Croissants & Crescents:
How Pakistan insulates India from terror
- M J Akbar June 15, 2008
A few days ago, the government of Pakistan abandoned a ceasefire pact with insurgents operating across the tribal Pakistan-Afghanistan border, reached by Pervez Musharraf but reasserted by his successors in power. On June 11, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, said in Washington that any future terrorist attack on his country would probably originate in this region, known by its acronym, FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). This had become the most secure base of al-Qaida, he added, after the fall of the Taliban in Kabul.
Why has al-Qaida become a cancerous bone in Pakistan's throat, with the country neither able to digest it or spit it out? There is general agreement across different elements of the Pakistan establishment that swallowing this bone will infect the body politic beyond cure. But instead of surgery, there is a paralytic helplessness as al-Qaida and Taliban beliefs and prescriptions seep into street, village and towards the foot soldiers that form the core of any armed force.
Both the army and newly elected democrats fumble when faced with a basic, if provocative, query: Why is Islamabad fighting America's war against fellow Muslims? The overlap between Pakistan's 'national' interest and the interests of the 'Muslim ummah' has been further blurred in the northwest frontier by a shared ethnicity that has never recognized the Durand Line as a barrier between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Islamabad's dilemma revives a question that raged on the sidelines of the Partition debate between 1940 and 1947: Could united India ever have a secure border on its northwest frontier? The Khyber Pass was the traditional "gate" to Delhi. Would the Muslims of the region, and their brethren in the united Indian Army, secure the gate or open it for any Muslim invaders? The British, it is commonly known, regretted the division of the British Indian Army much more than they regretted the partition of British India. Others were not so sure. Among them was Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, the great Dalit hero who considered himself neither Hindu nor Muslim and was thus above the growing bitterness between the two.
The Secretary of State for India revealed, a trifle reluctantly, the ethnic composition of the British Indian Army in the House of Commons on July 8, 1943: Muslims were 34%, Hindus 50%, Sikhs 10% and the rest 6%. But these were wartime statistics, when emergency recruitment had altered the traditional balance, or imbalance. It was believed that the Muslim proportion of the peacetime British Indian Army, driven by the "martial races" theory and the belief that Frontier Muslims were superior soldiers, might be as high as 50%. There was no question that the army of a united India would retain a high percentage of Muslims, largely recruited from the frontier; political pressure from Muslims would ensure as much.
Would Muslim soldiers be immune to the lure of pan-Islamism? The Muslim League had resolved that the Indian Army should not be used against Muslim powers, conflating Indian and pan-Islamic interests. It was also recalled that during the Khilafat movement (1919-1922), Muslims displayed potentially explosive angularities. Maulana Mohammad Ali had invited the Amir of Afghanistan to invade India and conquer Delhi with the help of an Indian uprising.
Dr Ambedkar argued that India was better off divided, because it could not remain a secure state with such confused loyalties at its porous crown. A new 'Hindustan' army, created out of the resources of divided India, would be untroubled by dual loyalties. Given that Pakistan has few answers to the incessant diet of bombs and suicide missions, we need only to pause and consider the havoc that a strong Qaida-Taliban movement would have caused across the cities of the Indian subcontinent if it had not been substantially, though not completely, insulated by the Indo-Pak border. Imagine the nightmare of an undivided India.
Indian Muslims, who consciously opted for their motherland, paid a heavy price: they were not to be fully trusted with the defence of India. No one doubted their patriotism in the 1962 conflict with China, but during the 1965 Indo-Pak war, they were picked up arbitrarily and detained without trial by the Congress government of Lal Bahadur Shastri. The heroism of Havildar Abdul Hamid was treated as an exception. This prejudice was a major reason for minimal Muslim presence in the Indian Army and police services.
The Indian Muslim mind shifted from a pseudo-glorification of the idea of Pakistan in the 1940s to fear, resentment and uncertainty over the next two decades. Bangladesh was the turning point; it was clinching evidence that Pakistan was not a paradise for Muslims, but the preserve of a regional culture and mentality that was not ready to treat every Muslim as an equal. Indian Muslims abandoned, completely, any residual temptation for Pakistan. This is not just my effort to be politically correct. There is evidence: the complete lack of interest that Indian Muslims have displayed towards the Kashmiri insurrection has puzzled and frustrated the self-styled "pan-Islamic jihadi" organizations who expected Indian Muslim support in the effort to terrorize the Indian state and people.
When Indian Muslims get angry, they do so for their own reasons, not for Pakistan's. Muslims born in free India are not ready to be victimized for the mistakes of their fathers. This is an assertion of equality, part of the confidence gifted to them by the unique democratic values of the Indian Constitution.
The violent Sikh upsurge of the 1980s reminded India that there was more than one potentially hazardous minority, and that the politics of indifference could not be sustained.
The most heartening image of contemporary India, to me, are the slightly funny pictures of young Muslims puffing their chests to meet physical criterion during periodic recruitment drives for the Indian Army or paramilitary forces.
I wish Indian politicians would appreciate that the politics of patronage is no substitute for the politics of indifference. Patronage is essentially demeaning, and serves only small Muslim cliques who enrich themselves at the cost of the community. The Indian Muslim wants to be treated as an equal. He is waiting for the establishment to appreciate the true nuances of the term.
Appeared in Times of India, June 15, 2008
Showing posts with label Muslim League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim League. Show all posts
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims
CROISSANTS & CRESCENTS:
Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims
- M J Akbar 08 June, 2008
A potent threat to Indian secularism comes not from its perceived enemies but from a section of the vanguard, the secular fundamentalists: those ideologues who forget that an Indian's identity — as distinct from India's identity — is shaped substantially by his faith.
The Congress that gave us freedom and reshaped India never made this mistake. The three venerable icons of secularism are a Mahatma, a Pandit and a Maulana. Their faith was gentle, culturally harmonious and hence quintessentially Indian. They protected the power of religion from the dangers of religiosity.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was anointed Mahatma during the Khilafat-non-cooperation movement of 1919- 1922, an inspiring instance of Hindu-Muslim unity in the common cause of nationalism. Gandhi aborted this awesome upsurge suddenly, after Chauri Chaura, to the bitter disappointment of particularly the Muslims, who had staked their all on his leadership. A chastised Gandhi often said that the term 'Mahatma' stank in his nostrils, but he never abandoned it. He did not need the title. But he knew that Indians needed a Mahatma as father figure of a nation awaiting rebirth. He understood that Hindus wanted this promise to be a Ram Rajya.
Abul Kalam Azad was a genuine Maulana, whose tafseer (analysis and translation) of the Holy Quran commands respect, and whose oratory soared above the high levels of his contemporaries. Among Azad's early enthusiasms, quickly abandoned, was an organisation called Hizbollah, or Party of Allah: you might be familiar with the name from the present politics of the Middle East.
But when did Jawaharlal Nehru become a Pandit? Nehru's liberal-democratic worldview was shaped by an European education and Indo-European sensibility. His personal lifestyle preferences were hardlly 'native'. Details of his breakfast need not detain us; suffice to note that they would not appear on the table of an orthodox Brahmin club. 'Pandit' was a political gesture, shaped by Gandhi, towards a conscious identification with an Indian reality. Indira Gandhi took care to visit the temple of Lord Krishna on his birthday. Their political heirs have lost this subliminal connect with the Indian psyche.
Indian Marxists, still convinced that class is the predominant determinant, are still reeling from the uppercut they received from Bengali Muslims in the recently held panchayat elections. Their grief is mixed with resentment: they gave Muslims protection from riots, and is this the reward? Peace was their sole exchange rate for the Muslim vote. It was a patronising view of secularism.
The CPM has not changed in three decades of power in Bengal, but the Bengali Muslim has. The young Bengali Muslim does not want to be a protected species. He believes he is an equal under the Indian Constitution. Safety of life is his right, not a favour. He wants jobs, education and healthcare, like the Bengali Hindu. And he wants the protection of his faith-identity. Biman Bose, the state party chief, attributed his party's sudden implosion to the corruption of its cadre. If that was the principal reason, the CPM ebb tide would have begun three elections ago. The tectonic shift has been led by the change in the Muslim vote.
Here is a paradoxical thought. The most successful Muslim leader of the 20th century, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a secular-fundamentalist in his personal life, and a man with a single-point mission in his politics: security for Muslims. Jinnah had open contempt for Gandhi ("That Hindu revivalist!"). Jinnah was privately contemptuous of the Muslim mullahs. He understood only the law, and convinced himself that equality for Muslims could never be achieved in any Constitution acceptable to an united India.
Six decades later, Bengali Muslims are upending that logic. Their politics is born out of the self-confidence of equality. They have the right, as much as a Bengali Hindu, to tell the state that law and order is a duty and not a gift. They insist on stretching security to faith, food, incomes and jobs. The fog of uncertainty in which the fear psychosis of the 1940s flourished has given way to the clarity of a citizen's rights, and the anger of citizens denied their due. Jinnah, incidentally, was perceptive to say, at one point, that the passions of Indian Muslims were like soda water. He maximised its power before the water went flat.
But the new power of Muslims is stable; it is the power of an equal. Jinnah, it is not widely known, enjoyed going to the races in Bombay. In 1946, just a year before Pakistan was born, he gave a tip to a friend, telling him to bet on a horse called Hindustan, which was giving odds of nearly seven to one. The friend protested: how could Jinnah recommend anything called 'Hindustan'? "Never mind," said Jinnah, "it is only a horse."
Two generations later, Hindustan is showing the pedigree of a champion, galloping ahead despite the scepticism of punters who gave it no better odds than seven to one. Indian Muslims want to gallop to victory on that horse, for it belongs to them as much as it does to any other Indian community.
(Appeared in Times of India, Mumbai)
Equality is a right, not a favour for Muslims
- M J Akbar 08 June, 2008
A potent threat to Indian secularism comes not from its perceived enemies but from a section of the vanguard, the secular fundamentalists: those ideologues who forget that an Indian's identity — as distinct from India's identity — is shaped substantially by his faith.
The Congress that gave us freedom and reshaped India never made this mistake. The three venerable icons of secularism are a Mahatma, a Pandit and a Maulana. Their faith was gentle, culturally harmonious and hence quintessentially Indian. They protected the power of religion from the dangers of religiosity.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was anointed Mahatma during the Khilafat-non-cooperation movement of 1919- 1922, an inspiring instance of Hindu-Muslim unity in the common cause of nationalism. Gandhi aborted this awesome upsurge suddenly, after Chauri Chaura, to the bitter disappointment of particularly the Muslims, who had staked their all on his leadership. A chastised Gandhi often said that the term 'Mahatma' stank in his nostrils, but he never abandoned it. He did not need the title. But he knew that Indians needed a Mahatma as father figure of a nation awaiting rebirth. He understood that Hindus wanted this promise to be a Ram Rajya.
Abul Kalam Azad was a genuine Maulana, whose tafseer (analysis and translation) of the Holy Quran commands respect, and whose oratory soared above the high levels of his contemporaries. Among Azad's early enthusiasms, quickly abandoned, was an organisation called Hizbollah, or Party of Allah: you might be familiar with the name from the present politics of the Middle East.
But when did Jawaharlal Nehru become a Pandit? Nehru's liberal-democratic worldview was shaped by an European education and Indo-European sensibility. His personal lifestyle preferences were hardlly 'native'. Details of his breakfast need not detain us; suffice to note that they would not appear on the table of an orthodox Brahmin club. 'Pandit' was a political gesture, shaped by Gandhi, towards a conscious identification with an Indian reality. Indira Gandhi took care to visit the temple of Lord Krishna on his birthday. Their political heirs have lost this subliminal connect with the Indian psyche.
Indian Marxists, still convinced that class is the predominant determinant, are still reeling from the uppercut they received from Bengali Muslims in the recently held panchayat elections. Their grief is mixed with resentment: they gave Muslims protection from riots, and is this the reward? Peace was their sole exchange rate for the Muslim vote. It was a patronising view of secularism.
The CPM has not changed in three decades of power in Bengal, but the Bengali Muslim has. The young Bengali Muslim does not want to be a protected species. He believes he is an equal under the Indian Constitution. Safety of life is his right, not a favour. He wants jobs, education and healthcare, like the Bengali Hindu. And he wants the protection of his faith-identity. Biman Bose, the state party chief, attributed his party's sudden implosion to the corruption of its cadre. If that was the principal reason, the CPM ebb tide would have begun three elections ago. The tectonic shift has been led by the change in the Muslim vote.
Here is a paradoxical thought. The most successful Muslim leader of the 20th century, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was a secular-fundamentalist in his personal life, and a man with a single-point mission in his politics: security for Muslims. Jinnah had open contempt for Gandhi ("That Hindu revivalist!"). Jinnah was privately contemptuous of the Muslim mullahs. He understood only the law, and convinced himself that equality for Muslims could never be achieved in any Constitution acceptable to an united India.
Six decades later, Bengali Muslims are upending that logic. Their politics is born out of the self-confidence of equality. They have the right, as much as a Bengali Hindu, to tell the state that law and order is a duty and not a gift. They insist on stretching security to faith, food, incomes and jobs. The fog of uncertainty in which the fear psychosis of the 1940s flourished has given way to the clarity of a citizen's rights, and the anger of citizens denied their due. Jinnah, incidentally, was perceptive to say, at one point, that the passions of Indian Muslims were like soda water. He maximised its power before the water went flat.
But the new power of Muslims is stable; it is the power of an equal. Jinnah, it is not widely known, enjoyed going to the races in Bombay. In 1946, just a year before Pakistan was born, he gave a tip to a friend, telling him to bet on a horse called Hindustan, which was giving odds of nearly seven to one. The friend protested: how could Jinnah recommend anything called 'Hindustan'? "Never mind," said Jinnah, "it is only a horse."
Two generations later, Hindustan is showing the pedigree of a champion, galloping ahead despite the scepticism of punters who gave it no better odds than seven to one. Indian Muslims want to gallop to victory on that horse, for it belongs to them as much as it does to any other Indian community.
(Appeared in Times of India, Mumbai)
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Friends and Masters
Byline by M J Akbar: Friends and Masters
Being an unrepentant optimist, let me begin with the good news. (Pessimism may be reasonable and even virtuous, but it is just too boring.) Pakistan’s trauma seems to have become a serial saga, with every episode raising the intensity of pain. But as a Pakistani friend visiting Delhi remarked, the events that culminated in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto were the first occasion when neither the Pak establishment nor the Pak street blamed India for any role in the tragedy.
At the root of the India-Pakistan problem is the Indian conviction that Pakistan will use any means, including war, to get Kashmir; and the Pakistani fear that India wants to destroy and subjugate their nation. There is sufficient evidence for the Indian conviction, the two wars of 1947-48 and 1965 and the present support to certain jihadi elements operating in the valley. Pakistanis see their evidence in the war of 1971, and the politics leading up to the creation of Bangladesh. They trace their angst to statements made by some prominent Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, that it did not seem likely that Pakistan would survive. That was a misjudgment by Nehru: nation states, once formed, do not disband themselves voluntarily, although the creation of Bangladesh did confirm that the original idea of Pakistan had to be kneaded and reshaped. This fear has fed such suspicion that almost anything that goes wrong internally is instinctively attributed to the enemy. It may have needed an awful tragedy, but Pakistan has clearly begun to shed that fear.
This cannot be either instant or accidental. It takes time to peel skin from the psyche. It was the nuclear bomb that gave the Pakistani street the confidence that "bigger" India could no longer destroy "small" Pakistan. "Big" and "small" are notional facts. Britain could have fitted easily into Bengal but still ruled half the world. But the correlation between big and strong is so deeply ingrained that it is almost impossible to remove it from the subcontinent’s dialectic. When India and Pakistan went formally nuclear, the MAD doctrine was in place: war could only lead to Mutually Assured Destruction. Fear and anger, the two dominant attitudes, began to ebb.
Anger has not disappeared from Pakistan. It has turned direction. It is now primarily directed at the Army, which has usurped power too often, raised itself above accountability, and delivered neither inclusive politics nor good government.
At one level is the wrath of the liberal, symbolised by the lawyer but extending to other sections of the middle and upper middle class. It is angry at the complete abolition of values by the Army in pursuit of power. No one expects the Army to be a paragon of democratic virtues, but General-President Pervez Musharraf has assaulted institutions and robbed them of a powerful virtue, self-respect, in order to preserve himself in office. The judiciary has been castrated, and media bled. The democracy that he is advertising as his creation is a car with five wheels, in which he is the fifth, and biggest, wheel. Of course the coming elections in Pakistan will be free, although not quite fair; because the voters will be free to defeat anyone except him. He remains in power. An election is nothing if it cannot also be a popular judgment on the incumbent. But Musharraf’s term in office is outside the frame of this poll’s reference. Whoever wins, Musharraf cannot lose. Such is the logic of Army democracy.
A number of retired generals, not all of them hostile to Musharraf for personal reasons, have described him as the problem, and asked him to step down. There are indications that senior serving officers have recognised that what is at stake is the credibility of Pakistan’s most important institution, its Army. They have begun to withdraw Army officers from civilian space. Musharraf used to buy peace with his peers-in-uniform by shoving them into comfortable jobs as head of public sector companies, or quasi-government bodies. Generals were not only fighting wars on the Frontier, but also running cricket. This had nothing to do with patronage. It was that old sin of autocratic rule: back-scratching. Backs were scratched so often that the country got eczema.
There is another, stronger, reason for anger on the street, creating a problem with inflammable consequences. The Pakistani in the bylanes, bazaars and villages wants to know why Musharraf is fighting America’s war against fellow Muslims. An answer is essential in order to make this war legitimate in the eyes of the people. It is possible that the jawan in the Pakistan Army might be asking the same question as well, although discipline would prevent him from voicing it. Strange stories are seeping through from the battlefields where the Pak Army is engaged with the Taliban and its allies in Swat and the Frontier, leaving observers to wonder whether in some cases there is any engagement at all. The dry fact is that large parts of this region are outside government control, and Taliban presence has not only crossed into Rawalpindi and Islamabad, but also reached Lahore.
As a retired Pakistani diplomat remarked, a Nato defeat in Afghanistan would no longer mean the Talibanisation of Afghanistan alone. It could lead to a surge and victory for the Taliban in Pakistan.
There are danger signals popping up all over Delhi as well, if there was anyone capable of reading the message in flashing lights. India has launched a spy satellite for Israel, and is planning to send up two more. If these were media satellites, it would be explicable. But Israel uses its spy satellites as weapons against the Palestinian people. Someone is bound to raise the question: why is Delhi fighting Israel’s war against Palestinians? Silence will be treated as a guilty plea.
The reason is not complicated. George Bush created an international alliance after 9/11, but he has failed to convince even his allies that he is fighting a genuine war against terrorism. Most Muslims — make that over 90% — believe that he has started a war against Muslims rather than against terrorism. If they had any doubts before, they were removed after America’s wanton invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The consequences of Talibanisation in Pakistan are not limited to Pakistan. They will have a direct impact. We do not have to buy into dread scenarios being offered in gruesome books about a coup that brings a Taliban-general to power in Islamabad and threatens India, and the world, with the nuclear arsenal under his command. Such hyper-drama may be off the wall. But common sense suggests that Indian foreign policy should tread a far more careful path than Pakistan’s gung-ho generals did.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called Bush India’s best friend. He might want to ponder over the long-term implications of such friendship. Bush has another best friend. His name is Musharraf.
Tailpiece: The surprise name in the annual awards handed out by the Government of India to the worthy and the faithful was external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee. Governments do not generally hand out gongs to a Cabinet minister. As a retirement benefit, it was a few rungs lower than an alarm clock; but clearly Mukherjee is not in any mood to retire. What on earth was the Prime Minister trying to tell Mukherjee? "Sorry, I couldn’t make you Prime Minister, which I know you want to be, but I’ve got the job; I could not make you President of India because you were apparently too invaluable at a more junior level. So here, take this gong. You are now at least as good as Sachin Tendulkar, Asha Bhonsle and Ratan Tata."
Even more intriguing question: why did Pranab Mukherjee accept the award?
Being an unrepentant optimist, let me begin with the good news. (Pessimism may be reasonable and even virtuous, but it is just too boring.) Pakistan’s trauma seems to have become a serial saga, with every episode raising the intensity of pain. But as a Pakistani friend visiting Delhi remarked, the events that culminated in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto were the first occasion when neither the Pak establishment nor the Pak street blamed India for any role in the tragedy.
At the root of the India-Pakistan problem is the Indian conviction that Pakistan will use any means, including war, to get Kashmir; and the Pakistani fear that India wants to destroy and subjugate their nation. There is sufficient evidence for the Indian conviction, the two wars of 1947-48 and 1965 and the present support to certain jihadi elements operating in the valley. Pakistanis see their evidence in the war of 1971, and the politics leading up to the creation of Bangladesh. They trace their angst to statements made by some prominent Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, that it did not seem likely that Pakistan would survive. That was a misjudgment by Nehru: nation states, once formed, do not disband themselves voluntarily, although the creation of Bangladesh did confirm that the original idea of Pakistan had to be kneaded and reshaped. This fear has fed such suspicion that almost anything that goes wrong internally is instinctively attributed to the enemy. It may have needed an awful tragedy, but Pakistan has clearly begun to shed that fear.
This cannot be either instant or accidental. It takes time to peel skin from the psyche. It was the nuclear bomb that gave the Pakistani street the confidence that "bigger" India could no longer destroy "small" Pakistan. "Big" and "small" are notional facts. Britain could have fitted easily into Bengal but still ruled half the world. But the correlation between big and strong is so deeply ingrained that it is almost impossible to remove it from the subcontinent’s dialectic. When India and Pakistan went formally nuclear, the MAD doctrine was in place: war could only lead to Mutually Assured Destruction. Fear and anger, the two dominant attitudes, began to ebb.
Anger has not disappeared from Pakistan. It has turned direction. It is now primarily directed at the Army, which has usurped power too often, raised itself above accountability, and delivered neither inclusive politics nor good government.
At one level is the wrath of the liberal, symbolised by the lawyer but extending to other sections of the middle and upper middle class. It is angry at the complete abolition of values by the Army in pursuit of power. No one expects the Army to be a paragon of democratic virtues, but General-President Pervez Musharraf has assaulted institutions and robbed them of a powerful virtue, self-respect, in order to preserve himself in office. The judiciary has been castrated, and media bled. The democracy that he is advertising as his creation is a car with five wheels, in which he is the fifth, and biggest, wheel. Of course the coming elections in Pakistan will be free, although not quite fair; because the voters will be free to defeat anyone except him. He remains in power. An election is nothing if it cannot also be a popular judgment on the incumbent. But Musharraf’s term in office is outside the frame of this poll’s reference. Whoever wins, Musharraf cannot lose. Such is the logic of Army democracy.
A number of retired generals, not all of them hostile to Musharraf for personal reasons, have described him as the problem, and asked him to step down. There are indications that senior serving officers have recognised that what is at stake is the credibility of Pakistan’s most important institution, its Army. They have begun to withdraw Army officers from civilian space. Musharraf used to buy peace with his peers-in-uniform by shoving them into comfortable jobs as head of public sector companies, or quasi-government bodies. Generals were not only fighting wars on the Frontier, but also running cricket. This had nothing to do with patronage. It was that old sin of autocratic rule: back-scratching. Backs were scratched so often that the country got eczema.
There is another, stronger, reason for anger on the street, creating a problem with inflammable consequences. The Pakistani in the bylanes, bazaars and villages wants to know why Musharraf is fighting America’s war against fellow Muslims. An answer is essential in order to make this war legitimate in the eyes of the people. It is possible that the jawan in the Pakistan Army might be asking the same question as well, although discipline would prevent him from voicing it. Strange stories are seeping through from the battlefields where the Pak Army is engaged with the Taliban and its allies in Swat and the Frontier, leaving observers to wonder whether in some cases there is any engagement at all. The dry fact is that large parts of this region are outside government control, and Taliban presence has not only crossed into Rawalpindi and Islamabad, but also reached Lahore.
As a retired Pakistani diplomat remarked, a Nato defeat in Afghanistan would no longer mean the Talibanisation of Afghanistan alone. It could lead to a surge and victory for the Taliban in Pakistan.
There are danger signals popping up all over Delhi as well, if there was anyone capable of reading the message in flashing lights. India has launched a spy satellite for Israel, and is planning to send up two more. If these were media satellites, it would be explicable. But Israel uses its spy satellites as weapons against the Palestinian people. Someone is bound to raise the question: why is Delhi fighting Israel’s war against Palestinians? Silence will be treated as a guilty plea.
The reason is not complicated. George Bush created an international alliance after 9/11, but he has failed to convince even his allies that he is fighting a genuine war against terrorism. Most Muslims — make that over 90% — believe that he has started a war against Muslims rather than against terrorism. If they had any doubts before, they were removed after America’s wanton invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The consequences of Talibanisation in Pakistan are not limited to Pakistan. They will have a direct impact. We do not have to buy into dread scenarios being offered in gruesome books about a coup that brings a Taliban-general to power in Islamabad and threatens India, and the world, with the nuclear arsenal under his command. Such hyper-drama may be off the wall. But common sense suggests that Indian foreign policy should tread a far more careful path than Pakistan’s gung-ho generals did.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called Bush India’s best friend. He might want to ponder over the long-term implications of such friendship. Bush has another best friend. His name is Musharraf.
Tailpiece: The surprise name in the annual awards handed out by the Government of India to the worthy and the faithful was external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee. Governments do not generally hand out gongs to a Cabinet minister. As a retirement benefit, it was a few rungs lower than an alarm clock; but clearly Mukherjee is not in any mood to retire. What on earth was the Prime Minister trying to tell Mukherjee? "Sorry, I couldn’t make you Prime Minister, which I know you want to be, but I’ve got the job; I could not make you President of India because you were apparently too invaluable at a more junior level. So here, take this gong. You are now at least as good as Sachin Tendulkar, Asha Bhonsle and Ratan Tata."
Even more intriguing question: why did Pranab Mukherjee accept the award?
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Left with an Alternative
Byline by M.J. Akbar : Left With An Alternative
The Indian Left is much larger than its most visible face, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). It is split three ways, each currently pointing in three directions. The CPI(M), CPI and their smaller partners represent the institutional-democratic element. The Naxalites, or Maoists, are the unstructured, undemocratic but increasingly potent dimension.
The recognised parties are restricted to one large, one medium and one small state. There is reasonable dispute over the true strength of the Naxalites. Some argue that many state governments are too eager to declare some of their districts Naxalite-infested because this translates into non-budgetary assistance from the Centre to curb the "Naxalite menace" in the name of that variable virtue called "law and order". But even if the Naxalites are not as powerful in the claimed 170 districts, there is no doubt about their influence in over 80 districts — sufficient to direct the course of the vote if they choose to do so. The Naxalites do not have a coordinated view on important issues, but it may be relevant to note that they were the first political force in the broad opposition spectrum to take an unambiguous view of the Indo-US nuclear deal. They rejected it comprehensively. We do not know if this will be reflected in the elections within those 80-odd constituencies, but it might if, as seems likely, the nuclear deal becomes a central focus of the next general elections.
A third aspect of the Left base goes largely unrecognised because it is not obvious. This is the vote that would have gone to the Left, if the Left had existed on the electoral map of that region. This is the "poor" or "garibi" vote that once automatically went to the Nehru-Indira Gandhi Congress, but which no longer recognises the party. Congress sensitivity is so heavily magnetised by the Sensex that it has no space for any parallel reality. This vote has switched twice, in the North, to regional parties. The first time it did so was in 1967; the second time was after 1989. The patterns in the South followed a different course, but there too the vote has shifted or swung between the Congress and regional parties.
The latest beneficiary of this phenomenon has been Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. There are two reasons why the BSP could break out from the limits of provincial success. Its core base, the Dalit, is spread across the country. The Dalits and Muslims constitute the only powerful nationwide vote blocs. Other vote blocs may be national in their sentiment, but they are not nationwide in their presence. There is also great overlap between the Dalit, Muslim and "poverty" identities. If Mayawati can harmonise and then mobilise these identities, she can extend her UP numbers into a much larger calculus.
Mayawati is essentially occupying the space left vacant by an absent Left. This is why she cannot make much headway in the states where the Left is entrenched. Alternatively, she succeeds handsomely where the Congress has ebbed.
What are the chances of a Left crumble, if not collapse, in the next general elections?
Kerala is a seesaw, so the Marxists cannot hope to repeat their success of 2004. They will succeed, however, in tiny Tripura, because they have delivered on the two basics of good governance: distributive economic growth and social harmony.
Uncharacteristically, the CPI(M) has fumbled on both counts in the critical state of Bengal. While Nandigram may continue to dominate the headlines, Bengal’s Marxists should be equally worried by the riots against ration shops in their heartland constituencies, like Birbhum. Food riots destroyed the Congress before 1967, and they will eat into Marxist margins in 2008.
One of the curious myths, sponsored by the current mania within the upwardly mobile middle class, is that the underprivileged are either unreasonable in their demand for exclusive attention, or, worse, simply unworthy of too much attention since they are a drag factor on economic growth. It is obvious that such self-comforting panaceas have infected Bengal’s Marxists. The truth is that the poor are far more realistic than they are given credit for. They do not believe that there is some magic wand. They have more patience than the better off; not because they are more saintly, but because they have fewer options. What the poor do possess, however, and have every right to retain, is a powerful sense of justice. They can read a signal, or detect a nuance quickly, for they do not have the luxury of complacence. The Bengal government has increasingly indicated that it prefers middle-class cosiness to street sensitivity. The manner in which, for instance, it has repeatedly snubbed Muslim sentiment is spectacular in its amateurishness.
How big a price will the party pay? The Marxists may still be rescued by the stand that the national leadership has taken against the proposed strategic alliance with the United States that constitutes the core of the so-called nuclear deal. In real terms, this strategic alliance means involvement in American conflicts in the Middle East. The Muslims have a rather unique distinction: they are possibly the one Indian community with a foreign policy. They have no sympathy for George Bush, and there could be electoral rewards for the Marxists in Bengal and Kerala, if they retain the clarity to find it. This will compensate for some of the malfunctioning in governance.
But the true opportunity for the Indian Left lies in the phase or politics after the next general elections, between 2008 and 2012. And this opportunity will open up in the Hindi heartland. One can see the impetus that created the groundswell for regional parties (most of them splinters of the old Socialist movement) beginning to fade. We might not see the explosive self-destruction of 1971, but it will be difficult for the regional parties to hold their own against the resurgent claimants of this space. The Hindi heartland will probably return to one of the two mainline parties by 2012, either the Congress or the BJP, depending on which of them has managed to preserve its credibility. The outside option in this game is the BSP, but its rise will only be a consequence of Congress implosion, since their vote base is similar if not the same.
The only alternative to either the BJP or the Congress will be a Left Front on the lines of the Bengal or Kerala model. The Kerala model, in fact, may be more relevant, but with a northern manifestation of the Muslim League thrown in. The ground for such a coalition will have many seeds, from the old Socialist movement of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia to the spadework being done by the Naxalites in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The Naxalite tactic of violence cannot be an end in itself; it must be the means towards a more sustainable political objective.
The future of the Left does not lie in the continuation of poverty. That is negative bias disguised with clever semantics. No one has a vested interest in poverty, least of all the Left. The future of the Left lies in justice, not poverty; in an economic programme that can create wealth without handing it over to a narrow apex.
That apex, however, is crowded by an orchestra of sirens. Can the Left leadership, as it negotiates its way through troubled waters in the next five years, resist the lure of those sirens?
The Indian Left is much larger than its most visible face, the Communist Party of India (Marxist). It is split three ways, each currently pointing in three directions. The CPI(M), CPI and their smaller partners represent the institutional-democratic element. The Naxalites, or Maoists, are the unstructured, undemocratic but increasingly potent dimension.
The recognised parties are restricted to one large, one medium and one small state. There is reasonable dispute over the true strength of the Naxalites. Some argue that many state governments are too eager to declare some of their districts Naxalite-infested because this translates into non-budgetary assistance from the Centre to curb the "Naxalite menace" in the name of that variable virtue called "law and order". But even if the Naxalites are not as powerful in the claimed 170 districts, there is no doubt about their influence in over 80 districts — sufficient to direct the course of the vote if they choose to do so. The Naxalites do not have a coordinated view on important issues, but it may be relevant to note that they were the first political force in the broad opposition spectrum to take an unambiguous view of the Indo-US nuclear deal. They rejected it comprehensively. We do not know if this will be reflected in the elections within those 80-odd constituencies, but it might if, as seems likely, the nuclear deal becomes a central focus of the next general elections.
A third aspect of the Left base goes largely unrecognised because it is not obvious. This is the vote that would have gone to the Left, if the Left had existed on the electoral map of that region. This is the "poor" or "garibi" vote that once automatically went to the Nehru-Indira Gandhi Congress, but which no longer recognises the party. Congress sensitivity is so heavily magnetised by the Sensex that it has no space for any parallel reality. This vote has switched twice, in the North, to regional parties. The first time it did so was in 1967; the second time was after 1989. The patterns in the South followed a different course, but there too the vote has shifted or swung between the Congress and regional parties.
The latest beneficiary of this phenomenon has been Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. There are two reasons why the BSP could break out from the limits of provincial success. Its core base, the Dalit, is spread across the country. The Dalits and Muslims constitute the only powerful nationwide vote blocs. Other vote blocs may be national in their sentiment, but they are not nationwide in their presence. There is also great overlap between the Dalit, Muslim and "poverty" identities. If Mayawati can harmonise and then mobilise these identities, she can extend her UP numbers into a much larger calculus.
Mayawati is essentially occupying the space left vacant by an absent Left. This is why she cannot make much headway in the states where the Left is entrenched. Alternatively, she succeeds handsomely where the Congress has ebbed.
What are the chances of a Left crumble, if not collapse, in the next general elections?
Kerala is a seesaw, so the Marxists cannot hope to repeat their success of 2004. They will succeed, however, in tiny Tripura, because they have delivered on the two basics of good governance: distributive economic growth and social harmony.
Uncharacteristically, the CPI(M) has fumbled on both counts in the critical state of Bengal. While Nandigram may continue to dominate the headlines, Bengal’s Marxists should be equally worried by the riots against ration shops in their heartland constituencies, like Birbhum. Food riots destroyed the Congress before 1967, and they will eat into Marxist margins in 2008.
One of the curious myths, sponsored by the current mania within the upwardly mobile middle class, is that the underprivileged are either unreasonable in their demand for exclusive attention, or, worse, simply unworthy of too much attention since they are a drag factor on economic growth. It is obvious that such self-comforting panaceas have infected Bengal’s Marxists. The truth is that the poor are far more realistic than they are given credit for. They do not believe that there is some magic wand. They have more patience than the better off; not because they are more saintly, but because they have fewer options. What the poor do possess, however, and have every right to retain, is a powerful sense of justice. They can read a signal, or detect a nuance quickly, for they do not have the luxury of complacence. The Bengal government has increasingly indicated that it prefers middle-class cosiness to street sensitivity. The manner in which, for instance, it has repeatedly snubbed Muslim sentiment is spectacular in its amateurishness.
How big a price will the party pay? The Marxists may still be rescued by the stand that the national leadership has taken against the proposed strategic alliance with the United States that constitutes the core of the so-called nuclear deal. In real terms, this strategic alliance means involvement in American conflicts in the Middle East. The Muslims have a rather unique distinction: they are possibly the one Indian community with a foreign policy. They have no sympathy for George Bush, and there could be electoral rewards for the Marxists in Bengal and Kerala, if they retain the clarity to find it. This will compensate for some of the malfunctioning in governance.
But the true opportunity for the Indian Left lies in the phase or politics after the next general elections, between 2008 and 2012. And this opportunity will open up in the Hindi heartland. One can see the impetus that created the groundswell for regional parties (most of them splinters of the old Socialist movement) beginning to fade. We might not see the explosive self-destruction of 1971, but it will be difficult for the regional parties to hold their own against the resurgent claimants of this space. The Hindi heartland will probably return to one of the two mainline parties by 2012, either the Congress or the BJP, depending on which of them has managed to preserve its credibility. The outside option in this game is the BSP, but its rise will only be a consequence of Congress implosion, since their vote base is similar if not the same.
The only alternative to either the BJP or the Congress will be a Left Front on the lines of the Bengal or Kerala model. The Kerala model, in fact, may be more relevant, but with a northern manifestation of the Muslim League thrown in. The ground for such a coalition will have many seeds, from the old Socialist movement of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia to the spadework being done by the Naxalites in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The Naxalite tactic of violence cannot be an end in itself; it must be the means towards a more sustainable political objective.
The future of the Left does not lie in the continuation of poverty. That is negative bias disguised with clever semantics. No one has a vested interest in poverty, least of all the Left. The future of the Left lies in justice, not poverty; in an economic programme that can create wealth without handing it over to a narrow apex.
That apex, however, is crowded by an orchestra of sirens. Can the Left leadership, as it negotiates its way through troubled waters in the next five years, resist the lure of those sirens?
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