The media in a time of terror

AMPLIFYING CHAOS, SOWING DISCORD

Terrorism has been a frequent visitor to Indian shores over the last two decades and more. Earlier visitations have been instantaneous blows that have stunned and staggered, though they have allowed for a quick recovery of morale as civic processes kick in and people who cannot afford the luxury of disengagement from daily routines, resume their normal activity.

Mumbai 7/11 – to use the media shorthand for the 11 July 2006 suburban train bombings that killed close to 200 -- was one such occasion. Yet when it came to Mumbai 26/11, resilience was no longer a virtue to celebrate. The incursion of armed desperados who sprayed death and destruction in vital nodes of the city’s life, before commandeering three buildings on November 26, has become a case study in the tactical confusion that India’s security apparatus is prone to. It also illustrates how the media can respond to emergency situations in a fashion that multiplies public anxieties and creates the conditions for imprudent and ill-considered strategic responses.

Though a seemingly trivial point, it is important to understand a reversal in the format of date identification between 7/11 and 26/11. Consistency in usage is not so important as getting the suffix right, so that it rhymes and resonates with 9/11, the universal shorthand for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. that inaugurated a phase of global insecurity and instability.

This is not to deny the uniqueness of Mumbai 26/11. Unlike all earlier terrorist atrocities, 26/11 was a slow haemorrhage of public confidence, a long-drawn bloodbath that claimed lives and at the same time tested the country’s response capabilities, sapped its self-confidence and imprisoned it in prolonged contemplation of a tableau of destruction.

When the gunfire began at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) – India’s most famous Victorian gothic structure, where millions figuratively tread everyday – it was reported as an outbreak of gang warfare. Only one among the English news channels had the story till well over an hour after it began. Most of India would have slept untroubled through that night. But anybody from the 80 million cable TV households who switched on at an early hour the next morning, irrespective of the channel first tuned into, would have been instantly transfixed. Riveted by the real-life drama, plunged into the depths of emotional trauma by the shooting war erupting in a locale normally associated with calm and unembarrassed displays of wealth, audience susceptibility was greatly multiplied.

The scenes unfolding in Mumbai heightened the Indian public’s mute awareness of its absolute lack of influence in deeply consequential security decisions. With the media orchestrating this national catharsis, the public mood was quickly transformed into convulsive rage against the politicians who supposedly held all the power and had yet allowed an atrocity of such enormity to occur. And it was just a short transition from raging against the politicians, to raging against the political system that had ensconced them in authority.

Perhaps the media was getting jaded by the coverage of election campaigns that rarely rose above the mundane; perhaps it was fearful that a serious interrogation of the security and intelligence apparatus would be negatively perceived; perhaps it was collectively disoriented at the sight of Mumbai’s two most prestigious hotels being gutted from within by faceless marauders.

There was also, perhaps, a genetic predisposition within the media to go overboard at the spectacle of the most exclusive quarters of India’s most affluent city becoming a battleground. The success of the media is premised upon its ability to mirror perceptions of high purchasing power strata, which are the main focus of advertiser interest. The tone of the media coverage was in this sense, brutally honest in bringing out into the open the subliminal disdain that those accustomed to privilege have, for the scruffy world of competitive politics.

In many ways, the media revealed more about itself through 60-hours of feverish and frenetic coverage, than about the terrorist atrocity that was being perpetrated in Mumbai. On the evening of November 28, as the siege approached the 48-hour mark, the local police ordered all channels to cease live coverage of the ongoing security operations. The police had been particularly irked by a Hindi news channel that established live telephonic contact with one of the marauders in the Jewish community centre, the third building to be commandeered. The news-anchor then proceeded to harangue the gunmen, denouncing them as desperate criminals and swearing that they would never escape India’s avenging fury.

The morality lesson for the invaders was abruptly interrupted by a commercial break, which was unusual for those feverish 60 hours when all channels dispensed with advertising. Resuming a few minutes later, the channel seemed to have turned the page, though without any effort at explanation. All arguments with the invading terrorists were forgotten. Later reports which have neither been confirmed or denied by either side, spoke of the police authorities leaning heavily on the channel to cease its conversations with the marauders.

The ban on live coverage was quickly rescinded. With the siege of Mumbai itself being broken soon afterwards, the news channels went into a mode of retrospection, though offering nothing more edifying than more vituperation against politics.

Politics was not slow with its riposte, though a little clumsy to begin with. A few days after the siege was broken, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued a notice demanding an explanation from the channel that had vainly sought to impart a morality lesson to the terrorists. The channel head pleaded injured innocence, claiming that his broadcast had not in any way given undue publicity to the terrorists but had to the contrary, had the wholly salutary effect of fortifying public resolve.

Two themes seemed to contend for attention in the political reaction to the media coverage of Mumbai’s horror. First was the concern that relentless live coverage may well have limited the scope and effectiveness of the security operations. A second theme that emerged in the post facto examination of the media coverage of Mumbai was the effect it had on the public mood. It fuelled anxieties and created an environment in which the appearance of drastic action, rather than prudence, became the priority. And because of the intense competition among the news channels to firmly ascribe responsibility for the outrage, the government was seemingly stampeded into considering a rather limited range of strategic options.

The Committee on Petitions in the Rajya Sabha took up the first of these themes in a report submitted during the brief sitting of Parliament in December. Responding to a petition on the alleged misuse of the right to free speech by the electronic and print media, the Committee urged that some form of statutory regulations be introduced on the media “in the larger interest of society”. The petition had been under consideration since 2006, but had evidently gained urgency in the light of the Mumbai horror. The growing competition within the media made “self-regulation” a difficult ideal to realise. The Committee drew pointed attention to the repeated attempts in the past to introduce a broadcast regulatory authority and a “content code” for the electronic media and affirmed the need to reconsider these on a priority basis.

Sections of the media were quick to push back against this line of thinking. India’s largest English language newspaper, which has strong interests in the broadcast sector, fielded a former chief of staff of the Indian Army, to refute any notion that the live coverage of the Mumbai operations could have compromised their efficacy. Drawing on his years as a military commander, General V.N. Sharma pronounced that individuals and forces engaged in armed combat or search and destroy operations, are unlikely to waste any time with following news broadcasts. On the other hand, the live media coverage had the positive impact of taking the horror into all homes and building up public pressure for swift and accountable action by the authorities.

The second and deeper concern was underlined by K.G. Balakrishnan, the Chief Justice of India. “The symbolic impact of terrorist attacks”, he said at a public function in Delhi, has been “considerably amplified by the role of pervasive media coverage”. The “proliferation of 24-hour TV news channels and the digital medium” ensured that “disturbing images and statements reach a very wide audience”. This manner of “unrestrained coverage” may have the effect of “provoking anger amongst the masses” and fuelling “an irrational desire for retribution”. “Furthermore, the trauma resulting from the terrorist attacks may be used as a justification for undue curtailment of individual rights and liberties”.

A week after the intruders were eliminated, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sent out an “advisory” asking all news channels to refrain from repeatedly airing footage of the Mumbai attacks. Averse as always to any official diktat, the news channels responded with a unanimous rejection. But the Ministry was not about to give in. Heads of prominent news channels were called in for a number of further meetings, at which the Ministry evidently invoked the possibility that it could act unilaterally under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act. Fighting now to retrieve the credibility of the principle of “self-regulation”, channels that have grouped themselves into the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA), on December 18, issued a set of “guidelines for telecast of news during emergency situations”.

Drawn up by a grievance redressal committee constituted by the NBA and chaired by a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, the guidelines uphold “public interest” as the vital touchstone. They commend the virtues of factual accuracy and objectivity, disavow any broadcast that may provide a platform for terrorists to propagate their views, and rule out any live programming that may hamper the efficacy of security operations or put at risk those involved in a hostage situation. Visually disturbing sequences that could cause trauma among victims and their relatives are to be avoided. And archival footage that may reawaken the sense of trauma or agitation in viewers’ minds should be broadcast only when necessary, after clearly identifying the date and time of its recording.

Despite the eminence of its authorship, the new emergency code was seen among most critics as just another exercise in formulaic thinking. It was as recently as August 2008, that the NBA had come out with a comprehensive set of guidelines on self-regulation, which were conspicuous only in their breach during the Mumbai crisis. The Ministry obviously remains unconvinced and is reportedly now thinking of mandatorily requiring news channels to carry pre-authorised content during designated emergency situations. The proposal is at a very early stage of discussion and it is unclear whether its intent is to completely supplant autonomous content generated by the news channels, or to be an additional input. Either way, the media industry is distinctly uncomfortable.

The debate remains incomplete. Even conceding the post-modernist conceit that all information is subjective, a civilised public dialogue is only possible if there is an effort to reach beyond the limitations of subjectivity. If the media is the main platform for this dialogue, then its minimal responsibility would be to reflect an authentic cross-section of the perceptions that have a bearing on the issue at hand. The print media goes through a 24-hour cycle of discovery, verification and analysis before it reports its perceptions of fact. The electronic media, especially since the 24-hour news channel became a reality in India, breathlessly records every random observation as fact, creating a clutter of information that confuses rather than informs.

There are also questions about the range of voices that people want to hear when they seek to cope with a national trauma. Are residents of Mumbai’s more exclusive neighbourhoods to have the run of the airwaves, their anger stoked by eager news anchors prepared to buy into the fiction that social merit is proportionate to taxes paid? Or is a more diverse public dialogue possible?

In its coverage of the Mumbai attacks, the Indian media seems to have seriously engaged with diversity of a very different sort, considering the multiple dissonances that have emerged on basic points of fact. This speaks as much about the quality of the relationship between the media and the public, as about the nature of the governance compact and the degree of accountability that the security and intelligence agencies seem inclined to accept. The media in this sense, amplified the tactical incoherence of the official response to an unprecedented tragedy.

To mention merely a few instances: early on the afternoon of November 27, well before the siege of Mumbai had reached the 24-hour mark, the Director-General of Police in Maharashtra announced that the Taj Mahal hotel had been emptied of all threats. The following day, the chief of the Indian Army’s Southern Command announced around midday, that the Taj Mahal had just one remnant gunman hiding out in its old wing. The new wing had been thoroughly “cleansed” and the sole hangout would swiftly be neutralised, he predicted. Gun battles raged on for hours afterwards and it was only early the next morning that the last of the marauders was put out of commission.

There were also periodic broadcasts that the gunmen had seized hostages and were engaged in negotiating a ransom for their release, when the reality was quite the contrary. Early in the encounter, a story was floated that huge quantities of the lethal explosive, RDX, had been uncovered from sites in close vicinity of the Taj Mahal hotel. This story remained the exclusive property of one of the English news-channels, but was quietly put to rest as the commando operation progressed. It resurfaced in another guise though, with the claim that the gunmen had huge quantities of the explosive and could possibly raze all three buildings, burying commandos engaged in combat in a graveyard of rubble.

After the clean-up was completed, the RDX theory in its mutant form, was decisively scotched by the head of the elite commando force, the National Security Guard (NSG), in full glare of the country’s numerous media channels. But even in its death throes, the theory proved to have some fervent adherents. Within two days of the final shot being fired in the siege of Mumbai, it was reprised, with attributions to anonymous sources. The two luxury hotels that had been commandeered, the new narrative went, had been seeded with lethal RDX bombs. These had providentially, been detected and defused just in time. The intent of the gunmen otherwise, was to set off those explosives and to escape under the cover of the resultant chaos and confusion.

There were numerous stories that the media managed to float on how the attackers beached on Indian shores. To begin with, three distinct places in Mumbai were identified as locations where the gunmen had come ashore, though the rubber dinghy they had used for landing had ostensibly been spotted and eyewitnesses to their arrival had spoken to the news channels.

Beyond this, considerable uncertainty was sowed over the mode of arrival. There was first, a story of four decapitated bodies being found, all of the crew of the fishing trawler that had been hijacked by the terrorists, possibly off the coast of Porbandar. Within hours, the number of victims of this particular episode was scaled back to one. The captain of the fishing trawler, it was surmised, had piloted the raiders to within sight of the Mumbai shore and then been killed. Concurrently, speculation was being fuelled that elements of the crew may have cooperated with the raiders. The investigation, it was put out, was looking with great interest at fishing boat operators recently incarcerated in Pakistani jails for breaching territorial boundaries, who had perhaps been indoctrinated by Pakistani intelligence.

The identity of the captured attacker -- the only one caught on film in reasonable clarity, thanks to a news photographer who reached Mumbai’s principal railway terminus just when the first shootout began – was again cause of great confusion. Taken alive after a beachfront shootout on November 26, there were different versions of his name afloat till a week later. First accounts spoke of him as fluent in English and well-educated. A subsequent account told of him being of indigent family origins, with education well short of primary schooling. There were reports that he had been gravely injured and had begged for life-saving medical attention at the hospital he was taken to, and then a clarification by the dean of the medical college attached to the same hospital, that he was unharmed except for minor bruises. Finally, contrary to the account in one section of the media that he was being held in an “undisclosed location”, the medical expert testifying to the captured terrorist’s condition was identified by both name and affiliation.

On December 2, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, playing host to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, spoke of a range of options that were under consideration to deal with the aftermath of Mumbai. Though he specified none and indicated no preferences, Mukherjee’s statement was interpreted in diametrically opposed fashion by two of the country’s biggest English-language newspapers: one headlined its story “India open to military action against Pakistan”, while the other said quite definitively, “Pranab rules out military action”.

The latter attitude though, was a minimal strain in the media in the aftermath of Mumbai, since Pakistan-bashing was the only constant element in the competitive clamour for attention. The question the Indian media faces is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course?

Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.

Beginning on November 29, Karachi, where the Mumbai marauders ostensibly set off from, was gripped by ethnic rioting on a scale never before seen. None of the known players in Karachi’s volatile political milieu owned responsibility for the violence. As The Daily Times of Islamabad, another newspaper known for relative sobriety, commented in its December 2 editorial, the Prime Minister of Pakistan had asked for intelligence on the incidents and “at least one TV channel (had) reported that an intelligence report sent to the prime minister has held India responsible for the mayhem”.

As the pitch rose of the diplomatic and political exchanges, the media on both sides began playing their accustomed role of amplifying the discord. The difference with earlier phases of mutual hostility, perhaps, was that the media on each side was now the specific target of attack by commentators and government spokespersons on the other side. This has been accompanied by ad hominem attacks – as by the anchor-person of the Times Now TV news channel in India – on human rights defenders who believe that the response to terrorism cannot be confined within the militarist mindset and needs necessarily to be attentive to civil liberties and social justice.

The Mumbai attacks came just as India was beginning to grapple with certain agonising questions about the fundamentals of its approach to terrorism. The Batla House encounter of September 19 in Delhi’s south-eastern suburb of Jamia Nagar, was a catalyst for several of these questions to be aired with rare freedom. The subsequent discovery of a terrorist ring involving supposed preachers of the Hindu faith and serving and retired officers of the Indian army, then broke old moulds of thinking on terrorism, suggesting that a workable approach to the problem needed to look in different directions.

Needless to say, all these questions have been suppressed with the Mumbai attacks. The dominant media project now is to integrate the Mumbai attacks into the master-narrative on terrorism that was being constructed till Batla House and the Hindutva terror ring cropped up as dissonant elements. The directions that the project will take are apparent in a recent piece written by a media analyst well-known for his feverishly speculative commentary. The figure around which this new narrative evolves is seemingly Mohammad Sadiq Sheikh, in police custody since September and accused of being the mastermind of serial bombings in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi. Sadiq Sheikh is putatively among the founders of the Indian Mujahedin, which has claimed responsibility for all these attacks and it now transpires, has had intimate links with the Lashkar-e-Taiba insurgent group in Pakistan’s side of Kashmir and with Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

When Safdar Nagori, the general secretary of a shadowy body of uncertain provenance called the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), was arrested in March 2008, the same analyst had commented that “SIMI cadre have been involved in almost every Islamist terror strike since (2000), ranging from the Mumbai serial bombings of 2003 and 2006 to attacks in Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi”.

Despite the seeming certainty behind this pronouncement, obviously inspired by driblets of information leaked by the intelligence agencies, a tribunal constituted to review the extension of the ban on SIMI, held on August 5, that there was no evidence connecting SIMI with terrorism. The Central Government on that occasion, secured a face-saving stay on the application of this ruling by the Supreme Court. Media comment was muted and the public, still under the pall of fear spread by the Jaipur, Bangalore and Ahmedabad bombings, remained indifferent to finer points of legality.

The pursuit of the terrorists behind the recent wave of bomb attacks in India, picked up momentum with the mid-August arrest of Abu Bashar Qasmi, a 25-year old cleric, snatched from his home in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh by four men who came visiting on the pretext of exploring a matrimonial alliance. Taken immediately to Gujarat, he was identified by the state police as the man behind July’s Ahmedabad attacks. He also reportedly, confessed to an undefined role in the Jaipur bombing.

On August 24, the Rajasthan police announced the arrest of Shahbaz Husain, a computer software expert who ran a small business in Lucknow. Press reports later blazoned the claim of the Rajasthan Police that sophisticated electronic chips and circuits of bombs resembling those used in Surat had been found in Shahbaz’s premises.

With Shahbaz’s firm implication in terrorism, an elaborate chain of linkages began to be drawn between the various blasts. Nagori, Shahbaz and Qasmi were all reportedly, members of a secretive cell that underwent explosives training in camps as far afield as Kerala and the jungles of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Brooding over the whole conspiracy was the presence of Mohammad Altaf Subhan -- later identified as Abdul Subhan Quereshi, and variously described by the alternative names, Taufeeq and Tauqeer, by which he was allegedly known in jihadi circles -- a computer hardware specialist missing from his home in Mumbai’s distant suburb of Mira Road, since 2006.

Subhan was supposedly the technical brain behind the ingeniously designed bombs and the e-mail messages --replete with graphics and intense Islamic religious symbolism -- that had been sent out celebrating each terrorist strike in the heart of urban India. When Delhi was gutted by three simultaneous bombings in September, Subhan was the name on every investigating agency’s lips.

Working its way through the chain that connected Subhan with Qasmi and Shahbaz, the Delhi police quickly identified the other links in the terrorism plot, all from Uttar Pradesh. Acting in concert with their Gujarat counterparts, the Delhi police secured access to Qasmi for a round of interrogation.

In the six days between the Delhi blasts and the Batla House encounter, the script was radically rewritten. As the encounter at Batla House began, concurrent media commentary had it that the interrogation of Qasmi had led to the identification of the tenement and that the prize catch, Subhan, was holed out there. When the dust settled, Subhan remained as elusive as ever and Qasmi it transpired, had nothing to do with the Batla House raid. The Delhi Police still claimed it had cracked not merely the Delhi bombings, but also the Jaipur and Ahmedabad attacks. One of the two youths killed in the Batla House encounter, Bashir, alias Atif Amin became, in the new narrative, the master terrorist.

The final twist in the story came on September 24, with the arrest of five in Mumbai. In just a matter of days, the Nagori-Qasmi-Shahbaz chain of culpability, was history. The Mumbai Police now definitively identified 31-year old Sadiq Sheikh, a resident of the Cheetah Camp slum sprawl near the city’s north-eastern suburb of Chembur, as the inspiration and the mentor for all the terrorist actions of the preceding months.

As the project of knitting Sadiq Sheikh into the narrative of the Mumbai attacks proceeds, various new dramatis personae should be expected to emerge. The old cast of characters clearly has been dispensed with. Subhan alias Tauqeer, always a shadowy figure has now been firmly banished. And so long as the media fails to ask the hard questions that it should, more names will crop up only to disappear as mysteriously, from the future construction of this narrative.

“Made for media” investigations into terrorist atrocities are clearly betraying the cause of justice and creating a new culture of lawlessness within the country’s police agencies. They are also creating a climate of fear among the country’s main religious minority. The hesitant quest for a new approach to terrorism, which had began with the Batla House encounters and the inquiries into the Hindutva terrorism ring, has now perhaps been scotched because of the enormous public anxiety created by the Mumbai attacks. If it is capable of occasional introspection, the Indian media should really ask itself if things could have been different, given a little sobriety and responsibility on its part.

New layers of bureaucratic complexity without accountability

When India’s Parliament resumed its sitting in December, the two principal political formations had just fought each other to a stalemate in five state assembly elections. The BJP’s effort to milk the Mumbai tragedies for electoral advantage had conspicuously failed. The defeat in Delhi, where concerns over urban terrorism and chaos should have been acute, was especially galling. But the magnitude of the Congress victories in Delhi and Rajasthan – not to mention Mizoram, which is a litle remote from the main theatre of political contestation – was not of sufficient magnitude for it to really claim gloating rights.

Taking the signal that it needed to get over the partisan rancour that normally follows every terrorist strike, Parliament acted with alacrity and with an elaborate decorum. The outcome was a rapid resolution of the issues that have bitterly divided government and opposition benches over the last many years and the creation of an agency specially empowered to tackle terrorism.

Heightened public concern ensured that the sensibilities of the states, which enjoy exclusive jurisdiction over law and order under the constitutional division of powers, would not be an impediment. The National Investigation Agency that will be created under the new laws, will have an intrusive jurisdiction into law and order matters all over. And when all the self-congratulation is done, it needs to be asked whether it would improve efficiencies in investigation and lend a sense of purpose to the prosecutorial process, or merely add another layer of complexity to a muddled bureaucratic apparatus.

The NIA is quite the centrepiece of the new legislation. It would be a police force created and administered by the Central government, which would endow all personnel above the rank of sub-inspector with powers throughout Indian territory. This conferment of powers would be at the sole discretion of the Centre, though the trigger to activate that process is nominally in the hands of the states.

In plain terms, a police station that records evidence under the relevant section of the Code of Criminal Procedure, shall send the statement on to the state government on any suspicion that the offence indicated could fall within the schedule of the NIA Act. The state government shall then forward this information to the Centre, which would on the basis of this and all other inputs, decide within 15 days on invoking the power of the NIA. Once the NIA enters the investigation, the authority of state government agencies would stand extinguished. All relevant records and material shall accordingly, be transferred to the NIA.

The Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act of 1987 (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 (POTA), allowed both the state and centre to establish special courts for trying relevant crimes. The NIA Act reserves this as an exclusive power of the centre, though the Chief Justice of the concerned state would be consulted on personnel choices.

A special court established under the NIA Act could hold hearings in camera and conduct summary trials when charges involve imprisonment for a period of upto three years. Its hearings would be conducted on a day-to-day basis and would enjoy precedence over all other cases. A judgment it renders could be appealed in the relevant High Court, which would hear it in a bench of two judges and dispose of it “as far as possible” within three months.

The key concession made by the new legislation to the civil rights discourse is in disallowing confessions made to the police as evidence in trial. But the amendments that have been introduced in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, bring in another undesirable feature of POTA, which is to reverse the burden of proof when fingerprints of the accused are found at the site of a terrorist act, or weapons and material used in the attack are found in his possession. This raises numerous troubling ghosts from the past, when police personnel involved in blatantly illegal acts have planted incriminating evidence to obscure the magnitude of their misdeeds.

The creation of the NIA runs contrary to the specific recommendations of the Administrative Reforms Commission, which had in a recent report, proposed a special wing within the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to deal with terrorism. Though originally created to deal with corruption in central government establishments, the CBI has by convention also become the agency to go to for lending a façade of probity to politically sensitive criminal investigations. The process of transferring a matter to CBI jurisdiction is relatively simple, involving the discretion solely of the state government. It is another matter that it has often proven fractious, since bureaucratic rivalries and political partisanship are never far below the surface.

The language of the NIA act specifies that state agencies “shall” undertake certain actions in defined situations. Whether this amounts to a categorical imperative or merely to a “best endeavour” demand, is a matter that legal experts will have to sort out. Yet even if the matter is settled in law, it is not apparent that its translation into actual practice will be smooth. Bureaucratic indecision and the infirmities of judgment could still be formidable obstacles.

Given their deeply ingrained operational procedures, police forces all over the country have been known in cases involving high levels of public anxiety, to follow a policy of ruthlessly eliminating risks, to hold suspects in detention for indefinite periods of time, and to allow prejudice to guide them rather than the demands of the law. It was not the formal wording of TADA and POTA that made them instruments of oppression, but the wholly muddled operational procedures followed by those empowered by these laws.

Apart from all its other provisions, the new legislation allows for the detention of terrorism suspects for upto 180 days, while the case against them is investigated. Perhaps the emphasis should have been the opposite: to allow for fewer days of detention than the 90 allowed under ordinary law. It is only under some such compulsion of accountability that public agencies are known to undertake a thorough reform of their operational procedures as a matter of priority.

Flat and Arid: Thomas Friedman's World-View

Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Why the world needs a green revolution – and how we can renew our global future, Allen Lane, London, 2008, pp 438, 20 pounds (Rs 595); ISBN 978-1-846-14129-4.

Much contemporary wisdom, it seems, originates on dining table napkins. Fiscal policy was influenced rather inordinately and for much too long, by the mythical conception called the “Laffer curve”. That was a serious misfortune and not just for the country of origin of that theoretical artifice. And it had its origin on a dining-table napkin, where the economist Arthur Laffer sketched out what he believed, was a new way of looking at the relationship between tax rates and the resultant revenue yield.

A whole generation later, Thomas Friedman, over a vigorous lunch-time discussion with the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, sketched out what he thought was a compelling inverse relationship: between the price of oil and human freedom. The higher the price went, he argued, the bleaker was the world outlook for the fundamental practices of liberty. This most recent wisdom to dawn from modest origins on a dining-table napkin, could be called the “Friedman Curve”, though the author of this book is perhaps much too modest to claim that eponymous honour.

The point that Friedman makes seemingly has a strong empirical grounding. When oil was hovering around the $ 25 a barrel level, he recalls, U.S. President George Bush could claim to see a friendly soul in his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. But when oil topped $ 100, the hidden, dark depths of Putin’s soul emerged: his urge to bend every other institution of the Russian polity, including the media, to his will, and his latent hostility towards western liberalism.

Similarly, when oil was selling at a modest and reasonable level, Iran elected the reform-minded cleric Mohammad Khatami as president, one of whose stated intentions was to launch a new phase of détente with the west. But as the oil price climbed, the reformist strain was reduced to a marginal existence, culminating in the election of the fiery former Islamic vigilante, Mahmood Ahmedinejad, as Iranian president in 2005.

Three years ago, Friedman turned Copernicus on his head, by pronouncing that “the earth is flat”. He has since then, rehearsed most of the arguments he now advances, in his column for The New York Times. But reading through this latest book of his, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Friedman is so deeply mired in the notion of “flatness” that he cannot see the multiple complexities of the contemporary world in more than two dimensions.

To just reverse the gaze that Friedman directs at the rest of the world: between Khatami and Ahmedinejad, Iran went through a phase of engagement with the west that began with a significant act of historical accountability, even atonement, by the U.S. In 1998, the U.S. administration of President Bill Clinton declassified papers relating to the 1953 intelligence operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and foisted on the country a quarter-century of the quirky autocrat who called himself the Shah of Iran. That act of accountability was meant to sweep away the debris of the past and open up new possibilities of rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.

Needless to say, the right-wing in the U.S. political spectrum took a dim view of this mea culpa, which it said, was corrosive of the entire U.S. foreign policy process. And with the right-wing restoration of 2001, Bush effectively choked off all new channels with Iran.

Similar hostile actions towards Russia, notably in the unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missiles treaty, could account for the relative hardening of attitudes towards the U.S. in that country. Now it is perfectly conceivable that without the rapid increase in oil prices seen over the last seven years, neither Russia nor Iran would have been in a position to challenge some of the U.S.’s more arbitrary diktats. Yet, it is a peculiarity of Friedman’s flattened perspective, that he consistently equates a country’s policy attitude towards the U.S. with its respect for human freedom, without ever turning his gaze towards the bullying, hectoring stridency of the U.S. engagement with the world under the Bush administration.

One of Friedman’s moments of revelation in recent times, was when engaged in conversation with an Indian software tycoon, who told him that the Indian industry’s success was a consequence of the “level playing field” they were given by the economic policy reforms of the 1990s. That remark was transformed into the epochal wisdom of the “flat earth”. The world, said Friedman, was increasingly being knit together by a constant striving for similar values and lifestyle paradigms, under virtually identical rules on economy organisation.

That very rosy forecast has been transformed into a more recent mood of alarm. Friedman now frets that the world, though flat is also getting too hot and crowded; that the consequences of flatness, of everybody believing that the American way of life was their rightful aspiration, could well be catastrophic. Now abreast of findings on global warming, Friedman asks the question that has been laid down as a challenge to the conventional development paradigm by numerous proponents of an alternative path, from economists of a gentle persuasion such as E.F. Schumacher to political radicals such as Fidel Castro. What would happen if India and China, not to mention all the other countries with high levels of aspiration in terms of lifestyle paradigms, were actually to achieve U.S. standards?

The answer quite clearly, is catastrophe. Resource exhaustion was the principal worry a generation back, though climate science has today established with reasonable certainty that the ecological balances that make life on earth what it is, will snap well before that stage is reached.

Friedman’s concerns clearly, have been awakened by an amalgam of the political and the ecological. On one side, he worries that the U.S. addiction to fossil fuels is subsidising the world’s greatest despots: from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela to Russia, they all rank in Friedman’s scale at roughly the same moral level. With the whole world emulating the U.S. since there is no other model available, the coffers of the autocrats of oil are assured of never running low. This could likely precipitate a political crisis for the U.S., ruining its efforts to bring liberty to the world. And it would culminate in ecological holocaust for the entire globe.

Is Friedman then, out to save the world or to retrieve American leadership? Seemingly both, since the well-being of the planet is bound in his perception, with the good-sense and the benign sense of purpose that only the U.S. can bring.

The way forward then, is to embrace a “green strategy” in energy, which would of course have ramifications in virtually every other domain of human endeavour – housing, transportation and numerous others. Friedman recalls with some degree of triumphalism, that the energy efficiency standards that were introduced in the U.S. after the first oil shock of 1973-74 “not only weakened (the oil exporters’ cartel) OPEC but also helped to unravel the Soviet Union”. But then, the virtual repeal of these efficiency norms when prosperity returned to the U.S. in the 1990s, shifted the geopolitical balance yet again.

A relentless sense of U.S. exceptionalism and primacy stalks this book, permeating the strategies that Friedman has in mind for mitigating the planetary ills he lists. With all the mixed record of implementation of the Kyoto protocols on global warming, world governments still remain engaged with the task of working out an agreed, common strategy. By December 2009, the global community is committed to agreeing on a treaty that will supplant Kyoto, addressing the key weaknesses in both its conception and implementation. Friedman remains indifferent to this project, since he does not see very much utility in global treaties. Rather, he would like to see the U.S. set off on a green crusade of its own, transforming itself within a generation into the most ecologically friendly nation in the world. The rest of the world, already inured to the idea that their well-being lies in emulating the U.S., would then voluntarily follow the same path, since “a truly green America … would be more valuable than fifty Kyoto Protocols. Emulation is always more effective than compulsion”.

Friedman’s strategies embrace a wide range of options, but they are derived in essence from what he portrays as the vast innovative capacity of the American people, their ability to contribute in many diverse ways to “nation-building at home”. The ideas are there; they just need to be tapped. The multiple missions that the U.S. needs immediately to embark on, include the replacement of fossil fuels (evocatively referred to as "fuels from hell") with renewable sources like wind and sun ("fuels from heaven"). This would require, for a country where lifestyles are built on wheels, the rapid adoption of electric engines by the automobile industry.

A technical hitch arises right here. A switch to electric automobiles would not in itself make much of a dent on the problem of climate change, since the car batteries would still need to be powered by an electricity grid that runs on fossil fuels. It may well aggravate the problem by bringing in one additional stage of energy conversion into transportation – from fossil fuel to electricity and then into motive power -- with all its problems of efficiency loss.

To get around this problem, the electricity grid itself would need to make the transition to renewable sources. And that problem appears fairly intractable, since there is no way that wind and the sun – which are intermittent and relatively low on energy density – can power an electricity grid that dispenses concentrated energy at virtually all times of the day. This has been part of the common sense thinking on alternative development paradigms for at least two generations. Friedman, obviously, does not get it, since he is obsessed above all, with preserving the American way of life and global leadership.

The “bottom-line” as he puts it, is that “America needs an energy technology bubble just like the information technology bubble”. This would require that the government make it “an absolute no-brainer to invest in renewable energy”. The reference to a “bubble” is interesting, since Friedman’s book arrives in the market at precisely the time when the adverse effects of the housing bubble burst are beginning to kick in.

Contrary to all his dark forebodings about the autocrats of oil seeking to destabilise U.S. leadership with their windfall earnings, he concedes that “sovereign wealth funds” based in these countries “have played a very healthy, stabilising role in the 2008 American subprime mortgage crisis”. One could well ask: what then is the problem? If the autocrats of oil are finally doing the U.S. a favour by recycling all the superprofits they make into Wall Street, what really does Friedman have to complain about?

The worry, it seems is long-term, since “over time” it is difficult to believe that the “economic clout” of the autocrats “will not get translated politically”. But Friedman seems to omit one matter of crucial detail: that the money has always been held in dollar assets and in many ways has served to keep the U.S. economy afloat.

Here is where Friedman’s most illustrious predecessor as a dispenser of napkin wisdom kicks in. The “Laffer curve” originated in a particular economic conjuncture in 1974. The U.S. was in desperate economic difficulties. The Arab world, with Egypt and Syria in the lead, had just been beaten back in a war fought to reclaim territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war of conquest. The oil-rich elements within the Arab world had joined the campaign for the liberation of Palestine by imposing an oil export embargo on nations seen to be supporting Israel’s occupation. Prices of oil spiralled upwards.

The U.S. was then in a conjuncture of declining manufacturing competitiveness and uncertainty about the future global role of its currency. The dollar had been delinked from gold convertibility and was in free float, seemingly unable with inflation rampant, to find its true level. At the same time, the federal government found itself over-extended on the fiscal front. Tax rates had been steeply raised to support welfare programmes launched in 1960s, and the Vietnam war, though winding down, was still claiming large outlays.

Times were difficult, calling for extraordinary measures. And Arthur Laffer in a moment of epiphany saw the pathway out of the morass. Tax revenues are not proportional to rates, he said, since rates that are seen as excessive have the effect of diminishing the instinct to innovate and produce. Low rates in fact, may be the key, since they would restore entrepreneurial incentives, contributing to a significant increase in social output. When output itself is growing rapidly, even sharply lower tax rates would yield higher revenues.

When this wisdom known as “supply-side economics” became official policy with Ronald Reagan’s revolution against good sense in 1981, the U.S. slipped rapidly into a massive external payments deficit. The economy from then on, was kept afloat by infusions of funds from abroad. The dollar came unofficially, to be premised upon the “oil standard”. Borrowed funds became the basis of economic growth for the U.S. First it was the federal government, then the corporate sector and finally, the household sector, that took on this debt.

Friedman’s insistence on a “green technology” bubble in this context is arresting. By definition, a bubble is known to form when values of assets – such as shares and real estate – far outrun their true long-term utility. A bubble is typically a consequence of concerted action by a large number of people with power to move finances into particular sectors, which boosts asset values in those sectors and induces more investors to enter. A bubble creates assets that do not improve overall national productivity. Though there have been some claims that the information technology bubble of the 1990s did contribute to productivity growth, the consensus view emerging today appears to be that it did not.

A “green technology” bubble would in these respects, be a worthwhile successor to all its predecessors, in sucking in volumes of global savings into the U.S., for no discernibly useful purpose. This does not mean of course, that the rest of the world can remain unmindful about the imperatives of a greener future. The options available have been much talked about and even hesitantly tried out in many parts of the developing world. If anything, they have been abandoned because of the power of the conventional wisdom, that emulating the U.S. is the only way to go. As a recent reviewer put it, Friedman represents the advance guard of the conventional wisdom, exploring pathways where the “group-think” of the U.S. establishment will reach in relatively quick time. His work offers abundant reason why the developing world should awaken to the compelling reality of today’s crisis-wracked world: that emulating the U.S. is perhaps the surest pathway to collective suicide.

Mumbai, the media and militarism

There are occasions in history when collective trauma brings a nation intimately in contact with its deepest anxieties. Mumbai 26/11, to use the media shorthand for the horror that began one night in November and carried on for close to three days, was one such. The terrorist attacks that began November 26 and transformed swiftly into a 60-hour long siege of three landmark buildings in India’s commercial metropolis, have deeply transformed the national polity. The true consequences will take a while manifesting themselves. But it is a conjuncture that demands calm sobriety, while tending to drift towards intolerance and authoritarianism.

Protracted and painful, the siege of Mumbai was the first terrorist atrocity to be covered in real time by India’s booming electronic media industry. At the time of the demolition at Ayodhya in 1992, the industry was in its infancy and well before the deed was executed, the perpetrators took the extraordinary measure of cleansing the site of media persons of all descriptions. Ten years later, when rioters and arsonists held sway in the state of Gujarat for close to a month, the horrors were carried to all corners of the country by a vigilant media. But the pain was not quite so sharply felt, since the people with a voice loud enough in the national political dialogue had no more than a shallow association with those afflicted.

Terrorism has since then, repeatedly visited India, not as long-drawn episodes, involving a slow haemorrhage of public confidence, but as devastating and instantaneous blows –that stun and stagger, but allow for a quick recovery of morale as civic processes kick in and people who cannot really afford the luxury of disengagement from daily routines, resume their normal activity.

Mumbai 26/11 was designed to be the opposite: a long-drawn bloodbath that would claim lives and at the same time test the country’s response capabilities, sap its self-confidence and imprison it in prolonged contemplation of a tableau of destruction. It was meant to heighten the mute awareness that the wider public has of its own helplessness and its seeming lack of influence in major decisions.

Expectedly, the mood was quickly transformed into unending convulsions of rage against the politicians who seemingly hold all the power and had yet allowed an atrocity beyond imagination to occur. Disturbingly, it seemed a short transition from raging against the politicians, to raging against the political system that has ensconced them in authority.

Enlightenment has been sought in the most unlikely quarters, with the U.S. being upheld as an example worthy of emulation. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks on its territory, said one commentator after another on the numerous channels that were collectively orchestrating the national catharsis, there had not been a single attack that had cost the U.S. human life.

Among all the analogies to have emerged from Mumbai 26/11, this is perhaps the most facile and dangerous – that the U.S., protected on both flanks by vast oceanic expanses and separated from the main theatres of instability and violence by realities of geography, is an example for India. Few drew attention to the fact that the U.S. effort to defuse the sources of terror has cost it thousands more lives than were lost in the September 11 attacks, of military personnel who were sent on campaigns in distant lands with no clear sense of what their mission was. Nor did it seem relevant to any of the instant pundits that emerged on the airwaves, that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, have lost their lives as a direct consequence of the scattershot U.S. strategy.

There was another sentiment freely aired: that politicians had lost the moral authority to guide and oversee the response to the terror attacks. They had indeed, even lost the right to applaud the resilience of Mumbai, because they had proven persistently unconcerned about the security of the city. The vulnerability of Mumbai to terrorism was underlined in the context of the substantial contribution that it makes to national tax revenue. Perhaps there was nothing more startling in the TV punditry served up by 26/11, than the spectacle of individuals best known for syrupy talk-shows, metamorphosing into fiery advocates of a tax-payers’ revolt by citizens of Mumbai.

These arguments are quite evidently, based on a non sequitur. Mumbai’s unique position as a vital node in the chain of national value creation determines both its contribution to the public exchequer and also, tragically, its special vulnerability as a terror target. But to speak of a special virtue that the residents of Mumbai have earned from the taxes they pay, or to argue that they can of their own volition, withdraw from the compact that binds them to the larger national community, amounts to a unilateral repudiation of the wider matrix of belonging that makes the city what it is. It dishonours the spontaneous empathy that emerged all across the country for those unfortunate enough to be in the direct line of fire of the terrorist marauders. And it undermines the social solidarity that is essential to defeat terrorism.

Unlike other attacks on Mumbai, except perhaps the 1993 serial bombings that remain the worst single-day incident of terrorism in India, this one has focused on symbols of affluence and power. The targets chosen were also emblematic of India’s newly acquired profile in the global chessboard of power. But those who died were not the rich and the powerful alone. The first casualties indeed, were ordinary Indians waiting to board trains at the city’s main railway terminus.

Beyond the urgent and frenetic coverage of the armed encounter that developed between the terrorists and commandos of the Indian army and the National Security Guard (NSG), the media found little time to cover these tragedies, or to provide the victims and survivors a voice in the evolving national dialogue. Though the print media did a relatively better job, the electronic media seemingly had little time for these stories of human suffering.

This raises questions about the range of voices that people want to hear when they seek to cope with a national trauma. Are residents of Mumbai’s more exclusive neighbourhoods to have the run of the airwaves, their anger stoked by eager news anchors prepared to buy into the fiction that social merit is proportionate to taxes paid? Or is a more diverse public dialogue possible?

Shortly after the September 11 attacks in the U.S., the spokesman for the U.S. president warned rather ominously that Americans needed “to watch what they say”. That was one among many expressions of the prevalent mood of intolerance, which the U.S. media continued to feed, providing the context for the reckless plunge into wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq. These were momentous decisions taken on the most shoddy calculations, which a compliant media chose not to challenge. Today, it is acknowledged by all those who were silent then, that their acquiescence may have contributed to the exhaustion and enervation of the U.S. today and its deeply eroded standing in the world.

There are indeed, vital lessons to be learnt by India from the U.S. experience with 9/11, though not of the kind widely imagined. By stoking the anger of hand-picked guests and unsubtly suggesting where the direct responsibility for the Mumbai outrage lies, the news media have seemingly predetermined whatever strategic choices may be available to India. No voices that question the militarist response, have even the remotest chance of being heard with any seriousness.

The Indian media though, seems to have seriously engaged with diversity of a very different sort, considering the multiple dissonances that have emerged on basic points of fact. This speaks as much about the quality of the relationship between the media and the public, as about the nature of the governance compact and the degree of accountability that the security and intelligence agencies seem inclined to accept.

Early on the afternoon of November 27, well before the siege of Mumbai had reached the 24-hour mark, the Director-General of Police in Maharashtra announced that one of the sites of the armed encounter -- the historic Taj Mahal hotel -- had been emptied of all threats. As the day wore on and gunfights continued to rage, he remained unavailable for comment. The following day, the chief of the Indian Army’s Southern Command, who had travelled over from his headquarters in nearby Pune, announced around midday, that the Taj Mahal had just one remnant gunman hiding out in its old wing. The new wing had been thoroughly “cleansed” and the sole hangout would swiftly be neutralised, he predicted.

Gun battles raged on for hours afterwards and it was only early the next morning that the last of the marauders was put out of commission.

There were also periodic broadcasts that the gunmen had seized hostages and were engaged in negotiating a ransom for their release, when the reality was quite the contrary. No hostages were taken, since summary execution was seemingly the directive the terrorists had been instructed to implement.

Early in the encounter, a story was floated that huge quantities of the lethally destructive explosive, RDX, had been uncovered from sites in close vicinity of the Taj Mahal hotel. This story remained the exclusive property of one of the English news-channels, but was quietly and unobtrusively put to rest as the military operation to clear the siege progressed. It resurfaced in another guise though, with the claim that the gunmen who had commandeered the venues had huge quantities of the explosive in their possession and could possibly raze all three buildings, burying commandos engaged in combat in a graveyard of rubble.

Breathlessly, and without any attention to the inherent irony – since the parallel effort at Pakistan bashing was proceeding apace -- the news broadcasts claimed that the terrorists’ motives could be to replicate the Marriot Hotel attack in Islamabad in September, when an explosives-laden vehicle was driven into the compound of the Pakistani capital’s most exclusive hotel, reducing it within minutes into a raging inferno.

The RDX theory in its mutant form, was decisively scotched by the head of the NSG after the clean-up was completed, in full glare of the country’s numerous media channels. But even in its death throes, the theory proved to have some fervent adherents. Within two days of the final shot being fired in the siege of Mumbai, it was reprised, with attributions to anonymous sources. The Taj Mahal and the other luxury hotel that had been commandeered – the Oberoi Trident – the new narrative went, had been seeded with lethal RDX bombs. These had providentially, been detected and defused just in time. The intent of the gunmen otherwise, was to set off those explosives and to escape under the cover of the resultant chaos and confusion.

Thus, even as the theory that the mission in Mumbai was to kill maximally and if necessary, perish in the effort, continued to hold sway, an alternative narrative was gaining ground: that the marauders actually believed they had a credible chance of making good their escape.

There were numerous stories that the media managed to float on how the gunmen beached on Indian shores. To begin with, three distinct locations were identified in Mumbai as places where the gunmen had come ashore, though the rubber dinghy they had used for their landing had ostensibly been spotted and eyewitnesses to their arrival had spoken to the news channels.

Beyond this, there was considerable uncertainty sowed over the mode of arrival. There was first, a story of four decapitated bodies being found, all of the crew of the fishing trawler that had been hijacked by the terrorists, possibly off the coast of Porbandar.

Within two days, the number of victims of this particular episode was scaled back to one. The captain of the fishing trawler, it was surmised, had piloted the raiders to within sight of the Mumbai shore and then been killed.

Concurrently, speculation was being fuelled by unnamed sources within the police forces, that some elements of the crew may have cooperated with the raiders. The investigation, it was put out, was looking with great interest at fishing boat operators who had recently served time in Pakistani jails for breaching territorial boundaries, and perhaps been indoctrinated by Pakistani intelligence.

The identity of the captured attacker -- the only one caught on film in reasonable clarity, thanks to a news photographer who reached Mumbai’s principal railway terminus just when the first shootout began – was again cause of great confusion. Taken alive after a beachfront shootout on November 26, there were different versions of his name afloat till a week later. First accounts spoke of him as fluent in English and well-educated. A subsequent account told of him being of indigent family origins, with education well short of primary schooling. There were reports that he had been gravely injured and had begged for life-saving medical attention at the hospital he was taken to, and then a clarification by the dean of the medical college attached to the same hospital, that he was unharmed except for minor bruises. Finally, contrary to the account in one section of the media that he was being held in an “undisclosed location”, the medical expert testifying to the captured terrorist’s condition was identified by both name and affiliation.

Ostensibly based on the interrogation of the main accused, a major English language newspaper on December 2, carried a front-page account of how the massacre had been planned. It did not name any sources. Mumbai’s Police Commissioner the following day, perhaps gave away the game when he was reported by the same newspaper as validating its account.

The disorientation induced by Mumbai has been sufficiently grave for traditional rules of journalistic procedure – distance, dispassion and objectivity – to be thrown overboard. These apart, the Rashomon effect was obviously at work in a very stark fashion, with every media observer being convinced that events could with justification be interpreted in accordance with a predetermined attitude.

On December 2, India’s external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, playing host to the Secretary-General of the Arab League, spoke of a range of options that were under consideration to deal with the aftermath of Mumbai. Though he specified none and indicated no preferences, Mukherjee’s statement was interpreted in diametrically opposed fashion by two of the country’s biggest English-language newspapers: one headlined its story “India open to military action against Pakistan”, while the other said quite definitively, “Pranab rules out military action”.

The latter attitude though, was a minimal strain in the media in the aftermath of Mumbai, since Pakistan-bashing was perhaps the only constant element in the competitive clamour for attention. Illustrative of how it has been deemed unnecessary to even provide a semblance of a hearing to the other side of the argument: a commentator on an English news-channel was dismissive about the need to present evidence to the Pakistan government, since such had been since long, featured on the front pages of all Indian newspapers.

It seemed irrelevant that there is a protocol of inter-governmental communications, that is quite independent of what is written in newspapers, whether on the front page or otherwise. Pakistan’s oft-stated request that evidence be placed before it of specific individuals and organisations suspected of involvement in terrorism, was dismissed as continuing testament to its state of “denial” and its unfailing recourse to “dilatory” tactics.

At the same time, the media found little amiss in reporting that India had presented detailed evidence on Pakistan’s involvement to the U.S.

The question the Indian media face is not a trivial one. Is it going to be an exclusive forum for the more extreme voices? Or can it find a sensible way forward, even in a conjuncture as trying as Mumbai 26/11, to promote a genuine social dialogue that is attentive to the true risks and benefits of any particular strategic course? From the huge variety of voices seeking to be heard in India, the media seemingly distils out only those that serve its prior conceptions. Though difficult in trying times such as now, can the media hear voices from across the border? Would it have any use for instance, for the following observations from the December 2 editorial in Dawn, one of the most restrained and sober voices in the Pakistan media: “…what cannot be condoned is the behaviour of the Indian media, that taking its cue from the politicians — and from a culture of nationalism that is especially apparent where Islamabad is concerned — came down hard on Pakistan, often conjuring up fantastical descriptions of the way the siege of Mumbai was laid. Not only does this put pressure on the Indian government to keep up its accusations and resist moves for a cooperative stance, it also damages people-to-people ties, for after all, the media is meant to speak for the common man”.

It has also completely passed the Indian media’s attention that beginning on November 29, Karachi, where the Mumbai marauders ostensibly set off from, was gripped by ethnic rioting on a scale never before seen. None of the known players in Karachi’s volatile political milieu owned any responsibility for the violence. As The Daily Times of Islamabad, another newspaper known for relative sobriety, commented in its December 2 editorial, the Prime Minister of Pakistan had asked for intelligence on the incidents and “at least one TV channel (had) reported that an intelligence report sent to the prime minister has held India responsible for the mayhem”.

This alibi, The Daily Times continued, was not really credible, since the history of strife between two of the city’s large ethnic communities – the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns – made the indigenous origin of the trouble an entirely plausible scenario.

Elsewhere in the editorial columns of the same newspaper, is the observation that November 2008 has been the bloodiest month so far for the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. The country’s territorial sovereignty was “fast eroding” as non-state actors took over ever-expanding swathes of territory, denying the authority of the legally constituted Pakistani state. Foreign military intervention in Pakistan, if it came about, would be more on account of ongoing events in Peshawar than what had happened in Mumbai.

In the circumstances, if India’s argument that the Mumbai marauders enjoyed official patronage in Pakistan is accurate, then the military and intelligence establishments in that country are effectively guilty of treason against their own people. If that case can be made with some credibility it would surely be of interest to the people of Pakistan, who are heavily invested in a sustenance of the current phase of civilian rule. More than a military adventure, which could mire India in a worse strategic mess than the U.S. today finds itself in, a candid and transparent dialogue between governments and people is what is required. That clearly, is not something that could even begin, as long as the media continues to be an accessory of militarism, rather than a voice of sanity and the public good.

Mumbai's Horror

Scenes of horrific violence, conducted with cruel and deliberate premeditation, elicit anger and indignation. Mumbai’s 48-hour ordeal of terror, covered in real-time by the country’s numerous news channels, unleashed spasms of rage across the country. The fury is only likely to intensify when security operations are concluded and a true measure obtained of the horror that was unleashed on Mumbai that fateful night of November 26. And calls for vengeance will for long continue to reverberate.

More than all the serial bombings that India has seen, the siege of Mumbai poses, in terms of its continuing ramifications, a clear danger to every value on which the country rests: openness, diversity and tolerance. The Prime Minister in his first address to the nation after the crisis began, seemingly sounded the retreat from his party’s longstanding insistence that it would not countenance any fresh abridgment of civil rights to combat terrorism. Several media commentators have joined in with calls for extraordinary legislative measures and the empowerment of the security agencies.

An alternative mode of seeing is illustrated in the life and death of Hemant Karkare. The chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad in the Maharashtra Police, the highest ranking Indian official to fall to terrorism in many years, was among the first to engage the armed desperadoes as they began to cut a swathe of destruction through Mumbai. He was cut down, along with several trusted colleagues, by the lethal firepower that the terror-ring managed to smuggle onto Indian shores. He leaves as an abiding legacy, the sterling sense of duty he displayed in his final hours.

The last month of his life, Karkare was engaged in the high-profile investigation of a network involving a supposed sadhvi, the self-proclaimed head of a religious foundation, a serving army officer and sundry others, which had allegedly carried out a string of bomb attacks in various parts of the country. He had earned the bitter ire of the principal national opposition party and its allies, which accused him of leading a politically motivated investigation and inflicting thoroughly unconscionable indignities on persons of the true faith.

There was grim irony then, in seeing the same political dignitaries jostling to offer tribute to the fallen officer, in a cynical effort to leverage his death for maximum advantage.

Once the shock and horror subside, the reality the nation confronts is of a terrorist threat that has climbed to an entirely new dimension: from stealth attacks carried out by faceless protagonists, to frontal operations carried out by individuals who do not hesitate to show themselves in full public view.

Reflexively, the security and intelligence community in India has held out the dire warning to Pakistan, that it would be expected in the days ahead, to prove its innocence, or risk a painful retribution. This threatens the faltering and tenuous Pakistani state which is evidently losing control of the many fanatical groupings that have flourished on its territory under a variety of patrons, including the superpower that is today sworn to their destruction. To challenge the Pakistani state to mortal combat would risk destroying the last potential buffer that stands between the entire South Asian region and a descent into anarchy.

At the same time, there is much that India needs to address in the fundamentals of its approach to terrorism. Late October, the Hyderabad police released four Muslim youth who had been held in custody, tortured and humiliated, for suspected complicity in the bombing of the Mecca Masjid in the city in May 2007. They had been arrested, it turned out, merely on a whim.

Around the same time, an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation established that officers of the Special Cell in the Delhi Police had conspired with the Intelligence Bureau, to implicate two Kashmiri youths in a terrorism plot. The two had in fact, been police informers who had fallen out of favour after an internal power struggle in the police force. Again, the two were held in custody for a needlessly long period of time and tortured, after incriminating evidence was planted on them.

The bare fact is that since terrorism became a consuming concern all over the world, India has consistently failed the test of evolving an approach that is even remotely likely to command the allegiance of the larger public. Where a broad public consensus is a vital component of a successful engagement, India’s approach has stigmatised one community, undermined social solidarity and created new wellsprings of resentment from which terrorism gains nourishment.

At the same time, a discourse that is patently antithetical to democratic policy dialogue has been promoted on the grounds that terrorism trumps all other concerns. Whatever may be the culpability of agencies and non-state actors based in Pakistan, India needs to ensure that domestic concord holds. That cannot be achieved by shutting off all critical voices in civil society and insulating the security and intelligence agencies from scrutiny. To suppress the democratic debate at home is to hand victory by default to alien forces of terrorism.

Hindutva's terrorism links

Terror strikes, randomly killing people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, unhinge reason. They breed an intolerance of difference and create conditions under which ordinary people are willing to abandon the commonsense of daily coexistence. In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist outrage, innocents who have suffered, demand recompense. And those fortunate enough to escape the direct experience of pain, fear that providence may not be so kind the next time around.

Part of the intent of terrorism, is that it creates the conditions in which quack remedies gain a measure of legitimacy. Acceptance comes in part from the seeming simplicity of these remedies, as also from their conformity with an existing template on terrorism.

That template was created in India soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. Though various authors have contributed, none has left as distinct an imprint on this master-narrative as Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s principal spokesman. Yet to become chief minister of Gujarat and with the horrors of February 2002 still a distant glimmer, Modi pronounced the mantra that has seemingly become the catechism for all official investigations: even if all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims.

This is the template that was broken late in October, with potentially shattering political consequences, by the discovery of an elaborate network of terrorism involving the faithful of the Hindutva flock. The plot began to unravel with the arrest of a retired army officer in Pune and a woman from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, who was once active in the students’ wing of the BJP before she donned the robes of piety and assumed the title of sadhvi. To great consternation all around, the investigations soon identified a lieutenant-colonel working with military intelligence and stationed in Jammu, as a key player in the terror network. And as the investigations progressed into the bombings on September 29 this year, in Malegaon in Maharashtra and Modasa in Gujarat, another saffron-robed religious preacher, normally based at Jammu, was arrested from a village of Kanpur district in Uttar Pradesh.

The Hindutva political fraternity, stung to the quick, reacted with allegations of a frame-up. Modi joined the fray with dark imprecations about a plot to undermine military morale. Propagandists for Hindutva in the media in turn, have sought to draw a distinction between “terrorism” and “vigilantism” – the one born in the stated desire to destroy the nation-state, the other spawned by the growing sense of frustration among the righteous majority, at the State’s failure to safeguard lives and liberties.

What all the sophistry fails to cover up, is that the reflexive belief -- fostered especially over the last seven years -- that those of the Islamic faith alone are responsible for terrorism, has created a cloak of impunity under which every manner of atrocity has flourished. It is conveniently overlooked that places of Islamic reverence have often been targeted in lethal bomb attacks – as with the cemetery adjacent to a mosque in Malegaon in September 2006, on an occasion when the pious gather to pay homage to the dead, and the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad during Friday prayers in May 2007.

These incidents have been easily subsumed within the master-narrative of jihadi terror by invoking the visceral animosity that adherents of Wahhabi Islam supposedly harbour towards the syncretism of sub-continental religious practice. Police investigations, guided by this quack diagnosis, have targeted innocent Muslims by the scores. As recently as November 4, four suspects held for varying lengths of time for supposed involvement in the Mecca Masjid bombings, were acquitted by a Hyderabad court of all charges, including waging war against the State. They narrated sordid stories of torture, forced confessions and finally, of trials that were they not so tragic, could only be described as farcical.

Similar stories of arbitrary arrest and torture have emerged from Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Malegaon, Mumbai, Varanasi and Delhi, to name only a few cities that have witnessed terrorist atrocities in recent years. They were gathered together in written depositions and orally presented before an Independent Peoples’ Tribunal in Hyderabad as recently as August this year.

In few cases have the investigations into jihadi terrorism managed to produce credible evidence that will stand judicial scrutiny. In virtually all of them, the police have brought charges and pressed for conviction almost solely on the basis of confessions obtained in highly questionable circumstances.

These new expediencies in investigation need to be read in the light of the growing clamour from Hindutva political forces, that a law specific to the menace of terrorism needs to be brought in, which would make confessions in police custody admissible as evidence in court. They need to be seen in conjunction with the weak-kneed and amoral response of the editorialists and the liberal fringe in politics: that the Indian people should be prepared for an abridgment of their rights to defeat a far greater enemy of human liberty.

Few have so far paused to question why the Indian people should surrender the freedom of which they have so little. But with the discovery of Hindutva’s terrorism link, there is a possibility, though still remote, of a paradigm shift in perceptions – a shift of potentially far-reaching benefits for all. Needless to say, this is a possibility that will only be realised if the political apologists for Hindutva are subjected to the processes of accountability demanded by the rule of law.

Intertwined Destinies, Bristling Borders

Conjoined by history, Pakistan and Afghanistan need new ideas to work themselves out of the geopolitical trap they have been lured into by the U.S.


As a term in the international political science discourse, “failed state” is of relatively recent origin. It would take a great deal of effort to understand when the term entered the vocabulary, gaining currency first in a tiny trickle, before becoming the virtual torrent it is today. What is germane for present purposes, is that Afghanistan and Pakistan both gained the honour around the same time – Afghanistan perhaps a few years ahead of Pakistan, though the two have since been marching in virtual lockstep.

Despite the lack of clarity about its provenance, there is little doubt that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has played a key role in lending the notion of the “failed state” respectability. The discussion has been fuelled in large part by the concern within these circles on the growing disorder of the international states system. In the mid-1990s, the term was applied to states that seemed to be on a progressive pathway towards disintegration. The end of the Cold War as it was called, was also the beginning of a severe process of deterioration of internal governance structures in a number of countries.

That coincidence, if that indeed it was, needs to be further researched. But if “failure” as pronounced by the U.S. foreign policy establishment is the sole criterion, then South Asia – and India as the pivotal nation within the region – has much to worry about.

For Pakistan, conferment of the honour of “state failure” dates from around the late-1990s, roughly from the time that disillusionment with the Taliban was beginning to dawn in the U.S. and the numerous U.S. companies that had looked to the Islamic militia as the key to opening a pathway towards the energy riches of Central Asia, were beginning to tire of the strategic complexities involved in the new version of the “great game”. Pakistan was then one among many countries considered worthy of the accolade, which of course had been conferred upon Afghanistan well before.

The Science of Failed States

By the early years of the millennium, the science of “failed states” was being systematically established. In 2005, the “Fund for Peace”, a research and advocacy body based in Washington DC, in association with Foreign Policy magazine, began putting out an annual listing of the world’s “failed states”. It was the global, negative beauty pageant that was awaited with the most dread.

In 2005, Afghanistan ranked 11th in the listing and Pakistan 34th. In the system adopted by the analysts of “failed states”, Pakistan just escaped being classed under the “alert” category, which comprised all the countries deemed beyond the threshold. It was however, ranked top within the next category of critical attention, named “warning”.

The following year, Pakistan was ranked 9th, well within the “alert” category and ahead (or to be more precise, behind, since this is a negative beauty contest) even of Afghanistan, ranked 10th. It was perhaps the most precipitate collapse of credibility as a state, at least as far as perceptions within the U.S. foreign policy establishment are concerned.

In part because it managed to halt its own precipitate slide in the indicators that make up the “failed state” index, Pakistan recovered fractionally in the rankings to 12th position in 2007, while Afghanistan dwindled to 8th. The following year brought about a further decline in the fortunes of both: Afghanistan clocking in at the 7th place and Pakistan intimately behind (or rather ahead), at 9th place.

In the most recent listing of state failure, 35 of 177 nations were classed under the “alert” category, suggesting the imminent possibility of failure. Another 92 countries were categorised under the “warning” list. Taken as an aggregate of crisis possibilities, this means that no fewer than 71 percent of the nations that were within the sample and well over 60 percent of the current membership of the United Nations, are deemed to be in danger of implosion.

In the most recent rankings, India came in respectably at 98th, classed within the tail-end of the “warning” category. But India has ample reason to worry, since five countries within its near neighbourhood, from amongst the membership of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), have been graded under the “alert” category. And the two others keep India company in the “warning” list.

Whatever the ethical merits of the rankings – and it must be noted that they lack a sense of history and completely leave out of account western culpability in the undermining of Third World states – they provide a window into understanding the current situation in Pakistan. Increasingly, it is a country whose fate is tied up with Afghanistan. This is not just because of undeniable historical links and ties of community and kinship, but also because, to their dual misfortune, they have been designated as battlegrounds in the preservation of a geopolitical order of growing fragility. They have in the interests of mere survival, surrendered virtually all autonomy to a superpower that began a military adventure within their territories in the firm belief that it would not be challenged. Now that superpower is flailing about and sinking into a morass of strategic confusion as it seeks to deal with the multitude of challenges – military and above all economic – that it faces.

The law of unexpected outcomes has kicked in with a vengeance.

When the accidental U.S. president, George W. Bush, launched his wars against Afghanistan, and following that, Iraq, he was convinced that these were not wars of choice: they had been forced on the U.S. Equally, he was confident that the wars would end at a time of his choosing. Yet as he nears the end of his term, he is clueless about how and under what conditions he would be willing to call an end to the many wars he has launched, now unanimously recognised to have been wars of choice. And it is the misfortune of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that they have been the countries targeted in this misbegotten adventure by a superpower that simply did not know when its time was up.

Since the wars for maintaining U.S. primacy began, every major rite of political passage in Pakistan has had the conspicuous representation of somebody from Afghanistan. Pervez Musharraf was Pakistan’s army chief, president and chief executive all rolled into one, when the military operations in Afghanistan began. In fractional, but distinct measures, he was compelled over time to surrender this vast accumulation of power. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s most well-known political leader, was expected incrementally, to assume the power that Musharraf ceded. But the Benazir-Musharraf pact never had the remotest chance of being implemented. The orderly transfer of power that the U.S. had scripted was quickly transformed into a messy affair, involving the putative rights of a widower to assume control of a political legacy, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, and his own shadowy past, involving multiple instances of seriously breaching public trust.

Shortly after the last vestige of Musharraf’s authority was removed, Asif Ali Zardari – who assumed leadership of the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) following the assassination of his wife Benazir -- was voted into office as the president of Pakistan. Present at his inauguration was Hamid Karzai, the figure who in western perceptions, represents the new Afghanistan. As Zardari shortly afterwards, addressed his first press conference as head of state, Karzai continued to be at his elbow.

This was an event without precedent, that had media observers scratching their heads in puzzlement. As the front page report in Dawn, Pakistan’s principal English-language daily put it: “President Zardari’s move to address his maiden press conference along with a foreign dignitary surprised many in the federal capital. Some analysts considered it a result of bad advice being given by people around him.”

Substantively, neither President had very much to say, aside from denouncing terrorism and vowing to combat all its forms. Karzai for his part, expressed “concern” over civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or as the U.S. and its allies put it, “collateral damage” in the war against terrorism, though without specifically referring to the air-strikes that had taken a heavy toll of civilian life in Afghanistan in the months preceding. And he stressed the need to win the “cooperation” of the people to make terrorism extinct.

This was the presumable alternative to the preferred western strategy of intimidating the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan into submission through massive displays of military prowess. The target of military action, said Karzai, “should be sanctuaries of terrorists, be these in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, and not the civilian population. We cannot tolerate civilian casualties and a fool-proof mechanism has to be established”.

Musharraf botches his compact with Benazir

Karzai also happened to be in Islamabad on December 27, 2007, the day Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The two met around noon that day and according to an account rendered from first-hand observation, exchanged much good-natured banter, though without getting down to any serious business. Scheduled to meet two senior legislators from the U.S. that evening, Benazir went directly into a meeting with a senior political aide, who she tasked with preparing a memorandum to be presented to her U.S. interlocutors. She thought it an especially urgent priority that the peculiar status of the military intelligence agencies in Pakistan should be explained to the U.S. political establishment.

Benazir then went on to her public meeting at Liaqat Bagh, named in tribute to Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, assassinated in 1950 in the same vicinity. Her assassins struck less than five hours from her meeting with Karzai. The clumsy official response shocked the world and led to much adverse comment since it seemed focused on effacing all traces of the outrageous assault on democracy rather than identifying those responsible for it. Benazir’s killing only served to underline, in the words of a perceptive observer, the “chasm of trust between Pakistan’s government and its people”.

Zardari was far away, in Dubai, as the deadly attack on Benazir took place. In a technical sense, he had secured indemnity in multiple cases of corruption, abduction and murder, through the extraordinary ordinance promulgated by Musharraf in October 2007. Yet Zardari did not feel sufficiently emboldened to return with Benazir to Pakistan that same month.

This may have been a decision made in abundant caution, since the terms of his return, as also of Benazir’s – as specified in the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) signed into law by Musharraf on October 5 -- like all such hastily crafted pieces of law, had areas of ambiguity that could conceivably have been manipulated to place Zardari under custody. Clearly, the man who had earned widespread disrepute for his rampant corruption and cronyism during Benazir’s last tenure as prime minister, had no wish to repeat the long years he had spent in jail between 1996 and 2005, for charges that included the murder in 1996 of Mir Murtaza Bhutto, his brother-in-law and prospective challenger for the mantle of the Bhutto political legacy.

Musharraf’s anxiety level in October though, was sufficient for him to bury all concerns about Zardari’s unsavoury past. He was intent on securing re-election as president by national and provincial legislatures that were at the end of their tenures and had little authority to elect a head of state to a full five-year term. The NRO was part of a deal to ensure him the loyalty of Benazir’s bloc of legislators, for which he was prepared reciprocally, to promise the waiver of the multitude of charges Benazir and her family faced. The legal device that was invoked for this very personalised exertion of the presidential power of pardon was an arbitrary cut-off point: October 12, 1999, the day Musharraf as chief of staff of the Pakistan army, overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief and installed himself as chief executive. In effect, the NRO divided up Pakistan’s political history into the ante and post-Musharraf periods. And as chief of staff of the army and an omnipotent president, Musharraf in October 2007 assumed the authority to extinguish, with a stroke of his pen, all cases registered before his advent to power.

Despite the long and arduous bargaining that went into it, this entire compromise was a seriously flawed affair. Musharraf first reportedly met in secret with Benazir in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi in July 2007. Clearly, some extraordinary circumstances had impelled him into this concession to the civilian politicians he had disdained and in earlier public utterances, held singularly responsible for all the woes that Pakistan as a nation faced.

Sources of Musharraf’s anxiety

Among the many circumstances that might have forced his hand, the bloody confrontation at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad in July 2007 was undoubtedly, among the most important. That was when long-simmering provocations by two brothers, both with claims to Islamic wisdom, who controlled the officially-funded Lal Masjid in Pakistan’s capital city – the venue for congregational prayers by much of the country’s top military brass – reached tipping point. Vigilante squads from the Lal Masjid had for months together been roaming free, imposing their own version of Islamic purity on the city. Islamabad’s prestigious Qaid-e-Azam University was targeted for its alleged disregard for Islamic values. Houses were raided and women taken hostage for alleged immorality. And a radio station operating within the premises of the mosque backed up this campaign of vigilantism with flagrant incitements to violence.

The Lal Masjid clerics were in effect given the untrammelled authority to both create flashpoints of tension and determine their modes of resolution. With great self-importance, clerics in the Lal Masjid played host to the Saudi Arabian ambassador, as also the Chinese diplomats who approached them as supplicants pleading for the release of compatriots taken hostage while working as technical experts on infrastructure projects. All this while, the premises of the mosque were being saturated with guns, explosives and lethal weaponry of every description.

Musharraf’s motives in condoning this perilous accumulation of power within a religious institution in the national capital, can only be guessed at. As Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of physics at Qaid-e-Azam University – and a highly respected spokesman for civil liberties – has argued, Musharraf could have been “banking on Islamic fanatics to create chaos in the nation's capital” and engineering a “bloodbath”, that would give him the alibi for an army intervention and the possible declaration of a “national emergency”. These in turn, would have given him a credible basis for arguing that national elections scheduled for October 2007, could not be conducted.

The game was up when China, smarting from the humiliation of supplicating for the release of its kidnapped technicians, issued an ultimatum. The subsequent conflagaration in the heart of Pakistan’s capital claimed, by the official count, 107 lives, though unofficial estimates put the magnitude of the carnage much higher. Musharraf had won a dubious triumph at enormous human cost. He had once again been shown up as the sorcerer’s apprentice who in his self-imagined cleverness, unleashes forces that later come back to haunt him.

Just days after the Lal Masjid bloodbath, Musharraf woke up to the discomfiting realisation that his continuing patronage by the U.S. could not really be taken for granted. On July 16, 2007, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence released his National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), a periodic summation mandated by the U.S. Congress, of the most authoritative findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. The NIE had several inconvenient truths to tell. It told for instance, of how the extremist group Al-Qaeda had, despite all the pressure exerted by the U.S. military machine, “protected or regenerated key elements” of its capability in the relatively sheltered environment of the Waziristan region in Pakistan. It observed too that Al Qaeda had achieved significant success in its effort to “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” willing to strike on U.S. territory, in part through an Iraqi affiliate.

The NIE set off feverish activity on another front, provoking calls by politicians, both minor and major, for aggressive new military action. Barack Obama, then one among many candidates for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party, insisted that the U.S. should be at liberty to act in the Waziristan region if “actionable intelligence” existed and Pakistan failed to do what was necessary.

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. then, the former general Mahmud Ali Durrani, responded with alacrity. Variously describing the findings of the NIE as “absolutely incorrect” and “an absolute fallacy”, Durrani reminded his U.S. hosts that they had no option but to rely on Pakistan to bring peace to Afghanistan. Unilateral action by U.S. forces often resulted in unacceptable levels of “collateral damage”, with few of the legitimate military objectives being met. Pakistan could not afford to sustain these levels of civilian deaths. Besides, Pakistan had the concern that U.S. intelligence very often was “faulty”, “inaccurate” and tended not to be “timely” either.

These locutions were clearly, a coded reference to the frequent missile strikes in Waziristan and other border regions of Pakistan, which were by then inflicting casualties in the scores. Two such attacks occurred in June 2007, though the bloodiest till then, was the October 2006 strike on a madrasa, which killed around 80 students. Eager to dispel any notion of its territorial sovereignty being breached, Pakistan had stepped up on all occasions to take responsibility for these attacks.

Waziristan erupts again

The same month brought another testing moment for Musharraf, when tribal chieftains in the Waziristan region, home to autonomous and fiercely independent Pashtun tribes that had never acknowledged the centralising power of the federal government in Islamabad, decided to tear up the peace agreement worked out in 2006.

Musharraf had secured the uneasy right to station his forces in the tribal regions in 2002, in exchange for a reciprocal promise that he would pay special attention to the developmental needs of an area that had subsisted for literally centuries in an administrative limbo. In 2004, under pressure from the U.S. to do something drastic to end the safe havens that Islamic militants fleeing Afghanistan had secured in the region, Musharraf sanctioned offensive actions by his forces. The results were catastrophic. Despite gung-ho predictions of swift and certain victory as his troops marched into the unknown, Pakistan’s armed forces suffered immense losses. And to multiply his agonies, the truce that Musharraf concluded after this misadventure was, soon after the Lal Masjid confrontation, unilaterally abrogated by the tribal chieftains of Waziristan who accused federal forces of a persistent pattern of violations.

Impelled by dire necessity to talk terms with the civilians he had once disdained, Musharraf soon ran into problems. Within a month of commencing the secret parleys, Benazir announced that the talks were off. Negotiations with Musharraf’s representatives, she said, had progressed “80 percent” of the way towards a deal, but resistance from members of the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), or the “King’s Party” as it was called in Pakistani political circles, had scuppered chances of a successful outcome. Benazir was also fairly explicit about what the ideal outcome of the negotiations would be: Musharraf’s resignation as army chief of staff and his reelection as civilian president for another term, and the restoration of her rights, as also of all party colleagues, to contest elections and hold political office.

It is uncertain whether Benazir had a specific sequence in mind when she placed these demands on record, though it is abundantly clear that neither side had the slightest faith in the other. Musharraf only signed the NRO into law on the eve of the scheduled election to the presidency. Despite the PPP’s very marginal presence in the electoral college, he was desperate to get Benazir’s endorsement, simply because there was no other way the second term he aspired to, could be spent in relative tranquillity. In the event, the PPP walked out of the assembly chambers in both the national and provincial capitals, rather than vote for Musharraf’s reelection.

If Benazir believed that Musharraf would stand down as army chief prior to seeking reelection, she was again gravely mistaken. Musharraf made sure that he still was in absolute power when seeking reelection, which permitted him the luxury – in disregard of all constitutional requirements – to choose the day that he would shed his khaki. And the day he chose was the eve of his swearing in for a second term as president. He had meanwhile, ensured that the formidable military machine that he was ceding control over, would remain pliant to his designs. On September 21, he effected significant changes in the top military command structure. The pivotal post of Director-General in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – often described as the secret state within Pakistan -- was entrusted to Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj, a close confidant who had served him as military secretary from virtually the very beginning of his tenure as the army chief.

Musharraf takes a political insurance policy

Keenly aware of the fragility of his political support, Musharraf then proceeded to remove all potential sources of inconvenient questions. A nationwide state of emergency was declared in November 2007, after which he proceeded to effect a massive surgical operation on the judiciary, removing all possible sources of dissent and bringing in judges who were less likely to entertain challenges to the political edifice he was constructing, on markedly dubious legal foundations.

When national and provincial elections were finally conducted, the PPP rode the sympathy wave created by Benazir’s assassination, to emerge as the largest single party at the federal level. But it was denied an absolute majority and had to enter into seemingly endless bargaining over constituting a government. The sticking point, ostensibly, was the insistence of the Pakistan Muslim League headed by Nawaz Sharief, (the PML-N) that a minimal condition for its association with the ruling arrangement would be a PPP commitment on reinstating all the judges dismissed by Musharraf. Now having assumed control of the PPP, as Tariq Ali described it, almost in the manner of a family heirloom, Zardari had evident reservations about allowing independent minds back into the portals of the country’s higher judiciary. That would have quite conceivably led to a reexamination of the entire foundations of his return to Pakistan and the reversed the remarkable revival in political fortunes that he was enjoying.

Sharief though, was smarting from the memory of the many humiliations he had suffered at Musharraf’s hands – first his ignominious ouster from premiership and imprisonment in 1999, his trial in 2000 and conviction for terrorism and “attempted hijacking” and the long years of banishment in Saudi Arabia. As recently as September 2007, he chose to preempt the Musharraf-Benazir negotiations and unilaterally reinterpret the terms of his exile by returning to Pakistan, only to be bundled out in double quick time and deep dishonour. It took an extraordinary political intervention by the Saudi ruling dynasty to secure his return in November, though his pathway towards resuming an elected role in politics remained blocked by judicial rulings.

The story of those deep intrigues still remains to be written. But the people of Pakistan could not have been happy with the games their politicians were playing, endlessly bickering over petty issues of personal concern, while delaying the formation of a civilian government, which had been the consuming passion of all for the many months preceding. Finally, the PPP and the PML-N agreed, just in time to salvage public trust, that they would constitute a government on the understanding that the judges would be reinstated and Musharraf’s future would be decided once they were installed in power.

To underline their very real resentments about Musharraf continuing in office on the basis of a dubiously engineered vote, PML-N ministers took their oath of office in March wearing black armbands. The gesture almost prompted a stormy riposte by Musharraf but it was a sign of the weak hand he had been left with, that he consented, in obvious ill-temper, to proceed with the swearing-in ceremony.

Within a mere six weeks of the taking the oath, all PML-N ministers quit the Federal Cabinet. Two deadlines had been set for the PPP leadership and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, to order the reinstatement of the judges. Both passed with no action.

Early in August 2008 though, the PPP and the PML-N found that they had a new basis for unity. After prolonged and still rather opaque negotiations, they resolved that they would jointly seek Musharraf’s removal as president, through impeachment if necessary. Zardari’s anxieties about the adverse consequences that could ensue from a confrontational course, had obviously been allayed by then. How this was accomplished is of course a matter that can only be guessed at, though the clues available are ample.

Late in August, two major U.S. newspapers reported that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, had been sharply upbraided by seniors in the U.S. State Department, for carrying out “unauthorised” contacts with Zardari. As U.N. ambassador, Khalilzad had little formal jurisdiction over Pakistan and yet, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher put it in an angry e-mail message, he had reportedly been offering “advice and help” to Zardari. Clearly infuriated that Khalilzad’s intervention had gone contrary to declared policy, Boucher demanded to know in what capacity he had offered “advice and help”: whether “government, private or personal”.

The contacts between the two men had been by all accounts, extensive. As The New York Times put it, they had spoken over telephone “several times a week for the past month”. It turned out moreover, that this was part of a pattern of deviant behaviour by Khalilzad, since he had in mid-2007, earned a “stern warning” from the second-ranking official of the U.S. State Department, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, for carrying on freelance diplomacy with the Bhutto family. The flamboyant Khalilzad, a former oil industry operative and a charter member of the cabal of “neo-conservatives” that drives U.S. foreign policy, agreed then to fall in line, but three days later, was reported to have had a private dinner with Benazir.

The U.S. decides who in Pakistan is dispensable

Clearly, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, despite all the official noises emanating from the State Department, had decided by August 2008, that they could dispense with Musharraf, since Zardari offered the more promising opportunities for future engagements in Pakistan. Rather than risk the humiliation of impeachment, Musharraf chose shortly afterwards to resign. The war in Afghanistan, once his greatest assurance of continuing support from the U.S., had become by then, a millstone that he could no longer bear. And the U.S. for its part had evidently tired of Musharraf by then and was keen to explore other options.

For the U.S., the change of horses was, from the strategic point of view, long overdue. Early in October, a French diplomatic telegram came to light, which recorded the rather lugubrious observations of the British ambassador to Kabul. The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, said the British diplomat in a conversation with French counterparts, was “destined to fail”. Seeking troop reinforcements from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would be counterproductive, since that would only multiply the range of targets for Afghan insurgents to aim their firepower at. Indeed, the foreign military forces on Afghan territory were part of the problem rather then the solution.

Karzai in this demi-official assessment, had lost all trust and could not be counted on to retrieve the rapidly deteriorating situation. Indeed, the most happy outcome for the west, would be for an “acceptable dictator” to assume absolute authority in Kabul in the next few years.

The gloomy message was underlined by the top-ranking U.S. military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Mike Mullen, in remarks to the media early-October. “The trends across the board are not going in the right direction,” he said. ”I would anticipate next year would be a tougher year.” Citing an intelligence assessment which was in the final stages of preparation, Mullen spoke of the imminent possibility of a “downward spiral” in the situation “unless there were rapid, major improvements”. These included curbing the booming heroin trade -- the most important source of funds for the insurgency – significantly devolving power to the district and provincial chiefs, and choking off the flow of militants from safe havens in Pakistan.

From the time in September 2001, that Musharraf was compelled to sign on to the U.S. war project in Afghanistan and to enroll himself as an accessory in the destruction of the Taliban regime that Pakistan had been singularly responsible in creating, he had shown ample signs of ambivalence. On the one hand, he was highly responsive to western demarches that he crack down on known Al-Qaeda operatives in his country and had offered significant logistical support in the capture and extradition of key figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. At the same time, he hardly made a secret of his deep disdain for the Afghan regime, despite the explicit and oft-repeated U.S. belief that Karzai was the man that it trusted to bring order to Afghanistan.

Musharraf’s behaviour in this respect has been described as “schizophrenic”, though to be fair to him, he probably was responding with as much consistency as he could muster, to conflicting pressures. Illustratively, in July 2006, he denied in a series of public statements that there were any Taliban cadre sheltering in Pakistan and accused Karzai of being manipulated by India. Shortly afterwards, he declared in a televised speech that the Taliban indeed, were a presence in Pakistan, though less so than in Afghanistan. In September that year, three days after signing a peace agreement with the Waziristan tribes, he paid a visit to Kabul at short notice, where he told a gathering of Afghan parliamentarians that “the best way to fight the common enemy (the Taliban) (was) to join hands, trust each other and form a common strategy”.

Barely civil

Shortly afterwards, Musharraf and Karzai who both happened to be in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, engaged in a bruising verbal battle in public, questioning each other credentials and capabilities. When they met a few days later in Washington DC, under the gaze of U.S. President George Bush, they reportedly avoided shaking hands. Karzai put forward his single-point demand: that Musharraf arrest the Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan, rather than make deals with them. Having barely extricated himself from a bruising military encounter with the Waziristan tribes, Musharraf was in no mood to listen. And Bush reportedly, was anxious not to be seen taking sides. An earlier demand from Karzai for the arrest and extradition of Taliban leaders sheltering in Pakistan was rebuffed with the accusation that Indian intelligence agencies, operating on Afghan soil, were engaged in a campaign of sabotage and destabilisation in the Baloch region of Pakistan.

The idea of a “peace jirga” involving Pakistan and Afghanistan was proposed at the Washington meeting, on Karzai’s initiative. By all accounts, Musharraf was lukewarm, but acceded to the proposal under U.S. pressure. The idea of adapting the jirga, or traditional assembly of Pashtun tribes to the cause of building bridges between two neighbouring States, each facing problems of internal turmoil and external tutelage, was a novel one. But it continued to encounter Pakistan’s indifference.

It is not difficult to see that the process of tribal consultations across borders runs contrary to the centralising tendency of a state dominated by the military. To be of any consequence, these consultations must be accompanied by a commitment that cross-border solidarities, of tribe or ethnicity or language, would be given significant room, setting up a force potentially antithetical to the centralising state. With the persistent trouble it was facing in Baluchistan compounded by the turmoil in Waziristan, there was ample reason for Islamabad to worry about yielding greater room for tribal communities to determine the contours of relations with Afghanistan. Aside from the insecurity engendered by recent experience, the process also seemed to necessitate a dilution of the concept of “strategic depth” – a doctrine that military administrations in Pakistan have in particular been committed to, as an antidote to the sense of siege the state has suffered from the moment of its birth.

Under relentless prodding from Washington, the peace jirga was finally scheduled for the early part of August 2007. In the days before the event, three heavyweight leaders of Islamic political parties in Pakistan – Fazlur Rahman, Samiul Haq and Qazi Hussain Ahmad – all of Pashtun extraction, decided to stay away. The tribal chiefs of Waziristan soon followed suit. Before setting off for Kabul, Pakistan delegates were extensively briefed by senior officials of the federal government in Islamabad and the provincial government in Peshawar, and told that they were under no circumstances to yield the moral ground. Any attempt to place the blame on Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan, they were told, would have to be firmly rebuffed.

Musharraf opted out of attending the jirga, sending Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead and staying back amidst frenetic speculation about his intent to declare a state of emergency. The mounting speculation only died down when the Pakistan president disavowed the idea, amidst expressions of disapproval from Washington. Shortly afterwards he decided to accept Karzai’s invitation to address the closing session of the jirga in Kabul. From Washington, a spokesman of the State Department put out the statement that the Bush administration was “pleased” at the decision.

Pakistan’s schizoid policy

In the hours before the Pakistan president’s arrival, the jirga had been debating, beyond the florid speeches and the routine expressions of good intent, how best to operationalise a credible truce in the border region between the two countries. Curiously, according to a report put out by the Afghan news agency, Pajhwok, the Pakistan delegates at one stage tabled a proposal that two Indian consulates – of the four opened in Afghanistan since the ejection of the Taliban – be shut down. The Afghan delegates protested that these demands were in breach of agreed rules of non-interference. And when Musharraf finally appeared before the closing session of the jirga, he came with a virtual mea culpa. In breach of the rules framed for Pakistan’s delegates, Pakistan’s president, with his Afghan counterpart nodding vigorously in agreement, read out the following lines from a prepared text: “There is no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistan soil. The problem that you have in your region is because support is provided from our side.”

This was another revelation of Musharraf’s uniquely schizoid style. And however well intended he may have been, there has been little change since then, in strategic realities in the two countries. In the midst of all the chatter at the jirga, though, there were views expressed that salvation for the region lay in nothing less than the withdrawal of all alien forces. It was a demand that the dominant political parties in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan soon afterwards amplified.

The U.S. forces have seemingly paid no heed. Shortly after Khalilzad and Zardari had presumably at one of their secret parleys, worked out their deal to oust Musharraf, U.S. air and ground forces stepped up their activity in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. There was a symmetry here between U.S. actions immediately after Musharraf’s ouster and actions just after he was voted to a full-term in the presidency in the infamously rigged referendum of 2002. As a recent work of reportage on Pakistan puts it: “The timing hardly seemed fortuitous. On May 1, 2002, only twenty-four hours after the controversial and flawed referendum that extended Pervez Musharraf’s presidency for an additional five years – with the tacit approval of Washington – Pakistan officials acknowledged that a small number of U.S. ground forces had been given reluctant permission to operate inside Pakistan”.

Every change of regime in Pakistan is in other words, merely a way-station in the growing assertion of U.S. military suzerainty in the region.

With civilian rule restored in Pakistan though, the U.S. would have little reason to expect a clear field for their military operations. The newly installed provincial government in the North-west Frontier Province for instance, is committed to a new approach to bringing peace to the trouble border with Afghanistan, other than the heavy-handed military tactics favoured by the U.S. The chief minister of NWFP, Asfandyar Wali Khan and the provincial chief of the ruling Awami National Party, Afrasiab Khattak – both scions of major political dynasties in the region – have indicated that they will open negotiations rather than risk a further escalation of hostilities.

There are indications also, that the Pakistan military has begun to respond with something approaching alarm to the impunity with which U.S. forces have been crossing the border. Late September, Pakistan forces fired what they claimed were warning shots at two U.S. army helicopters that were flying perilously close to the border.

Perhaps the most hopeful sign though, is that a new dynamic seems to be developing between the Pakistan military and the newly installed civilian leadership, as a response to the challenge posed by growing U.S. military overlordship. Contrary to earlier practices, when elected civilian leaders were denied access to security information that the army deemed its exclusive preserve, the Pakistan military brass recently delivered an extensive briefing on the war scenario to a joint session of both houses of the Pakistan National Assembly. The military leadership, though angered at what it called the persistent vilification of the ISI, also undertook to support the effort to evolve a new consensus on the security challenges facing Pakistan.

Things fall apart

How far this new mood of consensus will go is anybody’s guess. Since May 2008, casualties among U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan have consistently outstripped the toll in Iraq. Afghan civilian deaths meanwhile, have multiplied, increasingly as a consequence of misdirected attacks by U.S. and allied forces. Each such incident elicits a volley of protests from the Afghan national government, followed by a commitment from the foreign forces that investigations would duly be conducted. And as virtually foretold from the moment the inquiries are launched, the finding, finally, is that the occupying military forces acted “appropriately”.

The reasons why the border with Pakistan is now bristling with insurgency against the Karzai regime, owe entirely to the architecture of the western plan for Afghanistan. Because it did not want the retrieval effort in one failed state to end in a situation of two failed states, the west connived in the early phase of its military campaign in Afghanistan, with Pakistan’s strategy of withdrawing most assets invested in the Taliban regime, or at least all that could be salvaged. This withdrawal was part of an agreed compact by which Musharraf sought in the cataclysmic defeat of his country’s strategic ambitions, a pretence – even if a very thin one – that the country was well-served by the war in Afghanistan.

The militant tendencies were transferred to Pakistan’s northern areas, to greatly add to the restiveness of the Pashtun tribes there. Afghanistan meanwhile, approaches meltdown, since the leadership that the west had anointed for what it fancifully calls the “democratic transition”, has carved up the country into a multitude of personal fiefdoms. Rather than attend to the rigours of building up a genuine sense of national solidarity, the west opted for a confederacy of the same warlords – Rashid Dostum, Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Ismael Khan, Karim Khalili, and numerous others – whose ouster by the Taliban was greeted by the people of Afghanistan in the mid-1990s as a form of deliverance.

Denied authority in most of the country, Karzai himself has decided, according to authoritative assessments, to cultivate his own fiefdom in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar – currently Afghanistan’s most fertile breeding grounds for illicit opium. A loss of image in the west, the risk that he may be seen as a patron of the lethal trade in narcotics, is for Karzai, clearly a lesser danger than being overwhelmed by the confederacy of warlords that the U.S. military intervention has created.

It is increasingly clear, though, that peace can only be restored in Afghanistan through a process that fosters real sentiments of social solidarity and restores the benign face of the old allegiances of tribe and ethnicity. This is a process that would necessarily have to accommodate cross-border (or extra-territorial) ties of community and kinship. It would in that sense, work against the centralising logic of a modern nation-state, especially one that has remained for long years under military management. If the current gloomy prognoses by the U.S. intelligence agencies are to be taken at face value, things are likely to get much worse before they get better. That prognoses would be equally applicable to Pakistan too. And since no nation is an island, that is a forecast that all countries in South Asia need to pay heed to. There is little room for complacency. And the repercussions of a “business as usual” approach to neighbourhood relations, especially for the largest country in the region, may well be unacceptably high.