INDIA AND THE U.S.: THE BURDENS OF PARTNERSHIP
Sukumar Muralidharan
March 21, 2006
Three days after touching down, U.S. President George Bush left Indian shores, leaving in his wake an aura of general contentment. From deep within his security envelope, Bush had little opportunity to see the seething rage on the Indian street. The constituencies he addressed were the middle and upper strata, anxious to secure a U.S. stamp of approval for India as a partner in global affairs. And for the Indian nuclear establishment and its peers in foreign policy, the agreements forged on the occasion marked the beginning of a new concord. After their unseemly squabbles in the weeks prior, the Bush visit marked a new mutual amity for them, as much as it represented a new beginning between India and the U.S.
India’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) had initially resisted the deal that involved a segregation of military and civilian nuclear facilities. For foreign policy ideologues though, complete autonomy in nuclear affairs was not too high a sacrifice for winning U.S. benediction in global councils. Above all, autonomy was not to be confused with autarky, since isolation was no virtue when nuclear fission was potentially a valuable energy source for a rapidly industrialising country and international cooperation, the key to opening these limitless vistas.
If the deal that was finally agreed on day two of the Bush visit, succeeded in calming these quarrels and anxieties, its international repercussions were something else. Stopping in Pakistan on his way back – though not with the same cavalier inattention to local sensibilities that his predecessor Bill Clinton showed in 2000 -- Bush rebuffed any possibility that Pakistan could claim a status akin to that granted India. Two weeks later, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri warned darkly, that the whole Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would “unravel” since it was “only a matter of time before other countries (began) to act the same way.” Since ministers in Pakistan invariably direct their most pointed barbs at India, it may seem axiomatic that Kasuri was referring to the negative example that India had set in terms of global nuclear non-proliferation norms. On closer reading though, his statement seems to bear equal reference to both the U.S. as the patron of this breakout from the NPT norms, and to India as the client.
Tightly bound up in an alliance with the U.S., Pakistan may not have very much latitude to deliver on this threat. Yet, it is striking that India’s new bonding with the U.S., has evoked deep suspicion in even liberal circles, not known to be traditional bastions of hostility. The Guardian in London, for one, commented editorially, that the nuclear agreement between India and the U.S. was “about breaking rules and expecting others to abide by them”. More picturesquely put, it was about “preaching temperance from the barstool”. Indians may well delight in the bargain they had driven, said the newspaper, but there were likely to be some “thoughtful smiles” in Iran and North Korea as the “wider implications” sank in.
In advance of the Bush visit, the New York Times commented that despite all the accompanying froth, the presidential passage to India was “built around a bad nuclear deal”. With the deal consummated, the “newspaper of record” commented rather acidly, that Bush was turning out to be Iran’s best friend. His adventure in Iraq, launched on flimsy and fabricated evidence, had only succeeded in transforming that country into a satellite of the Islamic Republic next door. And his deal with India sent “exactly the wrong message .. just days before Washington and its European allies” were scheduled to “refer Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council for further action”. Iran’s hopes of thwarting a global consensus on restraining its nuclear program rested on “convincing the rest of the world that the West (was) guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues”, commented the New York Times. And in this respect, Bush “might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran”.
The Economist was no less scathing, accusing Bush of favouring a friend rather than sticking to principle. Here he was, insisting in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran should “not be allowed to bend the anti-nuclear rules out of shape to further what are assumed to be its weapons ambitions”. At the same time, he was without the slightest hint of irony, proposing that India, already in possession of nuclear weapons, be allowed to do just that.
This enormous sense of effrontery, this belief that the world will do as it says rather than as it does, is not a new mood in the U.S. But it is certainly so in India. Consistency in standards of international conduct is a virtue valued only by the weak, who seek their security through agreed rules and norms. The powerful have no use for them, as anybody who has witnessed the U.S. attitude of indulgence and abetment towards Israel’s policy of conquest in West Asia would know. But the strong nevertheless are in need of justifying their double standards. Just as Israel’s unending atrocities on the Palestinians are justified by its divinely ordained title to the land and by the redress owed world Jewry for the suffering inflicted by the Nazi Holocaust, India’s great escape from the prison of the non-proliferation regime, stands in need of a rationalisation. An authoritative if not exhaustive justification, one that fortunately, does not venture into the theological realm, is provided by Ashley Tellis, an Indian born U.S. national who has been on the inside track of national security policy in Washington DC, and now serves on the staff of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.[1]
Tellis derives his first rationale from the principle of neoclassical economics, which holds that a public good can be secured only at a price. In a situation of collective action, the fulfilment of this object may be impeded by the conflicting agendas that motivate diverse agents. Absent the capacity to quash the recalcitrant elements, this would require a special subvention being made to those who have the least incentive in obtaining the public good. India in this reckoning is deserving of a special concession. The other two hold-outs in the context of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are Israel and Pakistan, both of which merit special consideration in U.S. aid allocations. India is an exception within the “three-nation problem” that confronts the NPT, gaining neither from access to nuclear fuel and technology, nor enjoying any exceptional benefit from U.S. aid.
This argument might have been halfway convincing if it did not conflict quite so flagrantly with the U.S. agenda on Iran. Successive inspections by the IAEA have found that the transgressions of the NPT by Iran, if any, are borderline in nature. Since the agency was granted access to suspect sites in Iran in early-2003, it has found little material evidence of a nuclear weapons program. The quantity of uranium that has been processed is nowhere near the requirement for a nuclear weapon, and the level of uranium enrichment achieved falls short even of what is needed for energy applications. To make the arduous transition from the 1.7 percent enrichment level achieved to the 95 percent required for one – merely one – nuclear bomb, would take Iran many years, even up to a decade.
Several rounds of inspection have been conducted by the IAEA and despite serious reservations about unwarranted intrusions into sovereign sites, cooperation from Iran has not been lacking. But this has not prevented the IAEA from demanding, first in September last year and then again in February, that Iran should go beyond the formal stipulations of the NPT, to adopt “transparency and confidence-building measures” that may be demanded at regular intervals.
Essentially, India is granted a special dispensation to join the global nuclear imperium as a country allowed to possess nuclear weapons, while Iran is required to submit to greater rigours than even the NPT dictates. This particular anomaly needs an explanation that goes beyond neoclassical economic theories, and to his credit, Tellis does make the effort.
Tellis argues that for one thing, by allowing India to join the non-proliferation regime as a state with an internationally recognised right to bear nuclear arms, the U.S. would be giving it an incentive to “scrupulously control its national capabilities”. This in turn would “choke off” the only real security threat emanating from India.
This assessment, which flatters India’s capacities and misrepresents its intentions, needs to be treated with some scepticism. In Tellis’ analysis though, it is only a brief preamble before the crux of the issue is approached. To bring India on board the counter-proliferation regime would be consistent, he argues, with the Bush administration’s “new policy of advancing India’s economic transformation and growth in national power”. Within this paradigm, attention needs to be focused on how India’s “military resources could be used collaboratively (with the U.S.) to advance the national interests of both countries”.
If there has ever been an instance in the annals of geopolitics, of one country seeking as a matter of declared policy, to enhance the power of another, it would be interesting to define the correspondences and divergences with the situation that the U.S. has adopted today in relation to India. In Tellis’ narration, the crucial point of transition came in early-2005, when the U.S. decided after months of deliberation and much secret confabulations, to clear the sale of an advanced fighter aircraft to Pakistan. The expected outburst of indignation from India was met with the assurance that the “hyphenated relationship” was at an end. No longer would the U.S. assess each policy decision towards one of the adversarial neighbours in terms of the other’s perception. Rather, the new game would explicitly recognise India’s pre-eminence in the region. Beyond this formal acknowledgment, the U.S. would take upon itself the mission of helping India achieve the status of a major world power in the 21st century.
Tellis argues that this would involve multiple benefits for the U.S. Among other things, it would ensure that India’s “nuclear weaponry and associated delivery systems would deter against the growing and utterly more capable nuclear forces Beijing is likely to possess by 2025”. And beyond the necessity of setting up a pivot around which the containment of China could be effected, India also would serve to lend a semblance of stability in a volatile neighbourhood. “The problems of regional order”, Tellis argues, “are unified by an overarching theme: the need to cope with state failure in almost every political entity on India’s periphery”.
Taking a broader view, Tellis concedes that the special exceptions made for India were likely to excite the jealousy of other aspiring regional powers. And in putting down these expectations, the U.S. needed to learn that consistency in standards was not a particular virtue. The need argues Tellis, is for a “proliferation of counter proliferation strategies”. Each country merited differential treatment, depending upon its “friendship toward and value to the U.S.”
These prescriptions are salutary in their healthy absence of principle. An India that is just a little excited in its self-awareness as an emerging world power, may well be seduced by this robust amorality. But there is a price to be paid for seeking this privileged position within the new global architecture of power. What that price would be is made amply evident in another product from the Carnegie Endowment. Though it predates Tellis’ work, the volume authored by George Perkovich and four associates from the Carnegie Endowment, was published in India at the same time. Its title, Universal Compliance, A Strategy for Nuclear Security, has the same breathless as Tellis’ work. But without being in any way picky, it could be pointed out that the title itself encapsulates a gigantic incongruity, since there are no formulae for security in the nuclear realm, only for relative degrees of insecurity.
Perkovich and his associates (referred to hereafter by the lead author’s name alone), expect in gross disregard of fact or reality, that the U.S. could credibly lead the new global strategic consensus by bringing into effect the commitment to disarmament that is enjoined on it by the NPT. They deserve the benefit of the doubt if only because their book was written before the NPT Review Conference of 2005, which ended in disastrous failure, primarily because the U.S. refused to countenance a final declaration which reaffirmed the “13 practical steps” towards universal disarmament that had been agreed five years prior. Those commitments, entered into by the Clinton administration at the preceding review conference, were deemed just too much of a sacrifice of national security interests by the cabal of hyper-nationalists surrounding Bush.
The 2005 Review Conference effectively put the faltering momentum of global disarmament in reverse gear. To be fair to him, Perkovich could have been hoping for a better outcome when he suggested that the U.S. should, following this event, “orchestrate a summit” involving all the recognised nuclear weapons states, to “clarify the commitments they will make to advance universal compliance with nuclear non-proliferation norms and rules”. Elsewhere, Perkovich points out that the very word “compliance” suggests an asymmetric distribution of rights and responsibilities, leaving far too much coercive power in the hands of a few and enjoining meek obedience upon the many. Though grounded in substantive features of the global architecture of power today, this attitude he argues, need not be either “ignored or indulged”.
Curiously though, Perkovich then proceeds to do just that: ignore the global sensitivities involved in compelling acquiescence to a U.S. scheme for nuclear non-proliferation. He also ignores a sustained track record of contrary behaviour by the U.S., which has seriously vitiated the climate for nuclear disarmament. Thus, the “13 practical steps” – in themselves a concession made by the nuclear weapons states to the growing impatience of the world community about the tardy progress of disarmament -- included the principle of “irreversibility” in arms reductions, and required that the U.S. and Russia, as the principal offenders in the nuclear realm, should preserve the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and hasten the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). All three stipulations had been seriously mauled well before the 2005 Review Conference, and in all three cases, the most serious violations had come from the U.S.
To take just the principle of irreversibility, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) framework, allowed for a verifiable cutback in deployments of missiles by the two powers, though it was silent on the larger question of eliminating the nuclear warheads. Following a prolonged war of attrition by the right wing of the Republican party in the U.S., Bush transformed this process – with all its uncertainties on the dimension of warhead elimination – into a doubly uncertain one, with cuts in both delivery systems and warheads being potentially reversible. At the same time, he has repudiated the ABM Treaty, to accelerate research and development work on a technologically infeasible and financially profligate missile defence system, whose only enduring contribution would be to trigger an arms race in outer space. And he has shown little inclination to retrieve the CTBT from the legislative limbo into which it was cast by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate in 1999.
All this makes for a rather flimsy moral platform from which to launch an ambitious agenda of “universal compliance”, more so since Perkovich’s blueprint involves an intrusive system of inspections, interdictions and interventions, organised and spearheaded by the U.S. It will involve cutting off access to the nuclear fuel cycle, rigorously inventorying all existing fissile material and placing it under tight custody, diminishing the role of nuclear weapons in national security strategies, and obtaining sanctions for tough action against violators.
With all this, Perkovich disfavours any disarmament initiative on the part of the U.S., arguing that the U.S. nuclear deterrent is an essential safeguard during the transition to a regime of “universal compliance”. He mildly criticises the current thinking in U.S. national security circles, which tilts towards using tactical nuclear weapons to “take out” enemy assets. His reservations on this score are derived not from ethical concerns, but from potential fallibilities of intelligence, as seen in the missile strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and more catastrophically, in the invasion of Iraq.
Perkovich misses the point, so obvious from a non-U.S. perspective, that the threat of aggression, including through nuclear arms, is the worst form of incentive for reluctant nations to sign on to the non-proliferation regime. And when the aggressive instinct is unbridled, as by all accounts, it has with the Bush administration, then the environment is vitiated irretrievably. When forging a consensus however reluctant, becomes impossible, coercion remains the only recourse.
A few days after the Indian nuclear deal was solemnised, an arms control lobby in the U.S., which had always been deeply sceptical about its merits, put out a brief study seeking to debunk one of the platforms on which it had been constructed – India’s supposedly impeccable record in safeguarding sensitive technologies and meeting non-proliferation norms despite being outside the NPT orbit. Taking the instance of India’s uranium enrichment plant near Mysore, David Albright and Susan Basu, two prominent non-proliferation advocates, sought to paint a picture of clandestine procurement from abroad and consistent evasion of import controls by the DAE.
The account was of course, vigorously challenged in the decidedly DAE-friendly Indian media. But that is not perhaps the most interesting point about these exchanges. Rather, what is arresting is that Albright and Basu, sourcing their findings from a variety of published and unpublished accounts, construct a picture of gross under-performance by the DAE facility. Two decades after it was commenced, the project is far from producing enough enriched uranium to fuel a research reactor of fairly modest dimensions. It remains decades behind, in terms of meeting the Tarapur Atomic Power Station’s requirements and the more exacting needs of India’s nuclear submarine project and strategic arsenal.
Alibis of course could be found if needed, but those are of little concern in this context. What is relevant is that India’s modest achievements two decades into a uranium enrichment program should have provided it with quite a realistic picture of the technical constraints faced by Iran’s nuclear research. There was no reason in other words, why India should have bought into the grossly inflated assessment of the U.S., that Iran was menacingly close to acquiring adequate fissile material to assemble a weapon. That it did so is testimony to the fact that the strategic partnership with the U.S., involves not merely a sacrifice of principle, but a quite arrant disregard for facts.
The first down payment on the deal with the U.S. fell due rather rapidly. Within days of Bush’s Indian sojourn, the IAEA met in Vienna to debate the Iranian nuclear research program. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had, just hours before, spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, seeking to ensure that the debate remained confined within the IAEA. He also upheld India’s belief that Iran should have access to the full range of nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes.
A last-minute Russian gambit failed, which would have transferred industrial scale uranium enrichment out of Iran, allowing that country only the limited option of laboratory scale experiments. Rudely flouting the assurance of the NPT that every member-state has the right to access nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes, the U.S. has repeatedly announced that Iran cannot be trusted with any stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. The most recent affirmations – from Vice President Dick Cheney and U.N. ambassador John Bolton -- came at the policy conference of the American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), which devoted a substantial part of its three-day annual event to Iran.
Using the same platform, Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., engaged in a rhetorical flourish that could have been taken straight out of any political bigot’s notebook: “While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim”.
India has reason to worry about the company it is getting into. Addressing a carefully chosen audience in the picturesque environs of Delhi’s Purana Qila, Bush announced just before he left, that the U.S. and India are today “closer than ever before”. Indeed, there was no way that the two countries could shirk their common destiny of “leadership in the cause of democracy”. Should India buy into these rather quirky definitions – whether of “terrorism” or “democracy” -- it may well find itself a house divided against itself. And that would be a steep price to pay for the illusory security of nuclear deterrence.
(ENDS)
[1] Ashley J. Tellis, India as a New Global Power, India Research Press, Delhi (under licence from the Carnegie Endowment for International Press, Washington DC), 2005, pp 121.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Media freedom, responsibility and regulation
MEDIA FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND REGULATION
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
March 2, 2006
To talk about the “media” today is to deal with multiple meanings. Variously perceived, the media (used here and elsewhere in this article, in the singular) is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. Increasingly again, it is serving for a growing number, as a forum of self-expression.
With several models available to study the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. And global events in recent times have shown that the right to free speech is both contentious and elusive in its definition. The cartoon-caricatures of a revered historical figure, were in the perception of the Danish newspaper that recently published them, a mere articulation of its right to free speech. But for a major world community, this was an act of gross provocation, a manifestation of the licentiousness of western civilisation, which transformed free speech into a sanction to cause offence.
The problem is an old one for liberal democratic theory. When does one person’s right become an irksome intrusion into another person’s individual and social being? It is a dilemma that led to Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated elucidation of two notions of liberty: the positive and the negative. Positive liberty in his estimation involved the right of unbridled action with few social or institutional restraints. It also involved the potential for excess, for oppression of individuals in the name of some larger cause. Certain sections could in its name arrogate to themselves the right to decide what serves the cause of the larger social good, compelling others to acquiesce, often at the cost of their freedoms.
Positive and negative liberty
The consequences of positive liberty were for Berlin, too terrible to contemplate, which is why he advised that the concept be jettisoned as a basis of democratic liberalism. Far more manageable was “negative liberty”, which demarcated a zone of inalienable freedoms where the sovereignty of the individual could not be breached. Rather than defining an individual’s rights in terms of all that he could do, this notion confined itself to a range of actions where free will and choice could not be denied.
C.B. MacPherson, the Canadian political philosopher who has been a perceptive critic of Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy in the post-World War II years, pointed out in an important critique, that these notions are inherently flawed. They fail, for one thing, to take into account the possible constraints on individual conduct that skewed patterns of distribution of the means labour could impose. An individual who lacks the means to earn his subsistence would be obliged to put himself at the service of another, conferring on the latter, an “extractive power” over his labour capacities. And precisely because he is deprived of his freedom to choose how his faculties and abilities should be utilised, this individual is deprived of the opportunity to develop his talents and personality in the best manner possible.
To find a way out of this dilemma of modern political theory, MacPherson posed two alternative conceptions: of “counter-extractive” and “developmental” liberty. The former enables an individual to resist the extraction of his powers and capabilities by another, merely because he lacks the means to render his labour productive. The latter is a positive affirmation which goes beyond the preservation of individual sovereignty, to enable the exercise of freedoms for the development of the individual’s particular personality and genius.
How would these concepts bear up when imported into the domain of free speech? Counter-extractive liberty could be interpreted as the right of the individual to be free of manipulated images and information that vitiate his sovereign right to form an independent opinion. And developmental liberty would be the power to put forward a viewpoint before society and have it assessed for its intrinsic merit. The former involves fashioning an area of individual autonomy where the intrusive attentions of the media do not reach. The latter involves ensuring that every individual has access to the channels of information dissemination.
Interestingly, article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights conceives of precisely this kind of a radical investiture of rights in the individual. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” it states, and “this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
The compulsions of the real world impose the need on most national constitutions to abridge this absolute right. The Indian Constitution illustratively, speaks of article 19 freedoms as necessarily qualified by “reasonable restrictions”. The grounds for these restrictions, where it concerns free speech, are clearly spelt out: “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”
In all the debates that have taken place about the media and its social role, freedom is necessarily balanced by a notion of responsibility. To maintain the uneasy balance between information as commerce and information as a basic human entitlement, reliance is placed not so much on curbing the pursuit of profit, but on ensuring the sustenance of media diversity. Commerce need not be antithetical to the right to information, provided there is a sufficient plurality of sources from which the public can draw. A liberal democracy allows for few institutional restraints on the functioning of the media, leaving the marketplace of ideas as the final arbiter. In matters that vitally involve the public interest, where there is a risk of social disorder or offence to good taste, decisions are left to the prudence and sense of social responsibility of the media.
Yet there are circumstances in which questions that seemed banished for all time, emerge with a fresh vigour. In 2003, the Standing Committee on Information Technology of the Indian Parliament, urged the Government to prescribe a “ratio for coverage of news contents and advertisements in newspapers”. This was necessary since, as the Committee observed, “a tendency is being noticed in the leading newspapers to provide more and more space for advertisements at the cost of news items”.
Price regulations and the right to free speech
The Government for its part responded with a plea of inability. Both a prescribed ratio for advertisement space in newspapers and a “price-page schedule” – a rule requiring newspapers to increase their selling price with the number of pages printed – had been under active consideration, said the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. But these matters had not proceeded far “owing to legal and constitutional complexities”.[1]
It would be a misperception to believe that these outlandish policy options are the exclusive domain of politicians, since a “price-page schedule” to restrain fratricidal battles within the press, has been a part of the public debate on the Indian media. It proponents indeed, have included many with vital interests in the industry. The awareness that unlike in most other industries, price competition in the media could be antithetical to consumer interest is well developed, as also the belief that newspapers are an institution that require the controlling hand of public policy when self-discipline fails, as it inevitably must.[2]
Among independent India’s first exercises in enunciating a theory of the media in society, was the Press Commission appointed in 1952. Without undue fuss or ceremony, this body went to the core issue in newspaper economics: the relative proportion between circulation and advertisement revenue. And it underlined that this really was the crucial variable in determining how far the press remains an institution serving the public interest.[3]
The price-page schedule was the policy instrument through which the objective of media diversity was sought. In accordance with the powers conferred by a law adopted by the Parliament in 1956 the government in 1960 issued the Daily Newspapers (Price and Page) Order, an intrusive set of rules that sought to micro-manage every parameter of a newspaper’s functioning.[4]
In 1962, in the case of Sakal Newspapers versus the Union of India, the Supreme Court held the Price-Page Schedule violative of article 19 of the Indian Constitution. Handing down its ruling in the case, India’s highest court found that the order took away the freedom of the newspaper to charge whatever price it chose, constricted its ability to disseminate news and opinions, and cut into its commercial fortunes by limiting advertising space.
It was a curious and contrary case. The Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of the Government, that the order in dispute, would “promote further the right of newspapers in general to exercise the freedom of speech and expression”, rather than the opposite. The space allocated to advertisements, the Government pointed out, varied between 46 and 59 percent of total printed area and these brought in “substantial revenue” which enabled the newspapers to be sold at “a price below the cost of production”. In consequence, “newspapers of long standing” which had “built up large and stable advertisement revenue” would be “in a more advantageous position” and could “squeeze out” newcomers, “with the result that they are able to destroy the freedom of expression of others”.[5]
India’s highest judicial body disregarded all these arguments, ruling that free speech as a right, applied to every citizen of the country “not merely to the matter he (sic) is entitled to circulate, but also to the volume of circulation”. By fixing a minimum price for the pages a newspaper is “entitled to publish”, the Government aimed not to ensure fairness for the buyers, but to curtail the circulation of some newspapers. And if the “area for advertisements is curtailed the price of the newspaper will be forced up. If that happens, the circulation will inevitably go down.”[6]
Free speech as commerce
Revisiting the issue, the Second Press Commission appointed in 1978, affirmed the fundamental importance of Article 19, but baulked at the judicial orthodoxy on the “price-page schedule”. Far from the scenario foreseen by the Supreme Court, the Commission concluded, the objectives of this regulatory device were to “advance freedom of speech and expression” through the “promotion of competition and prevention of monopoly”.
This rather ambivalent situation provides the context for grappling with another significant judicial intervention in interpreting the free speech right, which came in a case involving the publishers of The Times of India. At issue was a government notification, issued in a situation of acute newsprint scarcity, limiting allotment of the commodity to publishers in accordance with their reported consumption. Newspapers that published in excess of ten pages were required to bring down their daily offering to that number. They would not be permitted to reduce circulation to maintain or increase the number of pages. To provide a full day’s complement of news, publishers could rationalise their allocation of space between editorial and advertisement matter. Or they could maintain profitability by curtailing news coverage to accommodate advertisements.
In October 1972, the Supreme Court decided that the order was violative of the Constitution. The judgment in the case of Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd versus the Union of India is of historic significance, since it lays out a whole range of norms on the exercise of the right to free expression. Addressing the issue of the locus standi of the petitioners, the majority on the bench, with Justice A.N. Ray speaking, held that that the “individual rights of freedom of speech and expression of editors, directors and shareholders, are all expressed through their newspapers”.[7] A few pages on though, the majority opinion effectively widened the ambit of the right: “It is indisputable that by freedom of the press is meant the right of all citizens to speak, publish and express their views. The freedom of the press embodies the right of the people to read. The freedom of the press is not antithetical to the right of the people to speak and express”.[8]
Whichever way it was considered, the restriction on newsprint use by a newspaper meant a serious abridgment of free speech. If the volume of news disseminated was reduced, that in itself was a loss to the public. And if the space devoted to advertisements were to be curtailed, the newspaper would suffer serious financial losses, “weaken” and perhaps “crumble”.[9]
The rest of the judgment clung very closely to the liberal orthodoxy: that governmental regulation is an evil more invidious than the prospect of private monopolies. Called upon to address the latter issue, the majority on the bench concluded without unduly bothering themselves with facts, that “the press is not exposed to any mischief of monopolistic combination”. And even if it was otherwise, newsprint allocation could not be a feasible “measure to combat monopolies”.[10]
A significant dissent
Of special significance is the lone dissenting judgment delivered by Justice K.K. Mathew, which essentially reverses the perspective -- rather than blandly rule it out, the judge explicitly concedes the possibility of a conflict between the public interest and the profit motivations of the press. Using a “theory of the freedom of speech” that essentially views it in terms of twin entitlements -- to speak and to be informed – Justice Mathew observed in his dissent, that “the distribution of newsprint for maintenance of (newspaper) circulation at its highest possible level .. (would).. only advance and enrich that freedom”.[11] As a constitutional principle, “freedom of the press” was “no higher than the freedom of speech of a citizen”.[12] What was essential in the circumstances was to evolve “an affirmative theory underlying freedom of expression” and to attend to the “various conditions essential to maintaining a workable system”.[13] The problem at hand was of bringing “all ideas into the market (to) make the freedom of speech a live one having its roots in reality”. In pursuit of this ideal, it was necessary as a first step, to recognise “that the right of expression is somewhat thin if it can be exercised only on the sufferance of the managers of the leading newspapers”.
Freedom of expression in other words, also involved the right of access to media space. And this requirement would be met only through the “creation of new opportunities for expression or greater opportunities to small and medium dailies to reach a position of equality with the big ones”. This was as important, said Justice Mathew, “as the right to express ideas without fear of governmental restraint”.[14]
“Access” was one of the most crucial questions raised in the Justice Mathew’s dissent: access both of the public to the media environment and of the media organisation to the essential resources of its trade. Though the latter was the key issue before the bench, the dissenting judgment tied up this issue with the larger one of the public function of a newspaper and its socially enjoined duty to reflect the variety and diversity of the milieu it operated within.
An individual citizen’s access to the media, as a right, was the subject of the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in the case of Manubhai Shah vs Life Insurance Corporation of India. The Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) was obliged under the ruling, to publish an article highly critical of its functioning in a journal meant for its policy-holders, agents and the general public. The argument that the journal was an in-house publication to which the general public was not entitled access, was denied by the Supreme Court on a number of grounds. But LIC was in a sense, a soft target – a government-owned corporation for which publishing was a peripheral activity. The same issue in relation to the media has not quite been addressed with any degree of rigour.
Whose freedom: the advertiser or the public?
To revisit this entire sequence of rulings, it is clear in the light of India’s media experience through the 1990s, that the relationship between circulation and advertisement revenue is not quite as neat as the Supreme Court believed it. Advertisement revenue is dependent not merely on gross circulation, but more crucially, on audience demographics. When the Times of India proudly proclaimed that it had crossed the magical threshold of a million in circulation in 1996, it did not in the breathless ardour of this achievement, inform readers how its printing presses were sustaining this output, when every additional copy was being sold at a price rapidly plunging below production cost. The answer simply was that the TOI had assembled an adequate war chest from its conquest of the advertising market, to be able to ramp up its financially draining output and reach the demographic segments of the most intense interest to advertisers.
The situation was the exact converse of what the Supreme Court had considered in the Sakal case, not of a newspaper being forced to raise prices because it was deprived of advertisement space, but of a newspaper able to slash prices and drive out competition because it had managed to establish a pre-eminent position in the ad bazaar. Advertisers unlock the doors to circulation and vice versa – though the newspaper that delivers the high purchasing power demographic segments to the advertiser has the potential to earn profits beyond the reach of others.
In short, the advertiser is king and there is nothing he likes more than a “feel good” ambience. As far back as 1997, when the Indian media market was just beginning to see the new philosophy in action, without quite understanding its motive forces or intentions, an analyst in the respected professional forum, the Columbia Journalism Review was writing about the “ad/edit chemistry .. changing for the worse”. “Corporations and their ad agencies have clearly turned up the heat on editors and publishers”, he wrote, “and some magazines are capitulating, unwilling to risk even a single ad”. This was turning up the competitive pressure on other publications, making it “tougher for those who do fight to maintain the ad-edit wall”.[15]
The motivations of the advertisers were clear. A product tailored to highly refined tastes, would look distinctly drab when placed in an “editorial context” that referred to the seamy underside of the good life enjoyed by the few, that drew attention to a world where poverty and deprivation are rampant, and ill-health and disasters extract an enormous toll in human suffering. Specific cases of this enforcement role played by the advertiser were flagged. Colgate-Palmolive, the worldwide consumer goods giant for one, had circulated a policy statement that it would not allow ads in a “media context” containing “offensive” or “antisocial” content. Much like the praise of motherhood as an institution, this statement of intent would have been unexceptionable, if Colgate had chosen to define what it meant by each of these adjectives. But to leave the matter vague was the preferred resort, followed by the menacing information that the company had charged “its advertising agencies and their media buying services with the responsibility of pre-screening any questionable media content or context”.[16]
In the Indian situation, the Times of India (TOI) group, as the most successful print media organisation – which today is at the vanguard of rapid diversification into the audio-visual and online spaces – is living proof of the benefit of planning ahead to accommodate the advertiser. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the TOI began a shift of content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment that had its loyal readership thoroughly flummoxed. But even as many among the older audience cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, the newspaper succeeded in attracting new readers from unexplored demographic segments, like the youth and the high purchasing power strata. At the same time its advertising revenue exploded and it was able to sustain a price war in Delhi – perhaps the fastest growing newspaper market in India – that severely weakened the competition.
Pay your way: the right of access defined
In March 2003, the TOI announced a new initiative that was professedly, part of its effort to stay current with journalistic practices. For an enterprise as crass as charging a fee for favourable editorial coverage, the TOI managed to adopt a rather lofty idiom of expression. The “Medianet” initiative as it was called, was in the words of the TOI management, part of its “desire to drive the market, to constantly break new ground”. The deficiency of traditional news-gathering techniques was apparent especially in new areas of audience interest – such as “lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, events, product launches, social personalities and city happenings”. Public relations agencies had a much more sensitive feel of the social pulse in these areas, yet no feasible method of regulating the flow of news from this source had been devised.[17]
Subtlety aside, this was a reference to the pervasive journalistic practice of accepting and even actively soliciting, monetary and other forms of gratification for news and editorial coverage that might be of material benefit to particular individuals or entities. Through Medianet, the TOI was, in accord with established rules of market competition, seeking to curb this corruption of the trade by institutionalising it. Objectivity and integrity of editorial content would no longer be at risk from the susceptibility of individual journalists to material inducements. The organisation itself would bear that onus of vitiating news content in pursuit of its monetary aggrandisement.
Medianet is now business as usual in the TOI group. The wave of adverse notice that it generated has subsided and the bottomline of the company, endowed with greater lustre. Profit finally is the most effective solvent for all the ethics and principles that journalists may in their quixotic fashion, still choose to cling on to. And all the momentous debates which went upto the highest judicial forum in the land and generated subtle and often pathbreaking pronouncements on the right to free speech, the right of access to media space and time, and other matters of enormous public import, have finally been reduced to the single imperative of profit. The fundamental rights are a live and vital charter for those who can pay their way to it.
India is today one of the few markets in the world where newspaper readership is growing significantly. The Indian media market in turn, is expected to register among the world’s fastest growth rates over the next few years. There are several factors driving this expansion, among them the vast literacy deficit in the country, and the impulse that neo-literates have to flag their arrival as players in the public domain by becoming active consumers of information. But with the advertiser being king and “pay your way” being the key to access, the contribution that the media can make to the evolving character of the public discourse, remains uncertain at best. The shape of Indian democracy has been determined to an extent by the strata that have entered the terrain of active political contestation in increasing numbers over the last decade-and-a-half. Its future will be moulded in part by the new voices that will resound in the political battlegrounds over the next few years. In its present shape, the Indian media is equipped neither to give voice to these aspirations, nor to render the polyphony of emerging social classes into something approaching coherence. With little left by way of a contribution the public discourse, the Indian media as an institution, could well be rapidly receding in terms of social relevance. That does not mean of course, that its prospects for earning a profit are any the worse.
[1] Standing Committee on Information Technology, Thirteenth Lok Sabha, 63rd Report, Lok Sabha Secretariat, December 2003, pp 39-42.
[2] See for instance, the report datelined Mysore, April 4, 2005, in The Hindu, which quotes a “veteran journalist and Kannada activist Patil Puttappa” decrying the price war among newspapers. This was a “dangerous trend”, he said, which “could lead to the death of many newspapers, and in the ultimate analysis, the death of democracy”. It needed to be regulated through a mechanism that would fix the price of a newspaper on the basis of the number of pages it printed. Mooted and abandoned in the past, it needed to be revived, said Mr Putappa, “failing which many small newspapers would die”.
[3] Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business, Response Books, Delhi, 2003, pp 18-9.
[4] 63rd report of the Standing Committee on Information Technology in the Indian Parliament (Thirteenth Lok Sabha), pp 39-42.
[5] This and all other citations are from the Sakal Papers judgment delivered by the Supreme Court, as recorded in Supreme Court Recorder (SCR). Following standard citation procedure, this would be 1962 SCR (3) 842. The citations in this paragraph are from pages 847-8. The judgment is available on the web at the following address: http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/qrydisp.asp?tfnm=4110.
[6] Ibid, p 862.
[7] Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd versus the Union of India, 1973 SCR (2), p 759. The judgment is also available on the web at the following URL:
[8] Ibid, p 760.
[9] Ibid, p 761.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, p 764.
[12] Ibid, p 803.
[13] Ibid, p 805.
[14] Ibid, p 814.
[15] Russ Baker, “The Squeeze”, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1997. As illustration, the following case is cited: “A major advertiser recently approached all three newsweeklies - Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News - and told them it would be closely monitoring editorial content. So says a high newsweekly executive who was given the warning (but who would not name the advertiser). For the next quarter, the advertiser warned the magazines' publishing sides, it would keep track of how the company's industry was portrayed in news columns. At the end of that period, the advertiser would select one - and only one - of the magazines and award all of its newsweekly advertising to it.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] The entire concept note of Medianet is available on the web at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39286961.
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
March 2, 2006
To talk about the “media” today is to deal with multiple meanings. Variously perceived, the media (used here and elsewhere in this article, in the singular) is today a source of information and entertainment, as also the midwife of a union between the two. Increasingly again, it is serving for a growing number, as a forum of self-expression.
With several models available to study the modern media as a social reality, a self-serving myth continues to hold sway. The media in this portrayal is the institutional bearer of the social right to free speech. And global events in recent times have shown that the right to free speech is both contentious and elusive in its definition. The cartoon-caricatures of a revered historical figure, were in the perception of the Danish newspaper that recently published them, a mere articulation of its right to free speech. But for a major world community, this was an act of gross provocation, a manifestation of the licentiousness of western civilisation, which transformed free speech into a sanction to cause offence.
The problem is an old one for liberal democratic theory. When does one person’s right become an irksome intrusion into another person’s individual and social being? It is a dilemma that led to Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated elucidation of two notions of liberty: the positive and the negative. Positive liberty in his estimation involved the right of unbridled action with few social or institutional restraints. It also involved the potential for excess, for oppression of individuals in the name of some larger cause. Certain sections could in its name arrogate to themselves the right to decide what serves the cause of the larger social good, compelling others to acquiesce, often at the cost of their freedoms.
Positive and negative liberty
The consequences of positive liberty were for Berlin, too terrible to contemplate, which is why he advised that the concept be jettisoned as a basis of democratic liberalism. Far more manageable was “negative liberty”, which demarcated a zone of inalienable freedoms where the sovereignty of the individual could not be breached. Rather than defining an individual’s rights in terms of all that he could do, this notion confined itself to a range of actions where free will and choice could not be denied.
C.B. MacPherson, the Canadian political philosopher who has been a perceptive critic of Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy in the post-World War II years, pointed out in an important critique, that these notions are inherently flawed. They fail, for one thing, to take into account the possible constraints on individual conduct that skewed patterns of distribution of the means labour could impose. An individual who lacks the means to earn his subsistence would be obliged to put himself at the service of another, conferring on the latter, an “extractive power” over his labour capacities. And precisely because he is deprived of his freedom to choose how his faculties and abilities should be utilised, this individual is deprived of the opportunity to develop his talents and personality in the best manner possible.
To find a way out of this dilemma of modern political theory, MacPherson posed two alternative conceptions: of “counter-extractive” and “developmental” liberty. The former enables an individual to resist the extraction of his powers and capabilities by another, merely because he lacks the means to render his labour productive. The latter is a positive affirmation which goes beyond the preservation of individual sovereignty, to enable the exercise of freedoms for the development of the individual’s particular personality and genius.
How would these concepts bear up when imported into the domain of free speech? Counter-extractive liberty could be interpreted as the right of the individual to be free of manipulated images and information that vitiate his sovereign right to form an independent opinion. And developmental liberty would be the power to put forward a viewpoint before society and have it assessed for its intrinsic merit. The former involves fashioning an area of individual autonomy where the intrusive attentions of the media do not reach. The latter involves ensuring that every individual has access to the channels of information dissemination.
Interestingly, article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights conceives of precisely this kind of a radical investiture of rights in the individual. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” it states, and “this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”.
The compulsions of the real world impose the need on most national constitutions to abridge this absolute right. The Indian Constitution illustratively, speaks of article 19 freedoms as necessarily qualified by “reasonable restrictions”. The grounds for these restrictions, where it concerns free speech, are clearly spelt out: “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”
In all the debates that have taken place about the media and its social role, freedom is necessarily balanced by a notion of responsibility. To maintain the uneasy balance between information as commerce and information as a basic human entitlement, reliance is placed not so much on curbing the pursuit of profit, but on ensuring the sustenance of media diversity. Commerce need not be antithetical to the right to information, provided there is a sufficient plurality of sources from which the public can draw. A liberal democracy allows for few institutional restraints on the functioning of the media, leaving the marketplace of ideas as the final arbiter. In matters that vitally involve the public interest, where there is a risk of social disorder or offence to good taste, decisions are left to the prudence and sense of social responsibility of the media.
Yet there are circumstances in which questions that seemed banished for all time, emerge with a fresh vigour. In 2003, the Standing Committee on Information Technology of the Indian Parliament, urged the Government to prescribe a “ratio for coverage of news contents and advertisements in newspapers”. This was necessary since, as the Committee observed, “a tendency is being noticed in the leading newspapers to provide more and more space for advertisements at the cost of news items”.
Price regulations and the right to free speech
The Government for its part responded with a plea of inability. Both a prescribed ratio for advertisement space in newspapers and a “price-page schedule” – a rule requiring newspapers to increase their selling price with the number of pages printed – had been under active consideration, said the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. But these matters had not proceeded far “owing to legal and constitutional complexities”.[1]
It would be a misperception to believe that these outlandish policy options are the exclusive domain of politicians, since a “price-page schedule” to restrain fratricidal battles within the press, has been a part of the public debate on the Indian media. It proponents indeed, have included many with vital interests in the industry. The awareness that unlike in most other industries, price competition in the media could be antithetical to consumer interest is well developed, as also the belief that newspapers are an institution that require the controlling hand of public policy when self-discipline fails, as it inevitably must.[2]
Among independent India’s first exercises in enunciating a theory of the media in society, was the Press Commission appointed in 1952. Without undue fuss or ceremony, this body went to the core issue in newspaper economics: the relative proportion between circulation and advertisement revenue. And it underlined that this really was the crucial variable in determining how far the press remains an institution serving the public interest.[3]
The price-page schedule was the policy instrument through which the objective of media diversity was sought. In accordance with the powers conferred by a law adopted by the Parliament in 1956 the government in 1960 issued the Daily Newspapers (Price and Page) Order, an intrusive set of rules that sought to micro-manage every parameter of a newspaper’s functioning.[4]
In 1962, in the case of Sakal Newspapers versus the Union of India, the Supreme Court held the Price-Page Schedule violative of article 19 of the Indian Constitution. Handing down its ruling in the case, India’s highest court found that the order took away the freedom of the newspaper to charge whatever price it chose, constricted its ability to disseminate news and opinions, and cut into its commercial fortunes by limiting advertising space.
It was a curious and contrary case. The Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of the Government, that the order in dispute, would “promote further the right of newspapers in general to exercise the freedom of speech and expression”, rather than the opposite. The space allocated to advertisements, the Government pointed out, varied between 46 and 59 percent of total printed area and these brought in “substantial revenue” which enabled the newspapers to be sold at “a price below the cost of production”. In consequence, “newspapers of long standing” which had “built up large and stable advertisement revenue” would be “in a more advantageous position” and could “squeeze out” newcomers, “with the result that they are able to destroy the freedom of expression of others”.[5]
India’s highest judicial body disregarded all these arguments, ruling that free speech as a right, applied to every citizen of the country “not merely to the matter he (sic) is entitled to circulate, but also to the volume of circulation”. By fixing a minimum price for the pages a newspaper is “entitled to publish”, the Government aimed not to ensure fairness for the buyers, but to curtail the circulation of some newspapers. And if the “area for advertisements is curtailed the price of the newspaper will be forced up. If that happens, the circulation will inevitably go down.”[6]
Free speech as commerce
Revisiting the issue, the Second Press Commission appointed in 1978, affirmed the fundamental importance of Article 19, but baulked at the judicial orthodoxy on the “price-page schedule”. Far from the scenario foreseen by the Supreme Court, the Commission concluded, the objectives of this regulatory device were to “advance freedom of speech and expression” through the “promotion of competition and prevention of monopoly”.
This rather ambivalent situation provides the context for grappling with another significant judicial intervention in interpreting the free speech right, which came in a case involving the publishers of The Times of India. At issue was a government notification, issued in a situation of acute newsprint scarcity, limiting allotment of the commodity to publishers in accordance with their reported consumption. Newspapers that published in excess of ten pages were required to bring down their daily offering to that number. They would not be permitted to reduce circulation to maintain or increase the number of pages. To provide a full day’s complement of news, publishers could rationalise their allocation of space between editorial and advertisement matter. Or they could maintain profitability by curtailing news coverage to accommodate advertisements.
In October 1972, the Supreme Court decided that the order was violative of the Constitution. The judgment in the case of Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd versus the Union of India is of historic significance, since it lays out a whole range of norms on the exercise of the right to free expression. Addressing the issue of the locus standi of the petitioners, the majority on the bench, with Justice A.N. Ray speaking, held that that the “individual rights of freedom of speech and expression of editors, directors and shareholders, are all expressed through their newspapers”.[7] A few pages on though, the majority opinion effectively widened the ambit of the right: “It is indisputable that by freedom of the press is meant the right of all citizens to speak, publish and express their views. The freedom of the press embodies the right of the people to read. The freedom of the press is not antithetical to the right of the people to speak and express”.[8]
Whichever way it was considered, the restriction on newsprint use by a newspaper meant a serious abridgment of free speech. If the volume of news disseminated was reduced, that in itself was a loss to the public. And if the space devoted to advertisements were to be curtailed, the newspaper would suffer serious financial losses, “weaken” and perhaps “crumble”.[9]
The rest of the judgment clung very closely to the liberal orthodoxy: that governmental regulation is an evil more invidious than the prospect of private monopolies. Called upon to address the latter issue, the majority on the bench concluded without unduly bothering themselves with facts, that “the press is not exposed to any mischief of monopolistic combination”. And even if it was otherwise, newsprint allocation could not be a feasible “measure to combat monopolies”.[10]
A significant dissent
Of special significance is the lone dissenting judgment delivered by Justice K.K. Mathew, which essentially reverses the perspective -- rather than blandly rule it out, the judge explicitly concedes the possibility of a conflict between the public interest and the profit motivations of the press. Using a “theory of the freedom of speech” that essentially views it in terms of twin entitlements -- to speak and to be informed – Justice Mathew observed in his dissent, that “the distribution of newsprint for maintenance of (newspaper) circulation at its highest possible level .. (would).. only advance and enrich that freedom”.[11] As a constitutional principle, “freedom of the press” was “no higher than the freedom of speech of a citizen”.[12] What was essential in the circumstances was to evolve “an affirmative theory underlying freedom of expression” and to attend to the “various conditions essential to maintaining a workable system”.[13] The problem at hand was of bringing “all ideas into the market (to) make the freedom of speech a live one having its roots in reality”. In pursuit of this ideal, it was necessary as a first step, to recognise “that the right of expression is somewhat thin if it can be exercised only on the sufferance of the managers of the leading newspapers”.
Freedom of expression in other words, also involved the right of access to media space. And this requirement would be met only through the “creation of new opportunities for expression or greater opportunities to small and medium dailies to reach a position of equality with the big ones”. This was as important, said Justice Mathew, “as the right to express ideas without fear of governmental restraint”.[14]
“Access” was one of the most crucial questions raised in the Justice Mathew’s dissent: access both of the public to the media environment and of the media organisation to the essential resources of its trade. Though the latter was the key issue before the bench, the dissenting judgment tied up this issue with the larger one of the public function of a newspaper and its socially enjoined duty to reflect the variety and diversity of the milieu it operated within.
An individual citizen’s access to the media, as a right, was the subject of the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in the case of Manubhai Shah vs Life Insurance Corporation of India. The Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) was obliged under the ruling, to publish an article highly critical of its functioning in a journal meant for its policy-holders, agents and the general public. The argument that the journal was an in-house publication to which the general public was not entitled access, was denied by the Supreme Court on a number of grounds. But LIC was in a sense, a soft target – a government-owned corporation for which publishing was a peripheral activity. The same issue in relation to the media has not quite been addressed with any degree of rigour.
Whose freedom: the advertiser or the public?
To revisit this entire sequence of rulings, it is clear in the light of India’s media experience through the 1990s, that the relationship between circulation and advertisement revenue is not quite as neat as the Supreme Court believed it. Advertisement revenue is dependent not merely on gross circulation, but more crucially, on audience demographics. When the Times of India proudly proclaimed that it had crossed the magical threshold of a million in circulation in 1996, it did not in the breathless ardour of this achievement, inform readers how its printing presses were sustaining this output, when every additional copy was being sold at a price rapidly plunging below production cost. The answer simply was that the TOI had assembled an adequate war chest from its conquest of the advertising market, to be able to ramp up its financially draining output and reach the demographic segments of the most intense interest to advertisers.
The situation was the exact converse of what the Supreme Court had considered in the Sakal case, not of a newspaper being forced to raise prices because it was deprived of advertisement space, but of a newspaper able to slash prices and drive out competition because it had managed to establish a pre-eminent position in the ad bazaar. Advertisers unlock the doors to circulation and vice versa – though the newspaper that delivers the high purchasing power demographic segments to the advertiser has the potential to earn profits beyond the reach of others.
In short, the advertiser is king and there is nothing he likes more than a “feel good” ambience. As far back as 1997, when the Indian media market was just beginning to see the new philosophy in action, without quite understanding its motive forces or intentions, an analyst in the respected professional forum, the Columbia Journalism Review was writing about the “ad/edit chemistry .. changing for the worse”. “Corporations and their ad agencies have clearly turned up the heat on editors and publishers”, he wrote, “and some magazines are capitulating, unwilling to risk even a single ad”. This was turning up the competitive pressure on other publications, making it “tougher for those who do fight to maintain the ad-edit wall”.[15]
The motivations of the advertisers were clear. A product tailored to highly refined tastes, would look distinctly drab when placed in an “editorial context” that referred to the seamy underside of the good life enjoyed by the few, that drew attention to a world where poverty and deprivation are rampant, and ill-health and disasters extract an enormous toll in human suffering. Specific cases of this enforcement role played by the advertiser were flagged. Colgate-Palmolive, the worldwide consumer goods giant for one, had circulated a policy statement that it would not allow ads in a “media context” containing “offensive” or “antisocial” content. Much like the praise of motherhood as an institution, this statement of intent would have been unexceptionable, if Colgate had chosen to define what it meant by each of these adjectives. But to leave the matter vague was the preferred resort, followed by the menacing information that the company had charged “its advertising agencies and their media buying services with the responsibility of pre-screening any questionable media content or context”.[16]
In the Indian situation, the Times of India (TOI) group, as the most successful print media organisation – which today is at the vanguard of rapid diversification into the audio-visual and online spaces – is living proof of the benefit of planning ahead to accommodate the advertiser. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the TOI began a shift of content towards fashion, lifestyle and entertainment that had its loyal readership thoroughly flummoxed. But even as many among the older audience cancelled their subscriptions in disgust, the newspaper succeeded in attracting new readers from unexplored demographic segments, like the youth and the high purchasing power strata. At the same time its advertising revenue exploded and it was able to sustain a price war in Delhi – perhaps the fastest growing newspaper market in India – that severely weakened the competition.
Pay your way: the right of access defined
In March 2003, the TOI announced a new initiative that was professedly, part of its effort to stay current with journalistic practices. For an enterprise as crass as charging a fee for favourable editorial coverage, the TOI managed to adopt a rather lofty idiom of expression. The “Medianet” initiative as it was called, was in the words of the TOI management, part of its “desire to drive the market, to constantly break new ground”. The deficiency of traditional news-gathering techniques was apparent especially in new areas of audience interest – such as “lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, events, product launches, social personalities and city happenings”. Public relations agencies had a much more sensitive feel of the social pulse in these areas, yet no feasible method of regulating the flow of news from this source had been devised.[17]
Subtlety aside, this was a reference to the pervasive journalistic practice of accepting and even actively soliciting, monetary and other forms of gratification for news and editorial coverage that might be of material benefit to particular individuals or entities. Through Medianet, the TOI was, in accord with established rules of market competition, seeking to curb this corruption of the trade by institutionalising it. Objectivity and integrity of editorial content would no longer be at risk from the susceptibility of individual journalists to material inducements. The organisation itself would bear that onus of vitiating news content in pursuit of its monetary aggrandisement.
Medianet is now business as usual in the TOI group. The wave of adverse notice that it generated has subsided and the bottomline of the company, endowed with greater lustre. Profit finally is the most effective solvent for all the ethics and principles that journalists may in their quixotic fashion, still choose to cling on to. And all the momentous debates which went upto the highest judicial forum in the land and generated subtle and often pathbreaking pronouncements on the right to free speech, the right of access to media space and time, and other matters of enormous public import, have finally been reduced to the single imperative of profit. The fundamental rights are a live and vital charter for those who can pay their way to it.
India is today one of the few markets in the world where newspaper readership is growing significantly. The Indian media market in turn, is expected to register among the world’s fastest growth rates over the next few years. There are several factors driving this expansion, among them the vast literacy deficit in the country, and the impulse that neo-literates have to flag their arrival as players in the public domain by becoming active consumers of information. But with the advertiser being king and “pay your way” being the key to access, the contribution that the media can make to the evolving character of the public discourse, remains uncertain at best. The shape of Indian democracy has been determined to an extent by the strata that have entered the terrain of active political contestation in increasing numbers over the last decade-and-a-half. Its future will be moulded in part by the new voices that will resound in the political battlegrounds over the next few years. In its present shape, the Indian media is equipped neither to give voice to these aspirations, nor to render the polyphony of emerging social classes into something approaching coherence. With little left by way of a contribution the public discourse, the Indian media as an institution, could well be rapidly receding in terms of social relevance. That does not mean of course, that its prospects for earning a profit are any the worse.
[1] Standing Committee on Information Technology, Thirteenth Lok Sabha, 63rd Report, Lok Sabha Secretariat, December 2003, pp 39-42.
[2] See for instance, the report datelined Mysore, April 4, 2005, in The Hindu, which quotes a “veteran journalist and Kannada activist Patil Puttappa” decrying the price war among newspapers. This was a “dangerous trend”, he said, which “could lead to the death of many newspapers, and in the ultimate analysis, the death of democracy”. It needed to be regulated through a mechanism that would fix the price of a newspaper on the basis of the number of pages it printed. Mooted and abandoned in the past, it needed to be revived, said Mr Putappa, “failing which many small newspapers would die”.
[3] Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business, Response Books, Delhi, 2003, pp 18-9.
[4] 63rd report of the Standing Committee on Information Technology in the Indian Parliament (Thirteenth Lok Sabha), pp 39-42.
[5] This and all other citations are from the Sakal Papers judgment delivered by the Supreme Court, as recorded in Supreme Court Recorder (SCR). Following standard citation procedure, this would be 1962 SCR (3) 842. The citations in this paragraph are from pages 847-8. The judgment is available on the web at the following address: http://judis.nic.in/supremecourt/qrydisp.asp?tfnm=4110.
[6] Ibid, p 862.
[7] Bennett Coleman and Company Ltd versus the Union of India, 1973 SCR (2), p 759. The judgment is also available on the web at the following URL:
[8] Ibid, p 760.
[9] Ibid, p 761.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, p 764.
[12] Ibid, p 803.
[13] Ibid, p 805.
[14] Ibid, p 814.
[15] Russ Baker, “The Squeeze”, Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1997. As illustration, the following case is cited: “A major advertiser recently approached all three newsweeklies - Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News - and told them it would be closely monitoring editorial content. So says a high newsweekly executive who was given the warning (but who would not name the advertiser). For the next quarter, the advertiser warned the magazines' publishing sides, it would keep track of how the company's industry was portrayed in news columns. At the end of that period, the advertiser would select one - and only one - of the magazines and award all of its newsweekly advertising to it.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] The entire concept note of Medianet is available on the web at: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39286961.
RSS Demographics: "Hum do, hamaare satrah"
The bizarre demographics of paranoid Hindutva
Demography is destiny. People are mere abstractions, tiny fractions of the demographic aggregates that serve the larger causes of history.
In Sri Lanka, newly elected President Mahinda Rajapakse appoints a Prime Minister known to be a hardliner on the ethnic question, distinguished for a recent declaration that unfettered Sinhala procreation is a necessary weapon in the war against the minority Tamils.
In the U.S., Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington – his “clash of civilisations” thesis looking rather jaded and worn -- turns his attention to the threats posed to the American identity by the changing demography of the southern U.S.
In Israel, the chastening realisation that Jews may soon be a minority in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, provokes a hasty stampede out of Gaza, converting a land once held captive by soldiers and settlers into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
And in India, the man who disavows a political role and yet commands enough authority to determine who should lead the country’s principal opposition party, exhorts every Hindu family to have at least three children. Anything less, he says, would be inadequate to beat back the threats to national identity posed by Muslim demographics.
Having set underway a tortured process of leadership change in the BJP, RSS chieftain K.S. Sudarshan evidently believes that a change in personnel is only part of the mission. A concern that goes far beyond the immediate task, to be accomplished before the year-end, is to lay down ideological parameters for the new BJP president. Demography is a key ingredient of this ideological core of the Hindutva project. And Sudarshan underlined that with his participation in the function marking the re-release of a book that has run the gauntlet of critical scrutiny, and come out distinctly the worse for it.
It is not known if the revised edition of "The Religious Demography of India", a book co-authored by two physicists and one metallurgist – none of them distinguished for his knowledge of the social sciences – is any less misconceived in its statistical procedures and any less rabid in its message than the first. Ashish Bose, one of India’s leading demographers, had in reviewing the initial offering, held that neither the methodology nor the interpretation of data stood up to scrutiny. And from this assessment, he proceeded to pose a key question, with careful understatement: “are scholars entitled to manipulate census statistics in the way these unknown scholars from an unknown institute have done?”
Manipulation of statistics is clearly the essence and the message was rather crudely summed up in Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s brazen encouragement of cultural animosity against the Muslims, in his “hum paanch, hamaare pachees” sneer, delivered from an election campaign platform in 2002.
In Sudarshan’s rendition, the jibe directed at the religious minorities is converted into an exhortation to the majority. Hindus, he urged, should not be beguiled by official slogans such as “hum do, hamaare do” or its more conservative variants. Their patriotic duty was to ensure at least three children in every family, though any figure above that would be still better. Perhaps taking his cue from the book that he was releasing, the RSS chief proceeded to lay out the laws of numerical progression for families, based on various configurations of reproductive behaviour. A family with twelve children, he pointed out illustratively, would in 120 years, have engendered 1,200 descendants.
Sudarshan’s arithmetic is of a piece with that employed in the book he chose to sanctify with his presence. It is a methodology that yields the alarmist conclusion that by 2050, “Indian religionists” will be reduced to a minority in “India”. The definitions confound all commonsense, since “India” in this rendition is all of present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sudarshan’s demographic war in this sense, goes far beyond the territorial frontiers of India.
The Arya Samaj leader Lal Munshi Ram, or Swami Shraddhanand as he later came to be addressed, had in the early years of the last century, raised the alarm that Hinduism was under siege, and could only be salvaged by performing the purificatory ritual of shuddhi on the entire Muslim population within the Indian subcontinent. But in the interests of ensuring a hospitable living space for the religious nationality, he insisted, the wild frontiers too needed to be tamed. Once the shuddhi of the Indian population was completed, the missionaries of the new nationalism needed to turn their attention to Afghanistan and perhaps even beyond.
In refurbishing these messages for the age of globalisation, Sudarshan, and the authors of Religious Demography, bear witness to the unlearnt lessons of history. Despite all the bloodshed and human suffering it has caused through its career, historical revanchism still retains sufficient appeal to demand that the social sciences submit to its demands. Heights of methodological absurdity are the inevitable outcome, not to mention rhetorical excesses that would make the worst demagoguery pale in comparison.
Demography is destiny. People are mere abstractions, tiny fractions of the demographic aggregates that serve the larger causes of history.
In Sri Lanka, newly elected President Mahinda Rajapakse appoints a Prime Minister known to be a hardliner on the ethnic question, distinguished for a recent declaration that unfettered Sinhala procreation is a necessary weapon in the war against the minority Tamils.
In the U.S., Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington – his “clash of civilisations” thesis looking rather jaded and worn -- turns his attention to the threats posed to the American identity by the changing demography of the southern U.S.
In Israel, the chastening realisation that Jews may soon be a minority in the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, provokes a hasty stampede out of Gaza, converting a land once held captive by soldiers and settlers into the world’s largest unsupervised prison.
And in India, the man who disavows a political role and yet commands enough authority to determine who should lead the country’s principal opposition party, exhorts every Hindu family to have at least three children. Anything less, he says, would be inadequate to beat back the threats to national identity posed by Muslim demographics.
Having set underway a tortured process of leadership change in the BJP, RSS chieftain K.S. Sudarshan evidently believes that a change in personnel is only part of the mission. A concern that goes far beyond the immediate task, to be accomplished before the year-end, is to lay down ideological parameters for the new BJP president. Demography is a key ingredient of this ideological core of the Hindutva project. And Sudarshan underlined that with his participation in the function marking the re-release of a book that has run the gauntlet of critical scrutiny, and come out distinctly the worse for it.
It is not known if the revised edition of "The Religious Demography of India", a book co-authored by two physicists and one metallurgist – none of them distinguished for his knowledge of the social sciences – is any less misconceived in its statistical procedures and any less rabid in its message than the first. Ashish Bose, one of India’s leading demographers, had in reviewing the initial offering, held that neither the methodology nor the interpretation of data stood up to scrutiny. And from this assessment, he proceeded to pose a key question, with careful understatement: “are scholars entitled to manipulate census statistics in the way these unknown scholars from an unknown institute have done?”
Manipulation of statistics is clearly the essence and the message was rather crudely summed up in Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s brazen encouragement of cultural animosity against the Muslims, in his “hum paanch, hamaare pachees” sneer, delivered from an election campaign platform in 2002.
In Sudarshan’s rendition, the jibe directed at the religious minorities is converted into an exhortation to the majority. Hindus, he urged, should not be beguiled by official slogans such as “hum do, hamaare do” or its more conservative variants. Their patriotic duty was to ensure at least three children in every family, though any figure above that would be still better. Perhaps taking his cue from the book that he was releasing, the RSS chief proceeded to lay out the laws of numerical progression for families, based on various configurations of reproductive behaviour. A family with twelve children, he pointed out illustratively, would in 120 years, have engendered 1,200 descendants.
Sudarshan’s arithmetic is of a piece with that employed in the book he chose to sanctify with his presence. It is a methodology that yields the alarmist conclusion that by 2050, “Indian religionists” will be reduced to a minority in “India”. The definitions confound all commonsense, since “India” in this rendition is all of present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Sudarshan’s demographic war in this sense, goes far beyond the territorial frontiers of India.
The Arya Samaj leader Lal Munshi Ram, or Swami Shraddhanand as he later came to be addressed, had in the early years of the last century, raised the alarm that Hinduism was under siege, and could only be salvaged by performing the purificatory ritual of shuddhi on the entire Muslim population within the Indian subcontinent. But in the interests of ensuring a hospitable living space for the religious nationality, he insisted, the wild frontiers too needed to be tamed. Once the shuddhi of the Indian population was completed, the missionaries of the new nationalism needed to turn their attention to Afghanistan and perhaps even beyond.
In refurbishing these messages for the age of globalisation, Sudarshan, and the authors of Religious Demography, bear witness to the unlearnt lessons of history. Despite all the bloodshed and human suffering it has caused through its career, historical revanchism still retains sufficient appeal to demand that the social sciences submit to its demands. Heights of methodological absurdity are the inevitable outcome, not to mention rhetorical excesses that would make the worst demagoguery pale in comparison.
Reflections on the earthquake in Kashmir
A message from Kashmir to the governments on either side: get out of the way
Sukumar Muralidharan
October 24, 2005
The devastating earthquake in Kashmir confronted the two affected countries with a challenge they were clearly unequal to. The harsh Himalayan winter was imminent. And relief operations in both India and Pakistan had simply failed to mobilise the material resources to begin treating the injured and rehabilitating the homeless.
Pledges of assistance had come in with much fanfare from around the world. But when the sums were totalled, the money involved was derisory – two weeks after the disaster, aid pledges from all over the world totalled a mere $ 90 million, when conservative estimates by the U.N. put the requirement at just over $ 300 million. And the monetary magnitudes involved, in all their meagreness, were immediately of no substantive use. By the time they traversed the bureaucratic channels of aid disbursement, it was clear, the harsh Kashmiri winter would have been well advanced. And a natural disaster would have been transformed into a manmade catastrophe.
Disaster fatigue is a worrying reality of the global situation today. But even in a world that has become cynical about human suffering, the Kashmir disaster has challenged the humanitarian impulse to break free of the layers of political deadweight it is normally buried under. It is still delicately referred to as the South Asian, or the Pakistan, earthquake. To concede to it the title of the Kashmir earthquake would be to recognise that a region abandoned by the world has an identity and a set of interests uniquely its own. But given the legacy of the dispute between two neighbouring states over Kashmir, the questions are unavoidable. When governments are unable to deliver what they are obliged to, as part of the social contract that keeps them in authority, will they step aside and allow the people to do what they can? Or will they insist on their monopoly on wisdom, even when in default on their side of the bargain?
The Kashmir earthquake in short, offers governments on both sides a pretext. Donning the vestments of humanitarianism, they could renounce the rights they have assumed and allow the people of Kashmir to speak for themselves, not to mention, organise relief efforts on their own. If the synergies among the people artificially separated for decades by the Line of Control (LoC) were to be recruited to a humanitarian cause, the final effect could well be beneficial. Indeed, people power, when fused with a worthy humanitarian cause, could well absolve floundering governments of the burden of blame for failing to measure up.
General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president and army chief has long spoken of the opportunities that he has uniquely enjoyed to “resolve” the Kashmir dispute “once and for all”. The Kashmir earthquake afforded him a renewed opportunity to revisit this familiar theme. But first he had to deflect the overtures from India, to relax the rigours of crossing the LoC for a humanitarian purpose. It did his confidence little good that the Indian proposal involved defence personnel traversing the border by both air and land, to offer their humanitarian services to the affected Pakistani population.
Early claims that Indian Army troops had crossed the LoC to deliver relief supplies were rudely refuted. And the initial effort by Indian Air Force transport planes to ferry across vitally needed equipment and stores were rebuffed. It was only after a prolonged process of negotiation and possibly the mediation of certain external powers, that the first Indian military planes were allowed to land on Pakistani territory.
About ten days after the disaster, Musharraf chose to make a dramatic offer to India which far surpassed anything that had been proposed from this side of the border. Kashmiris he said, should be freely allowed to cross the LoC in both directions, to partake in the grief on either side and to be part of the effort at its mitigation. He followed this up by reprising his familiar theme that the “dispute” could be resolved for all time by converting the tragedy of the Kashmir earthquake into an opportunity. The LoC which kept apart a people and made them victims of the rivalry between hostile States, in short, should be rendered irrelevant.
India reacted cautiously to this effort by the Pakistani general to steal the platform that it thought it had a unique claim over. Rather than address the Musharraf proposal directly, it proposed instead that telecommunication links across the LoC, shut down since 1990, be reopened. And while the two governments kept talking across each other, rather than engage in a purposeful mutual dialogue, militant groups on both sides of the LoC were stepping into the breach, knitting together civic solidarities, enabling people to deal with the adversities of nature without putting in jeopardy their inherent sense of self-esteem. In insisting that relief efforts should conform to the model of a patron-client relationship, governments on both sides of the LoC may well have conceded valuable ground to the militant groups. Politicking in the context of a natural disaster in other words, is always bad policy.
Sukumar Muralidharan
October 24, 2005
The devastating earthquake in Kashmir confronted the two affected countries with a challenge they were clearly unequal to. The harsh Himalayan winter was imminent. And relief operations in both India and Pakistan had simply failed to mobilise the material resources to begin treating the injured and rehabilitating the homeless.
Pledges of assistance had come in with much fanfare from around the world. But when the sums were totalled, the money involved was derisory – two weeks after the disaster, aid pledges from all over the world totalled a mere $ 90 million, when conservative estimates by the U.N. put the requirement at just over $ 300 million. And the monetary magnitudes involved, in all their meagreness, were immediately of no substantive use. By the time they traversed the bureaucratic channels of aid disbursement, it was clear, the harsh Kashmiri winter would have been well advanced. And a natural disaster would have been transformed into a manmade catastrophe.
Disaster fatigue is a worrying reality of the global situation today. But even in a world that has become cynical about human suffering, the Kashmir disaster has challenged the humanitarian impulse to break free of the layers of political deadweight it is normally buried under. It is still delicately referred to as the South Asian, or the Pakistan, earthquake. To concede to it the title of the Kashmir earthquake would be to recognise that a region abandoned by the world has an identity and a set of interests uniquely its own. But given the legacy of the dispute between two neighbouring states over Kashmir, the questions are unavoidable. When governments are unable to deliver what they are obliged to, as part of the social contract that keeps them in authority, will they step aside and allow the people to do what they can? Or will they insist on their monopoly on wisdom, even when in default on their side of the bargain?
The Kashmir earthquake in short, offers governments on both sides a pretext. Donning the vestments of humanitarianism, they could renounce the rights they have assumed and allow the people of Kashmir to speak for themselves, not to mention, organise relief efforts on their own. If the synergies among the people artificially separated for decades by the Line of Control (LoC) were to be recruited to a humanitarian cause, the final effect could well be beneficial. Indeed, people power, when fused with a worthy humanitarian cause, could well absolve floundering governments of the burden of blame for failing to measure up.
General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president and army chief has long spoken of the opportunities that he has uniquely enjoyed to “resolve” the Kashmir dispute “once and for all”. The Kashmir earthquake afforded him a renewed opportunity to revisit this familiar theme. But first he had to deflect the overtures from India, to relax the rigours of crossing the LoC for a humanitarian purpose. It did his confidence little good that the Indian proposal involved defence personnel traversing the border by both air and land, to offer their humanitarian services to the affected Pakistani population.
Early claims that Indian Army troops had crossed the LoC to deliver relief supplies were rudely refuted. And the initial effort by Indian Air Force transport planes to ferry across vitally needed equipment and stores were rebuffed. It was only after a prolonged process of negotiation and possibly the mediation of certain external powers, that the first Indian military planes were allowed to land on Pakistani territory.
About ten days after the disaster, Musharraf chose to make a dramatic offer to India which far surpassed anything that had been proposed from this side of the border. Kashmiris he said, should be freely allowed to cross the LoC in both directions, to partake in the grief on either side and to be part of the effort at its mitigation. He followed this up by reprising his familiar theme that the “dispute” could be resolved for all time by converting the tragedy of the Kashmir earthquake into an opportunity. The LoC which kept apart a people and made them victims of the rivalry between hostile States, in short, should be rendered irrelevant.
India reacted cautiously to this effort by the Pakistani general to steal the platform that it thought it had a unique claim over. Rather than address the Musharraf proposal directly, it proposed instead that telecommunication links across the LoC, shut down since 1990, be reopened. And while the two governments kept talking across each other, rather than engage in a purposeful mutual dialogue, militant groups on both sides of the LoC were stepping into the breach, knitting together civic solidarities, enabling people to deal with the adversities of nature without putting in jeopardy their inherent sense of self-esteem. In insisting that relief efforts should conform to the model of a patron-client relationship, governments on both sides of the LoC may well have conceded valuable ground to the militant groups. Politicking in the context of a natural disaster in other words, is always bad policy.
The politics of poverty and inequality -- An article from July 2005
THE POLITICS OF POVERTY AND INEQUALITY
Sukumar Muralidharan
July 2005
The discovery of the poor as a political resource is perhaps an abiding contribution that Indira Gandhi has made to Indian democracy. Her invocation in 1971 of the slogan of “Garibi Hatao”, was a moment when electoral politics in India, which had sunk into a low-level equilibrium of recrimination and strategic stasis, acquired a new energy.
The discovery of the transformative potential of the poor remained incomplete. Indira Gandhi was eager to recruit them to her political cause but disinclined to undertake the kind of radical redistribution that would make a significant dent on poverty. Her anti-poverty programmes were financed out of a burgeoning budget deficit. And with the agricultural economy then being in a state of stagnation, the increase in purchasing power in the hands of the poor was not matched by a growth in the availability of their items of staple consumption. The consequence was an inflationary spiral, considerably aggravated by speculative hoarding by private trade. When international oil prices exploded late in 1973, inflation in India acquired crisis proportions, compelling first, a rapid scaling down of the ambition with which “Garibi Hatao” was being pursued, and then, under the Emergency regime, an actual reversal of course.
It is yet unclear what lessons, if any, have been taken on board from this experience. The Employment Guarantee Act that both houses of Parliament recently passed, has since been signed into law by the President. Early indications from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, are that the outlays necessary to operationalise the law will be found from existing heads of expenditure, by reclassifying the allocations already committed for subsidies, rural development and employment generation programmes. This would politically be a hazardous course, to withdraw benefits and entitlements from certain regions and social sections in order to guarantee employment in 200 of the country’s more impoverished districts.
Failing a significant additional effort at taxation, which would in effect reverse the course of fiscal policy followed over the last decade-and-a-half, the prognoses is for an unrelenting rise in the budget deficit over the next few years. There is a viewpoint that this need not necessarily engender inflationary pressure as in past years, for a variety of reasons. Unlike the early-1970s, buffer stocks of food with the government and its agencies, are now a veritable embarrassment of riches. Far in excess of prescribed norms, their carrying costs have become a major burden on the public exchequer. If the rise in purchasing power among the poor were to lead to a depletion of these stocks, the net effect would be not an increase in the budget deficit, but quite conceivably, a decrease.
As with food, so also in several others sectors catering to the consumption demands of the poor, there is substantial excess capacity available in the economy. Rising demand for these items of consumption could easily be met by merely ramping up production, without the slightest risk of inflation.
If the growth experience of the 1990s and beyond were to be considered, there would be ample reason to be cautious about these arguments. The enormous accretion to food stocks has happened in spite of a steep decline in the growth rate of agriculture in the 1990s. The excess of supply in other words, has been achieved only by suppressing the demand for food amongst the poor. This has also been key to understanding the low-inflation experience of the last decade or so.
A further complication is likely to arise in the labour market once the employment guarantee kicks in. A vast sea of unemployed workers has been an assurance for agricultural capitalists that wage rates will remain low. But with the working population likely to enjoy fresh livelihood options once the employment guarantee comes into effect, wage rates paid by larger farmers who hire in labour, are likely to rise. This is likely in turn, to engender a demand from their side for higher support prices, creating its own dynamic in terms of the budget deficit, the issue prices of food, and the inflationary process.
Indications are strong that no serious dent can be made on poverty today, without an effort at the redistribution of income and wealth. It was a fundamental premise of the decade-and-a-half of globalisation, that growth will on its own, create a momentum down the scale of income and wealth, enabling increasing numbers of the working population to migrate out of poverty. That premise is now increasingly recognised as deeply flawed. Final confirmation came from the World Bank, one among the two principal missionaries of globalisation, in its recent World Development Report, which was evocatively titled, “Equity and Development”. Its message was summed up by chief economist Francois Bourguignon, with an appropriate economy of words: “Equity is complementary to the pursuit of long-term prosperity. Greater equity is doubly good for poverty reduction. It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a society”.
There is a hint of revisionism about the World Bank’s recognition that the high growth rates registered in India and China have not quite been as salutary for the removal of poverty as earlier assumed. The picture of global inequalities may have been somewhat mitigated, it argues, but “the best available estimates suggest that inequality in India has been rising, but with no solid assessment of by how much”.
This undoubtedly represents a rather late awakening for the World Bank. It has for long been argued by economists who have chosen to look at the evidence with some rigour, that the growth processes of the last decade and more, have been profoundly unequal in their implications. Personal consumption has undoubtedly been increasing in the two countries – China and India – that are today identified as canonical instances of growth driving a rapid decline in poverty. But rising consumption cannot be assumed to be an index of diminishing poverty. It could indeed, be merely an indication that inequality is increasing.
The evidence that global inequality increased during the 1990s is now considered fairly compelling. Globalisation, in fact, has been a polarising process, increasing the gaps between industrialised and developing countries on one side, while sharply widening the disparities within classes in each of these countries. This issue, which has been little considered in the last quarter century, is now recognised as an integral part of the battle against world poverty. As the economist Robert Wade put it in 2001: “Many analysts apparently take it for granted that global inequality is falling. Others think it sufficient to focus on poverty, and ignore inequality as such. Both these views need to be challenged. New evidence suggests that global inequality is worsening rapidly. There are good reasons to worry about that trend, quite apart from what it implies about the extent of world poverty”.
An innovation that Wade makes is to classify the urban and rural parts of China and India separately in estimating trends in economic inequality. Though his study covers only a limited number of years ending in 1993, the trends it highlights have undoubtedly persisted since. The reasons for growing income inequality that he identifies are several:
faster economic growth in the advanced countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD);
faster population growth in the developing countries;
slow growth of output in rural China, rural India and Africa; and
rapidly widening output and income differences between urban China on the one hand, and rural China and rural India on the other.
The economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in introducing their pioneering work on income inequality in the U.S., mention in passing, as a curiosity, that few studies since Simon Kuznets’ work in 1953, have really been concerned with this issue. There have clearly been some ideological barriers to research on economic inequality in recent times. And the reasons though not part of the focus of the Piketty-Saez study, are inferentially established by its conclusions:
a sharp increase in the share of the top 10 percent of the U.S. population in total income, has been a feature of U.S. growth processes since the early-1980s.
The trend indeed, begins to accelerate in the mid-1980s and gains further momentum in the mid-1990s.
A similar increase in the share of the top one percent of the U.S. population is also evident. Indeed, if 42 percent was the share of the top 10 percent in the national income, the top one percent alone accounted for 14.5 percent in 1998. And even though the Piketty-Saez study does not cover this period, it is a reasonable conjecture that the degree of inequality should have increased with the sweeping tax cuts that were among George Bush’s first policy initiatives since assuming the U.S. Presidency in 2001.
The U.S. experience, as Piketty and Saez indicate, has been rather different from that of France, which witnessed a relatively more equal distribution of income through the 1990s and beyond.
A similar estimation of income inequality using individual income tax returns data for developing countries is impossible, since tax administrations in these countries typically cover no more than a minute fraction of the population. A recent study attempted the much more modest exercise of computing income inequalities within the top one percent (or top percentile) of the Indian population using income tax returns data. The results though perhaps not definitive, are nevertheless important signposts to what could have been happening to Indian society under a regime of globalisation.
The study reveals a rapid increase in top income share since 1980-81, an increase that indeed, is sustained through the decade of the 1980s and picks up fresh momentum in the 1990s, with perhaps fewer fluctuations. A striking feature of income distribution in the 1980s was the relentless increase in the share of the top 0.01 percent of the population in total income. From 0.40 percent in 1980-81, the figure increases to 0.64 percent in 1990-91, before finishing the decade at 1.57 percent.
The “gradual liberalisation of the Indian economy”, the authors conclude, “did make it possible for the rich (the top 1 percent) to substantially increase their share of total income”. However, the 1980s and the 1990s were significantly different, in that in the former decade, “the gains were shared by everyone in the top percentile”, while in the latter, “it was only those in the top 0.1 percent who made big gains”. “This suggests the possibility”, the authors surmise, “that the ultra-rich were able to corner most of the income gains in the 1990s because they alone were in a position to sell what the world markets wanted”.
The claim that poverty has diminished is not inconsistent with the picture of growing inequality. The figures that have been officially adopted by the Government of India though, are considered rather infirm, overstating by a large degree, the extent to which poverty may have fallen. It is now the official orthodoxy in India that between 1993-94 and 1999-2000, when the 50th and 55th rounds of the National Sample Survey on consumption expenditure were conducted, the number of people living in poverty declined by the order of 60 million, with the poverty rate itself falling to 26 per cent. Apart from the fact that this narrative is inconsistent with the larger picture – of falling agricultural growth rates, growing “casualisation” of employment, and declining per capita availability of basic subsistence goods – there is strong reason to believe that it is a statistical illusion, engendered by a change in survey methodology in the 55th round. Indeed, the economist Abhijit Sen, now a member of the Planning Commission, has concluded after a careful reevaluation of the survey data, that the second half of the 1990s and beyond, may have been a period when progress was halted or perhaps even reversed, in India’s battle against poverty.
The economist Angus Deaton has observed, that the economic reforms introduced in India in the 1990s have remained controversial, as have “their effect on poverty”. This debate is not unique to India, says Deaton: “The worldwide controversy about globalisation and its effects on poverty and inequality has followed much the same lines as the internal debate in India”. Because India “accounts for about 20 percent of the global count of those living on less than $1 a person per day”, what happens in India “is not only a reflection of the worldwide trend, but is one of its major determinants”. With the Employment Guarantee Act, the Manmohan Singh government now has an opportunity to decisively influence the global debate and chart a new path out of the poverty trap. Whether it will succeed in discarding the old nostrums about growth being an adequate antidote for poverty, and break out of the stifling straitjacket of fiscal conservatism, remains to be seen.
Sukumar Muralidharan
July 2005
The discovery of the poor as a political resource is perhaps an abiding contribution that Indira Gandhi has made to Indian democracy. Her invocation in 1971 of the slogan of “Garibi Hatao”, was a moment when electoral politics in India, which had sunk into a low-level equilibrium of recrimination and strategic stasis, acquired a new energy.
The discovery of the transformative potential of the poor remained incomplete. Indira Gandhi was eager to recruit them to her political cause but disinclined to undertake the kind of radical redistribution that would make a significant dent on poverty. Her anti-poverty programmes were financed out of a burgeoning budget deficit. And with the agricultural economy then being in a state of stagnation, the increase in purchasing power in the hands of the poor was not matched by a growth in the availability of their items of staple consumption. The consequence was an inflationary spiral, considerably aggravated by speculative hoarding by private trade. When international oil prices exploded late in 1973, inflation in India acquired crisis proportions, compelling first, a rapid scaling down of the ambition with which “Garibi Hatao” was being pursued, and then, under the Emergency regime, an actual reversal of course.
It is yet unclear what lessons, if any, have been taken on board from this experience. The Employment Guarantee Act that both houses of Parliament recently passed, has since been signed into law by the President. Early indications from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, are that the outlays necessary to operationalise the law will be found from existing heads of expenditure, by reclassifying the allocations already committed for subsidies, rural development and employment generation programmes. This would politically be a hazardous course, to withdraw benefits and entitlements from certain regions and social sections in order to guarantee employment in 200 of the country’s more impoverished districts.
Failing a significant additional effort at taxation, which would in effect reverse the course of fiscal policy followed over the last decade-and-a-half, the prognoses is for an unrelenting rise in the budget deficit over the next few years. There is a viewpoint that this need not necessarily engender inflationary pressure as in past years, for a variety of reasons. Unlike the early-1970s, buffer stocks of food with the government and its agencies, are now a veritable embarrassment of riches. Far in excess of prescribed norms, their carrying costs have become a major burden on the public exchequer. If the rise in purchasing power among the poor were to lead to a depletion of these stocks, the net effect would be not an increase in the budget deficit, but quite conceivably, a decrease.
As with food, so also in several others sectors catering to the consumption demands of the poor, there is substantial excess capacity available in the economy. Rising demand for these items of consumption could easily be met by merely ramping up production, without the slightest risk of inflation.
If the growth experience of the 1990s and beyond were to be considered, there would be ample reason to be cautious about these arguments. The enormous accretion to food stocks has happened in spite of a steep decline in the growth rate of agriculture in the 1990s. The excess of supply in other words, has been achieved only by suppressing the demand for food amongst the poor. This has also been key to understanding the low-inflation experience of the last decade or so.
A further complication is likely to arise in the labour market once the employment guarantee kicks in. A vast sea of unemployed workers has been an assurance for agricultural capitalists that wage rates will remain low. But with the working population likely to enjoy fresh livelihood options once the employment guarantee comes into effect, wage rates paid by larger farmers who hire in labour, are likely to rise. This is likely in turn, to engender a demand from their side for higher support prices, creating its own dynamic in terms of the budget deficit, the issue prices of food, and the inflationary process.
Indications are strong that no serious dent can be made on poverty today, without an effort at the redistribution of income and wealth. It was a fundamental premise of the decade-and-a-half of globalisation, that growth will on its own, create a momentum down the scale of income and wealth, enabling increasing numbers of the working population to migrate out of poverty. That premise is now increasingly recognised as deeply flawed. Final confirmation came from the World Bank, one among the two principal missionaries of globalisation, in its recent World Development Report, which was evocatively titled, “Equity and Development”. Its message was summed up by chief economist Francois Bourguignon, with an appropriate economy of words: “Equity is complementary to the pursuit of long-term prosperity. Greater equity is doubly good for poverty reduction. It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a society”.
There is a hint of revisionism about the World Bank’s recognition that the high growth rates registered in India and China have not quite been as salutary for the removal of poverty as earlier assumed. The picture of global inequalities may have been somewhat mitigated, it argues, but “the best available estimates suggest that inequality in India has been rising, but with no solid assessment of by how much”.
This undoubtedly represents a rather late awakening for the World Bank. It has for long been argued by economists who have chosen to look at the evidence with some rigour, that the growth processes of the last decade and more, have been profoundly unequal in their implications. Personal consumption has undoubtedly been increasing in the two countries – China and India – that are today identified as canonical instances of growth driving a rapid decline in poverty. But rising consumption cannot be assumed to be an index of diminishing poverty. It could indeed, be merely an indication that inequality is increasing.
The evidence that global inequality increased during the 1990s is now considered fairly compelling. Globalisation, in fact, has been a polarising process, increasing the gaps between industrialised and developing countries on one side, while sharply widening the disparities within classes in each of these countries. This issue, which has been little considered in the last quarter century, is now recognised as an integral part of the battle against world poverty. As the economist Robert Wade put it in 2001: “Many analysts apparently take it for granted that global inequality is falling. Others think it sufficient to focus on poverty, and ignore inequality as such. Both these views need to be challenged. New evidence suggests that global inequality is worsening rapidly. There are good reasons to worry about that trend, quite apart from what it implies about the extent of world poverty”.
An innovation that Wade makes is to classify the urban and rural parts of China and India separately in estimating trends in economic inequality. Though his study covers only a limited number of years ending in 1993, the trends it highlights have undoubtedly persisted since. The reasons for growing income inequality that he identifies are several:
faster economic growth in the advanced countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD);
faster population growth in the developing countries;
slow growth of output in rural China, rural India and Africa; and
rapidly widening output and income differences between urban China on the one hand, and rural China and rural India on the other.
The economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in introducing their pioneering work on income inequality in the U.S., mention in passing, as a curiosity, that few studies since Simon Kuznets’ work in 1953, have really been concerned with this issue. There have clearly been some ideological barriers to research on economic inequality in recent times. And the reasons though not part of the focus of the Piketty-Saez study, are inferentially established by its conclusions:
a sharp increase in the share of the top 10 percent of the U.S. population in total income, has been a feature of U.S. growth processes since the early-1980s.
The trend indeed, begins to accelerate in the mid-1980s and gains further momentum in the mid-1990s.
A similar increase in the share of the top one percent of the U.S. population is also evident. Indeed, if 42 percent was the share of the top 10 percent in the national income, the top one percent alone accounted for 14.5 percent in 1998. And even though the Piketty-Saez study does not cover this period, it is a reasonable conjecture that the degree of inequality should have increased with the sweeping tax cuts that were among George Bush’s first policy initiatives since assuming the U.S. Presidency in 2001.
The U.S. experience, as Piketty and Saez indicate, has been rather different from that of France, which witnessed a relatively more equal distribution of income through the 1990s and beyond.
A similar estimation of income inequality using individual income tax returns data for developing countries is impossible, since tax administrations in these countries typically cover no more than a minute fraction of the population. A recent study attempted the much more modest exercise of computing income inequalities within the top one percent (or top percentile) of the Indian population using income tax returns data. The results though perhaps not definitive, are nevertheless important signposts to what could have been happening to Indian society under a regime of globalisation.
The study reveals a rapid increase in top income share since 1980-81, an increase that indeed, is sustained through the decade of the 1980s and picks up fresh momentum in the 1990s, with perhaps fewer fluctuations. A striking feature of income distribution in the 1980s was the relentless increase in the share of the top 0.01 percent of the population in total income. From 0.40 percent in 1980-81, the figure increases to 0.64 percent in 1990-91, before finishing the decade at 1.57 percent.
The “gradual liberalisation of the Indian economy”, the authors conclude, “did make it possible for the rich (the top 1 percent) to substantially increase their share of total income”. However, the 1980s and the 1990s were significantly different, in that in the former decade, “the gains were shared by everyone in the top percentile”, while in the latter, “it was only those in the top 0.1 percent who made big gains”. “This suggests the possibility”, the authors surmise, “that the ultra-rich were able to corner most of the income gains in the 1990s because they alone were in a position to sell what the world markets wanted”.
The claim that poverty has diminished is not inconsistent with the picture of growing inequality. The figures that have been officially adopted by the Government of India though, are considered rather infirm, overstating by a large degree, the extent to which poverty may have fallen. It is now the official orthodoxy in India that between 1993-94 and 1999-2000, when the 50th and 55th rounds of the National Sample Survey on consumption expenditure were conducted, the number of people living in poverty declined by the order of 60 million, with the poverty rate itself falling to 26 per cent. Apart from the fact that this narrative is inconsistent with the larger picture – of falling agricultural growth rates, growing “casualisation” of employment, and declining per capita availability of basic subsistence goods – there is strong reason to believe that it is a statistical illusion, engendered by a change in survey methodology in the 55th round. Indeed, the economist Abhijit Sen, now a member of the Planning Commission, has concluded after a careful reevaluation of the survey data, that the second half of the 1990s and beyond, may have been a period when progress was halted or perhaps even reversed, in India’s battle against poverty.
The economist Angus Deaton has observed, that the economic reforms introduced in India in the 1990s have remained controversial, as have “their effect on poverty”. This debate is not unique to India, says Deaton: “The worldwide controversy about globalisation and its effects on poverty and inequality has followed much the same lines as the internal debate in India”. Because India “accounts for about 20 percent of the global count of those living on less than $1 a person per day”, what happens in India “is not only a reflection of the worldwide trend, but is one of its major determinants”. With the Employment Guarantee Act, the Manmohan Singh government now has an opportunity to decisively influence the global debate and chart a new path out of the poverty trap. Whether it will succeed in discarding the old nostrums about growth being an adequate antidote for poverty, and break out of the stifling straitjacket of fiscal conservatism, remains to be seen.
The Employment Guarantee Act: Can India Have Economic Growth Led by the Poor?
The Employment Guarantee Act: can India have economic growth led by the poor?
Sukumar Muralidharan
August 25, 2005
By the philosophical standards established over a decade-and-a-half of economic reforms, it was thought to be a leap into the unknown. But few of the economic pundits who chose to voice their scepticism over the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act – adopted by Parliament in the last week of its monsoon session – had similar reservations about the various leaps into the dark that the process of “economic reforms”, as they have been called, has involved. There was then the comfortable calculation that tax rate cuts would not diminish revenue, since economic growth and better compliance would in fact, ensure its buoyant growth. That calculation has been devastated by the actual record of revenue collection since the reforms began in 1991.
There have been few voices though, that have been raised against the direction of tax reform, which severely limits the government’s ability to tackle essential social commitments. The employment guarantee act (EGA) though, has brought forth a torrent of dire forecasts. When not predicting an impending fiscal meltdown, or inflation galloping beyond manageable numbers, the doomsayers glumly prophesy corruption outstripping even the massive scales it currently is at.
At first glance, there was much that seemed to be running in favour of these arguments. Here was a government binding itself and all succeeding governments, to providing a guaranteed minimum of employment to the rural poor. This was an obligation that would last into the foreseeable future and beyond, since the only escape route from the EGA would lie in the intended beneficiaries themselves deciding that the protections it affords are superfluous.
The plain fact then, is that no rigorous costing exercise has been done on the EGA commitments. This has allowed critics to float the figure of Rs 40,000 crore as the annual financial commitment involved in the limited employment guarantee. A calculation by economists sympathetic to the cause has arrived at a roughly similar figure: around Rs 25,000 crore. The rough correspondence in orders of magnitude indicates that both critics and champions are on the same track
The difference between the two, is that the critics want no additional tax effort from the government, while the sympathisers of the EGA believe that one would be necessary at some stage. There would even in the absence of a fresh tax effort, be no immediate threat of a fiscal train-wreck, since the economy -- in the estimation of the economists who have championed the EGA -- has sufficient spare capacity to absorb the rapid increase in purchasing power that it would entail.
The rural poor who find themselves suddenly enjoying the luxury of guaranteed employment, are first likely to devote their earnings to the purchase of essential food items. And the food stocks currently available with the government, running at embarrassingly bloated levels, could meet this extra demand, neutralising any possible risk that the the injection of fresh purchasing power into the economy would fuel an inflationary spiral.
The EGA offers a hundred days of assured employment to every household in 150 of the poorest districts of India. The target group will soon be raised to 200 districts. More energetic advocates of the law had argued for universal coverage. Alternatively, they were willing to settle for a compromise that would make the law applicable all across the country within a defined time horizon. The government has given neither commitment. It obviously intends to see how the law shapes up in the first few years of its implementation and assess its diverse consequences – including the budgetary cost, the impact on rural wage rates, food production, and overall inflation – before undertaking any further commitments.
Addressing the Rajya Sabha just hours before it was scheduled to vote on the bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh essentially put on record the long-term strategic plan. He lauded the proposed law as “pathbreaking” and the “most important piece of legislation in independent India”. He also chose to sound a note of warning, and to gently chide the left parties that had been the most insistent in pressing the case for the EGA.
Manmohan Singh referred to the preoccupation of the left-wing chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, recently expressed in an investor’s meeting in Singapore, for enhancing the flow of foreign capital into his state. Bhattacharya had also committed himself to the range of investor-friendly reforms that his party comrades in the CPI(M) have consistently opposed at the centre. His irony did not escape the left-wing members of the Rajya Sabha, who appeared at a loss for an adequate riposte. But the sub-text of the Prime Minister’s remarks seemed to suggest that his commitment to the EGA was conditional.
Those in the business of governance, Manmohan Singh, urged, should ensure that the target of 7 to 8 percent economic growth was achieved every year. They also needed to shed dogma and look anew at the subsidies that had been built into the fiscal system through years of cultivating various political constituencies. The message was clear: without growth on the expected scale and a rationalisation of other expenditure commitments, the outlays needed to guarantee rural employment, may simply not be forthcoming.
After all the words of commendation he had for the EGA, this was a chastening wake-up call. The Prime Minister’s intent was clear. He expected the left parties, whose parliamentary sustenance is vital for the survival of his government, to cease being a roadblock to his ambitions as far as economic liberalisation is concerned. The EGA was a reluctant price he paid to win the longer term acquiescence of the left in his plans to privatise state enterprises and open up more sectors of the economy to foreign capital investment.
The paralysis of left opposition perhaps is not surprising. What is so, is Manmohan Singh’s belief, nurtured despite all the adversities reality has visited on him, that growth in the aggregate is an adequate medicine for the blight of poverty. What the experience of the last decade-and-a-half in fact proves, is that an economy can have buoyant growth without even scratching the surface of poverty. Growth in the era of globalisation does not diminish poverty. It creates an illusion of wealth within certain strata that in its turn, provokes a consumption surge. And this in turn could trickle down the scale of wealth, temporarily pushing up incomes in proximate classes. The illusion of wealth at the top of the income scale, in other words, creates an illusion of poverty being reduced at the bottom.
Most of the world has awoken to the fallacies – and the outright data fabrications – that underlie this story. The growing realisation now is that growth propelled by the consumption of the rich only polarises societies. Even as it generates temporary income effects at the lower end of the scale, it relentlessly increases disparities. And the transient income gains will rapidly be dispelled in situations when financial speculation exceeds prudent limits, as is increasingly the norm now.
The EGA affords the Indian government an opportunity to move out of the discredited paradigm that poverty would diminish as a consequence of growth. The alternative model is to attack poverty directly through income and assets redistribution, and a restoration of rights that have long been denied the poor. The entry of the poor into the economic mainstream would in itself, constitute a powerful motor for economic growth. Despite his ardent words of commitment to the EGA, Manmohan Singh’s recent locutions suggest that he has a long way to travel before he grasps the new economic commonsense.
Sukumar Muralidharan
August 25, 2005
By the philosophical standards established over a decade-and-a-half of economic reforms, it was thought to be a leap into the unknown. But few of the economic pundits who chose to voice their scepticism over the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act – adopted by Parliament in the last week of its monsoon session – had similar reservations about the various leaps into the dark that the process of “economic reforms”, as they have been called, has involved. There was then the comfortable calculation that tax rate cuts would not diminish revenue, since economic growth and better compliance would in fact, ensure its buoyant growth. That calculation has been devastated by the actual record of revenue collection since the reforms began in 1991.
There have been few voices though, that have been raised against the direction of tax reform, which severely limits the government’s ability to tackle essential social commitments. The employment guarantee act (EGA) though, has brought forth a torrent of dire forecasts. When not predicting an impending fiscal meltdown, or inflation galloping beyond manageable numbers, the doomsayers glumly prophesy corruption outstripping even the massive scales it currently is at.
At first glance, there was much that seemed to be running in favour of these arguments. Here was a government binding itself and all succeeding governments, to providing a guaranteed minimum of employment to the rural poor. This was an obligation that would last into the foreseeable future and beyond, since the only escape route from the EGA would lie in the intended beneficiaries themselves deciding that the protections it affords are superfluous.
The plain fact then, is that no rigorous costing exercise has been done on the EGA commitments. This has allowed critics to float the figure of Rs 40,000 crore as the annual financial commitment involved in the limited employment guarantee. A calculation by economists sympathetic to the cause has arrived at a roughly similar figure: around Rs 25,000 crore. The rough correspondence in orders of magnitude indicates that both critics and champions are on the same track
The difference between the two, is that the critics want no additional tax effort from the government, while the sympathisers of the EGA believe that one would be necessary at some stage. There would even in the absence of a fresh tax effort, be no immediate threat of a fiscal train-wreck, since the economy -- in the estimation of the economists who have championed the EGA -- has sufficient spare capacity to absorb the rapid increase in purchasing power that it would entail.
The rural poor who find themselves suddenly enjoying the luxury of guaranteed employment, are first likely to devote their earnings to the purchase of essential food items. And the food stocks currently available with the government, running at embarrassingly bloated levels, could meet this extra demand, neutralising any possible risk that the the injection of fresh purchasing power into the economy would fuel an inflationary spiral.
The EGA offers a hundred days of assured employment to every household in 150 of the poorest districts of India. The target group will soon be raised to 200 districts. More energetic advocates of the law had argued for universal coverage. Alternatively, they were willing to settle for a compromise that would make the law applicable all across the country within a defined time horizon. The government has given neither commitment. It obviously intends to see how the law shapes up in the first few years of its implementation and assess its diverse consequences – including the budgetary cost, the impact on rural wage rates, food production, and overall inflation – before undertaking any further commitments.
Addressing the Rajya Sabha just hours before it was scheduled to vote on the bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh essentially put on record the long-term strategic plan. He lauded the proposed law as “pathbreaking” and the “most important piece of legislation in independent India”. He also chose to sound a note of warning, and to gently chide the left parties that had been the most insistent in pressing the case for the EGA.
Manmohan Singh referred to the preoccupation of the left-wing chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, recently expressed in an investor’s meeting in Singapore, for enhancing the flow of foreign capital into his state. Bhattacharya had also committed himself to the range of investor-friendly reforms that his party comrades in the CPI(M) have consistently opposed at the centre. His irony did not escape the left-wing members of the Rajya Sabha, who appeared at a loss for an adequate riposte. But the sub-text of the Prime Minister’s remarks seemed to suggest that his commitment to the EGA was conditional.
Those in the business of governance, Manmohan Singh, urged, should ensure that the target of 7 to 8 percent economic growth was achieved every year. They also needed to shed dogma and look anew at the subsidies that had been built into the fiscal system through years of cultivating various political constituencies. The message was clear: without growth on the expected scale and a rationalisation of other expenditure commitments, the outlays needed to guarantee rural employment, may simply not be forthcoming.
After all the words of commendation he had for the EGA, this was a chastening wake-up call. The Prime Minister’s intent was clear. He expected the left parties, whose parliamentary sustenance is vital for the survival of his government, to cease being a roadblock to his ambitions as far as economic liberalisation is concerned. The EGA was a reluctant price he paid to win the longer term acquiescence of the left in his plans to privatise state enterprises and open up more sectors of the economy to foreign capital investment.
The paralysis of left opposition perhaps is not surprising. What is so, is Manmohan Singh’s belief, nurtured despite all the adversities reality has visited on him, that growth in the aggregate is an adequate medicine for the blight of poverty. What the experience of the last decade-and-a-half in fact proves, is that an economy can have buoyant growth without even scratching the surface of poverty. Growth in the era of globalisation does not diminish poverty. It creates an illusion of wealth within certain strata that in its turn, provokes a consumption surge. And this in turn could trickle down the scale of wealth, temporarily pushing up incomes in proximate classes. The illusion of wealth at the top of the income scale, in other words, creates an illusion of poverty being reduced at the bottom.
Most of the world has awoken to the fallacies – and the outright data fabrications – that underlie this story. The growing realisation now is that growth propelled by the consumption of the rich only polarises societies. Even as it generates temporary income effects at the lower end of the scale, it relentlessly increases disparities. And the transient income gains will rapidly be dispelled in situations when financial speculation exceeds prudent limits, as is increasingly the norm now.
The EGA affords the Indian government an opportunity to move out of the discredited paradigm that poverty would diminish as a consequence of growth. The alternative model is to attack poverty directly through income and assets redistribution, and a restoration of rights that have long been denied the poor. The entry of the poor into the economic mainstream would in itself, constitute a powerful motor for economic growth. Despite his ardent words of commitment to the EGA, Manmohan Singh’s recent locutions suggest that he has a long way to travel before he grasps the new economic commonsense.
Understanding Advani's Historical Revisionism: Jinnah and the Cops and Robbers View of History
ADVANI’S PAKISTAN YATRA
WHY HISTORICAL REVISIONISM COULD SERVE A VALUABLE CAUSE
Sukumar Muralidharan
June 23, 2005
My country right or wrong may be an apt slogan for the mood of overwrought patriotism shaped in the crucible of the global war on terror. But it is not a slogan that can subsist in isolation, without the essential buttressing of history. This reading of history is marked by very sharply etched moral categories, where good is an attribute that is very clearly invested in certain political causes and entities, and bad in certain others. This variety of history often dovetails very neatly with another, which sees historical figures in stark and simple terms. The historian E.H. Carr in his classic What is History? referred to this as the “Good Queen Bess, Bad King John” school of historiography. It is a vision of history as the arena where good and bad – embodied in individuals larger than life – contend for primacy, where the triumph of good over evil is by no means assured. As Carr said: “The desire to postulate individual genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of human consciousness”.
One may add here that it is also fairly integral to the early stages of nation-building. Since the aim of historical pedagogy is considered the socialisation of the individual into a sense of duty towards his country and State, there is often a powerful inducement to keep the complexities out and confine the narrative to a set of easily digestible categories. For the Congress, which was for long the custodian of official nationalism in India, the enterprise of writing history has, since independence, been dominated by the need to project Gandhi and Nehru as the good and Jinnah as the bad. The Congress in this narrative, stood for unity and for all the people of India. Jinnah stood for partition since he could never expand his horizons beyond the political interests of a narrow Muslim elite.
On the other side of the border, the reverse tendency is evident, with Mohammad Ali Jinnah occupying a lone position in the nationalist pantheon, for bravely fulfilling the historical destiny of bringing the Pakistani state into being against the obstruction and worse of the Congress.
Another version of this morality tale has gained a degree of prominence in recent years, with the BJP and its confederates succeeding, during their six years in authority, in introducing V.D. Savarkar into the Indian nationalist pantheon. Jinnah is still honoured in this narrative with the title of prime villain. But the assessment of both Gandhi and Nehru is deeply qualified. Far from being firm in their commitment to unity, they are rendered as rather weak and effete in facing down Jinnah’s provocative tactics, conceding the case for partition when unity of the sacred topography of India was far from being a lost cause. The place of honour in this rendition goes to Sardar Patel among the Congress leaders and of course, Savarkar and all the other individuals who were instrumental in crafting the political discourse of Hindutva.
It is this comfortably settled consensus within the Hindutva vision of nationalism that has been rudely disrupted by BJP president L.K. Advani’s Pakistan yatra and his effusive words of praise for Jinnah. This was a radical upending of all the practised verities of his ideological family, a rude shock to those who had cut their milk teeth in politics with incantations about the basic villainy of Jinnah and the community he claimed to speak for. The shock waves took days to abate, and then only after Advani had offered up his head as a sacrificial offering. He remained insistent though, that he was eager to join the debate his remarks had occasioned and carry it through to its logical conclusions.
The BJP would not countenance any deviation from its basic theology. In its resolution declining Advani’s resignation and sanctioning his continuance in office, it clearly signalled – after anodyne references to the great accomplishments of Advani’s visit to Pakistan – that it still holds the “two-nation” theory in utter repugnance. This was in the perception of many with a sense of historical authenticity, a spectacular own goal by the Hindutva parivar.
As President of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar had the following wisdom to impart to his flock at its annual conference in 1937: “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations, in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims”. It bears recalling that this occurs a clear three years before the All India Muslim League, under Jinnah’s leadership, adopts the Pakistan resolution, setting the two religious communities seemingly irrevocably on the path towards partition.
Contemptuous of ritualism, Savarkar believed nonetheless that allegiance to the values of Hindu civilisation alone could ensure that the Indian nation state then in the process of creation, would be a viable and stable entity. For those who failed to meld their identities within the notion of Hindutva that he constructed, the nation could offer few rights and little solace. And with all that, the Savarkar school of thought could still claim with little seeming contradiction, that it was unshakably committed to the territorial unity of the Indian sub-continent – “Akhand Bharat” as it continues to be referred in Hindutva discourse. This was a formula for territorial unity without cultural accommodation or appreciation, for the swamping of diverse identities in a homogenising wave, for the extinction of cultures that resisted the onward march of Hindutva. To the degree that Savarkar and his disciples stood for cultural nationalism and territorial integrity, they also stood for totalitarianism rather than democracy.
It was this rather uninviting prospect that faced the Muslim leadership as they sought a viable platform to coordinate nationalist activities on a non-sectarian and secular basis. This does not mean that the effort was completely futile. In 1916 for instance, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had forged his entire nationalist vision on the real and imagined glories of ancient Hinduism, led his followers back into the Congress after over a decade of alienation and recrimination. He had just earned discharge in a case of sedition in Bombay, in which his defence was led by a prominent city lawyer named Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In the course of the 1916 session of the Congress, Tilak and Jinnah concluded what came to be known as the Lucknow Pact, which formalised a system of separate but roughly equal representation for the two major religious communities of British India in the constitutional order.
Retrospectively, it would appear that the principle of separate electorates was the first strain of the virus of separate nationhood. In the circumstances then prevailing though, separate electorates were a pragmatic response to the limitations imposed on Muslim representation by the franchise rules of colonial India. The high property and educational thresholds for the right to vote, it is generally agreed, tended to exclude Muslims in higher proportion. And while a universal franchise would obviously have been the right way to go from a popular democratic perspective, few of the nationalist formations then in the fray had much appetite for the mass politics this would involve.
Defending the Lucknow pact against the religious chauvinists, Tilak reminded them that unity was the paramount requirement of the times: “When we have to fight against a third party – it is a very important thing that we stand on this platform united, united in race, united in religion, united as regards all different shades of political creed”. In the years that followed, Tilak established himself as a serious champion of an inclusive nationalism, with an appeal that reached across communal, linguistic and caste barriers. He campaigned vigorously for the representation of all communities, castes and linguistic groups in the constitutional scheme then being negotiated. His close political ally, Jinnah, who had made a most effective legal defence on his behalf just a few years before, also had a vision that was no less inclusive.
Testifying before the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament in 1919, Jinnah was asked about the perspective he brought to his deposition. He was, he said, unequivocally, speaking from the point of view of India. Did that mean that he spoke as an Indian nationalist? It did. If that indeed was his perspective, did it imply that he envisioned an early end to the system of separate electorates? Jinnah was hopeful, though perhaps not as definitive in his response: “I think so”. Did that mean, he was asked, that he wished to do away with the distinction between Hindu and Muslim in political life. Here the response was unambiguous: “Yes, nothing would please me more than when that day comes”.
Tilak did not live to see it, but there was a substantive effort by Jinnah, with the tentative backing of the Muslim League, to do away with the system of separate electorates in 1927. The proposals inherent in Jinnah’s so-called “Delhi declaration” were accepted by a committee of the “All Parties Conferences” headed by Motilal Nehru, which went on to draft a constitution for independent India, based on participative democracy and the universal franchise. The initiative was subverted and destroyed in the main by Hindu Mahasabha elements that had by then manoeuvred themselves into a position of influence within the Congress.
The directions that Jinnah wandered into after that failure, still remain to be explored in an objective historical frame, free of chauvinist intrusions. But there is little question that the progenitors of Hindutva politics – V.D. Savarkar, M.S. Golwalkar, and others – whatever their other differences, were convinced that there could be no reconciliation between Hindu and Muslim in India. And these were clearly stated public postures well before Mohammad Iqbal – the author of the most stirring nationalist anthem written in colonial times, which celebrated the unity of a Hindustan that provided equal opportunities for both Hindu and Muslim – began talking rather vaguely of a Muslim homeland within the Indian nation. And as most objective accounts would testify, well after the Pakistan resolution of 1940, Jinnah in most of his political speeches, still talked of “India” as a nation that would be preserved as a unified political entity. He was distressed at the outcome of the freedom struggle, and disdainful of the “moth-eaten” nation he had brought into being -- sundered as it was from the main sources of its cultural inspiration in what were known as the “United Provinces” of British India. His dream had turned to dust; but he died well before the nation he brought into existence turned its back irrevocably on the liberal politics that he valued most deeply.
Advani’s long delayed effort to understand history not as a morality tale but as an ongoing story with no pre-determined outcomes, could be occasioned by a desire in the evening of his career to free himself from the fetters that he has bound himself in all his political life. On the other hand, it could be a concession to realpolitik, and to the need to broaden the appeal of his party beyond the constituency it has cultivated through the politics of communal provocation. Whatever his intent, he has brought a long overdue dose of reality to historical understanding. And he has perhaps, done serious damage to the notion that historical understanding is little else than a clear choice between good and evil.
WHY HISTORICAL REVISIONISM COULD SERVE A VALUABLE CAUSE
Sukumar Muralidharan
June 23, 2005
My country right or wrong may be an apt slogan for the mood of overwrought patriotism shaped in the crucible of the global war on terror. But it is not a slogan that can subsist in isolation, without the essential buttressing of history. This reading of history is marked by very sharply etched moral categories, where good is an attribute that is very clearly invested in certain political causes and entities, and bad in certain others. This variety of history often dovetails very neatly with another, which sees historical figures in stark and simple terms. The historian E.H. Carr in his classic What is History? referred to this as the “Good Queen Bess, Bad King John” school of historiography. It is a vision of history as the arena where good and bad – embodied in individuals larger than life – contend for primacy, where the triumph of good over evil is by no means assured. As Carr said: “The desire to postulate individual genius as the creative force in history is characteristic of the primitive stages of human consciousness”.
One may add here that it is also fairly integral to the early stages of nation-building. Since the aim of historical pedagogy is considered the socialisation of the individual into a sense of duty towards his country and State, there is often a powerful inducement to keep the complexities out and confine the narrative to a set of easily digestible categories. For the Congress, which was for long the custodian of official nationalism in India, the enterprise of writing history has, since independence, been dominated by the need to project Gandhi and Nehru as the good and Jinnah as the bad. The Congress in this narrative, stood for unity and for all the people of India. Jinnah stood for partition since he could never expand his horizons beyond the political interests of a narrow Muslim elite.
On the other side of the border, the reverse tendency is evident, with Mohammad Ali Jinnah occupying a lone position in the nationalist pantheon, for bravely fulfilling the historical destiny of bringing the Pakistani state into being against the obstruction and worse of the Congress.
Another version of this morality tale has gained a degree of prominence in recent years, with the BJP and its confederates succeeding, during their six years in authority, in introducing V.D. Savarkar into the Indian nationalist pantheon. Jinnah is still honoured in this narrative with the title of prime villain. But the assessment of both Gandhi and Nehru is deeply qualified. Far from being firm in their commitment to unity, they are rendered as rather weak and effete in facing down Jinnah’s provocative tactics, conceding the case for partition when unity of the sacred topography of India was far from being a lost cause. The place of honour in this rendition goes to Sardar Patel among the Congress leaders and of course, Savarkar and all the other individuals who were instrumental in crafting the political discourse of Hindutva.
It is this comfortably settled consensus within the Hindutva vision of nationalism that has been rudely disrupted by BJP president L.K. Advani’s Pakistan yatra and his effusive words of praise for Jinnah. This was a radical upending of all the practised verities of his ideological family, a rude shock to those who had cut their milk teeth in politics with incantations about the basic villainy of Jinnah and the community he claimed to speak for. The shock waves took days to abate, and then only after Advani had offered up his head as a sacrificial offering. He remained insistent though, that he was eager to join the debate his remarks had occasioned and carry it through to its logical conclusions.
The BJP would not countenance any deviation from its basic theology. In its resolution declining Advani’s resignation and sanctioning his continuance in office, it clearly signalled – after anodyne references to the great accomplishments of Advani’s visit to Pakistan – that it still holds the “two-nation” theory in utter repugnance. This was in the perception of many with a sense of historical authenticity, a spectacular own goal by the Hindutva parivar.
As President of the Hindu Mahasabha, Savarkar had the following wisdom to impart to his flock at its annual conference in 1937: “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations, in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims”. It bears recalling that this occurs a clear three years before the All India Muslim League, under Jinnah’s leadership, adopts the Pakistan resolution, setting the two religious communities seemingly irrevocably on the path towards partition.
Contemptuous of ritualism, Savarkar believed nonetheless that allegiance to the values of Hindu civilisation alone could ensure that the Indian nation state then in the process of creation, would be a viable and stable entity. For those who failed to meld their identities within the notion of Hindutva that he constructed, the nation could offer few rights and little solace. And with all that, the Savarkar school of thought could still claim with little seeming contradiction, that it was unshakably committed to the territorial unity of the Indian sub-continent – “Akhand Bharat” as it continues to be referred in Hindutva discourse. This was a formula for territorial unity without cultural accommodation or appreciation, for the swamping of diverse identities in a homogenising wave, for the extinction of cultures that resisted the onward march of Hindutva. To the degree that Savarkar and his disciples stood for cultural nationalism and territorial integrity, they also stood for totalitarianism rather than democracy.
It was this rather uninviting prospect that faced the Muslim leadership as they sought a viable platform to coordinate nationalist activities on a non-sectarian and secular basis. This does not mean that the effort was completely futile. In 1916 for instance, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had forged his entire nationalist vision on the real and imagined glories of ancient Hinduism, led his followers back into the Congress after over a decade of alienation and recrimination. He had just earned discharge in a case of sedition in Bombay, in which his defence was led by a prominent city lawyer named Mohammad Ali Jinnah. In the course of the 1916 session of the Congress, Tilak and Jinnah concluded what came to be known as the Lucknow Pact, which formalised a system of separate but roughly equal representation for the two major religious communities of British India in the constitutional order.
Retrospectively, it would appear that the principle of separate electorates was the first strain of the virus of separate nationhood. In the circumstances then prevailing though, separate electorates were a pragmatic response to the limitations imposed on Muslim representation by the franchise rules of colonial India. The high property and educational thresholds for the right to vote, it is generally agreed, tended to exclude Muslims in higher proportion. And while a universal franchise would obviously have been the right way to go from a popular democratic perspective, few of the nationalist formations then in the fray had much appetite for the mass politics this would involve.
Defending the Lucknow pact against the religious chauvinists, Tilak reminded them that unity was the paramount requirement of the times: “When we have to fight against a third party – it is a very important thing that we stand on this platform united, united in race, united in religion, united as regards all different shades of political creed”. In the years that followed, Tilak established himself as a serious champion of an inclusive nationalism, with an appeal that reached across communal, linguistic and caste barriers. He campaigned vigorously for the representation of all communities, castes and linguistic groups in the constitutional scheme then being negotiated. His close political ally, Jinnah, who had made a most effective legal defence on his behalf just a few years before, also had a vision that was no less inclusive.
Testifying before the Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament in 1919, Jinnah was asked about the perspective he brought to his deposition. He was, he said, unequivocally, speaking from the point of view of India. Did that mean that he spoke as an Indian nationalist? It did. If that indeed was his perspective, did it imply that he envisioned an early end to the system of separate electorates? Jinnah was hopeful, though perhaps not as definitive in his response: “I think so”. Did that mean, he was asked, that he wished to do away with the distinction between Hindu and Muslim in political life. Here the response was unambiguous: “Yes, nothing would please me more than when that day comes”.
Tilak did not live to see it, but there was a substantive effort by Jinnah, with the tentative backing of the Muslim League, to do away with the system of separate electorates in 1927. The proposals inherent in Jinnah’s so-called “Delhi declaration” were accepted by a committee of the “All Parties Conferences” headed by Motilal Nehru, which went on to draft a constitution for independent India, based on participative democracy and the universal franchise. The initiative was subverted and destroyed in the main by Hindu Mahasabha elements that had by then manoeuvred themselves into a position of influence within the Congress.
The directions that Jinnah wandered into after that failure, still remain to be explored in an objective historical frame, free of chauvinist intrusions. But there is little question that the progenitors of Hindutva politics – V.D. Savarkar, M.S. Golwalkar, and others – whatever their other differences, were convinced that there could be no reconciliation between Hindu and Muslim in India. And these were clearly stated public postures well before Mohammad Iqbal – the author of the most stirring nationalist anthem written in colonial times, which celebrated the unity of a Hindustan that provided equal opportunities for both Hindu and Muslim – began talking rather vaguely of a Muslim homeland within the Indian nation. And as most objective accounts would testify, well after the Pakistan resolution of 1940, Jinnah in most of his political speeches, still talked of “India” as a nation that would be preserved as a unified political entity. He was distressed at the outcome of the freedom struggle, and disdainful of the “moth-eaten” nation he had brought into being -- sundered as it was from the main sources of its cultural inspiration in what were known as the “United Provinces” of British India. His dream had turned to dust; but he died well before the nation he brought into existence turned its back irrevocably on the liberal politics that he valued most deeply.
Advani’s long delayed effort to understand history not as a morality tale but as an ongoing story with no pre-determined outcomes, could be occasioned by a desire in the evening of his career to free himself from the fetters that he has bound himself in all his political life. On the other hand, it could be a concession to realpolitik, and to the need to broaden the appeal of his party beyond the constituency it has cultivated through the politics of communal provocation. Whatever his intent, he has brought a long overdue dose of reality to historical understanding. And he has perhaps, done serious damage to the notion that historical understanding is little else than a clear choice between good and evil.
An early opinion that the U.S. has lost the peace, even before winning the war
Frontline, Volume 20 - Issue 07, March 29 - April 11, 2003
India's National Magazinefrom the publishers of THE HINDU
COVER STORY
WAR AND RESISTANCE
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
`Operation Iraqi Freedom', the U.S.-led war that marks the final act of over a decade of duplicity, coercion and insensitivity, gets under way. As the aggressors stumble through, their plans of conquest and subjugation elicit hostility and contempt among Iraqis.
GENERATIONS in India that have spent two score years or more on this planet know roughly what a war of liberation is like. Even if the Bangladesh operations in 1971 were not etched deeply in public perception by relentless media coverage, these generations know that the chemistry between a people and an army of liberation is characteristic and unmistakable. But it took little of this special historical memory to know, four days into the United States-led invasion of Iraq, that the most fundamental conceit of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" had been rudely punctured. Metaphorically, the claim that invading forces would be welcomed as an army of liberation stood devastated as badly as the urban landscape of Baghdad.
With a whole division of the British Army encamped on the outskirts of Basra, there was yet no signal from Iraq's second city that it would welcome the invading forces in. The entire array of propaganda devices had been unleashed, civic amenities had been destroyed with deliberate intent to foment mass disaffection in the city of over one million people. Yet Basra remained resistant to the overtures of its putative liberators. And this was, in the rather fanciful strategic plans drawn up prior to the war, regarded as relatively easy terrain for the invaders, since Basra was believed still to nurse bitter memories of its uprising in 1991 that was brutally put down by the Iraqi regime.
A Reuters correspondent south of Basra saw a vast convoy of battered trucks and cars streaming out of the city. Contrary to U.S. claims that it had not entered Basra, a 24-year-old engineer fleeing the city seemed to indicate that small detachments of special forces had in fact got through to foment an uprising. "There is fighting in the centre, on the streets," he said. "It is terrible. We don't want Americans here. This is Iraq." Other media personnel found Iraqi youth greeting incoming Western forces with smiles and sneering when they passed. From the evidence of the first three days of relatively unhindered advance by the Western forces, partisan media organisations had rushed to the inference that the Iraqi people were in a rather hospitable mood, preparing to welcome their liberators with open arms. Day 4 brought the rude awakening to reality and Day 5 rubbed in the harsh message.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" had got off to a dramatic start with a furious volley of missiles and bombs on a narrowly focussed set of targets in Baghdad. The target allegedly was the Iraqi regime and the objective was a swift decapitation that would snuff out the central authority and reduce Iraq's fighting forces to rudderless confusion. Subsequent reports from Western military intelligence spoke of a high level of probability that President Saddam Hussein could have been injured or killed. Other assessments spoke of the likely elimination from the operational fray of three of Iraq's top five leaders, including Saddam's principal deputy Izzat Ibrahim, his Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan, and his son Qusay Hussein.
A few days of ambiguity ensued. Images of the Iraqi President kept appearing on local television without quite removing uncertainties about the dates of their origin. Day 5 then brought a decisive refutation of initial Western assessments. Just before noon in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi television - displaying the almost preternatural and eerie calm that so deeply struck Dan Rather, the news anchor and chief editor of the U.S. television network CBS, during an interview late in February. The message from the Iraqi President was clear. Although the Iraqi people had shown tremendous forbearance in subjecting themselves to prolonged and intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, the aggressive instincts of the U.S. and the United Kingdom had not been appeased. Resistance to the invasion had stiffened, and it was the job of the Iraqi forces to draw things out for as long as possible. The military forces of the U.S. and the U.K. had entered a quagmire, and they were to be hit with "force and precision". All of Iraq needed to be mindful of the plight of Basra and the people of that city, in turn, needed to keep their patience. Patience and courage were the key to victory.
After delivering all this with his trademark rhetorical flourishes, Saddam explicitly took the names of all the military commanders who were tasked with beating back the invasion. Special mention was made of the divisional commanders in Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah, Najaf and several other cities then under attack and siege.
Baghdad had suffered three days of "shock and awe" bombing as Saddam Hussein spoke. The clearly stated strategic purpose of the U.S. is to target the will of the civilian population through a massive aerial bombardment. It was to be, as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chillingly put it, unlike anything ever seen. In the basic document of the "shock and awe" doctrine, the will to resist was programmed to collapse within two days of massive aerial bombing, paving a rapid pathway to victory for invading ground forces. Drafted in 1996 by a group of former military officials - some of whom had held vital command positions in the 1991 Gulf War - "shock and awe" believes not so much in inflicting physical damage upon an adversary, as in undermining his will. The ironic outcome of its first trial in the laboratory of Iraq is that "shock and awe", while causing considerable physical damage, perhaps only bolsters the adversary's determination.
THE first three days of operations had brought deceptive evidence of progress. But just when U.S. forces were claiming to have captured key locations in southern Iraq in a relentless sweep of armour and infantry, Day 4 brought them back to the realities of operation in a hostile terrain against a resentful people. Iraqi forces in the city of Nasiriyah, which had been declared a safe zone for the Western coalition on Day 3, struck back, inflicting severe casualties on a U.S. Marine Corps detachment that was advancing ahead on the road to Baghdad. And after hoisting the stars-and-stripes at the Umm Qasr port on Day 2 of the operations and hastily taking it down to underline their benign intent, the U.S. forces, in seeking to secure the adjoining town, ran into stiff resistance, suffering a number of casualties.
Day 4 was a disaster for the grossly misnamed "coalition" in various other ways. Terry Lloyd, the veteran war correspondent from the British ITN News, was killed as he approached the war zone in southern Iraq. The car in which he was travelling was mistaken for an Iraqi armoured vehicle and blown up by "coalition" firepower. His body was subsequently found in a Basra morgue along with several other victims of arbitrary military attack. Day 4 also brought news of the bizarre downing of a British warplane, ostensibly by U.S. Patriot missile batteries. After having brought down three short-range Iraqi missiles launched into northern Kuwait, this was by far the most lethal strike of the hugely hyped Patriot system. It happened, unfortunately, to choose the wrong target.
The planned pincer movement on Baghdad, meanwhile, proved to be a spectacular non-starter. Once regarded as the most loyal U.S. ally in the region after Israel, Turkey strung the war clique in Washington along over a month-long bargain on the appropriate price for logistical and locational support. It then turned down the U.S. request for stationing ground troops in Turkey and using air bases within the country to mount sorties into Iraq. After a few more weeks of equivocation, Turkey grudgingly conceded overflight rights to U.S. forces, while subtly launching its own feint and manoeuvre, threatening to push large columns of armour and infantry into northern Iraq.
The U.S. was unamused since the Turkish incursion would have shattered its effort to bring Kurdish guerilla groups in northern Iraq into an anti-Saddam coalition. Under immense pressure, Turkey decided against opening a war within a war. But the U.S. has been unable to induct significant force levels into northern Iraq. It has stationed special forces in the region to operate in close association with Kurdish guerilla groups. But this leaves the balance of numerical advantage in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds, engendering deep reservations within Turkey. Should the Kurdish guerillas leverage U.S. patronage into a campaign to take the pivotal town of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, then Turkey's quiescence could no longer be taken for granted.
By Day 5, the U.S. had managed a manifestly imperfect job of unravelling all these complexities. Its initial operations in the Kurdish region were directed against Islamic militias, rather than the Saddam regime. To heighten its frustration, the U.S. found that its rearguard too was insecure. The 101st Airborne Division, a key military formation whose arrival in the Gulf theatre was supposed to mark the definitive intent to launch hostilities, suffered an embarrassing internal sabotage, when a soldier believed to be "disgruntled" and "weird" lobbed a grenade into the tent encampments of his unit's commanding officers. One officer was confirmed killed and 16 injured in the bizarre incident.
It was little wonder, then, that four days into the aggression against Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was an angry man. Images of U.S. soldiers captured by Iraqi forces and detained as prisoners of war (PoW) had been telecast by the Arab Al-Jazeera channel. This was demeaning to the dignity of combatants, protested the hawkish U.S. Defence Secretary. Iraq should be warned, he added ominously, that its actions were in violation of the Geneva Convention on the protection of the victims of armed conflicts.
Shortly afterwards, U.S. President George Bush, even if unwittingly, underlined the deep irony behind this invocation of the Geneva Conventions by his chief war-planner. As he flew back to Washington from a weekend at his hill retreat and spoke to the media corps at an impromptu interaction, the Texas oilman's priorities were clear. He spent relatively little time in sympathy for kinfolk of servicemen who had died in the operations, or in worrying about the status of the PoWs. What he found really worthy of celebration was the securing of the oil fields in southern Iraq by U.S. and U.K. forces.
Coming from individuals who have been insisting for over a year and a half that the U.S. had the authority to wage war to topple the Iraqi regime and redraw the map of the West Asian region, the new found commitment to the Geneva Convention was rather rich. Rumsfeld's attention could well be directed to the preamble to the Geneva Convention's first protocol, adopted by universal consent in 1977. Every contracting party is enjoined under the Convention, to conform to the Charter of the United Nations, and "refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of any State".
There is also an injunction in the Geneva Convention against attacking, destroying or rendering useless objects and facilities necessary for the survival of the civilian population, such as "crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works". In fact, as Rumsfeld blew a fuse over Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention, Basra city was entering its third day without water supplies. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross conceded that the situation was dire. But they were yet to gain any assurance of access to the city.
Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has directly targeted essential civilian infrastructure. Declassified papers from the last 12 years of siege warfare against Iraq show that water supplies all over the country were considered fair game for military strikes by the U.S. Indeed, a briefing paper prepared by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed greater concern about deflecting international attention from these evident war crimes, for fear that the Iraqi regime could derive what was described as propaganda advantage from them.
When he addressed his first press conference three days after operations began, General Tommy Franks, the overall force commander for the invasion of Iraq, had few such awkward questions to address. One of his responses, though, stood out for what it suggested about U.S. war strategies and objectives. The ostensible trigger for war being the Iraqi regime's failure to comply with its disarmament obligations, Franks was asked whether his forces had found any evidence that Iraq indeed possessed the proscribed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The answer was in the negative. What were the tactical options that the U.S. forces retained if Iraq were to attack them with chemical or biological weapons, Franks was asked. His response was curious: "If they use weapons of mass destruction against us, then we win."
This statement, of course, lent itself to a relatively benign interpretation: if Iraq were to use mass destruction munitions against invading forces, that would prove to the world that the basis of the war of destruction was not a lie. Facing a credibility problem of immense dimensions, the U.S. administration would be able to turn back and tell the U.N. weapons inspectors who had failed to find evidence of concealment and deception, that they had been too trusting of Iraqi intentions. Deluded by the pretence of cooperation, the U.N. inspectors failed to comprehend that the Iraqi regime in fact, had no intent to disarm and was only twisting the U.N. mandate to its own narrow purpose of survival.
But this was not quite the sense in which Franks spoke, as became evident immediately afterwards, when he referred to Rumsfeld's ominous warning to Iraq just prior to the start of hostilities. The man, who dismissed France and Germany as "old Europe" and waved aside Israel's oppression of the people in the "so-called occupied territories" as a trivial issue since the land had been won fairly in war, had little doubt about the appropriate response to Iraq's use of its putative WMD capability. His only advice to Iraq if it intended to use mass destruction munitions, he said, was "don't".
The blunt threat brought to mind an infamous statement from the Israeli defence spokesperson just prior to the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. What would be the Israeli response, asked a journalist, if Iraq were to lob something lethal into its territory? The answer was clear, unambiguous and brutal: "We will turn Baghdad into a sheet of glass."
There is little question that the invading forces are eager for sufficient pretext to use the most lethal weaponry in Iraq. Even as it unleashes cruise missiles in the thousands and drops ordnance that runs into the kilotons in explosive power, the U.S. can rest content in the assurance that the U.N. weapons inspectors did their best over the preceding three months, to give them the assurance of minimal resistance.
Resolution 1441 of the U.N. Security Council obliged Iraq to sign away the small vestiges of national sovereignty it retained after 12 years of siege and starvation. Late in February, the U.N.'s Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, asked the country, effectively, to sign its own death warrant. From the 11,000-page documentation that Iraq submitted to the U.N. in December 2002, the weapons experts surmised, one missile system that had been inducted into service exceeded the prescribed range limit of 150 km. The deviation was minor - the Al Samoud missile had, in a few of its flight tests touched a range of just over 180 km. And the Iraqi explanation was simple: not all the tests had been conducted with the missile's full payload of explosive charge or with the appropriate guidance system. If these were factored in, the missile would be well within the prescribed range of 150 km. The weapons inspectors would have none of it. And the destruction of the deployed missiles, as also the serial production facilities that Iraq had built up, were well under way when the U.S. started its war of destruction.
The U.S. war against Iraq comes as the final act of over a decade of duplicity, coercion and utter insensitivity. It was a gigantic pretence for the U.S. to imagine that Iraqi citizens would have anything but outright hostility and contempt for its plans of conquest and subjugation. That pretence was decisively shattered in just four days. And whatever the military outcome of the war, the first four days were sufficient to establish that the U.S. has already lost the peace.
Copyright © 2003, Sukumar Muralidharan
India's National Magazinefrom the publishers of THE HINDU
COVER STORY
WAR AND RESISTANCE
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
`Operation Iraqi Freedom', the U.S.-led war that marks the final act of over a decade of duplicity, coercion and insensitivity, gets under way. As the aggressors stumble through, their plans of conquest and subjugation elicit hostility and contempt among Iraqis.
GENERATIONS in India that have spent two score years or more on this planet know roughly what a war of liberation is like. Even if the Bangladesh operations in 1971 were not etched deeply in public perception by relentless media coverage, these generations know that the chemistry between a people and an army of liberation is characteristic and unmistakable. But it took little of this special historical memory to know, four days into the United States-led invasion of Iraq, that the most fundamental conceit of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" had been rudely punctured. Metaphorically, the claim that invading forces would be welcomed as an army of liberation stood devastated as badly as the urban landscape of Baghdad.
With a whole division of the British Army encamped on the outskirts of Basra, there was yet no signal from Iraq's second city that it would welcome the invading forces in. The entire array of propaganda devices had been unleashed, civic amenities had been destroyed with deliberate intent to foment mass disaffection in the city of over one million people. Yet Basra remained resistant to the overtures of its putative liberators. And this was, in the rather fanciful strategic plans drawn up prior to the war, regarded as relatively easy terrain for the invaders, since Basra was believed still to nurse bitter memories of its uprising in 1991 that was brutally put down by the Iraqi regime.
A Reuters correspondent south of Basra saw a vast convoy of battered trucks and cars streaming out of the city. Contrary to U.S. claims that it had not entered Basra, a 24-year-old engineer fleeing the city seemed to indicate that small detachments of special forces had in fact got through to foment an uprising. "There is fighting in the centre, on the streets," he said. "It is terrible. We don't want Americans here. This is Iraq." Other media personnel found Iraqi youth greeting incoming Western forces with smiles and sneering when they passed. From the evidence of the first three days of relatively unhindered advance by the Western forces, partisan media organisations had rushed to the inference that the Iraqi people were in a rather hospitable mood, preparing to welcome their liberators with open arms. Day 4 brought the rude awakening to reality and Day 5 rubbed in the harsh message.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom" had got off to a dramatic start with a furious volley of missiles and bombs on a narrowly focussed set of targets in Baghdad. The target allegedly was the Iraqi regime and the objective was a swift decapitation that would snuff out the central authority and reduce Iraq's fighting forces to rudderless confusion. Subsequent reports from Western military intelligence spoke of a high level of probability that President Saddam Hussein could have been injured or killed. Other assessments spoke of the likely elimination from the operational fray of three of Iraq's top five leaders, including Saddam's principal deputy Izzat Ibrahim, his Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan, and his son Qusay Hussein.
A few days of ambiguity ensued. Images of the Iraqi President kept appearing on local television without quite removing uncertainties about the dates of their origin. Day 5 then brought a decisive refutation of initial Western assessments. Just before noon in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi television - displaying the almost preternatural and eerie calm that so deeply struck Dan Rather, the news anchor and chief editor of the U.S. television network CBS, during an interview late in February. The message from the Iraqi President was clear. Although the Iraqi people had shown tremendous forbearance in subjecting themselves to prolonged and intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, the aggressive instincts of the U.S. and the United Kingdom had not been appeased. Resistance to the invasion had stiffened, and it was the job of the Iraqi forces to draw things out for as long as possible. The military forces of the U.S. and the U.K. had entered a quagmire, and they were to be hit with "force and precision". All of Iraq needed to be mindful of the plight of Basra and the people of that city, in turn, needed to keep their patience. Patience and courage were the key to victory.
After delivering all this with his trademark rhetorical flourishes, Saddam explicitly took the names of all the military commanders who were tasked with beating back the invasion. Special mention was made of the divisional commanders in Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah, Najaf and several other cities then under attack and siege.
Baghdad had suffered three days of "shock and awe" bombing as Saddam Hussein spoke. The clearly stated strategic purpose of the U.S. is to target the will of the civilian population through a massive aerial bombardment. It was to be, as U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chillingly put it, unlike anything ever seen. In the basic document of the "shock and awe" doctrine, the will to resist was programmed to collapse within two days of massive aerial bombing, paving a rapid pathway to victory for invading ground forces. Drafted in 1996 by a group of former military officials - some of whom had held vital command positions in the 1991 Gulf War - "shock and awe" believes not so much in inflicting physical damage upon an adversary, as in undermining his will. The ironic outcome of its first trial in the laboratory of Iraq is that "shock and awe", while causing considerable physical damage, perhaps only bolsters the adversary's determination.
THE first three days of operations had brought deceptive evidence of progress. But just when U.S. forces were claiming to have captured key locations in southern Iraq in a relentless sweep of armour and infantry, Day 4 brought them back to the realities of operation in a hostile terrain against a resentful people. Iraqi forces in the city of Nasiriyah, which had been declared a safe zone for the Western coalition on Day 3, struck back, inflicting severe casualties on a U.S. Marine Corps detachment that was advancing ahead on the road to Baghdad. And after hoisting the stars-and-stripes at the Umm Qasr port on Day 2 of the operations and hastily taking it down to underline their benign intent, the U.S. forces, in seeking to secure the adjoining town, ran into stiff resistance, suffering a number of casualties.
Day 4 was a disaster for the grossly misnamed "coalition" in various other ways. Terry Lloyd, the veteran war correspondent from the British ITN News, was killed as he approached the war zone in southern Iraq. The car in which he was travelling was mistaken for an Iraqi armoured vehicle and blown up by "coalition" firepower. His body was subsequently found in a Basra morgue along with several other victims of arbitrary military attack. Day 4 also brought news of the bizarre downing of a British warplane, ostensibly by U.S. Patriot missile batteries. After having brought down three short-range Iraqi missiles launched into northern Kuwait, this was by far the most lethal strike of the hugely hyped Patriot system. It happened, unfortunately, to choose the wrong target.
The planned pincer movement on Baghdad, meanwhile, proved to be a spectacular non-starter. Once regarded as the most loyal U.S. ally in the region after Israel, Turkey strung the war clique in Washington along over a month-long bargain on the appropriate price for logistical and locational support. It then turned down the U.S. request for stationing ground troops in Turkey and using air bases within the country to mount sorties into Iraq. After a few more weeks of equivocation, Turkey grudgingly conceded overflight rights to U.S. forces, while subtly launching its own feint and manoeuvre, threatening to push large columns of armour and infantry into northern Iraq.
The U.S. was unamused since the Turkish incursion would have shattered its effort to bring Kurdish guerilla groups in northern Iraq into an anti-Saddam coalition. Under immense pressure, Turkey decided against opening a war within a war. But the U.S. has been unable to induct significant force levels into northern Iraq. It has stationed special forces in the region to operate in close association with Kurdish guerilla groups. But this leaves the balance of numerical advantage in the hands of the Iraqi Kurds, engendering deep reservations within Turkey. Should the Kurdish guerillas leverage U.S. patronage into a campaign to take the pivotal town of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, then Turkey's quiescence could no longer be taken for granted.
By Day 5, the U.S. had managed a manifestly imperfect job of unravelling all these complexities. Its initial operations in the Kurdish region were directed against Islamic militias, rather than the Saddam regime. To heighten its frustration, the U.S. found that its rearguard too was insecure. The 101st Airborne Division, a key military formation whose arrival in the Gulf theatre was supposed to mark the definitive intent to launch hostilities, suffered an embarrassing internal sabotage, when a soldier believed to be "disgruntled" and "weird" lobbed a grenade into the tent encampments of his unit's commanding officers. One officer was confirmed killed and 16 injured in the bizarre incident.
It was little wonder, then, that four days into the aggression against Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was an angry man. Images of U.S. soldiers captured by Iraqi forces and detained as prisoners of war (PoW) had been telecast by the Arab Al-Jazeera channel. This was demeaning to the dignity of combatants, protested the hawkish U.S. Defence Secretary. Iraq should be warned, he added ominously, that its actions were in violation of the Geneva Convention on the protection of the victims of armed conflicts.
Shortly afterwards, U.S. President George Bush, even if unwittingly, underlined the deep irony behind this invocation of the Geneva Conventions by his chief war-planner. As he flew back to Washington from a weekend at his hill retreat and spoke to the media corps at an impromptu interaction, the Texas oilman's priorities were clear. He spent relatively little time in sympathy for kinfolk of servicemen who had died in the operations, or in worrying about the status of the PoWs. What he found really worthy of celebration was the securing of the oil fields in southern Iraq by U.S. and U.K. forces.
Coming from individuals who have been insisting for over a year and a half that the U.S. had the authority to wage war to topple the Iraqi regime and redraw the map of the West Asian region, the new found commitment to the Geneva Convention was rather rich. Rumsfeld's attention could well be directed to the preamble to the Geneva Convention's first protocol, adopted by universal consent in 1977. Every contracting party is enjoined under the Convention, to conform to the Charter of the United Nations, and "refrain in its international relations from the threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of any State".
There is also an injunction in the Geneva Convention against attacking, destroying or rendering useless objects and facilities necessary for the survival of the civilian population, such as "crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works". In fact, as Rumsfeld blew a fuse over Iraqi violations of the Geneva Convention, Basra city was entering its third day without water supplies. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross conceded that the situation was dire. But they were yet to gain any assurance of access to the city.
Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has directly targeted essential civilian infrastructure. Declassified papers from the last 12 years of siege warfare against Iraq show that water supplies all over the country were considered fair game for military strikes by the U.S. Indeed, a briefing paper prepared by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed greater concern about deflecting international attention from these evident war crimes, for fear that the Iraqi regime could derive what was described as propaganda advantage from them.
When he addressed his first press conference three days after operations began, General Tommy Franks, the overall force commander for the invasion of Iraq, had few such awkward questions to address. One of his responses, though, stood out for what it suggested about U.S. war strategies and objectives. The ostensible trigger for war being the Iraqi regime's failure to comply with its disarmament obligations, Franks was asked whether his forces had found any evidence that Iraq indeed possessed the proscribed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The answer was in the negative. What were the tactical options that the U.S. forces retained if Iraq were to attack them with chemical or biological weapons, Franks was asked. His response was curious: "If they use weapons of mass destruction against us, then we win."
This statement, of course, lent itself to a relatively benign interpretation: if Iraq were to use mass destruction munitions against invading forces, that would prove to the world that the basis of the war of destruction was not a lie. Facing a credibility problem of immense dimensions, the U.S. administration would be able to turn back and tell the U.N. weapons inspectors who had failed to find evidence of concealment and deception, that they had been too trusting of Iraqi intentions. Deluded by the pretence of cooperation, the U.N. inspectors failed to comprehend that the Iraqi regime in fact, had no intent to disarm and was only twisting the U.N. mandate to its own narrow purpose of survival.
But this was not quite the sense in which Franks spoke, as became evident immediately afterwards, when he referred to Rumsfeld's ominous warning to Iraq just prior to the start of hostilities. The man, who dismissed France and Germany as "old Europe" and waved aside Israel's oppression of the people in the "so-called occupied territories" as a trivial issue since the land had been won fairly in war, had little doubt about the appropriate response to Iraq's use of its putative WMD capability. His only advice to Iraq if it intended to use mass destruction munitions, he said, was "don't".
The blunt threat brought to mind an infamous statement from the Israeli defence spokesperson just prior to the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. What would be the Israeli response, asked a journalist, if Iraq were to lob something lethal into its territory? The answer was clear, unambiguous and brutal: "We will turn Baghdad into a sheet of glass."
There is little question that the invading forces are eager for sufficient pretext to use the most lethal weaponry in Iraq. Even as it unleashes cruise missiles in the thousands and drops ordnance that runs into the kilotons in explosive power, the U.S. can rest content in the assurance that the U.N. weapons inspectors did their best over the preceding three months, to give them the assurance of minimal resistance.
Resolution 1441 of the U.N. Security Council obliged Iraq to sign away the small vestiges of national sovereignty it retained after 12 years of siege and starvation. Late in February, the U.N.'s Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, asked the country, effectively, to sign its own death warrant. From the 11,000-page documentation that Iraq submitted to the U.N. in December 2002, the weapons experts surmised, one missile system that had been inducted into service exceeded the prescribed range limit of 150 km. The deviation was minor - the Al Samoud missile had, in a few of its flight tests touched a range of just over 180 km. And the Iraqi explanation was simple: not all the tests had been conducted with the missile's full payload of explosive charge or with the appropriate guidance system. If these were factored in, the missile would be well within the prescribed range of 150 km. The weapons inspectors would have none of it. And the destruction of the deployed missiles, as also the serial production facilities that Iraq had built up, were well under way when the U.S. started its war of destruction.
The U.S. war against Iraq comes as the final act of over a decade of duplicity, coercion and utter insensitivity. It was a gigantic pretence for the U.S. to imagine that Iraqi citizens would have anything but outright hostility and contempt for its plans of conquest and subjugation. That pretence was decisively shattered in just four days. And whatever the military outcome of the war, the first four days were sufficient to establish that the U.S. has already lost the peace.
Copyright © 2003, Sukumar Muralidharan
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