritzburg where Gandhiji was thrown out of the firstclass compartment for being a nonwhite.

His book

Three years ago when he brought out his memoirs, I told him the book revealed no secrets from the time he occupied top positions in the government. His reply was: I am not a journalist. Still, I think he should have told at least two stories of the Congress split in 1969 because he was an insider then; and, the attitude of the Soviet leaders when they smelt defeat during the Cold War. But then Gujral was known for not treading on anybodys toes. Posterity will remember him as a Prime Minister who was humble and who won the hearts of even his rivals through his humility. He was a gentleman in politics and this is imprinted on his

work of more than six decades in the service of his nation and the people. The country has lost a great leader. And I have lost a close friend who shared his innermost thoughts with me. Together we visited Pakistan, Punjab and Kashmir many times. In the Kashmir and Punjab groups, his amiable temperament brought members closer together. There is nobody to pick up the thread from where he left off. The work is important, and his absence will be felt. Personally, his death has left me feeling lonely. I shall miss the voice at the other end of the telephone, offering advice when I needed it.

(Kuldip Nayar is a veteran journalist and former Member of Parliament.)

In his short tenure as Prime Minister, Gujral went out of the way to accommodate neighbouring countries December 1, 2012

Politician who was gentleman first


After days of bargaining and back room negotiations, following the collapse of the H.D. Deve Gowdaheaded United Front government, Inder Kumar Gujral was formally elected on April 20, 1997 by the United Front (UF) Parliamentary Group as Prime Minister-designate. The scene of most of the activity was Delhis Andhra Bhavan, where Gujral had even slept the previous night after a meeting that went on into the small hours. Minutes after he was elected (those were the days when print still had an edge over TV), I seized the opportunity to shoot a few quick questions for the newspaper I then worked for. How would he

persuade G.K. Moopanars Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) to join his government and not merely support it from outside? How would he ensure that the Congress cooperated with the UF and not leave it in the lurch again?

Dressed in his trademark safari suit, looking relaxed, Gujral smiled and said, I will go again and again and again. I will not take no for an answer. We are old friends and colleagues and I will value their contribution and presence in the government. On the Congress, his answer was almost identical in spirit: We are trying to work out an arrangement that will be to our mutual satisfaction. Mr. Sitaram Kesri (then Congress President) and I are old friends and we have been in touch.

In the end, the TMC did not join the government, and the Congress pulled the plug seven months later.

Friends across the spectrum

If there is a key to understanding Gujrals life, it was that he had friends in virtually every political party, and across the social spectrum, something he makes it a point to underscore in his Matters of Discretion: An Autobiography. The old friends who helped him become Indias 12th Prime Minister (pipping Moopanar and Mulayam Singh Yadav to the post) included the CPI (M)s Jyoti Basu, former Vice-President Krishan Kant (who was Andhra Pradesh Governor at the time), a group of powerful journalists and an influential newspaper group.

Similarly, when Gujral made his peace pitch to Pakistans Nawaz Sharif at the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation conference in Male in 1997, it was on the basis of a warm relationship cultivated over the years.

As Prime Minister, his government gave Rs.8,000 crore to Punjab to help the State recover from the ravages of militancy it ensured the undying gratitude of the Shiromani Akali Dal (which was in power then) to this day: his son Naresh Gujral is currently a Rajya Sabha MP representing the party.

Indeed, it was his many friends, to whom he was loyal in turn, his image of being a gentleman-politician with a taste for Urdu poetry, his staunch secularism, and his brand of pappi jhappi diplomacy that catapulted him from the paan -stained interiors of the offices of the New Delhi

Municipal Council in the 1950s to South Block and the ultimate prize, the prime ministership. Along the way, he became a member of Indira Gandhis kitchen cabinet in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ambassador to the USSR, an assignment that set the stage for his becoming foreign minister in the governments headed by V.P. Singh and Mr. Deve Gowda, and what came to be known as the Gujral doctrine a doctrine that held that India should go the extra mile with its neighbours without expecting reciprocity, as long as it did not endanger Indias security.

Gujrals critics have attributed his many successes to the fact that he did not have any firm convictions. While this may be partially true, he demonstrated on key occasions that he could be principled. As Indira Gandhis Information and Broadcasting Minister when

Emergency was declared, he may not have expressed his opposition to it strongly, but he refused to brook interference by Sanjay Gandhi. He was dropped, but his loyalty to Indira Gandhi during the Congress split in 1969 ensured she did not drop him altogether she sent him to the Soviet Union as ambassador, a job he retained even after the Janata Party came to power in 1977. Again, as Prime Minister, when the Jain Commission report accused the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam of supporting the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers who were responsible for Rajiv Gandhis assassination, he refused to drop the party, even though the price was: withdrawal of support by the Congress.

Some controversies

His prime ministership, short as it was (April 21, 1997 March 19, 1998), was

marked by a couple of controversies. Shortly, after he became Prime Minister, Bihars then Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav faced criminal charges for embezzling funds from the States animal husbandry department. Gujral refused to sack him as he owed his seat in the Rajya Sabha to him; instead he transferred CBI Director Joginder Singh out. A newspaper editor from that time recalls that when he wrote an edit criticising Gujral, the latter acknowledged the criticism by telling him: I know you are telling me I lack guts.

On another occasion, he recommended central rule in Uttar Pradesh, but the then President, K.R. Narayanan, refused to comply with the recommendation.

I.K. Gujral was known for his skill in dealing with the trickiest of situations, and rarely spoke sharply.

But he would not tolerate any sort of foreign interference in Indias internal matters. So when the then British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, offered to mediate on the Kashmir issue, he was infuriated enough to refer to Britain as a third-rate power nursing delusions of grandeur of its past in a private interaction with Egyptian intellectuals during a state visit to Cairo. That remark got into print and the Joint Secretary incharge of the External Publicity Division, MEA, at the time was transferred out, after which his career never recovered.

Born on December 4, 1919 in Jhelum, now in Pakistan, Gujral started life as a student activist of the Communist Party of India, later joining the Congress and finally, the Janata Dal.

His parents were both in the Congress father Avtar Narain Gujral was a member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. After Independence, he migrated to India and began life afresh, dying four days short of his 93rd birthday after a rich and fulfilling life. December 1, 2012

Wanted: intellectual leaders, not CEOs


As the dictionaries tell us, and as every educated person knows, education involves something more than mere knowledge, training, or skill. The something more is hard to describe and harder still to evaluate. This is particularly true in our hypertechnological age, when there is nothing mere about invaluable assets like knowledge, training or skill, together summarised as competence. That is why there is great ambivalence

today about whether universities and colleges should impart anything more or other than competence. Most higher educational institutions either do not feel they need to, or are actually unable to do so. However, even elite public universities institutions best placed to pursue the traditional ideals of education are floundering. Most worrisome is the fact that the logic of their institutional position seems to make Vice Chancellors and other institutional heads part of the problem rather than the solution.

Definition of VC

Who or what is a Vice Chancellor today? If this were a multiple choice examination question, the options would be easy to imagine: 1) the CEO of an academic corporation; 2) an academic or bureaucrat with political connections; 3) a person selected by

accident, error or compromise; and 4) an intellectual leader. Any school child familiar with the pieties of our examination system would easily identify (4) as the answer most likely to be correct simply because this is how every Vice Chancellor (VC) is always described after he (rarely she) attains this exalted status. But any adult minimally acquainted with our universities would equally easily recognise that, though they may not be correct, the first three answers are more likely to be true. The sobering fact is that these options are arranged in order of their importance in Indian higher education today. Intellectual leadership is currently the most dispensable qualification for becoming a VC.

Unfortunately, this assessment is not born out of cynicism but out of the structural features shaping higher education in the era of reforms. The

astonishingly rapid expansion of this sector has changed it beyond recognition. Many more universities have been set up in the past 10 years than in the preceding 140 years since the first modern universities were established in India. Much of this growth has been in the private sector, which today accounts for the majority of enrolled students and about twothirds of the institutions. For obvious reasons, the technical-professional fields have expanded the most, and well over 75 per cent of such institutions are private. That is why the corporate manager is the most common type of VC or institution head today. This type also has its public sector variant, the academic entrepreneur who invests in a VCship, now an option in some States where fully marketised VC posts are available to the highest bidder without regard to caste, party, creed or credentials. Whether private or public, commercially minded

institutions will not be interested in education as such. Most State level institutions, though not commercial in this sense, are so hamstrung by political, financial and caste constraints that they and their VCs do not have any space to nurture education.

Central Universities

By contrast, VCs of Central Universities enjoy a high degree of autonomy. A peer-led selection process avoids direct political interference. The Acts of Parliament under which Central Universities (CUs) are established ensure basic protection from external threats. Though constrained by larger social or political realities, they cannot be forced to act as proxies of the government or the University Grants Commission. The other side of this coin is that the VCs of CUs are, in

practice, accountable to no one. In principle, they answer to their employer, the President of India, who is expected to maintain a dignified distance. VCs are also meant to work under the oversight of the Executive Council and the Academic Council, but the realities of power usually ensure that these councils are themselves subservient to the VC.

Autonomy for VCs should be good news, but it often is not, mainly because autonomy starts and stops with the VC it does not automatically devolve to the rest of the university. Unlike the optional accountability of the VC, the rest of the system is very much under the VCs control, despite the basic security of tenure available to permanent employees. The most important factor is the nature of the VCs role in India. Unlike VCs in the United States or heads of research institutions in India,

VCs of CUs do not have to worry about raising basic resources. The minimal lateral mobility possible within a centralised and elitist system ensures that faculty recruitment is not a primary concern. So the wellintentioned VC eager to make a mark tends to focus on academic reforms, a sphere in which she or he typically encounters resistance or dissent from the faculty. Despite the variety of motives that might lie behind it, such friction and debate are productive and necessary in an academic setting, but it gets vitiated because of the style in which reform is often attempted.

Big bang innovations

In a climate where reform is already a magic mantra and the public sphere is thoroughly media-saturated, there is a premium on swift and dramatic big bang innovations. Small, slow,

incremental changes lubricated by regular and detailed discussions are rarely media friendly, and few VCs have the patience or the inclination to invest in them. In keeping with the prevailing culture, VCs like most ambitious people are allergic to anonymity. The long-term erosion of a shared work ethic obscures the fact that painstaking, behind-the-scenes drudge-work is the life blood of institutions, and that it is every bit as important as the more visible or memorable events. Moreover, such work is anonymous only from an external point of view it is collective work done with colleagues, to whom it is perfectly visible. Such work certainly takes time, specially when it involves a laborious consultative process, but it is the only legitimate and sustainable method of bringing about change in an academic community. In their anxiety to achieve big things within their terms, impatient VCs often resort to coercion

via emergency powers. This initiates a self-perpetuating spiral of administrative edicts provoking resistance which invites more edicts. The final stage is when universities are imagined as nations at war and a if you dissent you are the enemy mentality takes shape.

To break out of this increasingly common impasse, it is necessary to return to the intangible more that separates education from competence. The essence of this excess is that it cannot be produced directly because it is a by-product that emerges within a certain environment. Creating and nurturing such an environment is the main mission of universities, but an imperious intolerance of debate is its very antithesis. Efforts to discipline a delinquent minority the standard justification for draconian measures alienate the diligent majority and

insult the other crucial minority of dedicated teachers. If VCs genuinely wish to make a lasting contribution to the universities entrusted to their care, they will have to acquire the fortitude and humility to educate themselves in the slow and painstaking methods of intellectual leadership.

(Apoorvanand teaches Hindi and Satish Deshpande Sociology at the University of Delhi. The views expressed here are personal.)

In their eagerness to push through reforms, Vice Chancellors resort to emergency powers, creating an atmosphere in which dissent is a nono and education the casualty December 3, 2012

Not by ramps and toilets alone


Today is International Day of Persons with Disabilities. After 40 years of service in the field, I look back on what has prevented millions of disabled people from entering the mainstream. What kind of system is it that has made them invisible, illiterate, unemployed and the most marginalised of groups among the poorest of the poor? What is it like to be disabled in India? My answer is that there has been no serious political intent to build a cohesive system. Sadly, but unquestionably, a person who is born disabled in India faces a raw deal.

Across the world there has been a sea change. With international declarations, acts of Parliament, codes of practice and guidelines, there is a road map for a disabled person on

how to operationalise laws that grant him/her a decent life and how to prioritise implementation within a time frame. Accountability and strong punitive action against noncompliance provide good safeguards.

But in India, what there is instead is a chaotic framework. Faulty, entrenched laws, structural and conceptual barriers; a lack of convergence and of robust disaggregated data (we dont know where the disabled are; what their needs are); an over-reliance on nongovernmental organisations (NGO) it suits the Planning Commissions budget delivering piecemeal microlevel service; political apathy and indifference under the mistaken belief that the disabled are not votecatchers, have no political constituency and have no voice in Parliament. All these have left at least a 100 million people excluded. Is it a

surprise then that 50 per cent of children with disability are illiterate?

Discrimination from birth

It is a sad commentary on our nation that institutional exclusion came after Independence, when disabled children were left out of the Ministry of Education (1966) and shifted to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJE). Two ministries address the educational and school needs of disabled children but their different agendas leave 70 per cent of them out of the services of both. For a structural change, all that it needs is a cabinet decision by the Prime Minister. This has not happened.

When it comes to congenital disability, institutional discrimination begins from birth. Child

Development pedagogy does not touch them. Though the Ministry of Women and Child Development carries out the worlds largest preschool programme, i.e. the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), it excludes children with disability. There is regional variance but a majority are excluded from even the basic human right of nutrition on the grounds of disability.The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WCD) does not include disabled children. As they are disabled, they dont need protection. Its not our job, but that of the Ministry of Social Justice, is the repeated argument.

The governments flagship programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), has not been effective in the case of children with disabilities. The programme focuses on providing them with aids and appliances and

even surgery. Statistics from the MoSJE and the World Bank show the bulk of SSA schools are inaccessible to children with disability. There is grave management malfunction between Block Resource Centres (BRC) and Cluster Resource Centres (CRC). Even after a decade, institutional capacity building, which is one of the broad strategies of the SSA, has not happened.

We have been involved in a district project in rural areas called the Shiksha Sankalp with the aim of providing a district hub for mapping, identifying and provisioning to fill the gap. For effective and appropriate expenditure to be done, expenditure needs to be responsive to needs. But finally, it is the government that has to make the decisions, which it does not.

On inclusive education

There is still little understanding of the concept of inclusive education. Archaic laws have been allowed to continue without being questioned. Government departments and NGOs dealing with special schools think that Special Education is Inclusive Education, so they turn to special educationists to operationalise the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act. The Rehabilitation Council of India (RCI), a regulatory body of the MoSJE, says that only special teachers can teach children with disabilities (CWD). According to the RCI, if an uncertified person teaches disabled children, it constitutes a criminal offence. Disabled children can never be taught by regular teachers if they do not get an RCI certificate.

This is a violation of the RTE. The RCI has to be amended, special education

demystified and the qualifications prescribed in the model rules for RTE schools should be applied to all children so that teaching them does not need a separate certification from the RCI. We think making education accessible to the disabled means providing physical infrastructure like ramps or toilets. It actually means addressing pedagogy, teacher training and spending money strengthening the knowledge base of regular teachers through short and regular courses on inclusive education. School and teacher preparation is what is needed. While we seem to fulfil the recommendations of toilet and ramps, we are shying away from the central driver of quality education good pedagogy.

We also need to move away from specialisation. The RTE is about inclusive education; its not about special education. There are 1.5

million schools and regular teachers need to be more aware of dealing with children who are marginalised due to poverty, gender, religion and disability. Inclusive education needs to exist at the heart of all teaching curricula.

We are aware of the problems, but there is a policy paralysis. When he was the Minister of Human Resource Development, Mr. Kapil Sibal formed a National Monitoring Committee for Education for Evaluation of Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Persons with Disabilities (PwD) to review the functioning of all schemes the ministry had launched. With his transfer, the momentum has been lost. The goal of Education for All is hampered when a new team takes over and has to understand the problems all over again.

The Prime Minister needs to appoint an adviser on inclusion in the PMO, similar to that for the Knowledge Commission and Skills Development. In disability, we are dealing with economically weaker sections of society. The victims are the result of exclusionary forces that have a stranglehold on our educational system. This needs to change if education is to be the stepping stone to national progress.

(Mithu Alur, Founder Chairperson of the Spastics Society of India, Mumbai, is a member of the Central Advisory Board of Education and various other committees of the Human Resource Department.)

The RTE cannot address the needs of disabled children unless it moves away from

the focus on special education and the exclusive emphasis on providing physical accessibility to schools December 3, 2012

Knowing your onions in New York


My onions are big, arent they? Chris Pawelski asked our group of visitors at his farm 60 miles from New York City. Any idea why?

Because of consumer demand, we wondered? Perhaps bigger bulbs caught the customers eye better? Nope, said Pawelski, a fourthgeneration farmer whose family arrived from Poland in 1903 and has worked this land for over a century. The size is set by the retail chain

stores. They everything.

dictate

almost

That almost everything includes prices. While the Walmarts, Shop Rites and other chain stores sell his kind of onions for $1.49 to $1.89 a pound, Pawelski himself gets no more than 17 cents. And thats an improvement. Between 1983 and 2010, the average price he got stayed around 12 cents a pound.

All our input costs rose, he points out. Fertiliser, pesticide, just about everything went up. Except the price we got. Which was about $6 a 50pound bag. Retail prices though, soared in the same period. Distances are not the cause. The same chains sell cheap imports from Peru and China, driving down prices. And have branches not far from this farm in

Goshen, Orange County, New York state.

Anyone does any cooking? he asked. A few hesitant hands went up. Pawelski held up the onion. They want this size because they know you wont use more than half of one of these in cooking a meal. And youll throw away the other half. The more you waste, the more youll buy. The stores know this. So wastage is a strategy, not a by-product.

For yellow onions, says Pawelski, we either grade on a 2 inch or 2{+1}/{-4}inch standard. There are exceptions, but those are the norms. The re-packers dictate to us the sizes, which are in turn dictated to them by the chains. S*** rolls downhill, as it were .... Three decades ago our size standard was 1{+5}/{-8}ths inch. Small farmers dont get to bargain

with Walmart. A huge pile of rotting onions those that didnt meet chain store norms sits besides his fields.

Qualifying as one

Pawelskis qualifies as a small farm. Which, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) tells us, is one with a gross cash farm income (GCFI) of less than $250,000 a year. Which makes 91 per cent of U.S. farms small. About 60 per cent have a GCFI of less than $10,000. Pawelski, his father and brother jointly plant about a hundred acres. Of these, they own 60 and rent 40.

Its not just the chain stores, however, that work against this exuberant and proud small farmer. Floods, hail and Hurricane Irene, have all claimed a toll. In 2009, he suffered crop losses of $1,15,000 but received just $6,000

from crop insurance. Far less than the $10,000 he had shelled out as premium. The losses drove the farm, which rests on some of the most fertile muck soil in the country, into debt.

Issue of labour

The whole agrarian structure and policy transformed in these past decades works against small family farms. The Pawelskis lived well for years off the fine farm they built. Chris himself went to college and has a Masters in Communication Studies. His great-grandfather arrived in the United States with five dollars in his pocket. The great grandson is over $320,000 in debt. The entire edifice of U.S. agriculture is geared towards serving the corporate sector, not small family farms.

His wife being an assistant librarian in the school system helps. She works to support my farming habit. His brother, too, lives off non-farm income. His parents collect social security. Last year, he spent $1,60,000 and earned $2,00,000 on his 50 acres in the farm. On that $40,000, I pay taxes. The leaves him little to reinvest. The farm is pocked with old barns, aging tractors and trucks flogged off by the army.

Normally, he has four seasonal farm workers. Three have left this year and Im down to one guy. The lack of labour hits harder as small farms take on more land on rent hoping to achieve economies of scale.

Its an all-immigrant labour force now. In the 1950s, it was mostly AfricanAmericans, says Pawelski. In the 1970s it was Puerto Ricans. Now its mostly Guatemalans. Some of them

could be illegal. Checking that out is not within the farmers purview, though. We follow all the laws we have to.

Pawelski is a battler who has taken his cause to Capitol Hill. I go maybe three times a year, he says. And hes met maybe 20-30 Congressmen and 10-12 Senators, building up some selling skills in the process. Perhaps the Masters in Communication helped. But hes hopelessly outgunned. Large corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying to ensure agriculture remains their captive. A lot of that gets spent when the Farm Bill comes up every five years.

AP investigation

An Associated Press (AP) investigation in 2001 showed where the (public)

money goes. Even if structured differently since then, the grip of the corporate world and the very rich remains firm. As APs scrutiny of over 22 million USDA cheques showed: 63 per cent of the money went to the top 10 per cent of recipients

Among those struggling farmsteads receiving huge sums of money were at least 20 Fortune 500 companies. Also billionaires like David Rockefeller (with a farm in the same Hudson Valley where Pawelski lives). Others getting farm subsidies that year included media mogul Ted Turner and basketball star Scottie Pippen. And prison farms got a cut, too.

All I want to do is make a living, Pawelski testified before Congress during one of his forays there. Im not trying to be an Elmer Fudd-type millionaire (the grumpy character in

the Looney Tunes/Bugs Bunny comics). Hes in no danger of being Elmer Fudd, for sure. And his free spirit is much closer to that of Bugs. The question is whether the next generation on this century-old farm can make a living off it. You dont want to know the answer.

sainath.p@thehindu.co.in

The entire U.S. agrarian structure and policy is geared towards serving

the corporate sector and against small family farms December 3, 2012

What Chinas transition means for India

Continuity is a word that National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon is likely to hear often from his Chinese interlocutors during his visit to Beijing, which begins today. Mr. Menon, who is also the Special Representative on the boundary question, will meet State Councillor Dai Bingguo, his counterpart on the border talks, for what officials have described as informal talks on the border and strategic issues of common concern. He is expected to hold talks with one of the seven members of the newlyselected Politburo Standing Committee likely to be secondranked Li Keqiang, the anointed Premier, subject to his availability marking Indias first real engagement with the fifth generation of the Chinese leadership following the November 15 transition.

The once-in-ten-year leadership change in China is likely to usher in a new chapter on how the country conducts its foreign policy, officials and strategic scholars in Beijing say. Over the next four months, both the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government that it leads will complete a sweeping change across all levels of its leadership. At the recently concluded Party Congress, the CPC selected a new 25-member Politburo and 371-member Central Committee, which will guide policymaking in all spheres for the next five years. The Parliament session of the National Peoples Congress in March will be of more relevance to Chinas diplomacy. The expected retirement of Dai Bingguo one of five State Councillors who function under the four Vice Premiers of the Cabinet, or the State Council in March has received much attention in India, as he has served as the Special Representative (SR) on the boundary

talks since the current format was initiated a decade ago.

Border talks

Chinese officials and strategic scholars who focus on China-India relations say Mr. Dais retirement will not have much impact on the boundary talks. Mr. Dai himself, as the SR, was only tasked with the mandate of following strictly the guidelines put in place by the Politburo and Central Committee for the talks. That role will be continued by his successor as the SR the current Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Vice Foreign Ministers Fu Ying and Zhang Zhijun, who were all selected as members of the new Central Committee, have been mentioned as likely candidates. Among Chinese strategic scholars, there is little expectation that the boundary talks, of which 15 rounds have been held, will yield any major

concrete outcomes in the near future. Since 2005, when the two countries completed the first of three stages of negotiations by signing an agreement on political parameters and guiding principles, perceptions in Beijing are that the crucial second stage of framework negotiations has been deadlocked.

After 2005, there is nearly no significant progress on the boundary talks, said Hu Shisheng, a South Asia scholar at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR). If there *will+ be any progress in the future, he said, it could be [because of] accepting and respecting each others LAC *Line of Actual Control+ claim. Based upon this, he said, both sides could put aside the sovereignty issue and leave the boundary question for next generations to solve. Mr. Hus sentiment was echoed in a rare

commentary on the boundary talks published last month in the Liberation Daily , a newspaper with ties to the CPC in Shanghai, which suggested that both sides put aside the dispute. The commentary said even the status quo that is, accepting the Line of Actual Control would not be acceptable to both countries, rendering a solution unlikely in the near future.

Lack of progress on the border notwithstanding, relations with India will be much more stable under the new leadership because of Chinas current domestic and external priorities, according to Mr. Hu. As the Work Report of the Party Congress the policy blueprint for the next five years stressed, the internal focus will be on development. As for the external focus, addressing Chinas relations with West Pacific neighbours and Chinas relations with the U.S. would be the likely priority, Mr. Hu

said. He agreed that India fared far below issues such as relations with the United States, current territorial disputes with Japan and the situation in the South China Sea in terms of Chinas pressing priorities. In urgency, it is true that China-India relations are secondary to those more urgent issues, he said. [But] in Chinas present foreign policy, India is regarded as one country that China has confidence in. India-China relations are not a disturbance. The Chinese government has to keep this kind of momentum. But as for issues such as the regional order in the Asia-Pacific region in particular, climate change and trade regime talks, Chinas strong partner is still India. So, in whatever way, he concluded, China needs more stable Indo-China relations.

Pivot concerns

Chinas concerns on the United States pivot or rebalancing, which has emerged as Beijings primary foreign policy focus in recent months, is likely to cast a shadow on ties with India. Obamas pivot offers a lens through which many Chinese analysts see Indias strategic intention toward China, said Han Hua, a leading South Asia scholar at Peking University. The two have to talk to each other on core interests and how to avoid challenging those interests, she said. Small frictions will be still there, but in general, stable relations are the main theme in Chinas India policy.

Ms Han was of the view that China under new General Secretary Xi Jinping will attach more importance on its relations with its neighbours than before. Chinese officials and scholars say the new leadership is acutely aware that the past year has been a difficult one for Chinas

diplomacy. There is renewed concern in the region particularly among Chinas neighbours about increasing Chinese assertiveness, in the wake of recent territorial disputes with Japan over the East China Sea islands and in the South China Sea. There is also a perception in Beijing that its diplomacy has lacked creativity and nimbleness. To elevate the level of diplomatic decisionmaking, the CPC is considering appointing one of its 25 Politburo members as a new foreign policy czar who would also hold the title of Vice Premier a rank higher than the position held by the current top Chinese diplomat, Mr. Dai. Wang Huning, who joined the Politburo in November, has been mentioned as a candidate for the post. As an official working in the Secretariat of the Politburo, Mr. Wang regularly accompanied President Hu Jintao on almost all of his international trips, including to India for the BRICS

Summit earlier this year. He speaks French fluently, and earlier worked as the Dean of the International Politics Department at Shanghais Fudan University.

Two other areas where a new approach by the Chinese leadership is likely to be of relevance to India are with regard to Tibet and trade. The CPC has appointed a new head of the United Front Work Department, the leading organisation in charge of Tibet policy and talks with the Dalai Lama, which have been stalled after the Tibetan spiritual leaders representatives resigned citing a hardening Chinese position. The around 90 self-immolation protests by Tibetans have brought fresh accusations aimed at Dharamsala of a separatist plot. The Tibet policy will be under the charge of Ling Jihua, a protg of Hu Jintao. Under Mr. Hu, China followed an approach to Tibet

that emphasised stability and security, and stepped up pressure on the Dalai Lama internationally.

On the trade front, the past year has seen a more than 13 per cent decline in trade with India, as of October. Bilateral trade has been driven by Indian exports of iron ore and imports of Chinese power and telecom equipment. Iron ore exports are unlikely to recover as a result of a prolonged slowdown in Chinas steel sector in the short-term and the governments long-term target of rebalancing the economy. China has suggested boosting mutual investments as a way to bridge the imbalance, but its officials have voiced concern most recently at the November 26 Strategic Economic Dialogue in New Delhi at the investment climate in India after duties on the import of power

equipment and restrictions in the telecom sector were imposed. The CPCs Work Report highlighted health care reform and Information Technology as strategic priorities for the next five years, which may open up new possibilities for Indian pharmaceutical and IT companies. In both sectors, India is pushing for greater market access. But Chinese officials say Indian companies will, for their part, have to invest far more in the domestic market in terms of boosting both their expertise and commitment if they want to expand their presence in China as the countrys new leadership takes charge.

The new leadership in Beijing is likely to look for stability in relations with New Delhi as it addresses more urgent issues with its neighbours in the Asia Pacific and the U.S.

December 4, 2012

This tablet is not a mood elevator


The Aakash initiative of the Indian government is an attempt to bolster the academic experience of students in the country by equipping them with purpose-built tablets at subsidised rates.

The Aakash 2 tablet was unveiled on November 11, 2012. It is the third iteration of a product first unveiled in October 2011, and is designed and licensed by a British-Canadian-Indian company named DataWind, headed by chief executive Suneet Singh Tuli.

On November 29, the tablet received an endorsement from the United Nations, where it was presented to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon by

Indias ambassador to the United Nations, Hardeep Singh Puri, and Tuli.

DataWind will sell Aakash 2 to the government at Rs.2,263, which will then be subsidised to students at Rs.1,130. However, the question is this: is it value for money even at this low price?

Version 1.0 to 2.0

When it first entered the market, Aakash was censured for being underpowered, underperforming, and just generally cheap.

Version one was a flop. The subsequently upgraded successor, released April 2012, was released commercially before it was remodelled into the Aakash 2 to suit the governments subsidised rate. As a

result, some critical features were substituted with some others whose benefits are either redundant or unnecessary.

Aakash 2 is more durable and slimmer than Aakash , even though both weigh 350 grams. If the tablet is going to act as a substitute for textbooks, that would be a load off childrens schoolbags.

Drawbacks

But the Ministry of Human Resource Development is yet to reveal if digitised textbooks in local languages or any rich, interactive content have been developed to be served specifically through Aakash 2 . The 2 GB of storage space, if not expanded to a possible 32 GB, is likely to restrict the quantity of content further,

whereas the quality will be restrained by the low 512 MB of RAM.

The new look has been achieved by substituting two USB ports that the first Aakash had for one mini-USB port. This means no internet dongles.

That is a big drawback, considering Aakash 2 can access only Wi-Fi networks. It does support tethering capability that lets it act as a local WiFi hot spot. But not being able to access cellular networks like 3G, such as in rural areas where mobile phone penetration is miles ahead of internet penetration, will place the onus on local governments to lay internetcables, bring down broadband prices, etc.

If the device is being envisaged mainly as one on which students may take notes, then Aakash 2 could pass

muster. But even here, the mini-USB port rules out plugging in an external keyboard for ease of typing.

Next, Aakash 2s battery life is a meagre four hours, which is well short of a full college day, and prevents serious student use. Videoconferencing, with a front-facing low-resolution camera, will only drain the battery faster. Compensatory ancillary infrastructure can only render the experience more cumbersome.

In terms of software, after the operating system was recently upgraded in Aakash 2 , the device is almost twice as fast and multi-tasks without overheating. But DataWind has quoted insufficient processing power as the reason the tablet will not have access to Androids digital marketplace. Perhaps in an attempt to not entirely short-change students,

access to the much less prolific GetJar apps directory is being provided.

Effectively, with limited apps, no 3G, a weak battery and a mini-USB port, the success of the tablet and its contribution to Indian education seems to be hinged solely on its low price.

South American programme

As always, a problem of scale could exacerbate Aakash 2s deficiencies. Consider the South American initiative of the One Laptop Per Child program instituted in 2005. Peru, in particular, distributed 8.5 lakh laptops at a cost of $225 million in order to enhance its dismal education system.

No appreciable gains in terms of test scores were recorded, however. Only

13 per cent of 12-year olds were at the required level in mathematics and 30 per cent at the required reading level, the countrys education ministry reported in March 2012.

However, Uruguay, its smaller continent-mate, saw rapid transformations after it equipped every primary-school student in the country with a laptop with access to the internet.

The difference, as Sandro Marcone, a Peruvian ministry official, conceded, lay in Uruguayan students using laptops to access interactive content from the web to become faster learners than their teachers, and forming closely knit learning communities that then expanded.

Therefore, what India shouldnt do is subsidise a tablet that could turn out

to be a very costly notebook. Yes, the price is low, but given the goal of ultimately unifying 58.6 lakh students across 25,000 colleges and 400 universities , Aakash 2 could be revised to better leverage existing infrastructure instead of necessitating more.

vasudevan.m@thehindu.co.in

With limited apps, no 3G, a weak battery and a mini-USB port, Aakash2 could turn out

to be little more than a costly notebook December 4, 2012

Neither effective nor equitable

The nondescript town of Kotkasim in the Alwar district of Rajasthan had its Peepli Live moment after it was chosen for a pilot experiment with direct cash transfers of kerosene subsidies. According to the district administration, the scheme led to net savings of 79 per cent in kerosene subsidies after it was launched in December 2011, by weeding out fake users. The administration further claims that if this were replicated in Rajasthan as a whole, it would lead to annual savings of about Rs. 920 crore for the State government. However, are these savings really driven by a reduction in the illegal diversion of subsidised kerosene? A quick investigation, based on discussions with residents and Fair Price Shop (FPS) dealers in three gram panchayats of Kotkasim, reveals a different story.

The scheme

The direct cash transfer of kerosene subsidies works as follows. Instead of getting kerosene from the local FPS at a subsidised price of Rs. 15 a litre, as they used to do, households now pay the full market price (initially Rs. 45 a litre, later raised to Rs. 50). The subsidy, that is, the difference between the market price and the subsidised rate of Rs 15 a litre, is deposited into their bank accounts. The subsidy payments are supposed to be made every three months, with the first three-month instalment paid in advance when the scheme is launched.

Clearly, this scheme requires careful recording of kerosene purchases and close coordination among the FPS, the administration and the banks. When people buy kerosene, the FPS dealer notes down their account number in

his sales register along the purchase details. This information is sent to the District Supply Officer (DSO). The relevant subsidies are then paid into bank accounts based on this information, every three months.

The main purpose of the scheme is to reduce leakages: if FPS dealers get the same price from their legitimate customers as from the black market, there is no incentive to cheat. That, at any rate, is how things are supposed to work.

Peoples perceptions

Most of the consumers we talked to said they used kerosene for lighting lamps, and sometimes in cooking stoves. Further probing revealed that some people used to mix kerosene with diesel to run tubewell pumpsets as well, though this was from their

own quota of three litres per month. Before the scheme was launched, households often bought extra kerosene by borrowing ration cards from others who did not purchase their full quota. These proxy purchases have more or less ceased under the new scheme, because the subsidy is credited directly to the cardholder. Many respondents complained bitterly about this.

On the other hand, in the earlier system, kerosene supplies often ran out (possibly due to illegal diversion). For this reason, many people were also willing to go along with the new scheme provided the subsidies were paid on time.

Old entries in the ration cards suggest that there was demand for kerosene from every household. Moreover, due to power cuts and a lack of alternative source of lighting, kerosene is a

necessity in many households. Then why did the purchase decline so dramatically after the new scheme was introduced?

One major reason is the erratic payment (or even non-payment) of subsidies, due to lack of coordination with the banks. Even a year after the scheme was launched, many households have not been able to open a bank account. Since the subsidy transfer requires Core Banking Solutions (CBS) enabled bank branches, the post office accounts of MGNREGA workers were not considered. Many households are yet to receive any subsidy, despite shelling out Rs 500 to open a (supposedly zero-balance) bank account for instance the SBI account holders of Bilahedi gram panchayat. Another major hurdle is the time and effort required to go to the bank and check whether the

subsidy has been credited. Quite often, people have to visit the bank many times just to get this information. Even a single visit can take a full day because of the distance, long queues, and uncooperative bank staff. This is a major hassle, particularly for poor households.

Because of this erratic and cumbersome transfer of subsidies, the effective price of kerosene has actually shot up, leading to a dramatic decline in FPS purchases. Since the launch of the pilot in December 2011, some households have received two subsidy instalments (for three months each) and some have received one but many others are yet to get any subsidy. Without assured and timely subsidy payments, people are reluctant or unable to buy kerosene at the market rate.

The worst-hit are the poorest households. For instance, Sumitra Devi of Kanhdka gram panchayat, a single woman, has been constrained to use her pension to purchase kerosene from the FPS at the market rate without receiving any subsidy. Apparently, her account number is yet to reach the bank.

The dealers story was consistent with what we heard from consumers. Kerosene sales dropped drastically in the very first month after the scheme was introduced. Subsequently, kerosene offtake by dealers also plummeted due to a dramatic increase in the amounts they had to pay upfront to get kerosene supplies. When the FPS transaction price per litre tripled (from Rs 15 to Rs 45), so did the cash advance from about Rs 3,300 per 220-litre drum to Rs 9,900 per drum.

Bad deal

Dealers commissions, however, remained the same (per litre). Further, it takes much longer to recover the advance, because sales have crashed. Thus, the returns on investment are much lower, to the extent that many dealers have lost interest in supplying kerosene. Some of them are literally being forced to continue, just to show that the scheme is a success. Even if many dealers were diverting kerosene earlier, maintaining a sound incentive structure for them is very important for the sustainability of the system. Forcing them to purchase kerosene at a loss to ensure that the scheme continues is both unsustainable and unethical.

Pilot or showpiece?

Pilot surveys are initiated to learn lessons from ground realities. Before scaling up, the shortcomings need to be rectified. However, till now there has been no objective assessment whatsoever of the scheme by the government. On the contrary, the administration is projecting the scheme as a grand success on the sole basis of reduction in total subsidy, without analysing (or revealing) its cause. Our investigation suggests that the main reason for the reduction in subsidy is the involuntary dropping out of legitimate buyers. The whole experiment looks like a desperate topdown attempt to successfully execute a showpiece at any cost. One dealer told us that the DSO had scolded him saying: Ramjibhi to 14 saal ke vanwaas par gae the, aap teen mahine scheme nahi chala sakte? (even Lord Ram was exiled to the jungle for 14 years, cant you run the scheme for three months). Another dealer was told: Aapko scheme chalani hi padegi,

Collector ko sammanit jo karwana hai (you will have to run the scheme since we have to get an award for the Collector).

Of course, if the real purpose of the experiment was just to reduce the amount of subsidy (if need be by driving legitimate beneficiaries out of the system), then, yes, it was a success. But if the purpose was to put in place a more effective and equitable system, the Kotkasim experiment is at best an opportunity to learn from failure.

(Bharat Bhatti is doing his MA in development studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Madhulika Khanna is a researcher based in Delhi.)

The direct cash transfer scheme launched a year ago in Kotkasim for providing kerosene subsidies has pushed legitimate beneficiaries out of the system December 4, 2012

Wake up and smell the ink


After an inquiry lasting a year, Lord Justice Leveson has delivered a damning verdict on the decades of outrageous behaviour by the media. If anything, this verdict would apply in even greater force to a large section (not all) of the Indian media which has since long been shamelessly indulging in malpractices paid news, the Radia tapes, and even blackmail and extortion.

The Zee exposure is only the tip of an iceberg. Lord Justice Leveson in his report has said that malpractices in

the media are not aberrations but common practices. This comment applies equally to a large section of the Indian media, though it must also be said that there are many upright and excellent journalists in India.

Lord Justice Leveson has said that: a section of the media acted as if its own ethical code simply did not exist; it wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people; there has been reckless disregard for accuracy.

Paid news

Everyone knows that paid news is rampant in India, but when the twomember committee (of Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and K. Sreenivas Reddy) set up by the Press Council submitted a damning 72-page report, it was shamelessly sought to be suppressed at the instance of some members of

the Press Council (before I became its Chairman). The first thing I did on becoming Chairman was to place the report on the Press Councils website.

Madhu Kishwar, a senior journalist, said on Rajya Sabha TV that many media people can be bribed and manipulated. The huge salaries which many top media people get (some are said to get packages worth several crores annually, often linked with TRP ratings) enable such media people to lead fancy lifestyles with huge cars, houses and bank balances, thereby making many of them (not all) docile hirelings of their corporate masters.

Need for regulator

Lord Justice Leveson has called for the setting up of an independent statutory regulator of the media, which is precisely what I have been

pleading for since long. However I have clarified that: 1. I want regulation, not control, of the media, the difference between the two being that whereas in control there is no freedom, in regulation there is freedom but subject to reasonable restrictions in the public interest. 2. This regulation should not be by the government or any individual but by an independent statutory authority (which can be called the Media Council) and 3. Most of the members of the proposed Media Council (which should have representatives from the broadcast media also on it) should be mediapersons, not appointed by the government but elected by media organisations.

This media council should have punitive powers including the power to suspend licences and impose fines, but such punishment should be given by the majority decision of the Media

Council, and not by the chairman alone. This is really a form of selfregulation and judgment by ones peers (as is done by the Bar Council).

Some mediapersons have quoted Jefferson who said that if he had to choose between a government without a free press or a free press without a government, he would choose the latter. While I have great respect for Jefferson, I regret I cannot accept this statement, for two reasons. First, if there is no government there would be anarchy, and a free press cannot exist in an anarchy.

Second, in a democracy, the media must help people in their struggle for a better life. Therefore, freedom of the media by itself has no value. It has value if it helps people secure better lives. If the media uses its freedom to perpetuate poverty and other social

evils like casteism, communalism and superstitions by propagating backward ideas, should we permit such freedom? Certainly not. Therefore, freedom of the media is a good thing only if it helps to raise the standard of living of the masses, and this it can do by spreading rational and scientific ideas and combating backward and feudal ideas like casteism and communalism.

Voice of the future

Historically, the media arose in western Europe as an organ of the people against feudal oppression in the 17th and 18th centuries. At that time, all the organs of power were in the hands of feudal authorities (kings, aristocrats, etc). Hence the people had to create new organs which could represent their interests. The media (which was then only the print media) was a powerful organ created by the

people. In Europe and America it represented the voice of the future, in contrast to the feudal organs which wanted to preserve the status quo. Everyone knows of the great role played by Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, John Wilkes and Junius who fought against feudal oppression, and helped greatly in the transformation of feudal Europe to modern Europe.

In my opinion, the Indian media should also play such a role. Today the Indian people are suffering terribly from massive poverty, unemployment, skyrocketing prices, an absence of health care and good education for the masses. The Indian media should help our country abolish these great evils, the way the European media did. Only then will it win the respect of the people.

Some people have misunderstood me and thought that I wish to gag or

muzzle the media at the behest of the government. The truth is that I have always been fighting for media freedom, as my track record shows. However, I have also been saying that the media must act responsibly, particularly in a poor country like India.

No freedom can be absolute. Man is a social being, as Aristotle said. Hence freedom cannot go to the extent of damaging society, because in turn, we will be damaging ourselves.

(Justice Markandey Katju is Chairman, Press Council of India.)

The Leveson report on the British press should jolt the Indian media into acting against ills such as paid news,

and focus on being an agent of progressive social change December 5, 2012

Dream run hits the hurdles


Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has pulled out all stops to thwart a challenge to his leadership of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) from his one-time advisor and trusted hatchet man Pyarimohan Mohapatra and other party workers.

Since March 2000 when Mr. Patnaik first became the Chief Minister, he has had a dream run. This is the BJDs third term in power, and it seemed there were no clouds on the horizon until May this year, that is, when the revolt began.

A week is a long time in politics, it is said. Six months later, the BJD president appears increasingly embattled and unable to curb the growing threat from the Odisha Jana Morcha, the political forum that Mr. Mohapatra, a Rajya Sabha member, has floated.

With the crisis refusing to go away, Mr. Patnaik has been addressing party rallies and meetings to keep his flock together; he has also announced new welfare programmes for different sections of people in order to maintain his popularity and protect his governments image.

In the aftermath of the launching of the Jana Morcha, Mr. Patnaik announced that self-help groups would be given financial support of Rs.10,000 instead of the previous amount of Rs.5,000. He also declared

that old-age pension holders would be paid Rs.200 to buy winter clothes. Further, he has assured payment of Rs. one crore per annum to the State lawyers welfare fund.

The Chief Minister now seems to be spending more time on planning moves to checkmate the Jana Morchas growth than in running the administration. He had suspended Mr. Mohapatra from the party along with two legislators and dropped three Ministers from his cabinet a few days after the alleged coup attempt on May 29, when he was away on his first official trip abroad. Although Mr. Mohapatra claimed he never had any intentions of ousting his one-time leader, Mr. Patnaik dubbed him a traitor.

For inner-party democracy

The Jana Morchas stated objective is to restore inner-party democracy in the BJD. Mr. Mohapatra has alleged that Mr. Patnaik is not running the party as per its constitution and no meeting of the State Executive Committee of the party had been held during the past two-and-a-half-years.

At its first rally in Bhubaneshwar on October 28, Mr. Mohapatra came out openly against the Chief Minister for his alleged inefficiencies, overdependency on the bureaucracy and overlooking the interests of the grassroots level workers of the party. Many second and third-rung leaders in the BJD have crossed over to the new outfit where they have been rewarded with posts as office-bearers.

When Mr. Mohapatra announced the Jana Morchas second rally at Bhawanipatna in the backward Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region on

November 19, Mr. Patnaik convened the State Executive Committee meeting of his party where a decision was taken to expel Mr. Mohapatra and another senior leader Jagneswar from the party.

The BJD responded by holding its own meetings in the same area ahead of the Jana Morcha rally, but the rival congregation at Bhawanipatna was quite a success. Mr. Mohapatra stepped up the tirade against Mr. Patnaik, dubbing him a selfish leader and also questioning his credentials as an Odia.

Since he entered State politics in 2000, Mr. Patnaik had managed to remain the undisputed leader of his party by removing many a senior leader if he sensed the slightest threat to himself. Ironically enough, Mr. Mohapatra was said to have had a hand in many of those removals

aimed at strengthening Mr. Patnaiks grip over the party.

Expelling Mr. Mohapatra was, therefore, never going to be a smooth affair. Mr. Patnaik now has a powerful enemy who has forced him to mount battle against large sections of his own party. There is an atmosphere of suspicion in the BJD as Mr. Patnaik tries to figure out who is loyal to whom, and who to Mohapatra. For his part, the rebel leader has dropped hints about converting the Jana Morcha into a political party.

Sensing opportunity, the Opposition Congress too has started highlighting scams relating to illegal mining, coal block allocation and the Maoist problem. The next elections are in 2014 and securing a fourth term in government is not going to be as easy as Mr. Patnaik once thought.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik appears increasingly embattled by the revolt

in the Biju Janata Dal led by his onetime advisor and hatchet man December 5, 2012

More FDI in insurance will undermine economic security


The most substantive arguments against the liberalisation of the insurance sector have come from its workforce. For nearly two decades, the biggest union in the Indian insurance industry, the All India Insurance Employees Association (AIIEA), has opposed the entry of foreign capital in the insurance industry. Amanulla Khan , president,

AIIEA, spoke to V. Sridhar about the issues raised by the decision to increase the cap on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Indian insurance companies from 26 to 49 per cent. Excerpts:

What are the main reasons for your opposition to FDI in insurance?

Insurance is a long-term contract. An insurance company deploys funds in long-term investments in order to be able to pay claims that may arise in the future. Insurance funds are thus suitable for developing national infrastructure and capital formation. In a developing country like India, the government needs to retain some control over domestic savings instead of allowing foreign investors to enjoy control over Indian savings. The Parliamentary Standing Committee came to the same conclusion. It recommended that the cap on foreign

direct investment (FDI) be retained at 26 per cent.

But there is the claim that insurance penetration has improved in the last decade because of competition. More will be better, they say

It takes only common sense to understand that insurance depends on economic growth and the level of disposable income in the hands of the people. It is purely coincidental that when the insurance industry was opened up in 2001, the economy was growing at about eight to nine per cent. But there has been stagnation in the last two years and private companies have closed down 34 per cent of their branches and cut their workforce by 30 per cent.

Why then are private insurers gleeful about the impending increase in foreign stake in their ventures?

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) had said that companies that have been in business for 10 years can raise fresh capital. If they really do need capital, why not go to the market to raise resources? Why do they have to look to foreign capital? The simple reason is that India is still an attractive market for foreign capital in the medium to long term. The insurance markets in advanced capitalist economies are in serious stagnation. They find the demographic composition of the Indian population very attractive 65 per cent of Indians are under 35.

How has the pre-eminent Indian insurance company, the Life Insurance Corporation, coped with competition?

The LIC adapted to the competitive environment very well. It offered better products and improved its servicing standards. The AIIEA also helped create a better work culture and a sense of belonging to the institution. The LIC dominates the life insurance market today with 76 per cent share in premium income and 81 per cent in the number of policies.

Private companies have focused on unit linked insurance policies (ULIP) where returns are dependent on the stock markets, which implies that the risk is borne by the person seeking insurance. But that is not what insurance is all about. Premium from ULIPs constitute over 85 per cent of premium collections in the private sector, compared to less than onethird in the case of the LIC.

The private insurers focused on ULIPs because they had to make much smaller capital provisioning (solvency margins in insurance industry parlance) for such policies.

Also recall that the Indian stock market was booming when these companies came in. The private companies could initially gather a market share of more than one-third. But when the slowdown in the stock markets and the wider economy started in 2008-09, people started moving back towards the comfort of the LIC.

Selling an insurance policy is like issuing a promissory note. Credibility is critical in this business. The customer wonders whether the insurer will be around if and when a claim is made

The ultimate yardstick to judge the performance of an insurance company is to see how quickly it settles claims. The LIC is perhaps the best in the world in this regard. It settles 99.86 per cent of the claims. In contrast, IRDA data reveals that in the last financial year, the private sector repudiated nearly 11 per cent of the claims. The regulator must address this issue immediately.

The average annual premium for a policy issued by the private insurers is about Rs.60,000, compared to Rs.9,000 for a policy issued by the LIC. This gives you an idea about the diversity in the LICs customer base. If the LIC is weakened, it may be forced to behave like a clone of the private insurers.

There are also complaints about misselling of life insurance. How has LIC fared?

The lapsation ratio (defined as the proportion of policies that lapse after the first year) of LIC in 2010-11 was five per cent, compared to 42 per cent in the case of an insurance company promoted by a large private bank. Another foreign insurer had a lapsation ratio of 72 per cent! On average, one-fifth of the policies issued by private insurers lapse after the first year. Policies lapse because the buyers, after paying the first premium, find that it does not suit their requirements. And, to make matters worse, the company can keep the money after misleading the consumer!

What will be the immediate consequences of increasing FDI to 49 per cent?

The Indian partners will have to divest a portion of what they now hold in favour of foreign entities. The IRDAs rules stipulate that a company that has been in business for 10 years can go to the stock market to raise resources through an initial public offer. But the catch is that these companies are not earning profits yet.

My understanding is that the IRDA is pushing the industry towards consolidation. It is likely that the wider space given to foreign capital will hasten the process. That will mean less competition, not more.

The government has decided recently to allow the LIC to invest up to 30 per cent of the shares of listed corporate entities, which was earlier set at 10 per cent. How will affect the interest of policyholders?

The basic objective behind any investment is to secure a decent return to policyholders while ensuring the security of the policy monies.

LIC generates large investable funds every year and is a long-term investor. However, not many good scrips are available for investment. The 10 per cent ceiling was preventing the LIC from enhancing value for policyholders. We feel there should be some flexibility on this score. Of course, we are aware that the enhanced ceiling may pose risks because of the greater concentration of funds in a few companies. We feel the LIC should strengthen its internal mechanism on investment decisions.

The LIC should also not invest more than 10 per cent of its investable funds in equities. We are also opposed to the investment of

policyholders funds in derivatives, which the IRDA is considering.

Is the AIIEA opposed to these measures because of the fear of job losses in the public sector?

For 10 years and more we have proved that we can compete effectively against these private companies. We lost market share initially, but we also regained it. This struggle is not about wages, jobs or about the narrow interests of the insurance workers. Our union believes that the unbridled entry of foreign capital into the insurance industry is harmful to the economic and social development of the country.

How effective has the AIIEA been in rolling back the reform process in the financial sector?

We understand that a trade union has its limitations. We know that the government is too powerful for us. Without public support we cannot push back these policies. That is why we collected more than 1.5 crore signatures from across the country when the insurance sector was opened up to private players. There is no other case of a union successfully pushing back the governments reform agenda for almost 20 years, since the Malhotra Committee (1994) called for the privatisation of public sector insurance companies. We have appealed to all political parties to oppose the governments move.

sridhar.v@thehindu.co.in December 5, 2012

No excuses for this error of judgment

Only those condemned to await their own deaths will know what it is to be suddenly blessed with the elixir of life. On November 22, two Kashmiri men found themselves lifted out of the darkness of their death row cells into light, life and liberty after the Delhi High Court set aside their convictions in the 1996 Lajpat Nagar market bomb blasts.

Grievously wronged

Mirza Nissar Hussain and Mohammad Ali Bhatt were grievously wronged by the Delhi police and the prosecution which, in the words of the High Court, committed lapses so grave that they raised a question mark on the nature and truthfulness of the evidence produced. The case had fallen below the threshold of minimum proof

required in a criminal trial, the court said.

Minimum proof and maximum punishment? Why were Hussain and Bhatt sentenced to death when there was no evidence even to convict them? The curious fact here is that the trial court itself was distressed by the quality of the police investigation, which it described as highly defective. Hussain and Bhatt eventually bridged the impossible gulf between death and freedom because a sensible, sensitive appellate court was able to see that the evidentiary dots simply did not connect in their case.

This High Court judgment, and a Supreme Court judgment of September 2012, have taken our understanding of terror investigations to a level where the usual excuses can no longer suffice to explain away

acquittals. Indeed, if a pattern has emerged in recent years of terror trials leading to acquittals, it has equally become a pattern for the police to blame the acquittals on the nature of terrorism which made evidence gathering difficult, more so in a system hamstrung by inadequate manpower and outdated forensics. The implication is that the men are guilty but get away.

The High Court rejected the policeprosecution argument that the law and the courts demanded impossible standards of proof which was bothersome in terror crimes. It said the weakness of the state could not justify lowering of standards. Very significantly, the court also noted that the evidence appeared to be manufactured.

Overturning the convictions of 11 persons under the Terrorist and

Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), the apex court berated the prosecution: firstly for falsifying evidence regarding a key TADA safeguard and then for arguing that the case did not turn on this piece of technical evidence. The plea was not good enough, the court said, dealing a blow to the spurious logic that subterfuge was a small aberration in the battle against terrorism.

Adnan Bilal Mulla

I record here the travails of Maharashtra resident Adnan Bilal Mulla. The case is not quite as dramatic as the one illustrated above but it shows the lengths to which the state will go once it has judged a citizen to have made the transition to terror suspect. Adnan was to get married on May 24, 2003. The marriage took place instead on April

14, 2010 at that because his fianc, now wife, mustered the will to wait for a man sent to jail under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Through the seven years he was in jail, Adnan, who owned a fruit juice stall in Padgha in Bhiwandi, could not get bail, nor was he brought to trial. Nearly a decade after his arrest, trial has still to start in the case, and alert to the dark possibilities of the future, his family lives each day as if it were the last.

Adnans lawyers went back and forth from trial court to High Court, filing applications, appeals and writ petitions, before securing his release on bail in February 2010. The prosecution constructed a powerful story of terror and conspiracy. In actual fact, the evidence was thin and far from constituting grounds for believing Adnan was guilty as charged

a legal requirement to justify persistent denial of bail.

Quite to the contrary, startling evidence surfaced while Adnan was in jail to show that the police had kept him under illegal detention for over a month and charged him under POTA when he refused to implicate Saquib Nachan, his brother-in-law and the main accused in a series of three bomb blasts recorded between December 2002 and March 2003. The trial court thrice refused Adnan bail, the last time in 2008, just months after a judicial enquiry confirmed his illegal and unauthorised detention. The enquiry report concluded: There is a clear probability that the investigating agency did not want to make Adnan an accused but it wanted to make him a witness. In other words, Adnan was summoned as a witness against Saquib, and when he did not oblige, he was made a co-

accused with Saquib and charged similarly: conspiracy to wage war against the state by committing terrorist acts.

Two years earlier, in February 2006, a two judge-bench of the Bombay High Court had rejected Adnans bail plea, condemning him in harsh language and justifying his incarceration through broad-brush theories of larger conspiracy and guerrilla war against the state. The rejection prompted Adnans family to file an RTI application seeking his whereabouts between May 5, 2003, the day he went missing, and June 9, 2003, when he was shown as officially arrested. The reply nailed the police lie: Adnan was given over in custody to Mumbais DCB-CID on May 5, 2003. Armed with this proof, Adnans lawyers demanded a judicial enquiry into when and why he was arrested.

The enquiry, conducted by Principal Sessions Judge T.V. Nalawade, established the following. On March 27, 2003, the Padgah police registered an FIR against Adnan and several others for obstructing the arrest of Saquib. It was a bailable offence, and since Adnan was shortly to get married, he surrendered to the Padgah police on May 5, 2003. He should have been released immediately. Instead he was handed over to DCB-CID which took him into illegal custody. When Adnan emerged from confinement 36 days later, it was as a co-accused in an omnibus terror conspiracy allegedly plotted by his brother-in-law.

During the enquiry, the prosecution argued that Adnan did not speak of his illegal detention when he was produced before the authorised court on June 9, 2003. Judge Nalwades answer to this was that long

detentions and the fear of further harassment often forced suspects to withhold the truth.

Four years after Adnan was lambasted by a bench of the Bombay High Court, a second bench of the court, with one of the judges being common to both, commented on the injustice done to him and released him on bail.

The judges took on record the enquiry report of Judge Talwande: The enquiry indicates that the appellant was initially picked up as a witness, and when he refused to give a statement against the main accused, who is his brother-in-law, he was shown as an accused and for doing so he was shown to have been arrested on 9/6/2003. The judges pulled up the trial court for refusing Adnan bail and for its failure to consider the changed circumstances arising from the contents of the enquiry report.

The judges further said: the evidence [produced by the prosecution] cannot be, as of now, read as to hold that there is sufficient evidence to record a conviction against him *Adnan+.

Adnans story is by no means unique: illegal detention, planted evidence and denial of bail have become so much the rule that not just the police force but society at large has come to view these as legitimate weapons to be deployed in the fight against terrorism. A recent study of 16 terror crime acquittals by the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association showed illegal detention and trumped up charges in a majority of cases. More recently, it has been disclosed that a member of the R.D. Nimesh Commission expressed serious doubts on the date, place and timing of the arrests of two bomb blast suspects in Uttar Pradesh.

Worst bias

Terror suspects suffer the worst attitudinal biases because the horror of terrorism tends to bring out the vigilante in the ordinary person. The state capitalises on this revulsion to such an extent that terror suspects are thought to have no rights at all. In 1996, the Supreme Court laid down a set of procedural safeguards, known as the D.K. Basu guidelines, to prevent illegal arrests and custodial torture. The charter gave an arrested person the right to inform his relatives of his arrest as soon as practicable. It also placed an obligation on the police to convey to the relatives the details of the time, place of arrest and venue of custody. Though the charter has since passed into law, it is not even followed in the breach. The pregnant wife of Fasih Mahmood an Indian engineer working in Saudi Arabia who went missing in May this year had

to file a Habeas Corpus petition to establish his location when she was entitled to get this information from the Indian authorities.

Fasih, who has been named a cofounder of the Indian Mujahideen, was formally arrested in India on October 22. If he was illegally detained, his family should have been told about it not only because the law gives them this right but because illegal custody is where forced confessions happen, leading to vitiated trials and verdicts.

From illegal detentions to wrong convictions, Indias terror prosecution

is in dire need of attitudinal overhaul December 6, 2012

Arming the law against gun trade


An overwhelming majority of 157 countries, including the United States and China, have voted to finalise next March a global treaty to regulate the billion-dollar trade in conventional weapons. Significantly, not a single country opposed the resolution to combat the proliferation of illicit arms in the United Nations General Assemblys First Committee and Russia was the lone major exporting power to abstain from the vote. The development reflects an emerging consensus that despite the legitimate requirements of defence cooperation among countries, weapons transfers ought to be subject to greater multilateral supervision in view of their devastating consequences for human lives and livelihood.

Needless controversy

Under the proposed global convention, governments are expected to agree to cease transfers of arms and ammunition where there are risks that countries are likely to deploy them for human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law. This is Amnesty Internationals Golden Rule, requiring all states to carry out a rigorous risk assessment of unauthorised use and potential rights violations. Predictably, attempts to incorporate basic principles of the rule of law was resisted both by the big arms exporting countries such as the U.S., China, and Russia, as well as autocratic regimes in Africa and Asia. However, any attempt to harmonise a global law on the trade in lethal weapons with broad human rights principles is unexceptionable. Such moves are in fact consistent with the spirit underlying established procedures that democratic states

have in place to not extradite terror suspects to countries where torture is routinely applied during trials.

The other controversy in the negotiations relates to the nature and scope of arms that should be subject to controls. Civil society campaigns have strongly advocated coverage of the entire range of conventional weapons, including small arms and light weapons (SALW) and related ammunition under the treaty. Their claim that a much larger proportion of casualties in modern-day armed conflict are caused by SALW is too compelling to be overlooked. Although the Obama administration reversed the earlier U.S. position on the treaty, Washington, with Moscow and Tehran, is not expected to strive hard for a strong law. One of the sticky points has been the inclusion of ammunition.

Cross-sectoral support

The first-ever comprehensive treaty for control of the commerce in conventional arms enjoys broad support in view of the ethical, socioeconomic and public health ramifications of armed conflict. Some 2,000 parliamentarians from over 114 countries have backed proposals to cover transfers of all conventional arms, including ammunition and equipment. Significantly, they have also committed to advocate early and effective ratification of such a treaty by their respective governments.

A World Health Organisation report on violence way back in 2002 singled out the need for a global response to arms trade as among the top priorities. Now, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War has underscored the importance of a robust treaty on arms

trade for the protection of life and the promotion of health. Also significant is the call issued last year by a group of global investors who manage or own assets worth $1.2 trillion. Signatories to the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Investment, the group has underscored the need for greater transparency in international arms transfers as social, governance and environmental issues have implications for investment portfolios.

Hard realities

Yet none of the stakeholders who engaged in deliberations for nearly a decade would seriously count on major weapons exporting countries to cease arming Africas warlords or Latin Americas drug mafia in a hurry. The ink had barely dried on the document signed in New York when Britains Prime Minister David

Cameron was busy negotiating weapons export deals with the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Ironically, the United Kingdom is one of the earliest champions of talks on the arms treaty.

Western powers seldom miss an opportunity to express support for the momentous democratic churning witnessed in the Middle East. But the material support they extend to autocracies and warlords in Asia and Africa tells a different story. It is no secret that Mr. Camerons bid for the sale of Eurofighter Typhoons acquired urgency after the failed merger of BAE Systems, the U.K.s largest defence contractor, with the Franco-German giant, EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company).

More broadly, clandestine arms supplies that sustain notorious dictatorships and defend domestic

jobs are not consistent with the declared policy of promotion of democracy and raising human rights violations abroad. Even less in the context of the severe fallout of the current global economic slowdown.

The broad support for regulating trade in conventional arms is an acknowledgement of its devastating effects on human rights December 6, 2012

The promise of unconditional money


Offering cash transfers before elections is an inspired move. Like birthday gifts, election promises must come brightly packaged, look good for the event even if they collapse in a heap afterwards. By then, another

birthday, another another promise!

election

and

In election campaigns, it is important to get the best promise out first. Performance can catch up, if at all, much later. There are five full years for that and time enough to waffle, dawdle and put up false figures. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was a great promise, so what if it failed to perform in most parts of the country? Its success in a few showcase States like Kerala provided the juice for excuses elsewhere.

Like all good gifts, an election promise must keep up with the times and cash transfer does just that. There is no point in presenting kirpans when Sikhs want economic opportunities. This is why when Akhilesh Yadav traded in his knuckledusters for laptops, it

worked wonderfully for him in Uttar Pradesh. Caste and minority consciousness are yesterdays promises and, as the Congress learnt in U.P., ready for the trash can. What kind of laptops and when, are issues for another day; it is the promise that must draw in the voters now.

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) proposal for cash transfers comes in a see-through gift wrap. It allows a peek at what it looks like but not what it feels like. This is what makes the cash transfer promise so electorally compelling. What is visible is limited cash transfer, but what is exciting is that it promises much more. For now, cash transfers will concern payments related to pensions, scholarships, and the like. These are low cost deliverables as they are already monetised.

But the dream team for cash transfers, which includes money for food, fertilizer and fuels, will have to wait. Their prices are difficult to control for they have a mind of their own. Also, it is hard to predict how the market will behave once the Public Distribution System (PDS) is dismantled. Wisely then, the UPA is silent about them. Five years from now, the easy victories will be paraded, just as Kerala is put out as MGNREGAs success story. In this case, once again, those chapters that are not exactly bedtime reading will stay unopened and forgotten.

It worked in Brazil

Also, cash transfer has an international gloss about it. It has worked in Brazil and how. Even the World Bank has certified it as an ace instrument for poverty alleviation. So what if only about 15 per cent of

Brazilians live in villages while nearly 70 per cent do in ours? So what if only 6.1 per cent of Brazils population earns less than $1.25 a day compared to a crushing 32.6 per cent in India? These complications should not come in the way of a good promise, especially when there is an election round the corner.

The fact that in Brazil it is not cash transfer but conditional cash transfer is a little detail that can be ignored. For the record, conditional cash transfers are linked to several human development issues which is why they are more than simple antipoverty programmes. In Brazil, poor families have to satisfy strict conditions before they qualify to receive cash transfers. They must make sure that their children have a high 85 per cent attendance in school and that their nutrition and growth charts are climbing up the right slope.

In addition, all children under five must have the full complement of vaccines and no excuses. Mothers too must submit to pre- and post-natal checks. Failure on any of these counts, and the cheque will not be in the mail.

For these conditions to be met, it is imperative that adequate medical and school facilities exist. Brazil has moved swiftly in that direction as it devotes above four per cent of its GDP to health and another four per cent to education. In contrast, India spends just one per cent of its GDP on health which is why cash transfers here had better not be conditional. Our existing educational and health infrastructures are too weak to bear the additional pressure of conditional cash transfers.

Under these circumstances, if conditional cash transfers are insisted upon in India then that would

drive people to private health and education providers. They would then be the new parasites. Fortunately, the UPA is playing within its limits and is not burning a hole in its pocket. As long as Brazil acts as a convenient metaphor, why step into the kitchen and spoil the party?

Opening bank accounts

Emaciated though our cash transfer scheme is, it nevertheless has a huge task ahead. So far, a little over 200 million Aadhar cards have been issued, but that is a long way from being translated into bank accounts. The Reserve Bank of India is yet to come out with guidelines on this matter, though that might happen any day soon. Yet it will require a fair amount of rejigging as banks will now be required to lower their guard when customers come in to open accounts. Nor is the report of the pilot Kotkasim

project encouraging. Though it was near test tube incubated, it failed on practically every front; from the opening of accounts to getting cash in the bank.

And there will be new accounts, millions of them, if the cash transfer scheme is to save face. So far, only about a third of our population has a bank account. In India, sadly, the poorer the State, the greater the pressure on banks. While in developed regions like Delhi, Chandigarh and Goa a bank serves between a manageable 3,500 to 6,500 people, the number jumps to over 21,000 in a place like Bihar. Not surprising then, after hospitals and courts, public sector banks scare people the most.

Migration

In the case of cash transfers it is necessary to factor in an added twist. Our people refuse to sit at home: they migrate everywhere in search of work or marital partners, though sometimes the two look alike. It is, therefore, not enough to have bank accounts at ones address; it is necessary to service people who are constantly on the move. As the Census figures show, upward of 90 million people, in the past decade alone, have changed their residence and the Indian Railways sells over six billion tickets annually.

It is likely that some banks will manage to overcome these problems, and do well or passably well in places like Delhi and Goa even if they flop elsewhere. Delhi and Goa will then become the new Kerala as far as the banking sector is concerned. Like MGNREGA again, success in a limited

sector will help cloud failure in large parts of the country.

Crores and crores

The stark truth in India is that roughly Rs.3.5 trillion is spent every year in subsidies and it is anybodys guess what proportion of this lines undeserving pockets. It cannot be denied either that the poor should have bank accounts or that our economy should be less cash driven than what it is today. Cheques are rarely issued, which is why the intermediaries with their scissor hands are ever ready to take their cut. So if the promise of cash transfers strikes a bell, remember it tolls for so many.

Given the complications of a conditional cash transfer, it is a great election move for the

government to promise cash transfers, but only in a limited fashion. Care must be taken that those in power are not overly persuaded by their own promises and begin to behave rashly. A hasty decision to abandon the Public Distribution System (PDS) or give money only to the women of the family, Brazilian style, would be extremely unwise.

The PDS may not have the whitest shirt, but its performance is not all bad. Different studies, such as those conducted by the National Federation of Indian Women and the Self Employed Womens Association (SEWA), have come up with contradictory conclusions. While the former unilaterally support the PDS, the SEWA research is guarded in this regard as some women prefer cash transfers, but there are others who are not so sure.

Nor would the UPA do itself a favour if cash transfers were made to the womans account, bypassing her husband. If it did that, cash transfers would meet with the same fate as the Womens Reservation Bill did in Parliament. In Brazil, the woman gets the cash and if the man wants a booze for the buck he has to take his missus to the liquor store. This takes away much of the sparkle from the boys night out. This is also why 85 per cent of cash subsidies are spent on food in Brazil.

That the UPA has not spelt out any condition in its cash transfer scheme is a well plotted election strategy. If it delivers in a limited way to a limited population it can draw enough goodwill to shout down the many Kotkasims that are bound to occur.

But by then its party time again: another election and another round of promises on the house.

(Dipankar Gupta is a former professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University.)

Cash transfers limited to a few schemes

and without strings attached make for

a compelling election strategy December 6, 2012

The demolition that rebuilt a community


Rarely has the destruction of a single building impacted history as much as the demolition of Babri Masjid. Apart from becoming a watershed in the

history of Indian politics, it has emerged as the defining moment for the Indian Muslim community as significant as the partition of India, but while partition impacted and continues to impact Indian Muslims negatively, the Babri demolition gave new life and direction to the community.

Intra-community linkages

At partition, most of the Muslim middle class migrated to Pakistan, leaving a few rich and many poor Muslims behind with little or no social, educational or cultural interaction between them. The vast majority of poor Muslims felt orphaned. Coupled with this was the structural exclusion of the Muslim community from the general domain of development by the establishment and society at large, restricting access to educational, economic and

development opportunities that reduced the communitys circumstances to a level below that of Dalits, according to available data. Even the Constitution of India excludes Muslims from the domain of entitlements by extending reservations on religious lines available only to caste Hindus and not to Muslims or Christians.

But around the phenomenon of demolition of Babri Masjid and the agitations and violence that preceded, accompanied and followed it, a sense of commonality, belonging and empathy developed within the Muslim community due to the shared sense of insecurity and increased profiling irrespective of their class or location. This resulted in the emergence of a connect between the elite, the emerging middle class and poor Muslims, leading to increased and sustained intra-community

interaction and collaboration in the social, educational, economic and political spheres. This in turn led to the establishment of organisations and institutions at different levels to further the educational, economic and social development of Muslims in general and of poor Muslims in particular. So many and so varied avenues for development were never available to poor Muslims before and most of these were being provided by rich and middle-class Muslims. Even if this did not greatly improve the situation of the community, it at least arrested the slide into greater impoverishment.

A new Muslim identity

In the phase before the Babri demolition, most elite and educated Muslims did not fully identify with the community. The general perception about a Muslim was that s/he was a

poor, illiterate and orthodox person. Educated and elite Muslims often heard a comment that you dont look like a Muslim, you dont act like a Muslim and they felt happy at not being bracketed with a community perceived as backward. With the dissociation of the educated and elite Muslims from the community identity, its image suffered even more, making Muslims easy targets for ridicule and hate, and exclusion from the spheres of development, entitlements and even claims of equal citizenship.

The Rath Yatra and the accompanying communal frenzy that gripped the country, leading to riots and culminating in the demolition of Babri Masjid, succeeded in creating a common Muslim stereotype that encompassed all sections and classes. Further, while derision was initially restricted to poverty and backwardness of the community, in

the communally surcharged atmosphere of the 70s to the 90s the culture, practices, traditions and even the religion of Muslims became targets for hate.

Every Muslim including the elite started to feel insecure and realised the injustice of it all. Educated, middle class and elite Muslims revolted against such profiling and began asserting that yes, they are indeed Muslims and proud to be so. Atheist Muslims too started accepting their socio-political Muslim identity even as they rejected faith. Thanks to Hindutva forces that destroyed the mosque, all Muslims were united as one community with a single identity. (Post 9/11 and with Islamophobia, this process has started acquiring international dimensions). The irony was that the Hindutva slogan of those times Garv se kaho hum Hindu hai (say with pride I am a Hindu)

remained a slogan, but got Muslims to accept their Muslimness and assert it openly.

This broad, all-encompassing Muslim identity became the trigger for numerous initiatives for the development of the community funded generously by and, and in some cases, with active and sustained participation of educated and rich Muslims. Not just that, it also resulted in the initiation of new political processes in the community and the country with far reaching implications.

Political transformation

With Babri Masjid went too the traditional Muslim leadership that had made the Babri issue the primary Muslim agenda for almost a decade and had kept the community confined within the concerns of security.

Muslims started searching for new leaders and new agendas this time, of justice, equality and development. As a result, they accepted even nonMuslims like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav and N.T. Rama Rao as leaders.

The Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid movement and the resultant formation of the BJP government at the Centre made Muslims realise the importance of who rules and its impact on the security, identity, culture and economy of the community. This led to greater political awakening and participation of Muslims in political processes, ending their earlier indifference to politics. For all Muslims, politics became a matter of life and death.

With the communitys greater participation in the electoral processes, the political influence of

Muslims is slightly more than their numbers because of the increased turn-out and tactical use of the vote. The Muslim vote has emerged as an important political factor with two objectives: keeping BJP out and securing rights and entitlements that are due to them as citizens.

For the first time after independence Muslim concerns entered the domain of rights and entitlements. It is this awakening of the Muslim community to their rights as citizens and growing demands for a politics of entitlement that compelled the Congress government to constitute the Sachar Committee and that led to the recommendations of the Ranganath Mishra Commission.

Given all these developments, it would be no exaggeration to say that demolition of Babri Masjid initiated the reconstruction of a community

that constitutes over 14 per cent of the population and the reorientation of the political direction of a country.

Tailpiece

Had the domes of Babri remained intact, BJP could have been still setting the political agenda of the country and ruling the roost while the Muslim community would have continued to be mired in issues of protection and security.

Hindutva forces were able to use the domes of Babri Masjid as images of revulsion to mobilise masses for political gains. But with the domes destroyed, they seem unable to project the vision of the Grand Ram Temple to energise enough numbers to propel them to power once again.

Twenty years down the line, it seems moot to ask if the act of vandalism December 6, 1992 just brought down a Masjid, or has it also frustrated forever the desire of the Hindutva forces to rule the country.

(Mazher Hussain is Executive Director of COVA, a national network working on issues of communal harmony in India and peace in South Asia.)

The destruction of Babri Masjid bridged the class divide among Muslims, giving them a unitary identity and new political awareness December 7, 2012

The Picasso of concrete

There was a story told by the mayor of the town of Niteroi, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, that expresses perfectly the epic stature of the Brazilian architect Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares, who has died aged 104. In the spring of 1992, after Niemeyers first visit to the seafront site chosen for the towns new museum of contemporary art, Mayor Jorge Roberto Silveira took Niemeyer and his colleagues to a restaurant for lunch. During the meal, Niemeyer described his vision of the museum rising upward, like a flower, or a bird. This satisfied everyone except Silveira, who requested a clearer idea in the shape of a drawing, and asked a waiter to bring Niemeyer some paper. The waiter was on his way back with a notepad when he was intercepted by a colleague who had overheard their conversation. Boy, he cautioned the first waiter. This is the man who built Brasilia. Go and get something bigger. Thus the first

sketches of the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art were made on a tablecloth. It was to be another four years before the elegant, cantilevered concrete dish was opened in 1996, to universal acclaim. Like Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which opened the following year, the Niteroi museum marked a surprising success for unrestrainedly expressionistic architecture. But where Gehry employed titanium alloy and a battery of computers, things were done differently at Niteroi. Not only was Niemeyers project much smaller (as was its budget), but its materials and methods belonged to another age. Where 3D computing in Bilbao permitted unprecedented precision, Niteroi, located on a promontory with the sea on three sides, featured lowtech concrete work, ill-fitting glazing and cheap polycarbonate balustrading.

In terms of timeless architecture, such disadvantages are unimportant, for Niteroi is a modern triumph, something that deserves to be considered alongside such great buildings as Frank Lloyd Wrights Fallingwater; Le Corbusiers chapel at Ronchamp and Mies van der Rohes Farnworth house. Using one basic material, plus daring structural engineering, Niemeyer turned poured concrete painted white into an expressionist masterpiece.

Le Corbusiers influence

Niemeyer, the son of a graphic artist and one of six children, was born in the Laranjeiras district of Rio de Janeiro. He was raised by his maternal grandparents his fathers family was of German descent and at the age of 23, he enrolled at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio to study architecture, graduating in 1934. Early

on during his studies, he found unpaid work in the office of the architect and town planner Lucio Costa, one of the few modernists practising in Brazil at that time.

Coincidentally, Costa had been among the group of Brazilian architects who had invited the celebrated Swiss modernist Le Corbusier to Rio in 1929 and then again in 1936. By the time of the second visit, Costa had promoted Niemeyer to the team formed to design a new ministry of education building. As a result, Niemeyer spent much time with Le Corbusier and was permanently influenced by his vision of a new architecture.Niemeyer swiftly learned to design according to Le Corbusiers five principles: fullwidth strip windows; rigid sun shading; roof gardens; pilotis (columns raising a building above the ground); and, most important of all,

free-forming plans within a grid of columns.

Working for nothing and reliant on his family, Niemeyer transformed the Corbusier scheme into the serene, high-rise building that adorns Rio today. A national monument, it has since been renamed Capanema Palace. . In 1944 he was the star of a New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition and book entitled Brazil Builds , and was subsequently invited to contribute to the design of the United Nations building in New York.

The scale and invention of Niemeyers work expanded with the growth of the Brazilian economy, and when in 1955 Kubitschek rode to power as president on a wave of trade union and Communist party votes, Niemeyer found himself on the brink of the greatest commissions of his life. The event was the realisation of a dream

enshrined in the 1891 constitution, to transfer the capital from Rio to a location on the central plateau some 600 miles to the north-west and 3,000ft above sea level. The new capital would be called Brasilia, and Kubitschek decreed that it would have a population of 5,00,000 and would be built in four years, before his term of office expired.

In 1956 Costa won the competition for a masterplan of the new capital, and Niemeyer was commissioned to design all the principal public buildings. Within two years, the city was employing a workforce of 40,000, and an epic series of modern public buildings designed by Niemeyer was under construction. These included the Square of the Three Powers, the National Congress building (with the twin towers of the secretariat, the dome of the senate and the bowl of the lower house), the diaphanous

lakeside residence of the president (better known as the Alvorada Palace), the high court, the national theatre and the endless rectangle of the Brasilia Palace hotel.

In his memoirs, The Curves of Time , published in 2000, Niemeyer declared: I am not attracted to straight angles or to the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. I am attracted to free-flowing sensual curves. The curves that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman. Curves make up the entire universe, the curved universe of Einstein. In an interview with Architectural Record , he said, My work is not about form follows function, but form follows beauty or, even better, form follows feminine. Niemeyer made modern architecture sensual and alluring, even in the great

red desert-like plains of Brasilia, far from ocean and mountains.

In 1987 Brasilia was made a Unesco World Heritage Site. In 1988 Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker prize. The Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, the most prestigious British award, followed 10 years later. In 2003 he designed his first British building, the Serpentine Gallerys summer pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London.

Niemeyer had joined the Communist party in 1945 and, unwavering in his support, was its president from 1992 to 1996. He was awarded the Lenin peace prize in 1963. His close friends included Fidel Castro who, in later years, joked, Niemeyer and I are the last communists of this planet. While his political allegiances led to the ransacking of his office in 1965, following the coup detat the year before that brought the military to

power under General Castelo Branco, Niemeyer remained a well known and popular figure among ordinary Brazilians, to whom he was always Oscar, and evidently adored, although younger generations of Brazilian architects have inevitably felt hidden in his shadow.

His first wife, Annita, whom he married in 1928, died in 2004. Their daughter, Anna Maria, died in 2012. He is survived by his second wife, Vera Lucia Cabriera, his former assistant, whom he married in 2006. Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2012

The architect of Brazils capital made modern architecture sensual and alluring December 7, 2012

Remembering to forget

In Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais powerful testament to Nazi brutality, the camera pans over the chilling remnants of concentration camps rows of curved concrete pillars with barbed wire, empty gas chambers and hospitals, and the barbaric shower rooms where Jews were gassed to death. There is no such detritus of the violence in Mumbai in 1992-93. While there is a clamour for a statue to the late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, indicted by the Srikrishna Commission for his role in the riots after the Babri Masjid demolition on December 6, 1992, there are no memorials to the over 900 people who were killed and many more who went missing. While justice for survivors has been delayed and denied, some are still fighting for close to 20 years with a system that is unyielding. The riots divided the city, hardening stereotypes, creating more ghettos and putting a question mark

forever on Mumbais cosmopolitan veneer.

Nearly 20 years after her son was killed, Akhtari Tahir Hasan Wagle gave an account of his death to a senior police officer, the third to investigate the case of her son. She told him the same things that she had repeated a hundred times to journalists and others who cared to listen. My husband was not at home that day. It was January 10, 1993, around 11 a.m. We heard the police entering the narrow lane to the chawl and closed all our doors and windows. They were going into houses and dragging all the men out but they kicked the doors open and I saw my son Shahnawaz being taken away.

A peons plight

The police ignored her pleas that Shahnawaz, 16, was a student and took him down two floors. My daughter Yasmin was standing at the window when she suddenly shouted and said Shanu is dead, theyve shot him. We both ran down and asked the police what had happened. I asked for my son. Give him back to me, I said. Instead they put him in a van and threatened to beat us if we didnt stay back, laments Ms Wagle.

That justice for riot survivors has been too little, and often non-existent is exemplified in the case of Farooq Mapkar, whose case against the police officers who fired inside Hari Masjid is still dragging on with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) submitting a closure report in December 2011. The next date for the hearing is December 20. Dont ask me how much time and money I have spent for the last 20 years on my

case, says Mapkar, 45, a peon in a cooperative bank. He fought long and hard with a reluctant State government which even went to the Supreme Court to scotch a CBI investigation in the Hari Masjid firing case where police randomly fired inside the prayer hall on January 10, 1993 killing six in all. Mapkar, who was shot in the back, was in jail for 15 days before getting bail and having the bullet removed. After the Bombay High Court ordered a CBI inquiry in 2008, a First Information Report was registered against then sub-inspector Nikhil Kapse and others who were alleged to have fired in Hari Masjid.

Chasing compensation

While the State set up a designated court under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court to try the cases of the serial blasts of March 12, 1993

which resulted in 100 convictions in 2007 the riot victims had nowhere to seek justice. Instead the police closed 1,371 of the 2,267 cases. Of the 1,371, 112 cases were reinvestigated. In eight cases, fresh charge sheets were filed, according to the Maharashtra governments affidavit to the Supreme Court in January 2008. Of the 31 policemen indicted by the Srikrishna Commission, 10 were punished after departmental inquiries, 11 were found not guilty and one died. Cases on the implementation of the commissions report are still pending in the Supreme Court.

Victims have had to face the trauma of chasing compensation for missing persons or for a paltry Rs.5,000 for their destroyed homes or workplaces. Women like Hazra Bi cannot hope to get justice for the brutal murder of her husband and son and Mukim

Sheikh, whose father was killed in the riots, did not even bother to testify before the Srikrishna Commission. Mumbais fabric of togetherness was ripped apart like never before in the post-Babri Masjid demolition violence. New ghettoes sprung up inside and even outside the city, like Mumbra and parts of Mira Road in Thane which ironically were dubbed terror hotbeds by the police.

Only one Shiv Sena politician, the late Madhukar Sarpotdar, was convicted for hate speech in July 2008 and handed out a years simple imprisonment. Of the eight cases filed in 1993 against Bal Thackeray for his articles in Saamna , four were withdrawn from the Dadar court. Of the remaining in two cases, charge sheets were filed after the stipulated time period and two were closed for lack of evidence, according to information using the Right to

Information (RTI) Act. Of the nearly 20 cases in all against Thackeray for hate speech and other sections of the Indian Penal Code, most are closed or the government has not given permission for his arrest.

Mumbai chugs along. No one will notice Rashida Kotawala as she sits at her street side stall repairing bags in Vile Parle. Or Sudarshan Bane who ekes out a living as a driver and does odd jobs. Banes parents were burnt to death in Gandhi Chawl in Jogeshwari, and his sister Naina escaped with severe burns. The Gandhi chawl incident was used by the Shiv Sena to wreak revenge for Hindu deaths, sparking off the bloody second phase of the Mumbai riots in January 1993. The Bane family, the face of the riots then, is struggling to survive now. While Mumbai mourns Bal Thackeray, there is a veil over the violence he was accused of

perpetrating after the Babri Masjid demolition.

meena.menon@thehindu.co.in

While Mumbai mourns Bal Thackeray, there is a veil over the violence he was accused of perpetrating after the Babri Masjid demolition, with justice eluding many of its victims December 7, 2012

Dealing with Pakistans brinkmanship


During the past decade, there have been notable shifts in Pakistans nuclear doctrine, away from minimum deterrence to second strike capability and towards expanding its nuclear weapons arsenal to include both strategic and tactical weapons.

Islamabad has described these developments as consolidating Pakistans deterrence capability at all levels of the threat spectrum. These shifts are apparent from the following developments:

(1) There is a deliberate shift from the earlier generation of enriched uranium nuclear weapons to a newer generation of plutonium weapons.

(2) This shift has enabled Pakistan to significantly increase the number of weapons, which now appears to have overtaken Indias nuclear weapon inventory and, in a decade, may well surpass those held by Britain and France.

(3) Progress has been made in the miniaturisation of weapons, enabling their use with cruise missiles, both air and surface-based (Raad or Hatf VIII

and Babur or Hatf-VII respectively) as also with a new generation of short range and tactical missiles (Abdali or Hatf II with a range of 180 km and Nasr or Hatf-IX with a range of 60 km).

(4) Pakistan has steadily improved the range and accuracy of its delivery vehicles, building upon the earlier Chinese models (the Hatf series) and the later North Korean models (the No-dong series). The newer missiles, including the Nasr, are solid-fuelled, which are quicker to launch than the older liquid-fuelled versions.

Not under safeguards

This rapid development of its nuclear weapon arsenal has been enabled by the setting up of two plutonium production reactors at Khusab with a third and fourth under construction. These have been built with Chinese

assistance and are not under safeguards. The spent fuel from these reactors is reprocessed at the Rawalpindi New Labs facility, where there are reportedly two plants each with a capacity to reprocess 10 to 20 tonnes annually.

Olli Heinonen, a former Director of Safeguards at the IAEA has observed: Commissioning of additional plutonium production reactors and further construction of reprocessing capabilities signify that Pakistan may even be developing second-strike capabilities.

These developments are driven by a mix of old and new set of threat perceptions and, equally, political ambitions. The so-called existential threat from India continues to be cited as the main driver of Pakistans nuclear compulsions. The rapid increase in the number of weapons is

justified by pointing to India having a larger stock of fissile material available for a much more numerous weapons inventory, thanks to the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear agreement. Tactical nuclear weapons are said to be a response to Indias so-called Cold Start doctrine or its suspected intention to launch quick response punitive thrusts across the border in case of another major cross-border terrorist strike.

Pakistans strategic objective has been expanded to the acquisition of a fullspectrum capability comprising a land, air and sea-based triad of nuclear forces, to put it on a par with India.

However, the focus on India has tended to obscure an important change in Pakistans threat perception which has significant implications. The Pakistani military and civilian elite is

convinced that the United States has also become a dangerous adversary, which seeks to disable, disarm or take forcible possession of Pakistans nuclear weapons.

This threat perception may be traced to the aftermath of 9/11, when Pakistan, for the first time in its history, faced the real prospect of a military assault on its territory by U.S. forces and the loss of its strategic assets. In his address to the nation on September 15, 2001, President Pervez Musharraf justified his acquiescence to the U.S. ultimatum to abandon the Taliban and support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, on account of four over-riding and critical concerns our sovereignty, second our economy, third our strategic assets and fourth our Kashmir cause. Pakistan once again became a frontline state, this time in the U.S. war on terrorism in Afghanistan in contrast to

the U.S.-led war against the Soviet forces in that country in the 1980s. But this time round, Pakistan became an ally by compulsion rather than by choice.

While the immediate threat to its strategic assets passed, Pakistans suspicions of U.S. intentions in this regard did not diminish and have now risen to the level of paranoia. The American drone attacks against targets within Pakistani territory and, in particular, the brazenness with which the Abbotabad raid was carried out by U.S. Navy Seals in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden, have only heightened Pakistans concerns over U.S. intentions. These have overtaken fears of India, precisely because the U.S. has demonstrated both its capability and willingness to undertake such operations. India has not.

Recent shifts

Thus the recent shifts in Pakistans nuclear strategy cannot be ascribed solely to the traditional construct of India-Pakistan hostility. They appear driven mainly by the fear of U.S. assault on its strategic assets. The more numerous and compact the weapons, the wider their dispersal and the greater their sophistication, the more deterred the U.S. would be from undertaking any operations to disable them or to take them into its custody. The U.S. finds it as difficult to acknowledge this reality as it has, until recently, Pakistans complicity in terrorism directed against its forces in Afghanistan. This permits putting the onus on India to reassure Pakistan through concessions rather than admitting that the problem lies elsewhere. There is also a strong nonproliferation lobby in the U.S. which believes it could leverage the threat of

an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange to reverse some of the concessions made to India in the civil nuclear deal. More recently, it is being argued that since the U.S. is finding it difficult to get its promised share of the civil nuclear business in India due to concerns over the countrys Nuclear Liability legislation, a major rationale behind the agreement no longer exists. And meanwhile, it is further claimed, the civil nuclear agreement has only heightened the danger of India-Pakistan nuclear war by feeding into Pakistani fears of Indias enhanced nuclear capabilities.

In this context, I wish to recall an exchange over dinner hosted by President George Bush for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November 2008 in Washington. The then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice remarked that after the heavy lifting the U.S. had done to get the

nuclear deal through, she hoped India would ensure that U.S. companies got a share of the orders for new reactors. Before our Prime Minister could reply, Mr. Bush stated categorically that he was not bothered if India did not buy even a single reactor from the U.S., since he regarded the agreement as confirming India as a long-term strategic partner rather than a mere customer for U.S. reactors.

Pakistan encourages the arguments of the U.S. non-proliferation lobby since this keeps the pressure on India and enables the camouflage of Pakistans real motivations. It would not wish to project, as an adversary, a much more powerful U.S., and lose out on the economic and military support it receives, however transactional these deals may have become.

The implications

What are the implications of these recent developments?

One, it is not through strategic restraint or security assurances by India that Pakistan would be persuaded to change its behaviour and revise its strategy. India and Pakistan have some nuclear CBMs in place and India would be prepared to go further. The main levers for such persuasion lie in Washington and in Beijing, not in New Delhi.

Two, whatever sophistry Pakistan may indulge in to justify its augmented arsenal and threatened recourse to tactical nuclear weapons, for India, the label on the weapon, tactical or strategic, is irrelevant since the use of either would constitute a nuclear attack against India. In terms of Indias stated nuclear doctrine, this would

invite a massive retaliatory strike. For Pakistan to think that a counter-force nuclear strike against military targets would enable it to escape a countervalue strike against its cities and population centres, is a dangerous illusion. The U.S. could acquaint Pakistan with NATOs own Cold War experience when tactical nuclear weapons were abandoned once it was realised that use of such weapons in any conflict would swiftly and inexorably escalate to the strategic level. Instead of urging India to respond to Pakistani nuclear escalation through offering mutual restraint, the U.S. should convince Islamabad that a limited nuclear war is a contradiction in terms and that it should abandon such reckless brinkmanship. The U.S. knows that Indias nuclear deterrence is not Pakistan-specific. Any misguided attempt to constrain Indian capabilities would undermine, for both, the value of Indo-U.S. strategic

partnership in an increasingly uncertain and challenging regional and global security environment.

Three, Pakistan is no longer Indias problem. Its toxic mix of jihadi terrorism and nuclear brinkmanship poses a threat to the region and to the world. Even China, whose culpability in continuing to assist Pakistan in developing its nuclear and delivery capabilities is well documented, is not exempt. It needs to reassess its own policies. An apparently low-cost and proxy effort to contain India may well become Chinas nightmare, too, in the days to come.

(Shyam Saran is a former Foreign Secretary. He is currently Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), and Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

Islamabads capability

expanding

nuclear

is no longer driven solely by its oftcited fears of India but by the paranoia about

U.S. attacks on its strategic assets December 8, 2012

Americas original ambassador of cool


Few musicians have embodied the interrogative, internationalist spirit of jazz as perfectly as Dave Brubeck, the composer and pianist who died on December 5 at the age of 91. During the course of his seven-decade career, jazz evolved from being popular dance

music into an esoteric art form. Brubeck was among the key figures driving that transformation. He expanded the vocabulary of jazz, a melting-pot music from the meltingpot nation of the United States, by seeking out and folding in musical ideas from a vast array of cultures.

Even as he steered jazz in new directions, he persuaded his listeners to take the journey along with him. That was clear from his Time Out album, recorded in 1959. Many of the tunes it featured Take Five, Blue Rondo la Turk, and Three To Get Ready employ unusual time signatures that challenged expectations. But Brubeck wrapped these unconventional devices in rhythmic and melodic structures that were so compelling, audiences were enchanted. Time Out became the first jazz album to sell more than a million copies.

Ironically, Brubecks initial explorations of cultures beyond the borders of the U.S. were made possible by the heightened suspicions of the Cold War. In 1956, the U.S. Congress sanctioned funds for an initiative called the Presidents Special International Program. It was designed to send U.S. artists around the world to demonstrate the vibrancy of American culture. Jazz quickly became the programmes centrepiece. Jazz, after all, was the only home-grown art form the U.S. could boast of.

In 1958, the U.S. State Department dispatched the Dave Brubeck Quartet which included the saxophone player Paul Desmond, the drummer Joe Morello and the bassist Eugene Wright on its first international tour. It would take the musicians through 14 countries, including

Poland, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq and leave an indelible imprint on the groups music. Our contact with music from other countries influenced the output of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, including our experiments in odd time signatures, Brubeck recalled in an interview on the eve of his 90th birthday.

The tale of Edward Saldanha

Later that year, Brubeck distilled the sounds hed heard on the road into an album called Jazz Impressions of Eurasia . The titles of the tracks reflected some of the destinations hed visited: Brandenburg Gate, Calcutta Blues and Marble Arch. The tunes, he wrote in the liner notes, werent intended to merge foreign musical traditions with jazz. Instead, as the title indicates, I tried to create an impression of a particular locale by using some of the elements of their

folk music within the jazz idiom, he explained.

India, its clear, influenced Brubeck quite profoundly. The quartet was in India from March 31 to April 13, 1958. They kicked off their tour in Rajkot and went on to perform in Delhi, Mumbai (Bombay), Hyderabad, Chennai (Madras) and Kolkata (Calcutta). In several places, they had jam sessions with local musicians. In Chennai, for instance, the group went to the studios of AIR and broadcast their musical interactions with the mridangam maestro Palani Subramania Pillai. One night in Mumbai, they had a long discussion with prominent Hindustani classical musicians, including sitar player Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan. Then they picked up their instruments to put their new knowledge to work. We all felt that given a few more days, we would either be playing Indian music or they

would be playing jazz, Brubeck wrote later.

India, in turn, was vastly charmed by the four musicians. The men strolled through the streets, chatting with fans and sitting in with local musicians. Stories about their exploits still do the rounds. One tale that is still recounted involves the evening Brubeck walked into Mumbais Ambassador Hotel and heard Bangalore pianist, Edward Dizzy Sal Saldanha, playing his heart out. Brubeck was so impressed, he wangled a scholarship for Saldanha at the famed Berklee College of Music in Boston. Brubeck paid his own money to send the Indian to a rigorous jazz summer school before his Berklee term began.

Sensitive to discrimination

Brubecks empathy for other cultures was rooted in a deep appreciation of his own countrys rich ethos and his pain at its shortcomings. He was especially sensitive to racial discrimination and refused to play at segregated venues (to significant financial disadvantage). Four years after his India visit, he elegantly exposed the hypocrisy of the State Department jazz tours which put African-American musicians in the spotlight as an example of U.S. democracy in action, even though blacks still werent allowed to vote in the U.S. south. In 1962, Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola got together with Louis Armstrong and other jazz stars to produce a jazz opera pointing out these paradoxes. Their witty, stinging indictment of the Cold War jazz project was called The Real Ambassadors . With Brubecks passing, jazz has lost one its most persuasive emissaries.

(Naresh Fernandes is the winner of the 2012 Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombays Jazz Age. Visit: www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com )

Jazz legend Dave Brubecks empathy for other cultures was rooted in a deep appreciation of his own countrys rich ethos and his pain at its shortcomings December 8, 2012

History without sentimentalism


Mark Mazower is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York. Widely recognised as one of the finest historians of his generation, Professor Mazower studied at Oxford and Johns Hopkins, completing his D. Phil in Oxford in 1988. He has taught at

Princeton, Sussex, and London University. His chief works include No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009) ; Hitlers Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008) ; Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 14301950 (2004) ; Dark Continent: Europes Twentieth Century (1998) ; and Inside Hitlers Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (1993) , several of which have won major prizes. His most recent book is Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012). He is a specialist of Greece, the Balkans, and more generally of the history of Europe in the twentieth century. Prof. Mazower will deliver the Sixth [Indian Economic and Social History Review] IESHR Annual Lecture in New Delhi on December 11, 2012. Here, he responds to questions from Sanjay Subrahmanyam , Professor of History at UCLA. Excerpts:

Even though you have ranged far and wide over the years, Greece and the Balkans are at the heart of a lot of what you have written. How does a Londoner like you come to have such a strong affinity with that part of the world?

I have to confess that I dont really know. I think that it was at first because it felt very different from London, and then turned out a bit like London to have a history that spoke to me. I travelled south in Europe first in my gap year I took a train through Italy, then over to Greece and Yugoslavia, and the Mediterranean landscape made an immediate impression on me. It touches me still: I find it stunningly beautiful every time I am there. I then went more to Greece because I studied classics and made some good friends there, and then started

learning modern Greek in Thessaloniki one summer, mainly because the alternative, which I really wanted to do then, namely to learn Romanian in Cluj, was overbooked. (Ive still to get round to Romanian.) I think the differences from England were really what attracted me; England and the Mediterranean as complements .

So who were some of the historians who influenced you early on? Or were there other intellectuals from the neighbouring disciplines literature, sociology, anthropology who were equally important as influences, either as teachers, or as friends and conversation partners, or just as authors?

I didnt really get round to studying history until I had to teach it. It wasnt my undergraduate degree, nor my masters (International Affairs). In that sense, the way I approach things was

probably shaped initially by nonhistorians my anthropologist supervisor at Oxford, John Campbell, also one of my English masters at school who taught me to read poems and novels closely, some of my undergraduate tutors in philosophy and ancient Greek, and may be above all a very rich training in music for many years as a child I played the French horn, and learned to conduct and to compose. My first teaching job was at Princeton, which was to land among the gods my colleagues, though I did not dare regard them that way, included Arno Mayer, Natalie Zemon Davis, Anthony Grafton, and James MacPherson. Carl Schorske was nearby and befriended me, and conversations with him taught me much; Felix Gilbert was still in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study. And probably even more important were the people I started out with, especially Stephen Kotkin and Gyan Prakash, who still

teach there, and Peter Mandler, now at Cambridge. Princeton was my great education in history. Later there was Sussex with people such as Rod Kedward, a masterly historian and a great tradition of its own. And later still, Birkbeck College in London.

With your book Dark Continent: Europes 20th Century (1998), you emerged as someone who could comfortably straddle the worlds of specialised research and popular history. You have continued to do this in your work since then. Do you ever find a tension between the rigours of research and reaching out to a wider, more popular, audience? Is there a need to compromise in some way?

The main tension is obviously between readability and argument. Stories carry a reader along when told well. Can one construct an argument to do the same thing? That is the real

challenge. One among many reasons for admiring Eric Hobsbawm is that unlike many historians he was never willing to sacrifice the analysis for the narrative, and took a dim view of those who did. I guess I do too. So one looks for micro-stories that illustrate the bigger points, and ways of making abstractions come alive. Ive never knowingly tried to shortcut the argument just to keep the reader with me. And introductions and conclusions become very important as ways of bringing people in, and getting the message across, and novels can provide models there: Georges Perec, for instance, was hugely helpful to me in thinking through the opening of Hitlers Empire . Perhaps because Ive had a small training in economics, Ive never been shy of numbers but it is often hard to make statistics gripping.

How do you see your intellectual relationship with an earlier generation of British Marxist scholarship, such as Eric Hobsbawm whom youve already mentioned or E.P. Thompson? Are these natural points of reference for you? Do you see your own work as belonging to any sort of school, or are all those things in the past?

I was not especially political as a student, and certainly never felt the temptation of either Communism or Marxism. Probably that was due to my own family background: Ashkenazi Jewish from Russia and Poland, with relatives still living in the then USSR. My fathers father had been active in the Bund. So if you were to look for a category it might be post-Bundist, but more by way of general outlook than anything specific: about the Bund itself, I had for many years only the sketchiest of ideas. I knew Eric

Hobsbawm, through Birkbeck College and the journal Past and Present , and as a result of his and Marlenes tremendous hospitality, and learned a lot from him and from his books his range, and willingness to try new things, his refusal of dogmatism, his way of talking about economics so that it mattered. Also, very important, a lack of sentimentalism. There was, incidentally, no Hobsbawm school: I think schools only emerge where someone wants disciples and that was not Erics way and something else one admired in him. More generally, I feel a great indebtedness to his generation Schorske, Francis Carsten and Claudio Pavone have also meant much to me, and Fritz Stern too as I have come to know him at Columbia and find much to admire in them, things they have in common, and of course great differences as well. It was a generation that at its best combined great breadth of vision with personal modesty, or at least reticence.

Obviously books like No Enchanted Palace (2009) on the United Nations and most recently Governing the World (2012) have taken you out of Europe to an extent. Have you engaged much over the years with the historiography on and from South Asia? Are there any particular influences that you could name?

I started off being educated in South Asian history by my friend Gyan Prakash, discovering Subaltern Studies and enjoying the way Gramsci and E.P. Thompson were combined with Marx and deployed in the cause of an antior postcolonial social history. I did not really realise that for a long time one was supposed to choose between the Subalterns and anything coming out of Cambridge in the U.K., because I found Eric Stokes, Chris Bayly and plenty of others to be fascinating and instructive as well. And I also found

some odd gaps. Why was so little written about the Partition itself? Why the neglect of diplomatic history? Later I came to appreciate the reasons for this and to see too that these things were changing, as they are now. In my recent reading on the history of the U.N., Nehru and early independent foreign policy more generally, struck me as completely fascinating. The literature remains strongly idolatrous, it is true, where Nehru is concerned. Much remains to be explained. How and why Nehru turned to the U.N. to elevate India as a new Great Power strikes me as a fascinating and important question for anyone interested in Indias current emergence as a major international player.

(For the complete interview, please visit www.thehindu.com )

How and why Nehru turned to the U.N. to elevate India as a new Great Power strikes me as a fascinating and important question . December 8, 2012

Reading the future in Mexicos malls


The driver of the taxi that took me from the airport to the hotel in Mexico city was a computer systems analyst. He was a cheerful English speaking man who talked about himself and his familys woes in the hour it took to cover the 30 km. He wanted to know about the global economic crisis so that he could figure out why things were bad in Mexico for people like him. He complained about unemployment and his inability to get the right job without connections a fate his children also face. He blamed the U.S. and its policies and corruption in society. This was a

recurrent theme during my week-long stay in Mexico recently.

Big malls

The taxi passed through many commercial and residential areas but I saw no small shops. There were big malls, automobile dealers, petrol stations, restaurants, pharmacy stores and car repair shops. I wondered if the small stores were in the residential colonies. A friend who had been posted in the Indian Embassy in the mid-1980s had mentioned that there were fruit stores everywhere and one could make a meal of fruits in the evening but such shops were nowhere to be seen. I wondered if this was the future that awaited the Indian metropolises.

The absence of small stores was perplexing but more intriguing was

the serious unemployment, given that Mexico has been a part of NAFTA since 1994 and which brought in much foreign investment. Many factories have relocated from the U.S. to Northern Mexico to supply the U.S. and Canadian markets and so on. The city was bustling with cars. It is prosperous compared to India with a per capita income 10 times ours. There are layers of flyovers one on top of the other but there are traffic jams. During day time, it takes two to three hours to cover a distance that takes 25 minutes early in the morning. The public transport system consists of rail, buses and trams but people are stuck in traffic for a good part of their day. The city has to spread horizontally since it is built on landfill and there is a lot of water below the surface, and multi-storeyed buildings require expensive deep foundations. So, most buildings are one or two stories high, forcing the city of 25 million to spread out.

Old timers remember that Mexico city had small stores until the mid-1980s. Only the organised sector stores survive now, like the Sanborn chain belonging to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world. Sanborn has a unique model of a restaurant on the first floor and a gift shop, pharmacy and other such conveniences on the ground floor. The young I talked to did not remember seeing corner stores in residential colonies.

From my hotel window, perched eight floors up, I could see malls but no small stores. Sears, Walmart, McDonalds they were there like anywhere in the U.S. In residential colonies, I did see a few small stores but most of them were American Seven Elevens. And there are pavement stalls and markets where the poor purchase their necessities. It was ironical to see workers in ties

from malls cross the street to eat at pavement stalls perhaps they could not afford to eat in the mall.

On a visit to the charming town centre, it was refreshing to see streets lined with small stores. My escort told me that many people came here to shop because it was cheaper. I went outside Mexico City to Teotihuacan to see the Pyramids. The huge pyramid of the Sun god is apparently a few times larger than the biggest Egyptian pyramids. It was part of an ancient city 2,000 years ago, which was over three miles long and had more than 1.5 lakh people. All this was aweinspiring but it was tiring because it involved hours of walking and climbing up and down. At the end of it, we went to the neighbouring town to eat. At its entrance was a beautiful arch which said Teotihuacan Pueblo con Encanto. The streets were lined with small stores.

Village republic

The next day, I visited the village Tlalnepantla in Morelos. I counted dozens of small shops for a population of a few thousand. This is a revolutionary village. Alvaro, our host, is an economics graduate who settled down here 40 years ago. He cultivates Nopal, or cactus, with the rest of the villagers. His small garden has trees bearing guava, avacados, lime and lukat. He has successfully experimented with creating a village republic. It was amazing to see the hilly village surrounded by 4,000 hectares of Nopal cultivation. Even more breathtaking was the clear view of the distant volcano from which a plume of smoke emanated.

The village had rejected the corrupt political parties. Villagers selected

their own leader and did not recognise the president of the municipality, a party man. The government sent in troops declaring Alvaro and others terrorists and they had to go underground. There were protests all over Mexico, especially in the universities. The government was forced to drop the charges and come to an agreement. The land here belongs to the community and cannot be sold to outsiders. Hearing that an Indian professor was visiting the village, its leaders came with lunch and cactus products cooked as vegetable, turned into pickle and marmalade, very delicious. Alvero asked me about Gandhiji, his philosophy of non-violence and how it could be applied to a modern society. Gandhiji seems to have a special place in Mexico. A chain of book stores is called Gandhi. There are parks and roads named after Gandhiji.

The farmers are upset with the U.S. and NAFTA. They complained that the free market had enabled subsidised food to come from the U.S. and destroyed their agriculture which now contributes only four per cent of GDP. Thus, the two big employers, agriculture and retail trade, have suffered in the last two decades, which is why unemployment is high (5.2 per cent), and underemployment is at 25 per cent. I met a professor who said his son got a job only because of his connections and another said his son doing a Ph.D. was worried about the future. Why is this happening with so much foreign investment? Unemployment has driven down wages. An Assistant Professor at the university complained that he could barely make ends meet with his salary, which is determined by the number of lectures he gives in a month. He thought the taxi-driver was better off than him.

Mafia rule

In Northern Mexico where investments from the U.S. have poured in, the mafia has taken over and there is lawlessness. The state there seems to be withering away. Unemployed youth join the mafia. There is drug trafficking and illegal migration of youth into the U.S. It is this migration that has kept unemployment from getting worse. The migrants send money back home. Remittances along with income from petroleum exports and tourism keep the Mexican economy afloat and prevent the crisis from deepening.

Instead of solving Mexicos problems, its proximity to the U.S., free trade with it and investments from there have led to deepening unemployment, the decline of traditional agriculture and the end of small retailers in metro cities. I

wondered whether what I was seeing in Mexico was India fast forwarded 20 years, when there will be lots of cars and traffic jams in the metros, lots of malls too, but few small retail shops, high unemployment and a crisis in agriculture. Small stores are likely to survive only in small towns and villages.

Our crisis is likely to be worse than Mexicos since we do not border the largest economy in the world where our youth could illegally migrate. Nor are we likely to get investment in per capita terms matching Mexico. We do not have petroleum or tourism income to prop us either. So, does Mexico mirror a part of our future, if we continue with our current policies?

(Arun Kumar is Chairperson and Sukhamoy Chakravarty Chair Professor, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University.)

arunkumar1000@hotmail.com

India may soon go the way of the North American country where small stores have vanished from the city, agriculture has declined and unemployment is huge December 10, 2012

A chance to clean the Olympian stables


Every Indian has the right to feel outraged at the latest decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which denies one-seventh of humanity the right to participate in the Olympic movement. Can the IOC justify penalising the nation and its

athletes for no fault of theirs? Certainly not.

The present action of the IOC has to be viewed in the context of previous suspensions of National Olympic Committees (NOC). Iraq was suspended in 2008 for dismissing the NOC and installing a new one headed by their own Sports Minister; Kuwait, in 2010, because its sports law was seen to heavily interfere with the functioning of the NOC; Ghana, in 2011, because the heads of National Sports Federations (NSF) were nominated by the government, which was against the Olympic Charter. In all these cases, therefore, the principal cause of action was government interference threatening the autonomy of sport guaranteed by the Olympic Charter.

The four issues

But in the case of India, the position appears to be quite the opposite because the National Sports Code only seeks transparency and accountability from the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and the NSFs in promoting the Olympic movement in the country. We need to examine four issues surrounding the IOA suspension episode to gain clarity. First, the refusal of the IOA to comply with the IOCs directive to conduct elections as per their constitution and to keep tainted officials out of the fray; second, the governments insistence on the IOA following the basic universal principles of good governance; third, the directive of the Honble High Court of Delhi giving overriding effect to the National Sports Code in the event of conflict between the code and the IOAs constitution; and fourth, the IOAs decision to go ahead with its sham

elections in defiance of the IOC directive.

On the first issue, the IOC knowing full well that the IOAs constitution was not compliant with the Olympic Charter, did little to correct it when the IOA accommodated non-Olympic sport bodies and State Olympic associations with voting rights, which was against the Olympic Charter. As regards the need to keep tainted officials out of the election fray, the National Sports Code too prescribes the same, which reinforces the fact that it only complements the Olympic Charter.

On the issue of the National Sports Code, it makes the adoption of basic universal principles of good governance of the Olympic and sport movements mandatory for the IOA and all NSFs, be it transparent elections, tenure limit, keeping

corrupt officials out, or representation of athletes in the management of sport. Further, these principles are based on the Olympic Charter. Therefore, the stand of the IOC on this matter is self-contradictory. While on the one hand it underlines the need to maintain the highest standards of ethics in sport, on the other, it makes good governance optional, leaving it to the total discretion of the NOC. The result is for all of us to see the pathetic state of sports in the country. It is sad that the IOCs stance has indirectly encouraged the IOA not to adopt good governance principles on the false pretext of autonomy and the cost of it has to be borne by innocent athletes. The question is: why cant India also adopt the United States system where the U.S. Olympic Committee is bound by law to adopt good governance principles and cannot amend its constitution without public hearing?

On the third issue of the court directive, the Olympic Charter categorically states that all constituents of the Olympic movement must respect applicable laws while trying to influence the lawmakers to protect Olympism wherever national and supranational laws and regulations are found to be inconsistent with the Olympic Charter. But that situation does not arise, as the National Sports Code is based on the Olympic principles. After all, the IOC does not object to the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, which grants monopoly status to the U.S. Olympic Committee subject to good governance requirements for it and its member national governing bodies for individual sports. The IOC should apply the same principle to India and consider setting up an interim IOA committee.

Chinese precedent

Finally, the IOAs sham elections sans IOCs recognition make it invalid and also liable to lose government recognition because for that, the recognition of the IOC is a necessary prerequisite. In this entire episode, the Indian athlete has suffered the most and the national pride has taken a hit for the excesses committed by the IOA and indifferent attitude shown the IOC, which is unwilling to engage with the government. That the Indian athletes may still be allowed to participate in the Olympics as independent athletes under the IOC flag is hardly any consolation. Besides the IOC must clarify as to who has given it the right to deprive the Indian athlete of his nationality and national pride. Surely not the Olympic Charter!

But in the end, every Indian should derive solace in what has happened because what the IOC has dished out

is bitter sweet bitter because it is outrageous to penalise the nation and its athletes for the IOAs fault, and sweet because it gives us an unprecedented opportunity to cleanse Indian sports by bidding farewell to the spoilt sport czars of the IOA. Let athletes and committed sports administrators rise to the occasion and carry the Olympic torch forward. If necessary, let India follow the Chinese precedent of voluntarily withdrawing from the Olympics only to come back stronger (China voluntarily withdrew from the Summer Olympics in 1952 when it had a dispute with the IOC regarding the recognition granted to Taiwan as Republic of China, and returned in 1984 and stood fourth in the medal standings).

(Injeti Srinivas is a civil servant formerly Joint Secretary in the

Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs. His views are personal.)

The International Olympic Committees move to suspend India is an unprecedented opportunity to set right the countrys sports establishment December 10, 2012

For a moratorium on death sentence


The Supreme Courts five-judge Constitution Bench judgment in Bachan Singh (1980) is the source of contemporary death penalty jurisprudence in India. Its major contribution was to limit the imposition of death penalty to the rarest of rare crimes, and for laying down the principle that the courts must impose the death sentence on a

convict only if the alternative sentence of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed. For achieving these twin objectives, the court held that judges must consider the aggravating features of the crime, as well as the mitigating factors of the criminal.

However, the application of its principles by the courts to various cases before them has been very uneven, and inconsistent. This has naturally led to the criticism that the jurisprudence suffers from a judgecentric approach, rather than a principles-centric approach.

Matter of concern

It is a matter of concern when this criticism emanates from the judiciary itself, as it smacks of its helplessness. The frequency of such criticism from

the judiciary may appear to be exercises in genuine introspection but to the litigants, the very credibility of the courts death penalty decisions is at stake.

The execution of death row prisoners in India might have come to a near standstill, with only one in the last decade, and another recently. Yet, the frequency of confirmation of death sentences by the Supreme Court has created a large pool of death row prisoners in the country, who may be living between life and death constantly for many years, till the executive decides on their mercy petitions. When the Supreme Court time and again admits that many of these prisoners might have been sentenced on the basis of erroneous legal precedents set by itself, the executive cannot pretend to be unconcerned.

The latest admission of such error is to be found in the judgment delivered by Justice Madan B. Lokur for himself and on behalf of Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan, in Sangeet & ANR vs. State of Haryana , on November 20.

The genesis of Sangeet can be traced to another Supreme Court judgment delivered in 2009. In Santosh Kumar Satishbhushan Bariyar v. State of Maharashtra , a two-judge Bench admitted to error in the sentencing to death of seven convicts by the previous benches of the court. Similar error was immediately noticed in the sentencing to death of six more convicts, after the delivery of judgment in Bariyar , taking their total to 13.

The error was the reliance by the court on a legal precedent, which Bariyar declared as per incuriam . The term, per incuriam , refers to a

decision which a subsequent court finds to be a mistake, occurring through ignorance of a relevant authority, and therefore not a binding precedent.

Erroneous precedent

The erroneous legal precedent was Ravji v. State of Rajasthan , decided in 1996 by a two-judge Bench. In Ravji , the court had found only characteristics relating to the crime, to the exclusion of the criminal, as relevant to sentencing. Bariyar noted with disapproval that the court had relied on Ravji as an authority on the point that in heinous crimes, circumstances relating to the criminal are not pertinent, in six cases. This was inconsistent with the Bachan Singh ruling by the five-Judge Constitution Bench in 1980, which had shifted the focus of sentencing from

the crime to the crime and the criminal.

In Sangeet , the Radhakrishnan-Lokur Bench has continued the judicial scrutiny started by Bariyar of postBachan Singh death penalty cases, to see if they have complied with the requirements of the law. Thanks to this scrutiny, five other cases which resulted in the wrongful sentencing to death of six more convicts have come to light. They are Shivu, Jadeswamy, B.A. Umesh, Rajendra Pralhadrao Wasnik, Mohd. Mannan, and Sushil Murmu. The former President, Pratibha Patil, has already commuted Murmus death sentence to life imprisonment.

Back to 13

Five of the 13 convicts identified in and after Bariyar have already got

their sentences commuted to life imprisonment by competent authorities. With Sangeet pointing to five more such convicts, the total number of prisoners to be taken off the death row is back to 13 again.

Unlike Bariyar , however, Sangeet has not declared the five erroneous judgments per incuriam . But the result of the scrutiny in both the cases is the same: no future Bench can cite these cases on a point of law, without inviting the Ravji taint. The recent appeal by 14 former judges to the President to spare the lives of the eight convicts, who have been wrongly sentenced to death by the Supreme Court must, therefore, apply equally to these five convicts identified in Sangeet .

It is not unusual to come across observations by the courts while justifying the death sentence, that

there is extreme indignation of the community over the nature of the crime, and that collective conscience of the community is petrified by the extremely brutal, grotesque, diabolical, revolting or dastardly manner of the commission of the crime. After making these observations, it is easy for the courts to jump to the conclusion that the criminal is a menace to society and shall continue to be so and he cannot be reformed.

These are empty clichs repeated ad nauseam without any basis. Sangeet , therefore, gently reminds the courts about the need to back such observations with some material. The nature of the crime alone cannot form such material, it has held.

Sangeet has pointed out a grave infirmity with regard to the sentencing of Umesh and Sushil Murmu, to

death. The Supreme Court found both Umesh and Sushil Murmu incapable of rehabilitation and, therefore, deserving of the death sentence because of their alleged involvement in crimes other than those for which they were convicted turning upside down the doctrine of presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of our criminal jurisprudence.

Bachan Singh , delivered by a fivejudge Constitution Bench, clearly discarded the proposition that the court must balance aggravating and mitigating circumstances through a balance sheet theory. The theory requires weighing aggravating factors of the crime against the mitigating factors of the criminal. In Machhi Singh (1983), however, a three-judge Supreme Court Bench, brought the balance sheet theory back, and gave it legitimacy. The theory has held the field post- Machhi Singh .

Sangeet has sought to revive the Bachan Singh dictum that the aggravating circumstances of the crime and the mitigating circumstances of the criminal are completely distinct and different elements, and cannot be compared with one another. Therefore, it has held that a balance sheet cannot be drawn up of two distinct and different constituents of an incident, as required by Machhi Singh .

Sangeet holds the balance sheet theory responsible for much of the arbitrariness in judging whether a case falls under the rarest of rare category, a test enunciated in Bachan Singh . It also endorses the proposition that by standardising and categorising crimes, Machhi Singh considerably enlarged the scope for imposing the death penalty, that was greatly restricted by Bachan Singh .

The Radhakrishnan-Lokur Bench, being a two-judge Bench, could not have overruled Machhi Singh , despite its obvious flaws, and the source of much of the inconsistency in our death penalty jurisprudence. A threejudge bench in Swami Shraddhanand II in 2008 had raised similar doubts about Machhi Singh ; but the courts continue to invoke it.

In its judgment delivered on August 29, among other things, the Supreme Court relied on the flawed Machhi Singh for its reasoning, and used the balance sheet theory, arraigned by Sangeet , to sentence Ajmal Kasab.

The serious issues raised in Sangeet are incapable of being resolved by the judiciary itself. Any delay in their resolution will inexorably create more death row convicts, than what is

justified legally. There is indeed a case for the government to immediately announce a moratorium on executing death sentences and set up a Commission to identify the cases in which any of the courts trial courts, high courts and the Supreme Court might have erred in correctly applying the Bachan Singh principles, while sentencing. The findings of the Commission will be useful for deciding the future of death sentence in the country.

There is a need to identify cases in which

the courts might have erred in applying the Bachan Singh principle that limits the imposition of the death penalty December 10, 2012

It is time to end the drift in Ukraines ties with India


VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH:We are offering India cooperation in fields where Ukraine is very strong aviation, space, energy, metallurgy, shipbuilding, engineering, chemistry and infrastructure building. PHOTO: UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTS OFFICE Ukraines President Viktor Yanukovych , who arrived in India on Sunday evening for a four-day state visit, is prepared to challenge Russias dominance of the Indian weapons market and sees enormous potential for bilateral trade with India. Before leaving for New Delhi he spoke to Vladimir Radyuhin at his official residence in Kyiv. Excerpts:

India and Ukraine marked 20 years of diplomatic relations this year. What place does India take in Ukraines foreign policy and what are your hopes for the coming visit?

Over the past 20 years, our two countries have built a relationship of partnership, friendship and constructive cooperation in many spheres. My current visit to India, the first by a Ukrainian head of state in 10 years, is designed to give a new impetus to our relations after a period of drift under the previous Ukrainian administration. I hope for significant intensification of our economic ties and political contacts at the highest level.

Was the drift you mentioned due to former President Viktor Yushchenko prioritising the western vector of Ukraines foreign policy?

It was not a question of priorities. In 2005-2010, Ukraine went through difficult political processes. President Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko were at loggerheads with each other and with Parliament which made it hard to conduct an effective foreign policy. Today, all branches of power in Ukraine work in concert and this has enabled us to launch the first comprehensive programme of economic, social and political reforms in 20 years since independence.

Ukraine is Indias second largest trade partner after Russia in the former Soviet Union. What are the most promising areas for bilateral cooperation?

Our trade, which currently stands at a fairly high level of $3 billion, has

enormous potential for growth because our economies are mutually complementary. We are offering India cooperation in fields where Ukraine is very strong aviation, space, energy, metallurgy, shipbuilding, engineering, chemistry and infrastructure building. Agriculture and tourism are also attractive areas for cooperation. There are many opportunities for Indian business in Ukraine. We have enacted legislation to promote publicprivate partnership and created favourable conditions for foreign investment.

Ukraine is eager to expand defence cooperation with India. However, many in India are concerned that Ukraine also supplies arms to Pakistan, which engages in terror against India. How do you see the situation?

This is a very sensitive issue and we try not to politicise it. We strictly comply with United Nations bans and restrictions and honour all our international obligations. We take account of all factors and act with restraint to avoid provoking enmity or God forbid war between nations, but on the contrary, to promote peace and security.

As two biggest defence manufacturers in the former Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine inevitably compete for Indian contracts. Do you think Ukraine can grab a bigger piece of the pie?

Its a buyers market. We have a very potent defence industry which turns out a wide range of quality systems that are competitive in international markets. We are ready to let our Indian partners closely study our products and decide what is the best for them.

You have said that while integration into Europe is a strategic priority for Ukraine, you also aspire to have closer ties with Russia. However, European leaders say Ukraine must choose between the European Union and the Russia-led integration projects. How can you resolve the dilemma?

Its wrong to force an either/or choice on us. It is in the national interest of Ukraine to look both East and West. Our trade with the EU amounts to $45 billion.

Were looking to Europe in reforming our legislative and judicial system and in trying to attain high standards of democracy and human rights. But then, our trade with Russia and other former Soviet states exceeds $60 billion, and we cant ignore the interests of our manufacturers.

Geopolitically, were destined to be a bridge between Europe and Russia.

Will Ukraine join the Customs Union set up by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan?

Were currently harmonising our laws, rules and regulations with those of the Customs Union. Its a long road but if we dont do it, our producers will face discrimination and lose the market. Time will show how far we will go in integrating with the Customs Union.

Ukraine seeks to slash imports of expensive natural gas from Russia, but Russias Gazprom says this would be a breach of your long-term contract which has a take-or-pay provision. Do you think the two countries are heading for another gas war?

We will certainly reach an amicable settlement. We just dont have the money to pay for Russian gas almost $200 more [for 1,000 cubic metres] than Europeans pay. Were looking for alternative supplies, replacing gas with coal and planning to produce synthetic gas from coal. By keeping gas prices for Ukraine high, Russia is losing Europes biggest gas market of 70 billion cubic metres a year.

The Opposition threatened mass protests against alleged violations in the recent parliamentary elections, which brought victory to your party. Do you think another orange revolution may be possible in Ukraine?

Public mood has changed. Some protest sentiments are there, but radicals do not have much support.

People understand that belttightening in crisis is a necessary and temporary measure. The government continues to honour its social obligations despite the crisis salaries and pensions are rising, even if slower than one would like to. The reforms we have launched will soon begin to bear fruit.

Have you been to India before?

I have only transited India on the way to other destinations. Im very keen to get first-hand experience of India and hope well be able to open a new chapter in our relations. December 11, 2012

An Indian grammar for International Studies

A little over three years ago I wrote in The Hindu that at a time when interest in India and Indias interest in the world are arguably at their highest, Indian scholarship on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge and that this could well stunt Indias ability to influence the international system.

As we meet here now, at the first real convention of scholars (and practitioners) of International Studies from throughout India, we can take some comfort. A quick, albeit anecdotal, audit of the study of International Studies would suggest that the last three years have been unusually productive. So much so, that we are now, I believe, at a veritable tipping point in our emergence as an intellectual power in the discipline.

Stanley Hoffman, Professor of International Relations (IR) at Harvard, once famously remarked that IR was an American social science. The blinding nexus between knowledge and power (particularly stark in the case of IR in the United States) perhaps made him forget that while the first modern IR departments were created in Aberystwyth and in Geneva, thinking on international relations went back, in the case of the Indian, Chinese and other great civilizations, to well before the West even began to think of the world outside their living space.

Having absorbed the grammar of Western international relations, and transited to a phase of greater selfconfidence, it is now opportune for us to also use the vocabulary of our past as a guide to the future.

2011 survey

Recovery of these Indian ideas should not be seen as part of a revivalist project or as an exercise that seeks to reify so-called Indian exceptionalism. Rather, interrogating our rich past with its deeply argumentative tradition is, as Amartya Sen put it, partly a celebration, partly an invitation to criticality, partly a reason for further exploration, and partly also an incitement to get more people into the argument. In the context of international relations it offers the intellectual promise of going beyond the Manichean opposition between power and principle; and between the world of ideas and norms on the one hand, and that of statecraft and even machtpolitik , on the other.

In doing so we are not being particularly subversive. A 2011 survey of American IR scholars by Foreign Policy found that 22 per cent adopted

a Constructivist approach (with its privileging of ideas and identity in shaping state preferences and international outcomes), 21 per cent adopted a Liberal approach, only 16 per cent a Realist approach, and a tiny two per cent a Marxist approach. When academics were asked to list their peers who have had the greatest influence on them and the discipline, the most influential was Alexander Wendt, the Constructivist, and neither the Liberal, Robert Koehane, nor the Realists, Kenneth Waltz or James Mearisheimer.

Mohandas Gandhi once said that if all the Upanishads and all the other scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in the Ishopanishad were left in the memory of the Hindus, Hinduism would live forever. Let me make what may seem like another astounding claim, and which I hope, in

the best argumentative tradition, will be heavily contested. If all the books on war and peace were to suddenly disappear from the world, and only the Mahabharata remained, it would be good enough to capture almost all the possible debates on order, justice, force and the moral dilemmas associated with choices that are made on these issues within the realm of international politics.

Uncertainty in the region

Beyond theory, we are faced with a period of extraordinary uncertainty in the international system and in our region. Multilateralism is in serious crisis. While the U.N. Security Council remains deadlocked on key issues, there is little progress on most other issues of global concern, be it trade, sustainable development or climate change. As academics, we cannot

remain unconcerned about these critical failures.

Our continent is being defined and redefined over time. Regions are, after all, as much shaped by the powerful whose interests they seek to advance as by any objective reality. Whatever nomenclature we adopt, and whatever definition we accept, we are faced with, what Evan Feigenbaum and Robert Manning described as two Asias: the Economic Asia whose $19 trillion regional economy drives global growth; the Security Asia, a dysfunctional region of mistrustful powers, prone to nationalism and irredentism, escalating their territorial disputes over tiny rocks and shoals, and arming for conflict.

The Asian Development Bank says that by nearly doubling its share of global GDP to 52 per cent by 2050,

Asia could regain the dominant economic position it held 300 years ago. Yet, as several academics have pointed out it is beset by interstate rivalries that resemble 19th century Europe, as well the new challenges of the 21st century: environmental catastrophes, natural disasters, climate change, terrorism, cyber security and maritime issues. An increasingly assertive China that has abandoned Deng Xiaopings 24character strategy of hiding its light and keeping its head low, adds to the uncertainty of the prevailing strategic environment.

Indias military and economic prowess are greater than ever before, yet its ability to influence South Asian countries is less than what it was, say, 30 years ago. An unstable Nepal with widespread anti-India sentiment, a triumphalist Sri Lanka where Sinhalese chauvinism shows no signs of

accommodating legitimate Tamil aspirations, a chaotic Pakistan unwilling to even reassure New Delhi on future terrorist strikes, are symptomatic of a region being pulled in different directions.

Can our thinking from the past help us navigate through this troubled present? Pankaj Mishra, in his brilliant book, From the Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia , describes how three 19th century thinkers, the Persian Jamal-al Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao from China and Indias Rabindranath Tagore, navigated through Eastern tradition and the Western onslaught to think of creative ways to strike a balance and find harmony. In many ways, these ideas remain relevant today as well. For if Asia merely mimics the West in its quest for economic growth and conspicuous consumption, and the

attendant conflict over economic resources and military prowess, the revenge of the East in the Asian century and all its victories will remain truly Pyrrhic.

(Professor Amitabh Mattoo is President of the Indian Association of International Studies. This is an edited version of his presidential address to the Annual Convention of the Association in New Delhi on December 10, 2012.) December 11, 2012

A British journalist & the Tamil poet


On November 23, 1907 on Chennais Marina Beach, between the esplanade and the surf, a huge crowd had gathered around a small platform. A large lamp had been set on the platform to dispel the quickly

enveloping monsoon darkness. In the teeming crowd, a lone European stood out. What was a white man doing at an extremist meeting being held at the height of the Swadeshi movement? He was no official or trader or missionary or even a vagrant. He was one of the finest late Victorian war correspondents, Henry Woodd Nevinson (18561941) whose work had been commended by writers such as Lawrence of Arabia. His biographer, Anjela V. John ( War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson , London, 2006) describes him as the man who brought warfare to British breakfast tables.

Self-confessed liberal

Nevinson had arrived on the shores of Bombay barely a month earlier. Prior to his Indian visit he had covered the

Graeco-Turkish War (1897), the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Russian revolution (1905). His reportage would continue through the two World Wars until his death. A self-confessed liberal, he supported womens suffrage, and voiced Irish grievances.

Following the Partition of Bengal in 1905, large parts of India were on a nationalistic boil. In its wake, this first phase of nationalist mass mobilisation brought in state repression triggering a cycle of sporadic violence. Nevinsons brief was to discover the causes of the present discontent and to report, without prejudice, the opinion of leading Indians as well as officials. Nevinson travelled across India for four months and his reports were carried by Manchester Guardian , Glasgow Herald and Daily Chronicle . He re-edited these pieces into a book:

The New Spirit in India that appeared in the autumn of 1908.

A thorough journalist, Nevinson did his homework: according to his biographer he met Dadabhai Naoroji, William Wedderburn, and Henry Cotton, apart from Lord Morley, before he set out from London. Coming at the back of Labour MP Keir Hardies visit, Nevinsons travels and reports alarmed the rulers even though, despite his evident sympathy for Indian nationalism and abhorrence of state repression, Nevinson sided with the gradualism of the moderates.

In Pune, Nevinson met Tilak and Gokhale, and was impressed by both (later he would meet Aurobindo as well, and would describe him in exalted terms). Armed with Gokhales introduction to G.A. Natesan, editor of the Indian Review , he arrived in Chennai in the latter part of

November 1907. From Chennai he would proceed to Orissa, visit Bengal, Varanasi and Punjab, and be strategically present in Surat to provide one of the most reliable accounts of the Congress split.

At Chennai Nevinson first visited the temples at Mailapur and Triplicane. Confirming standard descriptions of Madras as the benighted province, he observed that there was no part of India where the anti-English feeling was less to be expected than in Madras. He visited a swadeshi cotton factory among the palms of the north of Madras run by a wealthy Hindu Nevinson for some strange reason took no names in the two chapters on Chennai undoubtedly Pitti Theagaraya Chetti who later founded the non-Brahmin Justice Party. Nevinson also spoke at a meeting of the Madras Mahajana Sabha, and was interviewed by The Hindu and the

Madras Standard . What took a full chapter of his book was a description of the swadeshi meeting noted at the beginning.

Disciplined crowd

Before the meeting commenced, cries of Vande Mataram rent the air. Despite the charged nature of the meeting to celebrate the release of Lala Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh after six months of deportation without notice, charge, or trial the crowd was disciplined enough to earn Nevinsons commendation that A Trafalgar Square crowd is more demonstrative and unrestrained.

The meeting itself commenced with the singing of the Tamil version of Vande Mataram most certainly the translation by Bharati by a little boy.

When this national anthem was finished, the Tamil poet of Madras recited a lament he had written for Lajpat Rai at the time of his deportation. It was the common lament of exiles the fond memory of home, the deep attachment to the land of childhood, the loneliness of life among strangers and unknown tongues all very quietly and simply told.

Who is this Tamil poet of Madras of Nevinsons reportage? Undoubtedly Subramania Bharati. And this must surely rank as the first journalistic description of the great poet. Then barely 25, Bharati had cut his political teeth in the Swadeshi movement, and the greatest cultural achievement of the movement in Tamil Nadu was his emergence. Bharati had arrived in Chennai in late 1904 to join the editorial staff of Swadesamitran . Less

than two years later, he would quit this Tamil daily to serve as editor of the extremist weekly, India . During these years, until his flight to Pondicherry as political exile in August 1908, Bharati often sang nationalist songs at swadeshi meetings.

The song that Nevinson refers to is Bharatis Lajpat Rai Pralapam, Lajpat Rais lament. Consisting of 20 couplets, it speaks movingly in the voice of Lajpat Rai, of his pain at being forced to leave his homeland. According to Nevinsons report, Bharatis singing continued. Then by a sudden change, the poet turned to satire, and described a dialogue between Mr. John Morley and India, on the subject of Swaraj or Home Rule.

Dialogue between Morley & India

You are disunited, says Mr. Morley: what have you to do with Home Rule? You don't speak the same language, you haven't got the same religion; what have you to do with Home Rule? You cannot fight, you are too fond of law, you are the victims of education; what have you to do with Home Rule? You are born slaves, you prostrate yourselves before the Englishman: what have you to do with Home Rule? You are seditious, you are a prairie on fire, you are a barrel of gunpowder, you cry for the moon, you are not fit for a fur coat; what have you to do with Home Rule?

To which India makes a firm and dignified reply. She has tasted freedom, she has learnt from England herself what freedom is; even John Morley has been her teacher, and she will not cease to labour for Swaraj. Having drunk the nectar of freedom, can she turn back to the palm-tree

toddy of a government shop, or cease to labour for Swaraj? She claims the right of other nations, the rights for which England herself has fought; she claims the same freedom of person and of speech, and she will not cease to labour for Swaraj. From north to south her people are becoming united, from east to west the cry of Bande Mataram goes up, and slowly the sun of freedom is arising: it may rise slowly, but India will not cease to labour for Swaraj.

As journalistic reportage, especially by a British journalist with no Tamil, this may be taken as a reasonably accurate paraphrase. Nevinsons error lies in collapsing two distinct poems. For the first paragraph can be recognised as the poem beginning with the words Thondu seyyum adimai , and the next, the more famous Veera suthanthiram vendi nindrar

Even though it is more than evident that the The Tamil poet of Madras is Bharati, we have further evidence to prove this. Despite Nevinsons complacent remark that not a single soldier or policeman *was+ visible, this meeting was reported by the CID police. The abstract of the relevant intelligence report states that the meeting was held on 23 November 1907 under the auspices of the Swadeshi Vastu Pracharini Sabha to celebrate the release of Lajpat Rai.

If Nevinson reckoned that between four and five thousand people attended the meeting, the police put the figure at a more modest one thousand five hundred, mostly students. The meeting was chaired by G. Subramania Iyer, the founder of both The Hindu and Swadesamitran . Nevinson described him as a wellknown writer and journalist of

Madras whose effusive praise of Morleys liberalism only evoked guffaws from the audience. The other names mentioned in the police report include V. Chakkarai Chettiar, S. Duraiswami Iyer, G.A. Natesan and H.W. Nevinson of Daily Chronicle . The report also stated that The proceedings began with the singing of national songs by C. Subramania Bharati.

Did Bharati know of Nevinsons report? In late 1908, Bharati published a three-part essay in his India introducing Nevinsons book. Describing him as an English scholar characterised by large-heartedness, education and wisdom, Bharati praised Nevinsons liberalism and evident support for Indian nationalism. He also provided large chunks from the book in his own distinctive translation. Understandably the passages were

those in praise of Tilak and Aurobindo, and avoided any reference to Gokhale. Rather, notwithstanding Nevinsons endorsement of the constitutional methods of the moderates, Bharati selectively quoted him to ridicule the mendicancy of the moderates. Undoubtedly Bharati had read Nevinsons book, and would have easily recognised himself. Bharati died largely unsung, and he justifiably aspired for recognition from outside. Why then did he make no note of Nevinsons admiring report?

Nevinson met Tagore more than once, and appreciated being in the presence of a great poet. Did he ever realise that he had met an equally great poet on the sands of Marina?

(Today is Subramania Bharatis 130th birth anniversary. A.R. Venkatachalapathy is a historian and

Tamil writer. chalapathy@mids.ac.in)

Email:

Nevinsons report of a 1907 meeting at Marina Beach where Subramania Bharati spoke is probably the first journalistic description of the great revolutionary December 11, 2012

No need for hype but certainly a hope


We are grateful to Narendar Pani (Editorial page, Cashing in on schemes for poor, November 29, 2012) and Bharat Bhatti and Madhulika Khanna (Editorial page, Neither effective nor equitable, December 4, 2012) for starting a useful debate on the United Progressive Alliance governments

Direct Benefits initiative.

Transfer

(DBT)

At the outset, it must be emphasised categorically that this is not an initiative driven by electoral calculations, nor is it a further reduction in the effectiveness of social welfare schemes, as Mr. Panis article suggests. On the contrary, this marks a paradigm shift, where the State is explicitly taking responsibility to ensure that welfare schemes and basic entitlements reach the intended beneficiaries much more effectively than at present. In addition, the present proposal of the government clearly addresses the challenges observed by Bhatti and Khanna in the Kotkasim experiment for providing kerosene subsidies.

What will DBT do?

It is worth explaining briefly what the government is seeking to do. The DBT programme aims that entitlements and benefits to people can be transferred directly to them through biometric-based Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, thus reducing several layers of intermediaries and delays in the system. The last-mile of the initiative is the most important the system will allow actual disbursements to take place at the doorstep of the beneficiaries through a dense, interoperable network of business correspondents (BCs) using biometric microATM machines. Thus, the yardstick of success is not going to be that the money has reached a bank account, but that it has reached the hands of the intended beneficiary a student, a pensioner, a widow, an elderly person, a disabled person, a poor family.

Why is DBT a paradigm shift?

There are several dimensions to this. First, the link to Aadhaar and the use of biometrics ensures that the problems of duplicates, i.e., the same person getting the benefit more than once, and ghosts, i.e., a nonexistent person getting the benefit, are addressed. Second, it makes it possible for money to reach the intended beneficiaries directly and on time so, for example, pensions, which reach the beneficiary once every four to six months in many parts of India, can now reach her bank account on the first of every month. Third, a dense BC network on the ground with microATMs will allow payments to happen at peoples doorsteps, ensuring that the poor get the same level of service that the rich and middle-class in India get. Fourth, as it is a platform based on an open architecture, State governments can use this platform as much as the Central government. This is important,

because the government views this programme as a cooperative endeavour between the Centre and the States, and the States will have a critical role to play (in fact, many chief ministers, including of the Oppositionruled States, are strong champions of the programme). Fifth, the potential benefit to internal migrants who send remittances to their homes is huge. It is estimated that Rs.75,000 crore worth of within-country remittances are made in India every year many of these are lifelines for their families. Seventy per cent of these remittances are today channelled through informal (and illegal) channels which impose high costs on them. The Aadhaar-based microATM network can ensure that remittances take place instantly and at much lower cost to migrants.

Tackling the implementation

challenges

of

Having said all this, we would be the first to admit that there are numerous challenges of implementation that lie ahead. That is why the government is proposing to move ahead only gradually and with caution. First, the programme proposes only a modest beginning in Phase I, covering 34 schemes largely scholarships, pensions, and other benefit payments in only 51 (of the over 600) districts. It will be ensured that at least 80 per cent residents in each district have an Aadhaar number and an Aadhaar-linked bank account before any payments are started. And no one who does not have an Aadhaar number will be denied benefits. Only based on the learning from this phase, would the programme be expanded. Second, a system of independent concurrent evaluation is being embedded, to ensure that we get objective feedback on the challenges of implementation. There already are

useful lessons from five Aadhaar pilots in different parts of the country. Third, subsidies on food and fertilizer have not been included in the first phase, recognising that these are highly complex and require considerable thought. Chief ministers seem to have varying views on this issue, with some supporting the linking of DBT with fertilizer and food (and other Public Distribution System commodities), while others oppose it. Such issues will best be left to the discretion of the States. Fourth, the issue of mobile connectivity, a major challenge in backward areas and essential for online authentication, is being addressed in parallel, by adding more mobile towers (especially in backward districts) and through the ambitious government programme of taking broadband internet connectivity to every panchayat within two years. Fifth, the existing discredited BC model is being fundamentally changed, with an open

architecture replacing monopolies. This would enable anyone kirana shops, womens self-help groups, primary agricultural cooperative societies, post offices, Accredited Social Health Activists and anganwadi workers, etc. to become BCs. The business model for BCs is also being revamped to make it more lucrative. The post office network (a key payment channel, especially for pensions and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act payments) is also being reformed with the postal department committing to upgrading to a core banking solution (CBS) system across all its post offices within the next 18 months.

On the Kotkasim experiment, Bhatti and Khanna identified two main concerns from a user perspective erratic and delayed payments due to a lack of coordination, and the time and

effort required to go to and deal with banks. They also noted the absence of an objective assessment of the programme by the government.

Each of these is being addressed in the governments proposal. Bank accounts are going to be Aadhaarlinked that will ensure duplicates and ghosts are eliminated. Beneficiary accounts are going to be linked to Aadhaar and bank account numbers before any payments are made, and payments will be made instantly using the Aadhaar Payment Bridge this will ensure that payment delays dont happen.

An interoperable BC network with microATMs is going to be put in place so that beneficiaries have access to banking at their doorstep, which will reduce the hassle and delays involved in dealing with bank branches. And as mentioned, a concurrent evaluation

system is being embedded to ensure that we get objective feedback.

Conclusion

The DBT initiative is not a or the silver bullet for the malaise that plagues our delivery system. It is, more realistically, a first step in reengineering its very foundations. We are neither evangelical or dogmatic about DBT. Instead, we believe that rather than having endless ideological discussions for or against DBT, it is better to be pragmatic and try it out seriously and systematically, albeit in a cautious and phased manner.

(Jairam Ramesh is Union Minister for Rural Development. Varad Pande is with the Ministry.)

The Direct Benefits Transfer Initiative is the real tool against corruption that will ensure that the welfare state doesnt degenerate into a farewell state December 12, 2012

In Nepal, the quest for April elections


Seven months after the term of Nepals Constituent Assembly (CA) ended without delivering a constitution, Nepali politicians agree that fresh elections to a new CA must be held in April-May 2013. But unlike functional democratic set-ups, the issue of how to get to elections has polarised Nepali polity.

Here is the problem. The interim constitution does not envisage a second CA poll. To amend the constitution, President Ram Baran Yadav needs to use his constitutional

power to remove obstacles, on the recommendation of the Council of Ministers.

President Yadav has refused to exercise this power and asked for a political consensus first. This is elusive since the Opposition parties, led by the Nepali Congress (NC) and Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), have demanded that they be given the leadership of the government. The ruling Federal Democratic Republican Alliance (FDRA), of the Maoists and Madhesi parties, has instead urged the Opposition to join the Baburam Bhattarai-led government. Elections announced for November 22 could not be held. And the possibility of April polls is getting increasingly slim.

Presidential move

Claiming his intention was to resolve the deadlock, President Yadav called for a consensus Prime Minister on November 23. The move triggered off events and has dragged the office of the President into a controversy.

Opposition parties put forward the NC president, Sushil Koirala, as their prime ministerial candidate. The NCs claim for leadership rests on two grounds that both the Maoists and the UML have led two governments each since 2008 and now it is the NCs turn; and an agreement in May had provided for the NC leading the election government.

These are shaky grounds. All governments since 2008 have been elected by a majority on the floor of the house. Asking for leadership in the spirit of consensus is based on selective amnesia when the NC has been at the forefront of opposing any

Maoist-led government. The May agreement promised the NC leadership, but only after constitutional issues were agreed upon. The Maoists and Madhesi parties in government blame the NCs opposition to identity-based federalism for the failure to draft a constitution, and claim the pact is not relevant anymore.

Maoist proposals

While critics have blamed Maoists for the impasse, party chairman Prachanda has been active in putting out one proposal after another to break the deadlock.

Soon after the CA ended, he suggested that parties should try to find a middle way on issues of the constitution, revive the CA, and promulgate the constitution. The

Maoists agreed to postpone the specifics of federalism, as long as the different models on the table were attached as an annex to the constitution. But both the NC and President Yadav were opposed to the CAs revival, which buried the idea.

The Maoists then urged the Opposition to join the Bhattarai cabinet, since there was no legitimate way to replace the Prime Minister in the absence of parliament. To allay apprehensions that Maoists would misuse state apparatus during elections, Mr. Prachanda offered the home ministry to the NC, and the finance ministry to the UML. He also asked the NC to appoint its nominee as the chief election commissioner. The Opposition however rejected this possibility too.

The Maoist-Madhesi alliance suspects that the NC only seeks government

leadership, and will not hold timely CA polls. That is why they have said they would accept Sushil Koirala as the prime minister, only as a part of a package deal.

This deal, according to the FDRA, should include the date of elections, the election system and number of seats, the way to clear constitutional and legal hurdles, and how to fill vacancies in constitutional offices including the Election Commission, which will be left with no commissioners by January, and the Supreme Court, which is operating with less than half of its bench strength. Additionally, there must be a mechanism to preserve the work that has been done by the last CA, even if contentious issues like federalism are to be decided later. The NC has rejected the idea of a package deal too.

Mr. Prachanda has floated two other ideas that of either a Madhesi leader as prime minister, or a neutral figure leading a political cabinet to hold elections. The Opposition is not in favour of either option.

In all of this, an additional complication is the internal politics of the Maoists. The party is holding a general convention in early February, and leaders do not want to rock the boat till then. Mr. Prachanda wishes to be elected as chairman unopposed, and making any compromise that will antagonise Mr. Bhattarai will create complications for him. Despite their flexible stance in public, the Maoist attitudes have hardened in recent days since they do not want status quo to be disturbed till then.

Deadlines

The Presidents third deadline to the parties to come up with a prime ministerial candidate ends on Wednesday. Dr. Yadav has got into a self-made trap. He cannot backtrack, but neither can he take any other step for in the absence of a parliament, there is no other way to select a prime minister. He has already flirted dangerously with constitutional limits, and will create a new crisis with any unilateral move.

Unless political and constitutional hurdles are cleared by December-end, the EC has ruled out elections in April. If they are not held in spring, the political deadlock could continue through all of next year with the monsoon, harvest season, festival cycles and winter hampering the election schedule.

With their failure to draft a constitution, the relentless power

games, abysmal governance, and fractured party organisations, all Nepali political forces appear to be scared of returning to the voter. But there is no alternative but to seek popular mandate to resolve the current crisis, and restore legitimacy to the post-2006 framework. The onus lies largely on the Opposition to shed its singular obsession with the prime ministers chair, and partly on the Maoists to not let their internal party matters hold the country hostage. The focus instead should be on how to create conditions for free and fair elections in spring 2013.

The Oppositions insistence on changing the Prime Minister, without offering

a compelling political road map, is at the heart of the impasse in Kathmandu December 12, 2012

T20 politics has run its course


In the build-up to the Championship Trophy T20 cricket series early this year, the sponsor, a soft drinks company, unveiled an interesting advertisement campaign, which showed an ill-mannered Bollywood actor making a virtue of being rude and impertinently ad-libbing the catchline: Boss, ye T20 cricket hai; na tameez se khela jata hai, na tameez se dheka jata hai (This is T20 cricket; it is neither played nor watched with decorum). This charming invitation to forget our manners and etiquette is an extraordinary in-your-face celebration of the new cultural mood of loudmouthedness, a deliberate

disdain towards obligations of dignity and decency.

Perhaps the clever manipulation of cricket-centric emotions was merely a reflection of the new national rowdy habit of conducting dialogue and conversation. This habit has come to rest on a simple formula: no restraint, no boundaries, no nuance, no subtlety, no time for class or technique, no thought for long-term consequences, just a victory, here and now.

Infectious mood

How infectious this mood has already become was evident in last weeks debate in Parliament on the FDI issue. In the manner of a limited overs contest, the debate degenerated into a raw confrontation between the ruling party and its detractors.

Sushma Swaraj, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, otherwise a mild-mannered leader with a becoming sobriety, gave in to this mood with totally unintended consequences. Not satisfied with being personal and offensive to the Congress president, she shrilly suggested that the Uttar Pradeshbased parties the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party were obliged to help the government out because the Central Bureau of Investigation had been unleashed on the leaders of these two outfits.

As she saw it, the issue was not the presumed merits or deficiencies in the governments initiative; rather it was a simple matter of FDI vs. CBI a classic T20 formulation.

But as with the new kind of cricket so in the political arena, aggression and recklessness cannot remain the monopoly of one side; the rules give all other protagonists the same freedom to respond in a manner of their choice.

It was left to Ms Mayawati habitually denounced by the selfappointed arbiters of good taste and intellectual rationality to take on the Leader of the Opposition, and reframe the issue. In particular, Ms Mayawati served notice that the BJPs cultivated T20 bad manners would not go unanswered and would, in fact, invite retaliation in kind. She did more than that. The BSP leader framed her argument in an institutional context: a government defeat would embolden the BJP to continue its two-year-old strategy of parliamentary disruption, a technique that had already eroded

parliamentary institutions credibility and respect.

Like everyone else, Ms Mayawati knew that a setback on the FDI issue would have been much more than a defeat for the Manmohan Singh government. It would have advertised to every stakeholder at home and abroad that the Indian parliamentary system was no longer able to generate for the executive the requisite legislative sanction behind any kind of policy coherence. She unwittingly ended up providing a much-needed refurbishing to the basic scheme of our constitutional arrangements.

Last weeks debate underscored a larger purpose: the inherent fairness of our constitutional design. The BSP leader indicated that her party and its social constituency of the lower castes and classes see merit in making good

use of the parliamentary processes to demand and secure their share of the national pie. Unlike the Anna crowd and its political partner, the National Democratic Alliance, the BSP, at least, has every reason to want to abide by the Constitution because it knows that it is only the Constitution of India and its promise of an egalitarian order that would enable the marginal groups to secure a fair deal for themselves.

It is indeed somewhat mystifying as to why Ms Swaraj, who otherwise has the temperament of a one-down batsman in a five-day cricket test match, got seduced into recklessness. Perhaps the only explanation is that the BJP (as also its cheerleaders in the media) has been taken in by the success notched up by the Gujarat Chief Minister in the style of a limited overs-swashbuckler.

In fact, Narendra Modi is the first political leader of some consequence who has built up an aura around himself by rough-talking. His handlers have crafted a macho image for him, which now critically hinges on his perceived ready and uninhibited willingness to bad-mouth anyone; he has been projected as having the ability to take on anyone, and that he is unafraid of any holy cow. Mr. Modi is loud and immodest in selfpraise and self-promotion; unrestrained in his nasty comments about Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. He tickles our baser instincts, makes us feel good in our small-mindedness. So invidious a toll has the Modi-type aggression taken on our collective sensibilities that a gentle, soft-spoken Manmohan Singh is dismissed in middle class conversations as a namby-pamby.

New media

That aggression has been exponentially facilitated by the new media. The electronic news channels have done their own bit in promoting this itch to be boorish. The shouting and bad manners that passes for discussion and debate on television has bred a culture of low tolerance and baser prejudices. The middle classes who otherwise take pride in their refinement in taste and cultural immersions find themselves addicted to the display of bad manners, hectoring and scolding night after night. It was this T20 culture that provided the perfect background for the India Against Corruption movement.

Carnivals of accusation

Anna and his gang mesmerised us with their own version of

loudmouthed righteous denunciation. They staged vastly entertaining carnivals of accusation, where a handful of honest deshbhakts gave the appearance of taking on a whole legion of the corrupt and venal. For a while it seemed that name calling had become our national pastime. But they lost the plot when Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan went overboard and accused even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of being corrupt. Annas so-called team melted away when the corporate sponsors tightened the purse-strings, and its warriors got entangled in their internal acrimonious contradictions. But the nation particularly the middle classes have got addicted to the daily dose of name calling. It is this addiction that periodically goads Kejriwal & Co. to make a nuisance of itself outside this or that VIPs residence, hoping that the Delhi Police will get provoked into acting hamhandedly.

Violence in our daily political discourse is bound to breed violent proclivities in political society. The very fact that anchors can no longer talk softly in front of television cameras prompts everyone else to raise their voices and shout down others with unreasonableness, anger and acrimony. Political rivals are increasingly finding it difficult to communicate across lines of hardening polarisation. Political parties first find themselves having to field a few Rottweilers on the nightly name-calling contests, and then get trapped in the studio-generated bad vibes and bad blood. A take-noprisoners attitude has come to dominate even routine political exchanges.

This approach to public life has distracted political parties from their basic mandate: to initiate their cadres

into ideas and ideology, and then empower them to take the case to the citizens at large. Today, leaders in the public sphere get defined not by their ideas but by their antics. Their T20 orientation does not equip political leaders for the time-consuming, painstaking, unglamorous chores of governance. The polity is losing its capacity to serve both society and the state.

(Harish Khare is a senior journalist and public commentator.)

Just as a few victories in limited overs cricket do not equip a team for Tests,

loud-mouthed aggression in politics does

not generate governing capacity or trust among citizens December 12, 2012

Looking back in anger

Harwinder Singh Mander is a bright eyed youth in his twenties, born and raised in England to Sikh parents. He studied law and runs Naujawani.com , a popular internet radio station and internet TV that broadcasts content for a global Sikh audience. He is a blogger too on the topic of what he calls injustices against the Sikh community in India. His latest post asks Sikhs to sign an online petition to free Kulbir Singh Barapind and Daljit Singh Bittu, arrested by the Punjab police in September for allegedly reviving the outlawed Khalistan Zindabad Force.

He and his friends also support IPledgeOrange or Kesri Lehar (Orange, the colour of sacrifice, is also that of Sikhisms pennant), another online campaign launched by the United States-based Sikhs for Justice that petitioned the British Parliament on Monday for a debate on the atrocities on minorities in India. The campaign seeks to free Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row for engineering the bomb blast that killed the Punjab Chief Minister, Beant Singh, and 17 others in 1995.

IPledgeOrange also runs Rajoana TV, which features half-hour episodes in English focusing on events connected with the March turmoil in Punjab, when Rajoanas scheduled execution was stalled following a Statewide protest. A young shorn Sikh boy with a British accent eulogises Rajoana and Jagtar Singh Hawara (also convicted for the same offence) and

plays on notions of injustice, and denial of equality and freedom to the Sikhs.

Forget the images of saffron robed jathedars wearing long beards and kirpans uttering full throated cries of Jo Bole So Nihal that characterised the Khalistan campaign of the 1980s. These are educated, suave youngsters, most likely to be born and raised in the West. They talk of love, peace and humanity in the same breath that they talk of atrocities against Sikhs. Their heros are icons of the Khalistan movement such as Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Rajoana or Hawara.

Since February this year, when Sikhs across the world rose against the impending hanging of Rajoana, young Sikhs in the diaspora in particular have started what the police call a cyber war for Khalistan. The propaganda

overdrive, through scores of web sites and social media platforms, is aimed at the young and impressionable, feeding them a diet of one-sided stories on the theme of injustice and the governments failure to protect Sikh rights and interests.

New DGP

The appointment of Sumedh Singh Saini, a much feared police officer for his role in eliminating terrorism in Punjab, as the State director general of police in February coincided with the February stir against Rajoana, and provided much grist to the mill.

Sample this excerpt from a video devoted exclusively to Saini, on Rajoana TV. Mr. Saini was drafted at that time for a reason; because he is a trained killer, with the blood of

thousands of Sikhs on his hands. Graphic pictures of a Sikh family allegedly slaughtered by Saini, appear in the video. The soft voice on the audio, intones: This man is in charge of policing my State and my people. Can we expect any justice?

Police officers admit that law enforcing agencies have so far been unequal in this unfolding arena. It is vigorous and potent, says a police officer.

But those behind the cyber propaganda are at pains to stress they are not extremists. We do not want fighting or bloodshed. Khalistan means different things to different people, Mr. Mandher told The Hindu in an emailed response, whether they are in the West or in Punjab.

Canadian PMs statement

The Sikh diasporas efforts to fuel revival of interest in Sikh issues abroad paid off when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said during a visit to India last month that advocating for Khalistan by the Sikh community is not a crime. Harpers statement is plastered on most websites devoted to Sikh issues.

In March, when Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal visited the U.S. to attend a wedding, Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) ambushed him with a federal civil lawsuit alleging that he oversaw the torture of Sikhs in India. A court in Wisconsin issued summons against Badal on the SFJs complaint.

Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who heads SFJ, is seeking to internationalise Indias failure to punish the perpetrators of the 1984 anti-Sikh

riots, while handing out death sentences to the Sikhs who reacted in anger at those incidents.

Said Pannun, This suit will send a strong message to political leaders that they are answerable to the international laws and the courts for their role in gross human rights violations.

The Punjab government dismissed the radicals move as a cheap and desperate publicity stunt by marginalised elements who had a violent communal agenda.

Unsettled resentment

But voices within the Sikh community warn against dismissing the welling anger as the fulminations of a fringe group. This unsettled resentment

[over the 1984 riots] is manifesting itself in demands like opposition to the hanging of former terrorists or to have a memorial for Operation Bluestar.

It reinforces the sentiment that laws are only meant to be used against the Sikhs and not for their benefit, said H.S. Phoolka, a Supreme Court advocate who has been fighting for justice to the 1984 victims.

Young Sikhs are increasingly drawing comparisons between the treatment meted out to them and the Shiv Sena.

There have been at least three recorded shootings by the police of unarmed Sikh teenagers who have been peacefully protesting against the government. While in contrast, the Shiv Sena Group, which is an antiminority, fascist, pro Hindu group, has

been allowed, and in many situations, provided security protection by the paramilitary and police forces, while making anti-minority speeches and threats against the minority community, says the Kesri Lehar petition.

All this is not to suggest that an uprising is even remotely on the cards. It is widely acknowledged that the peoples rejection of terrorism was the main reason that Punjab returned from the brink. The new calls to resolve Sikh issues use only democratic methods. Young educated Sikhs living abroad, are beginning to question, in democratic ways, if what happened in Punjab in the 1980s was justified after all. Their questions now are not so much about the old territorial or river waters issues but whether Sikhs have been discriminated against by Indias politico-legal system in the last two

decades. What is worrying is that the voices are becoming insistent and even moderate Sikhs find it hard to fault their logic.

Efforts by sections of the Sikh community, especially in the diaspora, to revive interest in what they describe as unsettled injustices of the 1980s but what the police say is

a renewed campaign for Khalistan are fast drawing in the youth December 13, 2012

My Guru Pandit Ravi Shankar, my father and I


It fills me with great sadness that I have to write this tribute today to my Guru, Pandit Ravi Shankar. With his demise, an era has come to an end. The last of the legends of that

generation is no longer physically with us. But artists like Ravi Shankar never die because they will live on through their music. Millions of people across the world have been deeply influenced by this charismatic genius who was always way ahead of his time, and they will continue to be.

I was fortunate to be born into a family where my Guru was worshipped as God. My father, the late N.R. Rama Rao, was one of his earliest disciples from the late 1940s, when this legend himself was in his twenties. Their close bonding as guru and shishya is still spoken about in music circles as Ram bhakt Hanuman, Ravi bhakt Rao.

My father, his shishya

My father was the epitome of a perfect shishya and I grew up with lots

of stories of their beautiful relationship. Father sitting behind on a bicycle with the sitar and Guru ji riding the bicycle to All India Radio for his work; father listening to hours of Guru ji s practice sessions with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Annapurna ji as he gave accompaniment on the tanpura ; about the festive atmosphere that would set in weeks before Guru ji arrived at my hometown, Bangalore.

They shared a beautiful relationship, one that continued until my fathers death due to Alzheimers disease in 2004. I remember the time Guru ji went all the way to Bangalore to see him one last time. By then the disease was in a very advanced stage but the one person who my father could still recognise was his guru.

Even in the last few months, when, for all practical purposes, my father was not in this world and unable to

recognise his wife and children, there was only one thing that could bring a semblance of a response from him his gurus music. We could detect some movement in his eyes and his fingers would start moving involuntarily.

Surely, the world knows Guru ji as one of the greatest musicians and countless articles have been written about him for decades. Aside from the music I was privileged to learn from him; I was fortunate to see the human side of this great artist as well. His childlike enthusiasm to learn and live life to the fullest, his humility, and his humour like a true guru, he taught me not just music but about life itself.

Every single day was a learning experience right from my first lesson in 1973 in Mysore (where he taught me Raga Bhairav ), to the nine

years of living and learning with him from 1984 onwards, to the numerous concerts I played with him.

Despite his tight schedule during the two weeks in Mumbai in 1982 when he was working with Richard Attenborough composing music for the film Gandhi, he would teach me for three to four hours in the morning before going to the studio.

The Asian Games

In late 1983, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave Guru ji a house in New Delhis Lodi Estate (where senior government officers live) as a token of appreciation for the music he had composed for the Asian Games.

At that point in his life, he wanted to spend more time in India and asked

me to move to Delhi. The nine years that followed in the guru-shishya parampara are the foundation of my life. I learnt from him not just music or raga and tala but how to be a complete artist and to live the life of my music. For him, music was always a spiritual quest and I found this in every raga that he performed. He was the perfect naad yogi .

I will never forget two of his blessings the first was when his wife organised a surprise party to celebrate my wedding to Saskia as they could not attend the wedding in Bangalore; the second, when he visited the hospital a day after my son was born. Taking Ishaan in his arms, he said that he was only the second two-day old baby that he had held apart from his own son, Shubhendra Shankar (after whom my parents named me).

Last year, when I visited him at his home in California after finishing my U.S. tour, he told me, Beta , I feel bad I could not give you enough time when I had to because I was busy with my concerts and tours. Now I have the time and want to give you everything that I have, but you dont have the time because you are busy with your own concerts. I am really happy that you are doing well and my blessings are always with you.

For sure, I will feel the void his passing has left, but I know he is always with me. His smile, his mesmerising eyes, his easy sense of humour, his passion for life and most important, his music will always live with me all my life.

(Shubhendra Rao, a disciple of Ravi Shankar, is a leading sitar artist and composer. Email: sitar@shubhendrarao.com )

Like a true teacher, he taught me not just about music but about life too December 13, 2012

The sitar loses its strings

appropriating him for local nameboards. Why India, even in Manhattan, New York, I once counted three Ravi Shankar Indian Diners on 5th Avenue alone. The name became the stamp of India.

Admittedly, in the early decades of the 20th century, there were as many, if not more, accomplished sitarists in the country. Ravi Shankars own guru Baba Allauddin Khan, who set up the Maihar gharana , Ustad Enayat Khan who held up the Etawah gharana ,

Shankars younger contemporaries Ustad Vilayat Khan and Nikhil Banerjee, his one-time wife Annapurna Devi and such. But it was Shankar who captured the imagination of post-Independence India with his effortless contemporisation of an ancient style of music making, even as he contributed to the idea of a new aesthetic nationalism. Musical identity effortlessly fused with national identity.

Looking back on Shankars life, one can be pardoned for feeling a sense of inevitability at the way it all panned out. Born into an affluent Bengali family to Shyam Shankar Chowdhury and Hemangini Devi, Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury as he was then known, was the youngest among a brood of seven male siblings, of whom one was stillborn and another who died within a year. Of the remaining,

Uday Shankar was the eldest and was to go on to become among the legendary figures of the Indian cultural revival alongside the national movement. The other brothers Rajendra, Debendra and Bhupendra too were phenomenally talented. Robu, as Ravi Shankar was then called, was by far the baby of the pack and naturally received all their affection.

By the time Ravi was born, his father, a lawyer, philosopher, amateur musician and former Diwan to the Maharaja of Jhalawar in Rajasthan, had moved to Europe with his new English wife. Soon Uday Shankar too moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. Ravi would meet his eldest brother only when he himself was nine years old. Within a year, in 1930, all the brothers were in Paris to help Uday Shankar launch his new performance troupe. Between

then and 1938, Ravi Shankar was to tour Europe four times with the celebrated troupe and by the time he was 18, he was a stage veteran. However, all the while, his primary role in the troupe was that of a dancer. In 1935, Ustad Allauddin Khan had joined Uday Shankars troupe and it was this association that triggered the musical instincts in Ravi Shankar. There was also the company of the Ustads son, the young Ali Akbar Khan, already a phenomenon on the sarod.

Debut performance

In 1938, Ravi Shankar moved to Maihar for direct tutelage under Allauddin Khan Saheb, which was to last seven gruelling years. His debut performance was at the Allahabad Music Conference in 1939. It was in Maihar too that he was to meet Allauddin Khans charismatic and hugely talented daughter Annapurna

Devi and get married to her in 1941. It was a turbulent relationship with several ruptures first in 1956 and then in 1967. However, a formal divorce happened only forty years after the marriage, in 1981. Their one son from the marriage, Shubhendra Shankar, too was to emerge as a talented musician. The 1940s were a very productive period for Ravi Shankar as he assisted Uday Shankar in setting up his India Culture Centre in Almora in 1940 and, upon its closing down in 1944, joined the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA) in 1945. The family moved to Bombay and got involved in some of the most radical artistic projects of the time like the landmark films Dharti ke Lal by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Neecha Nagar by Chetan Anand. Ravi Shankar also produced musicals like India Immortal and composed a new melody for Saare Jahan se Accha both of which become hugely popular. From then

on, it was a roller coaster ride of recordings and projects and tours and setting up of musical collectives like the Jhankar Music Circle and the Vadya Vrinda, so closely associated with the development of a musical ethos in Delhi.

In the 1950s, he is also associating with theatre personalities like Shombhu Mitra and film makers like Satyajit Ray and creating awardwinning compositions for milestone films like the Apu Triology and Kabuliwala . Hes performing in Moscow, Tokyo, Prague and Edinburgh. This was to lead, in the 1960s to his meeting with the Beatles, his friendship with George Harrison and his rave appearances at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 and Woodstock in 1969. Ravi Shankar had arrived at the centre of the counterculture in the West. He emerged from it a full-blown icon for

both the East and the West. While there will be many narratives tracking his continuous achievements at home and abroad, it might be more useful here to concentrate a bit on what exactly he achieved with the sitar.

Tweaking the sitar

What is undeniable is the extraordinary depth of the talim , the pedagogy, he received from his guru. One of its primary cornerstones seems to have been a prodigious openness to all forms and variations of music. Ravi Shankars musical legacy is precisely this wealth of blends and joineries of an abundance of forms and traditions. He imbibed the control of dhrupad , the rich melody of khayal and the playfulness of the thumri . Over and above what he learnt, he was constantly adding innovations and fresh approaches and evolving a distinct style over the

decades. He tweaked the sitar in constantly new ways, working closely with the instrument-makers. He tuned it and strung it differently, plucked it in his own unique way with variations in volume and touch and, most significantly, emphasised new bass strings developed from the many early years he spent with the more complex surbahar . He combined many salient features of the surbahar in the jod section of the alap , which was to become his signature. In particular, his transit from the ati vilambit (very slow) to the drut (fast) gats in different taals with infinite variations had left its mark on subsequent musical practice and it is common now to see younger musicians seamlessly negotiate these innovations.

Ravi Shankar has claimed over 30 new ragas as his creation including Nat Bhairavi (created way back in 1945),

Bairagi, Manamanjari, Parameshwari, Jogeshwari, Rajya Kalyan (composed on the occasion of his relinquishing membership of the Rajya Sabha, 1986-1992) and so on. It is interesting to note that Shankar was always effusive about the debt he owed to Carnatic music for his inspiration. In his 1999 autobiography Raga Mala, he writes, I fell in love with Carnatic music in Madras at the age of twelve or thirteen when I first heard the great singer and veena player Veena Dhanam As the first Hindustani instrumental musician to perform regularly in Madras, over many years I came to know all the great Carnatic musicians of their day It has therefore been extremely satisfying to have succeeded in popularising among musicians in the North the ragas Kirwani, Charukeshi, Vachaspati, Simhendra Madhyama, Nata Bhairavi and others which are all of Carnatic origin The Carnatic systems mathematical approach to rhythms

and accurate application of them are also stunning. One of my greatest loves is for intricate sitar passages of mathematical precision filled with metric patterns and ending with complex tihais , all spontaneously improvised. As far back as 1945, I was absorbing the essence of these from the fixed calculative systems of the Carnatic form.

Indeed, a typical Ravi Shankar concert would incorporate and syncopate around all these elements that he absorbed a dhrupad kind of invocation, a khayal kind of midconcert colour, a Carnatic inspired climax and a racy finale created from a semi-classical thumri or a folkish dhun . He was ever supportive of the accompanying artists and even an artist of the calibre of Ustad Zakir Hussain would say: He has been one of the few instrumentalists probably the first one to offer a

spotlight to an accompanist. Before him you never heard of an instrumentalist putting his instrument down, keeping time and letting the tabla-player take off.

Ravi Shankars own claim is, in fact, in having made a huge difference to stage presentation of classical music. He credits Uday Shankar for having taught him stage and lighting techniques that made his concerts stand out when compared to the otherwise dowdy and shoddy presentations that musicians are usually prone to make, being quite innocent of the visual language.

One could echo Yehudi Menuhin in stating that what Ravi Shankar won for himself in music was an enviable sense of freedom in music. He was part of an intricate system and structure and yet always out of it, always open and receptive to new

impulses, always seeking a new threshold. Combined with the progressive politics he imbibed during his IPTA years, it is this special quality that made him, for a larger public, the representative musical genius of the last century. His music came to stand for a democracy of openness, a catholicity of free conversations divested of narrow corralling or pigeon-holing. His music acknowledged a cultural boundary even as it transcended the limit. It is another matter that, in later years, he slipped into a sort of sedentary celebrityhood. What is important is that whenever he picked up his sitar the meend , the mukri and the gamaks rang true. And as you listened, the musician evaporated and the music is what you heard.

With Ravi Shankars passing away, the pancham-taar (middle string) of the

sitar may have snapped. But close your eyes, the dhwani remains.

(Sadanand Menon is a senior journalist based in Chennai. Email: sadanandmenon@yahoo.com ) December 13, 2012

Figuring out the Modi speed machine


You should go to Gujarat only if you can will yourself to dismiss the contrarian signals: Because in the land of Narendra Modi, anything that mars the big picture, which is Narendra Modi himself, can be a red herring.

So much so, even the grouch with the litany of complaints oh yes, he exists and his tribe is growing will say in the end that much as he wishes otherwise, nothing can stop the three-

time Chief minister from winning again. Apparently, the only point of curiosity in election 2012 is whether Modi will hold his current tally of 117 of 182 Assembly seats or fall behind it and, if the latter, by how much.

The 2007 scenario

I stepped into the Modi minefield in the 2007 Assembly election when the theoretical odds seemed stacked against the Chief Minister. In September of that year, Saurashtra, accounting for 54 seats, had risen in revolt against Modi; in a spectacle quite at odds with the picture of bounty and happiness that was Gujarat in the publicity brochures, over 5 lakh farmers had gathered in Rajkot, denouncing the Chief Minister for leaving them to rot while he ministered to the business-affluent classes. We will finish you, the milling, surging crowds vowed, their

war-cry echoing off the corridors of Gandhinagar.

power

As elections neared, the underclass, their wretchedness revealed in their tattered clothing and the lines on their faces, turned up in hordes to hear Sonia Gandhi. The numbers, formed by Gujarats poor, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims, seemed ranged on her side. This not counting Modis own not inconsiderable problems. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose cadre worked on the ground to deliver votes to the Bharatiya Janata Party, was deeply discomfited by the growing personality cult around Gujarats Chief Minister: The sanghs once disciplined, devoted foot-soldier was now an icon who inspired hysteria and revelled in it too. An influential local RSS leader told me that Modi had crossed the line on a fundamental sangh belief: vyakti se paksh mahan, paksh se desh mahan

(party is greater than person, country is greater than party). Modi as an autonomous power centre also upset sections of the administration, from ministers and bureaucrats to lower level staff, police personnel and teachers. The latter manned the election machinery and conventional wisdom had it that you didnt win elections by alienating them.

On the other hand, there was Modis incredible chemistry with the voters, visible at all his rallies. They wore Modi masks, waved his posters and roared in approval as he made offcolour jokes about Sonia and the Congress. On counting day, the arithmetic came apart. The policeman who had called up a day earlier to tell me Hitler is losing, was untraceable. The RSS was numb with shock, and most unbelievably, it was a near clean-sweep for Modi in dissenting Saurashtra. Like Indira Gandhi, Modi

had dispensed with party and government in his case also the sangh and connected directly with the people. The crowds that attended the Congress chiefs rallies had no one to vote for in the Congress whose local leadership was diminished even more by Modis towering presence.

Returning to Gujarat five years later, Im struck by the far wider rich-poor gulf. Ahmedabad exemplifies Shining Gujarat, with showrooms and shopping plazas to rival the best in Europe. The beautified Sabarmati Riverfront is a captivating sight that is the regimes newest pride. Happy stories greet the visiting journalist on the mofussil stops along the super highway from the State Capital to Rajkot in Saurashtra. Narendrabhai, Narendrabhai chant little children as their parents gush about the rewards of having Modi as Chief Minister: uninterrupted power supply,

adequate water, pucca roads, houses, strife and fear-free environment and, above all, a leader who fans the fires of Gujarati asmita (identity) . At Sangani in Chotila, Sarpanch Waghabhai Danabhai describes Modi as a God-send to Gujarat. Next door, Bharatbhai, who is unemployed, gives Modi 130 seats, up 13 from 2007, and insists that after this election, he would be unstoppable on the road to Delhi and Prime Ministership. Bharatbhai is unbothered by his own jobless state.

Off the highway into rural Saurashtra, the narrative changes gradually, yet dramatically from striking prosperity and raging Modi-mania to poorer habitations and robust Modibashing. This is also Keshubhai country. The BJP veteran and now leader of the Gujarat Parivartan Party, had sided with the Congress in 2007 only for his dream to go up in smoke.

His Leva Patel community preferred Modi to the Congress. Now his hope is that the GPP will tap into the anger which had no outlet then.

Indeed, in the deeper interiors the shine entirely comes off Gujarats magnificent bijli, paani, sadak (power, water, roads) story, told and retold by Modi, and magnified online and offline by his manic fan clubs. Patchy and potholed roads are quite the norm here. The villages here could be from impoverished Uttar Pradesh, judging by the dusty, arid landscape, rundown homes, dark, dank shops, and turbaned men sitting around in groups, their foreheads creased in anxiety over the persistent drought conditions and what that means for their cotton crop. The luckier villages here get water once in three days for 15-odd minutes, others wait up to a week or more. Modi has promised a massive irrigation project for the

region but what looms large for now is acute water scarcity made worse by reduced job prospects and runaway prices of essentials.

For Premjibhai, who works as a daily wager on the cotton fields, no water means almost no money to take home. Vikas (development)? What vikas? Cant you see the conditions here? Modi speaks for the rich and they speak for him. I hope Keshubhai defeats Modi but it wont happen because Modi is too clever.

Industrialised North Gujarat has always boasted a healthy bottom line, and this is reflected in the regions admiration for Modi. Sautaka (hundred per cent) he will win, is a familiar one-liner in these parts. But here too there are strong anti-Modi voices, and as in Saurashtra, he is portrayed as the rich mans Chief Minister without a care for the poor

and the marginalised. At Nugar village in Becharaji, Mehsana, Ganpatbhai, a destitute lower-caste tailor rants against Modi, Write this down, he shouts, charging with his fists at the Sarpanch who tries to shut him up, the darji jaat *tailor caste+ doesnt get plots. Modi is a capitalist surrounded by rich industrialists. And the village headmen are in league with him. As I leave, Ganpatbhai says grumpily, I know Modi will win.

Scary

Why is Modis victory treated as a given? Is it because the Congress in Gujarat is in abject surrender? Or is it because people have been conditioned not to see beyond Modi? The magic Modi works on his audience is to be seen to be believed. Modi was scheduled to address an election meeting on October 9 at 7 p.m. in Ahmedabad. He arrived at 10

p.m. to frenzied crowds asking for more and more. An hour earlier, BJP managers had flung poll memorabilia at them: Modi masks, Modi posters, Modi gloves, Modi Tshirts, bandana, scarves and the works. If the sight of ordinary men turning in an instant into thousands of Modis, waving thousands of Modi posters, was unnerving, the music that pumped them up relating the gatha (story) of Gujarat and Modi was infinitely more scary, macho, muscular and intended to induce fear and admiration.

As the crowds grew restive, the organisers pressed other resources into service: high-ranking party functionaries eulogised Modi, a folk singer compared him to Shivaji, Prithviraj Chauhan and Vivekananda. But the masked men would have none of it. Not you, not you they cried, as a line-up of partymen competed to

paint Modi in hagiographic shades. Modi finally arrived, giving the audience their paisa-wasool moment. He mocked at Sonia and Manmohan Singh, knowing that would elicit the laughs. And he thundered and rallied Pradhan Mantriji, dont you dare trifle with Gujarat knowing that would stir the Gujarati pride, his everever formula for success.

India was Indira and Indira was India. But in Gujarat today, every Gujarati is Modi. Or so you are told by Modi himself. His blog, narendramodi.in, says: In the by lanes of Gujarats towns and cities, on the fields of Gujarat, on the coasts of Gujarat, people [are] taking pride in saying one thing Hoon to Modi No Manas Chu *I am Modis person!+ No BJP here. Only Modi.

As in 2007, so in 2012, perhaps more so this time: Saurashtra is angry, the

RSS is openly backing Keshubhai, who now has his own party even a few seats lost in Saurashtra would be a setback for Modi and there is disaffection within the Gujarat administration. But 58 per cent of Gujarat is urban which is Modis strength. The Modi speed machine overrode all obstacles in 2007. What now? Over to December 20, 2012.

Rural Gujarat is in distress and today

more and more people seem willing to

speak out against Narendra Modi. Yet

even his detractors say he will win December 14, 2012

Time to bring in the professionals


If cricket was but a game, as it once used to be, winning and losing would have been par for the course; you win some, you lose some. Thats been the way of amateur competitive sport for centuries. So why do we get so confused today, feel so miserably betrayed when we lose? That we lose even with the home advantage only adds insult to injury.

The cricket establishment traditionally comprised the Board and the players. The players meekly submitted to the whims of the Board. Not any more. With sponsors, the media and the multitudes of fans now an integral part of the game, the balance of power has shifted in favour of the players. With the backing of their sponsors, and the media, and with the financial security of money in their

bank accounts, players are unwilling to capitulate to the demands of the Board. Now you would think that this would be good for the game but actually it has achieved the exact opposite, especially as the Board sadly remains the same dinosaur that it was. The superstar players of Indian cricketer are beyond the reach of the Board, and now they are unwilling to grant even that simplest of requests that they play dedicated cricket.

While the cricketer himself has changed, and the demands from the game have changed, the player still conveniently hides behind the old faade, that cricket is but a sport where winning and losing is part and parcel of the game. Unfortunately, that defence is no longer available as the amateur for whom the spirit of the game and the laws were written is no longer an amateur. He has now become a professional. He gets paid

millions for his services and unless his role is redefined by the official as one of a professional and he is made answerable for each mistake made, Indian cricket will suffer.

To prove my point, all you need do is see the complete lack of application shown by the Indians in the last few Tests. When a doctor loses a patient his reputation suffers much like the lawyer or any other professional not performing to expected levels. Similarly, the cricket professional can no longer hide behind the old amateur faade. To him losing is no longer an option. The order of the day is simple: lose and make way for someone who will not. The problem is that this has not been spelt out to the players. Our cricket star continues to live in denial and believes, because of his status, his fat bank account, his huge fan following and the support he has from sponsors, that he is beyond

reproach. As long as the Board allows players this leeway, complacency will continue to cripple Indian cricket and we will waste talent and slide lower in our rankings.

On Sachin Tendulkar

Had I to decide on Sachin Tendulkars future, and thank God that decision will never rest with me, I would have, had he been an amateur, allowed him to play till he dropped of old age. But Sachin the professional I would have dropped many moons ago. We need to redefine the position of our players and align our policies and long-term objectives accordingly. Now, who would be in a better position to achieve this rather intricate manoeuvre of redefining Indian sport, an amateur or a professional? An Honorary Board Member or a highly paid CEO? With the introduction of large sums of money into Indian

cricket, with the game itself changing completely in most respects, with the player becoming a highly paid professional, to expect an Honorary Board Member an untrained amateur elected into power by another set of untrained and unpaid amateurs to provide optimum professional support to the game in India is quite amusing if not downright unfair to us cricket lovers. It is time that the whole system was revamped and the amateur, at all levels, was replaced by the professional who is answerable to the people of India. Surely the Board has enough money to pay for the services of such professionals, and surely the pathetic performance of the Indians has proven that its about time we replaced the complacent members of our cricketing fraternity with dedicated professionals.

(Saad bin Jung is a writer and former Ranji opener for Hyderabad.)

Team India cricketers can no longer be called amateur sportsmen, so the cricket board too should not be managed by untrained honorary members December 14, 2012

Voting with your fingertips


Every October, the Election Commission begins the annual exercise of revising the electoral rolls with the following January 1 as the effective date. This October, there was another important news the launching of Aadhar enabled service delivery in Dudu in Rajasthan. The EC and Aadhar can meet and let us see where and how.

The Commission undertakes two types of revisions of electoral rolls summary revision and intensive revision. In the former, responsibility is cast on the potential voter to get himself registered by going to the designated centre. In the latter, doorto-door verification is undertaken by the Commissions officers, the electoral roll is prepared afresh and this is generally done in States where a general election to the Assembly is due the following year. Over the years, computerisation of records and integration of voters photographs in the electoral rolls have helped make for a more error-free roll. They have also helped in undertaking various analyses to gauge the health of the electoral roll.

Change in numbers

It is now possible to quickly analyse by constituency and polling station the increase and decrease in the number of electors; based on the Census-given indicators of population growth, midterm population figures and its agewise distribution, pick out constituencies and polling stations that show a high deviation or, in other words, an abnormal increase or decrease in the number of voters. This helps to focus attention on constituencies and polling stations that need further checks and verification for mistakes in the electoral rolls. To quote an instance, immediately before the 2006 general elections to the Kerala Assembly, after an analysis on the above lines, the CEO of Kerala was able to pick two Assembly constituencies one each in Kasargod and Palghat that showed an abnormal increase in the number of electors. A special check ordered by the Commission, under the supervision of two senior officers,

one from Karnataka and the other from Tamil Nadu, revealed large-scale duplication of names in the polling stations on the Kerala side with polling stations in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu respectively. In the Kasargod Assembly constituency, about 5000 duplicate (bogus) voters were deleted. Incidentally, that figure matched the margin of victory in the previous election!

With computerisation, it is also possible now to compare the electors in different age groups in the rolls with the Census given percentage of population in different age groups. Not surprisingly, it has been found that in most States, there is underenrolment of electors mainly in the age group of 18 to 25, which made the Commission take up a special campaign for enrolling first-time voters. Such analyses, which began on

an all-India basis in November 2008, are now de rigueur .

Establishing identity

While establishing a voters identity at the polling station on the day of election has become easier with the photo electoral roll, problems of missing or left-out voters still remain. The problem is more acute in metropolitan towns because of high level of inter-State, intra-State and intra-town movement of electors. Rural areas too have this problem even though migration of rural labour from one part of the State to another, as also across States, is seasonal. It results in large-scale deletions from the electoral rolls or absentees on the day of polling a temptation to impersonation.

EPIC as proof

The Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) given by the Election Commission as a proof of identity is also used as a proof of address and, so, most electors try to keep it safe. However, many are still under the misconception that the card indicating the name of the constituency and the polling station is not a valid document if the elector shifts to a different Assembly constituency. The EC has time and again reiterated that the card is primarily to identify an elector and therefore can be used in any polling station in India to which the elector has moved, even if it does not show his current address, provided he is enrolled in that place as an elector. A reason why an elector moving to a new area ignores the old EPIC is because it carries the old address; he would rather have a new one incorporating his current address to be able to use it as address proof.

The EC can overcome this problem if (a) it sets up a system by which the poll machinery in the new location recognises the EPIC through a shortened procedure of computerbased search, and effects hassle-free enrolment at the new polling station; (b) there is quick replacement of cards, for a fee, effecting the change only in the address but retaining the unique number.

It is important to make it attractive for electors to retain the old card with the unique number intact while s/he applies for the new one, as that will help EC officials trace the voter to his/her earlier constituency, consequently, to include the voter in the new constituency and delete his or her name from the old place. Simultaneously, the new card carrying the new address of the voter will fulfil

his need for its use as proof of address or residence.

With the advent of the Aadhar card, it is time the Commission moved to incorporating the Aadhar number in the electoral roll. Thereafter, the Commission can move towards a system where changes in the electoral roll can be effected literally with ones fingertips. It will also open up the possibility of voter identification at the polling station using either iris or fingerprint. Since Aadhar, unlike EPIC, will be issued to those below the age of 18 also, bringing on record new voters will also become much easier as Aadhar records can provide the details of all those who complete 18 years as on January 1 of a year, enabling the Commission to bring them on the rolls.

If the Aadhar information is used with proper safeguards, it will also be

possible to avoid the deletion of names of seasonally migrating agricultural labourers, because based on the Aaadhar information and verification using the iris or finger prints, it will be possible for a migrant from, say, Bihar working in Chennai, to be enrolled in his native village of course, with a little help from the election law by way of a change in the definition of the term ordinarily resident. In the normal course, the migrant working in Chennai cannot be enrolled in his native village, even if it is in Tamil Nadu. But if an NRI living in the United States can be incorporated in the electoral roll of his village or town in India, even when he is not ordinarily resident there the facility has been afforded to him by an amendment to the law nothing should prevent a similar concession being extended to a migrant within the country.

Vote transfers

However, at the moment, the law may still stipulate that he can vote only if he is physically present on the date of polling at the place where he is a voter. If e-KYC can effect cash transfers, why not vote transfers? So the day need not be far away when a remote-voting solution emerges to combine the Aadhar information of identity with the facility to wire transfer the vote, making it possible for an elector residing in one part of the country to cast his vote in a polling station in another part where he is a registered voter. Not just to migrant voters, such a facility will be a great boon to armed forces personnel and those of the paramilitary forces and police, who live and serve on duty far away from the places where they are voters and are therefore not able to exercise their franchise, notwithstanding the postal ballot

facility they are entitled to. But for all these, the first step has to be the incorporation of Aadhar number in the electoral roll. One looks forward to the EC undertaking this exercise sooner than later.

(The writer is former Chief Election Commissioner)

The incorporation of the Aadhar number

in the electoral rolls will help to minimise malpractices and enable more people to participate in elections December 14, 2012

World music, but not fusion

It has been a day of remembrance and eulogy. Great masters, musicians young and old, politicians and artistes have offered paeans to Pandit Ravi Shankar, and invariably talked of his contribution to both Indian music and what they call world music, referring possibly to his cross-cultural collaborations with musicians from different cultures. And yet, the maestro himself declared unequivocally that I have never tried to do anything like fusion.

Willing to accept that his collaborative projects with non-Indian music and musicians were in the nature of experiments to explore aural textures and sounds, Ravi Shankar rejected the idea of fusion altogether. He insisted that all his work, collaborative or traditional, is anchored firmly in Indian classical music, or at best, folk melodies and rhythms. In a sense then, this insistence on the Indian-

ness of his musical involvement could possibly be considered an underlying motif in his collaborative works. At first glance, it seemed to convey Shankars willingness to collaborate and an innate desire to familiarise himself with musical systems other than Indian classical music, which he had mastered. But could it also suggest an unwillingness on Shankars part to experiment with other forms and systems of music; a generosity of spirit when it came to giving what he had mastered, but a reluctance when it came to borrowing from another form of music?

An approach always Indian

In an interview conducted by Peter Lavezzoli, author of The Dawn of Indian Music in the West , Pandit Ravi Shankar states of his collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin, Jean-Pierre Louis Rampal, Philip Glass and others,

that you will find that my approach has always been Indian from the beginning. He elaborates by saying that though he had not been formally trained in western classical music, he enjoyed and appreciated it greatly. His exposure to western music made him keen to use non-Indian instruments, played by non-Indian performers if required, in his collaborative projects. But for himself, he rejected outright the idea of blending influences from other musical systems in his work. How does this impact the music of these collaborations?

With Zubin Mehta

For his sitar concerto for the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andr Previn, and later for Raga Mala with Zubin Mehta as conductor, the melodic line remains unabashedly loyal to Hindustani classical music. Raga Mala features as many as 30

ragas , while Concerto for Sitar & Orchestra featured one raga for each of the four movements of the concerto. For the opening movement of Raga Mala , Pandit ji chose Lalit where he plays an alaap -like section with the orchestra responding to phrases and passages played by him in a call and response format. Zubin Mehta explained that although Shankar scored each of the alaap passages he played, he would often stray away from the score, go off on a tangent, then come back, and give me a sign so we could continue, and consequently he would have to wait for him to arrive at a certain note before we could continue. Clearly, the orchestra, led by Mehta is extending itself to accommodate the element of flexible, spontaneous elaboration so integral to Hindustani classical music. Shankar, on the other hand, remains within his familiar parameters of raag music and spontaneous but well-rehearsed

elaboration. The concertos retain their Indian character against the backdrop of the philharmonic orchestra.

And Philip Glass

In Passages , however, the recording project in which Shankar collaborated with Philip Glass, the collaborators exchanged compositions, themes and melodies they had written. A brief examination of two of the tracks from the album will lend the listener an idea of the processes involved in the making of the album. The opening Offering, written by Shankar, is treated by Glass in a manner that steers it away from any immediately audible raag roots. In some ways it seems more like a Philip Glass piece, touched by his minimalist approach. However, Sadhanipa , the four note theme written by Glass, loses it minimalism in the

arrangement scored for it by Shankar. Within a minute of the statement of the theme at the beginning of the track, the arrangement moves towards Pandit ji s trademark lush linear orchestration, marked by a virtual absence of harmony and counterpoint, but replete with sitar, sarod, tabla, mridangam and a host of other instruments, often in the call and response format. The use of paltaas or melodic patterns used in Hindustani classical music are recognisable, as are tabla and mridangam patterns (e.g. from 4.21 to approximately 6.20 in the track) over which corresponding melodic parts are placed. The music of the album is undoubtedly born of a commitment to collaboration, through all of which Shankar does not relinquish for a moment the self-stated Indian anchor to which he tethers his collaborations.

Handling of rhythm

In much of his work for orchestra, film, theatre, dance and vocal compositions, or for the AIR Vadya Vrinda, there are some stylistic preferences that recur frequently. For example, the use of humming in many of his vocal compositions, including Swagatam Suswagatam written for the Asian Games in 1982. ShantiMantra from the album In Celebration (1996) features similar humming passages over which chants are layered.

The handling of rhythm is a significant element in Pandit Ravi Shankars compositions. And a frequent motif in his rhythm scoring is a movement from tabla and mridangam segments to sections that use folk instruments arranged in tight, packed and even crowded sequences. A large rhythm section with a busy arrangement,

playing complex patterns, with tablas responding to mridangams and vice versa, rhythm patterns echoed on the kanjira, folk instruments, bells and cymbals can be heard in many of Shankars compositions. However, a body of work as large and diverse as is the musical legacy of the maestro, would merit an in-depth analysis, and these are only a very few points that a single student of music is able to gather from the periphery.

(Shubha Mudgal is a classical singer.)

Ravi Shankar did not allow his crosscultural collaborations to influence

the Indianness of his own creations, even in those projects December 15, 2012

On the art of creating fiction from reality


The human condition is at the very heart of the work of this years winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Chinese novelist Mo Yan. And his Nobel lecture on December 7 was no exception.

Two hours ago, the wife of the general secretary of the Swedish Academy had a baby girl. It is the beginning of a beautiful story, began Mo Yan. And throughout his talk, entitled Storyteller, his emphasis was on how he told stories, the craft of making a story come alive for the reader.

Many Nobel Prize winners are tempted to go didactic, make grandiloquent statements in the belief that that is what is expected of them.

Not this modest man who has retained his peasant roots and forgotten none of his familys poverty or his own early struggles.

It was his mother, he said, who did the most for him, showing him many kindnesses; and it was to repay her and make her life a little happier and liveable, that he began telling her stories. His mother, he said is the person most on my mind at this moment.

Born into a family of poor farmers in Chinas eastern Shandong Province, Mo Yan was awarded the prize for his hallucinatory realism that mixes folk tales, history and contemporary life. In his speech which was simple, direct and unpretentious qualities that mark his work the author discussed some of his best known works such as Frog , Big Breasts and Wide Hips , Life and Death are Wearing Me Out and of

course The Transparent Carrot , in which the protagonist, a young boy, has to bear immense suffering. He said the essence of his soul was in that boy.

I feel one should be humble in daily life but when it comes to literary creation, then one should follow ones instinct and take control, he said. He alluded to authors like William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez who he said were early influences.

The greatest challenge for any writer, Mo Yan said, was writing novels about difficult social realities. In writing about the darker aspects of society there is a danger that emotions and anger allow politics to suppress literature, he said.

Mo Yans English-language translator Howard Goldblatt said the speech had

diverse elements but was essentially a message from the heart. It was very personal in that it dealt with many of his novels in detail, and all his work as a reflection of his values and ideals, while touching briefly on the controversies surrounding his selection.

Mo Yans Nobel Lecture kept off the usual grandiloquence heard on these occasions and focused on the fascinating craft of storytelling December 15, 2012

The trouble with hurried solutions


The World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) that concluded on December 14 saw much heated debate. Some countries wanted to use the

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to gain intergovernmental control of the World Wide Web. Some saw it as an opportunity to democratise the Internet, by replacing U.S. and corporate domination of Internet policy, with a more intergovernmental process. Others insisted that the Internet must be left alone.

The result is that after many days deliberations, there was no consensus. The amended International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) document has not yet been signed by over 50 countries, of which some like the United States have refused to sign altogether, while others have said that they will need to consult with their national governments before signing.

This article discusses the broader issue under question, which is,

whether ITU is the best forum to solve the cross-border problems that arise in relation to the Internet.

WCIT, ITU and ITRs

The ITU has been creating international policy from the days in which the telegraph was prevalent. Although it is now a United Nations agency, its existence predates the U.N. As technology evolved, forcing the telegraph to give way to the telephone, the ITU created new standards for telephony. It even rechristened itself from International Telegraph Union to International Telecommunications Union.

The ITU performs an essential role in ensuring that multiple states with their varying technology, standards and legal systems, are able to interconnect and co-ordinate. Its

harmonising rules and standards make co-ordination easier and cheaper than having each state come to an agreement with every other state. The ITRs within the ITU framework facilitate co-ordination by creating binding rules for member states.

Some countries proposals for the amendment of the ITRs would have affected content on the Internet substantially. However, after prolonged negotiation, the final draft that was under consideration contained an explicit statement excluding such content from the ITRs purview. This draft also came with a resolution that made reference to states elaborating their Internet related public policy positions in ITU fora, which was a source of controversy.

Some of the initial suggestions like Russias controversial proposal would have given the ITU greater sway over the Internet, permitting it to lay down global standards. These standards may have encouraged countries to inspect data transmitted across the Internet to check whether it is undesirable content raising serious privacy and freedom of speech concerns, especially in countries that do not protect these rights.

The global standards created by the ITU would have permeated to the companies that create the web-based applications that we use, and the resulting law and technological choices would have affected individual users.

Internet governance

The ITU makes its decisions using a traditional model that only seeks consensus between governments, and this is far removed from the way in which the Internet has been governed thus far. Therefore, although expanding the ITUs mandate to the Internet may seem natural to those who have followed its evolution mirroring the evolution of information technology, the ITUs manner of functioning is viewed by many as being at odds with the more multistakeholder and ad hoc system used to build Internet policy.

In the 1990s, John Perry Barlow proclaimed that cyberspace was outside national borders, and questioned the authority and legitimacy of a national governments attempts to govern it. Over the years, it has become clear that national governments can exert jurisdiction in cyberspace: filtering content,

launching surveillance of users, and creating law that impacts citizens behaviour online directly and indirectly.

However, governments exertion of will on Internet users is tempered greatly by the other forces that have a strong influence on the Internet. Userbehaviour and content often depend on the policies of major service providers like Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook.

Key standards and functions like the allocation of domain names and developing of Internet standards are managed by organisations like ICANN and IETF, which are not governmental organisations. Features like user anonymity are based on technological choices on the World Wide Web. Therefore, governments face significant obstacles and counterbalancing power when they

attempt to impose their will on citizens online.

The ITU can weigh this power balance in favour of governments. Many fear that more government power will lead to more censorship, surveillance and stifling of the innovation that is integral to the evolution of Internet. But others support ITU intervention, in the belief that an international inter-governmental regulatory body would be more accountable, and would prevent corporate abuse of power.

Several of the aforementioned corporations, as well as regulatory bodies under question, are headquartered in the United States. There are those who see this as excessive U.S. influence on the Internet, eroding the sovereignty of other states, which have relatively limited influence over what their

citizens can transmit and access online. These people see the ITU as a forum that can democratise Internet Governance, giving states shared influence over the web. However, this shared influence is resisted by those who find that the U.S. influence offers them more leverage and protection for their freedom of speech, than increased influence of countries that threaten this internationally accepted human right.

Powerful arguments in favour of increased ITU involvement include highlighting the dangers of abandoning the Internet to the free market. It is true that markets need some regulation to guard against malfunction and abuse of power by stronger players. However, the significant question is not whether these markets should be regulated, but how they should be regulated. Unfortunately, many of the arguments

that supported expansion of the ITUs mandate failed to establish why the ITU is the best solution to the problems plaguing the Internet, rather than being the most readily available reaction.

Any regulatory intervention must have very clear objectives, and some estimate of its likely impact. The intervention must not be considered in isolation but in contrast with other ways to achieve the same goals. Although some of the serious transnational issues plaguing the Internet need international solutions, the ITU, at least in its current avatar, is not necessarily the best remedy. It also remains unclear exactly what effect ITU intervention would have on the Internet whether it would really offer solutions as intended, or whether it would prove more detrimental than useful, condoning of human rights violations and slowing

the blistering innovation that is characteristic of the Internet.

Lack of consensus

Therefore, some of the initial concerns expressed by the countries that refused to sign the ITRs were legitimate. However, the final ITRs document addressed many of these concerns. The dissent emerged over the insertion of text in the preamble that recognised member states rights to access international telecommunication networks. These rights, being expressed only in the preamble, are not enforceable, even if they express intentions that are unacceptable to some.

The debates at the WCIT made it clear that the world is not yet ready to come to a unified position on this subject. Perhaps the ITUs

continuation in its path towards increasing, and making effective, multi-stakeholder participation will be the unifying factor some day, if it evolves into a forum which everyone sees as sufficiently democratic, transparent and accountable for Internet policy.

(The writer is Assistant Professor of Law at National Law University, Delhi, and a Fellow of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. She attended the WCIT from December 3-14)

The World Conference on International Telecommunication showed that countries are not yet ready to arrive at a consensus on regulation and control of the Internet December 15, 2012

To pass biometric identification, apply Vaseline or Boroplus on fingers overnight


Pilot cash transfer projects taken up in Jharkhand for MGNREGA wages have achieved little success due to a variety of logistical, human and technological problems. A year after the launch of these projects, the problems remain unsolved.

In Ramgarh district, a majority of the beneficiaries are in Dohakatu and Marar panchayats of Ramgarh block. Over 63,000 people enrolled for Aadhaar numbers in the two panchayats in Ramgarh block. Of these, only 2,312 were mapped, i.e., their Aadhaar numbers and their welfare details were linked together. Of 4,791 active job-card holders in

the two panchayats, only 469 received MGNREGA payments through AadharEnabled Cash Transfers (AECTs). Fifty km away in Ratu block in Ranchi, of 8,231 active job-card holders in three panchayats, those paid through AECTs was even lower: 162.

Under strain

Ramgarh District Collector Amitabh Kaushal, who has been awarded the National Aadhaar Governance Award two years in a row, admits that the districts administrative capacity is under strain and banks are not able to cope with the volume of transactions. Of eight banks on the Aadhaar platform, five got added only last month.

In Ramgarh and Ranchi, all accounts have so far been linked with the service area bank, Bank of India.

Initially many people turned up to enrol without their MGNREGA jobcards. So now we have to physically go house to house to find every jobcard holder. In some places there was high enrolment but no BoI branch, in other places a branch existed but little enrolment, says Mr. Kaushal. He rattles off a list of other concerns bank technology upgrading, Internet connectivity in hilly areas, and availability, security and integrity of the cash-carrying Banking Correspondents (BCs).

At the Panchayat Bhavan at Dohakatu where most of the MGNREGA payments recorded were made, the BC, Rajesh Kumar, tries to rush through filling beneficiaries bank forms online he has been asked to submit them by December 15 but runs into many interruptions. The line [power] came back only at noon. Last week two days there was no

power and then there were server problems, he says. But at three p.m., when he begins making payments to those who have queued up to collect wages for land-levelling work done under MGNREGA in November, there is anxiety but palpable excitement too.

Disappointments

Of the seven workers who take turns to scan their fingers, the micro-ATM Mr. Kumar operates recognises four. He pays them between Rs. 300-200 from the cash he withdrew at the bank that morning. For two workers the micro-ATM lists errors repeatedly. One workers account has still not been mapped. Of four pension beneficiaries who turn up, three collect their payments within an hour.

Dashay Bediya, a frail agricultural worker in a white shirt and dhoti, tries eight times, placing different fingers in the hope that one will work and then goes outside the office and scrubs his hands. He returns and tries five times more getting more anxious and disappointed each time. Come after three to four days. Put Vaseline or Boroplus and rub your fingers before you go to sleep, Mr. Kumar instructs before sending him back. And so the question, can the ease of payments at the household or panchayat level not be better achieved through smart cards that require neither real-time Internet connectivity, nor the creation of a massive centralised database like UIDAIs that makes it harder to include those who missed enrolment the first time?

Dohakatu has had such a bevy of bureaucrats, officials and journalists visiting for months that the sarpanch,

Kalawati Devi, now keeps a stock of mineral water bottles at the Panchayat Bhavan. At the site of the second pilot in Ratu block, however, things have not gone so smoothly even during officials visits. A few days before October 2 when the Chief Secretary of Jharkhand was to hand over pensions through AECTs at a function at Tigra panchayat, block officials and BCs tried frantically to make the fingerprints verification go through for 45 beneficiaries. It worked only in the case of nine.

Since October 2, even these nine have not been paid through AECTs even once, their payments still going to their old post-office accounts. The only reason they are still able to get their pensions is that the government kept open the option to withdraw the money at the post-office using their old passbooks.

Half of MGNREGA workers fingerprints do not match. Maybe their fingerprints keep changing? In March I gave pension beneficiaries ID proofs to BoI so they open accounts and give passbooks. Then the bank manager changed in June and bank officials say they lost the documents. I gave the documents again in September but everyone is still waiting for passbooks, says Tulsi Koeri, the BC in Puriyo panchayat, Ranchi.

The BC in nearby Tigra panchayat, Mahmood Alam, says of 383 whose MGNREGA accounts were mapped with Aadhaar since last December, only 102 have got passbooks, making it difficult for them to withdraw wages if they run into authentication or Internet connectivity problems.

Missing wages

Neither Mr. Koeri, nor Mr. Alam has been paid their monthly salary of Rs. 2,100 since they were hired as BCs last November by United Telecoms Limited (UTL) that BoI outsourced the work to. Mr. Kumar, Ramgarhs BC, got paid for four months after the Collector, Mr. Kaushal, intervened in June. Even he has not been paid the last six months.

I spend at least Rs. 400 per month on fuel for this work. In October at the PMs video conference three of us were sent from Ratu, we paid over Rs. 2 lakh those three days. There have been 18-20 functions with officials from Delhi, Bangalore, even America. But if I ask for wages, UTL says if you do not like the work you can quit. Could you ask them about our wages please? asks Mr Koeri.

anumeha.y@thehindu.co.in

The technical glitches that plague cash transfers in Jharkhand may not have arisen with a simpler system that does not need Internet connectivity December 17, 2012

Looking beyond the four walls


TALK TO ME:While initiatives such as giving seed grants for topics, such as Bhojpuri cinema, hardly generated media interest, they existed as vibrant public secrets in online communities and among researchers and students. The file picture shows a promotional campaign of Bhojpuri film Santan. PHOTO: RANJEET KUMAR From this November, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, or

CSDS, in Delhi, where I work, entered its 50th year. That a research centre has actually survived and done reasonably well in the fraught conditions of Indian academia is nothing short of a miracle. Celebrating successful survivors is a wonderful thing, but a larger challenge is to reflect on the changing nature of the social science research centre.

In the early years, research centres were seen as places where academics would be shielded from the strains of university life. The primary focus in the 1960s and the 1970s was on the classic social sciences: economics, sociology and politics. State support was routed through the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Research centres mainly specialised in one discipline economics, sociology or politics. The CSDS itself was a centre for politics in the 1960s, influenced by American models of political science.

In media and governmental discourse the single discipline research centre has a continuing attraction; it makes core competence easy to identify, communicate and fund. This approach misses out important transformations that have taken place in the past few decades.

Specialisation?

A social science research centre based on a dominant discipline makes little sense today. Institutions named as social science institutions, such as the CSDS and the Kolkata-based Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS) are often as well known for outstanding research in the humanities. In the CSDS, initially conceived as a centre for politics, currently half the faculty has a humanities background, and the director is a philosopher. New areas include history, anthropology, cultural

studies, urbanism, media and film studies, non-western and Indic philosophies, Indian languages, political and social theory. Like all changes that emerge from within, these shifts have taken time, in fact over 30 years. From the 1980s, Sudhir Kakkars Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , Shiv Visvanathans Organising for Science and Ashis Nandys The Intimate Enemy opened new domains of research in India. All this was done quietly, without any of the noisy quarrels that periodically overtake mainstream disciplines. It also made possible innovations in existing fields, so that by the late 1990s the new Lokniti programme could bring fresh questions to the field of survey analysis and political study. By 2000, a film historian colleague, three filmmaker-artists and I set up a new CSDS programme called Sarai, focusing on media and urban life: a huge step for a classically modelled research centre, and

perhaps only possible because of the experimental outlook that the CSDS had nurtured over the years.

Interventions visible, invisible

Today, live television powerfully and continuously produces a permanent audience, and an incessant demand for academic expertise. Along with political life, Indian academic life has been fundamentally transformed by television. Of course, there are less visible publics, and their impact is arguably more durable and fundamental to the transformations of ideas. For example, in the CSDS, the Emergency and the post-1977 movements upset older models of research by interacting with peoples movements and popular perception, Rajni Kothari and D.L. Sheths writings quickly responded to this public. After

2000, the Centres Sarai programme gave generous seed grants for topics such as Dalit histories, graphic novels, pulp fiction, Bhojpuri cinema, surveillance, free software, nonfiction writings of working class lives, Dastangoi performance traditions. Many of these ideas would have been entirely stifled by our infamous educational and cultural bureaucracies. A staggering 400 projects were funded by this fellowship programme, all with modest sums of money that in total would struggle to equal a large government research project. The grant programme supported some well known names in our recent academic and cultural life: Sharmila Rege, Sarnath Banerjee, Basharat Peer, Aman Sethi, Mahmood Farooqui, to name a few. In recent years, the CSDS initiated a unique summer teaching programme for postgraduate students called Researching the Contemporary that

cut across disciplines and themes. In February 2013, the CSDS Indian Languages programme is launching a research journal in Hindi, the first of its kind. None of these initiatives, including Sarais widely circulated fellowship programme, generated a single media story; all of them have existed as vibrant public secrets in online communities, and amongst researchers, practitioners and students of diverse backgrounds.

These interventions raise questions about the public life of research. Instead of being hubs of disciplinary expertise, research centres can be reimagined as seeding and hosting experimental thought. The public emerges through a more dynamic interactive process, connecting the academy to knowledge formations outside, and disturbing the complacency of disciplines. There has been a great expansion of creative

publics in the past decade. Artists, writers, filmmakers, independent thinkers, software programmers have no place to go for critical reflection, the only residencies and fellowships for this new public are outside the country. Research centres and universities must have the imagination to engage these new formations; this will not come from Indian private enterprise.

Archival initiatives

The final point is about the public archive of research. The CSSS Kolkata has built a pioneering visual culture archive, Bangalores Centre for the Study of Culture and Societys media archive is widely used by students and researchers. Archival initiatives in research centres have grown in the last decade. The Sarai fellowship programme encouraged researchers to share their research material in a

public archive, an ethical imperative in the ever-expanding and expropriating proprietary environment of our time. Intellectual property regimes pose a serious challenge to research and education, dramatised by the recent private publisher-initiated case in Delhi University. A commitment to sharing and making publicly funded research freely available must enter academic discourse in all fields.

We need a radical re-imagination of the design of research centres today. They must be based on located experiments and address the creativity and intellectual drive of contemporary publics, rather than proclaim grand designs through media hyperbole. The former path is slow, less visible, but more durable.

(Ravi Sundaram is a Senior Fellow at CSDS. His views are personal.)

Research centres must engage with creative minds in the outside world December 17, 2012

At the receiving end of fanaticism


Pakistans Shias are so regularly killed in targeted attacks that counting the numbers who were thus killed in 2012 is an uphill task. But just to give an idea, even before the start of the Muharram month, when anti-Shia violence is usually routinely anticipated and accepted as a given, the numbers killed had crossed 389 the number of people the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says died in sectarian violence in 2011.

This time, the terrorists were emboldened enough to announce their intent. Ahead of Muharram, a number of Shias received text messages saying Kill, Kill Shias. Sure enough, the self-appointed deciders of who is or is not a Muslim struck, killing 23 in two separate bomb blasts early on in the Muharram month.

Relentless targeting

Through the year, terrorists have been relentless in going after Shias; be it in Parachinar along the PakistanAfghanistan border, Gilgit-Baltistan, Quetta, Karachi or the garrison town of Rawalpindi. The clinical manner in which the terrorists have been going about their mission has been chilling, generating enough disquiet among the members of the community to take to the streets on December 8 outside the United

Nations headquarters in New York protesting the genocide in Pakistan.

Of all Shias, the Hazaras are sitting ducks, their distinctive Mongloid features marking them out. They are pulled out of buses and shot down often enough to force many to leave the country. In all other Shia killings too except the attacks on Muharram processions they are identified by the killers from among large groups of people, by the selfflagellation scars acquired by Shia men during the Muharram mourning rituals.

The video footage of one such attack on the Karakoram Highway earlier this year shows a convoy of buses being stopped by gun-toting terrorists. Unhurriedly, the terrorists dressed in Army fatigues ask the passengers to furnish their national identity cards to single out those with Shia names.

The grainy video does not clearly show this but some accounts of the attack claim the passengers were made to recite a particular prayer which Shias say differently. Thereafter, the kameez (shirts) of the men were lifted to check for selfflagellation marks. Their Shia identity established, they were lined up and killed amid chants of kafir, kafir; Shia kafir (infidels, infidels; Shia are infidels). In this particular attack, three Sunni men were also killed for trying to defend the Shias.

More chilling than the actual violence is the general acceptance of such incidents. Apart from the momentary media coverage, perfunctory editorials and outpouring of angst on various social media platforms when an incident like this happens, not much national debate ever takes place over Shia killings. But it may not help

very much either, going by the zero difference that the national debate over Malalas shooting has made.

Unlike other persecuted communities, the Shias who constitute about 20 per cent of the population are not down and out socially or politically. The President, Chairman of Senate and National Assembly Speaker three constitutional office-holders in the country are Shias but they seldom speak up for the community for fear of losing political clout or support of non-Shias. Similar apathy exists in the media [where many honchos are Shias]. Many of my colleagues do not speak about sectarian issues for fear of being branded fundamentalists/extremists, rues Baqir Sajjad Syed of Dawn newspaper.

According to Islamic Research Institute Director-General Khalid

Masud, Shias have traditionally been leading contributors to the intellectual discourse among the subcontinents Muslims. Yet, a recent Pew Research Centre study showed that 50 per cent of Pakistanis do not accept Shias as Muslims.

Though Shia-Sunni differences are not new to the subcontinent, Pakistans penchant for allowing geo-politics to be played out in its backyard has exacerbated the tensions; particularly since the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that quickly followed.

Iran Revolution

While the Iranian Revolution, according to historian Tahir Kamran, seemingly emboldened Pakistans Shias who abandoned the Shia tradition of political quietism, the

Afghan jihad against the Soviets had the Saudis bankroll the then military ruler Zia-ul Haqs Islamisation project which encouraged the Sunnification of Pakistan.

Not only awakened but emboldened in the wake of the Revolutions success in Iran, the Shia were public and vociferous in putting forward demands for rights and representation, trusting in Khomeinis support, which he quite lavishly extended to them. Former Foreign Minister of Pakistan Agha Shahi revealed: Khomeni once sent a message to Zia-ul Haq, telling him that if he mistreated the Shia, he [Khomeni] would do to him what he had done to the Shah, Mr. Kamran wrote in an essay in the publication Sectarian Militancy in Pakistan .

The Saudi-backed effort to turn Pakistan into not just a Sunni country but a Deobandi Sunni stream that, too, of the puritanical Wahabbi-Salafi order clashed directly with this Shia assertiveness in Pakistan. An early point of clash arose when Zia made it compulsory for all Muslims to pay zakat (a tax to support charity) to the state.

Shia jurisprudence regards this as a personal matter and a very large number of Shias organised to demand that they be excluded This Shia movement was given some support by Iran While the Shias won that round , a line had been drawn that has continued to become darker and bloodier with time, wrote PakistaniAmerican writer Omar Ali in an article on Shias and their future in Pakistan.

Saudi-backed Sunnification

A native of Jhang the hub of antiShia terror networks like Sipah-eSahaba (SSP) and its breakaway Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) Prof. Masud maintains that the anti-Shia rhetoric began much earlier as he recalls hate literature against Shias being circulated from the 1950s in this central Punjab district. So the ground was fertile for Saudi-backed Sunnification and this made Shias launch their own militant outfit, clearly sharpening the divide.

Technically banned, the SSP and the LeJ have a free run with the former functioning under the new name, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ). The SSP which has contested elections has a vote bank and the ASWJ claimed that the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) won the recent by-elections in Punjab with its help. Such alliances debilitate

political parties ability to adopt zero tolerance towards terrorism.

All this notwithstanding, the anti-Shia rhetoric has till date not percolated into the curriculum Islamised under Zia. In fact, many in the Pakistani middle class still have no clear idea of where the anti-Shia polemic is coming from. It was not part of our education. While Shias were a minority sect, their version of Karbala and the martyrdom of Husain was accepted , writes Mr. Ali adding that Saudi Wahhabis have a well-developed anti-Shia polemic that brands Shias as heretics.

While SSP & Co want Shias to be declared non-Muslims like the Ahmadis, Dr. Masud maintains this is unlikely as the Shia community is much larger than the Ahmadis. Ironically, Shia parliamentarians had supported the law against Ahmadis and today their community faces a

similar threat a stark reminder of the eternal truth in Martin Neimollers Holocaust poem First they came

As chilling as the killing of Shias by

Pakistani terrorists, who want them

to be declared non-Muslims, is the

general acceptance violence December 17, 2012

of

sectarian

Between Delhi and the deep blue ocean

The Indian Ocean has been receiving a fair amount of, admittedly long

overdue, attention in recent weeks, with Indian Navy chief D.K. Joshi surprisingly willing to protect Indias fair name and interests in the South China Sea. But with the waters far more agitated in Indias immediate vicinity, in and around the Maldives, the question that remains is: how far Delhi is prepared to go to protect its reputation in a region it has often asserted it is the leader of?

By December 8 morning, armed with justification by the Singapore Supreme Court, the Maldivian government of Mohamed Waheed had revoked the 25-year licence of the Indian infrastructure company GMR, to build and operate a new airport in the Maldivian capital, Male.

Indias External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid sought to distance the impact of the cancellation of the contract from the larger bilateral

relationship, arguing that it was the prerogative of the sovereign Maldivian government to do what it wanted, and implying that there was a limit to which New Delhi could defend a commercial enterprise if it got into trouble, even if it were Indian.

Mr. Khurshids impeccable, if somewhat helpless, remarks are no doubt lifted straight from the best textbooks on diplomacy. More to the point, at this late stage in the dispute, there was little he could have done without exacerbating the damage already caused to the relationship. The Maldives is so polarised today, between the self-avowedly pro-India former President Mohamed Nasheed and the man who replaced him in Februarys bloodless coup, current President Waheed, that there is no way India can appear to take everyone along without taking sides.

Irrespective of isms, friendships

For some time now Indias diplomatic practice has been geared towards the promotion of a tranquil neighbourhood, where relationships with rulers in those countries must be maintained irrespective of ideology or isms or personal friendships.

National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon eloquently put forward this premise while delivering the Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture in August 2011, when he veritably laid out a road map for the exercise of power. Actively working towards a peaceful periphery was on top of that list, he said, pointing out that Indias several challenges of poverty and disease and illiteracy were best dealt with by a nation undistracted by problems on its borders.

Then he added, prophetically: To what extent we can become a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and our neighbourhood would depend on how it contributes to Indias own transformation.

So when the Maldives underwent its own coup in February this year the Maldivian National Defence Forces moved to arrest Mr. Nasheed, who agreed to hand over power hoping to avoid a bloodbath India recognised the new Waheed government within 24 hours. The Americans and the Chinese quickly followed suit.

China factor

New Delhi argued that the Maldives was far too important to have been left in a power vacuum, implying that the Chinese, Indias greatest rival,

would have moved in to take Indias place if it had not acted immediately. Over time, New Delhi would acknowledge that Mr. Nasheed had, indeed, contributed enormously to securing Indias maritime borders by allowing a series of Indian radars to be installed on several Maldivian atolls and islands a move former Maldivian President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom had resisted forever that were also close to Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean on which the Americans have had a base for decades. Most importantly, as the Chinese moved to expand their sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean, in Sri Lanka and the Seychelles as well as in the Maldives, India was able to gather a much better idea of what they were now doing.

Clearly, the swift recognition of Mr. Waheeds government was motivated by the yearning for a peaceful

periphery. Mr. Gayooms daughter, Dunya, was made a junior minister in Mr. Waheeds government, in implicit recognition of the power and influence her father continued to wield in Maldivian politics. And when he reached a town in South India two months ago, accompanying his wife for health treatment, Mr. Gayoom was invited to meet the powers-thatbe in Delhi in the hope that he would continue to push for the restoration of stability in the Maldives.

New Delhi thought it knew Mr. Gayoom; after all in 1988, when Sri Lankan terrorists had tried to overthrow the former leader, former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had ordered armed help for the Maldivian leader. Now in 2012, Delhi sought to play all sides Mr. Waheed, Mr. Gayoom as well as Mr. Nasheed. The latter was hosted in the Indian capital a couple of months ago

(at the same time as Bangladesh Opposition leader and former Bangladesh President Gen. H.M. Ershad), while Mr. Menon received Mr. Nasheeds special adviser Ibrahim Zaki a couple of weeks ago.

Depending on whose side youre on in this complicated Maldivian saga, the story unfolds accordingly. Mr. Waheeds men say that Mr. Zaki was arrested on a faraway island some weeks ago because he was doing drugs a bottle of hash oil was found on his person.

In his defence, Mr. Zaki told this reporter that he had travelled to this faraway island along with other Opposition Maldivian politicians to plot Mr. Waheeds ouster. They had been in serious discussions all night on the beach, Mr. Zaki said, when Mr. Waheeds security forces emerged from the water carrying truncheons

and proceeded to beat everyone up badly.

Mr. Zaki is believed to have shown his bruises to Mr. Menon in Delhi, who had him sent to a local Delhi doctor for treatment.

Soon enough, the GMR contract had become the perfect instrument for Mr. Waheed to attack Mr. Nasheed, under whose dispensation the $511 million contract had been awarded to the Indian infrastructure major in 2010. In his meeting with GMR president on December 7, Mr. Waheed insisted that no outside influence had played a role in the cancellation of the contract, implying that the Chinese had nothing to do with the decision.

Mr. Waheeds coalition partner, the radical Islamic Adhaalath party,

obviously thought otherwise. Last week a party spokesperson tweeted, We would rather give the airport contract to our friends in China, who now make the majority of our tourist population...With China already based in (the Seychelles), the addition of Maldives as a friend would be a massive blow to future Indian power in this region. India would lose her reliance on our strategic location and global trade routes. We will seek the assistance of China in this endeavour, the Adhaalath spokesperson said.

Official position

The official Indian position on the airport fiasco is that the legal process must be pursued to its logical conclusion. The Maldivian attorney general has already stated that compensation would amount to $700 million. Mr. Waheeds government has said it will not pay a dime, but

allow GMR three weeks grace period to leave the country.

As India loses this latest battle for influence in the Indian Ocean, it might be a good time for New Delhi to think long and hard whether it can paint all its neighbours, and the Maldives in particular, with the same brush. Whether or not Mr. Nasheed can be trusted, why Mr. Gayoom is trying to make a comeback and whether Mr. Waheed will be a credible candidate in the presidential elections in mid2013 through his adroit challenging of India.

Above all, the biggest question remains: is this really Indias ocean?

(Jyoti Malhotra is a Delhi-based journalist.)

After the GMR fiasco in the Maldives, India needs to engage its neighbours in

a mutually beneficial way December 18, 2012

Rising judicial stature, sinking parliamentary authority


Few things define us like our democracy. The image of a slow moving but functional, even vibrant democracy that shares western values of pluralism, freedom and republicanism, is an image fervently cultivated within India and assiduously hard-sold on the world stage. Indeed, it is what distinguishes India from China and Pakistan it explains Indian sluggishness when

compared with Chinese alacrity and Indian stability when compared to Pakistani self-destruction. Yet, behind this well crafted story of Indias incredible democracy, lies the disconcerting truth of a democratic misalignment. Consider these: in its Winter session last year, the 15th Lok Sabha utilised only 70 per cent of the available time, the least in the last 25 years. Only 10 per cent of all starred questions were actually answered orally in both Houses and despite a total of 10 hours having being allotted for Private Members Bills over four weeks, no time was actually spent on them on account repeated disruptions. In its Budget Session last year, 40 per cent of all parliamentary time was lost to discussions and even then, only 30 per cent of the remaining time was spent on legislative issues. Twenty-seven per cent of all Bills passed by Parliament in 2009 were discussed for less than five minutes, 63 per cent of total

parliamentary time was spent on nonlegislative issues and the government resorted to law-making by ordinance nine times, the second highest in the past decade. In 2010, Parliament recorded its worst performance in the Winter Session in the last 25 years. By 2011, the record had already been broken.

Supreme Courts role

As repeated disruptions prevented Parliament from doing any worthwhile business on the first few days of its ongoing winter session, our elected representatives would do well to consider the ramifications of a dysfunctional Parliament. Since 1980, the Supreme Court, easily one of the most powerful apex courts in the world, has played an increasingly activist role constitutionalising second generation socio-economic rights, ushering in good governance,

political reforms such as asset disclosures by politicians and, even directing how national resources may be disbursed. In the last two decades, the Supreme Courts contribution to legislative policy is staggering. The right to food, to housing, to education and to information have all foreshadowed much-belated parliamentary legislation. Nothing demonstrates this better than the Supreme Court decision in the Vishaka case. In 1997, appalled as much by the crime as by the total absence of parliamentary legislation on the subject, the Supreme Court took up the case involving the gang-rape of a social worker at her place of work. Faced with evidence of increasing and unchecked workplace harassment, the Supreme Court used the case as an opportunity to seek government accountability on the subject. The absence of a law, the worsening law and order situation and womens right to work were all brought into sharp

focus, as the courtroom transformed into a dialogic forum for a judgemoderated debate between the citizen and the government. While the case eventually ended with Supreme Court guidelines that were to hold the field until enactment of a parliamentary law, in becoming a forum for debate, the Court fulfilled a role constitutionally reserved for the Parliament floor. And in drafting, what it hoped would be interim guidelines, the Court plugged another democratic vacuum that of responsive lawmaking. One-and-a-half decades later, the guidelines are yet to be replaced by enacted law.

What is wrong

The Vishaka episode highlights four crucial aspects of what is wrong with Indian democracy: First, in exercising what noted Harvard law-professor, Mark V. Tushnet refers to as dialogic

judicial review, the Supreme Court has effected a role reversal which has important repercussions on the institutional checks and balances of our democracy. If the Lok Sabha Speaker is going to be confined to repeatedly adjourning Parliament, while the Chief Justice originates and moderates important constitutional and policy debates, judicial stature is bound to rise at the cost of parliamentary authority. That the common man turns to an unelected judge as opposed to his elected MP, points to a power-realignment in our democracy which has dangerous manifestations. Riding this wave of popular support for instance, the Supreme Court has secured for itself, the power of self-appointment, so that judges to Indias constitutional courts are appointed by sitting judges, with little role for the elected branches of government. That the government would not question the Courts decision, despite the

considerable separation of power challenges that the power of selfappointment raises, emphasises how vulnerable the elected branches feel in taking on judges before a jury of the very constituents they represent.

Second, the quality of judge-made law and judge-moderated debate is inherently suspect. Well intentioned though they may be, courts suffer from institutional incompetence in the sphere of law-making. Judges are not trained to draft law. By their nature, judicial decisions are reactive they do justice in the limited set of facts presented before the Court and are intended to right previous wrongs. Good legislation on the other hand, is proactive by nature. It seeks to correct future mischief and is rarely limited to a particular set of facts. Therefore, judicial decisions that double up as laws typically lack the foresight, range and depth that a well-enacted

parliamentary law would bring to the table. Moreover, while parliamentary debate guarantees participation across political spectra, courtroom trials neither incorporate that breadth and freedom nor provide representation for every political viewpoint.

Third, if Supreme Court decisions catalyse parliamentary law-making and if both the Supreme Court and Parliament are suffering from institutional backlogs, the wheels of Indian democracy are turning very slowly indeed. If the Supreme Court docket has a 10-year backlog, parliamentary inertia seems to add another 15 to that number. Roughly translated, it would imply that our elected institutions are well behind the time curve. Unresponsive democracy is really no democracy at all.

Finally, in as much as it empowers an unelected judge to review laws made by elected representatives, a judicial decision is intrinsically countermajoritarian and anti-democratic. This counter-majoritarian nature of judicial power however, is also considered one of its greatest strengths, when exercised within limits. But when executive and legislative visions are foisted on the elected branches, without any of the rigorous opposition and public debate that characterise the forging of prudent policy, we allow counter-majoritarian decisions to substitute for majoritarian ones, so that a set of unelected individuals begin to set the agenda for elected debate.

Together, what these challenges cumulatively represent is a problem of free riding. Because essential parliamentary functions are being at least partially fulfilled by courts, there

is an impetus to use parliamentary sessions for politicking instead of fulfilling the task of responsive law making and debate. Where the need for responsive law-making is most urgent, Parliament has been content to either enact law with little or no debate or to short-circuit the process altogether by validating governmental ordinances. As another round of politicking threatens to adjourn democracy this winter, its potential to cause lasting constitutional damage merits introspection.

(Jeet H. Shroff is pursuing a Masters degree at Harvard Law School.)

With repeated disruptions crippling Parliament, and its essential functions being partially fulfilled by courts, the potential to cause lasting

constitutional damage merits deeper introspection December 18, 2012

The death of a small boy


Picture a small boy facing two adult men. They are furious over something they suspect he has done, so they start hitting him. They feel they have the authority to do so because they are teachers. The boy is absolutely helpless. It hardly matters for this picture whether he is upper caste or Dalit or tribal. It is his isolation that matters in the moment of his helplessness. In that moment, he stands beyond the reach of all institutional mechanisms set up to protect him from the violent fate that awaits him. Neither the United Nations convention on child rights nor the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) can rescue him in that moment. In any

case, the state cannot be of much help, for it is the state under whose authority and supervision the two adults beating him mercilessly have been selected and appointed to serve as teachers. It hardly matters whether they are serving in a government or a private school, for both kinds of schools draw the legitimacy of their access to the childs mind and body from the powers entrusted to the state.

Brutal thrashing

The two adults kept thrashing the boy till he collapsed. His parents took him to a hospital in a neighbouring city. The doctors found that his backbone had been smashed. The treatment they suggested was too expensive, so the parents took the boy to a hospital in another city. There, the boy was declared dead. From the report that has appeared in the press ( The Hindu

, December 7), it seems the teachers got angry when the boy informed them that the school bucket had broken, and they suspected he had broken it. This incident occurred in a government school in Betul (Madhya Pradesh). One of the teachers has been arrested, and perhaps the other one will also be taken into police custody soon. The case against them will undoubtedly proceed. Perhaps NCPCR will back it after its own inquiry. Due procedures will be followed, and the law, as they say, will take its own course. While the case starts its journey along that familiar course, we can ask at least one fresh question, though it is not immediately evident how exactly it should be formulated.

As a crime, corporal punishment in school offers little scope for any doubt about the culprit. The newly granted Right to Education (RTE) seeks to ban

corporal punishment, meaning thereby that a teacher cannot use it as a means of disciplining a child. In a case where corporal punishment has led to injury or death, the teachers culpability is self-evident. All that a legal inquiry needs to establish is that the punishment was actually given, and that it is this punishment that led to serious injury or death. In the classroom, the teacher alone has authoritative access to the childs body, and this access derives from the teachers being in charge of the childs mind. As an adult, the teacher gets this physical access on account of the role in which he or she is placed. Let us ask therefore: Who places the teacher in this role? Such a question will allow us to go deeper in our appreciation of culpability for the crime suffered by the child.

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the public profile

and status of primary school teachers. While the RTE has improved childrens status and the governments image, the person responsible for the childs wellbeing and development at school remains a poor, lowly civil servant. In the specific case of Madhya Pradesh, teachers economic and social status has undergone a major change as a result of prolonged administrative manoeuvres. It has little to do with shifts in political power and ideology. A series of so-called policy reforms initiated during the Congress regime (1993-2003) has been sustained by the BJP which rules the State at present. The history of change in teachers lives is intertwined with the larger policy and programme scenario at the national level.

Low-paid breed

During the 1990s, the government chose to restructure the system of

education by allowing local groups to start primary schools and by delegating the task of recruiting teachers to the village panchayat. Cadre management policies were changed to accommodate different types of contractual, para appointments. The state decided to treat its existing pool of teachers as a dying cadre, implying that no new appointments would be made at the older scales. New teachers were given nominal training and pittance in the name of emoluments. As the demand for regularising these contractual appointees acquired political profitability, new pay scales were created that were radically lower than the older ones. While other north Indian States acknowledged that there were problems with para-teachers, Madhya Pradesh instead recognised them as full-fledged teachers. Initially, it was alone in this remarkable feat of governance; of late Bihar has emulated it, by replacing

existing teachers as they retire with this new, low-paid breed.

Kaun banega teacher?

This brief introduction to a complex history should suffice to indicate that, over the last two decades, a primary school teachers job has lost what little covetability it had acquired since independence. It is no more an attractive career for someone who has modest financial ambition and the urge to work with children, together with the aptitude to do so. The selection procedure does not involve the search for necessary attributes and talent, as it is based entirely on credentials which indicate precious little about the person and his or her capacities. Training courses that make a person eligible for recruitment have scant academic or practical worth in terms of the experience they provide. A vast majority of institutions licensed

to offer this training are bogus. A commission chaired by Justice J.S. Verma, which was appointed by the Supreme Court, found that only 44 out of the 300 institutions in Maharashtra providing a Diploma in Education were qualified to run the course. Such instances can be found in other States as well. The minimum qualification to enter this 2-year diploma course for primary level teaching is Class XII.

Apparently, no emotional or intellectual maturity is demanded of the person who will look after and teach 6 to 11 year olds. In the name of training, young people are required to go through pathetic rituals, in many cases by means of correspondence or distance teaching. Among the courses available for elementary school teacher training, there is just one exception that offers depth of academic and practical experience.

This is the 4-year Bachelor of Elementary Education (B.El.Ed.) course offered in eight colleges of Delhi University. This remarkable programme deserves expansion and replication, but instead, Delhi University is reportedly planning to start a 2-year diploma kind of course to produce primary school teachers. I wish the university had noticed that such a short duration is just not sufficient to enable trainees to link theory with practice, let alone question their own beliefs and values.

Let us now return to the Betul story. When the legal machinery receives all the evidence it needs to decide culpability in the case of the boy who has died, can we hope that the states responsibility will also be examined? His teachers who brutally hit him got access to his body because they were recruited to serve as teachers. The court must ask on what grounds did

the state satisfy itself that such persons could look after the welfare and rights of a small boy. The court must also ask what kind of professional training they were given to perform their role as teachers. Their criminal failure to serve as teachers deserves an explanation. A major part of that explanation lies in the casual approach that the state as the custodian of children and the nations human resource has adopted towards the job of teaching the young. This approach is incompatible with the lofty ideals of the RTE and the Constitution.

(The writer is Professor of Education at Delhi University and a former Director of NCERT.)

The Betul tragedy shows that the

state does not consider emotional

or intellectual maturity important

in a person who teaches children December 18, 2012

Old roads, new highways


The significance of Northeast India as a bridgehead between India and Southeast Asia is being increasingly realised by policymakers in New Delhi. For a long time, the security dimension dominated Indian thinking. As a result, Northeast India was viewed as a liability and a burden. However, in the context of Indias Look East policy, there is increasing realisation that if infrastructure development takes place, Northeast India could become a point of convergence among the dynamic

economies of Southern China, Southeast Asia and India. During Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs visit to Myanmar in May 2012, memoranda of understanding were signed not only to enhance border development, but also to increase connectivity between the two countries and through Myanmar with Thailand and the Indo-Chinese states.

Northeast India Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura shares land borders with China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal. It accounts for 7.6 per cent of the area and 3.6 per cent of Indias population. However, it makes up for 40 per cent of Indias land borders with neighbouring countries.

Traumatic transition

The inter-state boundaries of many Asian countries, including Northeast India, are colonial creations. Instead of uniting people who speak the same language, follow the same religion and belong to the same ethnicity, they tend to divide them. Mizos, Nagas, Meiteis are all divided between India and Myanmar. And in times of turmoil, they find sanctuary and support from kinsmen across borders.

After independence, guided mainly by security considerations, New Delhi began to push the administrative machinery to the borders. The transition, as B.G. Verghese, has put it, was not without trauma civil wars, insurgency, conflicting nationalisms, refugee movements, gun running, smuggling, narcotics, AIDS, trafficking in women.

I became conscious of the connectivity among peoples when I

visited the University of Manipur a few years ago. I met a Naga student who had come from Myanmar for higher education. I asked him naively, was it difficult for you to get a student visa from the Indian Embassy in Rangoon? The student started to laugh. When I asked him why he was laughing, he replied, Sir, I just cross the mountains and come to the University. During the vacation, I cross the mountains and return home. The higher education system in Northeast India is relatively more developed than the northwestern part of Myanmar. The universities in Northeast India should liberalise admission rules and institute scholarships for Myanmarese students. Such a gesture will be heartily welcomed by the people on the other side of the border.

Exploitation of connectivity among peoples could constitute the strong

building blocks of regional cooperation. It took a long time for New Delhi to realise this simple truth. After much hesitation, an agreement was signed in 1994 to permit border trade; the Moreh-Tamu point in Manipur was operationalised in April 1995. A second trade point was opened in Champai-Rhi in Mizoram in 2004. Another trading point, through Nagaland, will come into force soon. According to government statistics, in 2011 the border trade was worth $12.8 million. This figure does not convey the truth as unofficial trade continues in a big way. At an international seminar, Ambassador Ranjit Gupta mentioned that annual border trade is worth $750 million.

Lost opportunities energy

Unfortunately there is a big hiatus between Indian intentions and realities. Former Foreign Secretary

Shyam Saran has given two illustrations as to how the Government of India has failed to exploit the opportunities to its advantage. After the Asian economic crisis of 1997, India had a good opportunity to build relations with Myanmar in the field of gas exploration.

To quote Shyam Saran, This was a window of opportunity for energy starved India. Despite persistent efforts with our own Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and the public sector giants, ONGC, Indian Oil and GAIL, these opportunities were ignored and we have now joined the ranks of rejected suitors. The second relates to hydroelectric projects in the Chindwin river, near the MyanmarNagaland border. The entire generated power could be transferred to India. General Than Shwe was very keen that India should undertake the

project. To quote Shyam Saran again, It was an uphill task getting our own government to think strategically and pursue the project expeditiously. Flimsy reasons were put forward like Northeast India was surplus in power. He concludes, It appears that after much dilly-dallying the Thamanthi project is finally poised to take-off. I certainly hope so. The lesson is clear. If we do not avail of the opportunities provided for bilateral and regional cooperation, Indias image is likely to nosedive.

If Northeast India is to become an economic hub and break out of its landlocked isolation, and fruitfully engage in dynamic interaction with its eastern and northern neighbours, it is essential that it should become an area of peace and stability. This presupposes reconciliation among various ethnic groups and between ethnic groups and the government.

This requires an imaginative approach and the ushering in of a political system where multiple identities can coexist harmoniously. The same holds true of Myanmar.

Friendship between peoples

If Myanmar is going to be at war with itself, Indian attempts to forge links with Southeast Asia through Myanmar will be a non-starter. The prerequisite for cordial relations is for Myanmar to become a vibrant democracy. During her recent visit to India, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi declared, I was saddened to feel that we had drawn away from India, or rather India has drawn away from us, during our very difficult days, but I always had faith in the lasting friendship between our two peoples. She laid emphasis on friendship between peoples, not friendship between governments, because, she

added, governments come and go, and that is what democracy is all about.

(Dr. V. Suryanarayan is senior professor (retired) in the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras, Chennai.)

A peaceful and stable northeast, and in turn Myanmar, is the key to India forging links with the dynamic economies of the region December 19, 2012

Redrawing Indias disease map


The insights from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 published recently by The Lancet , underscore significant public health challenges before India. The headline message

from the research data is that public health policy must, in coming years, be directed as much towards noncommunicable diseases as infectious ones. There is considerable scope to build on the GBD analysis by adopting sound epidemiological approaches at the national level.

The emphasis of the GBD is on wellknown risk factors such as tobacco use, alcohol consumption, deficient diet and exposure to air pollutants, all of which display unhealthy trends in the country.

Hypertension is third on the risk chart based on attributable disease burden in 2010. But household air pollution caused primarily by burning unclean fuels is right at the top. Metabolic disorders and other traditional concerns such as infectious diseases, underweight children and dietary deficiency also rank high. Diabetes, a

major issue in India, requires a lot more epidemiological surveillance work in order to present strong conclusions.

Again, there is a rise in the number of people dying in road traffic accidents globally a rise of almost 50 per cent over a 20-year period and the trend is equally true for India. Without strong intervention, that risk factor also continues to grow.

If national public health policy is to be turned around, the country has to embark on a mission to turn tobacco fields into fruit orchards, as one expert puts it. That is necessary because tobacco use, including second-hand smoke, is linked to the rising incidence of various cancers and absence of sufficient fruit in the diet and consumption of high levels of salt are raising the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Fruits with potassium help

stabilise blood pressure at healthy levels, while salt, which is commonly added to packaged foods, produces the opposite, negative effect.

The coming shock

Alcohol consumption is part of the growing national problem of NCDs. From an epidemiological standpoint, it is a risk factor for many cancers, ischaemic heart disease, and gastrointestinal problems including irreversible organ failure. State governments that view growing alcohol sales as a revenue-spinner are obviously unable to see the coming health crisis. For instance, in Tamil Nadu, government-owned Tasmac declared provisional revenues of Rs.18,081 crore for 2011-12 from liquor trade. That represents 20-percent growth over the previous year. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India

(Assocham) projects a 30-per-cent year-on-year national growth in liquor consumption, more than doubling the present offtake by 2015. The size of the market for beer, wine and spirits stood at Rs. 50,700 crore in 2011. More and more young people are getting initiated into drinking early and the problem is therefore not confined to older adults.

In the case of tobacco, a well-known disease agent causing a great deal of social distress, India has a massive market although consumption patterns differ from other countries. Published data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey indicate that the number of tobacco users (age 15 and higher) in India is 274.9 million, compared to 300.8 million in China. The intensity of smoking is 6.1 cigarettes a day, while various other forms such as bidi , chewing tobacco

and snuff are consumed heavily, often as a combination.

Indias public health policy is thus pitted against three powerful sectors with enormous political influence: tobacco, alcohol and the packaged food industry. Can the government then muster the will to tighten controls on agents of harm and unhealthy products, including highsodium food that is promoted aggressively? Both tobacco and alcohol are now accessible to adolescents and young adults, with a strong influence on their entire life course. The policy response must therefore adopt a far-sighted approach and focus on prevention and management.

It is important to note that disease burdens attributable to tobacco use and hypertension are on the decline in the West, but increasing in India. By

regulating sodium levels in packaged food, for instance, the risk of heart disease, stroke, hypertensive heart disease, and kidney failure, among others, can be significantly lowered. This calls for regulation of salt content and compulsory labelling to encourage salt-free or low sodium products.

The GBD project also highlights gaps in top-level programmes such as the Millennium Development Goals. The approach to disability is one. This area, which did not enjoy a high profile when the MDGs were formulated, needs extensive study, given that disability caused by multiple factors musculoskeletal problems, back and neck pain is now reported by people living in both rural and urban areas in India.

Mental health as a form of disability is also acutely missing from such

evaluations. The role of social determinants such as education, income, safe transport access, water and sanitation, and good housing in reducing exposure to risk factors needs to be analysed rigorously.

The weakest link in the Indian approach to assessing disease burdens is its surveillance system for non-communicable diseases. As it stands, it is unable to determine mortality, actual disease burden, morbidity and risk factors with any degree of clarity, because statistical pathways are not robust. Patients often do not report for follow-up and fall off the map for a variety of reasons including high costs that they must bear out-of-pocket. The Lancet s reports serve as a base on which to build a strong national system to assess the burden of disease.

ananthakrishnan.g@thehindu.co.in

The government needs to reformulate policy on tobacco, alcohol and

packaged foods to reduce the burden

of non-communicable diseases December 19, 2012

Looming clouds of destruction


History tends to repeat itself. But seldom has it done so as mindlessly as it is about to do in Syria. The United States and its European allies are about to provide air and sea support to the Syrian rebels in order to bring the 20-month civil war to a close. Their plans are far advanced: The USS Eisenhower , with eight squadrons of

fighter planes and 8,000 marines, has arrived off the Syrian coast and a second aircraft carrier is on its way. Germany has transferred Patriot missiles to Turkey, which is stationing them on the Syrian border. The United Nations is withdrawing all nonessential personnel from Syria and, following a meeting between Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New York, Russia has withdrawn its warships from Lattakia harbour. In its hour of need, Syria, the last secular, modern state in the Arab world, stands utterly alone and abandoned.

The pretext

Even the pretext for the intervention is in place. On December 3, Barack Obama formally warned Syria that there would be consequences if it used chemical weapons against its own people or indeed in any

circumstances, even to repel a foreign invasion. All that is now needed is a video put up on YouTube showing the effect of Assads chemical weapons on innocent civilians. Doubtless the opposition will oblige, as it has been doing for the last 19 months. As a senior Indian diplomat remarked to the author last week, NATO is preparing another Gulf of Tonkin incident, the faked attack on a U.S. warship that triggered the Vietnam war.

NATO is considering declaring war on Syria out of the purest of motives. According to The Independent of London, the head of Britains armed forces, General Sir David Richards, hosted a confidential meeting in London a few weeks ago attended by the military chiefs of France, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE, and a three-star American general, in which the strategy was discussed at length

The commanders conference was held at the request of the Prime Minister, according to senior Whitehall sources. David Cameron is said to be determined that more should be done by Britain to bring to an end the bloody strife which has claimed 40,000 lives so far and made millions homeless. One key concern is the onset of winter, with 2.5 million people inside Syria needing help and 1.5 million internally displaced by the fighting, according to the U.N.

But such expressions of concern ring hollow when they come from countries that did not hesitate to invade Iraq after fabricating the same pretext they are thinking of using now in Syria, and declared an unprovoked war on Libya under a U.N. resolution obtained through fraud. The real reason for this lurch towards direct military intervention (albeit without boots on the ground) is the Wests

belated realisation that a victory by the opposition will bring to power not a moderate Sunni government controlled by Turkey but a government dominated by the violent and bigoted Takfiris that make up alQaeda.

This threat has not developed suddenly. Indeed the U.S. has been fully aware of the presence of alQaeda in the so-called Free Syrian Army since April 20, 2011 when Jihadis captured a truck (or Armoured Personnel Carrier) near Deraa, and killed all the 18 or 20 soldiers it was carrying not by shooting them but by cutting their throats in the approved Islamic manner. A few days later, the U.S. ambassador in Syria, Robert Ford, called some of his colleagues in Damascus, including the Indian ambassador, and told them that alQaeda had arrived in Syria.

April 20, however, was only the beginning. All through the summer and autumn of 2011, and throughout 2012, videos posted by the rebels themselves showed that the armed opposition in Syria has been sliding inexorably into the hands of radical Islamists. Thousands of foreign fighters have poured into Syria from Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and places as far apart as Pakistan and Chechnya. Syrian television broadcast interviews with numerous young men captured in Homs and elsewhere, who gave graphic descriptions of how they had been recruited by al-Qaeda to fight for Islam against a heretical regime in Syria. The rebels themselves have posted YouTube videos showing them executing captured Syrian soldiers and civilians in the approved manner.

But the Obama administration has steadfastly chosen to believe that the jihadis make up only a tiny fraction

of the Free Syrian Army, and has continued to provide FSA with logistical support, that is, satellitebased information about Syrian troop and VIP movements, and look the other way while Qatar and Saudi Arabia have provided it with guns and mounted pick-up trucks, mortars and RPGs.

This make-believe game had to end, and it did so when a Libyan ship docked in a Turkish port in September 2012 with 400 tons of weapons for the rebels in Syria. This shipment contained SA-7 portable anti-aircraft missiles and Rocket Propelled Grenades. When interviewed, the captain of the ship admitted that he belonged to an organisation that reported directly to the Libyan government. As if that was not disturbing enough, on October 10, the New York Times reported that most of the weapons that had been supplied

by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had gone to hard line Islamist groups in Syria.

Nightmare coming true

For the European Union and the U.S., this was a nightmare coming true. The EU had imposed an embargo on the sale of arms to any party in Syria and the U.S. had refused increasingly frenzied demands from the FSA for heavy weapons, because they did not want the missiles, which are capable of bringing down civilian aircraft, to fall into al-Qaedas hands. Now their own Sunni allies had connived to deliver SA-7s from Qadhafis stock in Libya to the rebels. The nightmare became real on November 28 when a rebel group brought down a Syrian army helicopter with a heat seeking missile somewhere north of Aleppo, and western intelligence sources told the

Washington Post the very next day that the rebels now had at least 40 such missile systems.

At about the same time, it became apparent that the fight against Assad had passed into Takfiris hands. Writing in Foreign Policy in October, Aaron Lund listed seven Islamist umbrella groups with, if their claims are accurate, more than 30,000 fighters. All but two are overtly Takfiri, that is, prepared to punish any form of apostasy with death. In the remaining two the most powerful brigades, such as the Ansar-ul-Islam, are made largely of foreign jihadis. Mr. Lund concluded that Jihadis still make up a minority of the Syrian rebel movement but they punch far above their weight in terms of both military effectiveness and ideological influence.

Another mistake

In September, therefore, the NATO powers found themselves on the verge of making the same mistake that the U.S. had made when it invaded Iraq. By destroying Saddam Husseins secular albeit despotic regime in 2003, the U.S. created the Shia crescent that Israel held responsible for its setback in Lebanon in 2006. The Arab Spring and Osama bin Ladens death lulled the Obama administration into believing that the threat from al-Qaeda was almost over, and that it was now possible to create a Sunni crescent of moderate Islamic states that would safeguard Israel and western interests in the near east. Syria was intended to become the fulcrum of this Sunni crescent, but instead it is on the verge of becoming a jihadi state.

The West has decided to join in the attack on Syria in the hope that by

hastening the end of the war, it will forestall the further rise of jihadis. But even had this been possible, the decision has come too late. The first indicator of Salafi supremacy within the armed opposition came in early October when western-backed FSA commanders who had formed a joint military command decided to celebrate by inviting Sheikh Adnan alAroor to be their guest of honour. Aroor is a Salafi preacher who gained notoriety by calling upon Sunnis day after day from TV stations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf to cut the Alawis to pieces and feed them to dogs.

The West got its second shock on December 11 when the U.S. decided to declare Jabhat Al Nusra, the most ruthless and powerful jihadi group in Syria, a terrorist organisation and ban the supply of arms to it. No sooner had the news spread than 29 fighting brigades and civilian fronts of the

armed opposition banded together to pledge allegiance to it and denounce the U.S. decision. A widely circulated statement on the Syrian oppositions Facebook page read These are the men for the people of Syria, these are the heroes who belong to us in religion, in blood and in revolution, The Al Nusra Front is the Syrian offshoot of Abu Mussab Al Zarqawis al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Had the NATO powers not been obsessed with the need to keep up the appearance of control, it would have realised long ago that hastening the collapse of the Assad regime would worsen the power vacuum that will follow and almost certainly trigger another vicious civil war, this time between the moderate and Salafi militias in the opposition.

(The writer is a senior journalist.)

The West is moving towards direct action in

Syria because it belatedly realises a victory for the forces opposed to Assad will bring to power jihadists backed by al-Qaeda December 19, 2012

The importance of Shinzo Abe


The Pacific and the Indian Oceans are now bringing about a dynamic coupling as seas of freedom and of prosperity. A Broader Asia that broke away geographical boundaries is now beginning to take on a distinct form. Our two countries have the ability and the responsibility to ensure that it broadens yet further and to

nurture and enrich these seas to become seas of clearest transparence.

With those words Shinzo Abe, now reelected Prime Minister of Japan, began a historic address to the Indian Parliament in August 2007. To an audience that had not yet absorbed the full import of the historic shift Mr. Abe was seeking in Japans relations with India, he added: This is the message I wish to deliver directly today to the one billion people of India. That is why I stand before you now in the Central Hall of the highest chamber, to speak with you, the peoples representatives of India.

Shinzo Abe is not just another Prime Minister in a country where Prime Ministers come by the dozen. He has pedigree and has acquired courage and a vision. Over the weekend he has also acquired a massive and historic

verdict in favour of his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

Early ties

Mr. Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, the first Japanese Prime Minister to visit independent India, in 1957. Mr. Abe recalls with affection the stories he had heard as a child about India, sitting on his grandfathers lap!

Mr. Abes first meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took place a few months before Mr. Abes first term as Prime Minister in 2006. He was on a visit to India as Japans Chief Cabinet Secretary, a position that would normally not have entitled him to a meeting with the Indian Prime Minister. Fortunately, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the present ambassador to China who had served as chief of

mission at the Indian Embassy in Tokyo in the 1990s, alerted me to the career potential of Mr. Abe and suggested I arrange an informal meeting for him with Dr. Singh. Given his political pedigree and his proximity to the major-domo of Japans ruling LDP, Yoshiro Mori, Mr. Abe was seen by Mr. Jaishankar as certain to become Prime Minister one day. Brushing protocol aside Dr. Singh welcomed Mr. Abe for tea.

Months later Mr. Abe replaced Junichiro Koizumi and became, at 52, Japans youngest post-War Prime Minister in September 2006. He was also the first Japanese Prime Minister to be born after the war. In his altogether brief first term lasting precisely a year from September 26, 2006 to September 26, 2007 one of Mr. Abes important foreign policy initiatives was to visit India and set out a new vision of India-Japan

relations through his address to the Indian Parliament. He dubbed it Broader Asia.

Japan is now trying to catch up to the reality of this Broader Asia, he told Indian MPs. Japan has undergone The Discovery of India, by which I mean we have rediscovered India as a partner that shares the same values and interests and also as a friend that will work alongside us to enrich the seas of freedom and prosperity, which will be open and transparent to all.

Seeking a Confluence of the Two Seas, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans anticipating Hillary Clintons idea of the Indo-Pacific Mr. Abe asked the Indian Parliament if it was not time for a value-based and an interests-based relationship between India and Japan. This partnership is an association in which we share fundamental values such as

freedom, democracy, and the respect for basic human rights as well as strategic interests. Japanese diplomacy is now promoting various concepts in a host of different areas so that a region called the Arc of Freedom and Prosperity will be formed along the outer rim of the Eurasian continent. The Strategic Global Partnership of Japan and India is pivotal for such pursuits to be successful.

Invested in China

This bold vision that Mr. Abe set out in his brief first term scared many in Japan who had invested heavily in the Japan-China business relationship and were worried that China would be provoked by Japans assertion of democracy as a factor in Asian diplomacy. Mr. Abes successor, Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, quickly retreated from Mr. Abes bold

perspective. Mr. Fukudas meeting with Dr. Singh in Singapore, on the sidelines of an Asean summit in November 2007, was a damp squib compared to the warm interaction with Mr. Abe. Mr. Fukuda was frosty and made no reference at all to Mr. Abes new vision for the bilateral relationship.

While there has been a revival of the idea of strategic partnership since Mr. Fukudas time, growing economic and business interests have added ballast to the relationship. The DelhiMumbai Industrial and Rail Corridor, a lasting legacy of Dr. Singh, Mr. Koizumi and Mr. Abe, has since created a wider basis for closer ties.

However, Japanese investors still find India a difficult place to do business. Unlike their more risk-taking Korean counterparts, Japanese businesses

seek more hospitable conditions in India to step up investment.

At a recent conference on India-Japan relations in New Delhi, Japanese economists and officials reiterated their concern about poor infrastructure, non-transparent legal and taxation systems and the sheer difficulty of living in and dealing with India. Though, as one Japanese put it, India now has more Japanese restaurants!

Mr. Abes vision of a Broader Asia has not excited too many companies that have, through the 1990s and well into the early 2000s, invested heavily in China. It is when China overtook Japan to become the worlds second biggest economy that Japanese businesses woke up to the rude reality of their increasing marginalisation in Asia.

Mr. Abes Broader Asia approach imparts a strategic dimension to the India-Japan relationship and could be a gamechanger for Asia. One important area in which this new strategic vision will make a difference is in nuclear and defence policy. As the worlds only victim of nuclear attack Japan has long resisted normalising Indias nuclear power status. More recently the Fukushima disaster fed into this latent anti-nuke sentiment in Japan creating yet another barrier to India-Japan cooperation in this area. The Abe verdict, and the defeat of the antinuke political groups in these elections, should help Japan work with India in a vital field of energy and national security.

India and Japan are truly natural partners in Asia. Their ties have deep civilisational roots, an increasingly

shared vision of a Rising Asia and a strong commitment to democratic values. As Asias technologically most advanced economy Japan can help Indias economic development. As a growing market of over a billion, with the worlds largest pool of youth, India can offer Japan both markets and manpower. Shinzo Abe now has the mandate to make his vision a reality.

(Sanjaya Baru is Director for Geoeconomics and Strategy, International Institute for Strategic Studies; Hon. Fellow, Centre for Policy Research and former Media Advisor to Prime Minister of India)

The incoming Japanese Prime Ministers closeness to India and his

vision of a Broader Asia bode well for bilateral ties

A Broader Asia

is now beginning

to take on a distinct form. Our two countries have

the ability and

the responsibility

to ensure that

it broadens yet further

Shinzo Abe December 20, 2012

The mass delusionist of Ahmedabad


Multiplying personality:In Gujarats political theatre of the absurd, as masked Modis proliferated, the Chief Minister occupied the entire mind space. Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury In the early 1990s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee was famously described as the mukhauta the mask the moderate face behind which BJP hardliners hid. In 2007, the Gujarat Chief Minister flipped that mask metaphor, literally, distributing thousands of masks, allowing all those who donned them to become Narendra Modi for a while allpowerful, autocratic, the mard manas

, even feeling the pain, as he himself phrased it, each time he was criticised.

Times had changed, and Hindutva advocates no longer needed to pretend they were anything else; now the unspeakable could be spoken. You could wear your ideology on your sleeve, indeed, on your face. In Gujarats political theatre of the absurd, as masked Modis multiplied and proliferated, he occupied the entire mind space.

In 2012, Mr. Modi didnt abandon the masks, despite an ironic Dorian Gray glitch: when the first batch of 50,000 arrived in November, they displayed a face so old, wrinkled and terrifying that they were withdrawn, and three lakh fresh shiny-faced masks were ordered.

Shock and awe

But not content with the masks this time, Mr. Modi, the technology fetishist, also went virtual. His 3D image, beamed from a studio in Ahmedabad, spoke to audiences across the State. The experiment, touted as a first in the annals of political campaigning, achieved the appropriate level of shock and awe among Mr. Modis most loyal constituents, tech-aspirational young men.

From the man to the mask to the hologram, Mr. Modis political journey as Chief Minister has grown progressively more delusional. When the rains failed this year in Saurashtra, he was loath to declare a drought, lest it mar the picture-perfectness of the image of Gujarat he sends out, and force him to impose austerity measures, cutting back on lavish

publicity campaigns. When the Wall Street Journal asked Mr. Modi the reasons for high malnutrition in his State, he said young women were more focused on being slim than healthy. Modi has progressively cut himself off from reality, sociologist Ghanshyam Shah said, I think he actually believed his own statement. Gujarat ranks 14th (Rs. 69) and ninth (Rs. 56) in mens and womens rural wage rates respectively among Indias 20 major States; consequently, most workers cant buy adequate nutritious food.

Those making flying visits to the State, whether NRIs or home-grown industrialists, are so dazzled by the glitzy glass and chrome malls of Ahmedabad, Surat and Rajkot, and the network of super highways, that few among them care to look beyond at the pockmarked roads and the vast swathes of poverty in the interiors.

Many Hindus who live here, but have prospered like their counterparts in the rest of post-liberalisation India, live in denial. A forty-something, wealthy, trendy and deeply political builder in Ahmedabad was shocked to hear there was a water crisis in Saurashtra. Mr. Modi had created Brand Gujarat, he said, thanks to which people like him in the real estate business were making more money than they had ever dreamt of. In a highly urbanised State, it has been easy for Mr. Modi to guide the spotlight on the Gujarat he wants people to see.

Passing the image challenge

If he has faced a challenge in the 11 years hes been in power, it has been to ensure that outside Gujarat he should not continue to be defined by the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 while remaining, at home, the Hindu hriday

samrat . Mr. Modis genius lies in the fact that, in large measure, he achieved that fine balance through a PR blitz.

The Vibrant Gujarat campaign helped to replace horrifying visuals of violence with happy images of people flocking to Gujarats tourist destinations, and then investing in the State. The annual investor summits from 2003 brought in a fraction of the investment Mr. Modi claimed, but they changed the optics, and helped re-create the atmosphere in which the business community could prosper in a State that has been industry-friendly since its inception in 1960. No one noticed that the rural poor werent thriving, the tribal people continued to live on the edge, and Muslims lived as second class citizens.

At the much-hyped Sadbhavna rallies, Mr. Modi posed with Muslims, but

refused to wear a skull cap even for a few seconds lest it alienate his core Hindutva base. His object was merely to help his acolytes tell those who cared to hear them that he is not anti-Muslim.

Admirers cite Mr. Modis marginalisation of the Sangh Parivar in Gujarat as proof that he has dumped Hindutva for a forward-looking world view. But, in fact, he is the RSSs most evolved product, who has photoshopped Hindutva. Only Sangh insiders recognise that the core hasnt changed. Keshubhai Patel, who built the BJP in Gujarat and challenged him in these elections, called Mr. Modi a modern Goebbels at a rally, minutes after senior RSS leader Pravin Maniar denounced him as Hitler. But neither accused him of abandoning the Hindutva project.

Sleek and expensive

Mr. Modi no longer resembles the RSS pracharak he once was: his wardrobe, customised by Jade Blue, an expensive chain of menswear stores patronised by the likes of Gautam Adani, has given him a whole new image. The sleek appearance, set off by a range of turbans, bandi and traditional shawls is a far cry from his earlier no-frills look.

As the great impresario of Gujarat, he has used official machinery to showcase himself as Father Bountiful, with District Magistrates playing event managers for an unending series of mela s, blurring the line between party and government. RTI questions on the source of the largesse being distributed have received no answers, just as no one knows who pays for his PR machine.

Finally, the gap between the man and the myth, and the chasm between the two Gujarats have become visible to all those who have seen him at close quarters whether in the BJP, or in the State government, or, indeed, those who have had personal dealings with him. But is this enough to end his dream run?

The selective images of progress that have cast a spell on many do not represent a progressive world-view but an evolved Hindutva December 20, 2012

Executing the neighbour


Like so many other men and women in Delhi, my friends and I kept a quiet, helpless vigil on Tuesday night for the young 23-year-old woman in Safdarjung hospital. All day long, on TV, in private conversations, on social

media, the demand for justice was voiced, with rising anger and with grief. Over the last few years, the anger over the way we treat our women in India killed before birth, starved and neglected as babies, denied education, respect, safety, freedom, brought up to be bartered into marriage, beaten, raped, burned has been escalating, becoming more open. Sexual violence, the safety of women on the streets and in their homes, a media focus on one horrifying gang-rape after another: all of these have become mainstream news, at least in urban India.

When I think of that young girl, fighting for her life after sustaining severe injuries when six men in Delhi raped her and assaulted her male friend, I also want justice. Like many Indians, across the board, I want those men to be jailed forever, so that they can never hurt another person again;

a base but very human part of me would like them to suffer as much as they made that woman suffer.

But when the conversation moves, as it does so frequently these days, to the question of the death penalty for rapists, I find myself unable to want that kind of vengeance. There are the practical reasons: aside from reasoned opposition to capital punishment, there is no evidence to suggest that the death penalty will act as a deterrent. There is the strong possibility that it would make an already low rape conviction rate even lower, since judges would be unwilling to hand down such an extreme sentence except in the worst and most brutal cases.

Then consider this: in the two-week period before this brutal gang-rape, a number of rapes were reported from Delhi and the neighbouring State of

Haryana. They included the rape of a five-year-old girl by a local temple priest, the rape of a nine-year-old by a neighbour, the rape of a 20-year-old girl who was initially too scared to report her neighbour, the rape of a 70-year-old woman in Haryana by a young relative. These incidents women raped by neighbours, relatives, people who know them are far more common than the gangrapes, horrifying as those are, that draw intense media scrutiny.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau data for 2011, most rapes are not committed by strangers. Offenders were known to the victims in as many as 22,549 (94.2 %) [of all cases reported in India in 2011+, says the NCRB report. Parents / close family members were involved in 1.2% (267 out of 22,549 cases) of these cases, neighbours were involved in 34.7% cases (7,835 out of 22,549

cases) and relatives were involved in 6.9% (1,560 out of 22,549 cases) cases.

These statistics have been remarkably consistent over the years: you can say with confidence that on average, 90 per cent of rape cases in India are perpetrated by people known to the victim, from their neighbourhoods perfectly ordinary uncles and brothers and fathers. (We arent discussing male rape here because there are very few statistics available for survivors of male rape. Its one of the least discussed crimes in India.)

And there are other, more clinical questions to ask those who support the death penalty. What about custodial rapes, and rapes by serving army officers and military personnel? The soldiers accused of rape in states Such as Kashmir and Chhattisgarh if those accusations are true, shouldnt

the death penalty apply to them as well? The eight men who raped a Dalit woman in Haryana this year in October, who took cellphone photographs as trophies: death for them, too? All of those implicated in the rapes of women from the lower castes, in every State from Haryana to Madhya Pradesh to Bihar: if we could, would we send them to the gallows along with the Delhi six?

So if you agree that the death penalty should apply to rapists, be consistent about it, and prepare for the consequences. The people youll be hanging, more than 90 per cent of the time, wont be strangers, the gangs of youth whom we can safely think of as marauding outliers, the threatening outsider beyond the threshold of our homes.

Swinging from those gallows, youll have local shopkeepers, tutors,

friends of the family. In 2011, if youd had capital punishment for rapists, that would have been 7,835 neighbours, 1,560 distant unclejis and mamajis and 267 fathers, brothers, grandfathers and cousins on death row, plus thousands of family acquaintances and distant colleagues. And thats without adding in the policemen, the army officers, the paramilitary troops and the odd politician playing out caste wars on the bodies of women, whom wed discussed earlier.

Its going to be a long queue of familiar faces, the queue of those we want to hang for the act of rape. I wish I could believe that this sort of mass public execution if we agreed that this was the way forward would do more than slake our collective need for vengeance.

I wish I could think that public hangings would miraculously solve the problem of violence against women, but I dont believe in fairy tales. Hanging the neighbour will not address the clear and present need to examine how violence works inside our own homes, within our own families.

We all want justice, and we desperately want this assault on women to end. I know that I want my niece, and every young girl in India, to grow up without the fear that stalked my generation of women. I know that I want them to have the freedom and the equality that so often eluded us, one way or the other; if we had it in our homes, we lost it when we stepped out into the wider world. If we fought for better working conditions for office-goers and domestic workers, women still often went back to face cruelty and fear in

their own homes, where they should have felt safe and free. I would like this generation of young women to feel more than safe; I would like them to feel that they have the right to live with freedom, and to be treated with respect wherever they might be.

(Nilanjana S. Roy is a New Delhi-based author)

The popular view would send many fathers, brothers and neighbours to the gallows since rapists are known to victims in most cases December 20, 2012

Legitimate aim, unconstitutional means


There is certainly a strong argument to be made in favour of reservation

for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in promotions but the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill that was passed in the Rajya Sabha is a poor attempt at achieving that goal.

Article 16(4A) of the Constitution permits reservation in promotion posts for the SCs/STs but Supreme Court judgments have imposed certain conditions for the state to exercise its power under this provision. The original draft of the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill sought to amend Article 16(4A) to influence the constitutional discourse on three critical aspects of the debate on quotas in promotions determining the backwardness of SC/ST beneficiaries; impact on efficiency; and empirical data to establish the lack of representation of the SCs/STs in promotion posts.

Although political negotiation between the UPA government and the BJP resulted in the agreement to drop the provision in the Bill that would permit the state to ignore concerns of efficiency, the position that the state need not demonstrate the inadequacy of representation whatsoever is constitutionally suspect.

Backwardness of beneficiaries

Through a rather erroneous decision in M. Nagaraj v. Union of India , the Supreme Court required the state to demonstrate the backwardness of SC/ST beneficiaries each time quotas in promotions were provided for under Article 16(4A). To appreciate the error of the Supreme Court in Nagaraj , it is important to understand the difference in the constitutional status of the SCs/STs and Other

Backward Classes (OBCs). After the judgment in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India , individuals in the creamy layer of OBCs could not be the beneficiaries of the reservation policy. However, the Supreme Court in Indra Sawhney explicitly held that no such exclusion would be applicable to the SCs/STs. The reasons for applying the concept of creamy layer only to the OBCs and not to the SCc/STs could be debated but the difference in treatment is due to the composition of groups and the nature of marginalisation they suffer from. Therefore, the Supreme Courts suggestion in Nagaraj that the SC/ST beneficiaries of quotas in promotions must be backward is without constitutional merit. The constitutional position is that all SCs/STs are deemed to be backward and there cannot be a further determination of backwardness among them. The 117th Constitution Amendment Bill rightly seeks to do

away with the confusion created by the judgment in Nagaraj by clarifying that all SCs/STs are deemed to be backward.

The main focus of Article 335 of the Constitution is the requirement of the state to acknowledge the claims of the SCs/STs while making appointments to posts and services. However, Article 335 also states that the acknowledgement of such claims shall be consistent with the concerns of efficiency. However, judgments of the Supreme Court have used this provision to strongly suggest, without any real supporting arguments, that reservation and efficiency necessarily pull in different directions. Though the provision permitting the state to provide reservation in employment finds mention in the Fundamental Rights chapter of the Constitution and Article 335 is in the chapter on Special Provisions Relating to Certain Classes,

the Supreme Court has used Article 335 to check the power of Parliament to provide reservation in promotions even while it is exercising its power to amend the Constitution. Adjudicating on the validity of three constitutional amendments providing for reservation in promotions with consequential seniority, the Supreme Court in Nagaraj (2006) held that the state could exercise its power under these amendments only if it could demonstrate that efficiency continued to be maintained. The Supreme Court did not clarify the precise content of such a requirement.

Concerns of efficiency lie at the heart of objections to quotas in promotion. The BJP articulated such a concern with the text of the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill by making its support contingent on the government agreeing to drop the words nothing in Article 335 shall

prevent the state from making any provision for reservation in matters of promotion. Article 335 has a rather complex constitutional history. In the Constituent Assembly, it originated as a provision to acknowledge the claims of all minorities when the initial sentiment was not to provide reservation in public employment. Instead of providing reservation in public employment, it was agreed to put in a weak provision that acknowledged the claims of minorities consistent with concerns of efficiency. However, all of that changed in the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly after December 1949. In a clear response to the violence of Partition, the term minorities was dropped and the provision subsequently acknowledged only the claims of the SCs/STs. Reservation in employment was then permitted for backward classes under Article 16(4) but not for the minorities. Article 335s origin was, therefore, in a

context where reservation was not contemplated for public employment. The central role it has come to play in contemporary constitutional discourse on reservation in public employment is rather puzzling.

The empirical battle

Article 16(4A) as it currently stands permits the state to provide reservation in promotions on the condition that the SCs/STs are not adequately represented in the services under the state.

It is on the meaning of this condition that the disagreement between the Supreme Court and governments seeking to provide quotas in promotions is at its most intense. Through the 77th, 81st, 82nd and 85th Constitution Amendment Acts (between 1995 and 2001), Article

16(4A) was inserted and amended to give the state power to provide quotas in promotions with consequential seniority. One of the conditions imposed by the Supreme Court in Nagaraj while upholding the constitutionality of these amendments was that every time a government sought to exercise its power under Article 16(4A), it must take up a specific exercise to demonstrate that the SCs/STs were not adequately represented. It was in Suraj Bhan Meena v. State of Rajasthan (2010) that the Supreme Court first struck down an attempt by a State government to provide quotas in promotions on the ground that it had not undertaken such a specific exercise to establish the inadequacy of representation of the SC/STs. The genesis of the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill can be traced to the Supreme Courts judgment in U.P. Power Corporation Ltd. v. Rajesh Kumar (April 2012), which struck

down Uttar Pradeshs attempt to provide quotas in promotions on grounds similar to those in Suraj Bhan Meena.

Short-sighted

The draft of the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill has a rather shortsighted response to the Supreme Courts demand that the inadequacy of representation of the SCs/STs must be demonstrated on the basis of each cadre. In essence, the Supreme Courts position is that if the state wants to provide quotas in promotions for clerks, it should demonstrate inadequate representation of the SCs/STs among clerks . The response of the 117th Constitution Amendment Bill is to remove any reference to the requirement of demonstrating inadequacy of representation. The Supreme Courts demand that the

cadre must be the basis for demonstrating inadequacy of representation is far from ideal. A cadre-based determination of inadequacy of representation of the SC/STs would not result in an accurate picture of representation of the SC/STs in public employment as a whole. The 117th Constitution Amendment Bill should have clarified that a cadre-based determination of inadequacy of representation was not required by the Constitution and that it would be sufficient for the State to demonstrate inadequacy of representation in public employment as a whole. Instead, the Bill that has been passed in the Rajya Sabha goes to the other extreme and no longer requires the state to demonstrate any sort of inadequacy of representation.

Even if the Bill does go through the Lok Sabha, it is very likely to be challenged in the Supreme Court

where it will be tested for violation of the basic structure of the Constitution. The demand to do away with the requirement of inadequacy of representation was specifically debated in the Constituent Assembly and rejected. The Constituent Assembly rejected the demand because it believed it would give the state unacceptable power in terms of determining the beneficiaries in the context of the general equality protection within the Constitution. Removing the requirement to establish inadequate representation of the SCs/STs would certainly make it easier for the state to provide quotas in promotions but it goes against the fundamental principle on which the decision to provide reservation in employment was based. All those clichs about learning from history might come back to haunt this constitutional amendment when the Supreme Court decides upon its validity.

(Anup Surendranath is an Assistant Professor of Law, National Law University, Delhi, and a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford)

The 117th Constitution Amendment Bill

has failed to define low representation of SCs/STs which is necessary to make reservation in promotions possible

December 21, 2012

Outcast reaches a hardwon orbit


After three, possibly four, previous attempts that failed, North Korea

achieved its ambition of putting a satellite in orbit on December 12 and became the 10th country in the world with that capability.

The Unha-3 launch vehicle placed an imaging satellite, Kwangmyongsong-3, in orbit about 500 km above the earth. Recent media reports indicate that the satellite has stopped functioning and is tumbling as it circles overhead.

Launch vehicles are immensely complicated machines, with a large number of components and systems that must work as planned under conditions of considerable stress. Despite its poverty and relative international isolation, North Korea has shown the ability to doggedly persist in the face of failure in order to master the technology.

The dual-use nature of such technology allowed the country to draw on its experience with ballistic missiles to build satellite launchers. Now, with the progress that it has achieved in launch vehicles, the country could, if it chose, develop more powerful ballistic missiles than those it possesses.

In the early 1980s, North Korea set about reverse engineering a Soviet short-range ballistic missile, R-17E, which is better known by its western designation Scud B. The Soviet Union had exported the missile to several countries and North Korea is believed to have got a small number of those missiles from Egypt.

By early 1984, the first prototypes of the North Korean version of the missile, Hwasong 5, was ready, according to an analysis published in 1999 by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., who

was at the time with the Monterey Institute of International Studies in the U.S. It then developed an improved version of the missile, Hwasong 6, with a range of about 500 km.

North Korea then went on to make a substantially bigger missile with a longer range, which U.S. intelligence designated as Nodong. Nodongs liquid propellant engine was a much larger and more powerful version of the one in the Hwasong missiles. The scaling up of the engine was accomplished with the assistance of Russian engineers who had earlier worked in a missile design bureau, according to Mr. Bermudez.

The Nodong prototype was ready by 1990. Subsequently, North Korea supplied the missile as well as the know-how for making it to Iran and Pakistan. In Iran, the missile became

the Shahab-3 and in Pakistan the Ghauri.

Setting the stages

Nodong provided the first stage for North Koreas first launch vehicle, Paektusan-1 (known in the West as Taepodong-1). The launchers second stage was thought to be based on the Hwasong missile, with what was possibly a solid propellant third stage. (Iran too used the Nodong as the first stage of their Safir launcher, which successfully put a satellite in orbit in February 2009.)

In an analysis published in 2009, Theodore Postol of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., however, argued that Paektusan-1s second stage had employed a liquidpropellant engine from the Soviet SA5 surface-to-air missile while the third

stage used a solid-propellant motor from the Soviet SS-21 tactical missile.

When the Paektusan-1 was launched in August 1998, its first two stages worked well but the third stage did not ignite.

Trying again

In July 2006, North Korea made what was possibly its next attempt at launching a satellite. The rocket could have been the Unha launcher that was flown three years later, according to David Wright, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in the U.S. In any event, the rocket exploded shortly after it lifted off.

Unha-2 was then launched in April 2009. Like Paektusan-1, it had three stages but was considerably larger

than its predecessor. Unha-2s fate was sealed by the failure of its third stage.

In an examination of the Unha-2 published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 2009, Dr. Wright and Dr. Postol took the view that the first stage of the rocket used a cluster of four Nodong engines. Its second and third stages, however, used significantly more advanced technology than in the past. The second stage appeared identical to the single-stage Soviet R-27 sealaunched ballistic missile.

The rockets third stage appeared to be very similar, if not identical to upper stage of the Iranian Safir launcher. In both cases, the stage used two small steering engines, running on liquid propellants, from the R-27 missile, they said.

While the Unha launcher represented a significant advance, it appeared to have been constructed using critical rocket components acquired from other countries, most notably Russia, according to Dr. Wright and Dr. Postol.

Unha-3 was launched in April this year, only to meet yet another failure. As in 2006, a problem seems to have occurred while the rockets first stage was firing. Eight months later, the Unha was once again on the launch pad. This time, however, the rockets three stages worked without a hitch and deposited the satellite it carried safely in orbit.

Capacity building

S. Chandrashekar of IIM Bangalore, who worked at the Indian Space Research Organisation for many years, believes the North Koreans have demonstrated the capacity for assimilating the many complex technological elements that go into a launch vehicle. Such challenging projects also needed an organisation framework to coordinate and oversee the effort. It was an oversimplification to say that everything they have now was acquired from other countries, he told this correspondent.

If the first stage of the Unha was a cluster of four Nodong engines, that was a major achievement, he said. Based on an analysis of Unha images carried out with colleagues at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, he was of the opinion that the Nodong also formed the second stage of the Unha launcher.

Moreover, in its latest launch, the Unha rocket had put the satellite into a near-circular 500 km orbit. The sunsynchronous orbit that had been achieved required the rockets third stage to be carefully reoriented before being fired. For that, the rocket needed to have good guidance and control, pointed out Prof. Chandrashekar.

The rocket launch was possible not just because of outside help. North Korea has tenaciously pursued the technology

By 1990 the North Koreans had scaled up their early missiles based on the Soviet Scud B. The new powerful missile, designated as Nodong, made it to Iran and Pakistan, where it

became Shahab-3 respectively. December 21, 2012

and

Ghauri

A false consensus is broken


The United Statess decision to walk out of the International Telecommunication Unions World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai along with some of its allies last week could represent a turning point in global Internet governance. These countries refused to sign the new International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs) that contain some basic principles governing the technical architecture of the global communication system. They said they could not agree to the ITRs, and the ITUs remit, extending to the Internet. However, the new ITRs contain no reference to the Internet,

all such language having been assiduously weeded out over the two weeks of intense negotiations. Also, the ITU has been undertaking Internet-related activities for more than a decade, with the U.S. participating in them.

In a full-blown Internet age, the new ITRs make no reference to naming and addressing the system of the Internet or its routing structures, make no effort to make ITU the Internet standards making body, and make a clear statement that content is not included in their remit. This could, in fact, have been taken to be a significant acknowledgement of the existing naming and addressing regime (ICANN) and Internet standards making processes (IETF or Internet Engineering Task Force). However, the U.S. remained adamant.

Diplomatic blunder

Both the U.S. and the ITU will take a hit from this meltdown of what was in any case a make-believe consensus. The U.S. seems to have said, well, the kid gloves are off and we are done with making polite noises about ITU. The old order is dead and the new has taken over. What if it is U.S.-centric; most people the U.S. likes to talk to seem to be happy with it. The walkout by the U.S. and its allies can also considerably damage the ITU. It has practically been told by these countries that they see no role for the ITU in an age when all communication systems will soon be Internet-protocol based. This suddenly leaves developing countries without any existing global forum to turn to for an appropriate role in global governance of the Internet. It is expected that this will lead to a hardening of their position on the existing U.S.-centric global Internet governance regime, something most of them have been

lazily going along with. With the walkout on the ITRs, the U.S.s diplomatic ability to defend the substantial control it has over the existing privatised Internet governance regime will go down considerably.

It is unclear whether the U.S. had come expecting a deadlock but hoping it would happen in such a way that the blame could be pinned on authoritarian countries with an extreme agenda of statist control over the Internet. These countries did bring in highly problematic drafts which were all rejected or withdrawn. By the end of two weeks of negotiations, as noted by Eric Pfanner in the New York Times , the United States got most of what it wanted, but then it refused to sign the document and left in a huff. It may turn out to be a diplomatic blunder. Despite valiant statements from the U.S. about having defiantly

stood for freedom of expression, the blame for the failure of the treaty process, and the consequent breakdown of the false consensus on global Internet governance, will have to be borne by the U.S.

Sequence of events

The real reasons for this sudden shattering of the uneasy calm over who governs the global Internet lie in the larger, long-standing structural issues, the kind which often come to a head when a definitive text has to be signed, as happened at the WCIT.

With less than two days to go before the end of the conference, the more active developing country actors began to get restive. The draft had gone bare-bone with hardly anything new in it compared to the existing

ITRs. They felt that they had made all the concessions; included text that content is not covered, agreed to human rights language in the preamble, and had withdrawn all proposals with explicit mention of the Internet, and also the more radical ones that would have taken the ITU into ICANN and IETF territory. As a delegate said in exasperation, It is unacceptable that one party to the conference gets everything they want and everybody else must make concessions, and after having made many concessions we are then asked to suppress the language which was agreed to.

Rather than seeking to give the ITU a new role with regard to the Internet, many countries legitimately feared that if the ITRs contained nothing at all about the Internet, this would be taken as the basis for pulling the ITU back from even its existing Internet-

related activities. All along, the refrain from the U.S. side had been that it is fine for the ITU to keep doing what it already does with respect to the Internet, but it would not accept any mention of the Internet in a binding treaty like the ITRs. In this background, it was a rather legitimate compromise that the Internet be kept out of the ITRs but be mentioned in an appended resolution which does not have the force of a treaty. The resolution was merely a set of instructions to member states and the ITUs Secretary General for a continuation of existing Internetrelated activities and role by the ITU.

This resolution mostly repeated agreed language from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). It was adopted by a show of hands past midnight of December 12, the second-last day of substantive negotiations. Its purpose seemed to

be to make clear that the absence of the Internet from the ITRs should not be seen as taking away the kind of role that the ITU already plays in the Internet area, and/or as compromising the WSIS mandate in this regard. But the U.S. and its allies were very unhappy with the resolution, and the first indication of an impending breakdown emerged.

Right of access

The real flash point, however, came on December 13, on a proposal to include text in the preamble seeking the right of access of Member States to international telecommunication services. It is difficult to see what a global telecommunication treaty would mean without such a basic high-level principle. The U.S. took it to be aimed at the unilateral trade sanctions that it applies against some countries. Since this text had been

hotly debated many times during the preceding days, and was in and out of the draft, Iran sought a vote on it. A gentlemans agreement at the meeting had indeed been to not go for a vote and seek consensus. But an equally important point to note is that the U.S. was standing against a simple statement asserting a collective right of people. As the proposal to insert this text in the preamble was carried 77 votes to 33, the U.S. declared it would not sign the treaty. The U.S. was immediately followed by the U.K., and the process broke down.

The U.S. does claim in its post-WCIT statements that, apart from the above two reasons, it was the inclusion of some language on security of networks and spam that made it walk out. However, this language does not seek anything that could be taken as getting into content regulation, which the U.S. says it is afraid of, especially if

read along with the clear text in the preamble that excludes content regulation. The WSIS had associated security and spam issues with the ITU and the ITU already works in these areas.

Even if somewhat contingent, the point of actual breakdown makes a telling statement. The U.S. will have to explain why it walked out on what was a simple assertion of the right of all countries to access global telecommunication services. If it cannot agree to even such a basic statement of principle, it has lost all legitimacy for overlordship of the global Internet, which it claims as its historic role. Its legitimacy will now be more easily and openly questioned by other countries.

The fallout from Dubai may also significantly compromise the ITUs role in the foreseeable future. The

appended Internet resolution, which was one of the main reasons for the walkout, contains many areas that the ITU is working on substantially at present. A very important ITU meeting the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum to be held in May 2013 is mostly about the Internet. It remains to be seen how the U.S. and its allies will interact with the ITU from now on, especially regarding the latters Internet related activities.

Positive agenda

The real problem with the WCIT was that there was no real positive agenda on the table, which is surprising given that we are on the cusp of an ICT triggered social revolution. It finally became just a battle between two sides, both with a largely negative agenda. One side wanted to prevent the U.S. from making a historical point that the Internet is to remain an

entirely unregulated space whereby its new global domination strategy leveraging its control over the Internet remains unchecked. The other side was trying to prevent China, Russia et al from changing the basic nature of the global Internet into a tightly state-controlled space. There was no constituency oriented to any positive agenda in the global public interest. The fact that the clash ended the way it did was perhaps expected. It can be taken as an opportunity for progressive actors from among civil society and many countries from both the South and the North to begin shaping a positive agenda for the global communications realm.

(Parminder Jeet Singh is Executive Director, IT for Change)

The U.S. rejection of new global telecom regulations should not overshadow the need for an Internetpowered social agenda for the world December 21, 2012

Memorial to a dysfunctional state


The makeshift memorial to Bal Thackeray is finally gone, in a secret operation under cover of darkness and heavy security with absolutely no media coverage permitted. A party that riots in the full glare of cameras wanted no one to witness an act which was a compliance of the law. It was their own temple that they were demolishing; their sensitivities had to be respected.

Bal Thackerays funeral took place on November 18; the dismantling of the makeshift structure on which he was cremated was carried out on

December 19. For a whole month, Mumbaikars were subjected to a show of machismo by the Shiv Sena over the removal of the structure erected in the citys landmark open maidan , Shivaji Park. This was accompanied by the mandatory vandalism of public property. When they finally announced they would follow the law and remove the structure, it was described by the media as a climbdown which stunned leaders of the ruling party.

Tough talk

Every day for a month, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan declared he would not tolerate the conversion of the structure into a memorial. Every announcement of his was met with a challenge: in the party mouthpiece Saamna and on TV, Sena leaders declared they would break the

hands and feet of those who touched their sacred monument. Of course no action was taken against them. Yet, Mr. Chavan was hailed by the media for his tough stand.

This is the state to which the financial capital of the country has been reduced. Expectations of the main opposition party abiding by the law are so low that we prostrate ourselves when the party merely announces its intention to do so.

The surroundings of the Shivaji Park are home to the citys traditional elite. Fiercely protective of the maidan , these citizens rush to court at the slightest hint of its inappropriate use, even for political rallies, which have been held there for decades. Yet, these prickly residents did nothing but hope that the new Sena chief, Uddhav Thackeray, would intervene to have the shakti sthal removed.

It was expected that the government would act before December 6, when lakhs of Dalits converge on Shivaji Park for Dr. Ambedkars Mahaparinirvan Day. But Republican Party of India leader Ramdas Athawale, who now has an alliance with the Sena, simply told the Dalits to pay their respects to Thackeray along with Ambedkar. Obediently, they bowed before the photograph of the man who had opposed the renaming of Marathwada University as Dr. Ambedkar University, whose followers had burnt their homes through the Namantar (renaming) agitation in the early 90s, and whose lieutenant had purified a city landmark with ganga jal after a Dalit rally was held there.

Even the Army...

Then came the Armys takeover of Shivaji Park on December 12, for which it had got the courts sanction. The Thackeray structure, said Army spokesmen, was an obstacle to the air show that could prove hazardous for spectators.

Imagine the national outrage such a situation would have invoked had it occurred in any other State capital: the Army not being able to use a maidan it had booked months in advance for a spectacular show, because it has been encroached upon and the government simply looking on. But in Mumbai? What! It was the Tigers memorial after all. Even after death, the Tiger is allowed to prey on his city. So much for Mumbai being the Urbs Prima of the country.

Other indicators tell us its time to stop using this title for Mumbai. The citys Municipal Corporation is the

richest in the country, with a budget larger than that of many States. For 16 years, Thackerays party has run it, with a State government-appointee as its head. Water supply, roads, hospitals, drainage, garbage clearance, schools, street lighting on all counts, the BMCs performance has been abysmal. Whatever the reasons, its not due to lack of funds. The BMC has, till last month, used only 17 per cent of its budget for this financial year. This underutilisation of funds in a chronically ill city has been a recurring story over the last four years. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Mumbaikars have been stricken by dengue. While the BMC says only five of them died, its own doctors put the number as higher.

One may escape dengue if ones lifestyle permits, but who can escape roads that suddenly cave in, potholes that send you off your two-wheeler

into the path of incoming vehicles, and cranes, slabs of concrete, or iron scaffolding that fall on you as you walk near a metro site? Eleven persons have died in metro-related accidents since 2008, but the Labour Department has only now sent a stop work notice to one contractor, Hindustan Construction Company, headed by Ajit Gulabchand, the man behind Lavasa, Sharad Pawars dream city. The Departments report states that workers were given neither safety harnesses nor helmets. Construction of the metro is being handled by the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Infrastructure, with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority being in charge overall.

Metro matters

The MMRDA, which was barely heard of before 2004, and now governs

almost all aspects of Mumbaikars lives, is accountable to no one but the Chief Minister. Many wonder whats behind the choice of routes for this super-expensive project; and, is anyone looking into the quality of work? But theres nowhere one can get an answer. But heres one reassuring fact relating to another Anil Ambani company. Since 2005, as many as six workers died and seven were seriously injured while working on Reliance Energy sites. An investigation by this writer last year revealed absence of gloves, safety boots with holes in them, and inadequate supervision by trained personnel. Neither the PWD nor the Directorate of Industrial Safety has cared to look into these accidents despite reminders by the concerned trade union. Metro workers dont even have a union.

Parties flaunting their prowess even in front of the Army; patients lying on the floor while municipal doctors stitch their wounds with wrong-sized needles and gloves; swathes of pedestrians risking their lives just walking on the roads; non-existent pavements this is daily life in glittering Mumbai.

(Jyoti Punwani is a Mumbai-based journalist)

The Shiv Senas unchallenged hand in running Mumbai to the ground is visible in the machismo displayed over the Shivaji Park site December 22, 2012

When Ravi Shankar was Comrade Robuda

When Pandit Ravi Shankar and his disciple, Beatles guitarist George Harrison, performed at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden in New York, I asked the Communist theorist of culture, the late Chinmohan Sehanabis why Ravi Shankar was the only maestro of Hindustani or Carnatic music to make this unique humanitarian effort in aid of Bangladeshs war and famine victims

Chinuda smilingly replied: After all, he was with the Indian Peoples Theatre Association [IPTA] in the formative years. Perhaps he still has some remnants of his sincere commitment.

When Ravi Shankar took over as the music director of IPTA in 1946, Chinuda was a key figure of the Communist Party of India fraction overlooking the Left-leaning

progressive cultural association. The 1971 concert was a milestone amidst the social, artistic and commercial shifts of the 20th century. The sitar maestro showed the way by showing his solidarity with a genuine emancipation struggle in South Asia.

One of the lasting contributions of Ravi Shankar in the very beginning of his IPTA days was the music he scored for Iqbals lyric, Saare Jahan se Achchha/Hindostan Hamara . The incident has been recounted by Preeti Sarkar, who was then living at the IPTA Commune of Andheri in Bombay as a fulltime performer and CPI activist. Now 90, she said in an interview: In 1945, when Pandit ji used to stay at Malad, IPTA requested him to set Saare Jahan se Achchha to music. Robuda, which is what we used to call him, readily agreed. I went to his apartment. He played the song on the sitar and asked me to sing

along. I learned the song and came back to the commune at Andheri and sang it before all. Everyone was enthralled and felt inspired to learn it from me. Then it became the opening song for any IPTA programme.

Nowadays, we preserve the song as a treasure, credit for which goes to Ravi Shankar.

New horizon

Parliamentarian and scholar Hirendranath Mukherjee told a group of IPTA artists in the early 1990s. Its a song for winning the world. It opened a new horizon that brought into IPTAs fold Ravi Shankar, the sarodist Timir Baran and danceexponent Santi Bardhan along with several other stalwarts of the time.

In those days, Ravi Shankar made it a point to visit the IPTA commune with his wife Annapurna and son, Subhendra Shankar frequently, recalls Preeti di . That was even before he formally joined IPTA. She wrote in the golden jubilee special of the West Bengal IPTA: Pandit Ravi Shankar joined IPTA in 1946 as its music director. The tunes of the IPTA songs drew heavily from folk songs all over the country. His first creative contribution for us was the ballet, Amar Bharat (Immortal India). The entire music was scored by him. The two streams classical and folk got mingled and under a trainer like him, the ballet reached a unique high. The very tune and versatility of Indian culture in totality was imbibed by IPTA.

Ravi Shankar plunged headlong into IPTA and its work for a progressive culture. He used suitable ragas to

welcome the monsoon and inspired us. We were mesmerised and spellbound. And we never felt tired. He used to train us rigorously, at times throughout the day and at night too. He never scolded anyone. Generally, he used to teach me first and I used to transmit the same to others by singing what Robuda taught, said Preeti di in an interview to the CPI newspaper Kalantar .

While in IPTA, he scored music for a few films such as Chetan Anands Neecha Nagar , a Hindi adaptation of Maxim Gorkys Lower Depths . Or take Khwaja Ahmed Abbass Dharti ke Lal . One of the lyrics he put music to was hum rukenge nahin/hum jhukenge nahin *I shall neither stop nor bend+.

Galaxy of talents

Ravi Shankar apart, talents like Timir Baran, Santi Bardhan, Sachin Sankar, Abani Dasgupta, Sambhu Mitra, Sobha Sen, Tripti Mitra, Jyotiprasad Agarwal, Anna Bhau Sathe, Vallathol, Dr. Raja Rao, M. Nagabhushanam, Balraj Sahani, Eric Cyprian, Bimal Roy, Tera Singh Chann, K. Subramaniam, Dina Gandhi (Pathak), and Toppil Bhasi, who wrote Ningal Enne Communist Aakki (You made me a communist) joined IPTA. Then there was also Bijan Bhattacharya, Nemi Chandra Jain, Venkat Rao Kandilker, Salil Chaudhury, Hemango Biswas, Jyotirindra Maitra and Amar Sheikh. What or who was the centre of gravity? Undoubtedly, the then CPI general secretary P.C. Joshi. Hemango Biswas revealed in an interview to the progressive Bengali literary monthly, Parichay , One day, Benoy, then a top party functionary in IPTA, told me, There are gaps in the political outlook of Ravi Shankar, Timir Baran, Sachin Shankar, Santi Bardhan and others. They need a political

orientation through classes. I shall write to Comrade PCJ.

He wrote, and the answer from Joshi came the same evening: They are your polit bureau. Learn at their feet. That was Joshi who made stalwarts gravitate towards IPTA.

Ravi Shankar left IPTA before 1949 and joined AIR as music director in 1950. Later, many of the other talents also left due to the sectarian and suicidal party line of CPI at its second congress (1948). There was no second P.C. Joshi. Nonetheless, many of the artists remained true to the humanist commitment they had imbibed during their IPTA days. Ravi Shankar was a shinning example.

(Sankar Ray is a Kolkata-based writer)

One of the maestros greatest contributions, the music for Saare Jahan se Achchha , brought him to the Indian Peoples Theatre Association December 22, 2012

The bad news from Flamanville


French electricity giant EDF, the engineer, constructor and operator of the Areva-designed EPR nuclear reactor (F3) being built in Flamanville, northern France, has announced a steep hike in the cost of the reactor, from an initial 3.3 billion in 2005 to a dizzying 8.5 billion this year. A revised estimate issued two years ago had put the cost at 6.5 billion.

Work on the reactor is already behind schedule by four years and optimistic estimates say it could go on stream in

2016 at the earliest with costs expected to rise even further by then. These announcements pose a dilemma for India, which plans to buy six of the massive 1650 MW reactors to be built in Jaitapur, Maharashtra. Normally, the first of a series turns out to be the most expensive since it is the first project to be translated from paper to concrete reality and costs tend to decrease as the equipment becomes tried, tested and streamlined.

Behind schedule

In the case of EPR, however, that logic appears to have been turned on its head. Flamanville (F3) is not the first but the second of the series to be built, the first being Olkioutou in Finland, which is also running several years behind schedule and is expected to start operating in 2014. Not a single EPR of the four being built is currently

operational, although Areva keeps assuring the Indian government that the two under construction in China, Taishan I and II, are running at cost and on schedule.

Not that surprising, considering there are 9000 Chinese workers doing 10hour shifts, seven days a week. But the Chinese appear to be on track also because they fought hard and obtained a total transfer of technology. Not so India, which refused this option. Therefore, the engineer/contractor mix under the overarching umbrella of the NPCIL remains fuzzy. What is worrying in the EPR story is not just the roll-on effect the huge jump in cost will have on the Indian purchase but the massive challenges posed by the complexity of design, construction and maintenance.

The first week of December was a nightmare for EDF. The Italian energy giant Enel announced it was ending its cooperation with EDF on the EPR in Flamanville and on five other projects. We have decided to exercise our right of withdrawal and are ending the strategic partnership reached by the two groups in 2007, an Enel communiqu said.

Enel received 613 million plus interest on December 19. EDF will thus recover all its rights in the EPR project at Flamanville including any future commercial gains that might acrue. Enel explained in its communiqu that Flamanville had seen delays and cost increases. This combined with a drop in the demand for electricity and an uncertain future for investments in the nuclear sector in France prompted its decision to withdraw. Another influential factor

was the decision by Italy to eschew nuclear power, the communiqu said.

In France this exponential price hike has the ecologist lobby up in arms. Is it worth building this reactor at all? It appears to be a bottomless financial pit and the cost of construction, which has nearly trebled from the initial 3.3 billion will eventually translate into an unacceptable hike in energy prices. This is sheer folly, said Cecile Duflot of the French Green Party who is Minister for Housing.

Ecologist EuroMP Daniel Cohn-Bendit called for abandoning the project altogether.

Another influential physicist, Bernard Laponche, who worked on the early French nuclear reactors as an engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, also decried the

costs and pleaded for the integration of the real cost of nuclear energy in electricity tariffs. The Flamanville (FA3) site is poorly administered and its construction presents numerous anomalies and weaknesses, inadmissible for such a gigantic project and one which is potentially dangerous, he told the newspaper Le Monde . Worse, the cost of the reactor is expected to rise even further after 2016, when it is supposed to go into service.

The construction work is being closely monitored by the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN), which has made several dozen requests for changes and improvements. Construction has often been found to be shoddy, carried out by untrained or poorly trained workers, imported from those parts of Europe where labour costs are low. There have been two deaths and several injuries on the

site. And EDF has yet to begin work on the sensitive core of the reactor. Even with cheap, hard-working labour the project is five years late and 80 per cent over budget. Is there something wrong with the EPR?

The French Institute for Radio Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) which carries out on-site inspections at Flamanville (FA3) said in its report: During the inspections, deviations to the projects technical specifications or to the rules of the art were pointed out by IRSN. Those deviations cover various items, such as concrete fabrication, concrete pouring methodology, lack of reinforcement in some structures, unadapted welding procedures of the containment leaktight steel liner and unsatisfactory treatment of concreting joints. The analysis of those problems has revealed flaws in the organisation of the contractors teams together with

an unsatisfactory control of the contractors activities by EDF.

Concerns over safety

EDF has struggled to cope with building and safety setbacks at the project. Safety authorities raised concerns over welding quality and shut down the site after holes and crevices were found in badly poured cement. EDF said costs rose partly because the plant is the first of its kind, citing the need to develop a new boiler design, meet regulatory and safety demands and carry out engineering studies, Businessweek magazine reported.

EDFs problems at Flamanville are making another French company, Areva, the designers of the reactor, distinctly jumpy. In a press conference on December 13, Arevas CEO Luc

Oursel defended the EPR saying We have learnt our lessons from the difficulties we have encountered and we do not hide them. Therefore we bring a certain guarantee in relation to delays and construction. Arevas aim is to sell at least 10 more EPRs by 2016. Mr. Oursel admitted that the cost of the still pending Finnish EPR OL3 will be close to that of the EPR at Flamanville or 8.5 billion. The EPR had just received certification in Britain and Areva is hoping to sell EPRs in Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, The Netherlands and Sweden, he said.

Areva indicated that EDFs new cost estimate did not reflect the price of an EPR reactor in the series offered in the market today. The French reactor has not benefited from experience gained on the Finnish construction project for reasons of industrial organisation and schedule, the Paris-based nuclear

generator builder said in a statement. But Arevas own experience with building the EPR as a turnkey project in Finland is none too bright. The Olkiluoto 3 reactor was originally scheduled to be completed in 2009 at a cost of 3 billion. It has run into a series of construction delays and cost overruns and Areva has booked more than 3.2 billion of provisions on the project. The plant wont be ready for regular power production until 2014.

Debate on energy

The warning about Flamanvilles spiralling cost comes less than a week after France began a debate on energy. The government says it will set up a road map for lowering the countrys reliance on atomic power.

The costs have risen so steeply because the nuclear industry has

wished to build bigger and more powerful reactors each time. Starting with the early 300 MW reactors, the industry is now aiming for 1650 MW giants. Which means more robust construction, better safeguards and backups. The economies of scale have not played in favour of the nuclear industry. Building bigger and stronger has meant not just marginally more expensive but much more expensive. And maintenance costs too are far higher as a consequence of the power to be generated.

Nuclear experts say that the real costs of building reactors are not properly reflected in energy tariffs, since the design and construction come from state coffers and are an indirect tax paid by the consumer. Similarly the cost of dismantling or phasing out reactors and the disposal and stockage of nuclear waste are not

calculated in the tariff but are an indirect tax paid by the consumer.

The delays and cost overruns at FA3 are likely to make private investors wishing to invest in nuclear power nervous and uneasy. The complexity of the EPR pushes up construction risks, which in turn increases the cost of capital. With yet another delay at FA3, nuclear power just got even more expensive.

The cost overruns on Frances signature nuclear reactor pose a dilemma for

India, which plans to buy six massive

units for Jaitapur December 22, 2012

On victory margins, Jyotibabu is ahead by far

As super hero-sized victories go, there is clearly no one among Indias galaxy of Chief Ministers, including the much-hailed and ostensibly Delhibound Narendra Modi, who can beat the record of West Bengal's Jyoti Basu.

Jyotibabu who was Chief Minister for close to five terms stretching over 23 long years, consistently registered blockbuster victories for the Left Front which held over three-fourths of the seats in the four terms between 1977 and 1996 225; 228; 242 and 241 in a house of 294. Even when the numbers dipped in 1996, the LF had a two-thirds majority, winning 202 or 68.70 per cent of the seats. The LFs

vote share ranged from 47 per cent to 51 per cent.

Naveen Patnaik and Sheila Dikshit are both three-time Chief Ministers. Mr. Patnaik who was in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party between 2000 and 2004, completely overshadowed his partner. The Biju Janata Dal won 81 per cent of the seats it contested in 2000. The corresponding figure for the BJP was 60.31 per cent. The BJD won 72.61 per cent of the seats it contested in 2004. The corresponding figure for the BJP was 50.79 per cent. In 2009, Mr. Patnaik dumped the BJP citing sectarian violence in Kandhamal. The move won him a bounty: The BJD won a three-fourths majority with a seat share of 103 in the 129-member Orissa Assembly. Mr. Patnaik, whose party polled 39 per cent of the valid votes, achieved this feat in a three-way contest among the BJP, the BJD and the Congress.

Ms. Dikshit was sworn in immediately after the 1998 Delhi Assembly election which fetched the Congress 52 of 70 seats or almost a threefourths majority. In 2003, she won a two-thirds majority with 47 seats, and in 2009, against all expectations, she won 43 or 61 per cent of the seats.

On Thursday, as results poured in from Gujarat, TV anchors competed to paint Mr. Modi in hagiographic shades, declaring that he was headed for a two-thirds majority. As time passed, the seat projection came down from 130 to 120 and stayed there even though expected tally hovered between 116 and 115 on the Election Commission of Indias website. In the end, the BJP in Gujarat wound up with 115 of 182 seats (63 per cent) two short of the 117 it had in 2007.

Significantly, the record for winning the highest share of seats and votes in Gujarat goes to the Congress. In 1980, it won 141 seats for a vote share of 51.04 per cent. Madhav Singh Solanki who became Chief Minister topped this in the next election with a phenomenal 149 seats for a vote share of 55.55 per cent.

Third-term Modi is in the company of three who far outshine him in terms of seat and vote shares December 24, 2012

A trial for the future of Bangladesh


December is a landmark month for Bangladesh. It is the month of the liberation of the country from Pakistan in 1971. And it is also a reminder of a great national tragedy it was during the same month that

year that the marauding Pakistani army and their local agents systematically eliminated hundreds of secular intellectuals just before the liberation on December 16, 1971. It capped a nine-month orgy of violence against civilians in which three million people were killed, 400,000 women were raped and 10 million people fled for bordering Indian States as refugees.

This year, as the country celebrates four decades of its independence, it also faces the task of completing a historic trial against the perpetrators of those horrific crimes.

The trial was long overdue. The events following the bloody coup in 1975 in which Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was assassinated, and the divisive politics thereafter, caused many delays in reckoning with the cruelties. When Sheikh Hasina came to power, this

was on her agenda. The move towards justice began on March 25, 2010, under a domestic law framed in 1971. But the path is yet not easy.

In the crucial last year of its tenure, the Hasina government faces, on the one hand, street protests by opposition parties positioning themselves ahead of the elections, and on the other, organized opposition against the trial by the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that had opposed Bangladeshs independence, supported by the Khaleda Zia-led Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Jamaat-e-Islami and its militant students wing, Islami Chatra Shibir, have chosen the route of organized street violence. Their aim is clear they want their key leaders, now on trial in war crimes tribunals, to be set free. Jamaat cadres no one can

forget that the party sided with Pakistan army in all conceivable ways to foil the national quest for freedom have gone as far as to attack the police, snatching their rifles and setting on fire dozens of police vehicles in Dhaka and across the country. They also attacked the Law Minister's motorcade.

The spate of attacks across the country has left several hundred policemen injured, many of them hospitalized with serious injuries. The government sees these as ominous signs of a plot to destabilise the country and foil the trial. The manner in which the police came under attack was somewhat unprecedented, and astonishingly, in most cases, the police lost the battle to the attackers.

Neither have the arrests of a few hundreds Jamaatis stopped the violence. Jamaat, which has grown

over the years to become the most organized cadre-based party both in terms of its funding and structure, launched the offensive from November, continuing it into the nationally sensitive month of December. In the backdrop of sustained street violence, secular, proliberation forces are seriously concerned that if such violence in the name of democracy is not checked, it may emerge as a single biggest threat to countrys liberal polity and security. There have been calls for a ban on Jamaat, but there are concerns too that proscription might send the party underground, with more dangerous consequences.

The main opposition BNP has not condemned the actions of its Islamist ally. Rather, it has been providing vital support to Jamaats game plan, to the extent that even BNP sympathizers are concerned that the poisonous

weed of Jamaats theocratic and medieval political and social agenda might ultimately eat up the very vitals of what remains of the partys remaining liberalism.

Alongside the unrest for the release of those on trial, Bangladesh has been witness to a separate set of violent protests by BNP and Jamaat for restoration of the caretaker government system. Pro-government activists, such as the Awami League student wings, have only added to a volatile situation by taking it upon themselves to thwart the opposition protests.

A number of cases in the war crimes courts are awaiting verdict, but the trial process has come under an increasingly hostile campaign at home and abroad. The head of one tribunal stepped down on December 11 after a controversy over his leaked Skype

conversations with an expatriate war crimes expert. The tribunal chiefs email and Skype accounts were hacked and the private conversations were published by a pro-opposition newspaper. The resignation, just ahead of case judgments, came as a big shock to vast majority of people who want justice done, but were celebrated as a victory by the Jamaat and BNP.

A total of 10 accused most are Jamaat leaders are presently in the dock. Jamaat has reportedly deployed significant sums of money to influence the US policymakers against the war crimes trial. Law minister, Shafique Ahmed, alleged that the government has evidence to show that Jamaat has appointed lobbying firms in the U.S. and the U.K. to frustrate the trial. The minister alleged publicly that Mir Kashem Ali, a Jamaat leader now facing trial, and also the key person

behind the fast growing Islamic Bank, as also the head of Jamaats media house, had paid $25 million to the U.S. lobbying firm Casadian Associates.

These challenges to the war crimes trials have, in one sense, reawakened the pro-liberation forces, making them aware that there is no room for complacency. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who sees a conspiracy to malign her government at home and abroad, has vowed to move ahead with the trial to fulfil a national obligation.

While the Hasina government can take credit for some unique achievements towards secularising Bangladesh and improving relations with India, some high profile scams, including alleged corruption in the Padma bridge construction, the high prices of essentials, and the bad

image of some ministers and field level activists, have all seen its popularity come down. The opportunity is being utilised by those who want this government to collapse even ahead of the next election, so that the vital war crime trial suffers a setback. The scrapping of the caretaker government system, and the U.S. displeasure over the governments treatment of the Nobel Laureate and Grameen Bank founder Muhammed Yunus have complicated the scenario for Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina.

It is to be hoped that the fast developing situation will not impede the landmark trial, vital for healing a deep national wound. The trial is not only crucial for Bangladesh, but also for the region. If it stalls, there is every possibility of a resurgence of religious extremism in Bangladesh that is bound to affect its neighbours. Born

out of a national war fought against religious bigotries and military chauvinism, Bangladesh cannot allow on its soil the tragedies being experienced by Afghanistan and Pakistan.

(The writer, a journalist and analyst, is available athh1971@gmail.com)

The war crime tribunals were set up to address a deep-seated national demand for justice, but they are facing a hostile campaign by vested interests at home and abroad December 24, 2012

Castration is not the right legal response


There is a fascinating urban legend that Apples logo is dedicated to Alan

Turing, who committed suicide by biting into a cyanide injected apple. A few years after he was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code in World War II, Alan Turing was convicted in 1952 for homosexual acts in England. He agreed to the administration of female hormones when faced with incarceration. Apart from the abhorrent aim of such a measure, the scientific claim that hormone injections could alter sexuality proved to be dubious. The intuitive appeal chemical castration has as a method of drastically reducing the incidence of rape, I argue, is largely misplaced because it misunderstands the nature of rape as a crime. Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power, violence, intimidation and humiliation. Attempts to reduce the incidence of rape by controlling the sexual urge of men are bound to be ineffective because they invoke a very shallow and inadequate understanding of rape.

More effective punishment

Much before the current demand for chemical castration as a legal response to rape, Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau, while sentencing Dinesh Yadav in May 2011 for raping his 15-year old step-daughter for four years, called for a debate on castration as an alternative to incarceration in rape cases. Sentencing Dinesh Yadav to the minimum possible punishment of 10 years for such a crime under Section 375(2) of the Indian Penal Code, Judge Lau indicated that castration, surgical or chemical, would perhaps be a far more effective method to prevent rape. While contemplating the legal and ethical aspects of such a measure, it is important that we understand the precise terms of the suggestion, its potential to reduce the incidence of rape and its potential for abuse.

Clarity on the meaning of some of the terms might be useful at this juncture. Surgical castration does not mean removal of the penis, but is instead the irreversible surgical removal of the testosterone producing testes. Chemical castration involves injecting anti-androgen drugs that suppress the production of testosterone as long as the drugs are administered.

Modern legal systems have flirted with biological control of sexual functions for a long time for a variety of reasons. Forced sterilisation of criminals and intellectually disabled people through legislation to protect the purity of the gene pool was seen as an acceptable response to the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States in the early 1900s. The United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927), upheld the constitutionality of the 1924 Virginia

statute that authorised the forced sterilisation of intellectually disabled people (mentally retarded was the term in the statute). Vehemently endorsing the eugenic aims of the statute, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. permitted the forcible sterilisation of an 18-year old woman, with an alleged mental age of nine years and a family history of intellectual disability, with the infamous words that three generations of imbeciles were enough. Though Buck v. Bell has never been explicitly over-ruled, the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) and the events in Nazi Germany considerably dented the popularity of forced sterilisations as part of the eugenics agenda. Forced sterilisations in the best interest of the intellectually disabled continued in the United States till the early 1980s and it was in the mid-1990s that the debates around chemical castration as a response to rape surfaced as a result

of legislation in certain American States.

Once we get past the historical baggage of the term castration, the strongest argument in favour of chemical castration is that it is a noninvasive, reversible method of nullifying the production of testosterone and thereby controlling extreme sexual urge. The use of DepoProvera in many American States subsequent to chemical castration legislation does indicate that it reduces the risk of recidivism. However, such an approach limits the understanding of rape to the framework of sex. Irrespective of the differences in their positions on rape, influential feminists like Susan Brownmiller, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Ann Cahill, etc., agree that rape is not about the manifestation of extreme sexual urge. Violence, power, aggression and

humiliation are central to understanding rape, and sex is only a mechanism used to achieve those aims.

Addressing the sexual element of rape does not address the violence and humiliation that rape is intended to inflict. Responding to a question on whether chemical castration for child molesters works, Catharine MacKinnon in an interview with Diane Rosenfeld (March 2000) captured the issue at hand by saying that they just use bottles. Castration as a response to rape furthers the myth that rape is about the uncontrollable sexual urge of men.

The limited role that sex has to play in understanding rape is further borne out by the fact that not all sex offenders are the same. In essence, an understanding that requires us to look at rapists merely as individuals

engaging in deviant sexual behaviour is inaccurate. Rapists fall into different categories including those who deny the commission of the crime or the criminal nature of the act; blame the crime on factors like stress, alcohol, drugs or other non-sexual factors; rape for reasons related to anger, shaming, violence, etc; rape for reasons connected to sexual arousal and specific sexual fantasies, etc. Administering anti-androgens to rapists outside the last category will not be an effective response to check the incidence of rape. Mapping the long standing demand in India to reform the definition of rape (beyond penile-vaginal penetration) to include object/finger-vaginal/anal penetration on to the different categories of sexual offenders shows that a sexual intercourse-based understanding of rape is extremely narrow.

Gender violence

Even the most ardent supporters of chemical castration recognise that administration of anti-androgens without relevant therapies defeats the point of the entire exercise. Given the significant side-effects of chemical castration, a law that would require indefinite administration of antiandrogens for sex offenders is likely to be unconstitutional. Even if the argument is that governments must invest in chemical castration even if it means a minuscule effect on the incidence of rape, it would require State governments to put in place a rigorous system of providing therapy for it to be a constitutional option. Given the condition of state health care services in India, there are very good reasons to be sceptical about the feasibility of providing such therapy.

It is difficult not to succumb to the intuitive appeal of chemical castration as a response to rape. But it is an intuitive appeal that fades away on intense scrutiny. Intuition can be a great asset in politics of all sorts, but it is best avoided while contemplating a law requiring huge public investment, whose potential for abuse is immense and the benefits of which are, at best, uncertain.

Any meaningful attempt to protect women against rape must engage with gendered notions of power entrenched in our families, our marriages, our workplaces, our educational institutions, our religions, our laws, our political parties and, perhaps, worst of all, in our minds. There are many violent manifestations of these entrenched patterns of power in our society and while rape is certainly one of them, it would be a great disservice to empowerment of

women in this country to not attach the same kind of urgency and significance to gender violence beyond rape.

(Anup Surendranath is an Assistant Professor of Law, National Law University, Delhi, and doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford.)

The view that it will deter rape is misplaced and based on a narrow, sexual intercourse-definition of the crime December 24, 2012

For Russia, deepening friendship with India is a top foreign policy priority

MULTIVECTOR COOPERATION:Joint high-technology projects can yield products that India and Russia can offer to markets of third countries. PHOTOs Sandeep Saxena & special arrangement

I am glad to have an opportunity to address the readers of one of the most influential Indian newspapers The Hindu . As my visit to New Delhi is beginning, I would like to outline approaches to further development of the strategic partnership between India and Russia.

This year marked the 65{+t}{+h}anniversary of diplomatic relations between our countries. During the past decades we have acquired vast experience of working together and achieved progress in a range of fields. Political epochs changed but the principles of bilateral ties, such as mutual confidence and

equality, remained the same. I would like to stress that deepening of friendship and cooperation with India is among the top priorities of our foreign policy. And now we have every reason to say that they have really unique special and privileged character.

The Declaration on Strategic Partnership between India and Russia signed in October 2000 became a truly historic step. The developments in the first decade of the 21{+s}{+t}century confirmed that it was a particularly significant and timely step. In fact, today we, the whole civilization, face serious challenges. These are unbalanced global development, economic and social instability, lack of confidence and security.

In that situation India and Russia show an example of responsible leadership

and collective actions international arena.

in

the

Multipolar world

We have a common goal to make the world we live in more just, democratic and secure and to facilitate resolving global and regional problems, including the situation in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Afghanistan.

I would like to note that our joint work in the BRICS has become increasingly intensive. The authority of that association is growing every year, and that is quite natural. Our proposed initiatives are aimed at establishing new architecture for a multipolar world order. The same constructive approach is also reflected in our interaction in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other

multilateral formats. We expect a meaningful dialogue with the Indian side within the framework of Russias presidency in the G20 that has begun.

Joint steps in the international arena, participation in the development of rules of global trade and enhancing business, scientific and technological and humanitarian ties form the basis for achieving a new quality of partnership.

We attach particular significance to bilateral trade and investment relations. The growing economic potential of India and Russia is mutually complementary in many respects. Our trade turnover has overcome the consequences of the global crisis, and in 2012 we expect to reach record numbers, over $10 billion. Our next goal is to reach $20 billion by 2015.

To this end, we should engage all reserves and maintain direct contacts between business communities and promote establishing efficient investment, technological and industry alliances in the most dynamic and promising fields, for instance, in the energy industry, primarily the nuclear one.

The construction of the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant with the use of the most reliable and up-to-date technologies and standards became a major breakthrough project in that field. The beginning of operation of the first power unit of that plant will allow to significantly reduce the energy deficiency in southern States of India, and eventually eliminate it completely, after the launch of the second and other power units. We expect that the implementation of our arrangements on the construction of

new NPPs in India will begin in the nearest future.

We hope for significant returns from long-term projects in steel industry, hydrocarbon production, car and aircraft manufacturing, chemical and pharmaceuticals industries, in the field of information and biotechnologies. Important benchmarks are set in the Integrated Long-Term Program of Cooperation in the sphere of science, technology and innovation until 2020. Its main task is to ensure that our scientists conduct fundamental and applied research in order to create new technologies, equipment and materials.

The joint operation of Russian global navigation satellite system GLONASS opens up broad prospects. The package of respective bilateral agreements has already been signed.

We intend to promote practical interaction in that important area.

The strategic nature of the partnership between India and Russia is witnessed by the unprecedented level of our military and technical cooperation. The licensed production and joint development of advanced armaments rather than just purchasing military products becomes a key area of activities.

Serious attention is being paid to developing a fifth generation multifunctional fighter plane and a multipurpose transport aircraft. The product of our designers, the BrahMos cruise missile, has successfully passed all tests. Today experts are thinking of its aircraft version.

I am confident that such a multivector cooperation will allow our countries not only to reach leading positions as a range of hi-technology projects are concerned, but will help to successfully advance joint products to markets of third countries.

Humanitarian cooperation has a particular significance for India and Russia, which are states with great cultural heritage and potential. The centuries-old history and culture of India, majestic architectural monuments and museums of Delhi, Agra and Mumbai have a unique attractive force. In its turn, Indian citizens with interest discover the wealth of Russian music, literature and art. The Festival of Russian Culture in India and All-Russian Festival of Modern Cinema and Culture of India which were successfully held this year have convincingly proved it once again.

I am confident that awareness-raising and educational projects should be more actively promoted and tourism and youth exchanges developed. In fact, they enrich our citizens and add new contents to human dimension of bilateral relations which becomes all the more significant and relevant today.

The India-Russia summit in New Delhi was preceded by painstaking and comprehensive preparations. We have a clear vision of major vectors of future-oriented joint work. I am confident that the summit talks will be constructive, as they always were, and their outcome will give a powerful impetus to a strategic partnership for the benefit of our two countries and peoples, in the interests of peace and stability in Eurasia and on our common planet.

I will take the liberty to outline joint prospects for strategic partnership between India and Russia in the 21{+s}{+t}century. These are deepening of cooperation in knowledge-intensive fields based on strong historic traditions, advancement of joint products to international markets, further increasing of the share of high value added products in the trade turnover, enhancing the role and effectiveness of Indian-Russian interaction in international affairs, and the widest possible realization of the potential of cultural and humanitarian contacts.

I sincerely wish to the people of friendly India peace, well-being and new impressive achievements.

(Vladimir Putin is President of Russia. He arrives in New Delhi on Monday)

A new level of partnership can be achieved by developing business, scientific

and technological, and humanitarian ties December 25, 2012

Risky futures that banks can do without


On December 10, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram proposed to add a new clause in the Banking Laws (Amendment) Bill which was not a part of the original amendments vetted by the Standing Committee on Finance last year. It allows the entry of banks in commodity futures trading in India. After strong opposition by political parties on the grounds of parliamentary impropriety, the

government dropped it from the Bill on December 18.

However, this clause would be incorporated in the Forward Contract Regulation Act (Amendment) Bill which is likely to be tabled in Parliament next year. As allowing banks to trade in commodity futures signals a major policy shift in the banking sector with wider ramifications, it should be discussed in and outside Parliament.

Current status

As per the existing regulatory framework, banks in India are allowed to trade in financial instruments (shares, bonds and currencies) in the securities market. But the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 prohibits banks (domestic and foreign) from trading in goods. Section 8 of the Act states: no

banking company shall directly or indirectly deal in the buying or selling or bartering of goods, except in connection with the realisation of security given to or held by it.

However, banks are allowed to finance commodity business and provide fund and non-fund-based facilities to commodity traders to meet their working capital requirements. Banks also provide clearing and settlement services for commodities derivatives transactions. But banks cannot trade in commodities themselves.

In addition to banks, mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies and foreign institutional investors (FIIs) are not allowed to trade in Indian commodity futures markets.

No evidential support

The arguments supportive of the direct entry of banks into commodity trading are backed by very little hard evidence.

The proponents argue that this move would enable banks to hedge their exposure to agricultural lending that arise from price fluctuations. In reality, banks lend money to farmers (and commodity traders) but they do not have any direct exposure to commodities.

Following the same logic, should banks get directly involved in building bridges, airports, highways, dams and power plants since they have large exposures in the infrastructure sector?

At best, banks could advise borrowers to hedge their price risk in the futures markets rather than hedging themselves. By acting as a trader/broker in the commodity derivatives market, banks would be moving away from their core competence lending money to individuals and businesses.

It needs to be emphasised here that 80 per cent of farmers in India are small farmers (owning less than two hectares of land) and not even 0.1 per cent of farm borrowers in India directly trade in commodity futures exchanges.

Further, there is no justification in allowing non-banking financial players such as mutual funds, insurance companies and foreign institutional investors (FII) in the agricultural commodity markets since they have

no direct exposure to farm loans and the farming community in India.

Lack of domain knowledge

By and large, Indian banks (public and private) lack the market knowledge and the expertise to benefit from trading in commodity futures. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has also expressed concern at the risks posed by domestic banks that lack the expertise and skilled manpower to deal with such risky trading instruments.

The commodity exchanges are supportive of this move as higher trading volumes would boost their revenues. The real beneficiaries are likely to be big foreign banks that have considerable international experience and expertise in dealing with futures trading. Unlike small traders and

hedgers, big foreign banks and FIIs could also benefit immensely from algorithmic trading and other advanced trading tools.

Already, foreign banks dominate the financial derivatives market in India. Most of these products are financial in nature with no actual bank lending involved. The off-balance-sheet exposure of foreign banks (e.g., currency forward contracts, interest rate derivatives) is currently very high in India and should be a matter of concern to policymakers. The offbalance-sheet exposure of foreign banks as a proportion of their onbalance-sheet exposure was 1,860 per cent in 2010-11.

Weak regulatory framework

The entry of banks into commodity futures trading could turn out to be a

risky proposition for several valid reasons. To begin with, the commodity futures market in India is still in a nascent stage of development. Therefore, the existing regulatory environment cannot handle the sudden entry of big financial players such as banks and institutional investors.

Unlike the equity markets regulator (the Securities and Exchange Board of India or SEBI), the commodity trade regulator (Forward Markets Commission or FMC) is toothless. The FMC does not have any statutory power for compulsory registration of traders and brokers which makes it difficult to monitor and supervise traders. There are instances where the FMC has failed to curb malpractices (parallel illegal trading) and prevent excessive speculative activities which distorted the price

discovery and hedging function of commodity future markets.

In addition, the existing penalty provisions are grossly inadequate and not in tune with the current trading volume in the Indian commodity derivatives markets. It may sound astonishing that the FMC which regulates billions of dollars worth of commodity trade does not have the power to directly impose a financial penalty on traders. Now, only a maximum penalty of Rs.1,000 can be imposed on market participants by the FMC and through court orders on conviction. A financial penalty of a mere Rs.1,000 (enforced through a lengthy court process) does not deter potential offenders in the commodity markets.

The recent guar trading fiasco reveals how commodity exchanges are acting like casinos for speculators, moving

away from their avowed objectives of price discovery and price risk management in an efficient and orderly manner. Guar seed and guar gum prices surged 900 per cent in the futures markets during the six months between October 2011 and March 2012. Such was the magnitude of speculative trading and market manipulation that twice the size of the annual production of guar was traded in the futures markets on a single day.

Under the Forward Contracts Regulation Act (Amendment) Bill, the FMC has been granted powers to impose higher financial penalties on rogue traders but the Bill is yet to see the light of day.

Autonomy

New Delhi should give more financial and administrative autonomy to the FMC which works under the supervision of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution. To carry out effective market surveillance activities, the FMC needs better technological tools as well as professionals with domain specialisation. The FMC is unable to recruit talented professionals due to its low remuneration policy. Most of its staff are on deputation from various government departments.

Currently, the total staff strength of the FMC is less than 90, of whom 35 perform purely administrative duties. Hence, it is not an easy task for the FMC to regulate and supervise futures trading worth billions of dollars in 21 commodity exchanges (five national and 16 regional exchanges).

Given the fact that the FMC is unable to effectively monitor and supervise existing non-financial players, it would require considerable time, resources and technical expertise to deal with the high trading volumes which the entry of banks into commodity trading would bring about.

G20 pronouncements

This policy move is contrary to the positions India has taken at the G20 and other international forums. India has always been at the forefront of international discussions seeking greater regulation, market transparency and the orderly functioning of volatile commodity markets, especially oil.

In September 2011, former Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee strongly urged the G20 to address the issue of

excessive financialisation behind the increase in the level and volatility of global oil prices. At the G20, India has backed the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) ongoing work on improving the regulation and supervision of futures and physical commodity markets at the global level.

We are living in a post-crisis world where the United States, the United Kingdom and other developed countries are taking corrective steps to rein in casino banking which resulted in over-financialisation of the real economy. One of the key lessons to learn from the financial crisis is to avoid financialisation of commodity futures markets.

Developmental concerns

Even though there are various causes of high food inflation in India, the role of futures trading has remained contentious. In 2007, New Delhi had suspended futures trading in key agricultural commodities due to their alleged role in triggering a rapid price hike. As pointed out by G. Chandrasekhar, Commodities Editor, Business Line , Participation of banks, MFs and FIIs can potentially distort the commodity markets instead of advancing it, as too much money would start chasing commodities in short supplies and result in inflation.

At a time when Indian banks are struggling to raise an additional capital requirement of Rs.5 trillion before March 2018 to meet the Basel III requirements besides fulfilling mandatory financial inclusion and priority lending targets, such a move could divert resources from developmental banking to speculative

trading activities which may weaken the otherwise stable banking system in the long run.

If financial inclusion is considered a necessary precondition for inclusive growth, the key policy priority should be in delivering banking services at an affordable cost to 400 million unbanked people in rural India and meeting the credit needs of small farmers and producers. Unfortunately, the governments performance is far from satisfactory on this front.

(Kavaljit Singh works with Madhyam, a policy research institute based in New Delhi. Email: kavaljit.singh@gmail.com )

Diverting resources from essential developmental activities to speculative commodities trade could weaken an otherwise stable banking system December 25, 2012

Gandhis faithful dissenter


Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was a man of books, both as an attentive reader and a writer of masterpieces. But it was in the writing of letters that he spent the largest part of his affair with pen and ink. He seemed to enjoy both the substance and the form of correspondence, with brief letters drawing the best from the effervescence of his wit and the longer ones, from the ripeness of his wisdom. When those two talents of his wit and wisdom combined and drew from the dictionary of trenchant words, we got what may be called vintage CR.

If Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an addiction, it was to the same universe of written communication. Few have written letters as prodigiously as Gandhi, fewer with his thrift, cogency and clarity, his letters remaining, mostly, straight-laced and serious, but sometimes bursting into a laugh. There were days when Gandhi did not eat, when he did not speak. Scarce was the day when he did not write a letter.

CR and Gandhi shared about thirty years of colleagueship, hardship and friendship. Letters or post-cards written on handmade paper and posted from different locations and also from wayside railway stations sustained the association no less than time spent together.

Even when most other limbs of British India, polluted by the imperialist ego, were boycotted by Congress, the postal system was not. It was not only not disassociated from but actively patronised by these eminent rebels. Legislatures were to be shunned, law courts abjured, colleges and schools run by the government declared noxious and out of bounds for the patriotic, but not so the post offices of the Raj, and its systems of collection and delivery.

From 1919 until Gandhis assassination in 1948, postal correspondence linked CR to his leader. During these three decades CR was based in Indias south either in Madras or in his ashram at Tiruchengodu, in the parched part of Madras Presidencys Salem district. And Gandhi was wherever his two feet and a million concerns carried him, restless and composed, agitated

and at peace, ever giving and ever demanding of trust. Not for nothing did he get to be known as Gandhis southern warrior, his foe-harrier, flagcarrier. And by some, as a barrier between them and the Mahatma, a wall that Gandhi leaned on for support and as a protective guard for his own spiritual sustenance.

The letters to Gandhi are of value as the intellectual and never unemotional outreach of Gandhis conscience-keeper, as the Mahatma more than once referred to CR. They are also a cardiograph of the national struggle for freedom and for social reform, as recorded on the sensitive disc of CRs observations.

Come back, CR writes to the Mahatma on June 16, 1920, and give us life.

Is that a prayer or an admonition? Counsel or a subtle warning? Is it an individuals appeal or a collective pleading? Perhaps the words are a blend of all that and more. I believe they are written by one whose faith in his leader did not indemnify the object of his faith from misjudgements, error or even folly. Can faith be judgmental? The writer addresses Gandhi, as Master. Can one admonish ones Master? Not usually. But then CR is not usual.

CR was never usual.

CRs last letter to Gandhi is what might be called official. It is indeed on an official matter, pertaining to his Ministry, sent by 67-year-old CR, as Minister in the interim government of free India in charge of the department of Industries and Supplies, on official letter paper, to the Father of the Nation. Though addressed, like the

others, to My dear Bapu, it is signed as CR would sign all official letters, in full C. Rajagopalachari. And, as is only to be expected from the unusual in CR, it demurs. CR declines to place 1900 bales of yarn per month at the disposal of a non-government agency for distribution in Noakhali on the ground that only the Bengal government could and should distribute yarn, then a commodity in short supply.

Noakhali, as we know, was the scene of a millennial intervention by the Mahatma on the eve of the partition of India, following brutal communal riots. Life in Noakhali was ravaged beyond recognition. As part of a process of healing and restoration, it would seem that Gandhi wanted to have (non-khadi, mill) yarn placed at Noakhalis disposal for providing weaving and wage-earning opportunities to the affected people

there. The idea was that a nongovernmental agency would distribute the yarn on a monthly basis. But, no, the Minister did not agree with the Mahatma. Procedures were procedures. Officially procured yarn was to be officially, not non-officially, distributed. And then in the quantities that were feasible, according to the governments calculations, not Gandhis. There is nothing to show that the Mahatma pressed the point.

The nearly eighty communications that pass between the first and the last reflect the same unusual nature of their relationship, where respect is given, affection lavished, but nothing taken for granted except the genuineness of the equation, its truth, its faith. They show CR as the faithful dissenter or the dissenting faithful.

That is where a certain grace informs CRs contrariness. It can sound weary,

sad. It does not sound affronted or disoriented by defeat. The strength of CRs intellection lay in its being exempt from two drawbacks: an eagerness to win an argument and fear of losing it. He seemed to find a careful exposition, a subtle elaboration, a syntactically apposite formulation laced with unexpected turns of humour to be sufficient unto the purpose.

He was unabashedly God-minded and pious, placing his talents and his time very consciously on the altar of reverential belief. He wrote on Scripture as a sacrament, on politics as a duty, on social issues as an obligation. He wrote on Gandhi as Ananda would on the Tathagata or Mark, Mathew, Paul and Luke would on the Prince of Nazareth.

CR was designed to leave a mark on the stage of endeavour, not on the

stage of achievement. His achievement was his endeavour, as a freedom fighter, as a public intellectual, as an opinion-maker, and as a statesman in high office and outside it.

Who or what was the essential CR?

CR was pious, he was not pietist. He was religious, not religiose. He was traditional, not orthodox. He could rebel, but not dally with heterodoxy. He prized intelligence but did not pickle his brains in the vinegar of cleverness. He was accepting of what Time served him, not servile before its buffetings.

CRs last recorded words in hospital, as life ebbed away from his 94-yearold frame on December 25, 1972, were I am happy. These were said by a man who rescued happiness from

the debris of disappointments and faith from shattered dreams. Contradictory? Of course, yes. But then what else could be expected from that most unusual man?

(Excerpted by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, former West Bengal Governor, from his foreword to the book My Dear Bapu. Today is the 40th death anniversary of C. Rajagopalachari).

C. Rajagopalachari was known as the Mahatmas southern warrior, which

he was in his own unusual way December 25, 2012

Lets ask how we contribute to rape

As I write this, there are protests going on all over Delhi, and in other parts of the country, against the gangrape of a young woman on a moving bus a few days ago in the city. People are out there in large numbers young, old, male, female, rich, poor and theyre angry. They want the rapists to be caught, they want them to be taught a lesson, many are suggesting they should be hanged, or castrated, but also that the State should act, bring in effective laws, fast track courts, police procedures and more. Not since the Mathura rape case have there been such widespread protests. The difference is that then, it was mainly womens groups who were protesting; todays protests are more diverse. Sometimes, tragically, it takes a case like this to awaken public consciousness, to make people realise that rape and sexual assault are not merely womens issues, theyre a symbol of the deep-seated violence

that women and other marginalised people experience every day in our society.

Not by strangers

At a time when every politician, no matter what colour, is crying foul, every judge and lawyer, no matter what their loyalties, is joining the chorus, every policeperson, no matter from where, is adding his/her voice, it is worth remembering some key things. First, more than 90 per cent of rapes are committed by people known to the victim/survivor, a staggering number of rapists are family members. When we demand the death penalty, do we mean therefore that we should kill large numbers of uncles, fathers, brothers, husbands, neighbours? How many of us would even report cases of rape then? What were seeing now the slow, painful increase in even reports being filed

will all disappear. Second, the death penalty has never been a deterrent against anything where, for example, is the evidence that death penalties have reduced the incidence of murders? Quite apart from the fact that the State should never be given the right to take life, there is an argument to be made that imposing the death penalty will further reduce the rate of conviction, as no judge will award it.

Then, and this is something that womens groups grasped long ago: a large number of rapes are committed in custody, many of these by the police. Mathura was raped by two policemen, Rameezabee was raped inside a police station by police personnel, Suman Rani was raped by policemen. There are countless other cases: will we hang all police rapists? Put together, thats a lot of people to hang.

Police action is, in fact, one of the demands. Yet, the polices record, whether in recording cases or in conducting investigations, is nothing to write home about. On a recent television show, a police officer put his finger on it when he said: how can we expect that police personnel, who are, after all, made of the same stuff as the men who gang-raped the young woman last week, to suddenly and miraculously behave differently? I was reminded of a study done by a local newsmagazine not so long ago of the attitudes of high ranking police officers in Delhi about rape. Roughly 90 per cent of them felt the woman deserved it, that she asked for it, that she should not have been out alone, or should not have been dressed in a particular fashion. Strange that womens bodies should invite such reactions could it be that the problem is in the eye of the beholder? Why, for example, does it seem to be

more legitimate for women to be out during daylight hours, but not at night?

Concessions by judges

Lawyers and judges too have joined the protests and this is all to the good for the more diverse the protests, the more impact they will have. But its lawyers who use every ruse in the book to allow rapists to get away, judges who make concessions because the rapists are young men who have their whole lives in front of them and so on. Do womens lives not have a value then?

And then there are our politicians. Perhaps we need to ask how many politicians have rape cases, or allegations of rape pending against them. Perhaps we need to ask why no one is asking this question: that here

you have an elected politician, your next prime ministerial candidate, someone under whose rule Muslim women in Gujarat were not only subjected to horrendous rape but also to equally dreadful violence. How can we, how can the media, how can journalists all of whom are lauding the success of this politician, how can they not raise, and particularly at this time, the question of his sanctioning, encouraging the use of rape as a weapon of war? And more, we need to ask: if the politicians are indeed serious about this issue, why are they not out there with the protestors? When Anna Hazare was fasting, there wasnt a day that went by when one or other politician did not go to see him. Where are they now?

Hatred for women

Rape happens everywhere: it happens inside homes, in families, in

neighbourhoods, in police stations, in towns and cities, in villages, and its incidence increases, as is happening in India, as society goes through change, as womens roles begin to change, as economies slow down and the slice of the pie becomes smaller and it is connected to all these things. Just as it is integrally and fundamentally connected to the disregard, and indeed the hatred, for females that is so evident in the killing of female foetuses. For so widespread a crime, band aid solutions are not the answer.

Protest is important, it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change, it makes them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that the current wave of protests will lead to at least some results perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also important: we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or

Kashmir who had been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way? Very likely not, for there nationalism enters the picture. Remember Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the Rajasthan Rifles raped over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of this, and yet, the people of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women from this area find it difficult to marry stigma has a long life. Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town near Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did that rape, of a mother and her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and their subsequent murder not touch our consciences in quite the same way.

It is important to raise our collective voice against rape. But rape is not something that occurs by itself. It is part of the continuing and embedded violence in society that targets women on a daily basis. Lets raise our voices against such violence and lets ask ourselves how we, in our daily actions, in our thoughts, contribute to this, rather than assume that the solution lies with someone else. Lets ask ourselves how we, our society, we as people, create and sustain the mindset that leads to rape, how we make our men so violent, how we insult our women so regularly, lets ask ourselves how privilege creates violence.

It is important we raise our collective voice for women, but lets raise it for all women, lets raise it so that no woman, no matter that she be poor, rich, urban, rural, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever, ever, in the

future, has to face sexual violence, and no man assumes that because of the system and peoples mindsets, he can simply get away with it. And lets raise it also for men, for transgenders, for the poor all those who become targets of violence. Lets not forget that the young rape survivor in Delhi was accompanied by a friend who too was subjected to violence and nearly killed. Lets talk about him too.

(Urvashi Butalia is a feminist writer and founder of Zubaan, an independent non-profit publishing house.)

Protest is important because it can bring change, but it must be remembered that as a society, we create and sustain a mindset that sees violence against women as normal December 26, 2012

Policing and legal processes are hardly unimportant in tackling rape


As women assert their identity and enter his bastions of power, the traditional Indian male is reacting with violence states Ratna Kapur in Rape and the crisis of Indian masculinity (Op-Ed, December 19, 2012) as a response to the gang-rape of a 23 year old student on a private bus in Delhi. While Kapur acknowledges that reducing rape to a single cause is problematic, she states that what these crimes have in common is that young men commit them. This and other generalisations in her article are questionable.

Kapur begins by lamenting the alarming regularity of gang rapes

which must compel us to reflect upon who we are as a society. Rapes cannot be solved by more laws and more police on the streets, she adds. Statistics show that 13,221 of the 24,206 rape cases reported in 2011 had investigation pending; 79,476 were awaiting trial while convictions numbered 4,072: proof that there is a serious lapse of order in society.

The reflection then should be on why due process is painstaking, why the state and the courts are unable to quell these crimes, why the police, whose job is to ensure safety, fail miserably, and why convictions are negligible. We must also reflect upon the attitudes of policemen who blame the victims singularly, seen in the Tehelka sting operation earlier this year.

Rape is no different from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer

(LGBTQ) hate crimes. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that policing and legal processes to punish hate crimes is a fringe solution.

A change of mindset in policing is indispensable in this regard but it hardly stems from the brand of insecurity that Kapur speaks about.

The assumption

She next assumes that rape victims are working women independent and bold and rapists are young men insecure of those traits. However, not all victims of rape are working women and nor can we assume that rapists are insecure men.

In the Delhi gang-rape case, the victim reportedly bit one of the rapists arm when he tried to injure her male

friend which provoked him to teach her a lesson. This however, is a rare occurrence. More often than not, women, who have not bitten, scratched, touched or even looked at the man, are raped.

Kapurs hypothesis doesnt explain the rape of Dalit and adivasi women, child and minor rapes, and most importantly, the oft-neglected rape within families rape of daughters, granddaughters, wives and sisters who arent a threat to the traditional, authoritative, decision making male; 22,500 out of 24,000 odd cases of rape in 2011 were committed by people known to the victim, not insecure strangers.

Neither do three cases in seven years mentioned by the author provide a causal link for her hypothesis young men are the ones committing these crimes. Forty-three per cent of rape

cases in 2011, for instance, were registered against men older than 30. Moreover, young men, brought up in more gender-equal backgrounds, on an average, should have an easier time dealing with successful women than older men.

Kapur further wonders if the sense of displacement which men are threatened by is generated by smartly dressed female professionals. Does visibility alone determine empowerment?

There are many working women who arent independent as they arent part of the decision-making process in their families. This empowerment can hardly make a man, still in charge, insecure.

Urban-centered

Moreover, Kapurs empowerment is urban and workplace-centred. She has simplified rape to mean the assertion of young men (alone) on young, urban, professional women.

In the absence of rigorous analysis and accompanying figures, vast parts of the article read like wilful generalisation.

India, like other nations, has a history and culture of using rape as a tool to beat communities into submission, exemplified by the Kunan-Poshpora rapes, allegedly by the Army, and the Gujarat riots; hence rapes arent conducive to urban reductionism nor confined to the urban female.

Young and old women who are not yet a part of the workplace and who

are dependent on their male counterparts get raped; nonaggressive women get raped; toddlers and teenagers of all sexes who by no means can pose a threat to the power-wielding traditional male get raped; and women across all ages get raped by husbands, fathers and grandfathers at home.

(Radhika Santhanam and Dhruba Jyoti Purkait are students at the Asian College of Journalism.) December 26, 2012

The temptation of anarchy


On Monday, a new reality impinged on our minds: because of the threeday long confrontation between the police and the angry citizens in the very heart of sarkari New Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced

to shift the venue of his talks with the visiting Russian President, Vladimir Putin, from the grand Hyderabad House to his modest residence on Race Course Road. There could not have been a greater symbolic triumph for the vendors of street power.

Yet let us make no mistake about this. The ugly and unpleasant standoff between the police and the largely spontaneous protesters over the weekend is only a precursor of things to come. Collectively, we seem to have unthinkingly bought into a narrative of empowered indignation in which anger against authority is deemed to be just and justifiable and any means to vent that anger is rationalised as socially acceptable and politically correct.

Connoisseurs of chaos

The gruesome brutalisation and rape of a 23-year-old woman suddenly stirred us out of our complacency. What is more noteworthy is that the protests, at least in the first two days, saw an unprecedented and voluntary participation by upper middle classes, citizens, men and women. Interestingly, there were no leaders, no organisers, no professional crowd managers; and, at first glance, it seemed this participation was facilitated by the new tools of social media as well as by the promise of a summons to a non-political gathering. Access to new technology-induced connectivity has imparted to its users and consumers a new sense of democratic entitlement. The confrontation at Rajpath between the police and the citizens has alerted the traditional guardians of order as also the new connoisseurs of chaos (to borrow poet Wallace Stevens title) to the possibilities of mischief inherent in the new technology. And this

potential should be both fascinating and frightening.

To be sure, crowds have always been a part of our public life and political mobilisation traditions. And, crowds do occasionally degenerate into lawless mobs. However, since the days of Chauri Chaura, whenever public leaders staged a celebration of dissent they had assumed the responsibility to see to it that things did not get out of hand. Those days of responsibility and restraint are way behind us. Increasingly, as political leaders and parties have vacated the ramparts of moral respectability, the onus of maintaining the distinction between orderly crowds and marauding mobs has shifted to the authorities. Political parties no longer seem to have sufficient control over their supporters and followers and, in any case, all the imaginary and physical sites of anger and protest

have already been taken over and occupied by non-political actors and formations which have no stake in observing the conventional rules of the democratic game.

In any fast changing society and economy, resentment and anger against an insensitive system is bound to find an expression; and, in our current discourse, empowered citizens are made to feel that they have a licence to defy, disobey and disrupt. A crowd is seen to be an ipso facto morally superior gathering in its collective democratic representativeness and hence is deemed to have sanction to resort to unorthodox methods of protest against presumably corrupt and crumbling power arrangements.

And, now, when the crowd gathers there are television cameras. Our liberal sensitivities are naturally

offended as powerful moving images of police lathi-charge, teargas, and water canons get beamed into our drawing rooms. No less stirring is the sight of ordinary citizens bravely standing up for this or that cause, demanding justice and insisting on instant solutions. Every story becomes a battle between good and evil. Any attempt, say, to contextualise police action is instantly put down and derided as justification of khaki highhandedness.

We seem to have arrived at a new, deeply democratic moment in our republic. There is a heady feeling in the air that we can make our rulers squirm, smoke them out of their comfort zones, disrupt and dispute their monopoly of defining content and substance of national aspirations and dreams, and, indeed, force them to listen to our demands and make concessions on our terms.

One precedent begets another. Once the polity and its authorised executives panicked over a televised fast at Ram Leela grounds and agreed to sit across the table with civil society to frame laws, an unhappy precedent was set. If new laws could be secured on the streets, it was only a matter of time before mobs would demand justice at Vijay Chowk.

Orgy of revulsion

The current orgy of revulsion among the middle classes over the rape incident should be seen as a continuation of an unfolding social milieu. Our popular culture especially Bollywood movies has for some time now created an illusion that crowds can legitimately demand and secure instant justice ( a la Gangajal ). In our popular imagination,

we have constructed this myth of the intrepid policeman ( Dabbang ) who single-handedly takes on the baddies against heavy odds. This cultural strain is emotionally satisfying because we do have a collective itch to see that the law-breaker is put in his place, whatever the means.

For instance, inaugurating the All India Police Science Congress in June 2006, the then President, Abdul Kalam, insisted on administering the following oath to his captive audience of policemen: I am proud of being a member of this police force of high tradition. I will always be citizen friendly and promote peace everywhere. I will be lightning and thunder with all law-breakers. I will protect the elderly, women and children against any type of crime. I will be a role model for conduct and discipline. I will lead an honest life free from all corruption. My life is my

Nation. Lightning and thunder? Really? President Kalam could well have been thinking of Amitabh Bachchan playing Inspector Vijay in that box-office hit movie, Zanjeer .

Danger of police raj

Just as the anti-corruption movement these last two years has sought to seek a solution to a complex problem by wanting to put in place an allpowerful Jan Lokpal with power of life and death over every public official, there is now a clamour for an intrusive police presence in every walk of life. We seem to be in a mood to put a policeman in every bus, a CCTV in every taxi, a posse of cops in every nook and corner of the city. The all too powerful temptation to rush to enact harsh laws and their harsher enforcement can only end up with police raj with all its un-pretty ramifications.

It is imperative that our leaders do not panic into conceding too much to the anger. Curative powers of the crowd can help us rediscover notions of accountability but we must be sceptical of all allurements of anarchy. Our reputation as a constitutional system dedicated to a rule of law and as a society committed to lawfulness has been built over decades of collective effort, cutting across party lines, and this cannot be allowed to be squandered away at Vijay Chowk, especially now that professional disruptionists and hooligans have edged out the genuine citizens.

It is tempting to suggest that stringent laws and stronger police presence alone would help roll back habits of violence against women. A major prerequisite has to be a culture of dignity and respect for women. And this is too exacting and complicated a task to

be left to be achieved only by the governmental fiats and legislative decrees. However grave the provocation, let us caution ourselves against seeking authoritarian solutions for democratic maladies. Above all, citizens have a collective obligation to see that the excesses of democracy do not drown the Indian state and its already frayed capacity to produce wholesome order.

(Harish Khare is a veteran commentator and political analyst, and former media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh)

There is a heady feeling in the air that we have a licence to defy and disrupt, and force our rulers to make concessions on our terms December 26, 2012

Old adversaries in new face-off


In 1997, K.P.S. Gill stunned the nation when, in a letter to the then Prime Minister, I.K. Gujral, he wrote, The conduct of the judiciary throughout the years of terror in Punjab has completely escaped examination . What is to be said of judges who failed to administer justice according to the laws of the land for over a decade in terrorist related cases?

He was writing in anguish after attending the funeral of Ajith Singh Sandhu, Taran Tarans Senior Superintendent of police, who, frustrated with a case of extrajudicial killing against him and his colleagues, that caused him to spend several ignominious days in jail, committed suicide by throwing himself before a train.

More than a decade later, the acrimony between the Punjab police and judiciary has not lessened, because many prominent trials against policemen and the Khalistan militants are culminating in the courts only now. And, with each acquittal or dismissal of appeal, that deepens the adversarial divide, the role of the judges is coming under scrutiny. As is that of the top brass of the police, feeding into a gaining perception that old scores are being settled.

The issue came into focus a few days ago, when a 2009 letter written by a Justice Tirath Singh Thakur, the then Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court was leaked ( The Hindu , Leak of probe letter sparks furore in Punjab and Haryana HC, Nov.19, 2012), which suggested that Sumedh Singh Saini, Punjabs Director General of Police had fabricated

evidence of corruption against some judges. The suspect material, as Justice Thakur described Sainis investigation, was used to recommend the transfer of Justice Mehtab Singh Gill (retd.) of the high court.

The same judge had in 2007, presided on the bench that ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into suspected extrajudicial killings against Mr. Saini. The police officer went to the SC with the plea that there was a judicial bias against him from the bench because, he had, in 2002, conduced an inquiry against the presiding judge (in a cash-for-jobs scandal) on the direction of the Chief Justice of the High Court. The apex court not only found merit in the argument, but honed in on more material to castigate the judge.

Last December, as it quashed the CBI inquiry against Mr. Saini, the Supreme Court put down in writing, for the first time what was till then an unstated accusation left hanging for years in Punjabs courts. The path charted by the High Court inevitably reflects a biased approach. It was a misplaced sympathy for a cause that can be termed as being inconsistent to the legal framework, the Supreme Court said, going on to say: The High Court was swayed away by considerations that are legally impermissible and unsustainable.

This is a strong indictment, said a dismayed lawyer associated with the Khalistan lobby even as many in the police received it with satisfaction.

In the light of the SC strictures, against a judge of the High Court, I would request the SC to reopen many

of these cases where terrorists have been acquitted and their sentences commuted. Sections of the Punjab judiciary were always sympathetic to the cause, Mr. Gill told The Hindu recently.

Heightening the hurt

There have been several judgments in the last couple of years that have heightened the sense of hurt within the khaki fraternity. In 2010, the High Court declined to confirm the death sentence of Jagtar Singh Hawara and commuted it to life imprisonment instead. Hawara and Balwant Singh Rajoana were awarded a death sentence by a trial court in Chandigarh for the sensational bomb blast outside the civil secretariat in Chandigarh in August 1995, in which Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh and 17 others were killed. Letting off Hawara from

the gallows sent a wave of anger in the Punjab police.

Now that peace has been restored and the judiciary is not fearful anymore, said an officer who was involved in nabbing Hawara, we find that judges seem to be interpreting the law too strictly without appreciating the special circumstances under which those actions took place. In so many cases they have thrown out the protection of Section 197 of CrPc that provides immunity from legal action to public servants, for actions taken while discharging duty.

As many as 1,700 policemen died while fighting terrorism in Punjab and scores of cases were registered for human rights violations against them. Twenty of them are still in jail for various offences. Among them are DSP Jaspal Singh and ASI Amarjit

Singh, convicted for kidnapping and eliminating human rights activist, Jaswant Singh Khalra in 1995. Their conviction is a very sore point with the police because it is the same case in which SSP Ajit Pal Sandhu was an accused along with them. Their appeals against life imprisonment were finally dismissed by the Supreme Court in November last year.

Each new setback in the courts makes it harder for officers like Saini, who feel helpless to save their men from the wheels of the legal justice system. He himself faces two cases of kidnapping and abduction from those days.

Rational opinion within the higher ranks of the Punjab police has always acknowledged that the force did indeed resort to undemocratic methods to save democracy in that tumultuous decade. When terrorism

ebbed in Punjab, the police were accused of using the same unorthodox methods that they honed against terrorists to deal with ordinary criminals or to settle scores with civilians over petty rivalries. The current episode leading from the leak of Justice Thakurs letter has brought upfront the same question once again. These are saner times but the finger pointing is just as vicious.

As prominent trials against policemen and Khalistan militants move towards culmination, the acrimony between

the Punjab police and the judiciary

is increasing December 27, 2012

Comparing Harvard apples with JNU oranges


Indian academe is anguished that not a single Indian university has made it to the top 200 universities of the world in the recent Times Higher Education rankings. However, the debate so far has missed many points.

First, any discussion of evaluation of global educational standards and rankings cannot ignore the vast disparities in resources between the rich and poor parts of the world. An overwhelmingly large part of global knowledge production is concentrated in the developed world.

In 2009, Drexel University president Constantine Papadakis was the highest paid university president in America with an annual compensation

of $49,12,127. That is around Rs.27 crore for running a university! Even the highest-paid public university president earned nearly $2 million as salary in 2011.

The endowment of Harvard University is around $31 billion more than{+1}/{-4}th of the GDP of Tamil Nadu. Research support in developed countries runs into hundreds of millions. As Times itself recognises, income is crucial to the development of world-class research.

Most in the U.S.

Is it then surprising that of the top 200 universities, 76 are in the United States and 196, no less, in the developed countries (two from China, and one each from South Africa and Brazil are the only ones from the developing countries)? [76 from the

U.S. and 196 in all from the developed countries. This includes the 76 from the U.S.] The crisis afflicting universities is thus, not an Indian phenomenon alone, but generalised across the Third World.

Second, while resources are crucial, they should not become an excuse for the abysmal standards of Indian universities. Instead the debate has to be extended, from merely technical solutions like establishing comprehensive universities or addressing student-teacher ratio, to the kind of academic culture that we have nurtured.

On merit and representation

Universities, on the one hand, have to reflect social reality by representing caste, class and gender criteria in order to overcome these hierarchies

in academia. Academic freedom and egalitarian relations in the departments are expected not only to foster academic brilliance but also a socially progressive culture.

On the other, given the excessively communitarian nature of society, universities have, only in name, provided representation to disadvantaged sections. They have not actually overcome predisposed social hierarchies. Our academic culture is marked by patronage and networks or by bureaucratic hierarchies of seniority and administrative positions.

Even new political mobilisations around caste and reservations have focused only on the issues of representation without raising those of pedagogy and curriculum. There is a stalemate between merit and adequate representation.

In fact, those demanding reservations should have argued that reservation brings diversity, which develops new knowledge systems and new modes of understanding. This would, eventually, also contribute to a new institutional culture. Instead, inclusion of newer marginalised groups has only created parallel networks and patronage in defence against the existing ones of the dominant groups.

This kind of social breakdown has rarely contributed to new ideas and energies. Experimental culture has for long been supplanted by a culture of fear and insecurity, not merely among the new entrants, but also among meritorious social groups.

Top-down syndrome

In fact, anything new is looked at sceptically, and often succumbs to the tyranny of age. Age-related hierarchy is perhaps the worst in the Indian university system and the leastdebated sacred cow. The top-down syndrome has resulted in universities resistance to introducing student evaluation of faculty, continued cases of victimisation of students including sexual harassment and arbitrary evaluation, and consequently, lack of motivation among the students, translating into ills like rampant plagiarism.

Third, while Indian universities seek excellence, treating exercises such as the Times ranking as sacrosanct is also problematic. Can we compare universities from America to Somalia? How do we arrive at an average from the vastly different material realities and the different starting points (which are historically and, often,

violently determined) locations?

of

these

Faults

The Times claims that it accounts for these disparities by providing a comprehensive and balanced comparison. But what does international outlook (one of the categories in Times worth 7.5 per cent) mean for a poor university in the global South which struggles to attract students even from the hinterlands of its own country? Or how does it go about achieving excellence in research, worth 30 per cent, and measured in terms of volume, income and reputation when the public spending on education is abysmally low?

The Times rankings of 13 performance indicators also have no

place for intangible features. In a university such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, students from some of the most backward regions study, thanks to its system of deprivation points. Students with very poor primary education, linguistic and writing skills, in very little time, gather confidence and become highly motivated, and look for an institutional culture that can translate this into a rigorous academic exercise. This is because of the vibrant student politics and a dominant discourse of social justice. Under what ranking can this amazing social feat of providing wide opportunity and social skills be judged?

While the poor quality of Indian universities is lamentable, does the solution lie in emulating the developed countries where high academic standards are now negated by the degenerating

commercialisation of education? Thus students pay an annual fee of $40,000 for a bachelors degree in an American Ivy League institution, and the average student-loan debt of 2011 in the U.S. was $26,500, rendering them perpetual bonded labourers of the market.

Students are not trained to become critical thinkers, but foot soldiers of the establishment. Therefore, they graduate without pondering over what it means when the university gives its presidents multimillion dollar salaries and its janitors $7 per hour. It is in this culture that people like Papadakis are able to double student enrolments and generate revenue surpluses rivalling multinational corporations.

Ultimately, the ranking debate is not just about Indian universities entering the top 200, but also the need for a

radically new academic culture, reducing inequalities of global academia, the ends of education, and the limitations of the ranking exercise itself.

(Ajay Gudavarthy and Nissim Mannathukkaren are with Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Dalhousie University, Canada, respectively.)

Any ranking of global educational institutions will be problematic if it does not take into account disparities in resources between rich and poor countries December 27, 2012

The danger to women lurks within us

I ripped away at this and that and the other, the others going haw haw haw still, recalled Alex, the hyperviolent teenage protagonist of Anthony Burgess masterpiece A Clockwork Orange , and real good horror show groodies they were that then exhibited their pink glazzies, O my brothers, while I untrussed and got ready for the plunge. Plunging, I could hear slooshy cries of agony. Then, he went on, there was like quiet, and we were full of hate, so we smashed what was left to be smashed typewriter, lamp chairs. The writer veck and his zheena were not really there, bloodied and torn and making noises, Alex concluded. But theyd live.

Following last weeks hideous assault on a New Delhi resident and her boyfriend, few Indians will need a dictionary of the teenage slang Burgess invented to grasp the horror

of this passage without doubt the most searing description of gang rape in the English language canon.

The text, though, is also of historical significance. In 1962, when Burgess published A Clockwork Orange in part a working-through of the gang rape of his first wife feminist campaigns against sexual violence were beginning to garner momentum. Burgess was hostile to efforts to remake masculinity, seeing them through his Catholic ideological prism as assaults on gods domain and free will; his Alex was redeemed by a quasi-mystical encounter with the idea of fatherhood.

Battle against sexual violence

Yet, we now know, sexual violence against women can be successfully fought. Figures derived from the

United States Justice Departments authoritative National Crime Victimization Survey designed to capture rape cases which do not make it into the criminal justice system show the incidence fell from 2.8 per 1,000 in 1979 to 0.4 per 1,000 in 2004.

There are important lessons in this experience. In particular, the limits of solutions that centre around policing need to be clearly understood. The decline in rape in the U.S. has mainly come about not because policing has become god-like in its deterrent value, but because of hard political and cultural battles to teach men that when a woman says no, she means no.

In 1980, Diana Scully and Joseph Marolla began an extraordinary series of conversations with evil. The scholars interviewed 114 rapists serving time in a Virginia penitentiary

for hideous crimes: among them, one who had forced a vacuum cleaner hose into his victims vagina, before severing her nipples with his teeth; another, a college student who, as part of a gang of four, forced his victim to lie naked on a snow to add to her pain; a third who raped and murdered five women, because he was heartbroken, or so he said, that his girlfriend had left him.

Like the gang rape in Delhi, these stories lead many to believe that rape is a psychopathology; the work of a handful of evil men. It isnt: data from across the world shows rape is extraordinarily commonplace.

Every year in the U.S., the highlyregarded Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) estimates, over 200,000 women suffer sexual assault one approximately every two minutes. In 2000, the United

Kingdom survey concluded that 4.9 per cent of all women had experienced at least one rape or sexual assault; a more recent survey put the figure at above 10 per cent. Ireland, Sweden and Germany have survey estimates that range from 25 per cent to 34 per cent.

Likelier than not, the 24,206 cases reported to police in 2011 are almost certainly the tip of the iceberg. Fiftythree per cent of 12,000 children polled in a 2007 government survey said they had encountered one or more forms of sexual abuse. More than a fifth, over half of them boys, reported severe sexual abuse. It is almost certain that even more encountered sexual violence.

Scully and Marolla pointed out that the sheer pervasiveness of sexual violence rebuts the notion that rape is the work of a small lunatic fringe of

psychopathic men. Even though the men they interviewed had committed acts of maximal violence, they were also entirely normal in their values and behaviour.

The men, notably, made no effort to hide the fact that they saw hurting women as entertainment. I always felt like I had just conquered something, one prisoner said, comparing his serial rape experiences to a visit to a famous amusement park ride in Dallas, like I had just ridden the bull at Gilleys. Few rapists indicated that guilt or feeling bad was part of their emotional response to their crimes; 92 per cent said they felt good, relieved or simply nothing at all. Like so many other things, Scully and Marolla concluded, rape is a learned behaviour.

Culture of misogyny

None of this ought to surprise us: though we might condemn rape, our culture shares the rapists values. Indias mass culture is replete with misogyny. Few films even seek to escape romantic memes which involve men pursuing, and eventually conquering, women who say no; it is no coincidence that pop singer Honey Singh, whose lyrics valorise the taming of liberated women, has become a youth icon. Even a cursory YouTube search for rape takes us to a plethora of film-clips eroticising the crime. This mass culture, in turn, accurately reflects the values of a sonworshipping society in which largescale violence against women is seen as entirely legitimate running the gamut from street harassment on Holi to female foeticide.

Policing cant change a culture that produces and legitimises violence

against women. From the western experience, it also becomes clear that even the best-resourced policing can have only a limited impact on deterring and punishing rapists.

Figures derived from RAINNs official statistics graphically illustrate the point. For every 100 rapes that take place in the U.S., only 46 are reported. The 46, on average, lead to just 12 arrests one for every fourth victim. Nine of the 12 arrested perpetrators go on to be prosecuted but only a third of these are eventually convicted of rape. Put simply, just 3 of every 100 rapists ever see the inside of a prison cell.

In the U.K. , 58 per cent of rape trials end in a conviction but only because the crown prosecution service rigorously weeds out cases unlikely to survive legal challenge. The stark fact is only six of every 100

women who report an offence will see the perpetrator convicted.

Conviction rate

The point here isnt that Indias lessthan-luminous conviction rates 26.5 per cent nationally, similar to the U.S. average; 41 per cent in Delhi are less grim than they seem. Rather, it is that policing isnt a panacea. The utter failure of highly-resourced U.S. campaigns to stamp out narcotics use is a case in point.

None of this is to say improved policing cant mitigate the problem. More officers, particularly women officers, on the streets, will deter street sexual harassment and stalking. Capacity building for investigation and prosecution will lead to a more effective punishment of perpetrators. Even better lighting in public spaces

has been shown to yield results. Harsher police action on street crime, elsewhere in the world, has often correlated with declines in rape rates.

Yet, we ought not to delude ourselves about what can be achieved. There is no reason, for example, to believe more police checkpoints will deter rapists, when they have done next to nothing to apprehend terrorists or robbers. Forensics will also help but, outside of crime-fiction shows, DNA isnt a magic anti-criminal bullet. Leaving aside the fact that forensic evidence can be matched to perpetrators only in a tiny percentage of cases, criminals have become increasingly adroit at covering their trail. Even a Mumbai suspect recently forced his victim to bathe after raping her, demonstrating a robust grasp of evidence destruction. Lapsing into pseudoscience fantasies that the screening of possible perpetrators will

help detect rapists, as judges of the Delhi High Court recently did, helps not at all.

Legal reform

Legal reform, another centrepiece of the ongoing campaign, is also needed but will achieve nothing unless it is backed by investigative and prosecutorial capacity. Past legal reforms, it bears mention, have done little to stem the decade-on-decade decline in rape conviction rates, from 44.28 per cent in 1973 to 26.5 per cent in 2010. Indias experience of extraordinary slow fast-track terrorism courts give little reason for optimism, either, that fast-track rape courts will work better.

Fixing the police and the justice system, thus, will achieve only so much and that so much is not a

great deal. The real battle is one that womens organisations have fought to address for decades to change the ways in which men relate to women; to create a culture of masculinity that does not involve subjugation. For progress to be made, we must begin by acknowledging this one fact: the problem isnt the police, the courts or the government. The problem is us.

Even as public anger on rape mounts, it is important to understand that policing is a small part of the problem and can only

be a small part of the solution December 27, 2012

Mind the pitfalls on this road to peace

As we approach closer to 2014, negotiations with the Taliban are gaining importance over other tracks, such as reconciliation and regional relations. To some extent this development was predictable: no successful transition/exit, however low the bar was set, would be possible without settling the Taliban question in one way or another. The military route failed: it remains to be seen whether the negotiations route can work.

Two recent events give an indication of the pros and cons for negotiations: the talks with the Taliban in France a week ago, and a leaked High Peace Council proposal entitled A Roadmap for 2015, dated November 2012. The Chantilly talks offered an opportunity for the Taliban to put forward their views publicly, and can be seen as representing a current but not immutable position. On the plus side,

Taliban spokesmen, apparently representing Mullah Omar, said they were willing to work with other Afghan parties, might accept the present government structure, and would accept girls schools run in an Islamic way. On the minus side, they want to rewrite the Constitution, accept the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) and, most likely, dominate newly established Afghan institutions.

The most important positive of the Chantilly talks was that the Taliban went public, so we now know what their present negotiating stance is. Interestingly, this is not a starting or opening position, given that talks have been on and off for the best part of a year, with several different interlocutors. But it does represent some forward movement.

Five-stage process

When read in conjunction with the leaked High Peace Council Roadmap, however, a number of misgivings arise. The document makes clear that the Chantilly talks were embedded in background negotiations.

It sets out a five-stage process, in which the first stage is an end to cross-border shelling of villages, release of designated Taliban from Pakistani prisons, a Taliban announcement of severing ties with the al-Qaeda, and renewal of negotiations for safe passage. The Pakistani government did release some Taliban prisoners just prior to Chantilly, and while the Taliban did not make an announcement regarding the al-Qaeda, they did indicate flexibility on other critical issues for internal reconciliation. So the document clearly has some bearing on reality.

The bulk of the roadmap proposes agreements between the Afghan government and the Taliban that are geared towards an end to violence and reintegration of ex-combatants. As a set of disarm, demobilise and reintegrate proposals, it would have been non-controversial. But it includes several provisions that go beyond these imperatives and could be a cause for worry in India, not to mention other closely concerned countries, as well as to opposition groups in Afghanistan.

To start with the last first, in stage three of the plan, the Afghan government and the Taliban are to agree on giving the Taliban positions in the power structure of the state such as ministerial berths and governorships, which other parties have to win through elections or at the Presidents pleasure. Analysts are

also speculating that this could mean handing over the southern and eastern provinces to the Taliban in a kind of de facto but not de jure partition. Whether the latter is feasible or not, this proposal is likely to alienate both the existing political parties and sections of civil society in Afghanistan.

More alarming, under the plan, the Afghan government and the Taliban will also agree to a vision on strengthening the ANSF and other key government institutions to remain non-political and enjoy full public support. This proposal, if it does actually become a focus of negotiations, will immediately polarise the polity on ethnic grounds. Moreover, the task of creating a vision for security forces, along with rules and regulations, belongs to Parliament not to the Afghan government and Taliban, on the

fundamental principle that elected legislators are the best expression of the will of the people.

Pakistans role

For India, and many other regional countries that suffered at the hands of the Taliban while they were in power, the idea of recreating the ANSF through exclusive, and largely secret, negotiations is alarming. In our case it is doubly alarming because the roadmap also gives Pakistan a controlling role in the proposed peace process, thereby keeping the door open to strategic depth. Pakistan will mediate between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and will decide, with the Afghan government and the United States, the conditions for Taliban participation, such as delisting and safe passage; Afghanistan and Pakistan will cooperate on fighting the

al-Qaeda and any groups threaten each others security.

that

Again, these proposals would not be alarming in themselves were it not for the ugly security dynamic in the region. Afghanistan and Pakistan are fully entitled to enter into bilateral security arrangements, and if their cooperation can bring the Taliban to the table it must be welcome. But any moves towards the institutionalisation of Pakistani influence in Afghan security structures, however indirectly, are bound to trigger fears of Afghanistan being used again for proxy wars. Indeed, they run counter to the Afghanistan-India Strategic Partnership Agreement.

The good news is that the roadmap was leaked while it is still a set of proposals, and is thus open to reaction and change. Several of the points made above could be

accommodated through the inclusion of guarantees that would satisfy opposition and neighbour concerns; for example that any provisional agreements regarding governance and security would be put to Parliament or a specially convened Loya Jirga, as was earlier done, or that the Taliban would simultaneously pledge not to support or give sanctuary to groups threatening a third country.

Out of it

But there is one larger problem that needs addressing by all the negotiators. The roadmap proposes regular monitoring and consultations with countries that have influence over the Taliban directly or through Pakistan, which is useful coordination. But it entirely omits consultations with neighbours who will be directly impacted by the outcome of its proposals. As ever, those who are a

part of the solution take a back seat to those who are a part of the problem.

With its strong ties to the Afghan government, and reasonable relations with peace process facilitators such as the U.S., Turkey and Saudi Arabia, India should seek to be in the consultation mechanism, as indeed should other neighbours that would need to on board if a peace process is to succeed.

(Radha Kumar is Director, Delhi Policy Group.)

Some proposals for with the Taliban misgivings in India as opposition and civil within Afghanistan December 28, 2012

an agreement could create well as among society groups

No Santas at this police station


On Christmas Day, December 25, 2012, my mother, our friend and I went to Jantar Mantar for a peaceful protest. We arrived to find things loud but calm, the police stood silently behind the barricades while the protesters raised slogans. There was no conflict. The three of us had found a group of women and were discussing the state of things when two panic-stricken girls approached us, saying they had seen some women protesters being attacked by the police and dragged away by them to Parliament Street Thana .

All of us women made a collective decision to accompany the two of them to the Thana and find out what happened to the detainees. There

were about 12 of us and two young men who also came.

Resistance and force

When we arrived, we asked to speak to the female ACP. They refused and told us to leave the station. We asked for the names and ranks of the constables present, but they withheld this information; their badges were hidden by their jackets. We then asked on what grounds those protesters had been detained and one constable (I later identified him as SHO Dinesh Kumar) said under Section 65.

He told us he would never release them and that if we did not leave the station immediately he would detain us. And thats exactly what happened. Our resistance was met with brute force when some women constables

were called and Dinesh Kumar ordered them to forcefully detain us. We were pushed, pulled and dragged. One female constable began to pull the hair of a woman and I ran to her aid. The constable then turned her blows on me, pulling my hair. From behind, Dinesh Kumar slammed my head into a wall. We were all pushed into one room with the other detainees and kept till well after 6 p.m. At last, a woman claiming to be from Deepjyoti NGO, came to tell us that mistakes had been made and that she would release all of us if we admitted we did something wrong and gave them our personal details and promised not to speak to the media.

Tweeting

Initially all of us refused to sign anything, but then, petrified, we all made a collective decision not to give

our real names and to just get out of there quickly. None of us felt safe disclosing information that the police can use to further harass us. All day, I had been live-tweeting (as I had been doing for some days) about the protests, the crowds, the police, the violence and the battery. I did this in order to inform and alert friends, activists and mediapersons on Twitter of what exactly was happening to us peaceful protesters.

My friends on Twitter helped spread the word. As a result, the media did pick up on what was happening and arrived outside the Thana before we were released and phone calls began coming to the Thana , asking for us detainees.

They agreed to let us out at around 6.45 p.m. Just as we women were being let go, the NGO worker came

running out with the police asking who is Shambhavi?

None of us had given our real names to protect ourselves from the police. My mother, terrified, ushered me out of there quickly. This wasnt the end of police terror. That same day at 10.24 p.m., my mother received a threatening call from 01123361100 (Parliament Street PS); a male voice said that if she did not bring me to the Thana immediately to apologise, they would come to our house and arrest us.

Detained twice

Of course I was detained twice in two days, there are people who are detained daily to prevent them from protesting. Of course I wasnt tweeting while my head was being bashed against the wall, thats an

insane assumption people have made. Of course I didnt tweet after being released, scared that the police would get wind of it and follow us and harm us. Of course I did not reveal sensitive information about myself because I just dont feel safe around the police. No young woman in the city does! If this is the kind of treatment our socalled protectors give to peaceful protesters, I shudder to think of how the police behave in other parts of India. To think that all 16 of us, educated, well-connected women who knew our rights were violated in this way is disturbing. It is because of police like this that rapes happen every day. Despite all this, I will continue fighting for the safety of women, for justice for the Delhi gang rape victim, for all rape victims and all victims of sexual harassment.

(Shambhavi Saxena is a 19-year-old student of English at Lady Shri Ram

College in New Delhi. She is also a volunteer for Greenpeace India and is passionate about the environment and human rights issues.)

A personal account of how 16 women, who went to protest the Delhi gang rape on December 25 ended up being arrested December 28, 2012

Still comrades after all these years


Russia was the first country with which India established a strategic partnership in 2000 when Vladimir Putin became President and reversed the drift in ties under Boris Yeltsin when Moscow veered westwards and lost interest in its Soviet-era friendships. The declaration of a strategic partnership with India was a

pragmatic step, calculated to restore Russias role in international affairs by linking up with independent-minded, friendly, economically resurgent countries like India that could help promote multi-polarity and resist United States-led policies of regime change and intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.

Since then, India has signed strategic partnership agreements with several countries, including the U.S. whose unilateralism was the motive for espousing multipolarity in the first place. The India-U.S. strategic partnership agreement shifts the balance in Indias foreign policy as its logic is both to deepen bilateral ties and build convergences in policies on regional and global issues. Because of the disparity of power between them, the U.S. has more capacity to influence Indias policies than the reverse, with the result that changes

in Indias stance on some domestic and foreign issues is often attributed to U.S. influence, causing misgivings about Indias U.S. tilt.

Perceived westward tilt

If before 2000 it was Russias westward tilt that unsettled our bilateral relationship, it is now the perceived westward tilt of India that is causing some unease in Russian thinking.

To underline the claim that the IndiaRussia relationship is in fine fettle and distinguish it from Indias other strategic partnerships, the two countries declared last year that theirs was a special and privileged one. But such well meaning rhetoric does not match reality.

If the economic pillar of relationships is more important today than the political one, then the inability of India and Russia to build a strong bilateral economic relationship weakens the foundations of overall ties. At $10 billion currently, two-way trade, even with a 30 per cent increase over the previous year, is small, compared to $100 billion in economic exchanges with the U.S. and almost $73 billion of trade in goods with China. The target of $20 billion by 2015 appears optimistic. Many efforts at the government level to promote more business to business contacts have not galvanised the economic relationship because of the hangover of the state controlled trade arrangements of the past that blunt real entrepreneurship on both sides, the decline of the public sector in India and the state oriented structure of the Russian economy, and also because the most dynamic, technologically modernising sectors of

our economy, especially knowledgebased, are west oriented. In this context, some agreements signed during the summit in IT and pharmaceutical sectors, as well as on satellite based navigation systems using GLONASS (the Russian GPS system), are encouraging.

In areas of obvious complementarities, as in the energy sector, achievements have remained modest despite several summit level discussions during the 12 years of strategic partnership. The joint statement issued at the end of the just concluded summit between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Putin devotes considerable attention to the subject, with some indication of progress. We have, as before, reiterated our interest in equity participation in new projects in Siberia, Russias Far East and the Arctic shelf, as well as in

discovered/producing assets and proposed LNG projects in Russia. In return, Russia has always pitched for a share in downstream activities in India, to which we are agreeable. The LNG deal between GAIL and the Gazprom group for long-term supply of 2.5 mmt mentioned in the joint statement is to be welcomed. We are looking to Russia to ease the tax liability on Indian investment in Imperial Energy which is making the project unremunerative.

As against this, the atmosphere for Russian investment in India has been soured by the problems Sistema has been facing in the telecom sector with its licences revoked by the Supreme Courts 2G judgment, putting in jeopardy its multi-billion dollar investment that includes $700 million of Russian debt funds. The issue has got complicated because Sistema contends rightly that it acted within

the policy framework and committed no wrongdoing and the Russian government seeks resolution through executive fiat and is unpersuaded that the government of India cannot disregard the Supreme Court judgment. Some amicable solution seems to have been explored as the issue does not figure in the joint statement, while Indias problem with Russian tax laws in connection with Imperial Energy does.

Disappointment

Russias disappointment with the delay in signing the agreement on Kudankulam 3 and 4, despite the attractive financial terms offered, is understandable. Having agreed to set up nuclear plants in defiance of U.S.led international restrictions on civilian nuclear cooperation with India and supply nuclear fuel for Tarapur, the Russians are resentful that India

wants to treat them and the Americans and the French alike with regard to our nuclear liability law, especially as the inter-governmental agreement pertaining to these reactors preceded our liability legislation. However, with Fukushima and the public agitation against Kudankulam 1 and 2, not to mention the Supreme Courts involvement in the matter, the issue has become politically difficult for the government. The answer may lie in increased cost of Russian reactors to cater for liability exposure. If Russia explored a practical solution within the rules framed under our liability law that provides considerable scope for limiting the financial liability of the supplier, Kudankulam 3 and 4 could be signed and Russia would dramatically increase its head start over others in Indias nuclear sector.

Similarly, on defence contracts, the Russians are unhappy at the negative publicity over the inordinate delay in delivering the aircraft carrier, now slated for November 2013, even as the Government of India has been extremely accommodating over the delay. Russia retains its privileged position as the largest source of defence supplies to India, but gets upset when it loses some tenders. Because the India-Russia relationship is excessively defence weighted, such losses are felt all the more acutely. India has to manage Russian expectations even as it is obliged to diversify its sources of supply as part of building strategic ties with other partners. The answer lies in diversifying the India-Russia relationship and giving it strong nondefence legs. On the positive side, the two countries are engaged in joint projects such as the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft, Multi-Role Transport Aircraft and the BrahMos missile,

while India has ordered an additional 12 MI-17v5 helicopters as well as technological kits for 42 additional Sukhoi 30-MKI aircraft. It is ironic that although India is the biggest user of Russian platforms which are used in exercises with the U.S. armed forces, military level contacts with the Russians, as compared to those with the U.S., are negligible. Beyond all this, it is a huge policy failure on our part that with so much access to advanced Russian equipment we have failed to establish an indigenous defence manufacturing base.

The joint statement has substantive paragraphs with positive formulations on several regional and global issues. Russia has expressed satisfaction with Indias cooperation as a nonpermanent member of the U.N. Security Council and reiterated its strong support for its candidature for permanent membership. The

formulation on terrorism is robust. Pakistan is not named, but the implication, including in the context of Afghanistan, is clear, easing doubts raised by Russias recent overtures to Pakistan. The Taliban is not named, but in the context of attempts to have a dialogue with it, both countries have recalled the redlines for this and have implicitly opposed the dilution of U.N. sanctions against the extremist elements.

The formulation on Syria reflects convergence in thinking on essentials, as also that on Iran where any military option is opposed. In the long paragraph on security in Asia, there is a call for inclusive regional security architecture. In the background of Chinese claims in South China Sea, the need for strengthening maritime security in accordance with the universally accepted principles of international law is stressed. The

trilateral India-Russia-China mechanism gets a positive mention, with Russia conveying its support for Indias membership of SCO and APEC. The important role BRICS plays in a multi-polar order and collective decision making is noted. Both countries back a more representative and legitimate international financial architecture that includes an expeditious reform of the IMF.

Russia has extended support to Indias membership of the MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime) and Wassenar Arrangement as well as the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The Australia Group is a notable omission. In the joint statement, India has underscored its determination to actively contribute to international efforts at strengthening nuclear nonproliferation regime, which, apart from the clumsy language, is unclear about what is implied.

All in all, despite a truncated visit consistent with Mr. Putins matter-offact, businesslike style, the 13th summit was timely in providing an opportunity to the two sides to underline a shared understanding on several important issues and address some vexatious ones creating ripples across the smooth surface of the bilateral relationship.

(The writer is a former Foreign Secretary)

The India-Russia summit saw positive formulations on many issues, while providing an opportunity to address

difficult questions like Kudankulam December 28, 2012

Lessons in policing, from a university

NEW APPROACH:Neither public nor private structures guarantee effective policing. What does though is a culture rooted in values.The picture is of the Stanford police. Policing is in a state of crisis right now. The protests in Delhi and elsewhere bear testimony to the public angst against the police. Our anger has notched up a big victory by getting the slumbering government to issue an irritated question, "What can we do to get you to shut up and go home?" What are we going to tell them?

The police are viewed with the same terror today as they were by our ancestors during the British Raj. The attitude of policing then was that of

rulership. When someone is picked up by the police today, the family does not know if that person will ever return home. To make matters worse, an unhealthy collusion with the political classes has led to a situation where we find it hard to trust the word of the police. Blaming and cornering the police is tempting but unhelpful, for it is just another way of dehumanising them, which is no better than what we often accuse the police of doing to us. For any positive change in the situation, a sea change is needed in our perspectives on policing and what may be possible.

Doctoral dissertation

For my PhD dissertation, I studied the history of the Stanford police department that had its modern origins in the violence of the 1960s and 1970s during the civil rights and the Vietnam era. Due to riots on

campus and a massive breakdown in law and order, the university recognised the need for a professional police department on campus that went beyond the existing departments function as security guards. Instead of calling in public police who would come in with riot gear, beat up and arrest students, they wanted a more sensitive approach that involved a deeper understanding of students. But professionalising an existing police department was easier said than done.

The university hired Chief Marvin Herrington, who was very passionate about policing values. He realised that the department hed taken charge of was not well trained. He took away the officers guns and had them reapply under much higher standards standards that are a no-brainer today. He brought in ideas that were

shocking that the police had to look at everyone as their client, including those they arrested! His officers resisted such a shift, but Herrington persisted, insisting in the dignity of even the drunk theyd pick up. Those who didnt accept his ideas retired and eventually he only had people who accepted these values.

Tackling drunk students

The foundation of values that Herrington built continues to this day. I experienced their culture by riding along with the police officers as part of my research. When arresting severely drunk students, officers would tell me that the students could really hurt themselves in that state, so they would arrest them for their own safety, transport them to the hospital and send them home when they had recovered. The approach to policing at Stanford is an integrated one when

such arrests are made, a school administrator in charge of alcohol education would get notified and students have to meet with this official for counselling. Moreover, the Stanford police even promise not to make arrests when someone reports an alcohol poisoning incident so that students wont be afraid to call it in, and the police can go in and help.

Privatising functions

This vignette is a snapshot of a different world of policing. A world in which values are the central organising principle. We can question how much of this vision can be ported to Indian policing but that would be missing the point. We can also get carried away and demand privatisation of police functions. It is certainly true that many police functions in our society are already

privatised, like property security guards. It is also true that Stanfords police department is privately funded, although it is deputised by the public police agency in the county, and operates like one.

However, history has shown us that many other private police forces have gone astray. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, it is not uncommon to hear of private militia creating fear in the hearts of the people. Neither public nor private structures guarantee effective policing. What does though is a culture rooted in values. Our emphasis then needs to shift from blaming the police to helping them reflect and evolve core values that they can live and die for.

The Stanford Police Departments story shows that a clear set of values when articulated and lived authentically, can live on beyond

individual authors and set the culture of an organisation. There is another utility for clearly articulated values.

Given how many times Indian police receive illegal orders verbally from the top, officers can develop an internal alarm system when orders are given against stated values, and require written orders. As most illegal orders involve deception and secrecy, such orders can be nipped in the bud by referring to the code of values and requiring a written record.

(Somik Raha holds a PhD in Decision Analysis from Stanford University on values, and works on value-based decision systems with SmartOrg in California.)

The Stanford police department is an example of how law enforcement can be both non-adversarial and effective December 29, 2012

Words that wound


His image irreparably dented, Abhijit Mukherjee has painted himself into a wretched and abject corner. The apology by the Congress MP and son of President Pranab Mukherjee, however, is hardly going to make amends for his monumental folly. What he said about the women who protested against the brutal gang rape of the 23-year-old in Delhi cannot be explained away with the usual disclaimers that it was said in jest, that it was taken out of context, or that it was a throwaway remark open to misinterpretation. His shocking comments describing female protesters as painted and dented women, suggesting that they hopped fashionably from discotheques to

street demonstrations were in the nature of an extended and deliberate commentary that he offered on not one but two separate occasions. His insincere apology does little to erase the sexist nature of his remarks. In July this year, when Abhijit began lobbying for the Congress ticket for Jangipur the seat his father vacated this newspaper counselled in an editorial against treating constituencies as an inheritance. The Lok Sabha is not for him yet, we wrote. (Descent of the Republic, July 25, 2012). The correctness of that assessment has been proved today by Mr. Mukherjees own words.

Sadly, Mr. Mukherjee is not the only public figure to be caught nursing regressive and gender discriminatory views in the aftermath of the recent gang rape incident. Another West Bengal politician, Anisur Rahaman of the Communist Party of India

(Marxist), put his clumsy foot into his wide open mouth by making a personal and deeply offensive remark against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee while criticising the limitations of a policy that allegedly does little more than compensate rape victims financially. Earlier this week, Andhra Pradesh Congress president Botcha Satyanarayana dismissed the rape as a small incident and said women shouldnt go out during the late hours. The irony of these backward comments is that a horrific assault which highlighted the failure of the state to ensure the physical security of a citizen is being used by politicians as an excuse to further dominate, control and regulate the lives of women. Once made, these misogynist statements are invariably withdrawn in the face of public outrage but no action is ever taken by senior party leaders against the offending legislators or party men. In a society where crimes against

females are rampant, proper legislation and implementation of laws are paramount. But it is also extremely important to change social attitudes towards women. Going by the remarks made over the last few days, we need to start at the very top with the very people who seek to govern us.December 29, 2012

How is India Doing (2012)?


Thirty years ago, in an essay titled How is India Doing? ( New York Review of Books , December 16, 1982) Amartya Sen took a synoptic view of where the country was. He concluded that while India was doing quite well in many respects, this progress was mixed and had to assessed in the light of the persistent inequities, and the basic weakness of modern India that sustains them.

Indias politics, economy and society have changed hugely in the intervening decades. But when reflecting on where we are today, what strikes one is the change with changelessness that is India in 2012.

Let us look at just four of the many broad areas that Sen covered in 1982.

First, the growth of the economy . When Sen spoke of signs of a pickup in the early 1980s, it was the beginning of a phase of the fastest economic growth in Indias recorded history. While we tend to look at what happened after 1991, the acceleration in economic growth started in the 1980s and continued thereafter. The pace of growth in the past 30 years has been almost 60 per cent higher than in the previous three decades. The phase of high growth has been related to the much greater role given

to the private sector and the larger process of globalisation.

Economic opportunities have expanded, entrepreneurial avenues have exploded, some sectors are now organised on very sophisticated lines and millions in the urban middle and lower middle classes can aspire to a better life.

But what of the human condition or the quality of life of all Indians?

The one major success since 1982 has been in combating illiteracy. In 1982, only 36 per cent of Indians were literate; now it is only 26 per cent who are illiterate. But on the big question of extreme poverty, the answer is decidedly ambivalent. If we cut through the academic debates, it is clear that the extent of poverty has certainly come down in the past 30

years. This contrasts with Sens perception that there was no evidence until 1982 of a decline. However, elaborations as well as qualifications are required.

One, the decline in poverty has not been uniform across regions and communities. If in 1982 your parents lived on the banks of the Cooum in Madras or in Dharavi in Bombay, it is likely that today your economic status is better than theirs. But if you are from a Dalit or adivasi family in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, or Uttar Pradesh, chances are that you are no better off now than your parents were in 1982. Two, the benefits of growth have indeed trickled down, but that is exactly what has happened: it has been just a trickle . The incidence of poverty has declined, but a quarter of the population or around 300-350 million people are still desperately poor.

Three, if other basic necessities like shelter, access to clean drinking water and sanitation are included, the picture is much more dismal. Research by R. Jayraj and S. Subramanian shows that severe multidimensional poverty afflicted 470 million in 200506, not much lower than the estimate of 520 million in 1992-93. Four, in certain critical areas for instance, malnourishment and maternal mortality conditions remain terrible. Close to half our children suffer from malnutrition, much the same as 30 years ago.

So if we paint a broader picture, the old sliver of the beneficiaries of Indias growth has only thickened a bit. For the large mass of Indias poor, daily life remains a struggle. There is no doubt India lost a major opportunity in the past three decades.

Lets turn to the third area addressed by Sen the status of women . Over the past three decades, a strong feminist movement has emerged, there has been a greater participation of women in economic activity in the cities, and there is reservation in panchayats for women, all of which would suggest a growing empowerment of women.

The sex ratio has at last begun to see some improvement, though only in the past decade. And the life expectancy of women is now, as it should be, longer than of men. But we are in a far worse situation than in 1982 with respect to the status of the girl child. The sex ratio at birth the number of girls born for every 1,000 boys born has declined in recent decades. And the sex ratio of children under six has also worsened. Whether the result of sex-selection at birth, female infanticide, or neglect of the

girl child, India has become an awful place for girls.

Fourth, the position of the deprived castes . We have seen the emergence of strong movements that have turned into political parties demanding the redressal of traditional inequities. The epochal change is that the political parties of the lower/backward castes now exercise a major say in regional and national politics. These parties have brought caste back to the table.

The outcome, however, has not been any major improvement in the economic status of the deprived castes. It may be too early to express any definite opinion on the achievements of these parties, but the early optimism that they would position the demand for lower-caste rights as part of a larger movement for justice and equality has faded.

These parties have at times turned into movements solely for the advancement of sectional interests, and, worse, have become vehicles of personal aggrandisement.

If these are the changes in four areas that Sen examined in 1982, one also has to recognise that major changes have taken place in other areas.

(i) Electoral Democracy

A significant change from the 1970s which levelled off in the mid 1990s was a rise in voter turnout, specifically of the rural electorate, women, and Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. All this has made elections more inclusive.

Yet, while the procedural practices of democracy elections have been

placed on a strong foundation, the substantive practices the accountability of institutions/elected officials, engagement with institutions outside elections, and the like have weakened. Now even some of the procedural practices are falling apart, most notably in the working of the legislature.

I see three related causes for this weakening of electoral democracy. One, the absence of inner-party democracy. Today, no party big or small, regional or national, cadrebased or family-based practices democracy internally. How then can we expect elected bodies to function properly? Two, related to this is the rise of the family in political parties. Patrick Frenchs analysis of the current Lok Sabha showed that over 65 per cent of MPs under 40 had a prior family connection in politics. In the future, will a majority of our MPs

be in Parliament because of who their parents are, not because they earned their spurs by working in forums of democracy? Three, money and politics. The assets of todays MPs are obscenely large. The Lok Sabha is not a Hall of the People but of the Wealthy. The links between elected representatives, business, and the executive (and organised plunder) are now so intertwined that it is difficult to see state financing making a difference.

(ii) Decline of the Public Institution

There are public institutions that have been strengthened over the past 30 years, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Election Commission being two of them. People have also developed greater faith in the judiciary, which it has been ready to respond to. But the larger trend is a decline in the

responsiveness of public institutions to the citizen. A single Right to Information Act cannot neutralise the deliberate abdication of all state agencies in providing services in education, health, public transport, drinking water, sanitation, energy, and housing. Much of the abdication has been in the name of privatisation. Corruption is the other face of a decline of public services. It disempowers the citizen, and reflects a weakening of the rule of law, and most dangerously, the intertwining of business and politics (and crime).

(iii) Communalism

For a country that became independent amid gruesome violence on religious lines, communalism has been no stranger. Soon after Sens essay, we had the anti-Sikh riots of November 1984. Mass murder was conducted over three days in the

capital under the benign gaze of a new Prime Minister. The message was: if you mobilise yourself with force, you can get away with anything. The message was heard, and put into practice in Bhagalpur 1989, Bombay 1993, and Gujarat 2002.

Beyond such open violence, it is the routinisation of communalism in daily life that is new. Mobilisation on communal lines took new forms after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad/Bharatiya Janata Party decided to raise the issue of the Babri Masjid. The rath yatra of 1990, the Congresss cynical attempt at soft Hindutva, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid completed the post-Independence transformation of India on communal lines. All this has contributed in no small measure to the growth of domestic terrorism. India is tragically now a less tolerant society than what it was in the early 1980s.

(iv) Regionalism/Secessionism

In the early 1980s one could still speak of India having successfully navigated the dangerous decades after Independence. But the accumulated resentment that exploded in Kashmir after the sham 1987 elections showed that political India was far from stable. Whether in Kashmir or the north-east, insurgent movements have enjoyed considerable local support.

The Indian state has responded with the use of force and by propping one group against another with only the occasional nod in the direction of dialogue. This approach flows from a rigid interpretation of the nation as conceived during the freedom movement. The routine use of force to deal with secessionist/regional

movements also brutalises the nation; as a result, we as a people have gradually become desensitised to state violence.

(v) Environment

Ecological degradation and the destruction of natural resources have increased sharply in the past quarter century. Our cities have become time bombs for health disasters. In rural India, it is deforestation, occupation of common property, overexploitation of groundwater, and indiscriminate use of fertilizers and pesticides that have caused problems.

Many movements have emerged to protect the environment, much legislation enacted and many regulatory bodies constituted. But the core belief of the ruling elite continues to be that growth must

come first and protection later.

environment

(vi) Media

The media in 2012 is unrecognisable in numbers, variety and content from what it was in 1982. Beyond its growth, questions are now being asked of the government rules under which it has to operate and its own lack of rules on integrity. But the big question the media is loath to reflect on is how it has silently come to identify itself with the state and the dominant ideology.

The media now has a visible probusiness tilt, as the political scientist Atul Kohli would call it, towards selling a particular vision of India. Many print and electronic channels peddle a certain kind of aspirational lifestyle for the new India. There are close

connections between this and a particular view of how the economy should function. As Kohli points out, the media also interprets the new lives of the upper middle classes in terms of a pro-business mindset. There is a similar identity of interests between the media and the state on national security, and Indias position in the world.

There are of course exceptions. There will also be exposs and confrontations with the state. But the media has begun to think like the ruling elite because it has bought into the dominant ideology and therefore refuses to question it.

The main sets of changes outlined here can be brought together to offer a larger understanding of how we are doing. The key lies in identifying who rules India and how they manage (not resolve) the countrys many divisions.

In a very rough formulation that borrows from elements of both political sociologist Partha Chatterjee and political scientist Atul Kohli, I would say that as before, we have a small ruling elite. And as before, this elite is a coalition of interests.

The ruling elite is made up of large Indian businesses, the new entrepreneurs in real estate, finance, and IT, the upper segment of the urban middle classes, the upper echelons among the bureaucracy, and even large sections of the media. This is neither a homogenous group nor is its formation set in stone. The state is neither a handmaiden of the elite nor is it autonomous. The new elite is impatient at being held back by the backwardness of India. It is dismissive of electoral politics, though it is this electoral democracy that legitimises its exercise of power.

Consider an example of how the system both stabilises and destabilises itself. The state introduced the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act against all opposition from the ruling elite. It did so not just for electoral considerations but because it realised that it had to set in place some survival support systems for those in rural India who were excluded from growth. When the state finds the scheme has become very large and there is opposition from new quarters, it finds it cannot roll it back because the deprived use their vote to ensure its continuation. To shed some of its fiscal responsibility, the state then starts contemplating alternatives like cash transfers in other important areas like the public distribution of food. All the while, the state sanctions the undermining of livelihood systems and oversees their sale to big business,

though these systems are more important than anything NREGA can provide.

The system worked like this even earlier but there is a new violence to the dominant agenda. Before the 1980s, there was a larger nationbuilding project. We did have sharp divisions, class interests took control of the national agenda, and there was corruption and manipulation of the system. But the narrative then was to build a nation of opportunity for all. Political parties represented particular interests, but as Kohli puts it, politics also had a public purpose. Citizens with their votes would invest in the executive the agency to try and realise this public purpose.

The first post-Independence project did not succeed. In its place now is a different kind of transition, to a more selfish society. Todays elite is more

involved with itself. It is impatient with anything that holds back the expansion of its economic muscle. Hence the talk now of policy paralysis and the political investment in something as trivial as foreign direct investment in retail. The selfconfidence about India that is part of the dominant narrative is simultaneously intolerant of any questioning from within or without.

There is a violence in this agenda because here the larger nation does not exist. There is a new disdain among the elite for the deprivation that surrounds it. Hence the mental and at times even geographical separation from the larger part of the country. All this together makes for a less compassionate, more intolerant, and less sensitive country than before.

We have always been a very deeply divided society. The practice of

democracy over six decades has not closed these divisions. Electoral democracy has actually built on them. In recent decades, new dimensions have been added to these divisions and these have contributed to greater inequality. Until the 1980s, the division used to be not very accurately portrayed as one of India vs. Bharat. Todays divisions run along multiple fractures class, caste, gender, urban/rural, advanced/backward regions, and even religion.

There is a bleakness in this understanding of contemporary India that gives little reason for hope. But a counter can ironically be found in the daily and relentless struggle of citizens to demand their dues from the state. What holds out hope is the continuous mobilisation, the daily demonstrations, the pressures exerted on the state not to be subsumed by the ruling elite, the

ferocious, and sometimes destructive, contestations.

even

A lived and tragic example of the many dichotomies of India is the story of Naimuddin Mohammed Yunus Ansari from Naroda Patiya, Ahmedabad, who suffered grievously in the 2002 killings):

The mob killed my mother Abida Bibi. They flung my seven-year old niece Gulnaz Bano into the fire. She died. My sister Saeeda died of burns at the hospital the next day. I was attacked by swords and lost my 11month-old daughter while trying to flee. I found her at the Shah Alam camp two months later, says Naimuddin. His wife Naseem (name changed) was gang raped by four men; her left arm chopped off with a sword, he adds.

It was only in 2010, when special court judge Jyotsna Yagnik started hearing witnesses testimonies that Naimuddin persuaded Naseem to give hers, the only woman to survive gang rape among the hundreds of victims of brutal sexual violence at Naroda Patiya.

Jyotsnaben listened so attentively to us, we salute her a hundred times. If the defence lawyers stared at us or tried to intimidate us, she would tell them off, says Naimuddin who made a living selling bread and biscuits in Naroda Patiya but has been unable to restart his business since. He works as a daily wage labourer now. I told Naroda police at the Shah Alam relief camp that I recognise the attackers. Many of them used to buy bread from me. (Anumeha Yadav, A Partial Sense of Closure, The Hindu , September 6, 2012)

This is a story of India today. First, the grinding poverty. Naimuddin was a poor itinerant seller of bread before the riots. Today he is a wage labourer. The years of growth and Gujarats prosperity have passed him by. Second, the violence, when your neighbours and acquaintances set out to do the most terrible things to women. But we also have here an example of the states unwillingness to protect its citizens. Third, in spite of everything, Naimuddin and his wife retained faith in the system of justice. Fourth, the system even if it needs a nudge can deliver, as in this case when 32 people, including one former minister and one political leader, were given life imprisonment. Fifth, when citizens fight for justice against all odds, individuals holding office can on occasion meet their expectations. Here it is the judge, Jyotsna Yagnik, who is an example of the state showing the impartiality that the citizen expects of it.

This is a microcosm of India today. Everything that makes you shudder is here. So too everything that says the citizen will not give up. And, finally, that all is not lost with the state.

This is the reason why we must remain optimistic about the future. In the end, one of the achievements of electoral democracy and the working of the Constitution is that the citizen knows she has rights and will fight for them, however much she may despair at not being able to exercise them.

(This is a revised and shortened version of the 2012 S. Guhan Memorial Lecture delivered in Chennai on December 5, 2012. The author is Editor of the Economic & Political Weekly, Mumbai. Email: ram@epw.in )

The media now has a visible probusiness tilt towards selling a particular vision of India. Many print and electronic channels peddle a certain kind of aspirational lifestyle.

The new elite is impatient at being held back by the backwardness of the country. It is dismissive of electoral politics, though it is this electoral democracy that legitimises its exercise of power.

In a 1982 essay, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen asked how India was doing and concluded that its progress

was mixed. Revisiting the question 30 years later,

C. Rammanohar Reddy notes the coexistence of change and changelessness that is India today. Everything that makes you shudder is here. So too everything that says the citizen will not give up the fight for her rights December 29, 2012

Charge of the unenlightened brigade


Rape Capital? Rage Capital? Delhi 2011 was completely and overwhelmingly defined by Anna Hazare and the milling, stampeding crowds that rushed after him, raising their fists and shouting Vande Mataram even as their messiah promised a second war of

Independence to liberate the country from its corrupt, venal rulers.

The images return as 2012 fades into another new year: Delhis VVIP avenues are choked with protesters who have breached security to reach Raisina Hill, the sanctum-sanctorum of the Republic. The outrage this time is over the unimaginably brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old and the target is the same government. The difference between then and now: Anna has vanished, and having evicted him and his Independence call from public memory, the regime has grown more muscle, more arrogance.

Commonalities

A future historian will surely record the commonalities between the protests. If the two periods could be captured in slide shows they would

show anger as the primary emotion anger directed at a government seen as crooked, self-serving and callous to the point of disbelief towards the ordinary citizen. But the slides would also show fury gone out of control, they would show lynch mobs with their cries of hang them, kill them overshadowing genuine, peaceful agitators asking for little besides their own personal safety. As in 2011, the mobs would show up on the streets, and perhaps in even larger numbers on social networking sites and Facebook accounts, seeking immediate, kangaroo court-style justice. In 2011, it was death to the corrupt, and a law (Jan Lokpal) with overriding powers and authoritarian shades. In 2012, it would be death to the rapists and a law that must be enacted here and now so offenders can be sent to the gallows with minimal due process.

As in 2011, television channels and some newspapers would sensationalise the 2012 mass anger, projecting it once again as Indias Tahrir Square moment implying thereby that street protests were enough to topple a shamed and discredited government. Of course, we know and they know that the moment would pass, a new distraction would take the place of the gang rape, and the government would live to fight another battle, if anything with greater confidence and bluster. After all, Team Manmohans handling of the gang rape protests suggested the perfection of a formula it had successfully employed against Anna and Ramdev. The government arrested Anna with no reason, and it set upon Ramdevs rally with equally no reason. A year later, it would go after the crowds at India Gate with a sledgehammer, and earn further wrath by exploiting the death of a police constable. But crucially, none of

this would matter because this government has been rude, unresponsive and has survived.

As the Indian Republic heads into its 64th year, we seem to be caught between an illiberal, insensitive government-political class and a rampaging mob demanding instant solutions, with only a thin line separating the two. The gang rape ought to have been understood as a complex socio-political issue, resulting as much from bad policing as from entrenched notions of female purity and honour. For all its veneer of modernity, India is essentially an overgrown patriarchy characterised by its violent intolerance of the liberated woman. Honour killings and rapes are not new but today they are executed with a brutality that suggests a compelling male need to subjugate and overpower women of a

particular kind: those that live life on their own terms.

When irate mobs ask to avenge rape through extreme measures, they reinforce the stereotype of the defiled, dishonoured woman. A reader responding to an article on an online newspaper came up with this ingenious solution for gang rapes: have the rapists raped in full public view by homosexual men. Why homosexual men? Because like women they are deemed to have no rights and can be used as society pleases. But this wild comment is by no means an exception as any visitor to online discussion forums will confirm. Significantly, most feminist groups, which by belief and practice will act in the best interests of rape victims, have emphatically rejected the death penalty as the answer to rape. This is because the death penalty does two things: it invests

rape with precisely the kind of power that makes it so fearsome, that engenders the rapist-mindset in the first place. Secondly, the death penalty which has been abolished in most countries and is applied in India in the rarest of rare cases will further lower the already abysmal conviction rate in rape cases. Forget the barbarity of the state deciding who must live and who must die, is the death penalty of any use if it cannot be applied?

It is understandable that this logic should escape the shouting brigade on the streets. But what explains the political classs shrill articulation of the death penalty demand? Worse, post the gang rape, politicians, women included, have furiously bought into archaic notions about the womans place: If she speaks out, she must be visiting discos. If she is a rape

victim, it is better she dies and so forth.

Responding to a rape incident in Delhi in 2002, then Defence Minister George Fernandes had said he wanted rapists shot dead in the same way the Chinese shoot their corrupt. Yet this was not out of any sympathy for the woman. Because he would also dismiss rape as an everyday incident in the context of the widespread sexual violence reported during the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom. We have heard these stories for 50 years, he would tell Parliament.

President Pranab Mukherjees son and Congress MP, Abhijit, was truly baffled that he was being asked to apologise for his description of women student protesters at India Gate as dented and painted a slang apparently used for women who apply make-up. To his uncomplicated

mind, it was the most obvious thing to say about modern women. Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee chief Botcha Satyanarayana contributed this bit: Freedom at midnight does not mean women roaming on the streets during late hours.

The Delhi gang rape expectedly rocked both Houses of Parliament. But if anyone thought our MPs would speak with intelligence and sensitivity on the subject, they were surely in for a shock. Because while the MPs undoubtedly spoke with passion, nothing they said made any sense : some speakers were unintendedly funny, most spoke of rape as if it was the end of the world, and all, barring a couple of exceptions, wanted an unfussy law that would swiftly put all rapists to death. One MP said left to himself he would have stoned the rape accused to death.

The leader of the unenlightened pack was Sushma Swaraj whose advocacy of capital punishment was because a woman victim of this kind can be counted neither among the dead nor the living. Further, even if she survives, she will live as a jeevit laash *living dead+.

The Janata Dal (United)s Shivanand Tiwari diagnosed the provocative item dance as the culprit behind the current environment for rape: Today we have reached a situation where aurat apni izzat nahi bacha sakti [the woman cannot protect her honour+.

The scar

The Samajwadi Partys Jaya Bachchan said the rape victim would be forgotten soon but the victim herself would remember the scar for the rest of her life. Ms Bachchan was

deeply anguished by the incident and protested that Parliament had no time for womens issues. Ironic because it was the SP that tore up the Womens Reservation Bill. Ironic too because the SP figured prominently in a recent list of parties that fielded rape accused in elections. Not content with describing rape as worse than death, M. Rama Jois, former Chief Justice of the Punjab & Haryana High Court and Bharatiya Janata Party MP, said rape happened because of cultural degradation, because you dont teach a code of religious conduct. He quoted Kautilya on rape: the committer of the offence should be killed on the spot.

The Nationalist Congress Partys Yogendra Trivedi said since legal deterrents were ineffective, the need of the hour was a national commission to look into falling moral values. The Asom Gana Parishads

Kumar Deepak Das lamented that the society of human beings had turned into a forest where wild animals found shelter and sanctuary.

With such words of wisdom, is it any wonder that we cant tell the politician from the mob? Is it any wonder that the government is uncaring, insensitive and feels free to crush the smallest protest? Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said he saw no reason to meet the protesting students.

We dont need regressive moral/religious teachings to stop rape. We need to raise boys and girls as equals and we need to enforce the constitutional guarantee of equality at home, at the workplace and on the streets. Most of all, we need to liberate women from the fear of rape, which is treated with horror not because it is violent but because it is

thought to be violative; it is thought to shame and dishonour the victim and rob her of her core.

Let us begin the process of destigmatisation and demystification of rape by pledging not to use associative words such as honour, violation, defilement and disgrace.

As the year draws to an end, we seem to be caught between an intolerant, insensitive government-political class and mobs baying for instant justice December 31, 2012

A note of dissent on cash transfers and UID


The following is the text of a note released by 208 scholars, activists and concerned citizens on the United

Progressive Alliance governments plan to introduce cash transfers linked to the Aadhaar (UID) numbers of beneficiaries:

We support cash transfers such as old age pensions, widow pensions, maternity entitlements and scholarships. However, we oppose the governments plan for accelerated mass conversion of welfare schemes to UID-driven cash transfers. This plan could cause havoc and massive social exclusion. We demand the following:

1. No replacement of food with cash under the Public Distribution System (PDS).

The PDS is a vital source of economic security and nutrition support for millions of people. It should be expanded and consolidated, not dismantled.

2. Immediate enactment of a comprehensive National Food Security Act, including universal PDS.

Instead of diverting the publics attention with promises of mass cash transfers before the 2014 elections, the government should redeem its promise to enact a National Food Security Act (NFSA).

3. Cash transfers should not be a substitute for public services.

While some cash transfer schemes are useful, they should complement, not be a substitute for the provision of public services such as health care, school education, water supply, basic amenities, and the PDS. These services remain grossly underfunded.

4. Expand and improve appropriate cash transfers without waiting for UID.

There is no need to wait for UID to expand and improve positive cash transfer schemes such as pensions, scholarships and maternity entitlements. For instance, social security pensions should be increased and universalised.

5. No UID enrolment without a legal framework.

Millions of people are being enrolled for UID without any legal safeguards. The UIDAIs draft bill has been rejected by a parliamentary standing committee. UID enrolment should be halted until a sound legal framework is in place.

6. All UID applications should be voluntary, not compulsory.

UID should never be a condition for anyone to access any entitlements or public services. A convenient alternative should always be available.

7. UID should be kept out of the PDS, NREGA and other essential entitlement programmes for the time being.

Essential services are not a suitable field of experimentation for a highly centralised and uncertain technology. Other applications (e.g. to tax evasion) should be tried first.

List of signatories: Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Vice-Chancellor, Tripura University; Kiran Bhatty,

Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research; Nikhil Dey, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan; Jean Drze, Visiting Professor, Allahabad University; S.S. Gill, Director General, CRRID, Chandigarh; Reetika Khera, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi; A.K. Shiva Kumar, Economist; Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum; Nivedita Menon, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University; R. Nagaraj, Professor, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research; Farah Naqvi, Writer and Activist; Dr. K. Srinath Reddy; Shantha Sinha, National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights; M.S. Swaminathan, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha; Sharmila Tagore; Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Reader, University of Hyderabad; Bezwada Wilson, Safai Karamchari Andolan and 190 others. December 31, 2012

Parliament and patriarchy


The Hindu ends its moving front-page editorial on the 23-year-old rape victim with this pointed and very pertinent plea: The Congress and the Opposition should forget about playing to the gallery. If they are serious about the rights of women, they should quickly pass the Womens Reservation Bill. Let the presence of at least 181 female MPs in the next Lok Sabha and the political mobilisation of women this will slowly catalyse be Parliaments way of honouring the death of the Unknown Citizen. (No turning back now, December 30, 2012)

Although widely used, tragic is too tame a word to describe an event that has shaken a nation. Horrific and barbaric may be more accurate. As

the anger and the outrage slowly stirs an apathetic citizenry and a still more apathetic political class and as we understand how the barbarism and brutality that manifested itself on that Delhi bus on a single evening is reproduced daily in hundreds of locations across the country, The Hindu has done well to offer a concrete solution. How best might we take it forward?

Past attempts

We might begin with looking backwards, at past political attempts to undo or at least undermine the patriarchal biases of Indian society and civilisation.

The first such attempt was through the Constituent Assembly, a largely male body that met between December 1946 and December 1949

to draft a new Constitution for the nation. One conservative member complained that the document finally adopted gave them the music of the English band, when what they had hoped for instead was the music of *the+ Veena or Sitar.

In fact, in at least two fundamental respects, the Constitution departed most radically from both western and Indian models.

The first was the provision of affirmative action for disadvantaged groups, through the 15 per cent of all legislative seats and government jobs reserved for Dalits, and the 7.5 per cent reserved for tribals. The second was the granting of the right to vote to all women who turned 21.

Both provisions aimed at reversing historic processes of discrimination

and disadvantage. The suppression of former Untouchables and the marginalisation of adivasis were encoded into the social practice of Hinduism, while the relegation of women to an inferior status was mandated by the social practices of both Hinduism and Islam. However, while the revolutionary nature of affirmative action for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes has been noted by historians and legal scholars, the fact that the granting of equal rights to women was an equally radical act has perhaps not attracted the same attention.

In the West, the franchise was granted in phases. First, only men of property enjoyed the vote. Then, educated men were added on to the roster. Eventually, after a long struggle by the working class, all men were allowed to vote. It took an even braver struggle by the suffragettes to

get the males to grant women the vote.

This phased process was followed in every western democracy. In some cantons of Switzerland, women did not have the right to vote as late as 1971. On the other hand, in the first elections held under the Indian Constitution, all adults, regardless of class, education, property, and (most crucially) gender, were given the right freely to elect their political representatives.

The next major legislative challenge to Indian patriarchy involved the abolition of traditional religious laws prohibiting women from choosing their marriage partners, divorcing brutal or neglectful husbands, or inheriting property. This was a more arduous process. A Bill drafted to enact these changes for the majority community (Hindus) failed to pass

through the Constitutional Assembly or the Provisional Parliament that succeeded it. Sundry sants and sadhus organised dozens of demonstrations outside Parliament condemning the Bill as an affront to Hindu society. Effigies of the Prime Minister and the Law Minister (Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar respectively) were regularly burnt.

Several years later, the reforms were finally passed by the first Parliament based on adult franchise. This was an important first step to the Common Civil Code promised in the Constitution. However, given the sensitive aftermath of Partition, it was deemed prudent not to extend the core of this legislation to the Muslim minority. But both Nehru and Ambedkar had no doubt that this too would have to happen. The moment came in 1986, when the Supreme Court, in the Shah Bano case, asked

the husband who had abandoned Shah Bano to continue paying her an allowance, commenting further that it was past time that the Constitutional promise of a common, gendersensitive, civil code be finally redeemed.

The Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru was bold enough to resist the challenge of reactionary sants . Tragically, the Congress of Rajiv Gandhi failed, 30 years later, to resist the challenge of reactionary mullahs. Despite many Muslim intellectuals and activists being in favour of the Supreme Court judgment, the 400-odd ruling party MPs, who could and should have been used to pass a common civil code, were instead instructed to support a bill overturning the court verdict. This foolish and callous act set back the cause of womens emancipation by decades, even as it helped stoke years of intense communal polarisation and

sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims.

In a speech to the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar famously described democracy as top-dressing on Indian soil. Custom, tradition, social practice and religious laws were all heavily loaded against the idea that all citizens should have equal rights. When Ambedkar said this, he had the practice of caste discrimination largely in mind. But his remarks apply equally to discrimination against women.

Three times in the past have Indian parliamentarians been asked to take sides on a major question of gender equality. Twice they have braved public opinion and taken the right side. On a third occasion, with Muslim opinion divided, and non-Muslim opinion largely in favour of a uniform civil code, they caved in to the fundamentalists. Now a fourth major

question of gender equality confronts them. Which side will they take?

From Rammohan Roy on through M. K. Gandhi, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, B.R. Ambedkar, and beyond, social radicals have had to battle against reaction and orthodoxy. The politicians who drafted the Constitution, who prescribed universal adult franchise, the abolition of untouchability, and the reform of patriarchal personal laws, were far in advance of public opinion. Now the situation has somewhat changed. In the third week of December, I was in deepest Kathiawar, tracking the places where the young Mohandas Gandhi lived and studied. In the small town of Morbi, I saw a group of young college and schoolgirls demonstrating against the barbaric events in Delhi. In 1947, there would have been no women in Morbi asking for the right to vote. In 1957, there would have

been no women in Morbi demanding the right to choose their marriage partner or inherit their fathers property.

Amplify the signals

As the intense, widespread, ongoing, demonstrations across India show, in 2012 large sections of the urban public at least have shed many of their past prejudices when it comes to womens emancipation. Now it is for the legislators to pick up and amplify the signals. The Womens Reservation Bill would be a fine way to start. For, as the experience of Dalits shows, affirmative action in legislatures is an empowering and enabling tool, that can hasten (even if slowly, and haltingly) the creation of a more just and less unequal society.

The Hindu editorial rightly calls for a proactive partnership in this respect between the Congress and the Opposition. Now, before Parliament reconvenes, a series of facilitating conversations between the major leaders of both parties is called for between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, between the UPA Chairperson and other BJP leaders. The Left parties have long indicated their support for this progressive legislation. The AIADMK, the Trinamool Congress, the Bahujan Samaj Party are all led by women, who must surely wish to have greater representation of women in Parliament. The numbers are there so is a large swathe of public sentiment. And, not least, the example of the visionary reformers of the past, who, in an even more inhospitable climate, took the first, tortuous steps towards gender equality.

(Ramachandra Guha is the author, most recently, of Patriots and Partisans . He can be contacted at ramachandraguha@yahoo.in)

Taking its generation

cue

from

an

earlier

of lawmakers who gave women the vote, abolished untouchability and reformed personal laws, Parliament must pass the Womens Reservation Bill December 31, 2012

For a Peoples Police from a Delhi tailwind


The recent gang rape incident in Delhi would appear to have stirred the conscience of the nation. There have been demonstrations in Delhi and in several other towns of the country.

The Delhi Police could not have imagined that an isolated incident of rape would snowball to such an extent and lead to a demand for the ouster of the police commissioner. The political class was also caught by surprise. Actually, what is happening in Delhi represents the cumulative dissatisfaction of people against poor governance of the country reflected, in the present context, in crimes against women.

The Delhi demonstrations bear a faint resemblance to the incidents in Tiananmen Square of China in 1989, where too the students came out into the streets against the government. The Chinese government crushed the student movement ruthlessly. Mercifully, the Government of India has used only tear gas and lathis to disperse the students. Our democracy, with all its flaws, gives

much greater latitude to voices of dissent.

Three core issues

The protests have thrown up three important issues: the governance of Delhi, the safety of women and the need for improved policing. The Chief Minister wants control over the Delhi police, which is presently under the Ministry of Home Affairs. What needs to be done to give better safety and protection to women is another area of concern. Besides, what are the measures that need to be taken to revamp and restructure the police so that their performance meets the expectations of the people?

On September 22, 2006, the Supreme Court of India had given certain directions in view of the urgent need for preservation and strengthening of

Rule of Law. It prescribed the setting up of three institutions in the states: a State Security Commission with a view to insulating police from extraneous pressures; a Police Establishment Board to give autonomy to the police hierarchy in matters of transfers and postings of junior officers; and a Police Complaints Authority to look into complaints of serious misconduct against policemen. The court also prescribed a procedure to ensure transparency in the selection of the Director General of Police and gave him a minimum tenure of two years. Officers performing operational duties in the field were also given a tenure of two years. The court further ordered that investigation and the law and order functions of the police should be separated to improve the quality of investigations. The Thomas Committee, which was set up to monitor the implementation of the courts directions expressed its dismay over the total indifference to

the issue of reforms in the functioning of police being exhibited by the States.

The States are reluctant to implement the Supreme Courts directions because it would mean the executive losing their grip over the police, which they consider vital for their political survival. The Delhi Police Bill has yet to be given final shape. Actually, the expectation was that the Government of India would pass what would be a model Police Bill for Delhi and that the same would, with minor adjustments, be adopted by the other States. However, that did not happen. The Delhi Administration, it appears, is not in favour of giving police the kind of autonomy visualised by the apex court. The executive has become so used to lording it over the police that it cannot think of a situation where the police would have autonomy in taking important law and order

decisions. It is like a drug addict being asked to give up narcotics.

We need police reforms not for the glory of the police but to ensure that the police uphold the rule of law and the Constitution of the country. At present, they are more bothered/concerned about the wishes and expectations of the political bosses, right or wrong, lawful or unlawful, rather than acting in the larger interests of society. The reductio ad absurdum of the situation is there for anyone to see. The police are not trusted and they do not inspire confidence.

It also needs to be emphasised that police reforms are absolutely essential if India is to emerge as a great power. Economic progress cannot be sustained if we are not able create a safe and secure environment. The democratic structure may also

crumble if the police continue to feel inhibited in taking action against criminals, some of whom are entering the portals of democracy.

Apart from the reforms mandated by the Supreme Court, a whole range of other measures are also called for to improve the functioning of the police. There must be substantial augmentation in their strength, apart from filling up the existing nearly 4.20 lakh vacancies; infrastructure at police stations must improve in terms of vehicles, communications, equipment and forensic support; housing facilities should be better, and working hours need to be prescribed.

It is indeed one of the ironies of modern India that while we are preparing for a mission to the moon, and there has been: a revolution in information technology; vast improvements in rail and road

networks across the country; a quantum leap in nuclear science, and India becoming one of the fastest growing economies, we are still more than 65 years after independence saddled with a colonial police with a feudal mindset. There are more than 20,000 police stations and posts across the length and breadth of the country, and their working impinges on the life of the common man from Srinagar to Kanyakumari and from Ahmedabad to Aizwal. It is a sad commentary on our Republic that we have not been able to transform the police into an instrument of service to the people.

Internal security

Looking at the larger picture, we need a motivated and effective police force to deal with the greatest internal security challenges confronting the country. These challenges are: the

threat of international terrorism, the Maoist insurgency, and the continuing problems in the north-east and in Jammu & Kashmir. If we are to tackle these problems effectively, there is no getting away from having a professional police force, well trained and equipped, and committed to upholding the unity and integrity of the country. The police are the first responders in the event of any terrorist attack or Maoist violence, and they are also the backbone of our intelligence and investigation agencies.

Corruption has become a huge problem in the country. The responses to Anna Hazares agitation showed how disgusted and fed up people are. The anti-corruption and vigilance organisations at the State level and the Central Bureau of Investigation at the Central level are manned largely by police officers. Hence the further

need to cleanse and reform the police.

Looking at the reluctance of the political class, how do we push forward the agenda of police reforms? The pressure of public opinion is perhaps the surest weapon. The protesters need to understand that unless the functioning of the police is overhauled, the prevention, detection and investigation of crimes against women would continue to be poor. National Crime Records Bureau statistics show that there has been a steady increase in crimes against women: 1,64,765 cases in 2006, 1,85,312 in 2007, 1,95,856 in 2008, 2,03,804 in 2009 and 2,13,585 in 2010. Out of these, in 2010 alone, there were 22,172 incidents of rape, the largest number being recorded in Madhya Pradesh. Public opinion must mobilise on the issue of police reforms. The media must also lend

support to the campaign. Nongovernmental organisations should also pitch in. The judiciary should wield the whip against defiant States. The Central Government should mount pressure on the States to accelerate the process of reforms in the police.

The future of India, it may be said without any exaggeration, is linked to the fate of police reforms in the country. Seen from all angles the security of the common man, safety of women, survival of democracy, maintaining the trajectory of economic progress, and dealing with corruption or combating the major threats confronting the country we have to have a reformed, restructured and revitalised police force, a Peoples Police in place of the present Rulers Police.

(Prakash Singh, a recipient of the Padma Shri, has been campaigning for police reforms.)

Given the reluctance of our politicians to initiate police reforms despite judicial direction, the pressure of public opinion is perhaps the best weapon

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